Category Archives: Observing

The creepiness factor goes to 11

Posted on by

John Brownlee started a bit of storm on March 30 when he posted a story about Girls Around Me, an app for the iPhone. The idea behind the app is relatively simple – you turn it on, it finds your current location, and then it locates all of the people (men or women) who are currently nearby. The information is taken from public Facebook profiles and Foursquare check-ins. Brownlee tells a great story about the reaction of friends to whom he showed the app; they gradually move from fascination to a tingly ickiness and finally outright worry.

All of the data is public, there’s nothing illegal about what the app is doing. In fact a lot of the fear and reactions come from the ridiculous splash screen, which can be seen at the link above, of “girls” in stripper profile pictures. The more Brownlee thinks about the app the more he realizes that it demonstrates the truly worrying things about privacy on social networks like Facebook and Foursquare. We are, mostly by default, sharing much more than we might like to think when we use these services. I don’t think we should ban them, but we do need to use them with much more caution and consideration.

Charlie Stross noted the story and summarized my feelings quite well:

In the worst case, it’s possible to envisage geolocation and data aggregation apps being designed to facilitate the identification and elimination of some ethnic or class enemy, not only by making it easy for users to track them down, but by making it easy for users to identify each other and form ad-hoc lynch mobs. (Hence my reference to the Rwandan Genocide earlier. Think it couldn’t happen? Look at Iran and imagine an app written for the Basij to make it easy to identify dissidents and form ad-hoc goon squads to proactively hunt them down. Or any other organization in the post-networked world that has a social role corresponding to the Red Guards.)

But as I said earlier, the app is not the problem. The problem is the deployment by profit-oriented corporations of behavioural psychology techniques to induce people to over-share information which can then be aggregated and disclosed to third parties for targeted marketing purposes.

Theory and practices of the soul

Posted on by

I’ve been reading some Habermas the last few days and am particularly struck by the appendix of Knowledge and Human Interests. The appendix is called “Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective.”

Habermas begins with the purpose of theory. The study of theory is directly connected to action because theory provides action with energy and ethical significance. The Greeks believed that the study of theory, which was the contemplation of the cosmos, brought the external and internal parts of the world together. Contemplating the cosmos allowed one to reproduce the order of the universe internally, within the self. So life itself becomes an expression of theory.

Husserl published “The Crisis of the European Sciences” in 1937 and argued that science was failing because it was ignoring its true theoretical calling. The connection between theory and life practice has been broken.

Thus, although the sciences share the concept of theory with the major traditions of philosophy, they destroy its classical claim. They borrow two elements from the philosophical heritage: the methodological meaning of the theoretical attitude and the basic ontological assumption of a structure of the world independent of the knower. On the other hand, however, they have abandoned the connection of theoria and kosmos, of mimesis and the bios theoretikos that was assumed from Plato through Husserl…The conception of theory as a process of cultivation of the person has become apocryphal.

The Cool Down

Posted on by

The heat wave has broken, at least here in Michigan. A cold front finally moved through earlier this morning. Yesterday the temperatures were in the mid-90s and the humidity was high. Even at night the lows were only into the 70s and the dewpoints stayed high.

I had hoped to watch some of the lightning and thunderstorms roll through last night. But the storms were moving west to east, just north of Ann Arbor. I could see the lightning on the horizon but not much more. Investigating the National Weather Service web site I finally found the online location to download images. Now I just need to merge these with some GIS software and get some nice pictures.

Bifurcations and Other Thoughts

Posted on by

There comes a time in any project where it seems like everything is going in too many directions at once. That the center cannot hold and things are about to fly apart.

Blogging is no different. There’s a constant cycle of push and pull inside of me between keeping everything I write here, in a single location, and writing multiple blogs on different subjects. In the past I’ve also been torn between wanting to try different weblog tools. Four years ago that made a lot of sense because weblog tools were constantly evolving and changing. Today the churn in weblogging software seems to have slowed. Movable Type and WordPress appear to have come out on top in the web application space, and Radio Userland still has it’s adherents. And new sites like Myspace or .. that offer blogs as part of a social network don’t really appeal to me.

So here are some weblogs or topic areas that have been sprouting in my mind.

  • Information Ethics. Mostly because that’s the really broad area I’m hoping to write my master’s thesis on. In particular ethics and copyright. This idea moves back and forth between a focus on the thesis process in particular and a broader, perhaps group-based, effort at the School of Information.
  • Writing prompts and creativity. A perennial interest of mine that’s persisted for at least the last decade. Visions of turning this into a low-level moneymaking effort spin in the back of my head, probably through links to books, other sites, or AdSense.
  • Deep Reading. A fleeting thought to write a blog about a particular author and analyze their work. The classics have been especially intriguing this summer, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare.
  • I was at Border’s a few days ago reviewing a copy of The Well-Educated Mind. It’s basically another lifetime reading plan, great books of the Western world, or the Western Canon a la Harold Bloom. There are even more lists here. So I ask why do these lists proliferate so widely and nothing comparable seems to appear for mathematics or science?

To fork or not to fork, that is the question. Here’s a backlink to yet more issues that have been surfacing in my consciousness recently.

So Sick it Makes You Laugh – Follies in Political Rhetoric

Posted on by

Whenever I take an interest in politics it’s usually to look at the language and rhetoric that is used to make arguments. When I see other people take an interest in the same issue I’m usually willing to read. Here are some posts on political rhetoric, all from a liberal perspective, that I’ve found interesting over the last few days.

Glenn Greenwald and Dave Neiwert have been consistently good about following the eliminationist rhetoric that regularly emanates from the conservative blogosphere. Neiwert links it to the paranoid style of American politics limned by Richard Hofstadter.

Greenwald just penned this missive about the need for journalists to pay attention to the extremism of the right-wing blogosphere.

The extremist and increasingly deranged rhetoric and tactics found in the right-wing blogosphere — not only among obscure bloggers but promoted and disseminated by its most-read and influential bloggers — is, indeed, “a very common disease.” When it becomes commonplace to hurl accusations of treason against domestic political opponents, or when calls for imprisonment and/or hanging of journalists and political leaders become the daily fare — all of which is true for the pro-Bush blogosphere — those are serious developments. And they merit discussion and examination by the media.

Eliminationist rhetoric is a real problem, however. People who call for the death of others in order to make a political point don’t believe in the same political values of democracy that I hold dear. A common tactic in many of these arguments is to complain about the failure of one side to condemn the extremists inside of its own coalition or party. I’m not sure if this is an argument that has always been present in politics, or if it’s a recent development. The paradigm recent example I can think of is Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment from the 1992 campaign.

So why do people insist on lumping together the opposition and then berating them for tolerating idiots in their midst? Can’t we all just accept that people agree with each other partially, instead of completely? So I’m not asking you to condemn anyone, I’m just asking you to stop being a hypocrite. I could care less if people don’t condemn their political allies. But don’t turn around and complain about the other side if they fail to condemn every single nutcase that may be on the fringes of their coalition.

Of course that plea for reason will be ignored. As Arthure Silber notes it is impossible to be nuanced when discussing politics today. We are well on our way to becoming the stupidest country on Earth. Another well worn example of crazy talk is the “I’m just saying” defense so perfectly captured in the recent example of Bill O’Reilly spinning about Saddam’s tactics. At least Saddam kept violence under control, says O’Reilly, and that’s just a fact. Of course, ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink; say no more’, he’s not really calling for oppression, he’s just saying it worked for some.

The only response to this insanity is to laugh and watch The Daily Show. Matt Stoller responds

Emergency Response and Hastily Formed Networks

Posted on by

The April issue of the Communications of the ACM contained an article about hastily formed networks. A hastily formed network is a network formed in response to a disaster or crisis of some kind. For example, the response to Katrina last summer and fall. Some students at SI collected material about the various responses to Katrina. Today I came across another story related to disaster response. It seems Tom Evslin and Jeff Pulver are trying to convince the FCC to mandate an emergency voice mail system for people affected by a disaster. Phone calls to people in the disaster area would automatically be routed to voice mail. This would only happen if there was no answer on the line. Whenever the person reached a working phone they could leave a message for their family, telling them that they are alright.

As any Red Cross emergency volunteer will tell you (Mary is my source for this), names are a lousy way to locate people: they never get input the same way twice; they are not unique. Phone numbers are great but the phones weren’t working. However, ever since telco switches went electronic, there has been no hard connection between a phone number and the physical line it is linked to.

Those evacuees who had voice mail could leave greetings saying that they were safe and giving their location. Family members could leave each other messages. Our proposal, over-simplified, is that phone companies be required to provide voice mail free to ALL of their subscribers when those subscriber lines are in an emergency area and/or have been down for twelve hours or more. Then everyone who had a phone line will still be reachable through his or her old phone number even if the line itself is drowned or unreachable.

A further post on the price of emergency voicemail.

Retrieving Information from My Own Internet Tracks

Posted on by

I’ve been looking for a weblog post I read two or three months ago about the future of libraries, but so far I’ve failed to retrieve it. This kind of situation is one of the most frustrating technological problems I regularly encounter. There’s just no way to easily retrieve this information right now.

I do have some programs on my Mac that help solve these problems. History Hound and browseback are two programs that keep track of pages that you display in your web browser. Both of them allow you to search the pages for information. Unfortunately neither has worked in this case because I don’t remember any key phrases fine enough to recall the passage.

When I see something of interest on the web I usually save it to ListMixer for later review. But these items expire after a month, which is a good thing. If they stayed around for much longer the list would become impossible to navigate easily.

The weblog search engines, such as Technorati, Sphere, Feedster, or Google BlogSearch, are useful, but didn’t help in this occasion. Again my memory of the post isn’t accurate enough to find something. The number of posts mentioning the future and libraries is quite high.

I wrote about my own information management last week.

Managing My Information World

Posted on by

One of my perennial interests is personal knowledge or information management. How do you keep track of all the stuff that comes at you? I’m an omnivore when it comes to collecting information. I’m working at improving my skills for disseminating information. So for the sake of my own future self who might want to know how I managed my information back in mid-2006 and any others who care, I offer the following list.

I’m dividing the post into three parts input, storage, and output.

Inputs, or how I do my daily read.

I use Firefox on my home and work computers. Bookmarks are synced with the Foxmarks bookmark. I have a couple of key groups that I check daily: news sites such as NYT, WashPo; political blogs – Tapped, Billmon, Dailykos, Political Animal, Sideshow. To read RSS feeds I use NetNewsWire and FeedDemon, both synchronized through Newsgator. I keep my feeds in different groups based on topics – libraries, knowledge management, film, economics, politics, philosophy, poetics, productivity, business, science, techanalysts, SF. There’s also a @1 feed which contains my favorite feeds that I read daily. It usually takes me a week to cycle through all the groups of feeds. Some weeks I’ll focus on certain groups instead of others, such as reading the SF group during Wiscon.

For mail I use Apple Mail, hooked up to my personal and school accounts. I also have a yahoo account which sucks up a lot of account registration and commercial sites. Gmail I use for high volume mail lists, in two different accounts. I’ll check into gmail every few days, but sometimes let them linger for a month or more, depending on mood. For searching I mostly use Google. In Firefox I’ve added search engines for Amazon, Technorati, Wikipedia, A9, Yahoo, Teoma, Clusty, Furl. If Google fails I’ll go through the list to see what other search engines suggest. The Groowe.com toolbar is also a good add-on to Firefox, especially for repeated searches across different engines.

For photos at Flickr I’ve just started using 1001. A nifty Mac application that let’s you subscribe to communities, tags, individuals, etc. It also let’s you mark items as favorites, or use them on your desktop.

Storage

Short term storage is usually ListMixer. I really like this site because bookmarks expire after 30 days if you don’t use them. I copied an Applescript onto my computer that sends the current open tabs from NetNewsWire to Listmixer. I’ll use this every few days when the number of tabs in the current window starts to become cluttered, usually around 20-30 tabs. I’m considering creating another script to take the list and dump it into a blog post tool, such as ecto.

Longer term bookmarks get sent to del.icio.us or furl. I use furl to store items, such as news stories, that I expect to search through in the future. Del.icio.us usually gets more high level items, such as the home page for different sites, instead of individual stories. So an article from the American Prospect will get sent to furl, while the address for the weblog goes to del.icio.us.

Output

Weblog posts are managed through ecto. I’ve been making extensive use of the draft facility the past few weeks to capture ideas and partial thoughts. It’s become even more ubiquitous than TextMate, my preferred text editor. One of the things I like most about the Macintosh are the many different outlining applications that are available. I’ve tried to use all of them at some point. My preferred ones are OmniOutliner, Yojimbo, DevonThink, and Hog Bay Notebook now known as Mori.

On Independence

Posted on by

It’s the fourth of July and America is celebrating Independence Day. I can hear people setting off fireworks. The windows are open and summer is in full swing.

The National Archives has a very nice web page on the Declaration of Independence. There’s also an essay on the history of the declaration and one on the rhetoric. Independence of thought and expression are two great gifts which the United States has demonstrated to the world.

Read more about them above. I particularly like the piece on the rhetoric of the declaration. If only we had more politicians today who could write and speak as well as Jefferson.