You read yesterday’s VatulBlog post on natural disasters and the benefits of educating yourself in this time of information plenty. Where do you start, however, when search engine output has a rather low signal-to-noise ratio?
1) A list of Google’s or Ask’s search terms shows many internet users cannot pose a question to save their lives. Use these 20 Tips For More Effective Google Searches to avoid being overwhelmed by search results. Become one with Boolean.
2) There are many free science search tools out there. Here is a review of the prominent ones. Search early, search often.
3) Ask a librarian. There exist these humans, many Library & Information Science graduates and other smart people, who work at libraries who can help you hone your search skills as well as find answers to your questions. They also do funny dances with library carts, I hear, which is always worth the time spent at your local library. Jokes aside, considering the number of people who don’t possess home computers and computer & online literacy, well-funded libraries and intelligent, helpful librarians are crucial to the future of information facilitation. Also consider publishing your search results and analyses as a blog post to help others who may have the same question.
4) For humanity’s sake, lower the noise or help verify data.
Blair pointed me to The Economist’s The Data Deluge which simultaneously celebrates and bemoans the exponential increase in data, be it photographic, tabular, scientific or vital-statistical in nature, and how corporations are only beginning to find value in separating the wheat from the chaff. Violation of privacy aside, the greatest threat to signal quality is data hoarding (especially by individuals, taxpayer-funded organizations and publishing houses) and a large amount of noise in the system. Those who do put information out there don’t (want to) curate it, which includes ensuring accuracy and constant updates. In a comment on the aforementioned Economist article, a D. Sherman says it best:
… the vast majority of of “noise” in databases is simply bad data, duly entered and propagated … We put a great deal of effort into collecting more and more data, but comparatively little into weeding out bad data. This implies that the sign[al]-to-noise ratio is only going to deteriorate. Part of the reason for that is that the incentives all favor collecting more data, but do not adequately penalize bad data.
… Members of the database resistance movement who are willing to risk more radical means of spoofing more important databases can readily imagine even more creative (though less legal) methods. When RFID tags and image-recognition tracking of people and vehicles becomes more common, the opportunities and means for injecting noise into the system will multiply exponentially.
The solution is a selective and sophisticated willingness to part with data depending on what the data involves. Not divulging personal information and data hoarding are two different things. While I value my personal privacy and often purposefully give wrong phone numbers and zip codes to websites and salespeople, I will readily part with any scientific, technological or social information that is not classified explicitly as proprietary. Google and Bing are not entitled to my street address but they are to my paper on transtensional folding because Americans paid for it and not Elsevier or Springer.
Another sure-fire way to lower noise is to cut back on content replication. A mature search engine will a) enforce canonical URLs and b) take a scythe to unabashed content scrapers who enjoy high search engine rankings. I’ve lost track of the number of MY blog posts that show up on others’ sites as higher-ranked search hits. (Just because my content is published under a CC-BY-NC-SA license does not mean you are entitled to pilfer it and ignore the non-commercial and share-alike components of the license.) Also, take-down notices only work if you can find a responsive human on the other end to respond, and who has time for that? There has to be an easier way to punish websites and aggregators for outright plagiarism and internet abuse.
Speaking of content replication, here’s an interesting “what-if” article on information copying and machine sentience. I guess there is one benefit to a low signal-to-noise ratio in the network: really dumb Artificial Intelligence, should it emerge.
@geologynews wanted to know where he could find “a list of all earthquakes from 2010 (say, >M5.0+), not just from the past week or month.” At the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) Earthquake Browser, of course!
The following map shows all 963 earthquakes between January 1st, 2010 and today.
In two months, a tiny fraction of a percentage of a blink of the geological eye, there were almost a thousand recorded movements of the lithosphere. They nicely outline Earth’s plates and some intra-plate activity: Oceans subducting under continents, the mid-Atlantic rift quietly creating new crust, the furious Pacific Ring of Fire, the East African Rift, India ramming away at Asia and America unraveling at the Basin and Range. The Earth is alive and doing its thing. Earthquakes aren’t oddities, they are the natural norm. Never forget that.
Next up are all earthquakes above Magnitude 5.0 for the same time frame. These make up a third of all earthquakes in the last two months.
The IRIS Earthquake Browser uses the Google base map and interface, so you can zoom in on particular earthquake-hit regions and look at satellite imagery & terrain data along with regular map view.
I urge everyone to donate as much as they can to the victims of the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, and also ask you to take an objective stance towards why natural disasters happen. As I explained to my physician brother who was concerned about the frequency and severity of recent earthquakes and attendant natural disasters, think of the earth as the human body, i.e. it’s all inter-connected and there is a perfectly plausible reason for all “ailments,” even ones we don’t yet fully understand.
Let’s use Haiti and Chile themselves as examples. Haiti is an impoverished and deforested former French island colony sitting on the steep, clayey soil over an active strike-slip fault which just moved in a catastrophic manner in the lead-up to the rainy and hurricane seasons. I hope to still be alive when the nation is rebuilt and recovers from its ongoing and upcoming physical, emotional and social trauma. The geographic shape of Chile could not have been fashioned more disastrously by God himself. The nation parallels an active subduction zone to the west and a highly-explosive mountain range to the east. When were this earthquake and associated tsunami NOT going to happen? (As it happened half a century before. And how long until the Andes let one loose?) Thankfully, Chilean buildings are more sturdy in build and the earthquake occurred offshore and not directly underfoot as in the case of Haiti. This also highlights the difference between the magnitude and intensity of an earthquake and why a 7.0 in Haiti wreaked more havoc than an 8.8 in Chile. Again, this time around, the generated tsunami did not take as many lives as in 2004.
Each new natural and unnatural disaster definitely weakens our collective will, but it’s not an excuse for brain rot. This is why I’m glad to be alive in the internet age. We use this interconnectedness to give and get help, hope and knowledge. Vive Haiti. Vive Chile.
From NCOTB, where commenters think they can make a better one. Can you?
Much in the way of interesting and infuriating has gone on this week in the areas of intellectual property, privacy, digital rights, open source and Googlization. A lot of it comes down to the rights of citizens and businesses in a networked society both parties helped create, the crucial need to protect the public domain, where innovation lies and the golden rule: he who has the gold (in this case, money and political power) makes the rules.
IP ALLIANCE TO OPEN SOURCE: YOU’RE PYRATES. ME: YARRRR! Like anti-healthcare legislators who take money from insurance companies, the US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance and its friends in congress should not have any say in determining the future of copyright and intellectual property, and how other countries set their own IP laws. Instead, the IP Alliance wants the United States to consider a Pirate or Enemy Of The State any nation that uses and encourages free/open-source software. Indonesia is the latest nation on the Alliance’s 301 watchlist for having the audacity to give “preference to free/open-source software because it will cost less and reduce the use of pirated proprietary software in government.”
That’s Apache, Blender, GNU packages, Linux packages, Perl, Python, Ruby, Thunderbird and WordPress, for starters. While I fully agree with Cory Doctorow that “this is like crack dealers campaigning against having a laugh with friends because happiness reduces the need for intoxicants,” what angers me about it is the sheer hypocrisy of the IP Alliance and the businesses it represents. Any technologist or R&D person will tell you that an astonishing number of these same companies use free/open-source software to maximize their technology budgets, innovate using these free tools and then slap patents and all kinds of proprietary-IP stickers on their final products. You think I’m kidding? The Recording Industry Association of America website runs on Apache and PHP. *facepalm*
No, kids, Walt Disney did not invent Cinderella and Snow White. Just like Disney built its fortune by copyrighting works in the public domain, the IP Alliance fosters this unethical business model: Build on or monetize free or cheap ideas and technologies that have come before, and then shut off these alternatives by buying yourself several congresspeople. (And people wonder why the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision was so dastardly and wrong.) When the technology world clamors for automation, standardization and interoperability, i.e. different systems of different capabilities playing together more efficiently, is not the time to make useless noise against open standards and technologies. During a recession when innovation is key, charging $1000/lb for a sack of shit top dollar for clunky, mediocre products and enforcing these as preferred solutions with political bribery, in lieu of free, shared and open source technologies, is stupid and tantamount to the communism Real Americans so fervently dread.
SPYCAMGATE Schools spy on kids through webcams. This shocker made it into the mainstream news, so I’m sure all of you know about the class action lawsuit filed against Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion School District and associated offenders by now. What you probably don’t know is that this is not an isolated incident. In the PBS Frontline Digital Nation documentary, which aired earlier this month, a Bronx school administrator boasts that he regularly monitors students remotely through their school-issued laptops. Parents: This is an egregious violation of privacy, especially using property purchased with your taxes. Take this opportunity to check your kids’ equipment, know your rights and read Cory Doctorow’s Creative-Commons-published Little Brother before he is thrown in the brig with the Indonesians.
PLEASE ROB ME & SCRUB MY KITCHEN FLOOR WHILE YOU’RE AT IT Despite being an IT professional or perhaps exactly because of it, my husband has no social media accounts. He can be contacted solely via email, phone or the occasional private IM. D’s rationale is that there is enough information about him out there, should someone choose to search hard enough or pay enough, that he doesn’t need to feed the beast. Conversely, Twitter Queen (someone at work actually called me this today) here is still not afraid that someone is going to rob my house when I’m gone and tweet from the road because they have to a) know where I live and b) say hello to aforementioned big, burly husband if he happens to be home. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. You’ll just have to find out. Big, burly Neighbors 1 and 2 and crazy hunter dude with shotgun may be around, too, so take your chances.
Patrix comes closest to pointing this out, but if you are smart about what social media outlets you pick, employ the highest privacy settings and don’t declare your street address or UTM coordinates, you can tell the whole world you’re leaving your jewelry and electronics on the back porch and are going away for a month and folks will not be able to use social media to locate your home. Unless they bribe your crappy friends, in which case you’re screwed anyway and it’s not Twitter’s or FourSquare’s fault.
MORE BAD NEWS FOR GOOGLE Google’s Top Executives Defied Italy’s Privacy Laws Except this time, I’m on Google’s side. They did not act quickly enough to pull down a YouTube video that showed kids bullying an autistic/handicapped boy, which violates Italy’s privacy laws, but this may be the only chance for justice for the assaulted child. Should the kid’s guardians sue, the video may be thrown out as evidence for being fruit of the poisoned tree (assuming Italy does assault lawsuits & has similar legal code). This is a tough one: Do we allow Google to flout international laws in humanitarian ca(u)ses, but complain loudly that we don’t want a large corporation in our business when it comes to our email and Buzz? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
BOOK Tarleton Gillespie, law-technology-media-culture professor and blogger, was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on February 23rd to speak about the politics of online media platforms. I wasn’t able to attend but am waiting on responses from friends who did attend. Gillespie’s book Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture nicely sums up the fight for digital culture and the links in this post. From the Wired Shut website:
… the enforcement of copyright law in the digital world has quietly shifted from regulating copying to regulating the design of technology …
… this approach to digital copyright depends on new kinds of alliances among content and technology industries, legislators, regulators, and the courts, and is changing the relationship between law and technology in the process. The [print,] film and music industries are deploying copyright in order to funnel digital culture into increasingly commercial patterns that threaten to undermine the democratic potential of a network society.
That’s it for This Week In The Fight For Digital Culture. Keep thinking. Keep fighting.
Needless to say, you’ve all heard about Apple’s iPad by now. I’m certain Steve Jobs’s unveiling speech yesterday was more popular than Obama’s State of the Union address, judging simply from the crazy high TPM (tweets per minute) related to the new gadget’s drop. (Disclosure: I contributed to said traffic with 9 tweets and around 10-12 replies and retweets. Glad to have done my part.)
As a technologist and tech blogger who attends conferences regularly, I am in the market for a new portable computer that is a little lighter and faster than the existing Dell Inspiron. Size, shape, bezel and “form factor” are meaningless to me. Following is what my portable computer has to DO, along with what the iPad does (green) and doesn’t (red) offer as a solution:
* Word-processing program for rapid note-taking, with machine on lap or standing at booths with very little counter space. $70 keyboard dock. The awkward iPad-keyboard size ratio and keyboard’s tilt make it seem unlikely the setup will stay put on a lap.
* Wordpress post creation and editing in full visual editor. The WordPress 2.1 app or WordPress in Safari should work pretty well for this (images may have to be resized and repositioned later, especially on photojournalism blogs).
* Occasional code testing in Python or from a terminal window An impenetrable Terminal app exists, but other than that, I haven’t tried any such thing on my iPhone. Anyone?
* Upload photos to Flickr directly from device OR quickly connect camera/device to computer, crop/adjust/saturate and upload to Flickr or to blog post. No built-in camera. $29 Camera Connection Kit with two dongles that plug into the keyboard dock connector; one for USB and one for SD cards.
* TweetDeck. Check.
* eReader sans DRM. iBooks is right out because it cannot read Project Gutenberg plain texts or anything other than the EPUB format. Not supporting that crap. The Stanza App will continue to read all formats, but will lack “form factor” of iBooks.
* Standalone GoogleChat. IM+ App or m.google.com
* All of these programs running simultaneously. NOPE!
Secondary requirements:
* Ability to view videos and HTML5 content. YouTube app for video. No Flash (no Hulu for you!) or HTML5.
* iTunes which accesses my 8GB iPod or my 20+GB iTunes music library. HAHAHAAAA! Dream on!
* Not having to deal with AT&T. What are my options here?
When I mentioned some of these points to a colleague who is seriously considering buying an iPad, he said, “I really don’t think it is meant to be a note taking device or for other uses you mentioned. Those are called laptops.” This person is also going to get the $500 base model (16GB; WiFi only, no 3G) for “casual use at home, looking at the internets, watching videos, reading books, pictures, etc.” Another friend is going to buy it as a second home computer, while yet another will purchase it as an eBook reader with internet access.
In no way will the iPad replace your phone, MP3 player, camera and a laptop/desktop, which you will still need to make calls, listen to much of your music, capture photos and video and do any substantial work. Moreover, as the HotHardware review says, “If we’re going to carry around something that requires a separate bag, we want it to have a real desktop and real multitasking capabilities.” It is, however, a cool toy with which to block the television while seated on the couch, read at the cafe or restaurant during those oh-so-frequent breaks or fall asleep with. A large-font eReader that surfs the internet and runs apps without having to run a giant OS.
Therefore, let’s not kid ourselves about the iPad as Disrupting Gamechanger That Forever Changes The Face Of Computing. That day is not yet here.
***
In my 2009 VizWorld tech wrap-up, I wrote, “There are many more people out there who simply want access to maps, books, music, data and that is the real imperative upon revolutionary, disruptive technologies. We cannot swallow the eReader marketing pill because it’s handed to us and, in our obsolescence-inducing plenty, unwittingly set data standards for the rest of the world. Consumers going into the second decade of the 21st century must focus on content and delivery – useful content in an accessible and understandable format on a relatively fast and ubiquitous machine – as their technology drivers. Open data, better communication and scrutinizing intent in this day and age of Twitter and other social media will make this happen. But, so will awareness, responsibility and active participation. In 2010, I ask us to be mindless consumers less and nurturing communities more.”
So, think critically about the social context of the iPad and read some more before you make this purchase.
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His classy resignation protest letter to NBC shows why I’ve always stood up for Conan.
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I love this blog and not just because I’m a (poser) nerd. Professor Lipton really makes mathematical and computational topics accessible.
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Michael Homan’s and Abdulrahman Zeitoun’s accounts of their ordeals during the Flood hit really close to home. Their stories come closest to what my father went through during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. People are awful. People are amazing. Such is humanity.
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“In 1998, aged just 14, aspiring young cartoonist Amir Avni decided to get in touch with the creator of Ren & Stimpy, John Kricfalusi. Being a hardcore fan of Kricfalusi’s work, Amir sent him an introductory letter along with a few cartoons he’d drawn, some of which contained relatively unknown characters of John’s. To call Kricfalusi’s response ‘generous’ would be an understatement.”
