Posts by Tim

Jamais Cascio on devices that pay attention:

Imagine a desktop with a camera that knows to shut down the screen and eventually go to sleep when you walk away (but stays awake when you’re sitting there reading something or thinking), and will wake up when you sit down in front of it (no mouse-jiggling required).

Or a system with a microphone that listens for the combination of a phone ringing (sudden loud noise) followed by a nearby voice saying “hello” (or similar greeting), and will mute the system automatically.

When you go down this road, extrapolating from existing abilities (accelerometers, face and voice recognition, light detection) to more complex algorithms, the possibilities get correspondingly more complicated:

What prompted this line of thought for me was the story about the Outbreaks Near Me application for the iPhone. It struck me that a system that provided near-real-time weather, pollution, pollen, and flu (etc.) information based on watching where you are — and learning where you typically go, to give you early warnings — was well within our capabilities.

Or a system that listened for coughing — how many different voices, how often, how intense, where — to add to health maps used by epidemiologists (and other mobile apps).

It seems to be almost an axiom that the applications of digital technology that are potentially the most beneficial for the aggregate likewise require the most information from the individual user – and therefore creep us out to the point where we’re reluctant to put them into practice. There’s got to be a name for this paradox – a digital analogue to The Fable of the Bees.

What is happening here?

This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus [of Cushing Academy] about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy

The NYT reconfigured their Baghdad Bureau blog to make At War, adding reports from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere as well as Iraq. This post by Atheer Kakan, an NYT translator and journalist in Iraq who (along with his family) was recently allowed to emigrate to the US as a political refugee, is downright astonishing: emotional and observant, sentimental and clear-eyed all at once:

My family was starving, so the first thing we did after we sat down was to bring them some food. I went to a fast-food shop and I ordered lots of American food. There was something with melting cheese. I think it was Mexican. And lots of French fries. The cashier girl was asking me if I wanted things, and I was approving everything she said.

Eventually I had lots of food to carry to my family, who were desperately waiting for me. I put down the food and we started eating, and I looked to my children, who seemed to be enjoying their time, and I released another breath as I felt that I was doing the right thing for all of us. It wasn

… get stolen from, retaliated against, hurt at work and convinced not to complain, and paid less than the minimum wage, not just sometimes, but most of the time:

The study, the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a decade, also found that 68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week…

In surveying 4,387 workers in various low-wage industries, including apparel manufacturing, child care and discount retailing, the researchers found that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of average weekly earnings of $339. That translates into a 15 percent loss in pay…

According to the study, 39 percent of those surveyed were illegal immigrants, 31 percent legal immigrants and 30 percent native-born Americans… [W]omen were far more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than men, with the highest prevalence among women who were illegal immigrants. Among American-born workers, African-Americans had a violation rate nearly triple that for whites.

Excuse me; I need to go punch something. And then maybe throw up. Then punch something else.

I love Matt Novak’s blog Paleo-Future, which combines everything I love about paleoblogging and hot buttered futurism into a single delicious pie.

He hasn’t posted a ton lately, and really, going after mobile phones is low-hanging fruit, but I was still delighted with today’s look at portable phones (from a 1976 book titled Future Facts). It includes this quote:

For a while at least, the portaphone will remain a business tool or luxury item. In time, however, portaphones will get smaller and cheaper, just as transistor radios have.

First: “portaphones!” When did we stop applying multisyllabic prefixes to words? Probably around the same time “port-a” became uniquely associated with outdoor toilets.

Second: today, we would almost certainly have to reverse that analogy: “Over time, transistor radios became smaller and cheaper, just as celullar phones have today.” I consider this a sign of the analogy’s intrinsic merit.

Last: it’s easy to look at old predictions of the future with awe at what they get right and glee at what they get wrong. But this should be taken seriously as symptoms. They show how the past dreamed itself, and indeed, how it dreamed the present, in all of its possibilities and constraints, into being.

Geoff Nunberg at Language Log on one of the biggest problems for scholarly use of Google Books: :

It’s well and good to use the corpus just for finding information on a topic — entering some key words and barrelling in sideways. (That’s what “googling” means, isn’t it?) But for scholars looking for a particular edition of Leaves of Grass, say, it doesn’t do a lot of good just to enter “I contain multitudes” in the search box and hope for the best. Ditto for someone who wants to look at early-19th century French editions of Le Contrat Social, or to linguists, historians or literary scholars trying to trace the development of words or constructions: Can we observe the way happiness replaced felicity in the seventeenth century, as Keith Thomas suggests? When did “the United States are” start to lose ground to “the United States is”? How did the use of propaganda rise and fall by decade over the course of the twentieth century? And so on for all the questions that have made Google Books such an exciting prospect for all of us wordinistas and wordastri. But to answer those questions you need good metadata. And Google’s are a train wreck: a mish-mash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.

The devil here is in the details – Nunberg goes on to list dates and categories that aren’t accidentally, but systematically misapplied, in wild, impossible fashion. There’s a great discussion after the post, too – not to be missed.

It’s actually surprising that this is such a problem, considering that the bulk of Google Books’s collection is gathered from major research libraries, who DO spend a lot of time cataloguing this stuff for themselves. What happened?

In discussion after my presentation, Dan Clancy, the Chief Engineer for the Google Books project, said that the erroneous dates were all supplied by the libraries. He was woolgathering, I think. It’s true that there are a few collections in the corpus that are systematically misdated, like a large group of Portuguese-language works all dated 1899. But a very large proportion of the errors are clearly Google’s doing. Of the first ten full-view misdated books turned up by a search for books published before 1812 that mention “Charles Dickens”, all ten are correctly dated in the catalogues of the Harvard, Michigan, and Berkeley libraries they were drawn from. Most of the misdatings are pretty obviously the result of an effort to automate the extraction of pub dates from the OCR’d text. For example the 1604 date from a 1901 auction catalogue is drawn from a bookmark reproduced in the early pages, and the 1574 dating (as of this writing) on a 1901 book about English bookplates from the Harvard Library collections is clearly taken from the frontispiece, which displays an armorial booksmark dated 1574…

[It’s like that joke from Star Trek VI: “not every species keeps their genitals” (by which I mean, metadata) “in the same place.”]

After some early back-and-forth, Google decided it did want to acquire the library records for scanned books along with the scans themselves, and now it evidently has them, but I understand the company hasn’t licensed them for display or use — hence, presumably, the odd automated stabs at recovering dates from the OCR that are already present in the library records associated with the file.

Ugh. I mean, the books in these libraries are incredibly valuable. But when you think about all of the time and labor spent documenting and preserving the cataloguing info over centuries, it’s kind of astonishing that we’re losing that in favor of clumsy OCR. Out of any company, Google should know that a well-optimized search technology is at least as important as the data it helps to sort.

Maybe they’re just excessively cocky about their own tools. After all, the metadata problem isn’t limited to browsing through Google Books. If you’ve ever tried to use an application like Zotero or EndNote to extract book and article metadata from Google Scholar, you find incomplete and mistaken information all over the place. You spend almost as much time checking your work and cleaning up as you would if you’d just entered the info in manually in the first place.

And in the end, manual entry is what we want to avoid. I’d say half the value of digital text archives for scholars is that they can put their eyeballs on a document – the other half is that they can send little robots to look at thousands and thousands of them, in the form of code that depends not least on good metadata.

I loved Virginia Heffernan’s postscript to the Facebook exodus:

You

I married my wife because not long after we met, she told me that when she was a little girl, she would rehearse for a never-to-happen appearance on Reading Rainbow, reviewing her favorite book, Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth.

That’s a true story.

Tom Ewing, on the ironies of music criticism becoming simultaneously more pop-friendly and less popular:

[I]f anything, rock criticism’s become less populist over the last decade, as the spiraling decline of album sales makes it tougher to frame successful records as public events and easier to make niche sensations seem like they matter. And as we’ll see, there were definite limits to the types of pop that could win over wider audiences.

On a personal level, of course, the idea of a pro-pop revolution feels right because it validates the many hours I spent arguing about it on the net. Making niche events feel somehow important is something the Internet is horribly good at: it turns arguments fractal, lets your bunch of digital friends and foes feel like the world when it no way is.

Clive Thompson talks to the Stanford Study of Writing’s Andrea Lunsford about the astonishing decline super-tumescence of reading and writing:

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it