Monthly Archives: January 2009

Checking On Technology.

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That durn techno stuff. It gets away from you if you don’t keep an eye on it all the time. Technology Review has a good story about the crisis facing social network sites. Tough economic times are putting the heat on these “sharing” sites and forcing some of them to go under, be acquired or merge. The really big places such as Facebook and Myspace seem to be doing well enough, but a number of smaller places have not made it, especially since they had this or that cool feature, but no real revenue.
Social

There is also a story in the same place about Microsoft’s effort to catch up to Google in the area of producing superior search results. The new gimmick relies on ‘groupization’, which I understand to mean using groups of similar individuals, or at least those with similar expressed interest, as filters and boosters for refining and enhancing search results. The feeling expressed is that, at the moment, technology for producing good search results (as opposed to a LOT of hits that just happen to contain several or even just one of the terms submitted) is stuck on a plateau. Old Timers like me would say “controlled vocabulary indexing”, but that’s really not feasible with the numbers of documents on the web. At least, it isn’t now.
Groups
There are also some good items on technology to monitor and predict breakdowns in the family car, a virus that helps rebuild nerve cells, better batteries for road vehicles, and more besides. We all should be scanning this site a couple of times a month, at least.

John Mortimer Dead at 85.

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John Mortimer, the creator of Horace Rumpole, Rumpole of the Bailey, the British Perry Mason, has died at the age of 85. PBS nerds will recall the defining performance of the Rumpole character delivered by Leo McKern in several seasons on Mystery, but Mortimer was a really good writer who worked in other forms, especially writing plays. His autobiography, Clinging to the Wreckage is a good read on its own. And, he seems to have been a genuinely nice guy who didn’t take himself too seriously, but he was a very sharp observer. He was trained in the law, was a fierce defender of personal liberty against intrusions, and despite his easy manner, no push-over in court. He knew his stuff. If the State wants to take away a guy’s liberties, make ‘em justify it and prove everything. Rumpole’s motto, “Never Plead Guilty!” was in fact his own. Mortimer also had a sincere affection for his father, apparently a remarkably well-read man, patient and kind. Mortimer had been ailing a long while and at the end, lost his sight. Still, he worked everyday, dictating when he could no longer “write”, pushing out 1,000 well-crafted words per day, every day. Hmmm. Maybe that’s the secret.
Here’s the link to Arts and Letters Daily. The Mortimer story…I almost wrote “Rumpole”… is in the left column, close to the top.
Mortimer

John Updike Dead at 76.

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John Updike, prolific American writer of novels, short stories, poetry, art criticism and other genres is dead at a hospice outside Boston, of cancer. He was 76. There is a very long obit and appreciation on the front page of The New York Times, and the link is provided, but you may not be able to reach it. Wait for the story in Arts and Letters Daily, probably tomorrow.

Updike

The Google Book Settlement: a perspective.

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Robert Darnton is the head of Harvard U’s Libraries. The HUL were among the original partners in the Google plan to digitize the contents of books held in major research libraries, so he knows the operation pretty thoroughly. In the New York Review of Books, he offers some ideas on the draft settlement hammered out by lawyers for Google and lawyers for plaintiffs in a class action copyright suit against the big G by trade associations of publishers and authors. It’s always risky to try summarizing somebody else’s arguments, but, here goes: parts of the settlement are great, and parts are much more worrisome. The worrisome parts are those which seem to move Google into a virtual monopoly position in the sale and distribution of digitized book content. They also rely an awful lot on the good will and benevolence of a large corporation not to abuse its very considerable power. Darnton sketches the balance that the Founders tried to strike, in framing the original copyright laws, between the fair demands of authors of protection of their rights and the need of the public for access. Without putting words into the guy’s mouth, it’s probably fair to suggest that he is wondering whether the balance has not swung too far away from the public interest.

NYRB

PS. We should note that the draft settlement provides for the creation of a governing board completely independent of Google to oversee and manage the activities of the entity created by the settlement.

Big River.

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The Amazon! They don’t come any bigger, and a giant no matter how you tackle it. A new book explores what might best be called the cultural anthropology of exploration of the Amazon basin by Europeans. Exploration is often a handy euphemism for destructive exploitation. The first guys to hit the big river were a pretty rough bunch, intent on enriching themselves, devil take the hindmost and woe to those who got in their way. There was plenty of woe to go around and the effects of it continue to this day. It’s all spelled out in a new book, which I stumbled on in trawling for items to put into this blog.

TREE OF RIVERS; the story of the Amazon , by John Hemming
368pp. Thames and Hudson. £20 (US $39.95).

I don’t think a reader should expect too much on the hydrology, or geochemistry, or climatology of the region. The slant here is on how Europeans reacted to the stunning immensity of the region. One brighter spot amid all the oppression and terror inflicted on the inhabitants was the courageous efforts of some naturalists to incorporate the amazing plants and animals they encountered into our understanding of the natural world. Some famous names pop, floatin’ down the river. Alfred Russell Wallace is one, and Alexander von Humboldt another. Hemming describes the work of two fellow Brits (there they are again, those annoying Islanders, about to stun us once more with feats of daring, endurance, energy, accomplishment that makes us wonder if we’ve been swallowing stupid pills since first grade). I mean Walter Bates and Richard Spruce, the latter of whom was of feeble health and expected to check out very soon. Well, he found Amazonia so fascinating that he didn’t get around to dying until many years later, and after a long period of achievement and robust health, both in Brazil and in India. Go figure. Moreover, the three guys actually met up, in Manaus in what surely must be a billion to one shot. It’s like one of those episodes from The Young Indiana Jones in which the youthful Indy runs into a passel of famous folk: Lenin, Somerset Maugham, Woodrow Wilson, etc. Yeah, right. But this actually happened. As Casey Stengel used to say: “you can look it up.”
Here’s the link to the review in the London Times:
River

Haeckel Reappraised.

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Ernst Haeckel was one of the leading figures in German science in the 19th century. I suspect few students of the sciences know much more about him than his connection to the tagline “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, or is it the other way around? I forget. Well, something recapitulates something. And, dear readers, in those few stammerings we see the state in which poor Haeckel’s reputation lies. Beyond that, it seems he has been the target of serious misrepresentation of his ideas, which have been tarred as the source of much later 20th century mischief. So, it seems only correct for a new life of Haeckel with a new understanding of what his views were and were not, to be published. And, it has been. The American Scientist, much praised in these lines as a good source of intelligent and detailed reviewing of science books, offers a review of a new Haeckel biography which seeks not only to understand his ideas but also to convey a stronger sense of Haeckel as a human being. The work in question is: The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle Over Evolutionary Thought by Robert J. Richards. The author has written several other works on the growth and development of evolutionary theory, and also a study of Romantic science, including German Naturphilosophie at and around the time of Goethe. So, a lot of academic heavy artillery is to be expected. The new book wants to transfuse the dry-ish Haeckel image with some real red corpuscles, and points out sides of his character that don’t get much mention, and surely not in undergrad survey courses. For example he was a “deep feeler” as well as a deep thinker, and he grieved over the death of his wife at a young age for the rest of his life. He was an artist, and skillfully illustrated many of his scientific works. And he was a fierce controversialist, with a lot to say on many topics.
Of course, the subtitle of the book show where the main thrust is placed, and that is Haeckel’s role in the clarification and elaboration of Darwin’s ideas. In this year of the Darwin Bicentenary, we can expect a number of new books exploring the intellectual landscape of 19th century science, society and culture, which were the substrate on which grew our modern understanding of Darwin’s contributions.

Online Tools and the Future of Science.

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Very good, according to some scientific gentlepersons from Canada. In fact, online tools are going to change science in ways not seen since the late 17th century, when investigators first began publishing and sharing their findings in the then brand-new institution of the scientific journal. Digital technology is allowing researchers to gather more data, and do it more often, than ever before. So, how can this mass of information be described and shared?
Well, one avenue might be to make better use of Web 2.O tools that facilitate social networking, creating the scientific equivalents of Facebook and its like. Another would be to encourage tagging, that is, the description of research data through assignment of appropriate terms conveying the meaning of the reports. You can read the story here at:
Science
There are a number of tagging sites on the web right now: Digg, Delicious, etc. which permit the sharing of useful items through the assignment of tags, but, a little caution might be in order here. It can often be more difficult to come up with a useful tag than might be thought at first blush. It can’t be too vague, but it can’t be too specific either. What you might think of as an obvious way to describe a research finding might not occur to me at all, and vice versa. Still, the task of managing the flood of data is so great that every reasonable and even some not so reasonable option has to be tried.

Gatherings

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It really is an ill-wind that blows nobody something good. So, even in this gloomy period of what is politely referred to as an economic “down-turn”, there are a few bright spots. One of these is the great increase in the traffic at public libraries. People are going there to use the computers to create, adjust or transmit resumes, check email, borrow music, video, and even books. Who knows, it may make at least half of these orphans of the storm into regular library users. Many local libraries however are facing tough times of their own, and are closing branches or reducing hours and staff. In places like California, it’s bad and will worsen as the state tries to deal with a budget shortfall that is bigger than the GDPs of many nations. The Journal has the story.
Libraries

Jen Cheney offers an NPR piece on the books of LOST, the television drama featuring a group of air crash survivors on a mysterious Pacific island. Three books that the author has in mind are: Watership Down, The Turn of the Screw, and Slaughterhouse Five by Richard Adams, Henry James and Kurt Vonnegut respectively. Read why at:
Lost books
PS. NPR has a recurring feature called Three Books, in which an invited writer pens a short appraisal of , well, three books on some particular theme…politics, China, dogs, ghosts, etc. Look for it at: www. npr.org

Ricardo Montalban, movie star and despite that, not a bad actor died recently at the age of 88, and Patrick McGoohan, British actor and star of the long running, super-weird TV series The Prisoner (sometimes described as “the thinking man’s spy-drama”) is dead at the age of 80. Old Timers will be pleased, or horrified, to learn that there are plans to re-shoot The Prisoner. Hhmmmmm. I have to say I never cared much for it. It was too Kafka-esque, rather like Lost, if you come to think of it. I guess I’m just showing my old, linear, two-state logic cast of mind.

Prof. Judith A. Little has edited a collection of writings by major SciFi authors, such as Ursula K. LeGuinn, James Tiptree, Margaret Atwood, under the title Feminist Philosophy and Science Fiction. The book is grouped around the exploration of basic themes, such as what is human nature, exactly? What constitutes a Utopia, or a Dystopia? It was published by Prometheus Books in 2007.

Wired magazine offered its Top Ten Gadget breakthroughs of 2008. The tenth item was a story about advances in flexible displays, which, if they pan out, could lead to some serious progress in things we’ve been hearing about for a while: “digital paper:”, for one thing. It also seems possible to create products on flexible displays by a kind of printing process, and that is important because of the implications for lower cost.
Some of the other choices didn’t impress me too much, such as the Speedo super-swimsuit, but to each his own.

Gadgets for ’08

Finally, Donald E. Westlake, author of many, funny caper-crime novels featuring the Dortmunder Mob, died on New Year’s Eve. He was 75. Westlake penned over 90 novels, at times writing under other names. John Dortmunder is a criminal mastermind, who contrives absolutely ingenious scams, break-ins, thefts and other crimes, only to see them fall apart because the Universe is a cruel place and Fortune is fickle. Also, the other guys in the mob are often not up to playing on Dortmunder’s crime Stradivarius. A tin kazoo is more in their league. So, tiny breakdowns, incidents, accidents and other interruptions shatter the Prussian efficiency. For Dortmunder, the plans, no matter how well laid, will always go agley, with comic results. Westlake also wrote screenplays, television scripts and straight crime fiction. Several of his stories were made into films, but it was hard to catch the tone in a movie version. He seems to never have stopped writing. If you’re down in the dumps, go try a Westlake novel…preferably one of the Dortmunder series.

Data Security and Cyberwar.

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The paradox of the Internet is that it has brought not only vastly increased possibilities for acquiring and sharing information but also has brought, with equal measure, vastly increased opportunities for misusing or controlling that same information. We are all very familiar with security breaches that are well-publicized in the general press because they seem to affect large numbers of people. We are less aware that “cyberwar” is a constant feature of internet operations. Cyberwar can be defined, roughly, as the sum of efforts made to maximize the advantages accruing to one’s self, team, company, sect or nation, while denying these advantages to competitors or enemies. Cyber attackers try to penetrate opposing systems to see what they can find. Cyber defenders try to keep them out, and if possible counter attack. The classic models are air defense and code systems, but there are others…the activity of the immune system for one. DefenseTech is a blog devoted to military matters, with a heavy concentration of attention on gear and support systems, hence the tech in the name. One of their correspondents, Kevin Coleman, recently posted a longish review on some recent developments in cyber attack and defense, giving three specific examples of bad experiences some US firms have had with cyber penetrators. Having power over a potential opponent’s Net/web operations would be as great an advantage as having the ability to decipher and read an opponent’s radio messages. It’s a shadow struggle, not much in the headlines, but it goes on daily.
Cyberwar

Here Comes “R”.

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What? R. That’s it. Just R, a new or at least newish program language that has become a favorite among statisticians and other analysts, who like it because it is relatively easy to learn and very versatile. I hadn’t heard of it until today, when I ran across a story in the New York Times which describes it and tells its history. Two academics from New Zealand got togehter to share ideas about ways to make analysis tools easier for their students to use, and one thing leading to another, as the saying goes, they spent about 6 years banging out the first versions of a program language which they called “R”, the first initial of both their first names. R is released as free ware and has gone through a number of iterations, and improvements as professionals write add-on programs or suggest changes. Statisticians love it because it has some very powerful features and allows them to run numerous analytical operations without the need to program these in some other language. One of R’s creators is still teaching in Auckland, NZ and the other is working in cancer research here Statesside. Whether R will topple any of the existing tools is hard to say, but being free and easy to use are rather powerful incentives for adaptation. I’m glad I stumbled on this item, since it’s really the kind of thing we should be talking more about on this site. Keep an eye out for R.
I see I forgot to add the link to the Times story for which, pardon
R

I also received a note from a very knowledgeable colleague in Indiana, who mentioned that R is pretty hot among social scientists and is moving in on the territory once claimed by a commercial package called Stata. He also forwarded me a link to a discussion about R’s advantages or drawbacks.
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