All posts by Ted Lewis

Ted Lewis is a retired professor of Computer Science interested in network science, social media, and emerging technologies, and has published over 30 books on topics ranging from personal computing to complexity theory.

The Fractal Software Hypothesis

Since the pioneering paper by Belady and Lehman in 1976 [1], software engineers have suspected that software development, and post-development called “evolution” is a complex process ending with a complex system—the software product. These early pioneers may have been the first to analyze program defects and note their statistical behavior. The idea that a software product is an evolving system with measurable statistical properties (like molecules in a gas or heat transfer in solids) has recently gained renewed interest with the introduction of agile methods, and the application of big data analytics to the software development process itself [2]. Continue reading The Fractal Software Hypothesis

The End of Life As We Know It

European wealth surged after the European’s adopted Arabic numbers, including recognizing the existence of zero and infinity, which led to calculus and ultimately the Industrial Revolution [1]. Steam power, assembly-­line manufacturing, and applied science made Europeans the richest people in history, because technology increased productivity. But then the rapid rise of productivity came to a near halt, soon after the “Internetal Revolution.” Why?

Continue reading The End of Life As We Know It

Net Neutrality and the Regulated Internet

Although Tim Wu introduced the phrase “net neutrality” in his 2010 book, The Master Switch his objective was to warn us against the eventual monopolization of the Internet through an emergent process known as Gause’s Competitive Exclusion Principle [1]. Continue reading Net Neutrality and the Regulated Internet