April 2003 Archives
Brad Templeton has an essay on the 25th anniversary of spam that deserves some attention, especially his observations on the conflicts involved in calling for its censorship via blacklists and the like. via BoingBoing
Spam pushes people who would proudly (and correctly) trumpet how we shouldn't blame ISPs for offensive web sites, copyright violations and/or MP3 trading done by downstream customers to suddenly call for blacklisting of all the innocent users at an ISP if a spammer is to be found among them. People who would defend the end-to-end principle of internet design eagerly hunt for mechanisms of centralized control to stop it. Those who would never agree with punishing the innocent to find the guilty in any other field happily advocate it to stop spam. Some conclude even entire nations must be blacklisted from sending E-mail. Onetime defenders of an open net with anonymous participation call for authentication certificates on every E-mail. Former champions of flat-fee unlimited net access who railed against proposals for per-packet internet pricing propose per-message usage fees on E-mail. On USENET, where the idea of canceling another's article to retroactively moderate a group was highly reviled, people now find they couldn't use the net without it. Those who reviled at any attempt to regulate internet traffic by the government loudly petition their legislators for some law, any law it almost seems, against spam. Software engineers who would be fired for building a system that drops traffic on the floor without reporting the error change their mail systems to silently discard mail after mail.It's amazing.
Dan Bricklin's old essay, from March 2001, on The "Computer as Assistant" Fallacy has some interesting points to be made about the complexity we sometimes ignore in common devices because we've become so used to their presence. My favorite example is the car. via Genehack
Being hard to learn, very dangerous (prone to crashes if we don't pay careful attention, and even then not totally safe), and in constant need of maintenance (like getting fuel and oil), etc., has not held our society back from becoming dependent upon the automobile. It's just one of the things we need to learn and keep up with.
Why should we expect technology or computers to be any different? Part of their inherent charm is that complexity can be abstracted away and that complexity can also lead to unexpected applications.
Some interesting links about the evolution of the web, which I have yet to read or absorb completely.
- Trends in the Evolution of the Public Web by Edward T. O'Neil, et. al., from D-lib magazine, pathinfo: via Sitelines - Ideas about Web Searching, a new weblog by Rita Vine, via LibraryStuff, a weblog by Steven M. Cohen
- The Invisible Dogma at the Ratcliffe blog, pathinfo: via Frank Patrick's Focused Performance weblog.
In addition I found this short comment from Mark Bernstein on the recent discussion about truth and honesty in weblogs.
Bernstein's 11th Conjecture: When blogging about things and ideas, injecting yourself is distracting. It adds unnecessary words, and blurs focus. But, when writing in your weblog about the body, the realm of the senses body -- about sensation, feeling, and experience -- write about yourself as directly, vividly, and candidly as you can.
His 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web also looks worthwhile.
A patchwork of items on Iraq:
Paul Kennedy, The Perils of Empire
This brings us to the broadest question of all, that of defining America's position in the world over the years to come. The clear victor of the Cold War, it no longer feels constrained from intervening in sensitive areas like the Middle East or Central Asia, should national security interests demand it. The United States is unchallenged militarily and sees no rival Great Power in sight. Yet it has taken little comfort from this. Since 9/11, it feels less secure and is spending massive amounts on armaments. It possesses the world's single largest national economy but faces huge trade and budget deficits and economic rivalries from an equally large European Union and a fast-growing China. It has taken on military commitments all over the globe, from the Balkans and Kuwait to Afghanistan and Korea. Its armed forces look colossal (as did Britain's in 1919), but its obligations look even larger. It is small wonder that while liberals protest soaring defense expenditures, the U.S. military repeatedly warns of overstretch and is dismayed at the hawkish calls for further adventures; in the recent war on Saddam Hussein's regime, part or all of eight of the 10 U. S. Infantry divisions were tied down in Iraq or standing by to go there.
From across the ocean at Spiked-online, Next stop Syria? by Brendan O'Neill
Yet now, even while scrappy little battles continue in Iraq, US officials are turning their eyes to Syria, and issuing warnings to Iran and North Korea about learning the lesson of Iraq. This ongoing war talk suggests that the war on terror was not about Iraq, just as it wasn't about Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, or the events of 11 September. Rather, the war is fuelled by America's own uncertainties, not by real, tangible threats from the third world; by Washington's desperate search for a means of asserting a sense of mission in the post-9/11 world, rather than by an old-style colonial agenda.'Where next?' is a legitimate question to ask - not because America is out to retake the Middle East and remake the world, but because the war on terror is driven by domestic problems, and won't be easily satisfied by 'successes' around the world.
The war is over but the confusion still remains and the Bush administration is jumping so quickly to economic issues the whiplash is painful.
CNN and the rest of the cable news networks have dropped the war in Iraq like a hot potato and are running overflow coverage of Laci Peterson murder stories, which seems as likely to have a long term impact on America as the Gary Condit story did before 9-11.
Watching the weekend news on ABC I realized that one of the things that makes cable news so unbearable is the comlpete lack of storytelling structure and narrative. With their focus on whatever is "breaking news" the cable stations don't have the will, resources, or inclination to do some of the in-depth storytelling that puts the news into context. The embedded correspondents in Iraq perpetuated this myth by throwing up hundreds on tiny slices of life and failing to give the larger picture or context. Examples abound, from the staged toppling of Saddam's statue to the bizarre reticience of the media to show any of the real blood and gore that attends any war. We've just lived through four weeks in which thousands of people were killed and we haven't seen a single dead body. No pictures of the bleeding wounded being rushed to the choppers a la Vietnam.
None of these critiques are new and I usually battle them myself by seeking out other resources on the internet:
Some news shows on television still impress me with their ability to bring some real issues into focus. The newsmagazines such as Dateline and 20/20 have a format that can be used to great effect, as ABC did a while ago with their special on prescription drugs, Bitter Medicine. Public television does a lot of this work through Frontline and NOW with Bill Moyers. Finally this story from Alternet points to some more places to look for information that might be interesting.
In "The Shape of Things to Come" Daniel H. Pink argues that the bell curve or normal distribution discovered during the 19th century statsitcal renaissance is losing its validity. More and more parts of the statistical world are distributing themselves as 'well curves', high on the ends and low in the middle. For examples he gives wage distribution in the U.S. (growing at the top and the bottom), consumer electronics (miniturization of screens and the gigantism of home theaters), and business (mega-corporations and the single entrepreneur). He concludes:
Of course, not everything we can measure conforms to this new shape. In national politics, the fastest-growing affiliation is Independent. Diversity and interracial marriage are rendering the old bimodal and trimodal racial categories irrelevant. Yet almost everywhere we look closely, we find ourselves staring down a distributional well. The implications are huge: insurers, marketers, and policy-makers may be basing decisions on faulty premises about what is normal. They're assuming a vibrant center - Middle America, middlebrow tastes - when the action has migrated to the edges. The 180 from bell curve to well curve has turned their logic on its head.Galton and his contemporaries believed that conditions would deviate from the bell curve only during periods of transition. Every age, of course, supposes it is living through a unique era of profound change. But in our case, the conceit might actually prove true. The madness of our times might simply reflect our stumbling effort to revert to the mean. Either that or one of the world's eternal verities is less eternal than we supposed. This deviation may turn out to be anything but standard.
Sheldon Pacotti, writing in Salon, makes some connections between languages, education, freedom, surveillance, and new technologies that is worth reading by those who haven't noticed the connections already. This paragraph really caught my attention:
As the computer becomes the central tool for research and development, scientific knowledge takes on a new character. Like software, it becomes primarily functional rather than descriptive. During the age of the printing press -- which brought with it dictionaries, encyclopedias, tables, journals, proofs, and the modern community of scientists -- the project of science appeared to be the "understanding" or "description" of the natural world, which was conceived of as a clockwork set in motion by God. The engineer meanwhile peered into this vast, static field of knowledge and applied the insights that were useful for a particular problem. Now it seems that the project of science is not primarily to represent the natural world with language but to reconfigure the natural world as language, so that it can be composed, transformed, and manipulated in the ways our minds are equipped to operate upon knowledge itself. (italics in original)The italicized phrase really hits something I've been seeing all over the place in my recent intellectual wanderings. The computer gives us an amazing amount of power to simulate our world and then to use those simulations to create new artifacts, from bridges and buildings today to new genes and genomes tomorrow.
It'd be interesting to trace out the intellectual histories that have moved us to a view of the world as a language that can be manipulated. Starting with calculus and moving forward through the periodic table and into the twentieth century we see an increasing number of abstractions reified in the form of new languages. Computers seem to be one of the more fertile fields for the creation of these languages. Would such a transformation have occurred without computers?
My own background in philosophy and literary criticism points to trends in analytic philosophy looking at the structure of language from the beginning of this century. Wittgenstein, Church, Tarski, Turing and others connect philosophy into computer science. On the continent we have Heidegger, Barthes, Derrida, the structuaralists and more. All of them seem to have been approaching a vision of the world as a semiotic web. Up to this point in history we have only been able to read the world. If Pacotti is right, and I think he is, we will soon be able to write the world.
My own personal conflict is a matter of deciding what I want to do with my life. I want to continue my professional education by returning to school for an advanced degree but there is always a fissure in me between returning to science, whether computer sci or biology (two areas of immense interest to me and likely to change the world in the near future), or following a more humanistic approach by studying law or library science. All of these areas are intrinsically interesting and there just doesn't seem to be enough time to be an expert in all of them.
A mixed bag of entries, offered with little comment.
- Mind Work: How a Ph.D. Affects Black Women, by Trudier Harris
- We've never had it so good - and it's all thanks to science, by Matt Ridley
- Why we may never regain the liberties that we've lost, by Dan Gillmor
