Category: History of Computing and Multimedia

Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thanks to Willard, I’m reading Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin’s Romance of the Machine, a defense of American materialism, science and engineering. He identifies 3 sets of technologies that have consolidated the Union – the telephone, the vacuum-tube oscillator (radio), and the gas-engine (auto and airplane.) He weaves a consciously idealistic story about engineering mirroring the machines of nature and weaving peace.

The machine is the visible evidence of the close union between man and the spirit of the eternal truth which guides the subtle hand of nature. (p. 29)

It looks like an act of providence that the telephone was born when the consolidation of our Union needed it most; the vacuum-tube oscillator arrived in time to lend its aid in the consolidation of this nation with the other nations of the world. Many an enthusiast believes that these two machines are messengers sent from heaven to aid in the guidance of the destiny of this nation, and of the whole world. This enthusiasm is not surprising. (p. 92)

There is a very interesting chapter (“Romance of the Telephone”, III) where Pupin argues that the telephone provided two important innovations – first the communications network and second a model democratic industry.

There is another epoch-making service which the telephone
rendered to this nation. This service was the creation of a great
American telephone industry, which in many respects serves to-day as a model to other big American industries. (p. 67)

His argument is that ATT is too big to be owned by wealthy families. Instead it is owned by the middle class – people like its employees. He further sees the management as coming from the same middle class and being professionals. He sees a shift from political democracy to economic democracy which benefits all. Whatever happened to that idealism?

Our telephone industry and the other large American industries encourage us in the belief that we are much nearer to the ideal of economic democracy than we are to Lincoln’s ideal of political democracy. The first is developed by scientists and engineers, the second is <pb> in the hands of politicians. (p. 77 – 78)

One thing that happened is a loss of faith in the technocracy. The second thing was a shift in business towards management who saw their mandate narrowly as being only to increase investor value.

Some more quotes:

There will be no place for barbarism, like war, in a world in
which the two American machines, the telephone and the vacuum-tube oscillator, are afforded every opportunity to develop their latent powers for the enlightenment of the world.

Here are two.machines which the American machine civilization has produced, and thus laid the foundation of the radio art, the most subtle and refined of all the technical arts ever conceived by the human mind. No trace of materialism can be detected in their history. On the contrary, their achievements represent them as messengers from heaven sent to earth to rid the world of barbarous notions and raise it to a higher level of civilization.(p. 94)

The telephone, the telegraph, the vacuum-tube oscillator, the aeroplane, and the automobile, will certainly bring the peoples of the world closer to each other and establish between them bonds of friendship, just as they are establishing them between the peoples of our States. That is the highest mission of these machines. (p. 103)

The book ends by talking about “The Great American Experiment” and how this political experiment inspired engineers and scientists to develop technologies to consolidate the Union so that “The designers, the builders, and the machines employed by them are the inseparable parts of the American machine civilization.” (p. 111)

Bibliographic Reference: Michael Pupin, Romance of the Machine (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930).

Peter Nicholson: The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority.doc – Powered by Google Docs

Peter Nicholson of the Council of Canadian Academies has an interesting paper that he has given on The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority. His thesis is:

People today are much less prepared to defer to the experts. But at the same time, we are being swamped with data and information – a glut that cries out for analysis and summary. So there’s a dilemma. Who to turn to? Increasingly the answer is – Well, to ourselves of course, as individuals empowered by a world wide web that has rapidly evolved into a social medium. More specifically, it is a medium that today supports massively distributed collaboration on a global scale that – we can only hope – will help us make sense of it all.

He talks about the “decline of deference” to traditional authorities (from the church to academic experts) and talks about it taking place recently. I suspect its been happening since the enlightenment began and might be a general feature of modernity and improved communication (and democratic institutions.) What is new is the ability of the many to replace authority with a distributed or networked authority. People now believe things are true if they have been negotiated by a community. Something is true enough if it won’t get you in trouble because your crowd has authorized the truth. Most of the time such negotiated truth is fine (with enough eyeballs someone will point out a flaw), but other times the community misses something and is satisfied with not-quite-good-enough.

JSTOR: Data for Research Visualization

"Dialogue" in Philosophy Journals
"Dialogue" in Philosophy Journals

Thanks to Judith I have been playing with JSTOR’s Data for Research (DfR). They provide a faceted way of visualizing and search the entire JSTOR database. Features include:

  • Full-text and fielded searching of the entire JSTOR archive using a powerful faceted search interface. Using this interface one can quickly and easily define content of interest through an iterative process of searching and results filtering.
  • Online viewing of document-level data including word frequencies, citations, key terms, and ngrams.
  • Request and download datasets containing word frequencies, citations, key terms, or ngrams associated with the content selected.
  • API for content selection and retrieval. (from the About page)

I’m impressed by how much they expose. They even have a Submit Data Request and an API. This is important – we are seeing a large scale repository exposing its information to new types of queries other than just search.

Rock-afire Explosion Clip – Rockafiremovie.com

rockafire

Shannon pointed me to The Rock-afire Explosion, an animatronic band from the 80s that was one of the entertainments at Showbiz Pizza. Rock-afire Explosion has been resurrected by a fan and one of the original creators of Creative Engineering who are programming tunes and uploading video to YouTube. See, for example, Madonna’s 4 Minutes. They take bids on New Shows to Program at a strange and not very clear site. If you bid high enough and it isn’t “dirty” they will program the animatronic band to do a song you want. (Would they do Plato’s dialogues?)

I cannot begin to describe how strangely captivating this all is. Perhaps the documentary made about it (see Rockafiremovie.com) captures the passion. Or, for a computing perspective, see the clip about Programming the Rock-afire Explosion.

Whatever happened to animatronics? Will it make a comeback now that we all carry around smartphones that can control things?

Internet Archive: Movies from the History of Computing

Willard McCarty on Humanist (Vol. 23, No. 116.) pointed to some early films about computing which are worth looking at. One is “The Information Machine” from IBM in 1956. It is an animated cartoon which presents the computer in a history of human information invention. It presents three functions for computing:

  1. Control or Balance (controlling complex systems)
  2. Design (helping us design and think)
  3. Simulation (modelling and predicting)

Another film is On Guard! The Story of SAGE also from IBM. This is about IBM’s contributions to air defense, specifically the SAGE system and the development of airborn modular computing. There is a fun part about the interactive operator terminal that visualizes data (as opposed to a TV that shows video.) The narrator actually talks about visualization (though not interactivity.

RFCs: How the Internet Got Its Rules

Stephen D. Crocker has written an Op-Ed on How the Internet Got Its Rules (April 6, 2009) about the Request for Comments or R.F.C.’s of the Internet. He looks back on writing the first R.F.C. 40 years ago as a student assigned to write up notes from a meeting. He chose the to call it a R.F.C. because:

What was supposed to be a simple chore turned out to be a nerve-racking project. Our intent was only to encourage others to chime in, but I worried we might sound as though we were making official decisions or asserting authority. In my mind, I was inciting the wrath of some prestigious professor at some phantom East Coast establishment. I was actually losing sleep over the whole thing, and when I finally tackled my first memo, which dealt with basic communication between two computers, it was in the wee hours of the morning.

Calling them R.F.C.’s set the tone for the consensual culture.

The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.

Another feature was layering for independence that allowed people to build new technologies on older ones without asking permission.

Thanks to Dan Cohen on Twitter for this.

H. P. Luhn, KWIC and the Concordance

We all know that the Google display comes indirectly from the Concordance, but I have found in Luhn’s 1966 “Keyword-in-Context Index for Technical Literature (Kwic Index)” the explicit recognition of the link and the reason for drawing on the concordance.

the significance of such single keywords could, in most instances, be determined only by referring to the statement from which the keyword had been chosen. This somewhat tedious procedure may be alleviated to a significant degree by listing selected keywords together with surrounding words that act as modifiers pointing up the more specific sense in which a keyword has been applied. This method of indexing words is well established in the process of compiling concordances of important works of literature of the past. The added degree of information conveyed by such keyword-in-context indexes, or “KWIC Indexes” for short, can readily be provided by automatic processing. (p. 161)

The problem for Luhn is that simply retrieving words doesn’t give you a sense of their use. His solution, first shown in the late 1950s, was to provide some context (hence “keyword-in-context”) so that readers can disambiguate themselves and make decisions about which index items to follow. It is from the KWIC that we ultimately get the concordance features of the Google display, though it should be noted that Luhn was proposing KWIC as a way of printing automatically generated literature indexes where the kewwords were in the titles. In this quote Luhn explicitly acknowledges that this is a method well established in concordances.

There is also a link between Luhn and Father Busa. According to Black, quoted in Marguerite Fischer, “The Kwic Index Concept: A Retrospective View”,

the Pontifical Faculty of Philosophy in Milan decided that they would make an analytical index and concordance to the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, and approached IBM about the possibility of having the operations performed on Data Processing. Experience gained in this project contributed towards the development of the KWIC Index. (This is a quote on page 123 from Black, J. D., 1962, “The Keyword: Its Use in Abstracting, Indexing, and Retrieving Information”.)

From the concordance to KWIC through to Google?

For some historical notes on Luhn see, H. P. Luhn and Automatic Indexing.

Vice President Al Gore

Icon of ComputerPeter O sent me a link to the original 1994 web page for Vice President Al Gore kept by NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration (of the USA.) What is amusing is that this copy of Gore’s page looks really dated and positions him as a pioneer of the Internet:

Vice President Gore, having first coined the term “information superhighway” 17 years ago, is the recognized public leader in the development of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).

Not quite the same as saying he invented it. To see the page Gore’s page linked from go to the White House page. Many of the links work, though not Clinton’s page.