Folders, Shortcuts, Aliases, Tags, Taxonomy and Ontology: Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Google spreadsheets has become Google Docs & Spreadsheets, it now includes Writely. Some annoyances remain, some have been fixed. What caught my eye, however is that you can now 'tag' your files -- just as you can 'tag' Gmail messages.

A 'tag' is a string associated with the file. A file can have many tags, there's some UI support for tag reuse, but it's inconsistent. You can filter views by tags. Microsoft Outlook categories are the same sort of thing, though Microsoft's implementation of categories is a baroque and buggy mess. The Google UI for adding single and multiple tags, then removing them, is awkward. They'd do well to study Keyword Assistant, a free tagging plugin written by Ken Ferry. Maybe Ken could sell KA to Google for a million or so.

This is the 'new age' approach to file organization: tag metadata and full text search. No folders - or at most (as Gmail) a few fixed folders.

There's no direct "ontology" (organization), you don't put a folder called "chairs" (note the plural) inside a folder called "furniture". If you attach the tag "chair" (note the singular) to a file, then a search on "furniture" (search within folder furniture) won't find "chair". Of course you could apply the two tags, "chair" and "furniture", but clearly this gets ridiculous. Of course one could have an external ontology (furniture:chair, etc), and it could even by an acyclic directed graph with multiple inheritance (see SNOMED), but of course that's a bit futuristic. Tags, for now, are not drawn from an external ontology, they're invented.

Tags are good. I like tags. One day we'll have the option of taking tags from external machine-useable ontologies as well as free-texting them (students, compare this to free text vs. coded diagnoses on patient problem lists) -- then they'll be even more useful. There's nothing wrong with tags, and nothing wrong with full-text search [1] -- but it's dumb to ignore folders.

Folders are a handy UI tool for creating and modifying flexible real-world subsumption (containment) relationships. Folders with aliases/shortcuts allow participation in multiple hierarchies (and with cycles too!). Sure Folders have defects, but that's no reason to toss them out. iPhoto manages to do pretty well with the combination of folders and 'tags' (keywords). Google should study that too.

Interesting stuff for the industrial ontologists among us.

[1] In theory. I've used every full text search app written for XP. Even the best of them, Yahoo Desktop Search, is awful. XP, especially XP with antiviral s/w, is hostile to this class of apps. OS X Spotlight, for all of its many flaws, is far more satisfactory. In any case, full-text search works much better on rich metadata than on traditional documents, which is why it works so well in Outlook (Lookout for Outlook) and relatively poorly on the file system.

Yahoo to test kindess of our galactic neighborhood

Yahoo implements an innovative experiment to test the general kindness and attitude of any high tech civilizations in our galactic neighborhood ...

Yahoo To Beam Digital Time Capsule Into Space - News by InformationWeek

...Yahoo and Yahoo Telemundo are creating a digitized time capsule that will beam onto an ancient pyramid in Mexico and into space.

Yahoo began accepting submissions of photos, video, sounds files, video and text Tuesday and announced that it would send the content into space and project it onto the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, near Mexico City.

The company said in a prepared statement that the purpose was to join the 'past and present with the universe's potential future by sharing today's culture on Earth with other life that may exist light years away.'...

We usually think our TV emissions are advertisement of our presence, but I've read those are actually pretty tough to sort out more than a few light years away. Not directional enough. A nice directional signal would get a bit further...

Perhaps fortunately, it's unlikely anything will view it.

Welcome to the new, furry, persons

This isn't great journalism. Bonobos are not the same as Chimpanzees. It is noteworthy, however, as a milestone in a journey of many centuries ...

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Chimps 'are people, too'

...According to philosopher Julian Baggini, it is possible that non-human animals like chimps could be people.

'You could say that an adult chimp has more of the characteristics of a person than a new born baby,' he says.

After all, though humans and chimps are different species, they share up to 99.4% of their most crucial DNA (the figure is difficult to calculate exactly and depends on the scientist you speak to). And to prove how similar we are to chimps, Danny takes part in a potentially humiliating experiment.

The scent of male sweat is controlled by their genes, in both chimps and men. In a blind test, three women were asked to sniff the sweat of Danny and Cody the chimp, to see which one they fancied most.

When they found out afterwards that one of the odours was from a chimp, there was laughter. When they realised that two out of three had preferred the chimp, there was nervous laughter...

I dimly recall a few biologists gingerly pointing out that we should probably be Pan sapiens rather than Homo sapiens. These things take time. We are slowly separating "person" from "human". In a hundred years there will be many species of "person".

NYT Top 25 on the day Korea tested its bomb

North Korea explodes a nuke. The world ... shrugs?

Most E-Mailed New York Times Articles in the Past 24 Hours - The New York Times:

1. MAGAZINE October 8, 2006
An Elephant Crackup?
By CHARLES SIEBERT
Attacks by elephants on villages, people and other animals are on the rise. Some researchers are pointing to a specieswide trauma and the fraying of the fabric of pachyderm society...

...

11. FASHION & STYLE October 8, 2006
The Farewell Tour
By RALPH GARDNER Jr.

On the college hunt, there’s plenty of time to (gulp) talk.
...
13. INTERNATIONAL / ASIA PACIFIC October 9, 2006
North Koreans Say They Tested Nuclear Device
By DAVID E. SANGER

North Korea became the eighth country in history, and arguably the most unstable and most dangerous, to proclaim that it has joined the club of nuclear weapons states.

Number 13 on the list and probably sinking already. Surely North Korea expected a bigger ... bang?

PS. This one is from Emily.

How can we kill faxing?

How can we kill faxing?

We need to kill it. The fax is a horrid thing. It's much less reliable than it was years ago, and it was never reliable.

Faxing into my Maxemail fax service is unreliable. Faxing from my home machine to Audio-Digest CME is unreliable. Junk faxes abound and are harder to filter than junk email. Fax numbers are busy. Error reporting is lousy. Faxing is just bad. The cost to the world of fax technolology must be horrendous.

It's seemingly easy to come up with a technical solution that would unify email, fax and scanning with security and authentication. Adobe was selling a lot of this technology years ago. The adoption (chicken/egg) problem is a bit tougher. The big problem, however, is patents and intellectual property. For faxing to be replaced we need an Internet Engineering Task Force specification that's unemcumbered by licensing fees and guaranteed to be safe from legal challenge forever.

That's the hard part. Adobe is not known for IP wisdom, though their DNG (digital negative) specification might be a counterexample. It would take a government, Google, or Microsoft to come up with an open specification that vendors can adopt, ideally with Adobe's cooperation. If the muscle is sufficient, Adobe would cooperate, no matter how grudgingly.

If Microsoft would kill fax this way, I'd forgive them for killing OS/2.

Maybe I can get Cringely to write about this ...

Four new Dyer essays

Dyer's spartan article page has four new entries:

2006

22 September 06 Thai Democracy
23 September 06 'Normal' Japan
29 September 06 Climate: A Stitch in Time
2 October 2006 No Genocide in Darfur

Time to catch up.

The twenty-five cent solution: How Google News can save journalism

Google News is often criticized for harvesting the fruits of journalism without compensation. I suspect this is a bit of misdirection; journalism's problem is the collapse of the print advertising and classifieds business model - not news aggregation or even bloggers. On the other hand, there might be a way for Google News to save journalism.

Google has the Google Checkout and Adwords micropayment infrastructure. They could put a button next to each Google News article. Click the button, and 25 cents, the cost of a crummy newspaper, is deducted from one's Google Checkout account. Every few months, Google issues checks to the news organizations. Maybe Google also offers some nice bennies to people who donate, like extra Gmail storage or more Picasa images -- benefits that would cost Google very little.

It's a win-win-win for readers, journalism and Google.

Why 25 cents? Why not just any amount? Because larger amounts mean that wealthy persons and wingnuts can "buy" news. A twenty-five cent donation means that the vast majority of the western world with online access can potentially donate.

Would it raise enough money to make a difference? There's only one way to find out.

Update 10/5: Emily asked for more details on how this helps Google. Here's a few ways:

1. They're being sued by a number of publishers. This might help with that.
2. It promotes Google Checkout, which is probably a very big deal for them.
3. If journalism is healthier, Google News is healthier, and so is the search business.
4. It's not evil.
   

The No-Fly List: reason enough to dispense with the GOP

This is not a new problem. I've written about it before. The FBI's No-Fly List is a "test" for security threats. It's a test with a positive predictive value of, approximately, zero. That is, the overwhelming number of alarms are false alarms. Another story:

Marginal Revolution: Another reason to give your kid a weird name:

... Gary Smith, John Williams and Robert Johnson are some of those names. Kroft talked to 12 people with the name Robert Johnson, all of whom are detained almost every time they fly. The detentions can include strip searches and long delays in their travels.

'Well, Robert Johnson will never get off the list,' says Donna Bucella, who oversaw the creation of the list and has headed up the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center since 2003. She regrets the trouble they experience, but chalks it up to the price of security in the post-9/11 world. 'They're going to be inconvenienced every time ... because they do have the name of a person who's a known or suspected terrorist,' says Bucella...

Beyond the inconvenience and cost to the innocent, this inanity results in increased security costs and increased security risk. A burglar alarm that rings every 10 minutes means that resources are misdirected from effective to ineffective measures.

This is achingly stupid. So how does it connect with the GOP? The new GOP has a strong anti-rational, anti-intellectual, anti-science streak (See: The Republican War on Science). This is fundamental, and it means stupidities like the No-Fly List are never fixed. The No-Fly List is reason alone to remove the GOP from office.

Incidentally, the current FBI is a disaster. I'd love to see the WSJ news team do an investigative review of the FBI.

Update 10/6: Incidentally, the comments on the 60 Minutes article (follow the MR link) are well worth reading. If you're on the List, your best bet is to inform security beforehand and give them all of the material they'll need (passport, etc). I loved the comment about 'terrorists with digital cameras', I can't figure out if that's satirical or genuine. Lastly, an obvious workaround, other than replacing the GOP and FBI, is for persons on the list to be offered the option to enroll in the Fed's Traveler ID program.

Almost forgot. Look for the wingnuts to accuse 60 Minutes of treason. Sigh. The 60 Minutes article is genuine journalism; and that's a profession in crisis. I'd like to see a 'donate' button on every news page so I could contribute to journalists doing great work.

The end of the American civil war: nobody left to die

This is the kind of history that grabs my analytic attention. Emphases mine … (unfortunately, DeLong forgot to credit the author)

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Study War...

... If you want to know about the American Civil War, you need to hear something like this:

Not even the deep South was strongly for secession. Those voting for delegates to Georgia's secession convention, for example, were almost evenly split--and you can bet that the African-Americans who did not get to vote for delegates were overwhelmingly against secession. Because there was no Southern consensus for secession, Lincoln was able to hold the border--Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, western Virginia, eastern Tennessee--by making it a war for the Union. And the war began with a Confederacy of 5 million whites (and 4 million African-Americans) and a Union of 21 million whites (and 1 million African-Americans).

The Union mobilized 2.6 million soldiers--24% of its total male population. The Confederacy mobilized 900 thousand soldiers--36% of its white male population. Armies would march down secured railroad lines or navigable waterways until they ran into other armies. Because they could not function far from railhead or water-based supply depots, strategic outflanking moves were rare. When armies clashed, casualties were horrendous, but decisive victories impossible. The rifled musket was too good in defense, and the large size of the armies made them too clumsy in pursuit.

The result was that the armies fought, and soldiers died in battle, afterwards of wounds, and in camp of disease. By April 1865 300,000 Union soldiers were dead, 300,000 more were disabled by wounds, about 200,000 had deserted and returned home, and 400,000 had been discharged--leaving 1.4 million with the colors. By April 1865 300,000 Confederates were dead, 300,000 more were disabled by wounds, and 300,000 had deserted or returned home--leaving next to nobody with the colors to surrender to Grant and Sherman. The war was then over.

In a world where defensive is strong, a war ends when one army is gone. What happens in a world where offense is strong and defense is weak (Nuclear weapons, bioweapons, even IEDs)? How does a war end then? How will the Iraqi Civil War end?

Children need extra hour in the day: BMJ article

Right. Another hour.

BBC NEWS | Health | Children 'need hour of exercise'

Writing in the British Medical Journal, the team conclude children need an hour of daily exercise and to eat healthily.

Ok, here's the problem. Until a few hundred years ago we got plenty of exercise and not that much food. We didn't exercise to stay healthy, we exercised to survive.

Now, to survive, we must learn. A lot. We must work - sitting. School is long. Walking to school is dangerous for most and rare.

My family probably makes this 3 hour a week rule for our kids (despite the fervent protestes of the 7 yo), but we don't have TV. We're positively weird and hyperkinetic and the kids don't get all their homework done. If we were to do all the homework we wouldn't make it on the exercise. (Note: the top 20% of children can do exercise and homework and probably even TV -- but that leaves the rest of us.)

There are too many requirements, not enough time. To meet this rule we'd have to either shrink homework, expand the school day (money), or substitute school exercise (recess, gym) for didactic time. Or have fat kids with diabetes. Or upgrade the human genome. This is basic math ...

Billions of planets and the prevalence of disease: Fermi looms

On of my favorite themes is back. The number of earthlike planets in the galaxy is a major component of the Drake Equation, and thus a contributor to the Fermi Paradox (aka, the mystery of the "great silence"). New data means astromers are starting to talk seriously about making estimates of the number of earthlike planets, and the number may be high:

New Planets Astound Astronomers in Speed and Distance - New York Times

... The results, astronomers said, confirm that planets occur across the galaxy with the same frequency that they do in the neighborhood around the Sun.

“We’ve learned now that planets are everywhere,” said Alan P. Boss, a theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who was not part of the team.

“We’re beginning to be able to calculate how many Earths there are, how many planets are habitable, if not inhabited,” Dr. Boss added...

.... Dr. Boss noted that astronomers now had found in the Milky Way all the types of planets that are in our solar system: gas giants like Jupiter, ice giants like Neptune and rocky “super-Earths” orbiting other stars. “Everything we were looking for,” he said, “just not in the arrangement we were looking for.”

As potential planets are found in increasing numbers, Dr. Boss said, the odds increase that planets and planetary systems like Earth’s would be found.

Mario Livio, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a member of Dr. Sahu’s team, said, “There are literally billions of planets in our galaxy.”

As these numbers mount, the hoary old Fermi Paradox will inevitably worm its way out of the whacko cult of Fermi (in which I'm fully enrolled) into the greater gestalt. The more we see, the less unique our solar system appears, with exception. We know of only one world with sentience and technology. If such things were common they'd be inescapable.

In medical terms, a disease is prevalent (common) when it either occurs frequently (colds) or lasts a long time (obesity) or both. If technological civilizations are as rare as they seem to be, they either occur extremely rarely, or they don't stay as we are for very long. The "occur rarely" number shrinks as the number of earthlike planets grow. That leaves the other one.

Will the mobile phone dam burst in the US

D-Link has announced it will sell a $600 "unlocked" GSM phone in the US: D-Link Introduces V-CLICK Dual-Mode GSM / Wi-Fi Phone. Oh, yeah, it does WiFi too.

Will this break the dam erected by US mobile companies? As of now the US is a "developing nation" in terms of its mobile technologies, a result of an oligopolistic market. If vendors can make money selling interesting hardware, and if one or more national GSM providers cracks under the strain and offers GSM cards for the device that work, then the dam will burst. The big losers would be the non-GSM vendors. Bye-bye Sprint.

This phone may be irrelevant as a device, but it's fascinating as the first shot of what will be a great non-violent battle...

The limits of case-control studies: breast feeding and intelligence

Everyone who's ever written about breast feeding and intelligence presumably knew that IQ is largely determined by parental genetics and/or early environment and presumably tried to control for that. It appears they didn't control well enough:

Breast-feeding has no impact on intelligence

... The researchers found that although breast-fed children scored higher on IQ tests this was because their mothers tended be more intelligent, better educated and provided a more stimulating environment at home....

What's interesting here is not the apparently lack of effect of breast-feeding on IQ. That was always highly suspect and breast-feeding appears to have other advantages anyway (though I suspect those are overstated for cultural-political reasons). Nor is the inevitable confusion between correlation and causation particularly interesting. That's so commonplace it's boring.

No, the interesting part is that despite enormous statistical sophistication, we still have a lot of trouble drawing reliable conclusions from case-control studies. I wonder if a case-control study result is really any more robust than extrapolating from experimental studies on animal populations. Maybe we need to downgrade case-control and upgrade experiments involving non-human animals...

Physics speaks up: The trouble with Smolin

Lee Smolin has written a surprisingly popular book that's critical of the dominance of string theory in modern physics. It sounds like a solid book, but it's odd that it's so popular. I'm not sure why it's gotten so many reviews, etc. In some circles it seems to fit the "political correctness" conspiracy theory that "the truth" is being denied by incumbents who probably vote democrat.

In any case, Cosmic Variance has a gentle response, saying that Smolin is reasonably correct about the dominance of string theory, but his enthusiams for alternate theories are unpersuasive. String theory has won some interesting results, and the alternatives are doing less well than Smolin suggests.

It's an excellent review, and a readable introduction to what's topical in modern physics. We are dealing with the very tough problems; we're pretty much stuck waiting for either a new conceptual breakthrough or some unexpected experimental results.

The cursed gender: Take II

Again. BBC NEWS | Americas | US killer in sex abuse confession.

Before.

Gordon's Notes: The cursed gender

... It is hard to imagine a long future for my gender, at least not without some substantial genetic re-engineering.

Males should certainly not be allowed to own weapons. Maybe the NRA would accept a law that required all women to carry weapons, and no males.

In the longer term, if we survive as a technological culture, I'm rasonably sure males will either be upgraded substantially or eliminated completely.

In the short term, I'm interested in the psych profiles of the latest batch of men killing students, children, principals, teachers, etc. If we had better mental health care and related laws, could any of this be prevented?