A Tennessee woman was arrested after poking another woman on FaceBook. What’s interesting to me about this story is that ABC News decided it was newsworthy. It just doesn’t seem like it is to me. The woman who was poked had a protective order against the poker. A protective order means no contact. Poking is a form of contact and so, yes, if the woman violated the protective order, she should be arrested. Her lawyer, of course, is questioning whether she actually was the perpetrator of the poke and if she wasn’t, then she should not go to jail. But if she did poke the woman in violation of the protective order, then she should face the same punishment as if she had called the woman or showed up at her house. I think ABC News thinks this story is newsworthy because it involves what ABC News considers an unusual medium for communication. I only wish they had made it clear that THAT was the reason the story was interesting to them. As the story reads now, it seems like they think it’s ridiculous that a poke would be considered contact. If it wasn’t contact, people wouldn’t poke their friends, right?
I heard Madeleine Albright this morning on Morning Edition, the fifth or sixth interview I’ve heard with her since Sunday morning. Albright just released a new book and the ensuing media blitz has brought attention to the unusual tactics she used while pursuing her diplomatic duties in the Clinton administration. In the new book, called Read My Pins, Albright discusses her tactic of using costume jewelry, brooches in particular, to send messages about the state of negotiations in which she was involved. Albright’s articulation of her use of jewelry in this manner is an example of semiotics in action.
Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols in communication. Albright first began using her brooches to send messages in diplomatic meetings when Saddam Hussein called her a serpent. Consequently, whenever she dealt with Iraq, she would wear an antique snake pin on her left shoulder. She then wore all sorts of pins to signal how she was feeling about diplomatic negotiations.
Semiotics is concerned with signification, the process of using symbols to encode messages. Communication of a message requires a second step, the decoding of the message by the receiver. Albright’s audiences learned that they could gauge her feelings by looking at the brooch she was wearing. Vladimir Putin told Bill Clinton that he could tell what the tone of a meeting with Albright was going to be by looking at her left shoulder.
Semiotics doesn’t make it to the mainstream very often. Albright’s deliberate use of the field is a reminder that the safety of the world might in fact depend upon diplomats being good semioticians, being able to correctly read the symbols and signs in front of them.
I’ve been watching Battlestar Galatica on DVD. One of the roles of science fiction, I think, is to raise controversial issues, to help us understand what it means to be human. Although the original 1970’s miniseries was cheesy and not very interesting, a few changes to the original idea makes the recent TV show one of the best when it comes to asking difficult questions and making us think about things in a new way.
The basic plot of the show is that humans created machines which then evolved into autonomous, intelligent beings called Cylons. Humans colonized twelve planets and after years of relative peace, the Cylons attacked the humans, destroying much of the human population of the colonies. The survivors, including those aboard a number of space ships, are now on the run from the Cylons, struggling to survive a war with a superior enemy.
One of the major changes from the miniseries to the TV show is in the look of the Cylons. In the miniseries, the Cylons were one of the cheesiest parts of the show, looking like robots made primarily of cardboard. In the new show, some of the Cylons look like machines but now they are computer-generated and sophisticated. But the most interesting change comes from the fact that Cylons can look and act just like humans. They bleed and sweat and some of them are even programmed to think that they are human, leading to what appear to be emotional responses such as love. Human-looking cylons allow the writers to raise questions about civil rights and justice and faith.
For example, season one of the show, which aired in 2004 and 2005, raised issues about terrorism and torture and justice at a time when the Abu Ghraib scandal was fresh in the news. The humans on the ship called Galactica discover a human-looking Cylon in their midst. Their instinct is to kill the Cylon by putting it into space (because human-looking Cylons breathe oxygen just as humans do) but the Cylon claims that there are several bombs planted throughout the fleet, scheduled to go off in a short amount of time. Sensing an opportunity to prevent these bomb attacks, the military commander sends the best human pilot, Starbuck, to question the Cylon (ok–so the plots are always completely logical). The Cylon messes with Starbuck’s head, telling her lies containing just enough truth to make her wonder what’s true and what isn’t. But he won’t tell her where the bombs are. Starbuck notices that the Cylon sweats and reasons that if he sweats, he must feel fear and pain. So she and her colleagues begin to torture the Cylon.
One of the most thought-provoking exchanges during this torture comes when Starbuck tells the Cylon that she recognizes the dilemma he is in. He wants to be human because being human is better than being a machine. But while he is being tortured, every instinct must be telling him to turn off his pain software. But if he turns it off, he won’t be human anymore because the defining characteristic of being human is the capacity to feel pain. I don’t know if I think that’s true or not but the conversation reminded me of research in machine learning that postulates that in order to really learn about the world, a robot must have a body.
The importance of embodiment to learning comes from the observation that human knowledge, especially that most basic knowledge that makes up our “common sense”, is gained through via perception, through the interaction of our bodies with the physical world. Not all AI researchers believe embodiment is necessary for learning. Cyc is probably the most famous example of an attempt to codify all of human knowledge without the use of embodied machines. The project was started in 1984 and has yet to be completed because of the difficulty of articulating all human knowledge. Imagine trying to put all human knowledge into a computer by writing statements such as “Bill Clinton was a President”, “All trees are plants” and “Abraham Lincoln is dead.” Each night, after spending the day coding statements like this, the researchers run some software (called an inference engine) which allows the computer to infer new statements about the world. Each mornin, the researchers look at what the computer has inferred. The inference process is somewhat flawed and the researchers find themselves having to correct some of the computer’s logic, encoding such bizarre facts as “If a person is dead, her left foot is also dead.” Because of the difficulty of encoding these kind of facts, many researchers now believe that embodiment and direct experience of the world is a more efficient way to teach a machine about common sense knowledge. So perhaps feeling pain is a necessary requirement for being human.
The same episode that contains this interesting conversation about the nature of humanity also contains a conversation about the purpose and effectiveness of torture. After many hours of torturing the Cylon, Starbuck and her colleagues are visited by the President of the colonies who asks Starbuck whether she knows where the bombs are yet. When Starbuck says no, the President asks why she has been torturing this man for eighteen hours, what makes her think she will get him to talk. Starbuck replies that the Cylon is not a man which she seems to think justifies the torture. The President orders that the torture be stopped since it has clearly not been effective. The President later shows that this is not a sentimental choice, one that has been made because she is soft on the Cylons. After getting the information she needs from the Cylon, she orders that he be placed in the airlock and sucked out into space so that he will no longer pose a threat. The implication is that she ordered that the torture be stopped so that the humans would remain human, that the torture was damaging to the torturers and their humanity.
Themes of faith and love and treatment of outsiders and many other of the most interesting, controversial debates in our society run throughout this series. I agree with Diane Winston, who said on Speaking of Faith that shows like Battlestar Galactica represent the great literature of our time, that people will come back to shows like this over and over, just as they read great books over and over.
Everyone seems to be talking about and planning for the H1N1 virus these days. My university, for example, sent out a memo to encourage us to plan for extended absences due to the virus as we plan our classes for the fall semester. Now we can all participate in world-wide planning for the potential pandemic, thanks to a group of researchers from Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. They have created a new Flash game called The Great Flu that allows the player to try to stop the spread of a virus. The consequences of the player’s actions can be surprising, as when I isolated victims of the virus in China and Japan which caused “chaos”. This game is an example of a serious game, that is, a game with a serious purpose such as education or advocacy. There are so many examples of serious games that the category constitutes a subfield of game studies with organizations and conferences dedicated to it. Don’t let the name of the category fool you, though. Serious games can be fun too. The Great Flu is pretty good and I learned quite a bit about public policy implementation for virus containment. Who would have thought swine flu could be fun? Give the game a try here. The game also contains quite a bit of humor. At some point, as the deaths from the flu rose in Central and North America, one of the global events that occurred was that “No Virus” t-shirts began to be sold. That sounds about right. 
My area of research when I was in computer science was artificial intelligence. AI is a broad field with many subfields, each of which has many applications. Within AI, I was particularly interested in pattern recognition via machine learning techniques. When I left computer science, I turned my research attention to the topic of this blog and began to focus more and more on the impact of technology on society and media technology issues. So I was quite interested this morning when my favorite National Public Radio show, On the Media, broadcast a story that shows the connection between these two research interests.
Pattern recognition sounds like an esoteric subfield of AI. But in today’s computer-focused society, there are many useful applications of pattern recognition. For example, I worked on two problems in microbiology while I was a graduate student. My master’s work involved looking for patterns in strands of DNA of an organism called Onchocherca volvulus which causes river blindness. We were trying to determine whether we could determine the evolution history and path of the organism to help with understanding the epidemiology of the disease. For my PhD, I worked on the famous “protein folding problem“, trying to predict the 3-dimensional structure of a strand of protein by looking at just the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein. The theory is that if we can predict the 3-D structure, we can predict the function of the protein as well and the implications of that are far-reaching. As I said, there are many practical applications of pattern recognition by computers.
On today’s edition of On the Media, there was a story that reminded me of the fact that pattern recogniton by computers is everywhere in our society. The story was about a contest by NetFlix, the DVD rental site. NetFlix allows subscribers to rate movies via a star system, where one star means “hated it” and five stars means “loved it”. Based on the ratings that a particular subscriber has given a set of movies, NetFlix attempts to recommend other movies that the subscriber will enjoy. NetFlix’s business model depends on these recommendations since a larger percentage of their movie rentals come from subscribers listening to these recommendations. Without the recommendations, subscribers would likely run out of movies that they know they want to see and then would eventually give up their subscriptions. But predicting what movies a person will like is a very difficult problem.
NetFlix does a pretty good job with their movie recommendation system, Cinematch, but if they can make better predictions, they’re likely to hang on to more subscribers. So they created a contest, offering a million dollars to anyone who can develop an algorithm that does 10% better in its predictions than Cinematch. Apparently, a number of groups immediately were able to develop algorithms that were 5% more accurate than Cinematch. Even getting to 8% more accuracy didn’t take that long. But a number of intriguing issues made reaching the 10% mark difficult. One of the most interesting is known as the “Napoleon Dynamite problem.” Napoleon Dynamite is a quirky, independent movie that came out in 2004. It seems that it is quite difficult to accurately predict whether a particular subscriber will like or dislike this movie. In fact, two people whose likes and dislikes are quite similar can disagree drastically about Napoleon Dynamite. So getting to the 10% mark will probably require a solution to the “Napoleon Dynamite problem.”
The contest closed a couple of days ago, although no winner has yet been announced. NetFlix says that they received 44,014 entries from 5169 teams in 186 countries. One of the requirements of the contest is that the winners must disclose their techniques to the world. Although getting more accurate movie recommendations is not a life or death problem, the solution to it is likely to provide insight into how to accomplish other pattern recognition tasks. And that’s good news for all of us.
I was talking to my dad tonight about the Kindle. He’s a fan and wants one, but feels as though he doesn’t read enough to justify the expense. I’ve written about the Kindle before and have said that I have a problem with Amazon’s high pricing of electronic books. Now Amazon has screwed up in another way and I have mixed feelings about that.
Recently, Amazon removed all traces of the digital versions of two of George Orwell’s classic novels, 1984 and Animal Farm, from their web site so that Kindle users can no longer purchase them. That action is not controversial. Amazon’s other actions, however, are controversial. Amazon also removed all digital traces of the novels from the Kindle devices of users who had purchased the novels. It turns out that the publisher who sold Amazon the rights to distribute the novels did not actually own the copyrights (in the US) for them. When Amazon determined that they were illegally selling the digital version of the novel, they stopped selling it. But they also retroactively removed the digital versions of the novels from those who had purchased it. People in the blogosphere writing about this issue have conflicting ideas concerning Amazon’s reaction. Some are outraged while others think Amazon did the right thing.
The difference in these two points of view comes down to values. Those who think Amazon did the right thing liken this to the police confiscating a stolen car from your driveway. You never had the right to own the item, whether you purchased it knowing it was stolen or not Those who think Amazon did the wrong thing believe that the users had purchased the item in what they thought was a legal manner and, therefore, Amazon should have left well enough alone. In fact, many are making the argument that situations such as this are arguments against digital distribution of content since the ownership of digital content is so ephemeral. The truth seems to be somewhere in between these two extremes, I think. There are two reasons that this is not the same as the police confiscating a stolen car. First, Amazon had a duty to determine that they were selling a legal product. They failed in this duty and should be held liable in some way for that failure. Second, once Amazon discovered their error in illegally selling the product, they were less than forthcoming about the remedy. They did refund the purchase price of the novel but they didn’t clearly explain what had happened and clearly notify those who had purchased the novels that they were being removed. Instead, Amazon surreptitiously removed the novels from the Kindle devices. That’s wrong. On the other hand, Amazon is not the devil in this situation. They honored the copyright of the novels and, most importantly, they refunded the purchase price. They tried to do the right thing.
As in so many situations, the real issue here seems to be about Amazon’s lack of forthrightness about the issue once it was discovered. The cover-up of the crime once again turns out to be worse than the crime itself. Did we learn nothing from Watergate?
Ian Schreiber, co-author of Challenges for Game Designers, is undertaking an interesting experiment in online education this summer. He is offering an online course called Game Design Concepts via Web 2.0 tools (a blog, a wiki, a discussion board, Twitter and so on). None of this is revolutionary. What makes this experiment interesting is that Ian is offering the course entirely for free and allowing an unlimited number of people to register (or not) for the course. Registration closed yesterday (June 29th) with 1402 registrants. Many, many more people (myself included) will probably follow the course informally without registering for it.
One thing that I wondered was why Ian would decide to do this. In his own words, here’s why:
I have many motivations for starting this project, some selfish and some altrusitic. Best to be up front about it:
- Game design is my passion, and I love to share it with anyone and everyone.
- I have taught some classes in a traditional classroom and others online, and I want to experiment with alternate methods of teaching.
- By exposing my course content and viewing the comments and discussions, I can improve the course when I teach it for money.
- It is a career move. If this course is successful, it gives me greater exposure in my field and promotes my name as a brand.
The reason that I find most interesting is the last one. I wonder how he knows that a successful course will lead to “greater exposure” and branding his name. But let’s assume that assume that success will mean that he gets these things. I also wonder how he will determine whether the course is “successful.”
Most of the materials that Ian is providing come in the form of text–twice a week blog postings, a wiki and so on. These items are not really much different than the book that he requires the students to buy for the course. In other words, so far this sounds like a correspondance course. But online education differs from other types of correspondance courses in its ability to allow interaction between a faculty member and a students as well as between two students. With 1402 students, I don’t think Ian will have much time to interact with the students individually. He puts the students into online groups and so they should have the opportunity to interact with each other. Of course, the quality of the experience that one has in such a situation is likely to depend on the other students in one’s group. It could be a great, meaningful experience if there is a critical number of students in the group who engage in thoughtful online discussions and group project work. It’s unclear at this point how many of the 1402 students will have this experience.
In explaining that there is a text book required for participation in the course (but no other expense), Ian says, “It’s still cheaper than a college education.” He’s absolutely right. The idea of getting together a group of people who are interested in learning the same thing is nothing new. I participate in a two-person academic book club and in a teaching reflective practice group to accomplish something similar to what Ian is trying to do via this class and I find both to be among my most rewarding activities. The difference between my book club and Ian’s class, however, is that the class has a single person (a teacher) who is structuring the experience while in the book club, we both take responsibility for structuring the experience. This responsibility ensures that we are both serious about the work we do in our book club meetings. But if enough of the people in Ian’s class are serious about the work, I think this will be a “successful” experience.
I’ve seen a couple of commercials on TV for Microsoft’s newest product, Bing. Microsoft claims that Bing is a “decision engine.” What exactly is a “decision engine”? According to a press release from Microsoft, a decision engine “goes beyond search to help customers deal with information overload.” In other words, information is no longer power. Products like Google (Microsoft’s competitor) present too much information in response to searches and humans now need help (more help than Google can give) to be able to make sense of it all. And Microsoft steps in with Bing.
The traditional search engine does a good job of helping people find information, according to Microsoft’s press release, but the explosion of information means that people have difficulty actually using that information to make informed decisions. So Bing will actually help us make decisions! That seems like a bold claim to me especially since search engine optimization is typically incremental rather than revolutionary. Is Bing as revolutionary as the phrase “decision engine” implies? It’s difficult to say at this point but even Microsoft’s own promotional materials make me doubt it.
According to the press release, Microsoft did some research about the kinds of things that people search for and found that lots of people are interested in four areas when they search the web: “making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.” Ok, so there’s the first way that Bing is not really a “decision engine.” The tool will be optimized to deal with searches that are related to these four areas and the press release makes no mention of whether the tool will help me make other kinds of decisions.
The optimization strategy for dealing with these four areas also doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary to me. The press release gives a bit of detail about the focus of the strategy. In particular, Bing provides “great search results”, an “organized search experience”, and it simplifies tasks and provides insights. What do these things mean?
“Great search results” simply means that Microsoft’s research found that only 25% of searches provide information that satisfies the searcher. So in creating Bing, they tried to increase this percentage. No details about how they’ve done this, however. But don’t all search engine manufacturers try to provide results that are as relevant as possible? So this is not a revolutionary strategy.
Microsoft also did some research and found that people want the results of their searching to be organized. So they added some organizational features to Bing. These features include “Explore Pane, a dynamically relevant set of navigation and search tools on the left side of the page; Web Groups, which groups results in intuitive ways both on the Explore Pane and in the actual results; and Related Searches and Quick Tabs, which is essentially a table of contents for different categories of search results.” When Microsoft uses the words “relevant” and “intuitive”, I am skeptical. Remember “Clippy”, the paper clip cartoon character that was supposed to help us when we used Office? Or how about the fact that Microsoft claims that they changed the menu structure in the Office suite for Vista so that the menus would be more “intuitive”? There are too many examples that show that what Microsoft considers “relevant” and “intuitive” doesn’t match what most people consider “relevant” and “intuitive”. So this statement from the press release doesn’t convince me that the claims that Bing is a “decision engine” is anything more than hype.
Finally, Microsoft claims that they use the strategy of simplifying tasks and providing insight. Again, most search engine manufacturers probably want to do this so the strategy itself is probably not revolutionary. But the fact that Bing focuses only on four primary areas of searching might mean that the tool can be optimized to simplify tasks and provide insights into these four types of searches.
I haven’t yet used Bing. The only way to know whether it really is a “decision engine” that will revolutionize the way we use the information provided on the Web is to use the tool. Microsoft has had a search engine tool for a long time (quick–do you know what it’s called?). It was called Live Search before it was upgraded and renamed to Bing. But the fact that you probably didn’t know that name is an indication that the old tool was probably not very good, certainly not better than Google. Given Microsoft’s record with upgrades, I feel pretty sure that calling Bing a “decision engine” is nothing more than hype.
The Supreme Court yesterday ruled in a case from Alaska that the state does not have to provide physical evidence (which the state still has) to a man who has been in prison for 16 years for the purposes of new DNA testing (which the man has agreed to pay for himself). Ed Brayton provides an excellent analysis of the case and explains the negative impact of the decision on our justice system.
I just finished reading My Lobotomy by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming. Howard Dully received a transorbital lobotomy (also known as an “ice-pick lobotomy”) when he was 12 years old. The doctor who performed the lobotomy was the king of transorbital lobotomies, Walter Freeman. The book chronicles Dully’s life as well as his search, more than 40 years after the lobotomy, for answers as to why this surgery was performed on him. It’s a harrowing story, especially because by almost all accounts, Dully was a normal kid. The problem in his life seems to have been his step-mother who for some reason just didn’t like him and was probably afraid of him because he was a big kid.
Antonio Egas Moniz was the pioneer of the lobotomy and in fact, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949 for his work in this area. By the late 1950’s, with the introduction of drugs that worked far better than lobotomies, the procedure fell out of favor in the mainstream medical community. In fact, some have characterized the lobotomy as the biggest mistake ever made by mainstream medicine. My favorite quote about the lobotomy comes from Norbert Weiner who is the father of cybernetics. He said on page 148 of his book Cybernetics, “…prefrontal lobotomy …has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier.”
Reading My Lobotomy is an eye-opening experience. Throughout the entire book, I wondered where the authorities were. Surely there were adminstrators at the hospitals where Freeman worked who realized that his methods for diagnosing patients as having major psychoses were problematic. Why did they let him continue to practice for so long? What about all those doctors that Dully’s step-mother took him to who said he was a fine, normal kid? Why did none of them recognize that she was going to continue in her pursuit until she found the diagnosis she was looking for? The problem, of course, is that at the time, a lobotomy could be prescribed for conditions as mundane as “youthful defiance” or even just “moodiness.” There is no doubt that Howard Dully was a defiant youth. Reading the book, I get a portrait of him as a really smart kid who was bored in school and who probably had attention deficit disorder as well as an incredible amount of stress as a result of being an abused child. But the kind of trouble he got into was normal kid stuff and probably could have been dealt with by someone paying a little bit of attention to him and maybe challenging him a little more in school.
The other question that kept popping into my head was whether things are better now. Could this sort of thing happen today? Obviously, there are not a lot of lobotomies performed today but kids are put onto serious psychotropic medicines all the time. What kind of safeguards do we have in place to protect kids (or adults for that matter)? Do we require multiple physicians to look at a kid before he or she is diagnosed as schizophrenic or bipolar or whatever? My guess is that we don’t. Although it seems like the effects of taking drugs for these conditions would not be permanent in the same ways that having a lobotomy would be permanent, some of the stigmatization that Dully describes would be present and very damaging simply with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or some other serious mental disorder.
One of the most moving parts of the book is the afterword to the paperback edition of the book. Dully is contacted by two brain researchers to have a detailed MRI taken of his brain to determine the kind of damage that was done by the ice picks. The researchers suspected they would find little damage because Dully seemed so normal, too normal for someone who has had a lobotomy. What they found was brain damage that was so significant that if it had been done to an adult, that person would be a vegetable. But because Dully had the surgery when he was 12, his brain was still maleable. It adapted to the damage so that after 40+ years, he was a normally functioning adult. Dully then says that he had always felt burdened by the lobotomy, like something really bad had been done to him as a child. After the MRI, he realized that he actually was quite lucky that he had the lobotomy at such an early age. If it had been done even five years later, he probably would never have left the institutions he grew up in. He would never have had a life with a wife and kids and a job. So he now sees his life as lucky. It’s an inspirational shift in perspective, I think, and I’m not sure how many of us would be able to make that shift.
From a technology standpoint, this story reminds me that we have developed lots of tools that we can use in a variety of situations. But having the tools doesn’t mean that we should actually use the tools. And when we do use the tools, we need to put into place significant checks and balances to avoid abuses of power and to protect the powerless as much as we can. I don’t think we’ve really learned these lessons yet.
By the way, National Public Radio did a 22-minute documentary about Howard Dully back in 2005. Here’s that story–I strongly encourage you to listen to it by clicking on “Listen Now” in the upper left corner of the page.
