Gazing in to the abyss

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Looking-Into-The-CraterYesterday’s exploration of  ‘What would George say?’ led me to following up a few points of research and whilst browsing around I came across this quote of Orwell’s:

Here is a saying of Nietzche which I have quoted before, but which is worth quoting again:

He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself;
and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.

’Too long’, in this context, should perhaps be taken as meaning ‘after the dragon is beaten’.

The line that struck a chord with me here, and has done for some years now, is ‘the abyss will gaze in to you’.  My topic for today – have we all spent rather too long staring in to the abyss and what have we bought back with us from there?

I guess a good place to start is with exactly what I mean by ‘the abyss’.  For me it’s that spiritual dark place where your personal and our cultural demons lie.  The trick is that whilst we need to be aware of the fact it’s there, we shouldn’t get ourselves too engrossed in it’s finer geography.   I look at it in the way that CS Lewis spoke of the Devil in ‘The Screwtape Letters’:

‘There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors.’

Over the years I’ve wandered to the edge of my personal abyss a few times and stepped back.  We all have our personal demons – what matters is whether we give them the freedom to do anything.  Show me somone who claims to have no personal demons and I’ll show you a liar.  And then there are those people whose demons are, shall we say, rather more unpleasant than those that most of us have; the criminal, the depraved, the insane.   The problem that we have today, I believe, is twofold – the abyss is now much wider and deeper than it was even 20 years ago, and it impinges more than ever in to our daily lives.

In 1984, Frankie Goes to Hollywood asked the question “Are we living in a land where sex and horror are the new gods?’  Back then I think the answer was still ‘yes’, but we didn’t really know what was around the corner. Twenty-five years down the line the abyss comes in to our house courtesy of the Internet.  Without sounding too much like Mary Whitehouse on a Sunday Evening,  the Internet, cinema and TV have increasingly bought the baser instincts of human beings to the forefront of our consideration.  I’m not dumb enough to believe that, in the words of Philip Larkin ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me)‘.  Interest in the more extreme edges of pornography – whether that pornography is the pornography of sex or that of violence – has always been with us and was usually squirrelled away in the far recesses of most people’s minds for a number of reasons:

Society was more ‘up tight’ – certain forms of behaviour or artistic expression were simply regarded as wrong and tended to be either illegalor seriously frowned upon by society.  Sometimes this was right (IMO) and othertimes it was ridiculous.  But there were boundaries set.

  1. There seemed to be less moral relativism – there seemed to be much more of a concensus view in society as to what was ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
  2. Extremely violent pornography of graphical violence was difficult to get hold of.
  3. Anyone who DID have extreme interests was typically on their own; they were in no position to talk about it with friends who might be horrified at their interest.

In these circusmtances, if you went to your abyss, and peered in, and did dwell there a while the risk was pretty minimal for society as a whole.  Your trip was a private one, one not to be shared with anyone.  And for most of us there was the knowldge that certain things were, to put it bluntly, totally wrong.

The Internet has brought a lot of good in to people’s lives, but it has also amplified the potential for people to gaze deeper and for longer in to the abyss.  It’s had two main impacts:

  1. Extreme sexual and violent imagery is available to everyone more easily than ever before in history.
  2. The sheer scope of the Internet means that it’s inevitable that no matter how extreme a person’s ‘interests’ are, it’s almost inevitable that somewhere in the 1.7 billion Internet users there is someone else with the same interests, and a web site delivering up media to accomodate those interests.

The impact of these two facts is that people with particularly unpleasant demons in their abyss now find, to their mind, their beliefs and views  validated by the existence of those websites and users.  This permits these individuals to look in to their personal abyss and see nothing wrong with what they see there, and hence feel encouragement to express their views in to the world.  It’s not trendy to be in favour of censorship, but the validation of perversity that seems to be increasingly common surely cannot be healthy for society as a whole.

The phrase ‘People of the Abyss’ was used by Jack London as the title of a book he wrote in the early 1900s about the poverty of the East End of London;  I believe wholeheartedly that we’re now generating a new breed of people of the abyss – those who’ve started hard and long in to the depths of their abyss, and have bought back their personal demons with them in to the workaday-world.   This new breed of Abyss Dwellers are to be feared and shunned; their moral compass seems to be dictated by ‘it works for me and is no one else’s business what I do’ and they exhibit a lack of respect for the social codes of the society in which they live.

It’s not just extreme sex and violence that is an issue; I’ve just spent some time watching scenes of anti-fascist demonstrators protesting outside the BBC about the appearance of Nick Griffin of the BNP on BBC’s Question Time.  There is soemthing ironic about a group allegedly demonstrating to preserve democracy by attempting to censor a TV programme.  Perhaps these anti-fascists who’ve ‘fought the dragon’ are in danger of becoming that which they fight?  In George Steiner’s novella ‘The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.’ – written in 1981 – a trial in teh South American jungle allows the 90 year old Hitler, who in this novella survived the fall of Berlin, to explain himself.  One comment made is that those who fought agaisnt him have taken on board many of the characteristics of his regime – in other words, by peering in to teh Nazi abyss and fighting the dragon, they’ve fought for too long and brought parts of the abyss back with them, and have now become the dragon which they once fought.  Defending democracy is a delicate balancing act; you should not get so involved in the way of the enemy that you forget that you fight against that you forget the positive characteristics of what you’re fighting for.

In his novella, Steiner has a character say:

“There shall come a man who […] will know the grammar of hell and teach it to others. He will know the sounds of madness and loathing and make them seem music.”

He was, obviously, referring to Hitler in the book but today there are many such people in the public eye and those who we personally may be aware of who might be described in the same way.  Modern people of the abyss who’ve been there and returned with a little more than they bargained for, and who’re determined to further expand their view of the world, and widen the abyss further, expanding the geography of Hell further in to our daily lives.

I’m a Christian – I think that colours my opinions on a number of topics, and makes me address them from a particular moral and ethical standpoint.  Whether you have an religious beliefs or not I’d simply suggest that you at least become aware of the place of the abyss in your own life; what you choose to do with it when you find it’s location is up to you.  Just remember that having gazed a little too long and deep, you may find that even if you leave the abyss, it may not entirely leave you.

Garden Party…

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I’ve always been one of the world’s great hoarders…one of those folks who hangs on to things because they may one day be useful, one who starts something and then has to sweat cobs to get it finished.

I guess it’s when I noticed I had 3 pages of accounts, user names and passwords that I thought I might have some issues of spreading msyelf a little thin around the online world!  A few more minutes of checking some of the accounts out – and finding that I’d last used them constructively maybe 3 or 4 years ago – made me realise that dragging behind you a load of digital deadwood is similar to having an attic, cellar, garage or study full of physical junk.  And the nature of the online world is that it’s really difficult to get back to where you left off – even if the site’s still up and running. 🙂 

We’ve recently been spending a lot of time tidying up around the Towers here – sorting out books, clearing out old stuff, and it struck me over the weekend that maybe I need to get some online tidiness and focus as well.  And the relevance of the blog item title?  I’ll get there eventually….

So…what to keep, what to throw, or is it what parts of me to keep, what parts of me to throw away?  Ironically, especially considering my previous posts on the subject, top of the keep list are Facebook and Twitter, followed by this August publication that you’re reading right now.  My plan is to:

  1. Suspend my accounts on various discussion forums, and focus on stroking my ego through my Twitter and Facebook accounts and this blog. 🙂  Seriously – I think I am spread waaaay too thin out in cyberspace and really want to be in a position to publish some ‘words with weight’ when I want to.
  2. Close the shutters on a few hobby sites I’ve run for a few years.  They’ve never attracted much traffic and I’d rather take them ‘off the grid’ rather than leave them looking forlorn.  Good backups will ensure nothing is lost, and who knows, one day they may return – alternatively they may simply be allowed to disappear forever.  My last shot at an Online Community – Coffeehouse Chat – is already mothballed.  Shame on you who offered support and never came… 😉
  3. There should also be a commensurate loss of email accounts.  I don’t know abouyt you but I find that whenever a new web site gets set up you almost always set a new email address up to go with it….
  4. Kill off the accounts on any number of sites that I’ve tried before buying and found wanting – The well, LastFM, Ecademy, etc.  Probably even Linked In and other business networking sites.  I don’t believe that my brand is, as yet, ‘hot’ enough to warrant being on these sites.  I get buried under all the other software developers, wannabe entrepreneurs, etc. 

I suppose my bottom line realisation in the last 12 months is that a lot of my current online (and offline) world is of greater relevance to the Joe Pritchard of 5 or 6 years ago than the Joe Pritchard I live with today.  It can’t possibly be healthy to live in the past – there’s not going to be room or even inclination to move forward to fresh fields and pastures new if your world is already full.  Various things have conspired to chop off quite important anchors to my past, and I’ve become increasingly aware that people have impressions of me that are no longer true, but are like looking at some image of me in some sort of Dorian Gray style painting of how I was some years back.  Hopefully, by clearing out the crud I’ll give my self space to move on to new things, whilst still keeping in touch with the people who really matter to me in the here and now.

And the title of this piece?  Rick Nelson bought it all home to me in these lyrics:

I went to a garden party to reminisce with my old friends
A chance to share old memories and play our songs again
When I got to the garden party they all knew my name
But no one recognized me I didn’t look the same

But it’s all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see you can’t please ev’ryone so
You got to please yourself

Smart bloke.  Time to re-invent.

The end of an era…

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Joe's old Nokia...an excellent phone!

Joe's old Nokia...an excellent phone!

Well, the end of a personal era for me.  A number of years ago – I think 2003 or thereabouts – I needed a new phone.  I honestly can’t remember what I had before the trusty Nokia shown on the left.  I think it was a Motorola of some sort – similar sort of functionality, though – phone, SMS, Breakout game.  I remember walking in to one of the phone shops on Fargate and ogling the more modern phones, gaining the attention of a salesman and then immediately asking him for the cheapest PAYG handset he could offer me.  A few minutes later I left with the Nokia 3410 that cost me £25.  I stayed with T-Mobile so I coudl keep my existing phone number and started my relationship with the most reliable and bombproof phone I’ve had to date.

The 3410 supported Java and apparently could connect to the Internet – quite what I’d be able to do with a small green screen I have no idea, and I never managed to get the Internet connectivity working.  I don’t think I really spent a lot of time on it – after all, all I wanted from the phone was the ability to talk to people when I couldn’t be with them – something that Alexander Graham Bell would definitely approve of.  Even texting for me was something done in extremis – there was a time when the only time I sent text messages was from noisy pubs where I didn’t want to go outside in to teh ferezing cold and lose my seat to make a call!

The Nokia was a brilliant little phone.  Not long after I got it I dropped it and cracked the fascia.  Fortunately my wife (who changes phones with greater frequency than I do) had a 3310 in the cupboard so I ended up with the front and back fascias not matching – a sort of two tone case.  Soon the vase was getting adorned with little stickers – charity stickers after I’d given money, little stick-on ticks from my niece, etc.  It was beginning to look like the guitar case of a particularly well travelled pub-rocker. The only think I couldn’t do with it was open the darn case – it seemed to be put together in such a way that precluded access to nail biting forty-somethings.  However, it could be coerced in to opening up by my sticking it in my breast pocket and running for a bus – the phone would fly out, hit the pavement and then explode in to 4 pieces – two halves of the case, the battery and the gubbins of the phone.  Opportunities like this were excellent for cleaning out cat hairs and other crud that had accumulated inside the phone.

After a while I began to realise that people remembered my phone – it was pretty much old fashioned when I bought it new.  As the new, all singing, all dancing handsets with more brains than your average X-Factor contestant hit the market, my magnificent machine was recognised amongst my friends as a steam powered anachronism that fitted the personality of it’s owner.  You see, despite my professional engagement with technology, I’ve always been something of a Luddite in some ways.  I don’t like being on the bleeding edge of things, or for that matter the leading edge.  God created ‘early adopters’ to experience the bugs and foul ups that normal people shouldn’t have to.  I was writing web services and partaking in ‘meeja’ projects with a phone that was appropriate for an operative from Warehouse 13 or a character in a Steampunk novel. I had one client who came in to the office one day holding an old 3410 and offering it to me for ‘spares’ – I think that rumours started that I actually planned to hand maintain the phone, and that in years to come whilst the rest of the world revelled in smart phones with a higher IQ than their owners, I’d still be chattering away in to my green-screen, steam-powered telephone.

Well, sure enough, all good things had to come to an end.  Earlier on this year I noticed that somehow some cat-fur had managed to get in to the display, and a couple of the keys were starting to get rather ‘sticky’.  I also had increasing numbers of people wanting to text me (and expecting a text message back – a process which with my inability to text through a numeric keyboard tenedd to drive me to the closer edges of insanity!)  And I was also getting increasing amounts of spam.  Some time ago I rather stupidly used the number for a contact number on the WHOIS registry of web domains – it escaped from there and seems to now be doing the rounds of insurance companies and other financial services organisations, generating lots of people trying to ring me to sell me financial services…. 

In June of this year I received a phone call from BT – my Broadband supplier – asking me whether I had a mobile phone contracA Crackberry similar to mine!t, and if not would I be interested in a smartphone of some sort.  The price was not much more expensive than what I paid on PAYG, and it included more than enough minutes and text messages…and whichever one I went for a real (if small) QWERTY keyboard…and other gadgets like MP3 players and Internet connections!  And so I’ve ended up with a Crackberry…OK…a Blackberry, just in case the manufacturers are reading!

And I’m delighted.  Actually, I think that some who know me may well think I’m besotted with the darn thing.  It’s a very capable and well equipped piece of kit, and is the only phone that I’ve ever had that I ‘fondle’ when I’m not actually using it.  It’s got a nice little facebook application, a Twitter application, I stuck a memory card in and put my music on, I can take photos with it, it has a great contacts book and diary AND I can make phone calls and send text messages at a rate that satisfies my texting friends! 

AND – I can receive photos of my dear God-daughter when she’s out on travels with mum and dad!

So…I wonder how long teh new phone will last me?  The 3410 was with me for 5 or so years; I’d like to give the Crackberry at least that long – the last thing I want to do is to get in the habit of regularly changing phones!!

Wolfram Alpha – how not to make friends and influence people!

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Hmmm…this is becoming WA corner recently – take a look at my previous piece here.  I was less than impressed with the technology and considered it either over-hyped or released too early in to the world.  However, I did hope that as time progressed there might be improvements in the results set returned and, more importantly from a developer point of view, an API published that would allow developers to build new applications to stretch and maybe improve WA.

So, this week an API was announced for Wolfram Alpha on the company’s Blog and I was pretty excited about the prospect of trying out a few things.  Despite my grumbles about the results returned, I was hopeful that with a suitable API encouraging third party developments, the underlying technology and data sets at WA might see an improvement.  My hopes survived for as long as it took me to start reading the small print – in particular this little document, the price list.  Now, I’m aware that WA has cost money to develop but to charge for developers to make use of teh API seems to be one of the dumbest and most counter-productive things they could do.  There are some ‘pioneer grants’ available for the developers, but I get the impression that these are still likely to involve shelling out money.

Google do not charge developers for use of the API until you start using the API in ‘closed’ systems and with a large number of calls.  They certainly don’t charge you during the development cycle – they have more sense.

Now, let’s assume I wanted to develop an API based application for WA – what we in the trade call a ‘proof of concept’ model – i.e. something that proves whether or not the bright idea that we sketched out on the back of a beer-mat in the pub will actually work.  How many requests might I get through to develop such an application?  Well, the other day I wrote some code to retrieve data from a Postcode / Geocode system’s API.  Now, this was a VERY simple application – send a Postcode, retrieve a list of addresses, send a code number, retrieve a full street address with map reference.  Let’s say 2 calls to the remote API for something very straight forward.  During code development and ‘in house’ testing I made about 30 or 40 API calls.  Now, during more formal testing on the client site that’s going to increase somewhat – probably in to the low-hundreds.  And this is for a problem with a well defined structure, with a finite returnable answer set – i.e lists of addresses, a single address or nothing at all, all in a set, predictable format. 

By the very nature of the sort of problem that WA has been set up to deal with, the problems passed up via an API are unlikley to be as well defined and the results set returned is also unlikely to be as simple to deal with as my addresses.  When I did some API work with Google for a client I found I was generating hundreds of API calls and responses during development, let alone testing.  For WA, I’m looking at $60 for 1000 API requests, and $0.08 for each additional request beyond the thousand I initially pay for.  Obviously, I can buy a bigger bundle, but the inference is clear – it ain’t gonnna be cheap developing for the WA API. 

API developments typically involve a learning curve for the API syntax and methods of use.  This is par for the course and to be expected.  However, when the API is interfacing to a curated data set like WA, we have an additional problem of whether the data set will actually contain the sort of data that we’re wanting to get back.  And whether it will be available in the sort of format we’re interested in.  And whether the curated data is timely compared to the data that is being made available through non-curated data sets like those available via Google – or other APIs, for that matter.  Clearly, if your problem space IS covered by WA and the data set WA has available contains what you want in the format in which you want it, then perhaps the API fee is worthwhile.  But for those developers wanting to try something new out, they’re most likely to look to free APIs to test their ideas, and spend time and energy working the wrinkles out in an environment that isn’t costing them pennies for the simplest query.

I’m afraid WA have dropped the ball big time here; by charging for ALL development use of the API they’ve alienated a large source of free development and critical expertise.  Look at how Google has benefited from the sheer number of developers doing ‘stuff’ with their various APIs.  Can you imagine that happening had they charged all the way?  Hardly likely. 

If WA were to make a limited  ‘sandbox’ set of data available for developers via a free of charge API, that would at least allow the developers to get the wrinkles out of their code.  The company could then charge for use of the ‘live’ WA datasets, and would have the additional advantage of the code being run against the live system being reasonably bug free.  By charging from the first line of code written, they’re restricting the development of their own product and driving people in to the arms of Google, Amazon, Bing and the like.  WA doesn’t appear to be offering a lot that is truly revolutionary; so-so natural language query interface against a curated data set.  I doubt it will be long before third party developers start producing the same from Google.

Book Review – ‘Mere Christianity’

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Mere Christianity cover from Wikipaedia

Mere Christianity cover from Wikipaedia

When I used to commute between work and office I used to do a regular(ish) item on here called ‘The Bus Book’ in which I reveiwed the book I’d been reading whilst on the commute.  One book I intended to review as part of that series, but never managed it because the commuting finished, was C. S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’.

C. S. Lewis is probably best known for his children’s classic ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’, part of the ‘Narnia’ series of stories about a fantastic land in which magic has true power.  The books are also deep Christian allegory, reflecting Lewis’s great abilities as a writer on the topic of Christianity and Christian apologetics.

‘Mere Christianity’ grew out of a series of radio lectures that Lewis was asked to do in the Second World War.  The BBC approached a large number of writers and artists to develop radio programmes in the war – Orwell and Priestley were amongst Lewis’s fellow contributors to the literary war effort – and Lewis contributed a series of programmes describing the ‘guts’ of Christianity – the common issues that the Christian Faith of all denominations has to deal with.  And these programmes, after the war, became the basis of ‘Mere Christianity’.

I’ve often commented that the mental processes that led to my eventual Confirmation in to the Church of England were started by two men – Johnny Cash and C.S. Lewis – both of whom came to their belief via what’s best described as a ‘non-standard’ route – Cash through feeling the presence of God when he’d decided to give up and die in a cave, and Lewis coming back to belief after many years as an Atheist.

‘Mere Christianity’ is a relatively slim book, but heavily laden with ideas.  Stylistically it hasn’t aged well in the 60 years since the material was originally written, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  The style is best described as ‘no-nonsense’ and the book approaches Christianity from, in my opinion, a very Anglican perspective, although the theses within are applicable to all Christian denominations.  The Anglican faith is often said to be based on three cornerstones – Faith, Tradition and Reason – and it is this statement that Lewis uses as the basis of his ideas in the book.

The book is split in to 4 sections –

  1. Right and Wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe
  2. What Christians believe
  3. Christian behaviour
  4. First steps in the doctrine of the Trinity

Central to the arguments of the first part of the book, where Lewis puts the case for Christianity, is the idea that there exists a general ‘law of morality’ – a rule about right and wrong known almost implicitly by all humans.  Whatever our beliefs, most people would argue that the Holocaust was wrong at any number of levels, that child-murder is abhorrent, etc.  (This was written 60 years ago – I guess it says a lot about the changes in morality in the last 60 years that I had to think hard when writing that last sentence!)  Lewis argues that for such a universal rule of right and wrong to be known to people irrespective of culture, there must be something above and beyond us to impose such a rule.

Lewis then posits what is now known in theological circles as the ‘Lewis Trilemma’ – an argument that is now a little dented by modern theological studies but that stated that Jesus was either divine, lying, or insane.  As His behaviour didn’t seem to indicate insanity, and his works did not indicate the moral turpitude associated with lying, Lewis was left with the conclusion that Christ was indeed divine.

He explores the virtues and the sins – I have to say that on reading this book for the first time the idea of  ‘pride’ being a sin – maybe THE sin -came as something of a shock to the system but when Lewis explores the idea that extreme pride is often at the back of the other sins, such as gluttony and lust – then perhaps it’s not such a long shot.  He then points out that Pride was what separated the Devil from God in the first place, so that rather put the hat on it!

Lewis’s exploration of virtue, sin and morality from a Christian perspective are interesting and well grounded.   He states very clearly that his intention with the book is to bring people who might be intrested in becoming Christians in to a sort of spiritual ‘waiting room’ where they can determine which particular branch of Christianity their calling will be for.  And it works very well on that level.  he does not intend the book and the ideas within it to be a doctrine of their own.

I think the only issue I woudl take with the book is the language and general style – it’s a little ‘stuffy’ and in a couple of places distinctly politically incorrect – and whilst that doesn’t bother me one jot I can see some people being put off.  My advice would be to persevere – the book was written 60 years ago by an upper-middle class male academic, but the issues it deals with are eternal.

I agree wholeheartedly with Anthony Burgess’s comment about the book : “…the idea persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who woudl like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way.”  It’s a great and useful book – I wish I’d come across it earlier in my personal spiritual journey.  An excellent companion for Lewis’s religious novel in ‘letter’ form, ‘The Screwtape Letters’.

Google and ‘The Dead Past’

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Earlier this year we saw the launch of Google’s Street View system – here – and with it came a plethora of complaints about the invasion of privacy implications.   I was one of the happy complainants – Google had a view right through my house, showing people in the house.  To be honest, their reaction was swift and the imagery was removed, but it was an invasion of privacy and I’m still to be convinced that there is any long term gain to be obtained from the system.  yes, I’m aware of all the ‘well, you can see what a neighbourhood’s like before buying a house there’ arguments, but if you do all your checking out of the largest investment you’ll ever make on the Internet then you deserve to find yourself living between a Crack Den and a student house.

Enough…step back and breathe…the title of this piece is ‘Google and ‘The Dead Past’ – now what on Earth do I mean by that?

Science Fiction afficionados amongst you may recognise part of the title as coming from an old story by Isaac Asimov, in which a researcher develops a time viewer to look in to the past, only to eventually realise that the past starts exactly a fraction of a second ago – for all practical, human purposes, the past, to his machine, is identical to the present.  He’s accidentally invented the world’s finest surveillance machine.  As a character says at the end of the story – ‘Happy goldfish bowl to you, to me, to everyone, and may each of you fry in hell forever.’

Now, there’s a looooong way to go between Google and eternal damnation through surveillance, but as is often pointed out, the road to Hell is firstly paved with good itentions and always starts with a single step.  Let’s do soem of that old style extrapolation, though, and see what we’ve got coming up in our future.  Here are a few things that have been posited and talked about as being part of our online future,  some of which are already here, some of which are extrapolations, all of which are technically feasible, if not yet politically acceptable.

  1. Decreased latency between changes in the online world and those changes turning up in Search Engines.  At the moment we might expect a day or so even on busy sites regularly trawled by search engines – a possible future might be that items get folded in to search space within hours.  We’re also already heading towards Tweets being searchable – perhaps future APIs will allow combined searches of facebook, Twitter and general webspace all in one shot?
  2. Use of  ‘mechanical turk’ approaches in encouraging people to use their spare time to classify images, scan online video, etc.  to tag media that are currently not searchable by search engines in their raw form. Imagine that being idone in near real-time.  DARPA are already researching tools to extract context out of text and digitised speech; perhaps some degree of automated scanning of video will follow.  And it’s not outlandish to suggest that what might be useful for the military will sooner or later find its way into civillian online life.
  3. The possibilities inherent in IP Version 6 for a massively enlarged Internet Protocol addressing space make it easier than ever to ensure that everything that can have a separate IP address will have a separate IP address.  Combine that with the geolocation capabilities that come with reduced cost GPS chip sets – many phones now have GPS built in – and the tracking of devices (and their owners) in real time or near real time, sold to us as extensions of the social media experience, becomes a reality.
  4. The increasing usage of ‘Cloud’ computing where everything about you is stored not on your computer or phone but on a ‘cloud’ storage system run by your phone company (T-Mobile?), software supplier (Microsoft?), media seller (Amazon?) puts all your digital life in to teh network – where it can be scanned and examined in transit or in storage.

Add to the technical advances the willingness for peopel to share their activities via Social media (or eventually the commoditisation of their activity patterns and media interests, as ISPs and phone companies realise that people will give up a lot of privacy for cheaper connectivity) and we are perhaps heading towards the science fiction scenario described above.

If people were concerned about the impact of Street View on their lives – a single snapshot taken as a one off – imagine the possible impact of your real-life world being captured as a mosaic by different sources and then being rendered and made searchable by interconnected search tools.  A phone call positions you in one place, photographs taken on the same phone and geo-tagged by the software are sent to a searchable social media site and so identify who you were with and when.  You show up in other photos,  as a recipient of a call from another phone, and so on.  The other evening I was asked ‘Who doesn’t want to be tagged in these photos?’ – the new social nicety for people who are concerned over the privacy of their friends.   Sooner or later I’m certain that nicety will slip by the wayside, and it will be up to us to police our own image online.

A recent business enterprise where people are being asked to monitor CCTV cameras in their spare time  – Internet Eyes – may be regarded as distastefully intrusive, but I do wonder whether it’s the start of a whole range of ‘mechanical turk’ type activities where people are encouraged to act as high-tech lace-curtain twitchers.  That past is not looking as dead anymore.

Are you feeling spied on yet?  If not, I’m sure you soon will be.

Death of a celebrity

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This weekend the singer Stephen Gately died at his residence in Majorca.  At the time of writing, the cause of death is unknown but suicide,  foul play and drugs abuse are not being suggested.  I was provoked in to making this post by the reaction to the death that I noticed from various friends and acquaintances who took teh death quite hard but who also commented on the ‘gallows humour’ and apparent indifference of people to the fellow’s passing.

Mr Gately was clearly well loved by friends, family and fans.  I have to say that he meant little to me – a passing aquaintance with his name on the news – but unfortunately those who live as celebs must die as celebs, and part of that is the sick jokes marking their passing.  Since the widespread uptake of email, and especially since the web, this sort of humour has followed celebrity death as quickly and inexorably as paparazzi photographers and ambulance chasing lawyers.  Before electronic media, one at least had to wait for the jokes to appear in the newspapers / magazines or be passed from people who’d heard them from a friend who in turn heard them from a guy who knew the gardener of the dead celeb.

It’s rarely anything personal – it’s a coping mechanism, perhaps some of the milder jokes even provide the 21st Century version of marking the death of someone by printing the borders of the newspapers in black.  As some of you will know I was Admin on Sheffield Forum for a couple of years.  How to handle posted ‘dead person humour’ was an ongoing problem.  I used to apply the rule of 24 – within the first 24 hours it’s not nice – after that, it happens.  It may not be nice but it’s a byproduct of being in the celebrity food chain.  When you stop swimming in the media seas, your body sinks and the local bottom dwellers come and dismember the body, so to say….

One comment made stuck with me; imagine going to bed at 33 years old and not waking up.  When I was a kid I lost a friend who died at age 11.  As a younger man I lost a friend who died at 21.  Every morning in the developing world people in their 30s don’t wake up because they’ve died in the night of malnutrition, AIDS, Malaria, Cholera.  At the risk of sounding callous, I’m afraid that death is not the preserve of the poor, the sick, the elderley and the nobodies in the world.  It’s pretty Catholic in it’s tastes and can strike out at anyone – not just people who immediately surround us, and those of our modern pantheon of celebrities that our media choose to inform us are worthy of dying publically.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m not hypocritical enough to comment that I feel the death of total strangers in the developing world at all in my life – I don’t – but neither am I willing to go to serious grief over a celebrity who I didn’t know from Adam and who doesn’t even know I personally exist, except as part of a demographic.

I’m willing to admit to being sad at the deaths of three celebs in particular – John Peel, Joe Strummer and Johnny Cash.  I grew up with their music playing an important part of my life to varying degrees, so can empathise with people who’ve felt the loss of Mr Gatley as a figure in their musical upbringing – and especially those who’ve actually met the fellow.  Whilst we can all reflect on John Donne’s words about ‘ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you’  it’s worth also reflecting on whether your feelings are genuinely inspired by the death, or inspired by the media scrum surrounding the death suggesting how we should feel.

Meanwhile, back in June…..

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Originally a Facebook Note, June 8th 2009, after the EU Elections….

The problem with democracy is that sometimes it allows people to vote for folks that you personally don’t want to gain any sort of power. Unfortunatley, that’s democracy for you. She can be a total bitch. FWIW, I voted for the Socialist Party inspired ‘No2EU – yes to democracy’.

There is an old latin saying – Ut sit magna, tamen certe lenta ira deorum est – the wrath of the gods may be great, but it is slow – that we can perhaps borrow and replace gods with people. To everyone saying how disgusted they are with their regions, their countrymen, stating people are idiots, etc. I ask them to think about the following.

From 2003 (beginning of the Iraq war) through to this weekend, the major parties in the UK have singularly managed to ignore or disregard the concerns and criticisms of voters. The Government has thundered on, ignoring calls for inquiries on numerous issues, ignoring the fears and concerns of voters on a number of issues, whilst keeping their “heads down in the pig bin, saying ‘Keep on digging'”, in the words of Pink Floyd. I’ve lost count of the number of people and groups who’ve asked the Government to reconsider their policies on things like immigration, ID cards and personal privacy, civil rights and freedom of expression in the UK. Phillip Pullman put it better than I can… http://www.joep.communityhost.org.uk/?p=71

We’ve recently had the financial debacle and then the site of MPs ignoring repeated requests for over 18 months to release details of their expenses.

And people wonder why voters voted the way they did? After the Government and major parties have acted with such hubris and contempt?

To be honest, we’re lucky this morning that we don’t have a handful of BNP and far-right groups holding seats all over Europe.

Voters used the only power left to them to get the attention of their leaders – the one thing that, as yet, New Labour haven’t removed from us. The power of the ballot. And when people used it they no doubt considered how they’d been ignored, taken for granted, treated as idiots and generally regarded as sheep who would quite happily vote for the famous ‘rosette on a dog’ representing the major parties.

Guess what – they didn’t. They said ‘Listen. We will not go this way again with you. You repeatedly ignore our concerns. You treat as as children and with contempt. Listen. We’re going to take the one course of action that will get your attention. We will vote for the parties that you and all those with a vested interest in the current system don’t want us to vote for’.

And that’s what they’ve done. Vox populi – the voise of the people. Keep on ignoring that voice – so apparently quiet in Westminster and Islington and the in inner circles of New Labour and the other major parties – and this will keep happening.

My final question – what are WE going to do about it? Many of you will know I’m a Libertarian – I believe in small government, and maximum involvement of the people in that governance. Wearing badges and shouting slogans and signing petitions is not enough. Wherever you live there are going to be issues in YOUR community that need tackling – social and political issues that left a mess for long enough will provide more grist to the mill of those on the extreme right and left who want to remove freedoms from us all.

Get out there and start fixing YOUR community and YOUR society. Listen to the people who’ve said ‘Enough’s enough.’ Work with them to address those issues that they’re concerned about and maybe, just maybe, we can collectively remind all politicians that they’re there because we give them the permission to be there.

If you need to blame anyone, need to feel ashamed or disgusted with anyone – just look to Westminster. Briefly – don’t dwell on it. Then look back to wherever you are and start fixing this mess.

Wolfram Alpha – too early released or over-hyped?

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In case you’re saying, “Wolfram what?”, here’s a little reading:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/05/does_wolfram_work.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8052798.stm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2009/may/18/wolfram-review-test-google-search

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/19/dziuba_wolfram/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/17/wolfram_alpha/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/18/wolfram_alpha/

 

OK – I’ll start by announcing a vested interest here.  I occasionally write software that attempts to make sense out of straight English questions and phrases, and then by cunning trickery makes the response from the program appear ‘sensible’ as well.  So I know something about how to make software appear smarter than it actually is.  And I’m afraid that at first glance I regard Wolfram Alpha as over-hyped, under-delivering and pretty much unsure of it’s position in the world.

But, the folks at Wolfram Research score highly for getting the coverage they’ve managed!

WA is described as a Computational Knowledge Engine, rather than a search engine.  However, it’s raison d’etre is to answer questions, and nowadays any piece of software on the internet that does that is always going to be regarded by users as some sort of search engine, and the ‘Gold Standard’ against which all search engines tend to be judged is Google.  So, first question…

Is it fair to compare WA and Google?

Not really, and Wolfram himself acknowledges this.  WA is regarded by the company as a means of getting information out of teh raw data to be found on the Web, and it does this by having what’s called ‘curated’ data – that is, Wolfram’s team manage sources used for the data and also the rpesentation of the data.  This makes it very good at returning solid factual and mathematically oriented data in a human readable form. 

Whereas Google will return you a list of pages that may be useful, WA will return data structured in to a useful looking page of facts – no links, just the facts.  And a list of sources used to derive the infromation. The results displayed are said to be ‘computed’ by Wolfram Research, rather than just listed as is the case of a search engine.

Is it a dead end?

WA relies on curated data – that is, a massaging and manipulation process to get the existing web data in to a format that is searchable by the WA algorithms and that is then also presentable in a suitable fomat for review.  This is likely to be a relatively labour intensive process.  Let’s see why…

In a perfect world, all web data would be tagged with ‘semantic tagging’ – basically additional information that allows the meaning of a web page to be more explicitly obvious.  Google, for all it’s cleverness, doesn’t have any idea about the meaning of web page content – just how well or poorly it’s connected to other web pages and what words and phrases appear withjin the page.  They do apply a bit of ‘secret sauce’ to attempt to get teh results o your search closer to what you really want, assuming you want roughly the same as others who’ve searched the Google search space for the same thing.  Semantic tagging would allow a suitably written search engine to start building relationships between web pages based on real meaning.  Now, you might just see the start of a problem here…..

If a machine can’t derive meaning from a web page, then the Semantic tagging is going to have to be human driven.  So for such a tool to be useful we need to have some way of ensuring as much web data as possible would be tagged.  Or, start from tomorrow and say that every new page should be tagged, and write off the previous decade of web content.  You see the problem.

What the WA team have done is taken a set of data from the web, and massaged and standardised it in to a format that their software can handle, then front-ended this system with a piece of software that makes a good stab at natural langauge processing to get the meaning of your question out of your phrase.  For example, typing in ‘Compare the weather in the UK and USA’ might cause the system to assume that you want comparative weather statistics for those two countries.  (BTW – it doesn’t, more on this later)

The bottom line here is that the data set has had to be manually created – something that is clearly not posisble on a regular basis.  And a similar process would ahve to be carried out to get things semantically tagged.  And if we COULD come up with a piece of sofwtare that could do the semantic analysis of any piece of text on the web, then neither of tehse approaches would be needed anyway.

In a way, WA is a clever sleight of hand; but ultimately it’s a dead end that could potentially swallow up a lot of valuable effort.

Is it any good?

The million dollar question.  Back to my ‘Compare the weather in the UK and US’ question.  the reason I picked this was that WA is supposed to have a front end capable of some understanding of the question, and weather data is amongst the curated data set.  I got a Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input. response.  So, I simplified and gave WA : “Compare rainfall london washington” – same response.  I then went to Google and entered the same search.  And at the bottom of Page 1 found a link : http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=349393 that had the figures of interest.  Now, and before anyone starts on me, I appreciate that the data that would have been provided by WA would have been checked and so would be accurate.  But I deliberately put a question to WA that I expected it should be able to answer if it was living up to the hype.

I then gave WA ‘rainfall london’ as a search and got some general information (not a lot) about London.  Giving ‘rainfall london’ to Google and found links to little graphs coming out of my ears.  A similar search on rainfall washington to Google gave me similar links to data on Washington rainfall.

WA failed the test, I’m afraid. 

Will it get better?

The smartness of any search tool depends upon the data and the algorithms.  As we’re relying on curated data here, then improvements might come through modifications to data, but that might require considerable effort.  If the algorithms are ‘adaptive’ – i.e. they can learn whether answers they gave were good or bad – then there might be hope.  This would rely on a feedback mechanism from searchers to the sofwtare, basically saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.  If the algorithms have to be hand crafted – improvement is likely BUT there is the risk of over-fitting the algorithms to suit the questions that people have asked – not the general searching of what MAY be asked.

And time passes…

As it turned out, this post never moved from ‘Draft’ to ‘Published’ because of that thing called ‘Life’.  So, a month or two have passed, and I’ve decided to return to Wolfram Alpha and see what’s changed….

Given the current interest in the band Boyzone, I did a quick search.  WA pointed me to a Wiki entry – good – but nothing else.  Google pointed me to stacks of stuff.  Average rainfall in London got me some useful information about rainfall in the last week.  OK….back to one of my original questions ‘Compare rainfall London Washington’ – this time I got the London data with the Washington equivalent on it as well – sort of what I wanted.  Google was less helpful this time than back when I wrote this piece.

So…am I more impressed?  Maybe a little.  Do I feel it’s a dead end?  Probably, yes, except in very specific areas taht might already be served by things like Google and Wiki anyway.

Do I have an alternative solution for the problem?

If I did, do you think I’d blog it here and expose myself to all that criticism? 🙂