Question Technology

Collection of Wikipedia Rejects

How bad must an article be that even Wikipedia won't make room for it?  Find out at The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump, a new blog started by pop science writer Clifford Pickover to collect the "best of the Wikipedia rejects."  The results are funny and a little sad.  Among the early entries:

"The Beard Theorem is a political theorem that relates to the Communist Party and its members. The Beard Theorem is a theory that suggests that the size of one's Beard, whether it be a puff, French Fork or Mutton Chop, has a direct correlation to the radicality of a person's Socialist views."

"Kynoid refers to any being whose body structure resembles that of a dog especially in the context of science fiction and fantasy fiction."

Via Law and Technology Theory.

CMU Study: Laptops Isolate Students and Don't Improve Performance

A recent study looked at how laptops affected behavior and performance of sophomores at Carnegie Mellon's School of Design.  Among the findings:

* Students interacted with a broader audience and received more diverse sources of feedback while using laptops. Laptop students were more likely to show their work to and get feedback from nondesign students. Instructors saw this increase in diversity of audience and critique as a positive learning experience for students.

* Students who used laptops spent more time on assignments and worked for longer periods of time than students who did not use laptops.

* While laptops led students to devote more time to their assignments, this did not translate into higher quality work. Students often interrupted their work to check email and surf the Web, or they spent significant time searching the Web for pictures or diagrams they could have created more quickly themselves.

* Students with laptops were more likely to work from home and reported home as their preferred place to work.

* Students with laptops were more likely to work alone than other students.

[...]  "It's not that laptops are good or bad for learning. It depends on how they are used," said Anne Fay, author of the study and director of assessment for the Eberly Center and the Office of Technology for Education. "Laptops can provide students with new creative tools and resources, adding to their intellectual toolbox of strategies, techniques and skills. The problem arises, however, when students use them as replacements for all their other tools. Used in this way, laptops serve to narrow the range of students' skills, not broaden them." [...]
   
The Carnegie Mellon study showed that laptops allowed students to enjoy the freedom to work whenever and wherever they wanted, without the constraints imposed by desktop computers or computer cluster hours. But many students complained that without externally imposed constraints, they often failed to manage their time and as a result were more likely to work through the night to meet deadlines.

Link: Spotlight News - Carnegie Mellon University,

via Inside Higher Ed.

Doom on the $100 Laptop

Who needs textbooks when it'll run Doom?  Engineers from the One Laptop Per Child Project have posted videos of themselves playing the videogame Doom on the new children's laptop.

Up next: the Darfur game?

Link: OLPC News: DOOM on the OLPC XO!, via BoingBoing.

More: The NYT features the project again today: For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate, and also has an active reader discussion about it.

Alberto Manguel on the Internet and the Future of Books

The CBC has a profile of Alberto Manguel, whose new book is The Library at Night:

Manguel describes himself as a “moderate skeptic” when it comes to the internet. He seems to regard it as a tantalizing diversion rather than an outright threat — like snacking on an energy bar instead of eating a proper meal. He cites its value in making texts available online that may otherwise be difficult to access, and acknowledges that its speed and multiplicity are alluring. But his preference is unhurried contemplation. To him, “reading often requires slowness, depth and context,” which skimming Web pages doesn’t provide.

As we become an increasingly online culture, electronic media are grabbing a bigger share of the public library’s scarce resources, a trend U.S. novelist Nicholson Baker attacked in Double Fold: Libraries and  the Assault on Paper (2001). In The  Library at Night, Manguel takes the sharp edges off Baker’s tone of outrage, but passionately echoes his concerns about junking valuable archives of newspapers and books in favour of electronic data storage.

“What worries me the most is that the impulse behind the replacement of paper-and-ink collections by a virtual collection is not an intellectual or even scientific impulse,” he says. “It is a purely material one that benefits the creators of the electronic media, who are making a fortune by inventing for us a fear of the fragility of paper, and laying no stress on the fragility of the electronic media. We don’t know how long memory sticks or CDs will last. We do know that books last for thousands of years.”

Link: CBC.ca - Arts - The Constant Reader: Alberto Manguel investigates the meaning of libraries,

via Bookninja.

Transhumanists Care About Overcoming (Your) Biases

The writing that comes out of the "transhumanist" crowd often baffles me.  I'm not really equipped to follow most high-level philosophy discussions, so maybe it's just me, or maybe I'm right and there's a large dose of bluster and nonsense mixed into it.  Here are some recent offerings that seem interesting, if a bit opaque.

The Future of Humanity Institute has launched the Overcoming Bias blog.  It is described as follows:

How can we better believe what is true? While it is of course useful to seek and study relevant information, our minds are full of natural tendencies to bias our beliefs via overconfidence, wishful thinking, and so on. Worse, our minds seem to have a natural tendency to convince us we that are aware of and have adequately corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing.

In this forum we discuss whether and how we might avoid this fate, by spending a bit less effort on each specific topic, and a bit more effort on the general topic of how to be less biased. Here we discuss common patterns of bias and self-deception, statistical and other formal analysis tools, computational and data-gathering aids, and social institutions which may discourage bias and encourage its correction. Other topics may be discussed to the extent they exemplify important biases and correction issues.

(Via IEET, Sentient Developments.)

As best I can tell, this blog is not about bias in discussions about transhumanism, which was how I first read it.  It's about discussing how future humans might not be biased.  That's what I gather from the abstract to a paper by Robin Hansen called "Enhancing Our Truth Orientation", to which the site links:

Humans lie to themselves, and often choose beliefs for reasons other than how
closely those beliefs approximate truth. This is mainly why we disagree. Three future
trends may reduce this epistemic vice. First, increased documentation and surveillance
should make it harder to lie and self-deceive about the patterns of our lives. Second,
speculative markets can create a relatively unbiased consensus on most debated topics
in science, business, and policy. Third, brain modifications may allow our minds to be
more transparent, so that lies and self-deception become harder to hide. In evaluating
these trends, we should be wary of moral arrogance.

Nick Bostrom (also of the Future of Humanity Institute) has posted a paper called "Dignity and Enhancement," Commissioned for the President's Council on Bioethics.  The abstract reads:

Does human enhancement threaten our dignity as some have asserted? Or could our dignity perhaps be technologically enhanced? After disentangling several different concepts of dignity, this essay focuses on the idea of dignity as a quality (a kind of excellence admitting of degrees). The interactions between enhancement and dignity as a quality are complex and link into fundamental issues in ethics and value theory.

James Hughes and others from the same crowd are on a panel taking place at the UN to "discuss the impacts of emerging neurotechnologies on cognitive liberty."  The meeting theme is described as follows:

Growing knowledge in the neurosciences, enhanced by exponential advances in pharmacology and other neurotechnologies (technologies that monitor and manipulate the brain) are rapidly moving brain research and clinical applications beyond the scope of purely medical use. These emerging neurotechnologies offer expanded intelligence, memory and senses, giving us greater ability to understand and control our own minds. But they also expand the avenues for possible coercion and invasion of mental privacy. What is the state of cognitive liberty today? What steps do we need to take to protect cognitive liberty, mental privacy and freedom of choice in light of these neurotechnologies? (Link)

Kinsley on MySpace

Michael Kinsley has an amusing piece in Slate about social networking sites on the web.  Excerpt:

But anonymity does not actually seem to interest many of the Web's most devoted users. They are the ones who start their own sites, or sign up for MySpace, or submit videos to YouTube. Quite the opposite: The most successful Web sites seem to be those where people can abandon anonymity and use the Internet to stake their claims as unique individuals. Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog. On the Internet, not only does everybody know that you're a dog. Everybody knows what kind of dog, how old, your taste in collars, your favorite dog food recipe, and so on.

Link: On the Internet, everybody knows you're a dog - Slate

Michael Crichton Tackles Genetics (and Web Spoofing)

The marketing wizards at HarperCollins are getting creative with the web in order to promote Michael Crichton's new novel, Next.  There's a website for a fictional company from the book, NEXTgencode, whose tag-line is "Your Destiny is No Longer in Question."  The site features spoof ads for their products, such as Perma Puppies ("ever wish they didn't grow up?"), ControlGene ("The gene found in every leader. You Choose: Leader, President, Dictator!"), and an ad about the possible extinction of blondes ("Never fear... We own the gene").  The ads are also posted on YouTube.

The site even has a "forum," which takes you to a blog called Ethics in Genetics.  The marketing connections on both sites are well hidden.  The only clue on the blog is a link to the NEXTgencode site, and the only clue there is a buried page about a new book that "reveals trade secrets" -- the Crichton book.

I learned about this at The Daily Transcript (at ScienceBlogs), which points to the blog Genetics and Health, which has a few posts about the book and the spoof sites.

I find this all kind of annoying.  Good fiction about biotech can foster discussion of the issues, but Crichton's credibility is pretty much zero given his previous anti-environmentalism/global-warming-doubting book (or at least a book that was widely perceived that way).  Having his name attached to biotech criticism does no favors to those who are genuinely trying to bring the issues to public attention.  (For instance, the people at the Center for Genetics and Society.)

The same goes for the spoof websites and blogs.  I can't tell if the "Ethics in Genetics" blog is sincere about discussion or not.  If the people behind this were really interested in educating readers they'd give some pointers to resources on the web and elsewhere instead of just muddying the waters.

Update:  Maybe I was a little unfair, to the book at least.  According to this Washington Post review the book contains "a seven-page bibliography of books and articles on genetics": Freaking Out Over Gene Tinkering.

Giving Old Mobile Phones to Toddlers as Toys: A Bad Idea in So Many Ways

I spotted this story at Techdirt, but it apparently originated with stories in the Times Online and Asian News International (links are below).  The stories quote a UK professor:

Lydia Plowman, Professor of Education at the University of Stirling, says parents should stop feeling pressurized into buying computerised toys for young children because they are no better than traditional methods of teaching children the basics.

Families eager to introduce their children to new technology should use lap-tops, mobile phones and other gadgets already in the home rather than splashing out on custom-built computers, she says.

"These toys are not particularly beneficial, although they are not particularly harmful either. There is no problem having them in the home. But in terms of literacy and numeracy they are certainly not more effective than more traditional methods of helping children to learn," she was quoted by Times Online, as saying.

In particular, she recommends giving children old mobile phones to play with so they can pretend to call their friends. "Family members often change their phone every year and give their old one to their young child. That's a very good way of introducing them to technology in an authentic setting," she said.

Link: Zee News: Old mobile phones are the best educational toys for your kids!

She begins with a good, though not terribly original, point: kids certainly don't need the newest electronic toys.  The problem is with her suggestion that you discard your old phones or other gadgets by giving them to young children as toys.  This is a stunningly bad idea for many reasons:

• Mobile phones have small parts that can break off and be a choking hazard.
• Mobile phones have toxic parts inside.
• If you turn the phone on so that it will make pleasant beeps (which people apparently do, according to the Techdirt story), you could be exposing your child to radiation.  Not enough is known yet about the effects of mobile phone radiation, but if it's dangerous you can be sure it's most dangerous to young children, who have thinner skulls.
• Apparently toddlers have been known to dial 911 on old mobile phones (according to Techdirt).  In the U.S. all phones will connect to emergency 911 services, even if service hasn't been paid for on the phone.
• Finally, and less importantly, the idea that toddlers need to be "introduced to technology in an authentic setting" is just silly -- no kid is going to be left behind because they weren't exposed to cell phones early enough.

In the ZDNet story about this, the writer is baffled by how to safely dispose of an old cell phone:

You were probably wondering what to do with that old cell phone anyway. It's bad karma to throw it away and have its components toxins leach into the landfill. The thrift stores won't take it.

It's not that difficult -- and it's worse than "bad karma" to throw it in the trash.  Here are a few ideas; you can find more on the web.

• Many women's shelters and senior centers accept old mobile phones so that they can be used in emergencies.
• Many office supply stores have recycling bins for phones and other electronics that need to be disposed of safely because of toxic batteries and other components.
• Some cell phone manufacturers are (finally) initiating take-back programs so that you can return them to the manufacturer for safe recycling and disposal.
• Check out your community's hazardous waste disposal guidelines.

Links to stories mentioned:     

• Zee News/ANI: Old mobile phones are the best educational toys for your kids!
• Times Online: Educational toys? Just give toddlers your old phone
• ZDNet: Need a toy for your toddler?  Try an old phone!    
• Techdirt: Give your kid your old mobile phone as a toy... But make sure they don't dial 911
     

Friday is Buy Nothing Day

The day after Thanksgiving is known for being the busiest shopping day of the year in the U.S.  If the crowds aren't enough of a reason for you to stay at home, here's another: participate in "Buy Nothing Day" by not shopping or by attending an event in your area to draw attention to consumerism out of control.  Buy Nothing Day is a project of Adbusters; it began in 1992 and is now a global phenomenon. 
Link: Buy Nothing Day - ADBUSTERS.ORG.

Are Tobacco Companies Advertising on YouTube?

An Australian researcher is investigating possible undercover advertising:

IS THIS the last frontier in tobacco marketing or simply a global stage for the look-at-me generation?

Thousands of videos of sexy, smoking teens are appearing on the internet phenomenon YouTube, possibly being posted by tobacco manufacturers to recruit the next generation of smokers.

A global authority on tobacco marketing, Professor Simon Chapman, of the School of Public Health at Sydney University, has accused tobacco manufacturers of hijacking YouTube by flooding it with videos of glamorous, smoking teens. Each day 100 million video clips are viewed on YouTube.

[...]

A digital marketing expert, Jean-Claude Abouchar, of Capture Communications, said YouTube's anonymity - users can hide behind aliases - provided the perfect cover for companies wanting to infiltrate the teen world.

"It's the perfect Trojan horse," he said. "They can upload videos of stars smoking in movies and call the clips 'celebrities' or add the actor's name or movie title to the video. And while that's not incorrect, it's a sneaky way of embedding their message that smoking is sexy or cool."

Link: Whiff of tobacco firms on net (Sydney Morning Herald, Nov. 18),
via PR Watch.

This wouldn't be surprising if it's true.  An unregulated net is a windfall for companies seeking new advertising space.  Wade Roush has a related article in the current Technology Review, about the commercialization of MySpace: Fakesters.  But cigarette advertising would be a new low, and possibly illegal.

Dawkins on Eugenics (or not)

Update: Dawkins may not have written this, or the Herald took it out of context or without permission, or something...  see Respectful Insolence: Is Richard Dawkins endorsing eugenics?

--

Apparently Richard Dawkins has not offended enough people with his new book, The God Delusion, so he has entered the "designer baby" debate in the UK with an opinion piece titled "Eugenics may not be bad."  It begins:

IN the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous – though of course they would not have used that phrase. Today, I suspect that the idea is too dangerous for comfortable discussion, and my conjecture is that Adolf Hitler is responsible for the change.

Link: "Eugenics may not be bad" (Sunday Herald)

One would hope that Dawkins knows enough history to know that Hitler was inspired by those very scientists Dawkins says "would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous" and who Dawkins apparently thinks today's scientists should take after.

A number of recent books have told the story of how eugenics began in England and the United States around the turn of the last century.  The only one I've read is Edwin Black's excellent War Against The Weak.

(Via the Center for Genetics and Society.)

Technology to Stop Drunk Drivers

From today's New York Times:

The threat of arrest and punishment, for decades the primary tactic against drunken drivers, is no longer working in the struggle to reduce the death toll, officials say, and they are proposing turning to technology — alcohol detection devices in every vehicle — to address the problem.

In the first phase of the plan, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, backed by a national association of state highway officials and car manufacturers, will announce here on Monday a campaign to change drunken driving laws in 49 states to require that even first offenders install a device that tests drivers and shuts down the car if it detects alcohol.

Many states already require the devices, known as ignition interlocks, for people who have been convicted several times.

Link: A New Strategy to Discourage Driving Drunk - New York Times.

Cutting down on drunk driving is of course a worthy goal, but there are risks to putting these devices in every car.  Will people become complacent, relying on the device to stop their friend from driving drunk?  Any decrease in social awareness would be unfortunate.

Further, the device almost certainly isn't error-proof, and it is sure to err on the side of false negatives rather than false positives -- no teetotaller will put up with a car that won't start even 1 out of 1000 times because the buggy software thinks it smells alcohol (nor should they have to).  So the device will miss some cases of drunk driving, and when that happens and there's a crash, who is responsible?

Print vs. the Web

Jason Pontin says some perceptive things about the nature of print vs. the web in his editor's column in this month's Technology Review magazine.  He's talking about a new plan to feature longer essays and fiction in the magazine.  The first is a personal essay by Freeman Dyson about his time in the British RAF during WWII.  Pontin writes:

I would never have commissioned such a piece for technologyreview.com. For a start, the essay is very long, and almost no one reads long stories on a computer, or even prints them from a Web page. Secondly, it is only slyly topical, and the Internet is mostly unforgiving of stories that are not bluntly of the moment. Finally, it is not obviously useful, and search engines and hyperlinks promote stories that answer people's questions and gratify their preoccupations.

In short, the Internet is a very good medium for economically expressed, timely stories. More, the Web is unapologetically responsive to the market. Online, the posture of editors before readers is slavish: we listen to your demands, or else we (more tangibly, our "audience traffic") are punished.

Yet editors can do more than give readers what they say they want; they can also offer up stories that surprise and delight. In print, editors can be purveyors of serendipity. Such a function may not be wanted in the yawping, demotic marketplace of the Internet.

Link: Technology Review: In Praise of Print.

I read this in the print version; I was surprised to see that it's online too, as is the Dyson essay.  That's handy for bloggers to quote snippets from, but I think Pontin is right.  Here's hoping that magazines can continue to publish print editions.

Programming the Universe (Because We Can)

I recently read Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos by Seth Lloyd.  Actually, "read" is a lie -- I could only bear two or three chapters -- so this quasi-review might not be entirely fair.

The idea of a quantum computer was first broached by Richard Feynman and others in the 1980s.  Lloyd gives us four reasons why building them is important:

• "The first is that we can ... We now possess lasers stable enough, fabrication techniques accurate enough, and electronics fast enough to perform computation at the atomic scale."
• "The second reason is that we have to -- at least if we want to keep building ever faster and more powerful computers."  (This is followed by the customary, breathless retelling of Moore's law.)
• "The third reason to build quantum computers is that they allow us to understand the way in which the universe registers and processes information."
• "The final reason to build quantum computers is that it's fun."

Reasons one, two, and four are inane and unlikely to impress anyone but the most simple readers looking to be dazzled by science candy.  His prose elsewhere is vapid and patronizing (which is why I put the book aside):

I began the initial meeting of my MIT graduate course on information in the manner I begin all of my courses: "First," I said to the twenty-odd students, "you ask questions and I'll try to answer them.  Second, if you don't ask questions, I'll ask questions.  Third, if you don't answer my questions, I'll tell you something I think you ought to know.  Any questions?"

I waited.  No response.

Something was wrong.  Normally, MIT students are more than happy to try to stump the professor, particularly if the alternative is that the professor will try to stump them.

I have a question: "How do I drop this course right now, you pompous fool?"

Lloyd's third reason gets to the thesis of his book: that the universe is a quantum computer.  What is it computing?  It's computing itself.  Why?  Well, because he says it is.

What Lloyd and others have shown is that they can model physical processes using information-processing metaphors.  That's all well and good, but you can't leap from this metaphor to reality, as Lloyd does in this book.  He wants us to believe that the universe really is a computer simply because it seems like one when you consider it that way.  This is such a fundamental flaw in logic that I'm amazed this book got published.

I am probably being a bit harsh, but this book has gotten plenty of gushing reviews -- I think it can stand some harshness.  I'm still interested in the theory behind quantum computers, but I could do without all the grandiose, unsupported claims about life and the universe, so I think I'll stick to technical papers.

$100 Laptop Update

Edited to correct the links and add more comments.

Technology Review magazine has a feature on Nicholas Negroponte's "One Laptop Per Child" project (a.k.a. "$100 Laptop").  I haven't read the whole article yet, but it looks like a good recap of the story to date.*  Here's an excerpt:

The simplest and strongest argument against the $100 laptop, though, is that even if it can be built, and even if it will work approximately as well as Negroponte promises it will, it's still a waste of money. In an ideal world with unlimited government budgets, the argument goes, putting a laptop in the hands of every child would be a marvelous and valuable feat. But in the far-from-ideal worlds of developing countries, which generally have limited budgets and pervasive social problems, millions or billions of dollars' worth of computers are a luxury that governments can ill afford. Brazil, for instance, which seems likely to buy a million laptops from OLPC as soon as they become available, has around 45 million school-age children: equipping all of them would cost something like $6.3 billion. Given the desperate poverty of many Brazilians, are laptops the best use for that kind of money?

Links: Philanthropy's New Prototype -- Part I, Part II, Part III.

Earlier this week the first working prototypes were delivered and a photo gallery was posted.  It's "cute" say some ... looks like a Speak & Spell to me, and is probably only marginally more educational (in my humble opinion).

Previous posts about the $100 Laptop.

* More: (now that I've actually read the whole article)

Surowiecki gives some interesting perspective on how Negroponte's combination of private and public collaborators is a new model for philanthropy, but aside from that there's not much that's new in his article.  He writes:

Ultimately, the critiques of OLPC can be divided into two types: those having with to do with technology and those having to do with what one might describe as ethics [meaning the money should be spent on other issues].

But he misses another criticism: computers don't necessarily improve education.  Sometimes they even make things worse.  Most communities and schools have bought in to computers, regardless of the fact that they haven't yet been proven to help (for some data, I recommend Todd Oppenheimer's The Flickering Mind).  One of the main assumptions of Negroponte & co. is that the mere presence of computers encourages learning -- rarely in these stories about OLPC do you hear anything about plans for actual educational materials on these machines, aside from the suggestion that they'll dump Wikipedia and some free books onto them.  The "give them a computer and they'll learn" idea is a variant of Seymour Papert's LOGO theories (and Papert is on the board of OLPC).  Papert thought that if kids learned to write programs and think procedurally they'd become smarter, but while LOGO was a big achievement in computer science, the benefits for education were limited and didn't take into account variations in learning styles.