Google, Blogger and the Machine

Does anyone reading this still happily use Blogger?

If so, please comment below or comment on this companion G+ public post.

I'm testing a theory, related to this old Marissa Mayer quote:

Two Schools of Thought: The Key Difference Between Apple and Google

... "It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where,” Marissa Mayer once told an upset team of designers about a product design she rejected. “It looks too editorialized. Google products are machine-driven. They’re created by machines. And that is what makes us powerful. That’s what makes our products great.”...

More when I get my results.

No, I don't need a denominator.

Update: Fixed a bad link.

Will Friedman win Salon's hack list 2011?

Last year Friedman came in third. Will he win this year?

Welcome to the 2011 Salon Hack List

Update: Darn! Friedman has been retired. Too predictably hackish to put on the list any longer.

And you thought the Jobs bio made him seem nasty ...

The Jobs bio makes him look pretty nasty, but apparently some of his nastiest bits didn't make the cut ...

AppleInsider | Steve Jobs refused to talk philanthropy with biographer: 

... any comments that were hurtful to individuals and served no purpose in the book were left out ...

A family doc's perspective on the best way to die

As a former family doc, I loved Ken Murray's essay on how doctor's die.

Is it true?

I suspect it's mostly true of family docs and some surgeons who are older and whose children are grown. I don't think it's true of younger physicians, especially those with children. My physician friend Tom fought his glioma very hard. He probably got an extra 1-2 years out of his suffering, and for his young family that was worth a lot.

I think I'd put myself through a lot to get my young kids a year or two.

When the kids are grown though, my physician wife and I have always imagined the kind of management Ken describes. Like most physicians, we're skeptical about how much medicine can really do for most end-of-life conditions. There's a difference between treatments that are statistically beneficial and treatments that make a really important difference.

After all, we know how the story ends.

Organizing human cognition: Lessons from CERN

There's a hierarchy in big time science schools, and physics holds the crown. (Math majors are in a different league.) Physicists are, face it, smarter than the rest of us -- and they know it.

Our only consolation is that they often work for a pittance.

So, from my perspective as a corporate ant, it's fascinating to read John Conway's description of how physicists organize their collaboration on history's biggest physics project (emphases mine)...

Making the (Higgs) Sausage | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

For the past year, physicists at the LHC experiments CMS and ATLAS have been analyzing ever–increasing data samples from the huge machine. Rumors are now circulating about what the experiments might announce at next week’s presentations at CERN regarding the search for the Higgs boson.

... As you probably know, each of the two big experiments has over 3000 physicists participating, from all over the world. Many, but by no means the majority, are resident at CERN; most are at their home institutions in Europe, North America, and Asia and elsewhere.

The main thing that allows us to collaborate on a global scale like this is video conferencing. We used a system called EVO, developed at Caltech, which allows us to schedule meetings and connect to them from a laptop or desktop computer, or even dial in by phone ...the experiments have gravitated toward having meetings in the late afternoon, Europe time, which makes it early morning for people like me in California.

.., In CMS, our whole system of producing physics results has a sort of pyramidal structure. Each experiment has a number of physics analysis groups which meet a weekly or biweekly, typically, and have two “conveners” who set the agenda and run the meetings. These convener positions are typically held by senior people in the collaboration such as professors or senior lab scientists, for two years at a stretch, one convener changing out each year. They report to an overall physics coordinator and his or her deputies.

Within the physics analysis groups are subgroups devoted to sets of analyses which share common themes, common tools, or similar approaches. Each of these subgroups in turn is led by a pair of conveners who establish the ongoing analyses and guide them to eventual approval within physics analysis group.

We have what I think is a pretty impressive internal website devoted to tracking the progress of each physics analysis. From a single website you can drill down into a particular physics group find the analysis you want get links to all the documentation, and follow what’s happening. In parallel, there is a web system for recording the material presented at every meeting.

The goal of every analysis is to be approved by its physics group, so it can be shown in public at conferences and seminars. This requires having complete documentation including internal notes with full details of the analysis, and a “public analysis summary” which is available to the public, and which often serves as the basis for a peer–reviewed paper which soon follows.
Every analysis is assigned an analysis review committee of three to five people with experience in the topic, who act as a sort of hit squad, keeping the analyzers on their toes with questions and comments at every stage of the analysis, both on the actual analysis details and on the documentation. After all, if we are not our own worst critics, someone else will gladly fill the role!

In parallel with processing the data that we record, we run full simulations of well–known standard model collision processes which represent our background when we are doing searches for new particles. There is a big organizational challenge in doing these simulations, which run on a worldwide grid of computers devoted to CMS data analysis. We make use of the Open Science Grid for this in the US, the EuroGrid in Europe, and other clusters scattered all around the world, comprising tens of thousands of computing nodes.

I'd love to see comparisons to organizational structures used in aerospace projects. There's nothing like this large scale organization in the industry I work in.

This framework for harnessing cognition reminds me of the original "computers" - humans who did large scale arithmetic calculations prior to the development of log tables. It's easy to imaging who this would map onto a cognitive unit made up of, initially, humans and AIs.

PS. Historical footnote: CERN was where Tim Berners-Lee, working as an independent contractor, led the development of the first web site and browser.

Is Gingrich our only hope?

Bruce Bartlett, a reformed Republican, says Gingrich is our only hope ...

Economic Experts Gather In DC To Explain Why Politics Has Doomed Us | TPMDC

... The most we can hope for is that a complete crazy person like Newt Gingrich gets the Republican nomination, the Republicans lose so badly that they lose control of the House and don’t get control of the Senate and then maybe in a year we can finally talk about doing something rational ...

Rationalists for Gingrich!

On the topic of reformed Republicans, there's a post deep in my backlog about what a reformed GOP would look like. I hope I get to it someday. Briefly, a reformed GOP would be reality-based, and would respect basic logic and arithmetic. There's lots of room for political debate within a framework of reason ...

Hungary a tyranny?

Krugman delivers an astonishing opinion, almost as a footnote to a blog post ...

Peripheral Stories - Krugman

... And I spent part of yesterday talking with people in Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs, who wanted to talk about Hungary. It’s hair-raising — and not just because of the economics. What will the EU do when one of its members slides into dictatorship?...

The comments come quickly ...

... Orban has established the rule of arbitrary tyranny in one and a half years. He appointed apparatchiks to key posts with unchecked authority for 9 or 12 years. These positions are:

1. Chief Prosecutor, who was given the right to select even the judges for trials of his choosing.

2. Chief Judge, with the right to appoint/promote/demote/dismiss judges

3. Chief of the Media, with the right to take away the licenses of radio stations and fine opposition outlets out of existence.

4. Head of the Financial Control Office.

He also stuffed the Constitutional court with Party and Personal faithful, enlarging it with from 8 to 15, and forbidding the Court to review cases that have anything to do with money.

It took a mere 3 weeks for Orban to push through a new constitution that restricts people's right to hold referendums, to appeal to the Constitutional court.

Hungary lives in fear now. You can be put in detention without trial for up to 3 years. You can be fired for political reasons and the unemployment rate is 12%.

and in response ...

As a Hungarian, let me correct the picture of my country as one "sliding into dictatorship." This is far from reality. Our government is indeed concentrating and extending its power as far as possible in a democratic system and is definitely doing so beyond good taste. Bearing a 2/3 majority they can even modify the constitution and they use this weapon without hesitation and without seeking consensus. This truly weakens our democracy somewhat, so harsh criticism is well deserved, but Hungary is not turning into a dictatorship, this is simply nonsense.

But where is all that nonsense coming from? Well, Hungarian politics is difficult to see clearly for a foreigner. The reason is the huge advantage of the Hungarian left (which is practically an alliance of liberals and former communists) of having a well-built international network which gives them an access to foreign media that the right just does not have. Hence, no matter who is in power, the foreign opinions about Hungarian matters are dominated by leftists' views. The key players in this game are renowned Hungarian leftist intellectuals residing in Western-Europe. Whenever it is not their team in power they always scream dictatorship - that is what they did with earlier conservative governments as well! Oh, and if the left were telling the truth, we would have a right-wing military dictatorship for 17 years by now, as this is what they "forecasted” before the 1994 elections...

Meanwhile, back home, Newt Gingrich must now be considered a real contender for the presidency.

Humanity dances on the edge of the knife. It's a habit.

The Il crime

The use of a font where these two characters have the same appearance is a data crime and should be punished by audit: lI.

Wikipedia's problem

A marketing firm is caught manipulating Wikipedia. The interesting bit is their response ...

BBC News - Wikipedia investigates PR firm Bell Pottinger's edits

... Lord Bell, chairman of Chime Communications, the owner of Bell Pottinger, said an internal review had been launched.

"I can't see any bad headlines for our clients," he told the BBC. "You won't find anybody, including journalists, who doesn't do exactly the same thing."...

"Everyone does it, so don't look at us."

I hope journalists will dig deeper into the state of Wikipedia and how the "pay-to-edit" problem will be managed going forward. I suspect there are are some reasonable answers, mostly building on Wikipedia's existing frameworks for managing malign edits. Problem is the same as the spam wars and the (new) voice-bot wars -- the costs keep rising.

Ghost story

It's not hard to do the numbers.

There are billions of people in the world and trillions of stories. Every day someone has a one in a million weird event.

Today was my turn.

It happened while I was using Google maps to visit my aunt's new residence in San Francisco. I clicked the zoom button for more detail.

Suddenly I was looking at dark green forest. I wasn't in San Francisco any more.

I zoomed out, and I found I was visiting the wilderness of British Columbia's Mount Garibaldi. It look something like this:

I zoomed in and out and suddenly I was back in San Francisco.

No big deal, just a glitch in the maps.

Except I have a connection to that part of the world. My brother Brian Faughnan vanished not far from there in July of 2002. He left his Whistler youth hostel room to go high alpine exploring - solo, off trail. Yes, that's at the far end of the risk spectrum.

There was a search but we never found a body. We searched Rainbow Mountain, because he could walk to that and he'd spoken of it. We did make a few inquiries about Garibaldi though. It's a beautiful destination, and he could have hitched a ride there.

So perhaps I was visiting his grave. It is certainly a beautiful and dramatic resting place.

Curious, I googled Garibaldi and Faughnan and tuned up a journalist's story I didn't remember and a post by Matt Gunn who met him in Vancouver before he was lost:

RainbowMountain - Missing Person/Fatality

Brian Faughnan went missing in the whislter backcountry in the summer of 2002. An extensive search failed to turn up any evidence about what happened. I met brian a few days before his disappearance while working at MEC and answered some questions he had about good hiking and scrambling destinations. We discussed rainbow mountain, which is where the search team believes he went missing. This story is a real tragedy and reminds me of the inherent danger of hiking alone.

There is a sequel to the story. I still wear a technical shell we found amongst Brian's gear. It's very faded, but it works. Tonight I thought I'd left it at an ice rink; so the kids and I went to look. We found it in my gear, but, for the first time in a while, we talked about my brother.

My 14 yo was five when Brian was lost, but he remembers more than I thought. He even mentioned Rainbow Mountain. We spoke about my brother for a while.

One of the very hardest things I've ever done was to call my 5 yo son from Vancouver and tell him we hadn't found his Uncle Brian.

These are tales for the dark nights of winter.

Update 12/6/11: I shared this story on Facebook the night I published it. A friend of Brian's, who lives in Vancouver responded that she new Matt Gunn. Then Matt Gunn replied.

Ants, corporations and the great stagnation

Do the great stagnation failures of the research enterprise and the modern publicly traded corporation have the same roots? Are not both ant-colony-like adaptive entities with emergent agendas of "their" own? An agenda to grow and survive regardless of the interests of their individual members or of their economic and human ecosystems?

See also

• Emergent computation -- the thinking world (Nature) 1/2004
• Malice, incompetence, and happy accidents 5/2011
• Why do corporations (firms) exist? 10/2010
• Speculation: The corporate ecosystem and American stasis 11/2010
• Why did medical progress slow after 1984? 12/2010
• Unemployment and the great stagnation 1/2011

PS. Extra credit speculation. Could these longterm trends be an independent contributor to the lesser depression? Independent of the macroeconomic disequilibria of disruptive globalization and IT innovation?

The AI Age: Siri and Me

Memory is just a story we believe.

I remember that when I was on a city bus, and so perhaps 8 years old, a friend showed me a "library card". I was amazed, but I knew that libraries were made for me.

When I saw the web ... No, not the web. It was Gopher. I read the minutes of a town meeting in New Zealand. I knew it was made for me. Alta Vista - same thing.

Siri too. It's slow, but I'm good with adjusting my pace and dialect. We've been in the post-AI world for over a decade, but Siri is the mind with a name.

A simple mind, to be sure. Even so, Kurzweil isn't as funny as he used to be; maybe Sir's children will be here before 2100 after all.

In the meantime, we get squeezed...

Artificial intelligence: Difference Engine: Luddite legacy | The Economist

... if the Luddite Fallacy (as it has become known in development economics) were true, we would all be out of work by now—as a result of the compounding effects of productivity. While technological progress may cause workers with out-dated skills to become redundant, the past two centuries have shown that the idea that increasing productivity leads axiomatically to widespread unemployment is nonsense...

[there is]... the disturbing thought that, sluggish business cycles aside, America's current employment woes stem from a precipitous and permanent change caused by not too little technological progress, but too much. The evidence is irrefutable that computerised automation, networks and artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine-learning, language-translation, and speech- and pattern-recognition software—are beginning to render many jobs simply obsolete....

... The argument against the Luddite Fallacy rests on two assumptions: one is that machines are tools used by workers to increase their productivity; the other is that the majority of workers are capable of becoming machine operators. What happens when these assumptions cease to apply—when machines are smart enough to become workers? In other words, when capital becomes labour. At that point, the Luddite Fallacy looks rather less fallacious.

This is what Jeremy Rifkin, a social critic, was driving at in his book, “The End of Work”, published in 1995. Though not the first to do so, Mr Rifkin argued prophetically that society was entering a new phase—one in which fewer and fewer workers would be needed to produce all the goods and services consumed. “In the years ahead,” he wrote, “more sophisticated software technologies are going to bring civilisation ever closer to a near-workerless world.”

...In 2009, Martin Ford, a software entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, noted in “The Lights in the Tunnel” that new occupations created by technology—web coders, mobile-phone salesmen, wind-turbine technicians and so on—represent a tiny fraction of employment... In his analysis, Mr Ford noted how technology and innovation improve productivity exponentially, while human consumption increases in a more linear fashion.... Mr Ford has identified over 50m jobs in America—nearly 40% of all employment—which, to a greater or lesser extent, could be performed by a piece of software running on a computer...

In their recent book, “Race Against the Machine”, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agree with Mr Ford's analysis—namely, that the jobs lost since the Great Recession are unlikely to return. They agree, too, that the brunt of the shake-out will be borne by middle-income knowledge workers, including those in the retail, legal and information industries...

Even in the near term, the US Labor Department predicts that the 17% of US workers in "office and administrative support" will be replaced by automation.

It's not only the winners of the 1st world birth lottery that are threatened.

 China's Foxconn (Taiwan based) employs about 1 million people. Many of them will be replaced by robots.

It's disruptive, but given time we could adjust. Today's AIs aren't tweaking the permeability of free space; there are still a few things we do better than they. We also have complementary cognitive biases; a neurotypical human with an AI in the pocket will do things few unaided humans can do. Perhaps even a 2045 AI will keep human pets for their unexpected insights. Either way, it's a job.

Perhaps more interestingly, a cognitively disabled human with a personal AI may be able to take on work that is now impossible.

Economically, of course, the productivity/consumption circuit has to close. AIs don't (yet) buy info-porn. If .1% of humans get 80% of revenue, then they'll be taxed at 90% marginal rates and the 99.9% will do subsidized labor. That's what we do for special needs adults now, and we're all special needs eventually.

So, given time, we can adjust. Problem is, we won't get time. We will need to adjust even as our world transforms exponentially. It could be tricky.

See also:

• Rambles at starchamber.com - Ned Ludd vs. Watson
• Virtual Assistants Raise New Issues of Phone Etiquette - NYTimes.com
• The Best Siri Hacks So Far - Technology - The Atlantic Wire
• Daniel Kahneman on 'Emergent Weirdness' in Artifical Intelligences - Alexis Madrigal

Silvio

Italy, Europe and the world will pay a high price for the long reign of Silvio Berlusconi.

Government is like parenting. Good parenting is somewhat helpful, but bad parenting is enormously destructive.

Corruption matters. Elections matter.

Are home phones now a sign of vulnerability?

We get a lot of junk calls now at home on our unlisted home wired phone. Many hangup calls, "survey" calls, robocalls -- our home phone number needs a spam filter. It's beginning to resemble my mailbox -- mostly junk.

Of course many homes no longer have fixed phones -- especially in all adult households. We keep ours for everyday use, as a security measure, and because we keep our mobile phone minutes low. As the junk level rises though, a combination of Google Voice and an increase in our mobile voice minutes becomes more appealing. [1]

Some of the calls these days drop as soon as I pick up. I wonder if they're looking for more vulnerable sounding voice. As fixed line phones become less common, they will become a marker for the vulnerable elderly [2]. The sharks will move in ...

[1] Google doesn't support moving a home number to GV, just a mobile number. So we'd have to first move to a mobile, then cancel the mobile...
[2] Not a new trend, Google tells me I wrote about this in 2004! -  Phone Phishing (spam): coming soon to the elderly and the vulnerable

The Gordon vs. AT&T iPhone war - Conclusion

Twenty-seven days ago I declared war on AT&T Mobile.

The war is done - for now. At this time I've slashed the amount of money we send AT&T, gotten a new 4S for me, ported away a sweet local phone number, and AT&T's "Executive Response Team" has been phoning me about a letter from the Minnesota State Attorney General.

I am geek, hear me roar.

Yes, even as you read this AT&T is licking its wounds, cowering in the corner.

It wasn't easy. I had to, for example, spend way too much time figuring out the microeconomics of the US iPhone marketplace and how AT&T's response to the end of SMS is killing SMS. Painful - but revenge usually is.

My revenge is not quite complete, however. I still need to summarize what I did, so you too can take revenge. My response was crafted around our family plan, but elements of it could work for any plan. Here were all the things I did and, briefly, why. There are more details in the links and below.

• We dropped child #2 from our family plan. He wasn't interested in phoning or texting - he wanted email, games and videos. We were paying $10 (plus taxes and fees) monthly for his plan and we'd have stuck with that, but AT&T's mandatory data plan for out-of-contract smartphones was going to make his cost $25/month. Too much.
• I liked child #2's easy to remember mobile number -- any my corporate Google Voice number was non-local (they no longer have MSP numbers). So I ported #2's number to Google Voice. Cheap at $20; I suspect AT&T puts more value on its numbers than that.
• I got a new 4S (more below), so phones moved around and child #2 ended up with iMessage and Facebook Messenger for texting with WiFI.
• Child #1 was stuck with the data plan, but thinking through iPhone Microeconomics it was clear I should use his off-contract $15/month data plan [2] to get a highly subsidized iPhone [1] that would facilitate iMessage use. He was eligible through our family plan and his voice rate did not increase. I could have been short-term cheap and gotten a 3GS, but a 4S has a longer lifespan and the camera and other features were worth the cost to me. I got the 4S, he got an old 3GS.
• I dropped our family plan from 1400 to 700 minutes. With Child #2 off the plan, and using GV at work to decrease my use of the iPhone for business, this was not hard to do.
• I dropped our $30/month family texting and any-mobile plan. This was the big cut, but looking at usage patterns it was clear that with iMessage and Facebook Messenger we'd pay less than $10 a month even at 20 cents/message.
• We were paying for SmartLimits for Wireless. I studied it and realized it was useless for an iPhone.
• We were paying for a Canada Calling service -- but I almost always use Google Voice to call Canada (saves me $1300 a year). Canceled that. [3]
• Emily and I had $30/month unlimited data plans - but we never come close to even 2GB. Emily is often under 200, and I'm always under 1GB. That's $10/month we don't need to spend - $240 over tow years. We dropped to 2GB plans. Emily may go to 200MB in time.

We've saved several hundred dollars and picked up a new 4S. You can do something similar. Start by dropping that expensive texting plan.

Now to figure out what to do with our increasingly junky home phone ...

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: iMessage use on an AT&T iPhone without a SIM card (iPod Touch mode) 11/30/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Giving your old iPhone to your kid: working around AT&T's mandatory data plan 11/3/2011
• Gordon's Notes: AT&T and the mandatory iPhone tax - even out of contract phones must pay 11/3/2011
• Gordon's Tech: AT&T Smart Limits for Wireless is almost worthless 11/4/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Turning an iPhone into an iPod touch - keep the original SIM! 11/28/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Porting a mobile number to Google Voice 11/21/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Testing Facebook Messenger as a texting alternative (4 and 3G) 11/5/2011
• Gordon's Tech: iPhone alternatives to AT&T's texting fees 11/11/2011
• Gordon's Notes: AT&T’s secret Nov 2009 mobile contract change – Elegant Evil 6/2010
• Gordon's Notes: The fear that's driving AT&T's smartphone data plan policies 11/7/2011
• Gordon's Notes: iPhone micro: How SMS pricing is accelerating the smartphone transition 11/24/2011

[1] The 3GS costs $1 with a contract. AT&T gets a portion of a data plan to cover the rest of what it owes Apple. A $15 data plan doesn't leave much margin for AT&T to pay Apple, so this is a highly subsidized phone.
[2] He uses about 100MB at most, usually less. We monitor with Dataman Pro, Safari and YouTube are parental control disabled. iTunes video samples is his main data drain, if that increases I'll disable iTunes - but he does well.
[3] To AT&T's credit, it's now easy to add and remove services from their web site and the accounting seems fair.

Update 3/4/2012: H2O wireless turns out to be a cheap way to add voice/SMS service for light use: Gordon's Tech: Pay-as-you-go voice and SMS service for a contract-free AT&T iPhone with H2O Wireless

Update 3/18/2012: Months after I make this change, I realize I have no SMS service at all! I didn't notice because most of my texting is via iMessage. Turns out I've been missing friend's texts, and my own infrequent texts have gone missing. No error messages of course, everything just goes into the ether. It appears when AT&T removed our unlimited messaging plan, they forgot to add in a transactional plan. I wonder if that was once automatic, and has only recently become an opt-in plan. I added it in, and now MyAT&T.app lists text use; I'd wondered why that wasn't included earlier.

Moral of the story: Even AT&T is overwhelmed by the complexity of its mobile plans -- so test everything!