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Internet garbage dump? What Weizenbaum really said

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Joseph Weizenbaum — creator of the Eliza chatterbot and author of “Computer Power and Human Reason” — passed away recently. Running through all the obits was a quote that seemed to summarize this computing pioneer’s critical perspective on technology:

The Internet is like one of those garbage dumps outside of Bombay. There are people, most unfortunately, crawling all over it, and maybe they find a bit of aluminum, or perhaps something they can sell. But mainly it’s garbage.

This line appeared in outlets from the Wall Street Journal to Valleywag. Caught my eye, too.

The original quotation was in a New York Times article from 1999. But it’s not the whole story.

Weizenbaum wrote a letter to the Times after the article appeared:

I did say that, but I went on to say, “There are gold mines and pearls in there that a person trained to design good questions can find.”

Amazing what a little context can do!

Interestingly, although Weizenbaum’s critique of computing centers on the limitations of algorithmic problem-solving, it was Google’s pattern-matching prowess that unearthed this connection for me. I’d never have found it on my own.

Weizenbaum, whose family fled Nazi Germany in the ’30s, was right to urge us not to discount the value of the human compass in navigating our lives, and not to abdicate our judgment to machines. But I think he might have been a little too ready to dismiss the ability of machines to help us find informational gold and contextual pearls.

Give us each day our daily campaign call

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During each election season, most days, each campaign runs a daily conference call with the media. These calls are the candidates’ equivalent of the White House “presser” — not real press conferences with the candidates or the president himself, but rather check-ins between the campaigns’ (or the White House’s) press handlers and the reporters.

I don’t know exactly when this practice started, but it’s been standard for a while. The calls are “on the record”; the campaigns are trying to get their messages out, to push and shove coverage in the direction they wish to see it go. But they’re not exactly public, or at least they haven’t been. If you were an everyday citizen — or, for that matter, say, a blogger — you mostly didn’t have a chance to listen in. You couldn’t actually hear what the campaigns were saying; you had to hear the reporters’ takes on what the campaigns said, and maybe a snippet of recorded material.

In the old days this might have been tenable. Today we’ve got this Internet thing that forces a nice clean line between the private and the public. Today, something is either truly private — limited to a very few — or it’s fully and irrevocably public. The grey zone is gone.

Dave Winer recently started trying to rustle up each day’s calls from each campaign and post them as MP3s. He argues, persuasively to me, that voters have the right to hear these on-the-record events first-hand if they want to — just as the White House pressers are now televised, online and transcribed. Sure, you could argue that most people have neither the time nor the interest to tune in to this stuff every day. And you’d be right. But that’s still no argument to keep them out of the hands of anyone who does want them. They are the primary source material, and it’s always good to have a chance to check what we read in the paper and see on the screen against the original.

From what I can tell, the trouble Winer has had in getting access to the material each day hasn’t been a matter of anyone trying to keep a big lid on the calls — some of them get posted already. It’s more a case of old-school journalistic professionalism, of a lingering “this is backstage stuff, no need for the public to listen in” attitude, and of a cave-in to convenience. The campaigns can’t invite a million bloggers on the call, so they draw the line that’s familiar and easy: they say, if you want to get on our e-mail list with the daily call info, you need credentials. And apparently no one with the credentials has yet stepped forward to provide the calls to Winer or the wider Web. Too bad.

There’s a parallel here to the institution of corporate earnings calls: they used to be accessible only to handpicked analysts and reporters; today, it’s still mostly those folks asking the questions, but the calls get posted online for all to hear.

I think it’s inevitable that the campaign calls will, too. It would be nice for that to happen before this critical election passes too many more milestones.

Disk — raw or cooked

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I returned from my travels, sat down at the desk yesterday morning, fired up my email program, and — ffftt!!! — encountered one of those awful Windows system messages (something to the effect that the system had been unable to write back to the disk and it was very sorry but some data had been lost) that can mean only one thing: hardware failure. I took a breath, ran the disk utility, and got another message informing me that there was insufficient disk space to fix the bad clusters, which made no sense, since there was plenty of empty space on the drive — unless, like, massive gigabytes’-worth of clusters had gone south.

The bad news was, this was the big 500 GB drive I use to store basically everything. (Another drive is for the system and applications.) The good news is, I’ve become religious about backups, I have copies of all my important data, including online backups; but it’s scattered about.

I can recall many hours spent hostage to CHKDSK back in the late ’80s, fixing my own or friends’ wayward drives, watching patiently as the little grid filled out with marks for good and bad clusters. This was when the disks held 10 or 20 megabytes. Then in the mid 90s I wrestled with bad Mac disks on the cruddy machines Salon was trying to make do with. But since then, either the quality’s gotten a lot better or I’ve had a good run of luck. This is the first disk disaster I’ve had in a decade.

I took another breath and began poking at the drive with various tools and utilities. Sometimes the system could see it, sometimes it couldn’t. Then, at the lowest ebb of my fight, my system told me that there was zero Kb of data in zero files on the drive, and that the drive, in fact, could not be examined at all because “the type of the file system is RAW.”

Raw? As in, not cooked? By now I was doing all my research on the old laptop. Google told me that this error message indicates that a drive is close to unformatted — in, as it were, the state of nature. Only I knew there was tons of data on the disk, and it hadn’t been erased, and it didn’t seem like the disk had massively failed (a la “head crash”).

A couple of hours digging through the tech forums led me to a fine utility called GetDataBack. Several hours later, this program had painstakingly reassembled the file-system tables of my drive and enabled me to ferry my precious information back to safety in (roughly) one piece rather than having to reassemble it from patchwork backups.

This morning, I purchased and installed a new drive. Spent the rest of the day restoring files. Now I’m back. Phew. Only two days lost.

My motherboard fried during the middle of my labors on Dreaming in Code. So maybe I get one technical disaster per book project, and now the one for my new book is behind me. (I also notice that the previous disaster also occurred after a week away. I wonder whether it’s the temperature change of sitting unpowered after weeks of constant use that’s stressing the gear.)

If you’ve read this far, you don’t need me to remind you of the moral of this tale: you must have a backup plan.

Links for March 21st 2008

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Bit of a backlog from my travels!

  • Martian Headsets – Joel on Software: Joel Spolsky provides the ultimate explanation of the browser backward-compatibility mess, and recaps why, in software, the battle between idealists and pragmatists must inevitably go to the latter.
  • helmintholog: The nerd is the enemy of civilisation: Andrew Brown cites some prescient excerpts from Weizenbaum’s “Computer Power and Human Reason,” including an early and comprehensive definition of the nature of the hacker/geek — pre-Steven Levy, pre-anyone else I can think of.
  • collision detection: Will DIY geeks save American ingenuity?: Clive Thompson on the value of working with your hands:

    Only a few decades ago, most serious adults were expected to be fluent in basic mechanics. If your car or stove or radio broke down, you opened it up and fixed it… when we stop working with our hands, we cease to understand how the world really works….Neuroscientists have shown that working with your hands exercises different parts of your cerebrum than sitting and cogitating…. America is healing itself at the grass roots — rediscovering the mental joy of making things and rearming itself with mechanical skills.

    I second the point. It’s great, after hours of writing and web research, seated at a keyboard, to get up and work with real tools on real stuff. My new basement office is conveniently located adjacent to a sawdust-filled workroom for this very reason. (Well, actually, it just happily worked out that way.)

Obama’s gamble on complexity

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Because I’m on the road I didn’t get to listen to Obama’s Tuesday speech until last night. I’d heard a mixture of reactions to it already — from one friend’s “best political speech of my lifetime” to another’s “not sure he put the controversy to rest.”

So I fired up the browser and tuned in.

First thing I realized: this is one lengthy piece of substantive political argument! After two terms of an incoherent chief executive and a couple decades of soundbite-driven political culture, it felt anachronistic yet oddly invigorating to settle in and realize that I was in for nearly 40 minutes of a well-constructed speech with a long sweep. Obama did not, as Dave Winer put it, “take the shortcuts.” The high road is also, sometimes, a long road.

Second thing I realized: Obama is not only a “great speaker” in the sense that his voice can soar and he can fire up a crowd; he is also able to summon more than one effective style. For most of this speech on race, he ditched the grand oratory and hit calm, somewhat informal, conversational notes: he was like your incredibly articulate friend across a dinner table, going deep into a political argument by increasingly personal anecdotes, gradually getting more passionate as the minutes pass.

Finally, I realized that the speech was a big gamble. As Jay Rosen wrote, it was a challenge to the media — a gauntlet thrown down at the cable networks’ reductive, infinite-loop approach to complex issues. But it was even more a challenge to his audience, to all of us, to listen with less impatience, to think for one moment a little less about the short strokes of one presidential race and a little more about the long arc of our national story.

In substance the speech was deeply pragmatic: It called on the groups that make up the American polis to stop objectifying one another because that simply distracts us from our opportunity to solve some big problems. That’s a practical argument: stop fighting because we’ve got work to do.

The speech’s idealism lay rather on a kind of meta level. In its length, its willingness to delve into history, its plea for us to embrace the complexities of our present conflicts by understanding their roots, it implicitly rejected the dominant mode of American political discourse since Ronald Reagan transformed it in 1980. Yes, Obama’s speech contained anecdotes. Yes, it contained soundbites. But these were the building blocks of something larger and more consequential.

Yes, Obama told us, we can have a political conversation informed by intelligence and nuance and a sense of history. We are not doomed to live forever in the Bush administration’s universe of stunted understanding, or the cable networks’ academy of closed minds.

Is he right? Will his gamble pay off? I’d like to think so. But it might be the most audacious hope of all.

UPDATE: Nick Kristof in the Times starts off with the same point — calling the speech “an acknowledgment of complexity, nuance and legitimate grievances on many sides” — before veering off in a different direction. (Hadn’t read him before I wrote this…)

On the road

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This week I’m in NYC doing interviews for the new book. So posting will likely be light.

I have now been living in the Bay Area so long (over 20 years!) that I have become totally de-acclimated to the east coast weather of my native city.

But I still know when a cabbie makes a wrong turn at the Kew Gardens interchange!

Links for March 13th 08

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  • The Case for Full Disclosure: James Poniewozik in Time argues that journalists should stop pretending they’re not human beings or citizens and be free to discuss their political preferences:

    If a tech writer told you he had no preference between Macs and PCs and chose not to use a computer in the interest of impartiality, you would rightly consider him an idiot. But politics is not consumer journalism, right? Right—it’s more important, and transparency in it is more essential.

    The reasons not to say whom you’re voting for boil down mainly to the interests of journalists, not those of readers and viewers. It would be a pain in the neck. Campaign sources would mistrust you. Radio hosts and bloggers would have a field day. Readers would become suspicious.

    But more suspicious than they are already? The biggest reason to go open kimono is that the present system does what journalism should never do: it perpetuates a lie.

    I have argued this for many years, most recently in 2004, when the Miami Herald told reporters they shouldn’t buy tickets to benefit concerts:

    If you believe that a reporter who contributes to a political campaign can’t write about politics, you’ve set an all-consuming trap for the entire journalistic enterprise. Your rule will keep widening its net: If buying a ticket to a political benefit is verboten, since the money from the benefit will end up in a campaign’s coffers, then the reporter should carefully refrain as well from buying a movie ticket from any studio that has used its profits to make any sort of political contribution. For that matter, better stay away from buying any product from any corporation that has chosen to give dough to any candidate. If you pay taxes, you’d better think twice about writing about any arm of the government to which you’ve contributed. And so on.

    It’s hopeless; the Herald’s staff might as well take vows of poverty, chastity and silence — and leave their paper’s columns blank.

  • Rudy Rucker: Fundamental Limits to Virtual Reality: A scientific view of why the idea of somehow reconstituting nature as “computational matter” can’t succeed and shouldn’t be tried: “Just as she is, Nature embodies superhuman intelligence. She’s not some piece of crap to tear apart and use up.”
  • LRB · John Lanchester: Cityphilia: Lengthy, much-recently-linked, comprehensible explanation of the financial mess we’re in and the opaque nature of derivatives trading.
  • WTFs/minute: Cartoon illustrating the only useful metric of software-code quality.

A lightweight blog-post draft management system

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[This is a post describing a technique I’ve found useful for managing my blog. Feel free to skip the geek-out!]

For a long time I’ve wished for a better system to manage my blog post drafts. I know there are client side tools like MarsEdit and Ecto, but I use lots of different machines at home and on the road, and prefer to work with one set of drafts on a server.

Recent tweaks to WordPress have allowed you to filter posts based on published/unpublished/draft status — that means you can have a standling link to a list of drafts. That simple capability got me most of where I wanted to be; when I get an idea for a post, I create a placeholder post with a quick note reminding me of the idea. A bookmark on my browser toolbar points to this list of drafts.

The other tool that has made this really useful is Postalicious — a wordpress plugin that creates blog posts based on Delicious tags. I was less happy with Postalicious the first time I used it because I had it set to automatically publish my links — but Delicious has a tight, Twitter-like limit on the number of characters you can use to annotate the links. And I like to gas on sometimes. I’d find myself going into the post after it was published and adding material — awkward at best.

Now I have Postalicious set to create the new posts as drafts. As I’m wandering the Web, when I see something I want to blog about, I tag it appropriately. Then the next time I have a chance to do some blogging, I’ve got a nice list of the links I want to write about waiting for me in my draft list. The URL is right there so if I want to quote at length I can just click right through to it and cut and paste the longer quote that wouldn’t have fit into Delicious.

Sometimes, it’s these simple things that please us users the most!

Maazel: “What I do here is of no importance”

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On Fresh Air yesterday, conductor Lorin Maazel described his Zen-like approach at the podium, aimed at achieving “no tension … other than the intensity of one’s musical imperative”:

The first thing to do is learn how to breathe — very deep breaths, slow. Then you stand in one position if you’re going to conduct, or sing, or whatever, for about a minute, and you deliberately relax every muscle in your body. You become aware of the fact that quite a few muscles are tense, so you relax them, all the way down to the calves of your legs. Then you take one more very slow breath.

And then you say to yourself, what I do here is of no importance whatsoever. I am here as a servant. And if I’m nervous, it means that I think what I’m doing is important. That is an egocentricity which no interpreter can allow himself the luxury of. You’re there to serve the music, and you have to be in the best postiion, psychological and physiological, to do so. Which means no tension, no nerves. Yes, exhilaration. Yes, enthusiasm. Yes, focused energy. But no nervousness. Because that’s counterproductive.

Links for March 11th

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  • EETimes.com – IT pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum dies: I’m surprised that this obituary hasn’t circulated more widely. Weizenbaum was the creator of ELIZA, the proto-chatterbot program (here’s a Web-based version) that, in the 1960s, demonstrated how readily people will accept a crude rule-based simulation of conversation as the real thing — filling in the blanks, as it were, of a computerized persona. Then he wrote a great humanist critique of the digital-triumphalist perspective titled Computer Power and Human Reason — a book that all the geniuses at Google should be required to read as a healthy counterweight to their “algorithms rule!” world view.
  • Monitor | The battle for Wikipedia’s soul | Economist.com: Inclusionists vs. Deletionists! I hear those words and can’t help recalling Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, in which Accelerationists battled with Deicrats. The labels — “inclusion” is far more appealing, and flattering to our self-images, than “deletion” — foretell the outcome.
  • Failure to connect: Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune interviewed me for a column about the Net in movies.
  • Time Out of Mind: Times op-ed points out that our organic experience of time is shaped by physical activities.

    Inner time is linked to activity. When we do nothing, and nothing happens around us, we’re unable to track time…. To measure time, the brain uses circuits that are designed to monitor physical movement… Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.

    Which leaves us to wonder whether time spent at the keyboard is perceived as “nothing happening around us.”