Did Tim Berners-Lee Trip Over his Own Feet?

Tim Berners-Lee is back in the news again. As in the past, it would appear that the combination of his reputation as “inventor of the Internet” (whatever that means) and his knighthood have led him to believe that he can pontificate about anything. Apparently it has only recently come to his attention that, if you create a medium through which anyone can say anything to anyone else, then everyone will. In other words it would appear that Berners-Lee has not yet grasped that phenomena such as fake news and hate speech are the inevitable products of what the Internet is and, for that matter, what Berners-Lee claims he wants it to be.

Back in November of 2013, this site took Berners-Lee to task on the basis of an article summary on the BBC News Web site that quoted him as saying that the “democratic nature” of the Internet was being threatened by a “growing tide of surveillance and censorship.” Apparently, it took him over two years to realize that, where information is concerned, an unregulated democracy has, by its very nature, tended to produce excess noise to the detriment of the signal in was intended to produce. If one wants to filter out the noise, then one must look for it (surveillance) and then design a filter for it (censorship). Before trying to unpack Berners-Lee’s failure to grasp this fundamental reality, it is worth recalling his own origins, as well as those of the Internet.

The important thing to remember is that Berners-Lee is a computer scientist whose skills led to his working as an independent contractor for CERN, a European research agency specializing in the challenging domain of particle physics. It subsequently became the home of the Large Hadron Collider, the primary instrument involved in the discovery of the so-called “God particle,” known more accurately as the “Higgs boson.” CERN is a perfect example of people with a wide diversity of cultural backgrounds coming together to work on shared problems. In that context it is easy to imagine Berners-Lee recognizing that communicating through a computer network could enable an even larger population to share their work and their results. He went about designing and implementing an infrastructure to enable that kind of world-wide sharing; and the result was the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee then became an evangelist for making the Web available to as many people as possible. The result tends to reflect the joke about the Statue of Liberty in the Beyond the Fringe “Home Thoughts from Abroad” routine:

After they put up the Statue, some idealistic Johnny decided to put the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” on the base. Well … people did!

Berners-Lee’s mindset never seemed to recognize that his evangelism would attract more than scientists or that the Web would be used for anything other than doing more science. Even the pre-Internet Usenet had more common sense, thanks to which those responsible for regulating discussion groups came down like a ton of bricks on the very first effort to advertise through spamming.

According to a BBC News story that appeared over this past weekend, Berners-Lee finally seems to have recognized that an unregulated Web is not good for much of anything, particularly his dearly beloved science. For example, he would like to see regulation of “unethical” (those quote marks come from the BBC, not me) political advertising. Unfortunately, he thinks this can be done by putting “a fair level of data control back in the hands of the people,” failing to recognize that “the people” are the ones putting the data he abhors into the system in the first place.

Fortunately, there is at least one government out there with a more realistic model of regulation, and it will be interesting to see if they can put it into practice. In an article that showed up in today’s The New York Times, Melissa Eddy and Mark Scott reported that Heiko Maas, Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection in Germany, is proposing that the technology companies responsible for maintaining social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, be fined for the presence of content that would constitute hate speech or fake news. In other words the only way you are going to get people to fix a problem is to penalize them for failure to do so, and whopping fines can make for a very effective penalty.

I applaud Maas’ effort, and I wish him well. However, whether we like it or not, this kind of regulation is likely to turn into a losing game of Whac-A-Mole. Shutting down one source can easily lead to another popping up, and probably more than one of them. The fact is that just trying to figure out how hate speech can propagate may be a major research problem. It is one thing for an extremist to find a sympathetic blog and then tell all of his friends about it, but what about the process of discovery itself?

Someone I know rather well tripped over this problem the other day. She was trying to track down information about Jews in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust. She typed a search query into Google and discovered a relevant Wikipedia page as the highest-ranked result. On the other hand the second-highest ranked result turned out to be an anti-Semitic blog being maintained on a Wordpress platform. In other words the Google search result was not only unreliable for her needs, it was also disturbingly offensive. Thus, regulating the content itself is definitely a step in the right direction; but, if we are really interested in regulating sources of hate speech or fake news, we have to think about not only those sources but also the ways in which they show up in search results.

Now we are in territory that, as some of Berners-Lee’s professors may have said on more than one occasion, is “beyond the scope of this course!”

What Would Will Rogers Say?

My favorite Will Rogers quote would have to be the following:

I do not support any organized political party. I am a Democrat.

These days it seems as if the Republicans are setting the bar for a "disorganized political party" and seem to just keep raising it. Could it be that the Internet has turned us into a culture that prefers anarchy to governance, even if the side-effects of anarchy include the laundry list of social abuses that now take place regularly on pages of the World Wide Web? Once upon a time the "futurists" were predicting that, by giving every individual his or her own voice, we would finally achieve a "true" democracy. Ironically, those futurists seemed blithely ignorant on how Athenian democracy was first conceived and how it actually worked. Rather than democracy, we have abundant opportunities for the unbridled execution of power, leading to the detriment of many for the sake of those who can shout louder than anyone else. At least the Democrats can take comfort that Will Rogers no longer can make fun of them.

Thankful for Ligeti Fans

I must confess that I have been pleasantly surprised to have Google Analytics inform me of just how popular my report for my national site on Examiner.com on the interactive Web site for the piano music of György Ligeti was. It has been some time since I had an opportunity to write a review about technology, rather than the music being delivered by that technology. In this case I felt that I was covering a relevant part of the story that had been neglected by The New York Times, even though the Times had relegated it to a post on their ArtsBeat blog. In cases like these, the delivery technology matters as much as the content. Perhaps it matters even more. If the technology is poor, the content may as well be a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. Apparently, I managed to attract the attention of a healthy chuck of readers who agree!

Nothing Changes

Back when I was doing research as a member of the Xerox family, I encountered many for whom Elizabeth L. Eisenstein was almost some kind of high priestess. She had written a monumental (two-volume) tome entitled The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; so it should not have surprised me that she would inspire many to look to the copy machine as a comparable "agent of change" and to view similar media-related innovations in the same light. I must confess that I have yet to read that book in its entirety; but I have begun to approach it from the perspective of her reviewers, both positive and negative. A review by Shannon E. Duffy showed up on H-Net and received Eisenstein's blessing in a retrospective article she wrote for The American Historical Review (for a forum piece edited by Anthony Grafton).

One particular sentence from Duffy's article particular impressed me when I read that review:

Moreover, the competitive nature of the printing industry, which was driven by a desire for sales, provided a new, more public outlet for controversies and insured that what began as a scholarly dispute between theologians gained an international audience.

Remember that we are talking about the threshold of the sixteenth century, yet the tension between scholarly and mercantile pursuits is no different today than it was then. The fact is that, over the course of the centuries, the public airing of disputes has had a healthy history as a marketable commodity with far greater impact than any interest in the dissemination of knowledge through reading or other educational practices. If Tim Berners-Lee spent more time reading history, he might have realized that 1) the World Wide Web would become the largest possible public arena for such disputes and 2) there would be those clever enough to make a fast buck out of those disputes by selling advertising space on the "virtual walls" of that arena. Sadly, he still seems to think that the growth of knowledge is all that matters, even if much of Eisenstein's research chose to focus on the plethora of "unexpected results" (a phrase from Duffy's review) that followed in the wake of the printing press.

Another Kind of Bailout

Most people by now know that HealthCare.gov Web site, the "digital portal" to the benefits provided by the Affordable Care Act, was launched in a seriously broken state. Today, President Barack Obama released the following statement:

Experts from some of America's top private-sector tech companies, who have seen things like this happen before, are reaching out and offering to send help. We've had some of the best IT talent in the entire country join the team, and we're well into a tech surge to fix the problem.

This seems to affirm the proposition that the government cannot attract even adequate talent to provide its software needs. However, it also carries the ironic corollary that, in contrast to situations of financial crisis, this is a case in which the private sector is stepping up to bail out the government!

Is the Social Network Sociopathic?

Chris Matyszczyk had a field day today with his Technically Incorrect blog for CNET news. The title of his post was "Does Facebook prolong heartbreak?;" and, as might be expected, the post was all about an affirmative answer to that question. The basic argument is that Facebook has a tendency to remind you of things you would prefer to neglect, one reason being that it has no way of marking certain links in a social network as leading to an emotional minefield for someone at one end of that link. To be fair, there is probably a good chance that any function capable of making such marks is not Turing-computable; but I think that just makes the point stronger. Those of us who continue to caution against unintended consequences continue to be in the minority, even when those consequences may be sociopathic.

However, while Matyszcyk's post may add fuel to one of my favorite fires, I have to be skeptical about its conclusions. The problem is that Matyszczyk's source for this post happens to be an article on Mail Online, the online service provided by the London Daily Mail. While the Daily Mail may have better claims to legitimacy that, say, the National Enquirer, I am not convinced it is that all much better. This particular story was filed by "DAILY MAIL REPORTER," which strikes me as a red flag that protects any particular individual from taking the rap for bad (or, worse yet, libelous) information.

The primary source then turns out to be Sir Nigel Shadbolt, who has never had any problems in accepting the burden of authority by publishing under his own name. The fact that he spends much of his time drinking Semantic Web Kool-Aid is his own affair. The point is that, because I know about his professional reputation, I am in a better position to assess my skepticism of his assertions than I am when confronted with an anonymous source.

I would, however, observe that Shadbolt is one of the co-founders of the Web Science Research Initiative. His co-founders are Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Dame Wendy Hall, and Daniel Weitzner. Having voice criticism about the IBM "service science" initiative in the past, my reaction to "Web science" is basically "more of the same." Just as "service science" tried to factor the social dimension out of acts of providing service, I fear that "Web science" may have a similar objective. This is likely to have no effect on any general awareness of unintended consequences and may even reinforce those determined to believe that such consequences do not signify.

Fortunately, since my own presence on Facebook is kept to a bare minimum (and that only because it is required for some Examiner.com communications), I do not think I need worry about any new threats to my own sense of psychological well-being.

On Distancing Myself from Yahoo!

Last month I wrote about the fact that my decision to start using OS X Mail had led to my having fewer problems with Safari, which would often freeze up as a result of bad behavior from Yahoo! on one of the tabs. This morning, after my latest Software Update, I discovered that Yahoo! is not behaving much better with Firefox than it is with Safari. As I have been finding my way into new working habits, I realized that I had not changed my default-loaded home page on Firefox, which had been my personal home page on Yahoo! It did not take me long to discover that, as a result of going to that page whether I wanted or not, I was confronted with the dreaded spinning rainbow and the "not responding" message on the Activity Monitor! By now I have become convinced that my only connection to Yahoo! for anything should be OS X Mail knowing how to synchronize with the state of my electronic mail over there.

As a result I discovered another unanticipated consequence of the change. It used to be that, every morning, I would use my Yahoo! tab on Safari to visit The Hunger Site to make a daily click. As a result of spending less time on Web pages, that habit went into attrition. As a result, The Hunger Site is now my starting page on Firefox. Thus, if I lapse on my visits to that site, I can always rely on my Firefox "home" to remind me!

On Being More Aware of Defects

When I used Yahoo! Mail through the Web, I was not always aware of when it was "suffering," whether going through a minor hiccup or just plain crashing. The only thing I came to realize was that, when it got into such a state, it could bring down Safari because its page needed to be reloaded, the only way of letting me know that it needed my login information again. Now OS X Mail tells me whenever Yahoo! is not communicating! Most of these are, indeed, short-lived hiccups; but it means that Yahoo! now does less damage to Safari!

Does Combining Two Flawed Technologies Make for a Better One?

Regular readers know that I am no great fan of Safari. I once would have said that it was the weakest link in the chain of Apple software, but the emergence of the Lion operating system put an end to that proposition. This has put me in a rather uncomfortable position with regard to how I use the Web. Safari continues to be flaky, even if these days it seems to freeze up, rather than just crashing and burning. On the other hand downloading images, particularly large files, has been a risk proposition on Firefox; and I do that frequently in the course of my writing for Examiner.com. Then, of course, there has been Firefox's persistent dismissal of providing any acceptable support for printing. (I still prefer paper to any screen when it comes to doing any serious reading.)

Recently, however, I discovered that I could get Firefox functionality while still enjoying Safari's ability to download images of any size and the page preview feature through which I can print with the most efficiency. The discovery was accidental and involves the Develop pull-down menu. This menu is hidden by default, but there is a Preferences setting for making it visible. I came across it when trying to figure out how I could see the HTML source for a Web page (which I have had to do from time to time). However, after reading about it in one of Topher Kessler's MacFixIt articles for CNET, I decided to see what else was in the Develop menu. It turns out there is an entry called User Agent, which opens another menu. Through that menu, a Safari used can choose to have a Web page realized by non-Safari software, one option being Firefox.

This quickly fixed the most important annoyance that required my keeping Firefox available. This was the fact that, under Safari, I could not create attachments for Yahoo! Mail messages. Presumably all User Agent options are available as open source. So all Safari has to do is link to alternative software to take care of page rendering. This strikes me as a weird way to solve the problem; but, as they say, it beats working on building your own solution. I wonder how many other software development problems are being handled by this technique, even as I write this!

From "Big Data" to "Big Insights"

A story by Jason Palmer, Science and Technology Reporter for BBC News, offers an interesting account of the possible benefits of "big data" studies, which seems to be one of the prevailing trends when it comes to getting institutions to put big bucks into technology. Palmer's article is based on a report that appeared today on the Scientific Reports Web site maintained by Nature, basically a platform for a more rapid turnaround process for making scientific results available to the public than his been achieved through print publication. (This particular paper was received on February 25, accepted through a peer review process on April 3, and showed up on the Web site this morning.) The title of the paper is "Quantifying Trading Behavior in Financial Markets Using Google Trends;" and the authors are Tobias Preis. Helen Susannah Moat, and H. Eugene Stanley. Since this article is publicly available at no charge, it seems worth while to reproduce the abstract:

Crises in financial markets affect humans worldwide. Detailed market data on trading decisions reflect some of the complex human behavior that has led to these crises. We suggest that massive new data sources resulting from human interaction with the Internet may offer a new perspective on the behavior of market participants in periods of large market movements. By analyzing changes in Google query volumes for search terms related to finance, we find patterns that may be interpreted as “early warning signs” of stock market moves. Our results illustrate the potential that combining extensive behavioral data sets offers for a better understanding of collective human behavior.

This definitely makes for an interesting read; and I can imagine that it is going to get a lot of citations at future "big data" conferences, particularly when potential funders are sitting in the audience. Nevertheless, Palmer's article includes a quote that Moat gave that may be cause for a bit of reflection:

We were intrigued by the idea that stock market data serves as a really large record of all the actions people take in the stock market, but don't necessarily tell us much about how people decided to take those actions.

This seems to imply that market behavior is based on "the actions people take," which appeals to that classic democratic image of the little old lady with five shares of AT&T sitting attentively at the annual stockholders meeting.

That image is, of course, a myth. It is quite a stretch to suggest that market behavior reflects the actions of individual agents. Most transactions that move market indicators (such as the standard averages reported in the news every day) are the actions of large funds buying and selling shares in quantities beyond the wildest dreams of that little old lady. Furthermore, these days they tend to be the actions of software, rather than individuals who assume the responsibility of managing such funds.

Of course there have been stories about the unpleasant consequences of automated trading for at least the last two decades. Now we have the possibility that one automated system will be trawling Google for big data for the sake of telling another automated system how to make large transactions. If we accept the premise that all software systems have undetected bugs, are we really prepared for that possibility?

The BBC World Service Gets Less Worldly

I like to keep a weekly schedule for BBC World Service Radio by my bedside. I can receive this through my satellite radio, so I like to know what is being broadcast when I get up in the morning and when I turn in at night. For some time the BBC has been very good at providing this. I tell them the city in which they live; and they prepare a schedule that organizes everything with respect to my local time, giving the GMT in parentheses, since that is the time the broadcasters use. At the beginning of this week I discovered that I could not get my schedule. I figured this may have involved a software bug due to a time change somewhere, the result of a work action, or perhaps a state of shock in reaction to Thatcher's death.

When normality had not been restored by the weekend, I decided to poke around. It turned out that none of my explanations were valid. This was just another case of rampant redesign of the Web site without letting anyone know. The weekly schedule is a bit longer, because it now gives some more explicit summaries of content. That is the good news. The bad news is that it is now given only in GMT. Apparently, honoring the local needs of listeners around the world is no longer a priority for the World Service!

Sir Tim's Problems with Reality Continue

This is not the first time I have cast a jaundiced eye upon Sir Tim Berners-Lee's rather perverse form of "Enlightenment rationalism," which seems to be grounded more in the imperial Britain that ruled the nineteenth-century waves than in the social turmoil of our current century. However, when he flogs his stuff on a public medium like the BBC, I feel a reality check is in order. As reported by Joe McKendrick in a ZDNet article originally written for Service Oriented, Sir Tim used the BBC to sing the praises of HTML5, which will enable a future in which "every single web page out there, if you like, is like a computer." He then goes on to resume his attack on governments trying to take over the Internet, with an added swipe against corporate interests concerned only with (gasp!) making money.

Perhaps it is just my MIT upbringing, but I feel that Sir Tim has never really grasped a fundamental axiom of human nature as it applies to man in the world of technology. The axiom is a simple one:

Any entity, hardware or software, capable of computation is capable of being hacked.

The world "malware" never appears in McKendrick's article; and, while I did not watch the BBC video, I am fairly confident that the word is not in Sir Tim's working vocabulary. If Sir Tim does not yet realize that the primary beneficiaries of HTML5 will probably be the next generation of malware designers and advertisers coming up with even more annoying ways to distract you from your reason for visiting a Web page in the first place, then he will be in for a rude awakening!

Reading from the Screen

I am still pretty ambivalent about whether or not any of those portable reading devices are actually worth the investment.  As a result I have decided to give myself a reading experiment based on my “untethered” MacBook Pro.  I realize that this is larger than most readers;  but, given that I already do a fair amount of Web reading in this mode, I figure I am creating a situation that gives the technology a slight advantage.  Because I rarely read anything on paper without a pencil in my hand, I also decided to base the exercise on my Acrobat Pro, since I am pretty comfortable with the annotation tools it provides.

I should also point out that this not the first time I have done this sort of experiment.  About five years ago I tried it with one of the early portable models that could be used in both tablet and keyboard mode.  At the time the tablet resolution was way too crude to support my pencil habits.  On the other hand I have been annotating PDF files in Acrobat for some time;  so, again, I was giving technology an advantage of familiarity.

The real question I wished to confront was the one of length.  I read most of my news on the screen these days.  So I wanted to see if many of the habits I already had would scale up to longer documents.  My experiment five years ago was with a full-length book;  and I gave up after the first few chapters.  This time I selected an article from the Journal of the American Musicological Society for which I had a really high interest level, since the topic concerned the relationship between Henry Cowell and John Cage between 1933 and 1941.  (As a point of reference, this is the time period during which Cage heard Nicholas Slonimsky conduct Edgard Varèse’s “Ionisation” at the Hollywood Bowl.)  Normally, I print reprints and read them with a very active pencil.  However, this particular article was 66 pages long;  so I had a pretty strong incentive to take a “paperless” approach.

I downloaded the PDF of this article on the afternoon of December 12.  Almost exactly two weeks have elapsed, and my first observation is that I am progressing slower than usual.  Had I been reading from hard copy, I would have been able to fold the paper into one of my copious jacket pockets and take it with me on many of my ventures from home.  I do not do that with the MacBook Pro, and I am not yet sure how inclined I would be to carry around one of the new reading devices.

Nevertheless, I am progressing.  I am about sixteen pages into the paper;  but I had little time for reading it in the midst of last week’s pre-holiday activities.  So I am not unhappy with my rate of progress.  For the record, I have been using the Acrobat commenting tools;  but, so far, that has only involved underlining two passages (one of which confirmed the story about Cage at the Hollywood Bowl).  As to the physical reading experience, I find the MacBook Pro equally comfortable when sitting in a chair or lying on the couch.  The new two-finger scroll control (which I initially disliked) works very nicely since I cannot fit a full Journal page on the screen.  I probably would have preferred being able to look at the screen in portrait mode, but the keyboard would then have been awkward to manage.

I am waiting to see if I find any need for marginal annotations in this reading experience.  I know that I shall not be able to actually “write” in the margins;  but I have used the Acrobat tool for adding notes in the past.  That creates notes with content that can be found with the search tool, and that may prove to be a real advantage.  In other words I am not sure I would want to have any kind of “virtual pencil” with one of the new portable readers;  and I suspect that, when I need to create such notes, I would prefer a physical keyboard to a virtual one.

At this mid-point in the exercise, I have yet to be convinced that any of the new technologies will support my kind of reading;  and I also am willing to admit that “my kind of reading” may be going obsolete even faster than I anticipated!

Did YouTube Change?

I had to read the report on the BBC News Web site in order to learn that YouTube (or I suppose it would be more accurate to say “Google”) had redesigned its Web site.  I also got to read the BBC account of how the change was received:

Around 17 hours after an official "Get More Into YouTube" clip explaining the move went live, 6,703 members had clicked the "dislike" button compared to 2,280 who had clicked "like".

Well, I never knew the clip existed;  and any changes I experienced seemed like minor cosmetic ones.  Why?  Because almost everything I want from YouTube I find through search, either my Firefox search bar or for a Google search where I decide to view Videos.

The BBC story also included the following sentence:

The site's owner, Google, has posted a blog saying that the new design was "focused on helping you discover a broader range of entertainment", but said there might be "further tweaks" depending on members' feedback.

Anyone who follows me either here or on Examiner.com should know by now that I really do not need “a broader range of entertainment.”  I can barely manage my current range!  My guess is that this is part of Google’s designs on taking over television viewing habits and ruling the roost with their own television service.  Given the current like-dislike vote, I would think that they may need to reexamine their long-range plans!  At least I can appreciate the irony that Google’s own search tool may be the greatest enemy of the new YouTube design.

Recognizing the Interests of Peace

It now seems to be official, at least according to Declan McCullagh.  In his Privacy Inc. column for CNET News, he reported this morning that WikiLeaks is among the 241 nominees for the 2011 Nobel Prize.  In fairness McCullagh also reported that it does not take much to get a nomination:

Nominations for the Nobel Peace Price may come from any professor of "social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology," in addition to national governments and former Nobel Peace Prize recipients, under the rules of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Nevertheless, as I observed last December, the nomination itself throws an ironic light on the attitude of large and powerful governments towards the Nobel Peace Prize:

What makes me most uneasy is that the “official” reaction of our government to Assange and WikiLeaks comes dangerously close to the conduct of the People’s Republic of China in response to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiabo.

At a time when our commitment to peace is under considerable scrutiny by many on the world stage, this nomination puts us in an awkward position regarding our desire to prosecute Julian Assange.

McCullagh also reported that the Internet itself had been nominated for the roles in has been playing in revolts against authoritarian governments in the Arab world.  This one strikes me as more of a stretch.  It amounts to a confusion between agents (who would qualify as nominees) and agencies, which simply serve as tools for those agents doing things worthy of winning the award.  As I see it, the day we start thinking of the Internet as an agent is the day we “officially” elect to disregard those social qualities that make us the humans we are.

Does that argument not also apply to WikiLeaks?  While I grant that possibility, I am also willing to entertain the hypothesis that WikiLeaks amounts to a community of like-minded individuals who use the Internet as their primary agency.  I doubt that anyone would view the Internet in its entirety as a “community of like-minded individuals!”

Do We Need a Sociology of Robots?

It took me a while to appreciate that Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were not primarily about engineering.  Rather, they presumed that, because robots shared the social world with humans, robot-makers should strive to endow them with a code of normative behavior.  Whether or not such a “normative code” could be “engineered” into “software code” remains a debatable issue (one for which Lawrence Lessig has had much to say);  but, since Asimov had confined himself to fiction, he could presume this to be the case and then use his stories and novels to pursue the likely consequences.

Dr. Markus Waibel of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich is not interested in the world of fiction.  He is interested in a decidedly likely future in which robots will be part of everyday human life.  What will that part be?  Waibel plans to approach that question through a project called RoboEarth, which he described to Mark Ward, Technology Correspondent for BBC News, in a story posted this morning:

"Most current robots see the world their own way and there's very little standardisation going on," he said. Most researchers using robots typically develop their own way for that machine to build up a corpus of data about the world.

This, said Dr Waibel, made it very difficult for roboticists to share knowledge or for the field to advance rapidly because everyone started off solving the same problems.

By contrast, RoboEarth hopes to start showing how the information that robots discover about the world can be defined so any other robot can find it and use it.

RoboEarth will be a communication system and a database, he said.

In the database will be maps of places that robots work, descriptions of objects they encounter and instructions for how to complete distinct actions.

The human equivalent would be Wikipedia, said Dr Waibel.

"Wikipedia is something that humans use to share knowledge, that everyone can edit, contribute knowledge to and access," he said. "Something like that does not exist for robots."

Waibel clearly has some sorting-out to do.  He does not seem to appreciate the distinction that social theorists draw that separates objective, subjective, and social worlds;  so Waibel thinks he can reduce everything to storing and communicating data.  Thus, it is unclear whether his verb phrase “see the world” is merely an overly-enthusiastic metaphor or a serious failure to grasp the subtleties behind bringing order to sensory signals.  Similarly, he seems to view Wikipedia as a data resource maintained by multiple individuals, rather than an ongoing process of social interactions that sometime take a turn for the pathological.

Asimov projected a future that remains beyond our grasp.  However, in writing the history of that future, so to speak, he envisaged agents who anticipated serious consequences and tried to plan for them.  This made him far more utopian than, for example, Lessig, who recognizes, along with James Madison (or possibly Alexander Hamilton), that men are not angels and are definitely not the puppets of a benevolent author.  Thus far at least, his speculations have not led him onto the turf of social theory;  but, in the face of Waibel’s aspirations, it is probably time to start exploring that turf.  After all, the question is not whether robots are capable of sharing data as self-motivated agents;  clearly they can do this,  The more important question is what they will do with that capability, and it is about time for those in “real-world” robotics to take that question as serious as Asimov did.

Getting Even with TIME

Those who may have had a “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment” over this morning’s announcement of Mark Zuckerberg as Time’s Person of the Year may find a bit more substance in this morning’s London Telegraph.  While I continue to be aggravated by this obsession with rank-ordering just about anything on the basis of quality (as in our obsession with the “Big Five” American orchestras, and not just because San Francisco did not make that cut), I felt obliged to scan the Telegraph’s list “Top 10 men and women of 2010.”  I took a bit of comfort in Zuckerberg’s absence from this article.  Indeed, while I may not have agreed with all of the selections, I found far more grounds for substance among those twenty names than I have ever been able to associate with Facebook, since, as we all know, earning power has nothing to do with such substance.  On the other hand I cannot really claim any surprise at Time’s selection.  After all, their Person of the Year issue for 2006 featured a mirror on the cover, in the middle of which was the world “You!”  I suppose that the best coverage I have encountered so far came this morning on the BBC World Service.  After announcing the selection the news reader ran through a few names of past individuals to be so honored by Time.  The first name on that list was Joseph Stalin.  Was the BBC trying to tell us something about the connection between the extremes of capitalism and those of totalitarianism?  Enquiring minds want to know!

WikiLeaks CHUTZPAH

As the quantity of news surrounding the current tribulations of both WikiLeaks and its director Julian Assange continues to increase, I find that I am more inclined to attach the positive connotation of chutzpah to the Chutzpah of the Week award I granted to Assange at the end of November.  At the very least this morning’s Associated Press dispatch by Cassandra Vinograd and Raphael G. Satter makes it clear that Assange recognizes the limitations of his own editorial capacities.  This is why he has been playing out the documents to five major newspapers, “outsourcing” editorial judgments to their respective staffs.  WikiLeaks is thus not the direct conduit from a whistle-blower to the World Wide Web that I originally took it to be.  Rather, the organization recognizes the need for a mediating role and appears to have chosen a perfectly viable way to address that need.

Meanwhile, it is interesting to see how the media have been dealing with public reaction to the current flood of leaks.  For the most part the media have sided with those whose oxen have been gored by the revelations;  and, of course, most of those oxen happen to be American.  Thus, we seem to get no end of reports of inflammatory reactions, many of which have taken this as an opportunity to resume hurling accusations of terrorism at anyone who happens to embrace a “thought that we hate,” to appropriate from the title of Anthony Lewis’ recent book on the First Amendment.  This leads me to wonder about the extent to which the efforts to prosecute Assange in Sweden (and in the United Kingdom for extradition) have been motivated by heavy-handed pressure tactics coming from our own country.  Thus, while I appreciate the potential for damage resulting from some of the WikiLeaks releases, I worry that there will be those who will make political gain through collateral damage to the foundations of our government, particularly where the Bill of Rights is concerned.

What makes me most uneasy is that the “official” reaction of our government to Assange and WikiLeaks comes dangerously close to the conduct of the People’s Republic of China in response to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiabo.  However, while the situation in China has a lot to do with the stability of a prevailing culture (which, face it, most of us do not understand in the slightest), the WikiLeaks affair may well influence the future of the Internet, particularly where questions of governance are concerned.  As I have observed in the past, most of those who develop, maintain, and evangelize the Internet tend to overlook matters of governance and may even see the Internet as a refuge from such matters.  Then something ugly happens (as was the case with the death threats directed at Kathy Sierra);  and we get a lot of throat-clearing and a paucity of clear thinking.

Once again we are back on the turf of Number 51 of The Federalist:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

WikiLeaks is a dispassionate “external control” that owes allegiance to no institution, governmental or corporate.  In effect it uses the Internet as an “insurance policy” against the fact that none of us are angels.  Unfortunately, this carries the corollary that those in government are not angels either, but they happen to be vested with considerable authority and the powers to exercise that authority.  We now face a “clear and present danger” that the very governance of the Internet, deemed unnecessary by most of those who gave us that technology in the first place, will be brought to heel by those determined to thwart any exercise of “external control.”

Quantitative CHUTZPAH

Patricia Cohen has a piece in today’s New York Times that definitely deserves attention;  but it is the sort of attention that one reserves for a double-edged sword.  The good news is that she gives a good account of both edges of the sword.  The bad news is that she leads with the blue-sky technocentric evangelism that I continue to hold responsible for much of the current mind rot of our national culture and its possible global implications:

Victorians were enamored of the new science of statistics, so it seems fitting that these pioneering data hounds are now the subject of an unusual experiment in statistical analysis. The titles of every British book published in English in and around the 19th century — 1,681,161, to be exact — are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer fresh insight into the minds of the Victorians.

This research, which has only recently become possible, thanks to a new generation of powerful digital tools and databases, represents one of the many ways that technology is transforming the study of literature, philosophy and other humanistic fields that haven’t necessarily embraced large-scale quantitative analysis.

Before delving into details, there is one important reflection on Cohen’s choice of a lead sentence, which can found in the “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” entry in Wikipedia.  That entry makes it clear that there is no hard evidence of who first applied that phrase but that the most plausible evidence seems to point to the Liberal Victorian politician, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, whose 1996 biography by Roy Harris Jenkins was entitled Dilke:  A Victorian Tragedy.  There may thus be a bit of exaggeration in the use of that adjective “enamored!”  Neither of these two names appears in Cohen’s article, although one of the cheerleaders for this brave new statistical world is Alice Jenkins, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Glasgow, who may or may not be related to Dilke’s biographer (just as one of the leading researchers, Dan Cohen at George Mason University may or may not be related to the Times writer).

From a technical point of view, Cohen (the historian, not the Times writer) and his colleagues see the Internet as a vast corpus of text sources that will open up a new generation of methods for lexical analysis.  This is certainly the case.  It is also the case that Peter Norvig, Director of Search at Google, has turned up some interesting results in how one may actually be able to derive results in semantic analysis on the basis of relatively brute-force results in lexical analysis.  Nevertheless, the “bridge” that Norvig has investigated can only be crossed through well-developed methods involving how one chooses the data, how one selects the statistical tools, and how one interprets the results that those tools yield.  In other words increasing the size of the data sample, even by several orders of magnitude, does not turn lexical analysis, in and of itself, into some kind of “miracle drug.”  For Cohen to claim that lexical methods now allow scholars to “finally and truly test” outstanding hypotheses is nothing more than chutzpah fueled by technocentric enthusiasm.

The Times story offers an amusing counterexample based on research by Meredith Martin, Assistant Professor of English at Princeton:

Ms. Martin at Princeton knows firsthand how electronic searches can unearth both obscure texts and dead ends. She has spent the last 10 years compiling a list of books, newspaper and journal articles about the technical aspects of poetry.

She recalled finding a sudden explosion of the words “syntax” and “prosody” in 1832, suggesting a spirited debate about poetic structure. But it turned out that Dr. Syntax and Prosody were the names of two racehorses.

The punch line to this and any number of other equally amusing anecdotes is that one needs to handle the results of context-free examination of words with the same caution one would apply to an unexploded bomb.

(There is a similar incident involving our own Department of Homeland Security scouring a massive collection of documents for names that would appear in close proximity in the text stream to that of Osama bin Laden, the assumption being that these would be the names of likely terrorists.  It turned out, however, that one of the names that appeared very frequently in this analysis was that of George W. Bush!  While this became a source for many jokes about Bush being a terrorist, the real punch line was that lexical analysis could not distinguish “talking with” from “talking about!”)

From the standpoint of chutzpah, this is a clear case of making too much from not very much.  The fairest response would probably be for the two Cohens, the scholar and the reporter, to share the Chutzpah of the Week award.  The first deserves it for over-promotion;  and second deserves it for keeping the “evidence to the contrary” in a “below the fold” position in the article, thus contributing to the inflated promotional value.

Sir Tim Rules the Waves (of digital communication)

I find it unpleasantly ironic that, on the day after I filed my obituary piece about Chalmers Johnson and his efforts to stem the combined tides of American imperialists and purveyors of mind rot to impede efforts of the general public to think for themselves, I should encounter an imperialist manifesto in, of all places, Scientific American.  This, of course, is not how things appear on the surface.  The title of the article in question is “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality;”  and the author is Tim Berners-Lee, writing on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the launch of the World Wide Web.  The letter of his text embraces principles that many readers are likely to find admirable;  but the spirit is that of nineteenth-century Britain, a time of an unholy alliance of “Enlightenment rationalism” with imperialist statecraft so unbridled that the sun had no place to set over the British Empire.

I thus advise readers to give serious thought to Berners-Lee’s visions and proposals but then to consider the impact of his final paragraph:

Now is an exciting time. Web developers, companies, governments and citizens should work together openly and cooperatively, as we have done thus far, to preserve the Web’s fundamental principles, as well as those of the Internet, ensuring that the technological protocols and social conventions we set up respect basic human values. The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.

The underlying problem with Berners-Lee’s manifesto is that those who engage objective teleological rationality to arrive at utility commodities, such as the World Wide Web, inevitably ignore the “self-evident truth” that the social world that actually engages those utilities is not the same as the objective world that produced them.  Thus, while it is easy to employ the noun “humanity,” those who build often fall into the trap of equating it with “people like us.”  Such tunnel vision misses out on all sorts of unanticipated consequences, which, in the case of the World Wide Web, can usually be grouped under the rubric of malware.

The very concept of “humanity” is a product of Western rationalism, which assumes that there is some useful category that serves as an umbrella over a vast array of radically different instances.  (This is the same problem that Ludwig Wittgenstein examined in the difficulty of defining the word “game.”)  Each of those “instances of humanity” has a different set of culturally-induced values that reflects an equally different set of interpretations of just what it means to be served.  This does not sit well with the missionary zeal of the builders, particularly when their greatest aspiration is that the next generation of builders “will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.”

Because of its diversity, however, the social world has always been more robust than the objective world.  However, to the consternation of those in the objective world, the behavior of the social world is rarely teleological, at least in any straightforward manner.  Perhaps those who understand this best are the Zen sages who live by the precept that those who try to change the world only make things worse.  On this anniversary the best I can wish to Sir Tim is that he be visited by the ghost of Ronald Reagan, who will ask him, “Are you better off now than you were twenty years ago?”