» Society Desert of My Real Life

{May 30, 2009} Recycling

If you’re anything like me, you probably have a couple of old, unused computers lying around your house gathering dust. In my house, we had six computers until recently, two very old desktops, two relatively old laptops and two new laptops. We had accumulated these six computers in just 11 years since we had a fire in 1998 which destroyed most of our belongings, including our computers. It’s amazing how quickly we accumulate new computers. A lot of this quick accumulation is the result of planned obsolescence, the idea that computer manufacturers design computers to either fail or not be able to keep up with newer technology in a certain period of time. And then, of course, there’s the question of what to do with the old computer when we get a new computer. In fact, the EPA estimates that 30-40 million computers will become surplus each year for the next several years. The EPA also classifies these surplus computers as “hazardous household waste” so simply dumping the computer into a landfill is dangerous.

When I purchased my newest laptop, I got a form to send in along with my old computer so that it could be recycled. The problem with this form for me was that I really wanted to recycle the old desktop computers but they are HUGE and I really didn’t want to pay for the shipping even though the recycling itself would be free. So I decided to check out the options at my local transfer station. It’s a “transfer station”–not a “landfill”–so I was hopeful that they’d have a solution for me.

It turned out that for $8 each, I could dispose of both of the computers at my local transfer station. I believe $5 of the $8 was for the monitor. Apparently, the glass in the CRT of the monitor contains a high amount of lead. The tower portion of the computer contains mercury, cadmium and fire retardant. The mouse, keyboard, speakers and so on apparently don’t contain hazardous waste although since they are made of plastic, they still should not end up in a landfill.

My local transfer station hires a company to take away the hazardous portions of the computer and that’s why we have to pay a fee. When I placed the monitors and the towers in the appropriate sections of the transfer station, I noticed that there were upwards of 50 other systems there, many of which were far older than mine and which looked like they had been there for a long time. I live in a really small town and so I do imagine that it would take a while to accumulate the number of systems that would make a trip to the town by the recycling company worthwhile. Since we’re a small town, our transfer station is completely out in the open, with no building covering any of the materials dropped off there (which raises a whole other issue of what happens when paper gets wet and the fact that we pay by weight to have it taken away). So I did wonder what the environmental impact of having those computers systems sit out in the weather for all these years might be. But at least they won’t end up in a landfill.

{May 23, 2009} Security Theater

Nothing captures the public’s attention like a named killer. Jack the Ripper. The Boston Strangler. Son of Sam. Zodiac. The Night Stalker. The Green River Killer. Last month, a new name was added to this list: The Craigslist Killer. It turns out that Philip Markoff, the medical student who was arrested (and who has pled not guilty) for the murder of Julissa Brisman in Boston, is not the first killer dubbed “The Craigslist Killer.” In fact, quite a few murderers who met their victims via the popular classified advertising site have been dubbed “The Craigslist Killer.” What’s interesting about this latest murder, however, is the response from the administrators of Craigslist.

Police claim Markoff had attacked several other women in the days leading up to his alleged murder of Brisman. He apparently found his victims on Craigslist in the “Erotic Services” section of the online advertising site (although it isn’t clear that all of them were found in that section–I’m making an assumption based on Craigslist’s response to the murder). An earlier victim, for example, had advertised as an exotic dancer. Brisman advertised her services as a masseuse. When Brisman was shot, Markoff was allegedly attempting to restrain her, presumably in as a prelude to robbing her, as he had his earlier victims. By all accounts, Markoff is an unlikely suspect, a Boston University medical school student with no criminal record and no history of legal problems.

In the wake of this murder and series of crimes against women, several attornies general have called on Craigslist to do something to prevent future use of the web site by predators. Craigslist has responded. They will remove the section called “Erotic Services” and replace it with an “Adult Services” section that will be “monitored” by Craigslist employees. Any sexually suggestive advertisements will expire after seven days. This response appears to have satisfied the attornies general for now but to me, this is an example of what Bruce Schneier has called “security theater,” an action which is about making us feel safer without any real consequence to actual safety.

To see what I mean by this, think about the Brisman case. She was advertising her services as a masseuse. I’m not sure whether her advertisement was under “Erotic Services” but let’s assume it was. I’m also not sure whether her advertisement was sexually suggestive but again, let’s assume it was. So if someone were to write the exact advertisement that she had used today, Craigslist employees would review it and presumably decide it was one of the ads that needs to expire in seven days. In those seven days, many Markoff clones would review that ad and presumably call for those services. Is the woman now any safer than Brisman was? And after the ad expires, the woman will now write a new ad. Does the fact that her ad expired in seven days make her any safer? And what is more likely to happen is that the woman advertising masseuse services will NOT write a sexually suggestive ad (because she know that it will expire in seven days) and will therefore, NOT have her ad expire in seven days. Is she any safer than Brisman was?

It is completely unclear to me how a Craigslist employee reviewing “Adult Services” advertisements could have saved Julissa Brisman. So perhaps what we should be calling for is the complete elimination of both “Erotic Services” and “Adult Services” advertisements. Brisman was advertising as a masseuse. Do we want to go so far as to claim that ALL massages have an underlying erotic dimension and that they therefore should ALL be banned from advertisement? Why don’t we ban those advertisements from all newspapers, both in print and online, then? In fact, there have been many murders in which the murderer and victim met through newspaper classified ads (just google “lonely hearts killers” to get a sense) and yet those advertisements have not been banned. Maybe they should be. But then we should also ban all advertisements for masseuse services from the Yellow Pages, right? In fact, maybe we should ban massages altogether.

The response by Craigslist to the fact that an alleged murderer met his victim via their web site is all about theater, about making us feel safer rather than really making us safer. In actuality, nothing could have stopped Markoff from robbing someone and in those robberies, someone who resisted him was likely to get injured and perhaps even killed. Why do we need to kid ourselves otherwise?

{December 31, 2008} Failed Predictions

Predicting the future is a notoriously difficult endeavor and yet there is never a shortage of people willing to play the game, especially at the end of a year.

Many of the predictions for 2009 seem to involve world politics. For example, over at Psychic World, Craig and Jane Hamilton-Parker predict that an assassination attempt on Barack Obama will occur in 2009. They posted this prediction on October 9, 2008 and then updated the entry on October 27, 2008 (in red font, just so we know that it’s an important update). The update tells us (and I can almost hear the breathlessness with which this important information is stated) that this prediction already came true! Apparently, the vague assassination “plot” by two neo-Nazis thwarted by the ATF in October constitutes an assassination “attempt”. The fact that these men did not actually begin to implement the plot, which involved first shooting over 100 black people in Tennessee and following that spree up with the assassination of then-Senator Obama, doesn’t matter to the psychics who made this prediction. It still counts as a success for their ability to predict the future. An even bigger issue for me is the fact that they predicted the assassination attempt would take place in 2009. Clearly, this plot was discovered in 2008. The psychics never discuss how useful it is for a prediction to be that far off in its timing and details.

As amusing as I find the predictions of psychics who claim to be able to “foresee” the future, the predictions that I’m most interested in are the ones made by those who examine trends and then predict where those trends will take us. People who make these kinds of predictions are called “futurists” or “futurologists” and, unlike psychics, claim no mysticism in coming to their predictions. Instead, according to Wikipedia, futurologists study “yesterday’s and today’s changes, and aggregating and analyzing both lay and professional strategies, and opinions with respect to tomorrow. It includes analyzing the sources, patterns, and causes of change and stability in the attempt to develop foresight and to map possible futures.” Although futurologists make predictions about many different fields, I’m particularly interested in the area of technology, especially because technological change is very rapid and vast. I think technology shows despite their claims to scientific methodologies, the predictions of futurologists are typically as wrong as the predictions made by those claiming to have a mystical insight into the future.

The technological futurologist that has gotten the most attention in the US in recent years is Ray Kurzweil, the author of a number of books that have captured the popular imagination. Kurzweil is a computer scientist from a time when computer scientists were rare. When he was just a teenager, long before computers were widespread and common, he created computer software that wrote impressive musical compostions using the patterns it discovered analyzing great masterworks. He also developed the first optical character recognition software which led to his invention, in 1976, of The Reading Machine, which read written text out loud for blind people. Since that time, he’s invented musical synthesizers, speech recognition devices, computer technology for use in education, and a whole host of other useful tools. He’s obviously a smart, creative guy who knows a lot about technology and how to use it to benefit humans. Kurzweil’s faith in technology is so great that he considers himself to be a transhumanist, advocating the use of technology to “overcome what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death,” according to Wikipedia. It is in this area that many of his predictions fail.

In his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, about the impact of artifcial intelligence on human consciousness, Ray Kurzweil made a number of predictions about technology at the end of 2009, 2019, 2029, and 2099. Since we are just about to begin the year 2009, I thought it might be interesting to consider how likely it is that Kurzweil’s predictions can come true in the next year. Chapter 9 of the book, which makes predictions for 2009, can be read online here.

The chapter is divided into sections called The Computer Itself, Education, Disabilities, Communication, Business and Economics, Politics and Society, The Arts, Warfare, Health and Medicine, and Philosophy. Although some of Kurzweil’s predictions have indeed come to be reality, the vast majority of them are still far off into the future. In fact, some involve technological tangents that seemed interesting in 1999 but that our society has chosen not to pursue.

Kurzweil predicted that the computer itself would be much more ubiquitous than it actually is and that they would be smaller than they actually are. Because computers are so ubiquitous and small today, it’s difficult to imagine how someone might have overestimated these trends just ten years ago. But that’s the problem with Kurzweil. He is such a technology evangelist that he tends to go too far. In the case of the computer itself, he predicted that the average person would have a dozen computers on and around her body which would communicate with each other using a wireless body local area network (LAN). These computers would monitor bodily functions and provide automated identity verification for financial transactions and for entry into secure areas. The technology he describes is nearly available now in the form of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips which are common in some warehouses and which are now part of every US passport. Most of these RFID chips are passive devices, however, which means that they can only be read by an external device and do not provide computing power themselves. In addition, there has been something of an uproar over the increased use of these chips. For example, I recently received a new ATM/credit card from my bank that had an RFID chip embedded in it to make using the card easier. I would no longer need to swipe the card to use it. Instead, I could simply tap it against any reader. But because it doesn’t have to be swiped, anyone who got close enough to me with a reader could read the chip. I didn’t see the advantage of having such a chip in my credit card and saw many disadvantages and so I returned it, making a special request to get a card without the chip. I suspect there are others out there who have similar concerns. Kurzweil did predict that privacy issues would be a concern in 2009 but I’ll talk about that later.

Some of the other things about the computer itself that Kurzweil got seriously wrong involve the way in which we interact with our computers. He predicted that most text would be created using continuous speech recognition software–in other words, we would speak to our computers and they would transcribe our speech into text. This is clearly not going to become the norm in the next year and I’m not sure we would want it to become the norm. As I sit typing this blog entry, for example, I have the television on (because multi-tasking is the prevalent way of interacting with the world–something that Kurzweil does not mention) and Evelyn is sitting next to me interacting with her own computer. Neither of us would want the other to be talking to her computer at this moment. This might be an example of a place where a cool technology would actually be an obstacle to the way most users interact with their computers. But Kurzweil did not stop there. He also predicted that we would wear glasses that allowed us to see the regular visual world in front of us but with a virtual world superimposed on it using tiny lasers. Such glasses do exist but they are novelties, used only in experimental situations. And I think most people would find such a superimposition to be a distraction. Until some benefit can be shown for this technology and how it allows us to interact with the world, I think it will remain a novelty.

Another area where Kurzweil predictions have not come to fruition (yet) is the area of disability. It is in this area that Kurzweil betrays his transhuman biases. He predicted that by the end of 2009, disabilities such as blindness and deafness could be dealt with using computing technologies to the extent that such disabilities are no longer considered handicaps but are instead mere inconveniences. Although significant progress has been made in the area of augmenting such situations using computing technologies, we are nowhere close to where Kurzweil predicted we would be. Kurzweil’s zeal in the advancement of technology once again led him to overestimate the progress that we would be able to make in ten years. The history of technology is filled with such zeal and overestimation.

I won’t detail every area that Kurzweil gets things wrong but I do want to touch on the area of politics and society. The Obama campaign rode its unprecedented use of technology to a presidential victory but in ways that were not predicted by Kurzweil. Kurzweil predicted that privacy issues would be a primary political issue and although there are groups of people who are very concerned with privacy in our society today (both because of technical issues and because of political issues involved with the War on Terror), I don’t think too many people would say that privacy is a primary political issue in our society, although I, for one, wish it was a bigger issue for most people.

I’m curious to see which of Kurzweil’s predictions do eventually come to pass. My guess is that anyone who pays close attention to technological issues could attain the same level of accuracy that he does. At least he doesn’t claim to have some mystical connection to what the future will bring.

{December 27, 2008} FaceBook: A Hotel California?

Robin forwarded an article called How Sticky Is Membership on FaceBook? Just Try Breaking Free from the New York Times. Of course, because I’m completely addicted to FaceBook, my first thought was “Why would anyone ever want to leave?” But I can see that there may be reasons that someone might want to leave. And even if you don’t want to leave, FaceBook’s approach to member information might raise some privacy concerns.

According to the New York Times article, members who want to leave FaceBook find it difficult to do so because FaceBook retains information on their servers after a member deactivates her account. As one disgruntled member says, “You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.” FaceBook’s executives say that they retain this information in order to make it easy for a member to reactivate her account. That is, because the information doesn’t disappear when an account is deactivated, if the account is then reactivated, the information is available for the reactivated account. This is obviously a problematic answer to member concerns about information retention. If I decide to deactivate my account, I want my information to be removed from FaceBook’s servers. In response to the ensuing uproar, FaceBook’s executives provided another process for removing information from a deactivated account. The member must delete each piece of information and then once all the information has been manually deleted, the account can be deactivated. Clearly, this is a tedious process that has done little to stem the tide of criticism about FaceBook’s practices.

From a technical standpoint, it should be easy to provide a one-step process for deleting all of the information in an account and then deleting the account itself. So when I first read about the tedious process required for deleting the information associated with an account, I thought perhaps the technical folks at FaceBook had simply been overwhelmed by the success of the site and had not had time and resources to build in as much user-friendliness as the members demanded. After all, FaceBook was created as a hobby project by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 and as of October, 2008, there were more than 140 million active members worldwide. That kind of growth is bound to result in some pain so I figured the lack of easy account deactivation was simply part of that growing pain.

But then I read this excellent post by Steven Mansour. Mansour points out that we voluntarily give our personal information to FaceBook which can then sell that information to the highest bidder. Perhaps this lucrative side business is the real reason that FaceBook doesn’t want to make it easy for users to delete their accounts. This particular privacy issue has been a concern for me for a long time. For example, I am one of the few people I know who has no rewards cards–the kind of cards that you get from grocery stores and book stores where you provide your personal information in return for savings on items that you buy. I have not found that the savings on my purchases has been worth the price of making my private information available to these large corporations. It had not occurred to me that FaceBook might be engaged in the same kind of information harvesting as Hannaford Brothers and Borders Books and Music. But I guess I was just being naive. And the sad thing is that knowing that FaceBook might be engaging in this behavior has not convinced me to leave FaceBook. In return for my information, I get easy-to-use tools that help me keep up with my friends’ lives. I guess everyone has her price.

{September 13, 2008} Digital Rights Management

Back in the late 1980’s, I worked as a volunteer on a running race. Because I had a background in computer science, one of my tasks was to set up a database of all the race entrants and then to enter their finishing positions after the race so that we could publish the results in the local paper. A friend of mine had an Apple II computer with a database management program on it. I think the database program was AppleWorks. In any case, the database management program had a primitive copy protection mechanism, a scheme for ensuring that users of the software did not give copies of it to their friends. Each time I started the program, I had to answer a question from the user manual. The question might be something like: On page 37 of the manual, what is the fourth word in the third paragraph? This was in the days before copy machines were widely available so the thinking was that the software would not be very useful if you didn’t also have a copy of the user manual. It was a very primitive way of trying to prevent users from giving the software to all of their friends, of trying to protect what the software developers felt was their right to limit the copying of their software. Of course, this mechanism would not work today since it’s extremely easy to copy user manuals. But even back then, the critique of this protection mechanism was that it was easy to circumvent if you were determined to do so but it was simply an inconvenience for legitimate users. What if you lost your user manual, for example?

Since that time, digital rights management has come of age. DRM is a hot topic with owners of digital content claiming that their rights cover all sorts of things, allowing them to do all sorts of things to our computers without our consent. And yet, it is virtually impossible to use technology to prevent the copying of software and other digital content. So DRM is typically criticized for not actually protecting against illegitimate copying while making the lives of legitimate users very difficult. A number of stories about DRM have been in the news recently.

What is digital rights management? According to Wikipedia, it is a generic term that refers to any scheme that a hardware manufacturer or copyright holder implements to prevent illegimate use of their hardware or copyrighted materials. In 1998, the United States passed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) which among other things, made the circumvention of any digital right management mechanism a crime. In other words, if a company used the DRM mechanism that I described above (asking users to answer questions from a user manual), then copying the manual and giving it to a friend would violate the DMCA. But the situation for users of digital content is even more dire than that. DRM mechanisms today are wide-ranging, claiming all kinds of rights for the owners of digital copyrights, at the expense of your right to control what happens on your own computer.

I have been thinking about the DMCA since its passage because of its immediate impact on the research of computer scientists. Soon after the passage of the DMCA, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) ran a contest that challenged researchers to break their latest digital watermarking scheme. Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, chose not to sign any of the confidentiality agreements that would qualify him for the monetary prize of the contest. Within three weeks, he and his team had broken the watermarking scheme and wrote a scientific paper that described the techniques they used. When the SDMI and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) found out that the team was planning to present this paper at a conference, they threatened to sue, citing violation of the DMCA, specifically the portion of the act that makes it illegal to circumvent DRM schemes (of which the digital watermarking scheme was one). Felten withdrew the paper but also sued the SDMI and the RIAA and sought a ruling that presenting the original paper should actually have been allowed. Because Felten had not actually been sued and therefore had not been harmed, his case against the SDMI and the RIAA was dismissed on the grounds that he lacked standing to sue. Since then, the Justice Department has said that any threatened legal action against researchers such as Felten under the DMCA is invalid. But this judgment has not yet been tested in a court of law. And in the meantime, content providers have gotten bolder in their uses of DRM technologies.

In early 2007, Sony BMG Music Entertainment agreed to settle with the Federal Trade Commission after it was discovered that music CDs from the company contained software that was secretly installed on any computer on which the CDs were played. This software “limited the devices on which the music could be played, restricted the number of copies that could be made, and contained technology that monitored their listening habits to send them marketing messages.” Because the software gave access to users’ computers to Sony BMG, it also opened up holes on those computers to any intruder who knew about them. In addition, the software, once discovered, was unreasonably difficult to remove. The Federal Trade Commission said that this secret installation of software violated federal law. The settlement was a financial and public relations disaster for Sony BMG and should have put that kind of DRM technology out of business forever.

But the long-awaited release of Will Wright’s new game, Spore, from Electronic Arts earlier this month shows that DRM is alive and kicking. The reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly negative due to the existence of SecuROM, a particularly nasty implementation of DRM. This software was developed by Sony DADC, does not announce that it is installing itself, limits the user to 3 installations of the game (even if it has been uninstalled), and is very difficult to uninstall, even if the game is uninstalled. It remains to be seen what kinds of security risks are opened up on the computers that have SecuROM on them. The biggest complaint seems to be about the limit of three installations because of how strict this limit is. Apparently, changes in hardware make the software believe that a new installation has occurred. So if a user upgrades her video card, she may use up one of her Spore installations. This software sounds very similar to the software that Sony BMG got slapped down for using so I can only imagine what is going to happen as these thousands of disgruntled gamers make their dissatisfaction known. Of course, the developers of Spore claim they are just trying to stop piracy. The problem with this argument is that the DRM scheme was broken before the game was released so anyone intent on pirating the game will be able to do so. Only legitimate users of the game will be harmed by SecuROM.

Legitimate users of Yahoo Music recently learned the lesson that purchasing DRM-protected content is actually like renting, rather than purchasing, that content. Yahoo Music Store will close its virtual doors at the end of this month. If you are one of the unlucky legitimate customers who bought your music through this store, you will no longer have access to your music because of Yahoo’s DRM scheme. When the store closes, the DRM license key servers will shut down. If you can’t get a DRM license key, you can no longer listen to music that you legitimately purchased. Meanwhile, those who pirated that same music will continue to enjoy what they pirated.

Content providers need to stop creating roadblocks for their legitimate users. These roadblocks do nothing to protect content.

{September 7, 2008} We ARE Telling Stories

As I suggested in a previous post I don’t understand why FaceBook calls each status update a story. I said that if we were to consider each update a plot point in a longer story, then I could understand the use of the word story. Clive Thompson, in a New York Times article, explains that part of the reason these status updates (no matter how banal they might seem individually) are compelling is precisely because taken together, they tell us a story of our friends’ daily lives that we wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s a fascinating article. Thanks to Liz for pointing it out to me.

I can now be found on Twitter. I look forward to reading 140-character installments of your life story there.

{September 1, 2008} Hamlet (The FaceBook News Feed Edition)

FaceBook is changing how we view and think about many aspects of our lives, including literature. As an example (from McSweeney’s), here is Sarah Schmelling’s version of Hamlet, written in the sound bite style of a FaceBook News Feed.

HAMLET
(FACEBOOK NEWS
FEED EDITION)

BY SARAH SCHMELLING

- – - -

Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.

Hamlet thinks it’s annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet’s annoying.

Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.

Hamlet’s father is now a zombie.

- – - -

The king poked the queen.

The queen poked the king back.

Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.

Marcellus is pretty sure something’s rotten around here.

Hamlet became a fan of daggers.

- – - -

Polonius says Hamlet’s crazy … crazy in love!

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent.

Ophelia removed “moody princes” from her interests.

Hamlet posted an event: A Play That’s Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family

The king commented on Hamlet’s play: “What is wrong with you?”

Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind.

Polonius is no longer online.

- – - -

Hamlet added England to the Places I’ve Been application.

The queen is worried about Ophelia.

Ophelia loves flowers. Flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers. Oh, look, a river.

Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don’t Float.

Laertes wonders what the hell happened while he was gone.

- – - -

The king sent Hamlet a goblet of wine.

The queen likes wine!

The king likes … oh crap.

The queen, the king, Laertes, and Hamlet are now zombies.

Horatio says well that was tragic.

Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, says yes, tragic. We’ll take it from here.

Denmark is now Norwegian.

{August 18, 2008} Technology, Sports and Cheating

A lot of the Olympics news coverage has focused on the fact that so many swimmers set world records in their events, partly because of advances in swimsuit technology. Speedo’s LZR Racer, a full body swimsuit that reduces drag by using ultrasonic welding rather than stitching and by streamlining the 2% body fat of elite swimmers (it takes even the leanest athlete a half hour to shoehorn his body into the suit), has been worn by athletes setting dozens of swimming records. The reduction in drag is reported to be 5% over the previous state-of-the-art swimsuits and 40% over a traditional swimsuit. Filippo Magnini, an Italian swimming champion, has said that wearing the suit is equivalent to “technological doping.” The OCC apparently disagrees since it allows the use of the suit. Because of this official sanctioning of the suit, no one accuses a swimmer who wears one of cheating despite the fact that the rules state: “No swimmer shall be permitted to use or wear any device that may aid speed, buoyancy or endurance during a competition”. Clearly, this swimsuit aids in speed by reducing drag. But the Olympic committee has decided that wearing the suit is allowed.

Meanwhile, Korean pistol shooter Kim Jong-Su won silver and bronze medals in pistol shooting at the Olympics but was expelled (and therefore lost his medals) after he tested positive for a banned beta-blocker called propranolol. Beta-blockers block the effects of adrenaline on beta receptors and are used to treat hyper-tension and heart-related problems. Adrenaline, of course, can cause hands to shake and heart rate to increase. When an athlete such as a pistol shooter uses these drugs to control his “nerves”, his hands may be steadier and therefore, his shooting will be more accurate. So the Olympic committee has banned the use of these drugs for athletes in sports such as pistol shooting. When propranolol was found in Kim Jong-Su’s system, he was accused of cheating and was stripped of his medals.

So what’s the difference between using the technological doping of the LZR Racer and the chemical doping of propranolol? I have two ideas about why the Olympic committee might see these two situations differently. First, the swimsuit is worn outside the body and the effects of the suit are gone as soon as you take the suit off. Propranolol is ingested and affects the athlete’s entire system. There’s no way to simply take something off to remove the effects of the drug. Second, the LZR Racer was designed for swimmers. It has no other use than to make swimmers more effective. Propranolol, on the other hand, was designed for a medical use. So when Kim Jong-Su took the drug, he was misusing it, that is, using it for a different purpose than it was designed for. (Unless, of course, he has high blood pressure or a heart problem.)

These two reasons for why the Olympic committee has problems with one technology and not the other fall apart, however, when we look at the case of South African runner Oscar Pistorius. Pistorius is a paralympic athlete who runs with the aid of Ossur’s Flex-foot carbon fiber lower legs. In 2007, he began to compete in able-bodied competitions and set records in a number of events. The International Association of Athletics Federations, whose rules govern the Olympics, examined Pistorius’ performances and changed its rules to ban the use of “any technical device that incorporates springs, wheels or any other element that provides a user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device.” That wording sounds eerily similar to the rules for the swimming competitions but in this case, Pistorius was told that he couldn’t wear the Flex-foot prostheses in able-bodied competitions, including the Olympic games. That ruling was overturned in a court (which said that the IAAF hadn’t shown that Pistorius had an advantage over other athletes not using the prostheses). Pistorius then became eligible for the Olympics. The immediate controversy died when Pistorius failed to make South Africa’s Olympic team. But since he is only 21 years old, the controversy is not likely to have ended permanently.

The Flex-Foot prostheses don’t seem very different to me than the LZR Racer swimsuit. Both were designed for the purposes that the athletes are using them for. Both are worn outside the body and the effects of them are gone when the device is taken off. So perhaps the difference that the Olympic committee sees has to do with access. Anyone can put on a swimsuit while someone who has legs cannot wear the prostheses. Only amputees can wear them. In fact, the issue of access is hinted at in looking at how the rules are worded. The swimming rules do not mention advantages over other athletes while the rules for the running competitions use the phrase “an advantage over another athlete not using such a device.” But if access is the issue, then all of this technology should be banned. Athletes from poorer countries will never have the same access as athletes from wealthier countries. The swimsuits cost over $500 each, which would be prohibitively expensive for some athletes. It seems that economics-based access has never been an issue for Olympic committee rulings so why would other types of access be an issue?

The rules governing which technologies are allowed and which are not seem to be quite arbitrary. Until some objective principle is developed to decide what is cheating and what is not, we can expect this controversy to continue to rage.

{August 13, 2008} You Can’t Always Believe Your Eyes

In yet another step toward hyperreality, it has been revealed that the opening ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics were (partially) faked. If you watched the spectacle on television, you were probably amazed by the fireworks display. There was indeed a fireworks display during the ceremony but you weren’t watching it. Instead you were watching an animation of a fireworks display that took nearly a year to create. Apparently, the creator of the animation even added a little “camera shake” to the animation to enhance the impression of watching a real recording of what was happening in the stadium that night. The official explanation from Beijing about why this little deceit was necessary is that it was too dangerous to film the real fireworks display from a helicopter. Since when is that an acceptable justification for journalistic deception?

Some of the stories about the incident actually muddy the facts of the deception, saying that the controversy occurred because some portions of the show were “pre-recorded.” This statement implies that the deception involves “live” performance vs. “pre-recorded” performance. But actually, this particular deception is about something that never happened. What we television viewers saw was something that never happened. It was an animation that was created on a computer. As a viewer, I never thought I was watching something live. The opening ceremonies started at 8am EST on August 8 and were not broadcast on NBC until 7:30pm EST on August 8. So the whole ceremony was “pre-recorded.”

Although the animation was not created by NBC, they did show it without disclosing that it was not what was actually happening in the stadium. In fact, Matt Lauer said during the ceremony, “This is actually almost animation. A footstep a second, 29 in all, to signify the 29 Olympiads.” Bob Costas responded, “We said earlier that aspects of this Opening Ceremony are almost like cinema in real time. Well this is quite literally cinematic.” Does that sound like they were coming clean about this portion of the ceremony being an actual animation? Why were they being so coy?

Clearly, this is not the first time that images have been manipulated for dramatic effect. The most famous example of such manipulation is probably the OJ Simpson Time Magazine cover showing his mug shot after his arrest for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. His skin on the cover was darkened to make him appear more menacing. And there are examples of manipulation all the way back to the beginnings of photography. The oldest example I could find was from the 1860s when Abraham Lincoln’s head was superimposed on the body of John Calhoun. So this is certainly nothing new. But the ease with which such manipulation can be accomplished now that digital is everywhere should give us all pause before we believe what we see in a photo or even in a video. Luckily, there is also a growing field called digital forensics, pioneered by Hany Farid, a faculty member in the very same Dartmouth College Computer Science Department where I got my undergraduate degree. He and his team are developing tools and techniques to allow us to discover manipulation of photos and videos. I think their work is increasingly necessary.

{August 10, 2008} FaceBook Revisited

In honor of the recent release of the remake of Brideshead Revisited, I thought it might be interesting to revisit FaceBook. I’ve been using FaceBook for nearly a month now and my feelings about it have evolved just as Charles Ryder’s feelings about Brideshead evolved. (Don’t think too much about the analogy between Brideshead and FaceBook–it doesn’t really fit very well.)

You may recall that my initial reactions to FaceBook were all about freaking out. I was especially overwhelmed by the amount of information that FaceBook was sending me via email. I knew that I had the option to turn some of those emails off but as a new user, I was unsure about which ones it made sense to turn off. I ended up turning them all off. So I no longer receive any notifications about FaceBook in my email inbox. Instead, I just receive the notifications of various updates within FaceBook itself. I guess as a new user I had been worried about missing something but I realized that I wouldn’t miss anything if I got notified within FaceBook. Since I visit FaceBook less often than I check my email, my notification of FaceBook happenings is not as immediate as if I were getting email updates. But I don’t want immediate notification of what’s going on in FaceBook. Instead, I want to be able to control when I receive those notifications. In other words, I want to receive them when I’m interested in knowing what’s going on in FaceBook. That is, I want to know what’s happening in FaceBook when I visit FaceBook! Perfect.

Although I do visit FaceBook less often than I check my email, I have been visiting FaceBook several times per week. This surprises me because my initial reaction to the social environment was not a particularly positive one. But now that I am not being overwhelmed by information from FaceBook, I have mostly enjoyed using it. In fact, I find it to be somewhat addicting. I’ve been thinking a lot about why and although I don’t have any answers about that question, I do have some observations.

I currently have 43 “friends” on FaceBook. Of these, there are probably 20 who are quite active, posting something or interacting with me several times a week. I am most interested in the activities and communications of about 8 of these 20 active friends. I think it’s because of these 8 that I visit FaceBook as often as I do. What do these people have in common? These are all people that I actually am good friends with in real life or that I could imagine being good friends with if our real life circumstances were to change. Even though I still find the use of the word “friend” problematic in FaceBook, the way we understand the word in real life is similar to the way it actually plays out in my use of FaceBook.

One of the most interesting aspects of FaceBook so far has been the way in which I “communicate” with most of my friends. Very little of our interaction is directly targeted at each other. That is, most of my friends do not post communications that are meant for me in particular. Instead, they update some part of their FaceBook profile (such as their status) to tell all of their friends what they are currently doing. I then read that information and find it interesting because I then know a little bit more about their daily lives. It’s a way of touching base that would not happen without FaceBook and as a result, we get to know each other a little bit better. And because I already like them in real life, I want to get to know them a little bit better. In other words, the immediacy (the focus on “now”) of FaceBook, which felt so problematic when I first joined, is actually something I enjoy and look forward to. What’s different between when I first joined and now that makes me enjoy the immediacy? I think the main difference is that I have now gotten my FaceBook life “caught up” with my real life. What do I mean by “caught up”?

The rhetoric of FaceBook assumes that life begins when you join the social network. So you are “now” friends with someone you’ve known for a long time simply because FaceBook “now” knows about that relationship. Each time you add some detail about your life to FaceBook, the rhetoric reminds you that your life has “now” begun, that everything before either didn’t exist or was somehow not quite “real”. The feeling that your FaceBook life is more “real” than your BFB (Before FaceBook) life is disconcerting. But once you get the details in to your profile, FaceBook has “caught up” to your actual life and so the things that you do in FaceBook really are happening “now”. So for me, the rhetoric no longer feels like a mismatch with my “reality”. Now that my FaceBook life is more closely aligned with my real life, I appreciate the “nowness” of FaceBook. The “nowness” means I’m learning current tidbits about these friends of mine.

Although most of my friends and I interact in this indirect manner, reading each other’s general updates, there is one friend with whom I have had an ongoing direct conversation. This friend is an ex-partner of mine with whom I have maintained inconsistent email contact for the past 15+ years (since our break-up). Now that we are both on FaceBook, we have been using its messaging system to engage in a long, intimate conversation. The messaging system is similar to email but because it is embedded in FaceBook, I also get to see the frequent (or infrequent, depending on the friend) updates that my friends make to their profiles. And so when a friend posts a new photo or a link she finds interesting, I can see those things which contextualizes our FaceBook messages in a way that isn’t easily accomplished via email. So far, this long conversation with my ex has been the most surprising aspect of FaceBook for me. Until I experienced how different this kind of direct contextualized communication via FaceBook is compared to regular email, I wouldn’t have believed that it would matter so much. The other interesting thing about this aspect of FaceBook is that although I’ve enjoyed our online communication, I am not tempted to meet in real life for a face-to-face conversation about the break-up or about our current lives (both of which are topics in our online conversation). FaceBook provides a useful buffer, or maybe it’s a cover, without which I’m not sure I would be comfortable enough to keep the conversation going.

Another thing that I’ve been thinking about is why FaceBook has captured my attention in a way that the other social networking environments I’ve joined (MySpace and LinkedIn, for example) have not. My nephew is on MySpace and so I’ve spent some time communicating with him there. But I find these other environments far less compelling than FaceBook. One reason, I’m sure, is because most of my friends, the ones I’m interested in communicating with, are using FaceBook rather than these other environments. But I think the main reason is that FaceBook makes it extraordinarily easy to find and communicate with people you know. When I joined FaceBook, it immediately suggested some people that I might know. Once I was friends with some of those people, it used their friends to suggest other people I might know. In contrast, on MySpace, I had to think about who I might know there, coming up with their names out of the blue. In addition, when I tried to find my nephew on MySpace, I had to weed through several pages of people with the same name, despite the fact that his friends are mostly from Goffstown NH (where he lives) and the fact that I went to Goffstown High School. It seems like it would be a simple matter to do some sort of matching to determine which Kyle LeBlanc I might be interested in connecting with. This is actually somewhat of a problem in FaceBook as well although my nephew was at least on the first page of many pages of Kyle LeBlancs. He should, I think, have been the first Kyle LeBlanc shown to me in both MySpace and FaceBook.

I also think it’s easier to communicate with your friends in a way that feels most comfortable and appropriate on FaceBook than it is on the other social networks. For example, my nephew and I were both on MySpace at the same time last night. I wanted to chat with him but in order to do so, I had to install a separate application (MySpace IM with Skype). On the other hand, the chat facility is built into the basic FaceBook interface so there’s no extra installation required. I appreciate that extra ease of use in FaceBook.

I still think there are some interesting problems with FaceBook but overall, I have been happy with my experience there. Time will tell whether it’s the newness of the tool that keeps me going back or whether it will become something I will wonder how I could have ever lived without.

HAMLET
(FACEBOOK NEWS
FEED EDITION)

BY SARAH SCHMELLING

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