From The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins (thanks, Blair):
Behold the mighty dinosaur,
Famous in prehistoric lore,
Not only for his power and strength
But for his intellectual length.
You will observe by his remains
The creature had two sets of brains –
One in his head (the usual place),
The other at his spinal base.
Thus he could reason A priori
As well as A posteriori.
No problem bothered him a bit
He made both head and tail of it.
So wise was he, so wise and solemn,
Each thought filled just a spinal column.
If one brain found the pressure strong
It passed a few ideas along.
If something slipped his forward mind
‘Twas rescued by the one behind.
And if in error he was caught
He had a saving afterthought.
As he thought twice before he spoke
He had no judgment to revoke.
Thus he could think without congestion
Upon both sides of every question.
Oh, gaze upon this model beast,
Defunct ten million years at least.
– Bert Leston Taylor (1866 – 1921)
What if we could have been double-butt sacrocoocygeal-brained? How would that have changed us?
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.
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.
A geospatial and engineering study, recently conducted by my firm in support of relief operations in Haiti, shows that much of the island nation is susceptible to landslides. And by “much,” I mean MUCH. About 80%. This should not be surprising considering young volcanic rock, active tectonics and steep slopes. Easily-weathered, clay-rich soil at an angle will slide when shaken, right?
A structural geology and geophysics nerd, I was initially more enamored with and engrossed in the earthquake’s ground motion numbers, which were fed into predicting building failure, than ground sliding. Thankfully, the Katrina levee failures have led me to a more holistic view of disasters. To come up with solutions, we do need subject matter experts, but it is crucial that the general scientific attitude is less “I’ll take the seismic stuff, you take the soil stuff and let’s not be bothered by policy which is for suits in Washington” and more interdisciplinary cooperationin the name of scientific progress and human betterment. Never will I sift through sediments or poke at fossils, but I’ll be damned if I ever view a problem through the blinders of specialization again. At some point, we have to grow up as scientists and citizens and want to incorporate other research as well as demand and follow through on change implementation.
More on the need for synthesis:
1) Disasters aren’t things that happen to other people, parts of which you later study for academic purposes. The paper Katrina’s unique splay deposits in a New Orleans neighborhood by Tulane University’s Stephen Nelson et al. documents some fascinating patterns of deposition of canal sediment in the Gentilly neighborhood, which ultimately show WHY the levee there failed as it did (pilings driven into ground all wrong due to poor sampling of and little care for the subsurface).
2) Disasters are normally compounded by other disasters. These things rarely happen in isolation. Landslides and floods triggered by earthquakes (and Atlantic hurricanes) are worsened by deforestation for charcoal in a job-starved and subsequently energy-starved country. The need for aid and housing now is appreciated, but what of the larger problems of disappearing trees and moving coastlines?
3) “If the disasters themselves are not preventable, sometimes the way we handle the aftermath is,” says Adele Barker in Disaster’s Aftermath. Ms. Barker speaks of aid agencies not being prepared in the wake of Haiti and how it reminds her of botched aid following the Southeast Asian tsunami (which in turn puts me in mind of our own New Orleanian disaster after the disaster). Sometimes, the way we handle the scientific aftermath is preventable, too.
There is no room for academic and political ivory towers. We work together or bust.
***
I will admit immense joy in science as an end in itself and a certain freedom in ignoring government and the social contract as petty constructs. Forget you jokers with your grabs, wars and laws; when I’m in my lab, in my world, you cease to exist. Science is a magical thing that way. *ironic chuckle* Moreover, within science itself, too much generalization leads to master-of-none paralysis. You have to be good at something, do something, prove something, in order to move forward. But, there’s no roadblock or harm in being good at something, learning more and sourcing from work outside of your expertise. It makes you better. More human. In the end, isn’t that the point of science?
