I’ve been reading a lot and playing around a little with ChatGTP and Bing, guided by some helpful guest speakers at work. On the whole, I’m a curmudgeon, though not for reasons related to my sci-fi fandom or comp sci degree. Instead, I am leery as a reader because I do think these large language models (LLM) value answers but not thoughtful or factually correct writing. More selfishly I’m also risk averse and setting aside larger fears I do think it will be disruptive to my field and others reliant on writing.
But there’s no running from automation. I think this effect will be mitigated by real constraints on time to read. Quality and trustworthy writing is more rewarding for readers at the same time cost, though I imagine this will strengthen winner take all dynamics and the importance of brands as the internet faces an ever growing tide of copycat mass-produced writing.
My biggest challenge as a scholar is the way LLM default to breaking the chain of custody for primary sources and ideas. This is a bit like wanting to identify the source tree for an individual bite of apple sauce, though Bing at least is experimenting in being able to cite. I think Tim Hickson does a good job of unpacking a range of issues in the AI art domain. One point that stood out for me is that Adobe’s generative art program and the Stable Diffusion music generator are explicitly limited to sources where they have rights due to public domain or arrangements with creators.
The scholarly dynamics for research and theory are different from art, although there are elements of both thinking and craft to unpack. I am glad not to be a teacher in this environment, because I find Paul Musgrave and Alan Jacob’s arguments persuasive and depressing. At the same time, I do think Dan Nexon is right to experiment with what the tools can and can’t do as well as thinking about how the demand for writers will change in each field.
So what are the opportunities and where does it add the most value? Starting with the big picture, there’s already more written material produced constantly than any of us will ever have a chance to read and moreover writing is a favored form of human expression that people make sacrifices to engage in. Same for visual arts and music. That said, customization is key; there are lots of places where people want middling writing or art: all sorts of promotional materials, a summary which zeroes in on a certain element of a large corpus of writing, a picture of your roleplaying game character. Quality is nice in these cases but a 33 percent solution at your finger tips could greatly increase demand.
In my work, I see three areas that are particularly promising:
All three cases involve existing applications of machine learning and other software tools. That said, open source tools such as those provided by the creepily named HuggingFace mean I can potentially be creating and refining my own tools rather than relying on third party services. But whether I make or buy I think these uses all help me engage primary sources rather than replacing my engagement.
So readers, is there anywhere you’re experimenting?
Still speaking for myself.
The Maryland Democratic Party was humbled on Tuesday. Governor-Elect Hogan managed to get a substantial victory, performing well across the state. This wasn't just a matter of the general Republican wave, as Brian Frosh is now Attorney General-Elect and Maryland's economy has been over-performing the national under Gov. O'Malley.
The incoming Governor deserves credit for staking out an agenda, however much I disagree with it. It is not enough to point out differences on social issues when one's opponent is not running on them and the legislature is not in play. Similarly, we Democrats in Maryland and around the country need to do a better job of providing a clear economic agenda. Fundamentally, even though the national economy is improving, these remain troubled times with stagnating wages. Democrats cannot hope to prevail unless we offer answers on these questions. The increasing nationalization of even gubernatorial races means we can't sit on our laurels even when the results are positive.
I was fairly frightened as to the fate of the Purple Line going into the election. Thankfully, Governor-Elect Hogan's initial words and deeds have lived up to his campaign pledge to be willing to work with Maryland's Democrats. Despite the fears that I shared, his initial take on the Purple Line is that "we're going to be talking about that during transition." There's a lot for him to take on during that period and taking his time and reviewing the range of active and ongoing projects from the O'Malley administration makes sense. He has appointed a Democractic co-chair of his transition team which offers valuable opportunities in living up to his stated goal of being "a governor for all of Maryland."
No doubt Governor-Elect Hogan will put his imprint on things, but projects like the Purple Line can fit with a growth agenda and have broad business community support because they bring economic as well as environmental benefits. As Dan Reed has noted, the Silver Line was initiated under a Republican Governor and a Republican President.
To be clear, the onus is on Purple Line advocates more than ever to explain the virtues of the project. This is a duty I do not intend to shirk and I hope we can all come together to continue to build a brighter future for the state we love.
I was excited to discover that Guidebook now offers the ability to share one’s schedule. Two years ago, I was hoping for this social feature, and now that it’s here I’d like to exploit it. I’ve tied it to my Google+ account and am happy to connect with friends. Because of Otakon preparations and a crunch period at work, posts may be sporadic over the next few days.
In addition, I’ve slowly been getting photos up on Flickr. Check out my Japan collection to see them as they get posted. I’m also going back and adding them to older posts as I go and hope to start including them in new posts regularly.
The first trip I rigorously photoblogged was my tour of China in 2007. Back then, as now, Flickr offered a rather good deal on storage and had some helpful online tools. For reasons I do not understand, perhaps relating to the increasing size of photos or mismanagement by Yahoo, uploading to Flickr has gotten steadily harder over the years. Back in 2013, I was regularly stymied when trying to upload photos from my trip to attend Guy’s funeral. The Uploadr tool, since deprecated, would inexplicably leave out some of those photos and consulting with technical support did me little good. I’ve tried using Flickr’s new website uploading tool and found it to be slow and quirky. It simply failed to register many of my Picasa tagged photos until I’d given it ten to twenty minutes to finish processing the photos. I’m going to try a few third party apps like jUploader and slow updating for now, but at this point I’m largely sticking with Flickr for legacy reasons. If I ever get around to swapping my site to Wordpress I may find a new photo hosting solution as well.
Happily, the geo-tagging delays were playing with a new toy and not a frustrating attempt to reproduce what once was simple. On the left, you can see our first morning in Tokyo mapped out in Google Earth. Our new camera has wifi abilities and could grab geo-tags off another source, but I have not yet linked them up or worked out whether it could get these tags from my phone without draining the battery. Once I’m further along in blogging I will try to figure that out and may pick a dedicated wifi geotagger if need-be. This effort is worth it to me because I take far too many pictures (between my mother’s camera and ours we took some 9,200) and actually sorting through them and tagging them to make them usefully findable in the future is no small project. In essence, the photos regularly serve as my trip notes. Many of the more banal images are there just because of some cross-cultural or geographic detail that I wanted to remember. However, if I at least know where the photos are from, deriving many of the tags should be much easier as should jogging my memory.
The Picasa geo-tagger works with Google Earth, allowing you to do text based searching or visual scanning of the 3D map in order to find where your photo was taken. The interface can be a little rough, you notably you cannot change the size of that tiny little window in the lower right to give you more of a photo to work with. Similarly, while you can control the number of photos being tagged on the Picasa end, you cannot shift-select once you’re in Google Earth. Tagging one or tagging all our your only option. Finally, I had a bit of false hope based on the fact that the size of the focus reticule, seen in the upper left of that picture, stays the same size at variable level of zoom. My initial naive take was that if you tagged from a greater zoom, it may somehow track that, perhaps in an error measure or just by rounding off the latitude and longitude to avoid false precision. That is not the case, so I’ll have to consult my friendly neighborhood esteemed information scientist about geo-tagging best practices.
Are you the type that's always desperately searching through a convention/conference schedule? Hopping from a panel to a screening in search of a free seat or more exciting content? Addicted to your smart phone and wanting to apply it to ever more aspects of your life? Then I heartily recommend the Guidebook Android app. It may also be available for the iPhone; I haven't checked.
I'll be attending Japanese anime/manga/culture convention Otakon this weekend up in Baltimore and downloaded the app after hearing about it from Omar. It has exceeded my expectations: the schedule is searchable, you can easily add and remove events from your own personal schedule, and it even offers reminders. However, the best part is that it seems both fast and robust. Even the slightly clunky bits, like the listings for fan parodies and AMVs which presumably had to be updated at the last minute, aren't really a problem.
While I'm writing this up in the context of Otakon, I think I'd find it handy for professional conferences as well.
Feature for which I'd be willing to buy a premium version: The main additional feature I would like would be the ability to share schedules and maybe check-in to events. I'd put my price point for such a feature at $5 for a premium app or the like. I some how doubt that there's enough demand to make it worthwhile, so for now I'll appreciate the features that are there and try to remember to "like" my favorite panels as I go.
I've been stockpiling these for a while. Some probably merit their own blog posts, but my new years resolution for this year was 'no more backlogs.'
For reasons why, look to Ezra Klein's interview with Sen. Ron Wyden. The whole interview is worth reading, but here are key excerpts:
EK: What makes PIPA and SOPA cluster bombs? If you agree there is a problem, why aren’t these acceptable solutions?
RW: PIPA and SOPA, at their heart, are censorship bills and blacklisting bills, and they undermine much of the architecture of the internet… What the bills do is say, when you get a court order, you can’t use the domain-name system to resolve to the IP address.
EK; When you say “resolve to the IP address,” exactly what that means. Let’s say I run EzraTube.com. And someone has uploaded copyrighted content to my site. What happens next?
RW: When you type EzraTube.com into your browser, your browser is asking Comcast to ask other servers where that goes. These servers basically act as phonebooks. What the so-called “DNS remedy” in the bill does is enable the attorney general to get a court order that tells Comcast, ‘when people want to find EzraTube.com, don’t send them there. Send them to a Department of Justice site instead.’ People who want to work around this would be able to. There are already third-party tools that use foreign servers or other domain-name servers outside of Comcast’s network. But that’s a problem because, for the last 15 years, we’ve spent all this time building the DNS system into a secure standard…
EK: As I understand it, another element of these bills is that they would move the burden of policing content to the Web sites themselves. Right now, YouTube, if alerted to pirated content, needs to get it down. Under SOPA and PIPA, YouTube would be responsible for making sure it never goes up in the first place, and liable if they missed a video.
RW: You are describing what I call the “turn Web sites into Web cops” provision. This is a provision that has raised concern about what this is going to mean for innovation. If you’re a small Web site trying to get off the ground and you look at that provision, you put people through this kind of legal burden, which will mean a significant amount of money for anyone trying something new, it will do a lot of damage to innovation. That’s one reason the venture capital folks are speaking out.
[Update: Now's a good day to contact your member of Congress. Probably no need to send more than a polite sentence or two or use a form letter, I'm guessing numbers matter more than the specific message at this point. In Maryland, Sen. Cardin at least seems to be responding to SOPA/PIPA concerns.]
Programming note: Since this is a typepad blog and not a wordpress one, I don't see a quick and easy way to down it entirely [and frankly my readership is relatively small so I'm focusing on a call to action rather than get the tech right.]. So this post is my means of solidarity.
It's been a rough year for following social media in Google Reader. At some point, Facebook cut off friend feeds. More recently, the sharing features of Google Reader got moved over to Google Plus. As a result, I'm now reasonably good at generating shared entries and such but I do a very bad job of seeing what other people are posting.
So I could use Tweetdeck to follow Facebook in Twitter, but I'd likely need to separate my news accounts and friends account as unless I'm constantly checking, the former totally swamp the latter. However, even if I make regular use of Tweetdeck that still doesn't actually cover Google Plus. This isn't even to mention the LiveJournal updates, although that is now so rarely used I can easily get away with checking it once a day or so.
So, more social network-adept readers, any advice? Am I just going to have to check Facebook/Tweetdeck and Google Plus, all on top of using Reader? Is there someway I can pay these companies money just to let me read my friends content without having to use their sites? Also, are there any good tutorials for learning how to split twitter lists into social and news categories?
If you can help, your reward is that I'll be better able to read your content.
I had occasion to order something today from Amazon.ca and I noticed that they charged sales tax. This isn't that much of a surprise, Amazon.com has long claimed they'd be happy to charge tax, they just want a consistent national standard first. Unfortunately, developing such a standard would require legislation and at present our system seems to barely be capable of delivering a handful of complex bills a year so no national solution is likely to happen.
That's all old news, but that leaves consumers with a predicament. The argument that internet commerce needs protection is as outdated as our Borders Reward cards. I think my solution will be that when I'm doing price comparison I'll look at pre-tax prices. That's probably not enough, perhaps I should preferentially buy things from brook and mortar chains or indies. I don't think I'm willing to go full boycott, Amazon's still my go to source for electronic music and stuff not easily available in stores and some of those are good ways to support smaller scale creators.
Maybe rather than making the odd impulse buy of books or more common CDs, I should just keep a shortlist version of my wishlist and try to pick something up at those times when I'm hanging out in bookstores. Given my commute, that isn't as often as it once one, but may still be a way to do my part. Bibliophiles will ultimately need to pay to keep our social spaces, although I'd also gladly by snacks from a library store and am happy that my tax dollars go to that cause.
Feed is a story about what happens after a zombie apocalypse, but it isn't post-apocalyptic as such. Instead humanity has retrenched behind sealed doors, protected by blood tests and automated systems. It's a world where many of our current issues have lost their salience but security threats and perhaps security theater are everywhere. It's a tale told to us by the bloggers that venture out into this world and thus has an innate appeal to those of that send our thoughts out into the net.
The story focuses on siblings Georgia and Shaun Mason, respectively a reporter ("newsie") and a daredevil ("irwin"). Together with their tech genius story writer, a "fictional" nicknamed Buffy, they get the story of their lives when they imbed with a Republican candidate seeking his party's nomination for the 2034 election. On the whole it's a good premise and a neat world. The writing was reasonable, the characters could be fun, the plotting a bit predictable at times, and the politics perhaps a trifle naïve. If the premise appeals, I think you'll be satisfied if not necessarily blown away.
Starting with the parts I found a bit less satisfying, I'm not quite sure I see media evolving into collections of "newsies", "irwins" and "fictionals". Print and television journalism now has any number of people willing to risk extreme danger to bring home stories and who too often die in the pursuit. The lack of risk aversion of the bloggers and the licensing process were all interesting but didn't quite work for me as media critique. The overall media environment had elements that rang true - an obsession with ratings, the management of support staff, the jump from an existing website to independent operation - all of which gave the characters' jobs more solidity although I'm not quite remembering how the business model was detailed.
Slightly less plausible was Sen. Ryman's campaign. He had some good speeches and a strong staff support but I don't quite buy his rocketing to political prominence. The bloggers were accurate enough in seeing through much of the artifice of the campaign, but with one notable exception I didn't really see the horse trading or rhetorical tradeoffs that seem as relevant to the world of 2034 as the world of 2014. Amusingly, though, one of Ryman's opponents appears to be a version of Texas Gov. Perry, which has made his official announcement for President all the more frightening.
I think the strongest of the political elements was the focus on security measures. The bloggers were a bit more necessary for investigations than seemed plausible to me, but the range of security measures, often redundant and obnoxious, all rang true. To a fair extent the zombie-terrorized world does work as our present day fears taken to a logical extreme. The best political issues of the book, like the question of how to handle animals that were large enough to zombie, stemmed from these issues. I don't think the first novel of the series full explores that theme, but it's a good start and at some point I think I'll pick up the sequel.
Origin: Gift from Kate, a particularly well-targeted one.
Image from Mira Grant's website.
I had the pleasure of attending a launch celebration for Alyssa Rosenberg's move to ThinkProgress. Despite the hiccups of the new facebook based comment system, I think it's a great move and look forward to reading more from her now that she's blogging full time. Thankfully, her cordial and thoughtful comment community seems to have survived the transition to a large venue known for its trolls and flame wars.
I definitely learned a few things about serious blogging and community maintenance, but I'll try to restrict this post to a few ideas of my own that have been improved through quality conversation. When discussing problematic comments with older generations, anonymity is regularly blamed as the source of all the vitriol. There's something to that, but I've seen multiple communities with pseudonyms get by just fine. I consistently blog and comment under my name, but others lack that freedom and still can be great contributors.
The problem instead is a bit simpler: on the one hand, most blogs and the like come with comments by default while maintaining a healthy comment community of any real size takes both skill and hard work. We've developed our technology for allowing communication to a far greater extent than we have our methods for building communities. That's not really a surprise; despite problems with spam, communication has a far easier time scaling up. In fact, I'd argue that the labor requirements mean that quality moderation is often a result of necessity and not design. I've found many feminist blogs can have great discussion areas. I suspect that this is a side effect of needing to protect themselves from harassment, anti-feminist trolls, and explicit misogynists. Of course, heavily moderated communities have their own risks as the ban hammer is of course a blunt instrument and there's always a risk of group think.
On the whole, I think we do a bit better against spam than against trolls. Why is that? I think it may be that community management requires gaining and maintaining legitimacy. Thus a blog author would have a much easier time doing it than would, say, a full-time staffer. The technical ability to ban is important but perhaps not as powerful as the ability to reply directly to critics which encourages them to switch to person-to-person mode rather than broadcast to the internet mode. If larger organizations want to have safe comment communities, perhaps they should work on finding ways to give staffers the authority and discretion to build their own legitimacy as moderators. This can be scary, but I think it may prove an better alternative than comment anarchy or simply going without.
Back when I was going to school, various instructors regularly made a point of noting that information on the internet wasn't necessarily reliable. This always seemed amazingly self-evident to me as it should be to anyone that's ever posted documents online. I'm not sure if the warnings were driven more by curmudgeonliness or by receipt of far too many poorly sourced sourced papers. Regardless, I was pleased to see Jenna Johnson report in the Post that the Wikimedia foundation has found ways to encourage more productive engagement:
This school year, dozens of professors from across the country gave students an unexpected assignment: Write Wikipedia entries about public policy issues.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the Web site, organized the project in an effort to bulk up the decade-old online encyclopedia’s coverage of topics ranging from the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 to Sudanese refugees in Egypt. Such issues have been treated on the site in much less depth than TV shows, celebrity biographies and other elements of pop culture.
Many students involved in the project have received humbling lessons about open-source writing as their work was revised, attacked or deleted by anonymous critics with unknown credentials…
"I start every semester with the typical speech: ‘If you are turning in a paper and cite Wikipedia, then we have a problem. We need to talk,’ ” said Matt Dull, who is Pearson’s professor at Virginia Tech. But this time, he gave that speech and followed it with the Wiki assignment.
As the article makes clear, this work isn't accepted with open arms by all wiki-editors. Nonetheless, the students seem to be having some productive engagements and the quality of content is being improved. One of the things I always found unsatisfying about school was the meaninglessness of the work I produced. Sure, I was learning things, but it still seemed like quite a waste. This is part of why I blog: even if my audience is rather small it's satisfying to know that my thoughts are recorded in an accessible way online. While nasty editors are a downside, editing Wikipedia entries is a step up from personal blogging. That online dictionary, like other open source projects, are public goods. Even if only a portion of changes make it by other editors, that small improvements makes things a little better for all internet users in the language in question. One of the instructors sums it up nicely:
“It’s the ability for students to feel that their work matters, that it doesn’t get trapped in the classroom,” said Adel Iskander, a Georgetown instructor who assigned Wiki entries in his graduate-level Arab media course. “We’re kind of challenging the academic establishment, in a way.”
Kudos to everyone involved and Jenna Johnson for a non-embarrassing write-up of an internet phenomenon. That's no mean feat.
I had the privilege of attending the public viewing at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (thanks Kate!) and learned a lot about Messenger as it moved into the next phase of its mission. The design featured a range of ingenious bits of engineering to overcome weight limits, conserve fuel to push it into orbit, and to generally keep costs down due to competition from other NASA programs.
I'm a bit envious, as my field is international relations and for all the gee whiz tech that goes into defense I spend more time reading about cost overruns and projects that try to do too much and fail. Of course the bigger issue is that for anything political, the level of challenge Messenger achieved is just unthinkable. The metaphor they gave tonight was having to shoot an arrow from Miami to Seattle with a margin of error of less than the width of the arrow shaft. In politics, my rule of thumb is that any solution must be robust versus being implemented with some notable flaw;, if your idea requires hitting a bulls-eye at 20 paces, you should probably find a way to expand your target.
That said, tonight the international relations field has an important success and a failure of sorts that may save many lives. More on those after the cut.
Kate had been the first to show me the exciting news about a video game exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. Based on the description, it sounds as if the curators know their stuff and it should be an excellent exhibit. They are doing a public vote about what should make it in, which is a promotional gimmick that forces some tough choices for nostalgia–ridden voters like myself. Similarly, Kate long agonized about the choice between Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts II. My advice to her was to vote for the one she actually played through, given that she liked the art in both cases.
My only complaint of note is where the hell are the PC games for the Bit Wars! (1989-1994) era? As a result a lot of the early history of the classically defined adventure game genre was completely absent. Was Lucas Arts and Sierra's successor company just being really stingy with the rights? Believe me I didn't have a console in that area but I still played a lot of games. Too many games really.
Rob Pegoraro makes a solid point and makes me hopeful about a trend to the future:
Trying to cram GPS and Web applications into cameras is not a long-term answer. Instead, the camera should learn to talk to the phone, asking it for its location and tossing photos over to the phone for it to share at will.
But aside from one interesting, Android-linked Samsung model debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show in January - where I took more pictures with a smartphone than my own camera - camera manufacturers don't seem to have figured this out.
I'd be really excited by that combination. I've been meaning to do a better job of geotagging my pictures, but I haven't really gotten around to it yet. That said, you might still want an electronic compass in cameras, if the size was right, as you can't get facing from a separate device. The obvious alternative is phone cameras that are good enough to do the job, but from what I've heard the bottleneck is lenses and not megapixels, so Moore's law won't help on that one. This is consistent with my experience with my Droid camera, it can do the job but even my point and shoot canon gets me much better quality consistently.
Now I just need to find an app to do my tagging for me.
On the international relations front, I think the fast upload camera-phone combo could make a big difference, although that may be an area where smart phone cameras are the best bet unless you're a would be photo journalist.
I consider this to be a very good thing. I won't pitch the series at this point, but for those that are fans here's the art.
Generally speaking I do recommend Faith Erin Hicks' LJ which has samples from a nice mix of her work. Here's a mix of her comics. Her current online strip is Super Hero Girl which tells the story of an up and coming young superhero working off a grant from the Canadian government. It manages to be unusually true to life in some ways without sinking into dark depths of angst.
Edgar Choueiri of Princeton was presenting at the D.C. Philosopher's club. To start with context, he provided a logarithmic scale map of the universe that was just a bit out of date given NASA's recent announcement of 1200 more solar systems likely to hold planets. On the map he noted that traveling from D.C. to Boston is less distance than getting to space. Thus as prep for going to Mars, traveling to the International Space Station is like Columbus dipping his toe in the Atlantic. GPS satellites are a bit further out and geostationary satellites past that. Our Deep Space probes, Voyager 1, Voyager 2 are approaching Heliopause the edge of the solar system. They're traveling at 14k / sec which means it would take them 74,000 years to get to the nearest star. By comparison radio communications from Earth have now hit about 10,000 stars.
First question, how do we get a space station to geostationary orbit? Answer: Not chemical rockets but space elevator. You would need a cable 36,000 km long tethered to an asteroid. Very stable because the gravitational potential keeps it taut. The cable would need a strength of 70 giga pascals or 100* the strength of steel. A carbon nanotube can get to 100-110 giga pascals. However, the record length of nanotubes is 18.5 centimeters of nanotube which is an improvement over microns a few years ago. The point of the space elevator is saving money. It gets the per kilogram cost to low-earth orbit down from $10k to $20k to between $200-$400. For the farther out Geostationary orbit, the per kilogram cost cost would drop from around $100,000 to around $2,000 – $4,000. The most logical place to put the space elevator would be at the equator. Interestingly enough, space debris isn't really a problem due to the extremely small cross section of a nano-tube. Obviously the transport itself would have a much larger profile, but it would also have the ability to manipulate its rate of ascent or descent and detect debris, so it would be a manageable problem. I found this an unsurprising answer, although I've heard a lot of debate about the viability of space elevators and Dr. Choueiri's focus seemed more to be rocketry rather than proving the viability of the tubes. However, given the greater detail, I don't have time to write-up the more advanced propulsion mechanisms, and thus will finish my summary tomorrow.
I'm now on vacation in Florida, so I thought I should finish up Pittsburgh and get on with my current trip. My friend and I spent much of the morning of my other day up in Squirrel Hill where his mother continued to be most hospitable. My last foray into Pittsburgh was then a visit to the Senator John Heinz History Center. The admission cost was [$10] , [$5] student discount available, and that covers both the History Center and the Sports Museum. There was also a Treasures of the Vatican exhibit available at additional charge, but partly because I've seen the actual Vatican museum we didn't care enough to pay.
We ended up only going through the Pittsburgh history exhibit since I had a bus to catch. It was a fairly classical approach, artifact-heavy with a with special touches like a very in depth visitor director Q&A with John Westinghouse. That particular interactive video had an interface that lent itself to frequently asked questions but allowed for more detailed exploration which seemed like a good balance to me. It was titled Pittsburgh: A History of Innovation, that wasn't quite true but [more history than innovation, but] the history of the city is [inexorably] linked with the history of its great inventors and industrialists notably Carnegie and Westinghouse. There's also a giant robot that smoked that's a holdover from a world's fair. All and all it was a satisfying way to spend a few hours and if you also want to hit the sports museum and other exhibits around the history center you could probably make a day of it.
After the visit we walked over to the convention center area, got lunch at a Subway, and then I caught the bus home. All and all a great way to spend two days.
If you're a high volume RSS feed consumer like I am, managing all that comes in can get to be a real problem. I manage it by having a few topical folders, a favorites folder which draws from all topics, and a skim folder. Generally speaking, I want to glance at everything in the favorites folder while the skim folder often just gets reviewed on the basis of title.[1]
The trouble is that it's hard to go fast through the skim folder. Hotkeys help of course, but mark all read is quite a blunt instrument. Newsrob Pro is my droid reader of choice in part because it has two key tools that help:
Together, these have left me in the bizarre situation that I find my phone app has more functionality than the one I use via my web browser. Maybe that just means that I should switch to using my email client as a reader. I'm not claiming that Newsrob had these features first, so if anyone knows where they were invented let me know in comments and I'll update this. Similarly, if you know how to pull this off in reader please let me know. However, for now, Newsrob Pro makes me happy and I'm glad I dropped the fiver or so it took to get the full version. One caveat, you do need to login to your google account via the app and I know that's a legitimate concern for a lot of people.
[1] Admittedly, I do have some feeds that make both the favorites and the skim folder. These are ones that I like but are higher volume than I have appetite for. Also, most of what I get through friends' shared items goes in the skim folder.
Good article in the post by R. Jeffrey Smith and Peter Finn on how recent cases show that it’s harder to pull off secret assassinations these days. Notable examples include the Russians and Alexander Litvinenko, the Isrealis and Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, and the U.S. and the kidnapping of a Muslim Cleric in Italy. Obviously, the Predator drone strikes show that overt assassinations are still all the rage but that’s not really a big surprise.
I don’t think this really holds when talking about intra-country assassinations, in those cases suspicions will always be there but no investigation would be allowed. Similarly if the nation of the killing is willing to participate in a cover-up then the secret is likely to stay one.
On the whole, I do think this is a real positive for international relations. I still have mixed feelings about the use of targeting killings in Pakistan, but they seem to be both effective and comparatively low casualty. The implicit support and explicit condemnation from Pakistan seems like a risky situation, but is hardly unheard of and may be more tenable after the Taliban have exposed their own brutality.
However, use of assassination outside of war may take out bad guys with key knowledge or connections but on the whole seems more useful for killing political leaders and dissident threats. On the whole, when people want to hide violent acts from the eyes of the world, it isn’t typically to further world peace.
Last was week the Games for Change festival where designers of serious games got together to discuss their nascent industry. One regular topic for discussion at such gathering is whether serious games need to be fun and what fun even means. Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer summarizes the discussion:
Perhaps games, and the audience for games, would be better served by design that emphasizes values beyond fun, but it’s clearly a difficult assignment. A notable undercurrent at this year’s festival was a sense that the current crop of games for change aren’t reaching their intended audiences. Most of these games are perceived by players as preachy, and even their developers admit they often fail to match the engaging gameplay offered by commercial games.
He also casts doubt on the idea that a new generation that grew up on games would be more inclined to take games seriously given his experience with some freshmen regarding his class on video games. That said, Abbott found hope in the increasing awareness of the value of connections with commercial developers. From my experience with documentary films, I do think production values definitely matter. This doesn’t mean that serious games should be high budget, that’s impractical, but they should have a professional look.
On the fun breakdown, I’m inclined to think engaging is a better word. To find an audience beyond the equivalent of textbooks and corporate training videos people have to want to play serious games.
Making serious games engaging gets to the mention of multiplayer in my title. Economics and political science both heavily involve themselves in game theory with the classic example being the prisoner’s dilemma. The mechanics there are not particularly impressive, cooperate or betray, but I recall little grumbling when people paired up to experiment with it. I think that’s because the challenge and competition of playing with another person can up the engagement value substantially. This could even be faked I suspect, but probably only for one-off games.
A few game journalists have been moving around lately. Stephen Totilo is moving to Kotaku and also will be maintaining his own personal gaming blog. I’m going to keep around MTV Multiplayer for now, although it’s on hiatus, because I’ve grown to like Tracey John’s commentary. I guess I’ll link to Totilo’s personal blog for now.
N’Gai Croal has left Newsweek to go into consulting. He doesn’t have a personal website up yet to my knowledge but he does have a tumblr blog. I wish him the best of luck advising designers, if they listen to him at all I’ll have more fun with their games.
Finally Patrick Klepek was another good commenter on MTV Multiplayer and I don’t think he’s yet found a new home. He’ll make my blog roll when he does, until then fans can follow him over at his twitter account eXxy. I’ve got my own twitter account with my usual creativity in naming things: http://twitter.com/gregorysanders. It’s entirely public, but not particularly exciting unless you want vaguely daily updates on my life as well as notifications when I’ve got new posts up.
Also, I finally beat the boss in world 3 of Henry Hatworth. It required improved tactics on my part as well as replaying an old world to get money to buy an upgrade. That done, I’m still enjoying it on the whole, but even with puzzle game add-ons, Mega-man style platformers really aren’t my strong point.
The Future Combat System was the Army's attempt to buy the next generation of vehicles in a single project and by doing so to fully network them from the ground up. According to numerous GAO reports, most recently on March 12, bthe program is failing due to its reliance on unproven technology (Here's the Army's response to the report). Sec. Gates apparently found the GAO's case compelling and has recommended cutting and replanning the vehicle program of the FCS, effectively shattering the program. With that summary completed, I'd like to take this moment to emphasize that I'm speaking for myself and not any institution that employs me.
When they first launched FCS six years ago, the Army's top generals made a bet — not just on the coming wars around the globe, but on the politics within the Beltway. Ordinarily, weapons systems are bought one class at a time: one particular tank, one particular network, a single model of a fighter jet. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Army saw several of its weapons programs killed off by the Pentagon brass. So the generals made a decision, to package what would ordinarily be dozens of programs — new vehicles, new robots, new networks — into a single effort called "Future Combat Systems." And they awarded the massive contract for the whole thing to a pair of companies, Boeing and SAIC. The executives and the generals said it was to make sure all the gear worked in concert. Critics countered that, by combining all those programs into one, it made FCS too bloated, too ungainly to ever work right. And by the way, they added, why was there so little government oversight of what Boeing and SAIC did?...
Bits of FCS will continue. Small ground robots and drones developed under the program will be "spun out" soon to the troops. But, if Gates has his way, the generals' original vision for Future Combat Systems is over. As one Capitol Hill source put it, "They wanted to make it too big to fail, and in the process, made it a failure."
To give the Army a little more credit, there's a reason to think that the networking would be easier if you're doing all the projects at once. If you want a highly coupled network then the projects are by definition highly integrated. However, while I can see the desirability of such a network, I think as presently conceived is far too complex to be achievable. We do have a range of tools to deal with complexity, here's a series of workshops and reports from CSIS on the matter. However, I'm skeptical of our ability to handle the ecosystem and emergent behavior of counterporary warfare via any acquisition process, let alone a process as flawed as our present one. I think instead we need to give warfighters robust tools and standards to mash-up loosely coupled systems. In short, shoot for the internet and not for Windows Vista.
I respect Gates' need to take charge of the FCS project and restructure it. I don't, however, believe he's thinking logically about the vehicle design. First of all, he's stated that at least 50% of the DOD programs are still oriented toward conventional warfare. Second, we've all seen the reports by people who've stated that the best way to avoid IEDs is to get OUT of the vehicles and walk around. Third, usually one accepts that there are tradeoffs between mission capability and protection. If Gates wants full protection, then the vehicle's going to weigh too much and cost too much. Not hard to figure out.
That makes sense to me, although I don't really have the relevant knowledge and experience to judget the mission capability and protection trade-offs that well. I think it may be worth having vehicles that are so heavy that they take longer to get to the theater. On the other hand, some of our current vehicles are too heavy to operate in the challenging terrain of Afghanistan or to be able to manage some bridges in Iraq. FCS attempted to maintain heavy armor survivability rates by striking first and via advances in armor technology. That's not really going to work, lighter vehicles are going to take a survivability hit. However, if this improves their ability to achieve their mission, then lives will be saved over the long term.
I took an AI class back in undergrad, more than seven years ago now. We never really discussed ethics, but that's in large part because the field wasn't far enough along. The trouble is, there may not be that bright a line for when we are. When an AI can impersonate a human conversationally, passing the Turing test, it will still probably be via the use of a range of heuristics and trickery. However, the human brain also uses such short cuts. It seems to me distinctly possible that we still will have highly limited understanding of human consciousness by the time we start to get to real AI. Without that understanding it will be difficult to say what qualifies as consciousness via software.
But, this article argues human-like computation in robots will be realized within 30 years or less.
Hans Moravec, a robotics specialist at Carnegie Mellon, speculates that a computer would have to be able to compute 100 trillion instructions per second to emulate the human brain. That means that to perform like a human brain a “futuristic” PC would have to be 1,000 times more powerful than the average PC produced in 2008. This bridge between current computer power and that needed in the future may seem large. But, keep in mind that computational power doubled each year in the 1990s. Experts believe the doubling of processing speed every year will continue to grow exponentially well into the next decade.
Living in a world where computers are as smart as and can learn as quickly as humans will change the way people live. According to Moravec, the rise of robots will lead to a “fundamental restructuring of our society” (sounds like our friend Ray Kurzweil, no?). Business practices, scientific advances, and even athletic competitions could all be held without people. Based on the articles, it appears as though human-like robots are truly right around the corner. Whether people in society will be willing to accommodate their integration is another issue.
This is a bit of a follow-up to some of the gaming stuff I was doing last month. No real new information here, but I'm trying out some formatting tricks for use in the future. If it doesn't work for you or you have any thoughts, feel free to comment.
2008 was definitely a mixed bag, both on a personal and national level. The question for 2009 is whether the good political news can beat out our bad economic state. On a personal level I’m planning to finish up dealing with 2008 health discoveries, getting married, and maybe trying for a job government side. Not sure what the latter will mean for the blog, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now I want to thank all you readers, with special thanks to commenters and guest writers. I love keeping this blog up, but it wouldn’t be much fun without an audience.
Here’s a few things I’m considering for the blog in 2009, if anyone has any requests or thoughts on my ideas, now’s a good time to speak up:
I heard news of this first through my friend Monica and then my mother, essentially my librarian news network. There’s now a settlement between Google and book publishers over copyright infringement issues. Short version is that Google was scanning and posting a lot of library books using an opt-out system. The opt-out system was necessary because there’s a lot of orphaned works out there and tracking down who had rights to all of them would be cost prohibitive.
Neil Netanel over at Balkinization has some details on the deal:
Under the proposed settlement agreement (which as of this writing I have just read quickly), copyright holders will have the right to opt-out of the Project for any given book, but the default rule will be that Google may display 20% of the text of copyrighted out of print books and may sell access to viewing the entire text online. Google will also continue to be able to display short snippets of copyrighted in print books and to display and make available for user download the full text off public domain books in response to user’s search queries. Copyrighted and in print books will be made available for display (beyond the short snippets), online viewing, and download per agreement with each copyright holder. Under the settlement agreement, all public libraries in the United States will be offered a free online portal to Google’s digitized collection and Google will offer institutional subscriptions to colleges and universities.
He notes two worries. First, if Google had just fought and won under fair use then other people may better be able to get out under the thumb of increasingly burdensome copyright rules. Second, barriers to entry are probably high enough to give Google a monopoly in this realm.
So Bob Woodward has been saying the government has a new secret weapon that’s a game changer the same way the tank made WWI tactics obsolete. Here’s a summary from Mark Irvine over at the PCR blog:
We still don’t know enough to evaluate Woodward’s extraordinary claim, but today’s Los Angeles Timesprovides a better descriptionof what he was alluding to in the interview. At least part of the secret is a car battery-sized device attached to a predator drone used to identify and target individuals even while indoors:
But officials said the previously unacknowledged devices have become a powerful part of the American arsenal, allowing the tracking of human targets even when they are inside buildings or otherwise hidden from Predator surveillance cameras. Equally important, officials said, the systems have significantly speeded up decisions on when to strike. The technology gives remote pilots a means beyond images from the Predator’s lens of confirming a target’s identity and precise location.
Putting together the pieces, we’ve got a technology that can work through walls and provide a secondary form of ID. I don’t think heat sensors or sonar imaging would help on the identification. Similarly, I don’t think we could pick up a scent through walls. So that probably leaves sound. In various spy games and movies I’ve seen heartbeat sensors that go through doors and laser eavesdropping tech that can listen through windows using vibrations. This would seem like the logical extension of that stuff, assuming it actually exists.
It would also be relatively easy to build up a voiceprint database. Many of our enemies are kind enough to provide videos taunting us, and hopefully the NSA can pick up some of the rest. It may also be possible to get a voiceprint ID without being able to fully eavesdrop. Probably the lowest registers are easiest to pick up through other materials, think subwoofers, so we might just be comparing bass samples to what we have on file. The fidelity necessary for an identification might be lower than the fidelity required to understand the conversation.
Anyways, this is entirely speculation, if I knew things I wouldn’t be saying things, so take it for what it’s worth.
Back at the apartment my printer has been out of commission for nigh on six month because it ran out of color ink. In its infinite wisdom, the printer decided that this means it shouldn’t be printing in black and white either. Farhad Manjoo has a good piece in Slate about how to fight back against the worsening trend of printers pretending they’re out of ink:
Eventually I came upon a note on FixYourOwnPrinter.com posted by a fellow calling himself OppressedPrinterUser. This guy had also suspected that his Brother was lying to him, and he’d discovered a way to force it to fess up. Brother’s toner cartridges have a sensor built into them; OppressedPrinterUser found that covering the sensor with a small piece of dark electrical tape tricked the printer into thinking he’d installed a new cartridge. I followed his instructions, and my printer began to work...
In the long run, though, the printer companies’ strong line against cartridge makers seems destined to fail. Buying ink and toner is an enormous drag. Having to do it often, and at terribly steep prices, breeds resentment—made all the worse by my printer’s lying ways. Some companies are realizing this. When Kodak introduced a new line of printers last year, it emphasized its low ink costs. Kodak claims that its cartridges last twice as long as those of other printers and sell for just $10 to $15 each, a fraction of the price of other companies’ ink. When my Brother finally runs dry, perhaps I won’t replace the toner—I’ll replace the printer.
Sounds good to me, I’ll check out that Kodak line. Read the whole piece for more tips.
Fruit has replaced cookies as the top snack for the under six set. Who is driving the new trend? Stephen Colbert has more:
More seriously, I wonder how much of a difference Cookie Monster actually made. Unfortunately, I’m not sure comparing the results in households that do watch Sesame Street, far too many confounding factors there. Perhaps if we knew how many people picked up the slogan that "cookies are a sometime food."
Via Yglesias a neat idea for building floating islands for refugees. Lots of nice pictures, but as Yglesias notes that its easy to assert the ecological stability of such a thing. At first glance though, I’d say they look way too good. If those sorts of resources were available to refugees we’d have less refugee problems.
There’s also been a libertarian effort at this sort of thing. It’s called the Seasteading movement and they rightly realize that if you don’t want to deal with nations, going to sea might be one of your best options. I’m no libertarian, but I think it makes an interesting experiment. Here’s a Wired write-up, apparently a founder of Paypal has given them $500k to have a go at it. Anyways, unlike the LILYPAD’s discussed above, Seasteading actually has some dollar figures.
The costs that we are talking about (say $50 - $200 / ft^2 final cost to residents) are not drastically out of line with first world house prices. It’s not as cheap as Costa Rica, but it isn’t as expensive as Silicon Valley either. If these estimates are right, we can build
brand-new sovereign territory for a cost similar to the housing of many upper-class Americans. To us, this seems incredibly encouraging!
To solve refugee problems, it’ll have to get a whole lot cheaper.
Went to an event today on attempt to provide a new web portal to allow people doing stabilization/reconstruction and disaster prevention and response. It’s trying to address the problem that people that there’s a lot of fragmented groups across the world working on these issues and they often don’t communicate well. Government side, civil-military divides and splits between multiple agencies further complicate things.
So the websites try to provide web 2.0 solutions to be a one stop shop allowing people to link to relevant resources or post original content. Worth checking out if you are interested in these resources or have some resources of your own that you want to promote.
My favorite comment was from someone in the audience who noted that the Brits no longer use the term “lessons learned” they use the term “lessons identified.” That is perhaps the least Orwellian name change I’ve ever heard of. Yay for increases in accuracy.
I’ve been meaning to update my blogroll for a while and it seems like now is a good place to start. My latest add is James Fallows over at the Atlantic. He’s a journalist presently living in Beijing and does great coverage of China. The man is also quite tech savvy and it sounds like we all owe him a debt of gratitude.
We all pick our causes. During my brief and enjoyable stint at Microsoft long ago, I worked on various big-think projects. But my claim to have changed the world may rest on my all-out war against "Clippy," the moronic "help" feature that popped up to say "Hey, you seem to be writing a letter!" each time you typed "Dear ..." I don’t want to overstate things, but before I arrived, Word came with Clippy turned on by default. Now it’s turned off by default. Judge for yourself.
His current quest is to get people to stop using the "boiled frog" analogy. Turn up the heat fast, frog jumps out, slow, frog stays in and boils. Apparently it isn’t true. I’m not going to fully join that crusade, but I will make sure I don’t use that particular parable.
Fallow’s is also the author of a classic 1996 piece on why Americans hate the media. Great read and still holds today.
On the issue of Time’s most influential person web poll, I think I’m going to have to go with Stephen Colbert based on this:
If this video convinces you to back Stephen vs. his nemesis Korean pop singer Rain, vote here.
I would also vote for the Black Drum fish, but I don’t think it was nominated.
Via Brad Delong a pretty funny short about a time travelers forum:
At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.
The Washington Post has posted their second Peep diaroma show. Some of them are pretty awesome and almost all are pretty good.
My favorite one I don't want to give away, but it's something I've reviewed in this blog. Finacee's favorite was #13.
Pam Spaulding over at Pandagon has taken up the issue of excessive taser use. In this latest entry she documents three people killed by Taser as well as someone tasered for "aggressive language."
The real problem is that many police officers haven’t been trained in the use of tasers. So when they use them that use is excessive and they use them in situations where even non-lethal violence is effective. Such mistakes are basic human nature, I’ve seen similar trends in roleplaying games where people are sometimes quite willing to hand out non-lethal attacks. Of course, as the cases above show, in real life even non-lethal weapons can prove deadly. One commenter suggests that the better term is less-lethal not non-lethal.
However, the title was not just snarky. I think cameras for tasers is a great idea, what we need now are cameras for guns. Questionable shootings would be easier, if by no means trivial, to resolve if we could consistently get footage.
In fact, having done a bit more googling, it looks like somebody is actually trying the idea. Check out comment #6 for more details. There was also a swrite-up in the Times Herald-Record. That article also mentions the idea of shoulder mounted cameras, which might be easier but would also raise more privacy concerns. Still increased accountability for cops and better evidence against criminals might make for a worthy privacy trade-off.
Also, as a side note, if it’s good for policing it’s probably also good for counter-insurgency.
My main activity today was a losing Caps game. Still fun though, although they really fell apart in the second period.
But, I also read the fourth Manhunter trade paperback 4 today. I don’t think I reviewed 3 either. The series is about a lawyer by day deadly superhero and parent with visiting privileges at night. What makes the series a bit different is the hard driving poor parenting attorney is Kate Spencer, a female.
Anyhow, the third book picks up after DC comics skipped year. I think the gimmick hurts the series. It starts in a reasonable place with increased attention on some supporting characters, but I didn’t know some of them so I wasn’t invested in them. The story also took a turn for the darker with Kate doing some jobs for a shadowy government agency. The book was enjoyable enough but not quite good enough for anyone not already a fan.
Happily the fourth book picks up nicely. I got to know some of the newer supports better and like them. One is Obsidian, a gay superhero whose main home is the JSA comics. So I am inclined to like him and more time is helping. I particularly like the stories involving henchman extraordinaire Dylan Battles and government agent Cameron Chase. Nothing incredibly new there, but their stories tend to be fun. There’s also a plotline involving a prior Manhunter, Mark Shaw. Too soon to tell whether a lot of fairly ironic setup will actually pay off.
But most importantly the main plotline is a terrific Wonder Woman cross-over. She needs defending in US court for a murder that happened in a big DC event. The story is interesting enough but mostly they have fun interactions and I prefer the lighter tone when Wonder Woman is around. So if you got three but weren’t sure about four, I can definitely say go for it.
Via Yglesias
Good job House denying these guys immunity. The fight is still on of course, but for once we’re not running scared just because Pres. Bush’s fearmongering.
Via Yglesias; Tyler Cowen points to an interesting bit of research that studied the impact of giving land to former slaves.
After joining the Confederacy in 1861, the Cherokee Nation was forced during post-war negotiations to allow its former slaves to claim and improve any unused land in the Nation’s public domain... I find the racial gap in land ownership, farm size, and investment in long-term capital projects is smaller in the Cherokee Nation than in the southern United States. The advantages Cherokee freedmen experience in these areas translate into smaller racial wealth and income gaps in the Cherokee Nation than in the South. Additionally, the Cherokee freedmen had higher absolute levels of wealth and higher levels of income than southern freedmen. These results together suggest that access to free land had a considerable and positive benefit on former slaves.
Here’s the paper by Melinda Miller. This does seem fairly logical, but this involves policy issues that are still debated today. The issue of land reform comes up fairly regularly, particularly in Latin America. There’s some question as to whether disadvantaged groups, upon being given land, will actually be able to keep the proceeds from it. I wonder if giving land is more effective than giving money. Both can be used as a source of more income, although land at the same time can provide housing and if arable food in as a side benefit while a bank account has to be depleted to provide these things.
Anyways, definitely an area worthy of more study and I’m happy to see that this particular effort at reparations actually worked.
Via Kevin Drum (and other earlier people, I don’t feel like looking it up)
The Weekly Standard actually put up a parody that made me laugh: "Mitt’s Notes on Religion"
That said, while I was not pleased by Romney’s religion speech, as a Lutheran I like the description confident independence. That said, for the alternative I would have gone with a floating things in jello and not hearty laughter.
Klein has an interesting article up on Amazon’s Kindle.
Short version:
Devices like the Kindle promise to do that for us. They pledge to archive our personal intellectual histories, make them sortable, searchable, accessible, and, most importantly, permanent. They will not replace paper. More than likely, nothing will. But they will allow paper to focus on what it is best at -- delivering an enjoyable experience -- and relieve it from it what it is worst at -- transmitting large amounts of information to imperfect receivers.
I already did this to a degree when a typed my lecture notes for grad school. That made them searchable which was often useful in school although hasn’t come up all that much since I got out. Also particularly useful was the ability to have all the electronic class readings at my fingertips, if I needed to pull something up during a discussion I could easily.
In more recent years, my blog reader has taken a similar roll. Starred and shared items, as well as searchable history for all entries, have substantially augmented my memory. I use del.ico.us as my clip file for any newspaper items of interest which then feeds into Google reader via my del.ico.us RSS feed. If I could integrate my books in as well, I’d be closer to having an eBrain of sorts.
However, I really don’t think the software is quite there yet. Aside from Kindle’s proprietary problem we haven’t yet truly advanced that far beyond the magic of search. I think we need to hit the next generation of tagging and citation to truly progress. Essentially citations need to become synonymous with hypertext if not simpler. Copy text from any published document and have it automatically create a citation to the source. Read through books and articles and be instantly able to jump to the documents they’re referencing even if they’re in another book entirely. Be able to clip on ellipses or [cut words] and be able to see what got replaced.
And yet, so little of that matters for pleasure reading. I think Ezra’s right, the eBook won’t kill the book, it will just result in media specialization.
This afternoon Estonian Minister of Defense Jack Aaviksoo gave a Statesman talk at CSIS on "Real Threats of the Imaginary World." Why Estonia?
They were taken by surprise on by a cyber-attack on April 21st, 2007. The minister learned about it when he couldn't get online. However, the mid-level unofficial network was already to work by then and had already called in specialists from abroad. There second move was to cut off access from some foreign servers. No formal decision-making to react and its unclear whether the response steps were authorized by existing legislation. After the initial onslaught the third step to get experts from abroad. The later waves were on the 4th and 9th of May and Estonia was able to reduce the volume tenfold.
Most of the attacks were against government websites and servers, new portals, two banks then all banks (one at a time), and internet service providers. The volume raised Estonia internet traffic more than 400 times the normal rate of traffic. This led to some street riots (up to $10M in damage), no access to banking over computers (90% of transactions in Estonia; a few million in damages), and cut off of news. Not just volume but also well coordinated, in a set time, and coordinated with real world demonstrations. The attacks were carried out via botnet of a million zombified computers (maybe 10% from the U.S.) that were rented in advance from illegal groups. Renting one costs ten to fifty cents a computer. Perhaps 1% of any given audience has a zombie computer.
This happened when Estonia displeased Russia by moving an old statue celebrating the Red Army. However, they have no solid evidence of the organizer. All they can note is that they were well-organized and coordinated with diplomatic actions by "their big neighbor." There were minimal long term consequences, some of the attacks were neutralized thanks to friends inside and outside of Estonia. What it did was psychological: Caused confusion, intimidation, cut off information access. More developed are more vulnerable, but it isn't limited to developed countries.
After the cut, what to do on the defense?
Continue reading "Veteran of the first nationwide Cyber-Attack" »
The Post’s tech column has a review of cameras that will automatically Photoshop your pictures so you look better.
When they work, both can generate a photographic likeness that looks more attractive than the real you -- a SuperYou that you can post on Facebook, MySpace, Match.com or any other site. HP’s photo alterations are more ambitious than Fuji’s (and probably more in demand, given the hefty state of many Americans). To use the slimming mode, you take a picture as usual, then switch to the camera’s playback mode.
Bring up the photo, tap the "Design Gallery... " button on the screen, tap "Enhance Photos," and then choose "Slimming." There, you can then select one of three levels of shrinkage to determine how much narrower the person in the shot will appear. The camera will save a new copy of your shot, allowing you to compare the original and the edited version back on your computer....
The camera will then slightly soften the appearance of any faces that it detects in the image. This doesn’t always work out: In many of my tests, either I couldn’t see any difference, or the "enhanced" shot merely looked a bit out of focus.
With the right kind of photo, though -- a close-up portrait with the subject centered or nearly so -- this mode made people’s faces look slightly smoother and younger. Think of it as the reverse of what high-definition TV does to actors: Where one adds five years to a person’s appearance, this feature can knock five years off...
So why not build cameras that know more of the editing tricks creative
photographers have used on their computers? If a camera can make people
look thinner and younger than their physical selves, why not have it
also whiten their teeth, dye their hair and blot out their birthmarks?
On the whole, I’m willing to chalk this up as a good thing. We’re constantly bombarded by prettied up images of people that are already beautiful. Meanwhile, almost everyone feels they look bad in photos. I think this is in part because they do, on average I think people look better in person than in snapshots.
The ability to edit our own pictures with incredible ease will both make people more attuned to the edits on magazine covers and let them have pictures that look as good as they do in person, if not better. Admittedly, this is a rather bourgeoise solution and in present form it won’t be available to those with self-esteem issues but not money. However, if this works, I’ll bet we’ll see it in photobooths and disposable cameras within a few years. The techniques are widely known and the software should be fairly cheap to replicate.
In preparing for my trip to China, I’ve been making a fair number of calls. Not surprisingly, this has involved some waiting on hold. Beyond a short wait time, usually the best you can hope for is that the ads or music won’t be particularly annoying or repetitive. I also place a premium on not being told repeatedly how much they care about my business.
Up to this point, the I was most impressed by call centers that gave time estimates and notified me of my position in line. Bonus points for having tracking numbers that helped me jump past the telephone tree and get working immediately on my problem. But today, my call to Blue Cross-Blue Shield managed a whole new level of call center technology: call backs.
Instead of waiting on the line for someone to pick up, I gave them my number and they had an automated program call me back. I picked up the phone, pressed one to verify that it was me, and talked to someone. There phone tree was hellish and I still had to regularly re-enter information, but good-bye waiting on hold. Obviously, just giving somebody a number and waiting to be called back isn’t some huge break through, but when we’re talking about an automated system that gives fairly accurate time estimates on the wait for a call back, I’m happy to see it.
The only downside is that you do have to repeat some information when you get the call. I don’t think that’s just an IT problem, so one else could answer the phone, particularly if there’s a long wait, so security probably demands at least one or two questions. However, it seems like everyone asks anyways, so this is hardly a step back.
Slate’s Machinist blog has some weakly sourced numbers on Radiohead’sname your own price album sale: 1.2 million digital copies sold. "The figure dwarfs first-week sales of"Hail to the Thief," released in 2003, racked up 300,000 sales in its first week; "Amnesiac" managed 231,000 copies in 2001; and "Kid A" hit 207,000 in 2000." Of course, 1.2 million doesn’t mean much if everyone paid nothing. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case:
But we may have a clue. The British music newsletter Record of the Day conducted a poll of 3,000 purchasers of the album. People paid an average price of £4, about $8, the newsletter found.
Because the band isn’t working with a record label, it gets to keep all that money. If it had sold its songs instead on iTunes, it would likely have seen less than $1.50 per album.
There’s some incentive to lie and inflate the amount you paid, but even at £2 per album they’d still be beating the pants off going through iTunes. I bought it paying £5. I meant to actually only pay half that, I didn’t notice immediately that it was in Pounds and then didn’t figure out how to lower the amount without starting over. I thought the album was alright, although I tend to find heavily electronic albums a bit muddy. That said, it was still kinda neat participating in the experiment.
Shadi Hamid over at Democracy Arsenal highly praises the whole idea:
This is, as far as I can tell, the first time a band as big as Radiohead has completely superceded and subverted the whole infrastructure for selling records. If Radiohead pulls this off, they’ll be sure to pocket much more profit, paving the way for other artists to follow suit. Everyone benefits: we get our music for cheaper; Radiohead gets more money; the middle man gets cut out; and the music world suddenly becomes democratic in a way it never was - or could have been - before.
So you say you want a revolution? Get on with it, then. Go right ahead and buy the new album.
That said, a commenter notes that they didn’t manage to cut out the credit card companies, who are charging ~$1 a sale. The main disappointing thing about the whole experience for me was that they didn’t take Paypal. I figure the next attempt probably will.
Funny how art imitates life:
I’m pretty sure the original, 1970s Bionic Woman worked for a government agency. But this version works for a private contractor - she even gets assigned to protect the daughter of a tycoon who gives the company a lot of business. Yet this private company seems to be empowered to go around killing people. And nobody seems to consider this at all unusual, or legally dubious.
I guess TV writers just pick up on the Zeitgeist.
On that note, a development that seems straight out of Neil Stephenson [Probably because it turned out to be a fake]. The first non-depressing assassination to come out of Russia in some time:
Alexey Tolstokozhev (btw, in Russian his name means ’Thick Skin’), a Russian spammer, found murdered in his luxury house near Moscow. He has been shot several times with one bullet stuck in his head. According to authorities, this last head shot is a clear mark of russian hit men (known as "killers" in Russia).
Who hated Tolstokozhev so much as to hire a hit man to assasinate him? Well, I guess you have about one billion e-mail users to suspect. Tolstokozhev was a famous spammer who sent millions of e-mail promoting viagra, cialis, penis enlargement pills and other medications. Links in these e-mails usually led to some pharmacy shop, which paid Tolstokozhev a share of its revenue. This is a well known affiliate scheme employed by spammers worldwide. Tolstokozhev is estimated to be responsible for up to 30% percent of all viagra and penis enlargement related spam...
This is a second murder of a spammer in Russia. Another russian spammer, Vardan Kushnir, was assassinated in 2005.
Via Sullivan.
[Updated: A fake apparently]
Eve Fairbanks on Ann Coulter’s latest (emphasis mine):
In other words, are you more likely to rile people up for being a racist? An anti-Semite? A misogynist? A homophobe? She is all of the above, so her whole life is like a kind of Freakonomics experiment in bigotry.
Via a Gene Weingarten Chat. Have you ever wondered why the message is so long when you leave a voice mail? Dial X to leave a call back number (what does that even do? Has anyone ever done that) etc. Seems like a real waste of time, right?
Months ago, a NY Times tech columnist found the answer (emphasis added):
(P.S. … As longtime Pogue’s Posts readers know, my biggest cellular pet peeve is the endless recording you hear when you reach someone’s voicemail: “To page this person, press 2 now. You may leave a message at the tone. When you finish recording, you may hang up. Or press 5 for more options”—and so on.
At the conference, I asked one cellular executive if that message is deliberately recorded slowly and with as many words as possible, to eat up your airtime and make more [Average Revenue Per User] for the cell carrier. I was half kidding—but he wasn’t fooling around in his reply: “Yes.”
On the upside, VOIP is hurting them. Go Skype!
The cellular industry is going through insanely rapid change. Almost everyone there—800 attendees from 200 phone companies in 65 countries—was running scared of VOIP. That’s voice over I.P., better known as Internet phone. VOIP includes cheapo unlimited home-phone service like Vonage, as well as absolutely free computer-to-computer calling with programs like Skype. It’s all growing like crazy, which is making a huge dent in these companies’ ARPU.
The Left of Boom series in the Post on IEDs has been terrific. If you want to know more about the weapon that’s killed the most US soldiers and how we’re responding it’s a must read.
A few key points:
If you want to see a quick summary of each part and a couple of related links, check out the PCR blog.