Google solicits search feedback: working with an algorithmic mind

Even as Google has been infuriating me by (probably algorithmically) filtering out my comments and questions to the Gmail Google groups help forum, the google-mind is asking for my feedback in other domains. When I'm signed in to personalized search, the bottom of the screen now has a discrete feedback link to this form:

Dissatisfied with your search results?

Thanks for helping us improve our search. While we aren't able to respond directly to comments submitted with this form, the information will be reviewed by our quality team

The Google mind is divided. In a similar vein, Google seemed to have removed the feedback form I used to complain of splog misidentification, but when I submitted my mislabeled blog URL for clearance via the old method the CAPTCHA sign of doom vanished immediately instead of the old 3 day wait.

Working with an entity that functions by alogorithm, rather than by traditional human thought, is ... different. I cannot model Google the way I can sort-of-model a human; to work with Google I need to understand the underlying algorithms and resulting emergent behaviors. The Google-mind is not sentient (quite yet), but it has emergent behaviors that are starting to feel as complex as those of my dog -- albeit far less appealing than those of Kateva.

Managing algorithmic entities with emergent behaviors will be a new skill for the emerging generation, much as using a PC was for my generation, using a phone was for my parent's generation, and driving a car was for my grandparents.

See also.

Why antibiotics make some GI infections more dangerous

Back when I was a real doctor, perhaps 10 years ago, it was a mystery to me why some GI infections became so much more dangerous when treated with antibiotics. I knew enough to follow the treatment guidelines, but not why. The explanations I read were unconvincing.

Now I've heard a convincing story, courtesy of The Loom. The lethal toxins are produced by viruses, and bacterial death by antimicrobials unleases the viruses:

The Loom : Why Tainted Spinach And Antibiotics Are a Bad Match

Like other microbes, Escherichia coli O157:H7 carries a number genes that were delivered to it by viruses. In some cases, the viral DNA has mutated to the point that it cannot produce new viruses, and so the genes can only be passed down from one generation to the next. In other cases, the viruses are dormant but still independent. In response to stress, Escherichia coli starts making new copies of the virus, which then burst out of their host. Antibiotics are among the stresses that trigger the viruses to escape. It's a good strategy for the virus, because it can escape from its host before the antibiotics kill the bug. It's not so good for the host [jf: the bacteria], of course, and can be pretty bad for us as well. That's because the toxins in Escherichia coli that can cause organ failure are actually carried by the viruses. The genes only become active as the host begins making new viruses. That means that if you take antibiotics for infection with Escherichia coli O157:H7, you may wipe out the infection, but you may also trigger organ failure...

Our GI immune system has presumably evolved to kill the bacteria without triggering release of the viruses. A tricky and complex maneuver. Antimicrobials are less discriminating.

Hmmm. Multiple-system organ failure and sepsis must be imagined rather differently now than it was back in the day. Doubtless reasearchers have been looking for similar viral payloads in a wide range of infections. The trick may be to slow bacterial replication without stressing the viruses too much, so that the human immune system can survive long enough for a quieter means of bacterial assassination.

PS. Speaking of The Loom, I think of it and about 70 of my other favored blogs everytime I read about how the blogosphere is full of blather and nonsense. Such claims are so absurd that, on reading them, I not only turn the article aside I put the author into a metaphorical trashbin.

Be evil: Gmail, spam, data lock and a digital identity bill of rights

My Gmail acount is dying of dysfunctional spam filtering. Too bad. Well, I can just delete it and start over. After all, I've always been careful to keep a local repository of all my email -- I don't have to try to download via POP tens of thousands of messages. I don't even need my Gmail address, I only ever give out personal email addresses that redirect to Gmail. I've been so careful to maintain a layer of indirection ... or have I?

Ahh. Not so fast. Google checkout (purchase records), Picasa Web Albums (just paid $30 for the 9GB storage), Google Earth (I have the upgrade account, also $30 or so), my search history, my Google spreadsheets, my Google Apps -- there's are now 15 services inextricably linked to my Google digital identity -- and Gmail is the core of that identity. Soon my blogs, including this one, will move to that identity. Some of this data can be extracted, much cannot.

So can I keep the Gmail account in a sort of moribund state, setting spam filtering to an extreme level? No, Gmail doesn't allow one to control spam filtering. Yahoo email does, Gmail does not. You get the default.

It's a nasty situation. I'm wed to Google, but my bride is demonstrating sociopathic tendencies. Divorce is very expensive. Such are the perils of "data lock", but ownership of digital identity is worse than conventional "data lock" -- it starts to smell a bit like indentured servitude.

We need a digital identity bill of rights. I'll write more on this, but here are two a list off the top of my head:

1. Digital identity must be portable using a well defined public standard.
2. Digital identity must be independent of services. In other words -- there's a layer of indirection between my digital identity and my email account, my credit card account, my eCash account ...
   

Only two requirements, but it's a start. It means that neither Google nor Microsoft nor my credit card company nor my checking account can own my digital identity. They may host my digital identity, but I need to be able to migrate it, with appropriate authentication, to another host without breaking the associated services.

Google, unwittingly or with full knowledge, is now Evil. How can Google become less evil? They could adopt the Digital Identity Bill of Rights. The first step would be to separate a user's Gmail address from Google's digital identity, the next step would be to adopt and define an open standard so that Google customers could opt to migrate to another Digital Identity host.

If Amazon, Yahoo, or even Microsoft were to adopt this Bill of Rights, they'd get my business. I think Amazon would be my first choice.

Update 9/22/06: But then things began looking better ...

Will winner take all work?

The Winner-Take-All Society is a world in which most of the productive surplus of a society is concentrated in the hands of a few winners -- irregardless of whether they win by virtue, luck, malice, talent or some combination thereof. This is our world.

In our world it is not unusual to see a CEO exercise over $30 million in stock options. That money could have gone to shareholders, or to existing employees, or to customers, or to business partners, or to recruit and retain new talent -- but it went to the winner.

This makes sense if one accepts the notion that the CEO is the company, and that success or failure is determined by the CEO. This is a popular notion; it is widely accepted by a vast array of journalists, consultants, senior executives, writers of best selling business books, the Harvard Business Review and, of course, CEOs.

It might be true. I have no great evidence to the contrary -- but I have doubts. In the world of medicine observational studies are notoriously unreliable and misleading; real data comes from genuine experimentation -- experiments that can't be done in the world of billion dollar corporations. If one believes that modern business is as complex in some ways as living organisms, it's likely we don't have any real evidence to support the belief that the CEO is the company.

There's room for a contrarian opinion -- that companies that do well are the product of hundreds, or thousands, of significant contributors -- most of whom are invisible -- and numerous external uncontrolled variables we can call "fortune" and "circumstance". If you buy this story, then there's a problem with winner-take-all.

The problem is that those contributors are human, and they have the human compulsion to "punish cheating". They will, unconsciously or consciously, respond to "winner take all" in a myriad negative ways. in time this will affect the performance of the corporation, though, not, perhaps, the winnner's take.

This is fundamental human biology -- it cannot be readily changed. Winner take all carries the seeds of its own destruction.

Update 9/16: I didn't expect a supporting argument from a sports article.

A Defining Moment for America - washingtonpost.com

From DeLong and Discourse.Net - widespread astonishment that the Washington Post has one surviving person of character. The proof of this mystery person -- this editorial:

A Defining Moment for America - washingtonpost.com

PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly...

Too bad The Economist continues to fail miserably. My 20 + year subscription ends next month. I'm sure they'll miss me ...

Cringely on Apple's media play: not based on advertising

Cringely is the most interesting commentator in the PC world, and writes for PBS. Bizarre. Anyway, here he has a particularly good column -- he points out something I hadn't noticed and nobody else has commented on. Apple's media play isn't based on advertising ...

PBS | I, Cringely . September 14, 2006 - Swimming With Sharks

.... Contrast this with Google or Yahoo and even with Microsoft in recent years when everything seemed to be moving to being ad-supported. Where is advertising in Apple's strategy? It is nowhere to be found.

By selling outright, Apple doesn't need ad sales to succeed, reducing its risk. It also reduces downloads, I am sure, but that's not all bad. Even if the system were heroically successful right from the start, it might have technical problems. By ramping slowly with retail sales only, Apple can hope to keep ahead of the demand curve.

Just as Apple isn't Microsoft relying on working with the TV networks and cable channels, Apple isn't dependent on advertising, either. PVR (personal video recorder) functionality and advertising can easily be added at a later date if that is justified by market conditions or revenue expectations. Yet for Microsoft or Google going the other way -- from free with ads to paid -- it is that much harder a task.

When Apple needs more revenue from its movie business it can always add commercials. When Apple needs more revenue from its hardware products, it can always sell a PVR upgrade for $99. The ongoing profit potential is immense...

This is dog-that-didn't bark stuff. Absence is harder to notice than presence, but Cringely is right. Fascinating, and complementary to the strategies of Apple's new best (boardroom) friend - Google.

The entire column is worth a careful read.

Bears and Humans: intersection of problem solving capabilities

We are quicker than most animals at solving most problems, but the gap is not as large as we often think ... (yes, this smells like an urban legend, but I liked Schneier's comment on persistence ...)

Crypto-Gram: September 15, 2006:

Human/Bear Security Trade-Off

I like this example from SlashDot: 'Back in the 1980s, Yosemite National Park was having a serious problem with bears: They would wander into campgrounds and break into the garbage bins. This put both bears and people at risk. So the Park Service started installing armored garbage cans that were tricky to open -- you had to swing a latch, align two bits of handle, that sort of thing. But it turns out it's actually quite tricky to get the design of these cans just right. Make it *too* complex and people can't get them open to put away their garbage in the first place. Said one park ranger, 'There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.''

It's a tough balance to strike. People are smart, but they're impatient and unwilling to spend a lot of time solving the problem. Bears are dumb, but they're tenacious and are willing to spend hours solving the problem. Given those two constraints, creating a trash can that can both work for people and not work for bears is not easy.

The lesson, other than humility about human cognitive abilities, is that attackers often have far more persistence and commitment than defenders. Measures that work against persistent attackers (password rules, etc) so annoy defenders they become impractical.

Whatever happened to Amazon's lousy service?

Is this the sign of new trend? At one time Amazon had a reputation for awful customer service; only a wizard could locate their hidden customer service number.

No longer. Their product return service is fully automated and very effective. Most impressive, is their eStara powered online phone service. When a USPS package went misssing recently it took only one or two clicks to get eStrata to call me back. The problem was resolved almost immediately.

Impressive, and expensive. Amazon is making a big bet that customer service counts. Maybe the pendulum is swinging at last. Dell is no doubt taking notes.

Blumenthal's indictment of Bush - the worst ever (Salon)

Salon has reprinted the introduction to Sidney Blumenthal's new book, "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime. The introduction is a fairly lengthy indictment of GWB beginning with the days he was considered a “moderate” to the conclusion that he’s probably the worst president in the history of the United States.

It’s probably true that Bush was always this bad, but many people who knew him before seem to think he’s really changed. I’ve often wondered about some unusual organic brain disorder or a significant head injury with post-traumatic deficits.

Garrison Keillor on homeland security

It’s not just funny. I think he spent quite a while thinking this through. It’s a good short course in what’s wrong with our security model, though he’s wrong about the profiling. Competent terrorist would use plain looking euros, we’ve just been lucky current crop is no more competent than the Bush administration…

Guns on a plane | Salon.com

... Sept. 13, 2006 | And now you can't bring your cup of coffee on board the airplane. It's the latest new rule laid down by the nation's security wizards…

But we ditch our venti latte in the trash barrel (goodbye, four bucks) and board the flight, and there we read in the paper that aggressive CIA questioning of an al-Qaida bigwig -- stripping him, turning the air conditioner to 40 degrees, blasting him with Red Hot Chili Peppers music -- broke him, so he ratted on Jose Padilla, a terrorist who set out to make a dirty bomb and who believed that by swinging a bucket of uranium in a circle over his head he could separate plutonium. It's like a cartoon.

The way to stop terrorists on planes is to encourage passengers to bring loaded firearms aboard: guys in orange vests sitting in exit rows with deer rifles on their laps…

This way, if some guy in a burnoose sets up a chemistry lab in Row 24 and mixes hydrogen peroxide, sulfuric acid and acetone in a big beaker that is packed in 15 pounds of dry ice to keep it cool, and cooks up some triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, the passengers will be able, in the several hours it will take him to make the deadly explosive, to bring him under control, assuming the fumes haven't knocked Ahmed out. And they could nab the mastermind too, the monocled guy in first class petting the white cat.

It all began with the name Homeland Security. Somebody with a tin ear came up with that, maybe the pest exterminator from Texas, or Adm. Poinduster, because, friends, Americans don't refer to this as our homeland…

"Homeland" was a word you heard shrieked by a cruel man flicking his riding crop against his shiny black boots: "Zie homeland -- ve shall defend it at all costs, achwohl!" Americans live in Our Country, America, the nation of nations, the good old USA.

… God forbid, somebody shows up at an airport somewhere in the world with an explosive tucked up in his lower colon. The Achtung people will come up with some new security procedures that will effectively kill airline travel, and then this enormous bureaucracy can turn its attention to the nation's highways. Pull over at the checkpoint, get out of the car, open the trunk, take off your shoes, put your hands on the top of the car, turn your head to the right, and cough.

They can search each laptop for possible terrorist-type writing and confiscate cellphones, white powder, shoelaces, car keys, pencils, anything sharp or cylindrical or made of glass, and interrogate people randomly, putting them naked into cold rooms with ugly music played at top volume. It's all fine with me. I'm a liberal and we love ridiculous government programs that intrude on personal freedom. But where are the conservatives who used to object to this sort of thing? ...

I think we know where those old conservatives are nowadays …

Tidbits notices: iTunes and families don't go together

Ahh. Someone who has readership finally noticed this. The problem with most tech geeks is they don’t seem to have families, or even longterm relationships. They don’t seem to notice that you can’t merge iPhoto Libraries or that iTunes is fundamentally designed for a single user environment (see also and this). The Tidbits group is older, and so they noticed …

TidBITS - Apple Updates iPods, Introduces Movies, Previews iTV

... As far as we can tell, iTunes 7 in no way improves the situation of a family that wants to have a single music archive that's shared by multiple computers. Built-in sharing works poorly because only one computer can make playlists, rate songs, and so on, and maintaining a shared music folder on a centralized server works acceptably, but each computer must add new music manually. The one new feature here is that iTunes now supports multiple libraries like iPhoto does; hold down the Option key when launching iTunes to create or switch between libraries. The only real utility we can see to this feature, though, is having a relatively small library on a laptop for travelling, but having another library that points at a shared storage folder when you're at home. ...

The technical problem is bigger than it looks. iPods are also designed to hold contacts, photos, etc. Those are all user-specific. So you want sync to be user specific, but also support shared Libraries with personalized and shared playlists. A bit tricky … but there’s a shark in this pool.

You see, we only think we buy music for a family. The copyright holders would say we buy it for ourselves. If your son wants to hear “Yellow Submarine” he should buy his own copy. DRM rights, you see, are personal, not familial. Feel that noose?

So sharing iTunes Libraries is a bit trickier than it looks …

How bad is the new GOP? Old GOP stalwarts yearn for defeat

Shrillblog detects the end-times. Old-time GOP stalwarts seek defeat, and likely lust for Clinton:

Shrillblog: Breaking News: Shrillness Singularity Discovered!

…George H.W. Bush speechwriter Christopher Buckley, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush advisor Bruce Bartlett, former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, Cato Institute Chairman William A Niskanen, conservative constitutional lawyer and activist Bruce Fein, Ronald Reagan speechwriter and former National Review editor Jeffrey Hart, and ConservativeHQ.com Chairman Richard Viguerie all write in to say...

… They hope the Republicans lose in 2006 ...Well, let’s be diplomatic and say they’d prefer divided government—soon …

I’m sure they weren’t quite so direct as the above paraphrasing implies, but anyone from the old-time respectable GOP must feel the same way.

The Bush/Cheney/Rove/Rumsfeld GOP practices an authoritarian populism familiar to students of history and of South American politics. It’s not the GOP I grew up with. I didn’t like Reagan or Bush I, but that was before I experienced Rove’s GOP. Now even Reagan, demented though he was, shines like a beacon in the harbor. (Were it not for his unforgivable crime of handing a gun to his enemies Clinton’s retrospective radiance would blind unprotected eyes).

It’s difficult, and painful, to remember what competent governance was like. An entire generation of young voters has no experience with government that’s worthy of the name.

Using Google co-op for health information.

Somehow I missed Google Co-op. Here it's being used to define resoures health information. These collaborative bookmarking, path sharing projects are all the rage, though until now I've not found one that worked for me.

The Google Co-op project is intriguing of course, it's getting hard to keep up with all of their inventiveness -- is Google trying to advance The Singularity all by itself?

Needless to say, the memex had this feature. Vannevar Bush's 1945 prototype for the WWW+ involved the sharing of links, connections and paths in a collaborative development effort.

PS. Visiting my all-but-forgotten del.ici.us site I was intrigued to see the vanity feature -- an ancient link to Gordon's Tech under the old name is on a few other people's lists. I'll have to add all of my blogs and key pages there to see how many others have been found ... Clearly, I've not thought enough about these emergent collaboration sites ...

The magic of the blog: critique a product, the CEO responds

In addition to this opinion blog, I write a tech blog that’s mostly a reference for myself and friends, a little read special needs blog, and an announcements blog for a local special needs hockey team. These have miniscule readerships, but the web works in strange ways.

Recently I wrote two posts on products I use quite a bit. One was an affectionate announcement of the long (long) anticipated release of an iPhoto product I love, the other was a comparison: Gordon's Tech: SmugMug + PictureSync vs. Google Picasa Web Albums.

Within 12 hours of the original posts comments appeared from both the CEO of SmugMug and the author of Keyword Assistant.

Is this a sort of ‘long tail’ variant? Something interesting is going on in our world at the level of feedback loops.

Now if only we could fix planetary heating this way …

The insanity of using SSN as a password

When corporations outsource various HR functions, the disparate contractors all need an identify management process. They can get IDs easily enough, but not passwords. So they need to give everyone a password.

Typically they use a password that consists of some combination of one’s name and a portion of the SSN. For the past few years they’ve routinely used the last four digits of the SSN. Of course since everyone in the world uses the last four digits for authentication that information is now widely distributed and cannot be considered even remotely confidential.

So today one of these vendors asked me for the last six digits of my SSN.

I think you can guess where this is going. We have 3 digits to go.

Blithering idiocy.