Michael Geist: iOptOut

Tired of getting unsolicted phone calls? Michael Geist has set up a web site, iOptOut to allow people to opt out of organizations that are exempted from the do-not-call registry. The site lets you specifically ask exempted organizations to not call you. We need more useful social sites like this.

Michael Geist explains iOptOut thus on his (excellent) blog:

I began to develop the site soon after the do-not-call bill became law. The premise is simple – under the law, exempted organizations (which include charities, political parties, polling companies, newspapers, and companies with a prior business relationship) are permitted to make unsolicited telephone calls despite the inclusion of a number in the do-not-call registry. However, organizations must remove numbers from their lists if specifically requested to do so.

Cybersyn: Before the Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism

Image of Cybersyn Opsroom

In New York for my last f2f meeting of the MLA Committee on Information Technology I got a New York Times with an intriguing article about a Chilean management system, Cybersyn, titled Before the Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism.

Cybersyn was born in July 1971 when Fernando Flores, then a 28-year-old government technocrat, sent a letter to Mr. Beer seeking his help in organizing Mr. Allende’s economy by applying cybernetic concepts. Mr. Beer was excited by the prospect of being able to test his ideas.

He wanted to use the telex communications system – a network of teletypewriters – to gather data from factories on variables like daily output, energy use and labor “in real time,” and then use a computer to filter out the important pieces of economic information the government needed to make decisions.

Cybersyn was apparently semi-functional before the coup that overthrew Allende’s government and it was used to help manage around the small-business and truckers strike in 1972. I don’t think the Opsroom pictured above was ever fully operational, but visualization screens were important even if at the time they were hand-drawn slides that were projected rather than computer generated visualizations (see http://varnelis.net/blog/kazys/project_cybersyn on the chairs of the Opsroom.) Beer and the Chileans wanted Cybersyn to help them implement an alternative socialist economy that was managed in real time rather than “free” and chaotic or planned in the heavy handed way of most socialist economies of the time.

Rooting around, I found a good article about Cybersyn and the English visionary designer Stafford Beer from 2003 in the Guardian by Andy Beckett, Santiago Dreaming. It turns out that Beer gave the Massey Lectures in 1971 and they have been reprinted by Anansi as Designing Freedom. He also moved part-time to Toronto in the 80s where his last partner, Dr. Allenna Leonard of Metaphorum still resides. He died in 2002.

Another interesting thread is Fernando Flores who was the political lead of Cybersyn and the person that recruited Beer for the project. After the coup, Flores went to the US and got a Ph.D. in Computer Science collaborating with Terry Winograd, and being influenced by Maturana, also Chilean. That’s right – the Flores of Understanding Computers and Cognition. He is now back in Chile as a senator and supports various projects there.

The common thread is that Beer, Flores and Maturana all seem interested in viable systems in different spheres. They were applying cybernetics.

Korea: Part-time Lecturers and Suicide

The Global Voices Online site has a story on Part-time Lecturers and Suicide that matters. A number of humanities lecturers have committed suicide after spending years in part-time sessional work with no promise of a professorship. Would we know if we had a similar situation here in Canada? Increasingly we are dependent on sessional teaching to cover courses as we handle budget cuts by not hiring tenure-track or even just contract faculty. My guess is that a few departments may get to 50% of their teaching being done by part-timers. Why is this? Sessionals, hired one course at a time, are a cheap way to get quality teaching, especially if the sessionals are led to believe they might eventually get the coveted positions. Full time faculty benefit because we can keep our research positions while letting help for a fraction of our salary. At what point should we be honest with ourselves and admit that a university cannot afford tenure track faculty for teaching and deal with the effects by creating teaching positions that have some stability instead of stringing on recent graduates. Is Korea ahead of us in confronting the desperation of part-time faculty? Will it take a suicide for anyone to notice here?

Dreyfus: Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence

Willard in Humanist pointed us towards an interesting RAND Paper by Hubert L. Drefus from 1965, Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence which suggests that artificial intelligence research is like alchemy – initial success has led to it being oversold when the fundamental paradigm is wrong.

Alchemists were so successful in distilling quicksilver from what seemed to be diret, that after several hundred years of fruitless effort to convert lead into gold they still refused to believe that on the chemical level one cannot transmute metals. To avoid the fate of the alchemists, it is time we asked where we stand. Now, before we invest more time and money on the information-processing level, we should ask whether the protocols of human subjects suggest that comptuer language is appropriate for analyzing human behaviour. Is an exhaustive analysis of human intelligent behavior into discrete and determinate operations possible? Is an approximate analysis of human intelligent behavior in such digital terms probable? The answer to both these questions seems to be, “No.”

In this paper Dreyfus leverages the lack of progress after people like H. A. Simon in 1957 predicted the extraordinary. Dreyfus does more than make fun of the hype, he uses it to question what AI research might achieve at all and to think about intelligence.

Now that we are 50 years after Simon’s predictions things are more complicated. We do have chess playing machines that are better players than humans. (Drefus points out how the early machines being hyped were really stupid chess players.) We do have machines that can recognize complex patterns and recognize speech. We do have better machine translation. It may be going slowly, but research is moving forward. Perhaps the paradigm of the mind as a machine is wrong, but thinking about it that way and trying to model intelligent behaviour is getting results. What then do we make of the alchemical insult. Is it too easy to call magical thinking those projects that are ambitious and make the mistake of predicting success? Having recently read Siegried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media, I’m finding myself more sympathetic of magical projects that promise to transmute data into intelligence. Impossible … probably, but that is no reason not to try.

To paraphrase the third of (recently died) Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of prediction:

“Any sufficiently magical proposal should be indistinguishable from research.”

This obviously applies to grant proposals.

Gaming, Learning, and Libraries

It won’t come as a surprise that libraries are getting into gaming, whether to support game studies by making games available as they do books, or using games to teach information literacy. I came across na nice conference video report by Tom Peters of the American Libraries Association (ALA) TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium in 2007. I like how the video report is edited. It is a bit short of content, but it shows the atmosphere and people.

I’m less convinced by games to teach library and information skills. Here are some I’ve found:

Quarantined: Axl Wise and the Information Outbreak is from Arizona State and lets you play a student, Axl, who works for the student newspaper and who has to figure out why the university is quarantined. It seems rather a lot of irrelevant puzzles for a little bit of simulating searching for information, but could be fun enough.

I’ll Get It and Within Range are two games from Carnegie Mellon, neither of which are much fun, but that may not be the point.

I’ve been talking with Kevin Kee at Brock about the logic of serious games or educational games. I’m tempted to say that games can’t by definition be both playful and serious. I gave a paper to that effect at Playing the Gallery, but Kevin is convincing me that games are sophisticated enough a phenomenon that there can be all sorts of planned learning. I think the National Film Board The Cyber-Terrorism Crisis site (which Kevin was involved in) might be a good example of a playful web site for learning, though parts of it are no longer working. I’m certainly convinced that designing games can be serious work through which learning happens. I also accept that there are things one learns through playing like “problem solving”. I just find games created to teach certain skills, like how to file books, are neither games nor particularly good at teaching.

Stay tuned, Kevin and I are writing a dialogue where I will get to be a curmudgeon on this issue.

Addiction to internet ‘is an illness’

According to an article in the Guardian Observer, Addiction to internet ‘is an illness’ (David Smith, Sunday March 23 2008). The story mentions research by Dr. Jerald Block and case studies from South Korea. Internet addiction has these components:

  • Excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives;
  • Withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible;
  • The need for better computers, more software, or more hours of use;
  • Negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation and fatigue.

Is blogging an addiction?

FlowingData: 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe

Twitter Visualization

Peter sent me to a neat blog, FlowingData that is partly about visualization. Nathan, the author, posts longish notes like 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe. He also has a good one on 21 Ways to Visualize and Explore Your Email Inbox which has some creative ways to handle spam like Alex Dragulescu’s Spam Architecture that takes spam and generates “three-dimensional modeling gestures”! (I want to be a 3D modeling gesture!)