Society | Desert of My Real Life

{September 8, 2010} Mad Men Mixed Media

Mad Men is one of the most interesting shows on television right now. The characters continue to reveal layers of complexity into the show’s third season. The early 1960’s setting is rife with tension–between women and men, blacks and whites, old and young, between the staid 1950’s and the revolutionary 1960’s–that we know is going to explode any minute now. And the story lines focused on advertising provide hints and clues as to how we became the media- and celebrity-obsessed culture that we are today. It is fascinating to watch.

I just finished watching Season Three on DVD from Netflix. There were a couple of episodes in this season that made me think about the ways in which the show crosses boundaries.

First, it crosses a boundary between different media. In particular, I think the show combines photography with television in ways that I haven’t seen before. This is particularly appropriate since the show is about advertising in an age when photography was of paramount importance. The episode that made me think about this was in Season Two, when Betty’s father, Gene, dies. The last scene of the episode shows Sally in the foreground lying on the floor watching television (so appropriate), her face illuminated by the light of the TV. To her left, in the background, the adults sit around the kitchen table, lit by an overhead (presumably flourescent) light, drinking cocktails and smoking cigarettes. They’ve been telling stories and laughing about Gene, celebrating his life without dismissing their grief at his death. Sally doesn’t like the laughing, doesn’t understand that laughter and celebration is a great way to honor someone who has just died. The tableau of a grief-stricken Sally in the foreground and the laughing adults in the background is reminiscent of great photography. No, it IS great photography. The show is full of these tableaux. It is beautiful to watch. That is one of the things that makes this a great show.

The second interesting boundary that the show crosses is between fiction and non-fiction. In Season Two, there was, for example, an episode in which Bert Cooper bought a painting by Mark Rothko, who, at the time, was a relative unknown. The characters in the episode have discussions about the nature of painting in the face of the abstraction of this particular painting. The episode gives us a glimpse into the kinds of discussions that were occurring at the time. The discussions give the episode a sense of reality and groundedness. But the last two episodes of Season Three are outstanding in their examination of the ways in which real life events impact the lives of these fictional characters. And this is a spoiler alert. If you haven’t watched these episodes of the show, skip the next paragraph.

President Kennedy is assassinated in the next to the last episode of Season Three. The nation is shaken. Even the Republicans are upset. There are many tableaux in this episode. It is beautiful to watch. But the impact of the real-life assassination of President Kennedy on the lives of these fictional characters is moving, and, I suspect, realistic in a way that illuminates what this event meant to real people of the time. The episode features a wedding that occurs a few days after the assassination, before Kennedy’s funeral. It is a touching nightmare. But it is the last episode of the season, when people have moved on but the impact of the assassination is still being felt that moved me most. In this last episode of Season Three, a number of characters have been moved to make major changes in their lives, at least in part because of this major event on the national stage. Don makes a pitch to Peggy for her to join him in his new ad agency. She is resisting in uncharacteristic ways, in ways that we, the audience, celebrate. She wants to know why he wants her. He tells her that, unlike most people, she sees Kennedy’s assassination in a way that is real. She sees that in this huge tragedy, people have lost their identities, a sense of themselves. The tragedy has made them question who they are, who they thought they were. As someone who has had a terrible thing happen recently (even if it was my “choice”), I understood this. I recognized this as true. As “truth”. Tragic events make you question who you think you are. This was illuminated for me by this last episode of Season Three of Mad Men. Isn’t that the definition of great fiction?

When dramatic events occur, people question who they are. And this episode of Mad Men made me remember this or maybe made me realize this for the first time. This crossing of the boundary between fiction and non-fiction illuminated for me a truth that helped me understand my actual life. It helped me understand who I am, why I feel the things I feel. What more could I ask of a TV show?

{August 30, 2010} Facebook Places

Here’s the status update of one of my friends on Facebook today (August 29): “IMPORTANT!!! Facebook launched Facebook Places yesterday. Anyone can find out where you are when you are logged in. It gives the actual address & map location of where you are as you use Facebook. Make sure your kids know. Go to ‘Account’, ‘Account Settings’, ‘Notifications’, then scroll down to ‘Places’ and uncheck the… 2 boxes. Make sure to SAVE changes and re-post this!”

I had heard something about this particular feature but, to be honest, until I saw this status update, I really hadn’t paid much attention to it. But this status update felt so dire that I decided I really needed to check out what this feature is all about. It turns out that this feature was released on August 18, nearly two weeks ago.

I checked the help section of Facebook and found that Places is a “feature that allows you to see where your friends are and share your location in the real world. When you use Places, you’ll be able to see if any of your friends are currently checked in nearby and connect with them easily. You can check into nearby Places to tell your friends where you are, tag your friends in the Places you visit, and view comments your friends have made about the Places you visit.” So it seems that Facebook is trying to move its network into the real world in a new way. In fact, they tell us that we can “Use Places to experience connecting with people on Facebook in a completely new way.” They seem to see Places as a way to connect the real with the online in a way that hasn’t really been possible in the past.

Like many changes to the way Facebook works, this particular feature has raised privacy concerns. People have worried that this feature can be used to track a Facebook user’s movements. I think this is a valid concern but it’s one that is easily ameliorated. The Places feature is currently only available to those users in the United States who access Facebook via their iPhone or via touch.Facebook.com, which is Facebook’s website for touchscreen mobile devices. Although I haven’t been able to confirm this, I think your mobile device would need to have GPS capabilities so those of us who use the iPod Touch don’t need to worry about this feature (at least, not yet).

Some of the privacy concerns seem to be a bit misplaced, however. Although I haven’t checked it out, Facebook assures us that no user’s location would be shared unless that user “checks in” with their location. In other words, the feature requires active participation on the part of the user. Which is a good thing, it seems to me. No location sharing happens without the user explicitly allowing it. So maybe the feature isn’t as dangerous as my friend’s status update would lead us to believe.

In my opinion, privacy is about choice. Privacy is not necessarily about secrecy. Instead, it’s about giving the owner of information the choice as to whether and with whom she will share that information. Although Facebook has made some problematic privacy decisions in the past, from what I can see so far, the Places feature does not jeopardize the privacy of Facebook users. I don’t quite understand yet the feature where your friends can tag you at a location so perhaps that’s an area of concern. I’ll be curious about whether anyone else knows more about that.

Regarding the instructions given in my friend’s status update that I reference in the first paragraph of this post–those instructions are about notifications. They specify whether you will be notified if someone tags you at a place. If you uncheck the box (as the instructions tell you to do), you will not be notified of such a tagging. Unchecking the box does not prevent someone from tagging you. So I think you probably don’t want to follow those instructions–especially if you are concerned about the information that is out there about you.

{August 19, 2010} Barack Obama X?

I could not believe what I was hearing on NPR this afternoon.

I had heard about the “Hussein” controversy when Obama was running for President of the United States, where conservative commentators tried to make a big deal of his middle name during the 2008 election. I even changed my own middle name on Facebook to “Hussein.” I recognized the fear-mongering in this argument, in trying to make a connection between Obama and Sadaam Hussein. Since when is having the same name as someone else a crime? Or a reason to not elect someone president?

I had heard about the controversy surrounding President Obama’s birth certificate. Because his father is Kenyan (and his mother is American), conservative commentators raised the issue of whether he is really an American citizen. Of course, if he isn’t an American citizen, he can’t be president. But he was born in Hawaii so he is a citizen.

Some have argued that since he was born in Hawaii, he isn’t an American citizen because Hawaii wasn’t a state when he was born. Of course, he was born in 1961 and Hawaii became a state in 1959. Why didn’t these people raise the issue of his citizenship when he ran for US Senate? Clearly, politics are at play here.

But today, I heard a story that had slipped below my radar. Actually, I guess it’s two stories that are interrelated. The first story is about Malcolm X, a well-known African-American activist who was a member of the controversial religious (some say terrorist) organization the Nation of Islam (but who left the organization amid disagreement and hostility and who was assassinated by members of that organization). Apparently, Malcolm X secretly fathered Barack Obama. There is a resemblance between the two men. But the evidence is non-existent. And even if it was true, who cares? Isn’t our country founded on the idea that each of us should be judged for who we are and not who our parents are?

The second part of the story is that Obama is a Muslim. If his father is Malcolm X, he MUST be a Muslim, right? What if his father isn’t Malcolm X? Could he still be a Muslim? Sure, he could. But the White House adamently insists that he is a Christian and that he prays daily. Who cares? Can’t a Muslim be a good President of the US? Since when is religion a criterion for whether someone should be President? But such is our world. He has to be a Christian AND he must pray every day. I’m an Obama supporter (because, seriously, what are my alternatives?). But I would prefer that he NOT pray daily. I want a President who isn’t mystical, who uses his brain when making decision about global security. But that isn’t the world we live in today. Today, even the liberals disagree with a fundamental tenet of the founding of our country–the separation of church and state. And so, the non-story of our President being the love-child of Malcolm X and therefore, a Muslim, is given enough credibility to be discussed (and dismissed) by a respected news organization like NPR.

{July 28, 2010} Security Theater Revisited Redux (Redux Redux …)

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that I’m interested in (and amazed by) the security theater that pervades our airport experiences. I’m in Washington, DC as I write this, ready to review proposals submitted to the Broadening Participation in Computing CFP. That means I experienced our airports today. And once again, experienced amazing theater. I decided not to check any bags today, partially because US Airways charges for each checked bag. Which makes no sense to me, but more about that in another post. This means that I needed to pack all of my liquids in a quart bag in quantities of 3.4 ounces or less. This rule is in place, of course, because some whacko tried to combine some liquids into an explosive at some point in the past. That’s the same reason that I have to take my shoes off as I pass through security. But again, that’s another story. So I DID pack my liquids in quantities of 3 ounces or less. One of my items, my toothpaste, was in a tube that I had purchased in England, a tube that looks different than US tubes of toothpaste but which, nonetheless, was 3 ounces, which, if you’re a math genius, you know is 0.4 ounces less than the requirement. I had, after all, brought this tube from England in to the US with no problems. But the guy at the security check point in Manchester decided that this tube was too big, that it contained more than the limit of 3.4 ounces. So he stopped me at the check point and said that I would have to throw it away. I protested and asked him to check the tube. Oh, yes, he said, it is 3 ounces which is less than the maximum of 3.4 ounces. Be on your way, he said. And so I was.

Why do I complain about this incident? Because clearly there is no logical reason for a 3.4 ounce limit on liquids. My tube of toothpaste looked unusual to this guy’s eyes and so he flagged it. But as soon as the weight was determined to be within the limit, as soon as I complained, he let it pass. Either there’s something of concern with the tube or there isn’t. The limit of 3.4 ounces is arbitrary and my unusual tube proved that. Are we safer because this guy wanted to throw my tube out? Are we safer because I protested and he double-checked and let it through? No. It’s about the appearance of security rather than actual security. And that’s no security at all.

The other incident that concerned me about this trip was my neighbor on the flight from LaGuardia to Washington National who constantly checked his Blackberry throughout the time that all such electronic devices were supposed to be turned off. Why did they need to be turned off? And what was it that this middle-aged man couldn’t wait five minutes to check? Each time the stewardess came through the cabin, he had it turned off. But he looked at his messages on this device over and over when the device was supposed to be turned off. The risk, I thought, was that the plane would crash because of the … signals … electric waves … something from this device. And yet, he didn’t care. And you know what? Our plane DID NOT CRASH! I promise that I will not complain about my students checking their cell phones in class being an indication that this newer generation is disrespectful. What’s disrespect compared to the prospect of the plane crashing? We need to keep things in perspective. And if the lure of texts is so great that this guy risks a plane crash, how can the risk of “disrespect” stand up to that?

{July 15, 2010} New Ways of Thinking

A year or two ago, in one of my classes at the InterLakes Senior Center, a man asked me how he could get a copy of the information he finds on web sites. I explained to him how to add the site to his list of favorites so that he could come back to it later. When I finished with this explanation, he asked me how to put that in his file cabinet. Only at this point did I realize that he was asking me how to print the contents of a web site so that he could put a piece of paper in his physical file cabinet. I tried to explain why people don’t do that but instead just save electronic links to electronic material. He remained unconvinced so I explained to him how to print a web page. I suspect he now has a file cabinet full of paper taken from the web, badly formatted and rarely read.

I guess I thought that because I’ve been involved in software development and online culture for as long as I can remember, I would be immune to the difficulty that one encounters when faced with new technology and the new ways in which it sometimes requires you to think. I’ve adopted and adapted to all kinds of new technology in my many years of studying, creating and working with various types of software and hardware systems.

And yet today I found myself in conflict with Flickr and the way it presents information. I went to England and France for a few weeks and now wanted to share photos from the trip with my friends and family. I’ve done this before and struggled with Flickr but figured that it’s two years later so surely the problems I had must be fixed by now. But they aren’t. They’re still there. A huge part of me thinks the problem is with Flickr, that the creators and managers of Flickr are wrong in the way they’re thinking about things. But then I remembered the guy from my class and thought that maybe the problem is me and my thinking. Maybe I’m just wanting to create a file cabinet full of paper in a world where file cabinets full of paper are unnecessary.

I think the problem, where I come into conflict with Flickr, is the “photostream.” This is the main page where my photos will be displayed. The underlying notion of the photostream is that immediacy is of the utmost importance. That is, whatever has happened most recently is what is most important. So when I upload my photos, the ones taken most recently are displayed first by default. This means that if I upload the images from a trip, those from the end of the trip appear first. Of course, when I upload images from a trip, I want to tell a story to my viewers, the story of my trip. This means that I want the images to be displayed in the reverse order from the default in the photostream. But there is no way to change the order of the images in the photostream.

The solution appears to be in Flickr’s use of “sets.” I can put the photos into a set and then order the pictures so that they tell the story of my trip. This is easy to do and works very well. The problem is that there is no way to get the sets displayed in place of my photostream. Instead, the set sits off to the side and the visitor has to click on it to view it. But when the visitor clicks on the set, the images are displayed as thumbnails by default and the visitor must then click a tab called “detail” in order to see the images in a size that can be easily viewed. Most people don’t know this and so even if I give them a link directly to the set, they will not be able to easily view the images. Another problem I have with Flickr is that when I look at full size images, there is no easy way to go to the next full size image. There is no “next” button. All of these problems lead me to believe that the folks at Flickr do not think of viewing photos as a linear, possibly narrative, process. Instead, like much of Web 2.0, whatever has happened most recently is most important. And whatever has happened most recently is unconnected (narratively) to whatever happened right before that.

My first thought is that this is a mistake on Flickr’s part. But perhaps I’m the one who is mistaken? Maybe I’m thinking of time-based linearity in a world that has moved past such ways to organize experience? Is linear narrative akin to the file cabinet? From my perspective, it’s difficult to believe this is true. It seems illogical. But my student in the senior citizen class thought his way of thinking about things was perfectly logical too. How can I tell? I can rationalize the need for linear narrative but is it just a rationalization that I use to try to preserve a way of thinking that is no longer necessary?

{April 17, 2010} The Common Cold

I have a cold. It is a very common cold. Nothing special. Just enough to make me want to sleep at 2 in the afternoon. We can land humans on the moon and yet we can’t cure the common cold.

Coincidentally, yesterday’s RadioLab podcast was indirectly about the common cold. The podcast was about complexity and the limits of human understanding. When we have complex systems, with many parts that interact and affect each other in complex ways, it is difficult for humans to make sense of the chaos. Despite its commonness, the common cold is one of these complex systems. The way that the cold virus interacts with the genes and proteins and other parts of the human body is extraordinarily complex. The human brain cannot make sense of such a large number of interactions. We have a limited capacity for understanding these kinds of interactions.

And so, according to RadioLab, we build robots. My sense is that these are artificial intelligence tools which map the interactions and attempt to create mathematical equations to model those interactions. And we have been successful in creating the equations that model those interactions. The problem is that we don’t understand the equations. We recognize that the equations are correct in the sense that they can predict the future. That is, given new data, they can predict the consequences on other variables in the system. These kinds of tests are common in neural networks, an artificial intelligence technique that attempts, in a limited sense, to model the human brain. One of the ways that we test whether a neural network has been created correctly is to measure its ability to generalize, to predict the results of new data. The problem with neural networks is that they can’t tell us WHY they predict what they predict. Instead, they create mysterious, almost mystical equations to predict the consequences of new data, to predict the future. But we can’t understand these equations. We know that the equations tell us that when one variable goes up another variable goes down by some fractional amount. But we don’t understand why. We cannot make sense of the equations. And so researchers are pushing our tools to explain themselves. To tell us why one variable goes up when another goes down or vice versa. Interesting.

And still, I have a cold. I know how this virus manifests itself in my body. But no one yet understands why. Or how to cure it.

{March 14, 2010} Toyota Software

Toyota has been much in the news lately because of questions about the performance of a variety of their cars. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I’ve owned four cars in my lifetime–two Fords and two Toyotas (my current car is a Scion which is a division of Toyota). When I was 14, I learned to drive a standard using my father’s company trucks, teeny tiny Toyota pickup trucks. So I have been a fan of the company.

But I think the company’s response to reports about problems with unexpected, uncontrolled acceleration have been quite problematic. And this response made me realize how scary a situation we are all in when it comes to our cars, no matter the make or model.

I’ve understood for a long time that our cars are increasingly controlled by a computer. I think this realization came upon me gradually, as my check engine light came on over the years and increasingly computers could read whatever the problem was based on diagnostic codes. I was a software developer for a long time and I believe we are placing too much trust in software. The Toyota issue is another piece of evidence that we are placing too much trust in software.

When I first started hearing about the Toyota recalls, the discussion was all about the unexpected acceleration being caused by gas pedals that get stuck or by floor mats that get wedged under the brake pedals. These mechanical explanations for the problem are comforting because they can be fixed fairly easily. Just replace the shaft of the gas pedal or the floor mats and the problem goes away. Toyota would certainly like us to believe that the problem is mechanical and not a problem with the software. They have implied that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s report indicates that misplaced floor mats have caused all of the accelertation problems. Unfortunately for Toyota, the NHTSA’s report simply said that they had found no other problems–yet.

So here’s the thing. Software is complex. The way software interacts with hardware is even more complex. Finding bugs in software is sometimes incredibly difficult because it is impossible, in a complex system, to anticipate and test every single combination of conditions. As a result, bugs in software can raise their ugly heads intermittently for years before they are discovered. Software developers should understand this.

Whenever possible, if lives depend on the integrity of a software system, an override should be built into the system. In the case of Toyota vehicles (and cars of any other make), this means that there should be some sort of mechanical override of the software system. An easy override would be that when the key is turned off (which should be a mechanical process unmediated by software–this is clearly not the case), the computer should shut down and the brakes should go into mechanical mode, which means it will be more difficult to brake but braking should still be possible. Apparently, this does not happen in Toyota vehicles since a driver in California recently had a high profile case of unexpected acceleration. Scrutiny has turned to the past of the driver in that case (he has had significant financial problems in the past) but even if this case turns out to be a hoax, Toyota should seriously reconsider any decisions they have made to rely exclusively on their software. Even the best software has bugs.

{March 8, 2010} Pattern Recognition and Pseudo-Security

One of my favorite shows on NPR is On The Media. Each week, the hosts examine a variety of topics related to the media, mostly in the US. I hear the show on Sunday mornings on New Hampshire Public Radio. On February 26, 2010, the show aired a story called “The Watchers.” It brought me back to my graduate school days and my academic roots in computer science, specifically in pattern recognition and machine learning.

The story was about the value of the massive amounts of data that each of us leave behind as we go about our daily electronic lives. In particular, John Poindexter, convicted of numerous felonies in the early 1990’s for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal (reversed on appeal), had the idea that the US government could use computers to troll through this data, looking for patterns. When I was in graduate school, deficit hawks were interested in this idea as a way to find people who were scamming the welfare system and credit card companies were interested using it to ferret out credit card fraud. Then George Bush became president and 9/11 occurred. Suddenly, Poindexter’s ideas became hot within the defense department.

In 2002, Bush appointed Poindexter as the head of the Information Awareness Office, part of DARPA, and Poindexter pushed the agenda of “total information awareness,” a plan to use software to monitor the wide variety of electronic data that we each leave behind with our purchases and web browsing and cell phone calls and all of our other modern behaviors. The idea was that by monitoring this data, the software would be able to alert us to potential terrorist activity. In other words, the software would be able to detect the activities of terrorists as they plan their next attack.

The On The Media story described the problems with this program, problems that we knew about way back when I was in graduate school in the early 1990’s. The biggest problem is that the software is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data that is currently being collected. This problem is similar to the problem of information overload in humans. The software can’t make sense of so much data. “Making sense” of the data is a prerequisite for being able to find patterns within the data.

Why do we care about this issue? There are a couple of reasons. The first is that we’re spending a lot of money on this software. In a time when resources are scarce, it seems crazy to me that we’re wasting time and money on a program that isn’t working. The second reason is that data about all of us is needlessly being collected and so our privacy is potentially being invaded (if anyone or any software happens to look at the data). Poindexter’s original idea was that the data would be “scrubbed” so that identifying information was removed unless a problematic pattern was identified. This particular requirement has been forgotten so that our identifying information is attached to each piece of data as it is collected. But I think the main reason we should care about this wasted program is because it is another example of security theater, which I’ve written about before. It does nothing to make us actually safer but is instead a way of pretending that we are safer.

When I was in graduate school, I would never have thought that we would still be talking about this idea all these years later. Learning from the past isn’t something we do well.

{February 28, 2010} Impressive Perform

Ann said I should write a post about this latest comment to my blog. It was posted on my iPad and Education entry but I think it’s spam. What do you think? “Impressive perform on your own send. Hold up using the specatacular work.”

The website that it came from is: free-music-downloads2.tumblr.com Don’t put that website into your browser. It’s spam. But the poetry of the comment is priceless, almost as good as the classic: “All your base are belong to us.”

So why didn’t my spam filter catch this comment as spam? It’s not clear to me since it seems so obvious that it’s spam. How did the authors bypass the spam filter? I have no idea. But I have my blog set up so that I have to moderate any comments from new posters. So I was able to mark this particular comment as spam and not have it actually post as a comment.

I do, however, like “Impressive perform on your own send.” Praise, even nonsensical praise, makes me feel good about myself.

{February 15, 2010} Conspicuous Consumption

I’ve commented on this blog before about my love of the status update, both on FaceBook and Twitter. I love reading about what my friends are currently doing and regularly use Twitter myself to update my FaceBook status. A new website takes the status update to a whole new level. Blippy.com allows the user to link his or her credit card to a status updater. So every time a credit card purchase is made, the purchaser’s followers are notified of the amount and the place of the purchase. In addition, the purchase is itemized. You can also link your Blippy account with your FaceBook account (so your purchases become your FaceBook status) and your Twitter account (ditto your Twitter status). Then, when you make a purchase, your status will be changed to something like: “Cathie spent $9.99 at Amazon.com” and the itemization would show you that I purchased the Kindle version of The Given Day by Dennis Lehane. The site bills itself as: “Blippy is a fun and easy way to see and discuss the things people are buying.”

Ann brought this website to my attention after she read an article about it in Time Magazine. It was an interesting article by Barbara Kiviat. The interesting thing about that article is that Kiviat theorized that if people could see what she was spending, she would be shamed into spending less. But her own behavior, and that of others, showed the opposite. Instead, people wanted to spend more money to show their followers the cool places they were visiting and the cool things they were buying. Conspicuous consumption, indeed.

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