Mar

4

Why the Opposition to Year-Month-Day

Filed Under Computers, Philosophy | 1 Comment

When naming files, I would make a file with today’s time stamp 20080304. My brain was confused for a second when it saw 13012008. There are not thirteen months! Oh….

I have to use ls -latr to get the list in chronological order instead of just ls.

Month-day-year I can understand (old habits die hard). Any know a reason for day-month-year?

Feb

24

Persuasion

Filed Under Philosophy, Religion / Baha'i Faith | Leave a Comment

When I present my ideas, my intent is just to provide what I know or think without bias. The information just… is. The good, the bad, and the ugly all need to be in front of the decision maker(s) to have a chance at a quality decision. From my perspective, the information I provide belongs to the group or individual making the decision not myself. This is based on principles of Baha’i consultation which I have used for years.

Trying to force agreement by influencing a decision through information control, I think has the opposite effect. People may sense the agenda and resist being manipulated. Anything said forward from that point would be suspect and minimized and possibly outright ignored. People can handle the truth.

Jan

11

Computer v Human Diagnosis

Filed Under Computers, Philosophy | 1 Comment

I just finished How Doctors Think yesterday.

First impression was doctors don’t spend very much time thinking and gathering information to make a diagnosis. That impress struck a very negative chord with me as it sounds like in my profession of database and computer administration we spend hours picking apart the data we have to diagnose even minor sounding issues.

The better impression ought to be doctors spend very little time with a seemingly routine diagnosis. When confounded they spend more time doing analysis. They also have to deal with the patient’s lack of patience.

In tier 3 support, we spend even less time with routine issues. “Try another web browser and call me in the morning.” anyone? When we don’t know this gives the “patient” something to do while we go investigate the real cause (looking at logs or stats). Unfortunately, our computer “patients” want resolutions in minutes or maybe hours. Few find taking a few years to heal a computer problem acceptable.
:(

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Dec

15

Are Books the Only Way to Learn?

Filed Under Education, Interweb, Philosophy | Leave a Comment

Is the Internet really a bad invention? According to Doris Lessing, yes.

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men’s libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.

We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it. We think of the old adage, “Reading maketh a full man” - reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge. A hunger for books

Certainly I understand the perspective. We take the astounding availability of knowledge for granted. Instead of stuffing our brains with more and more information, we are content to waste our time online. I think creating a love of life long learning should be the goal.

Books are great. I love to read. Reading is important, yes. I also love to talk to others about what I’ve been reading. The prevalence of books created the Intellectual Movement in which people published books to discuss ideas. Except for Divine knowledge, ideas are refined through challenging weaknesses or problems. The printing press made it easier for people to publish books and get these ideas to the masses so more can read them and respond by publishing their own books. The Internet and especially blogging has improved the response latency from day to years to minutes.

Collaborative philosophical inquiry helps kids at an early age. These skills serve them well even into high school. This strikes me as similar to how the Intellectual Movement worked. Should this be adopted more broadly, then maybe our kids won’t embarrass Doris?

Jun

16

False Positives

Filed Under Philosophy, Science, Work | Leave a Comment

It’s often argued that the high false positive rate proves the system is poorly run or even useless. This is not necessarily the case. In running a system like this, we necessarily trade off false positives against false negatives. We can lower either kind of error, but doing so will increase the other kind. The optimal policy will balance the harm from false positives against the harm from false negatives, to minimize total harm. If the consequences of a false positive are relatively minor…, but the consequences of a false negative are much worse…, then the optimal choice is to accept many false positives in order to drive the false negative rate way down. In other words, a high false positive rate is not by itself a sign of bad policy or bad management. You can argue that the consequences of error are not really so unbalanced, or that the tradeoff is being made poorly, but your argument can’t rely only on the false positive rate.
– Ed Felton — Why So Many False Positives on the No-Fly List?
(Bolding my own.)

This quote is really about the No Fly List whose purpose is to help the airlines identify who is not allowed to fly. False positives have come up at work lately in the context of catching “bad people”. In our case, great differences of opinion exist about whether the false positives are relatively minor. We all do agree that false negatives are very bad.

A concern about the false positives, is a lot of time an resources are spent looking at the possibles only to determine they are not really a “bad person”. The more false positives we get, the more we doubt the usefulness of the tools we have to identify “bad people”.

Jun

9

Godwin’s Law

Filed Under Philosophy | Leave a Comment

Godwin’s Law:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Wowsers…

Jun

4

B for a Be

Filed Under Philosophy | Leave a Comment

Are online students really students? We like to think seeing is believing, but who meets a student who takes a completely online class? Apparently, seeing is also interpolating…. at Stanford, anyway. Is this a single case? How easy is it for someone to take an academic year’s worth of classes without anyone catching on to the scam?

An 18-year-old Fullerton woman spent the past eight months posing as a freshman biology major at Stanford, buying textbooks, sneaking into meals and even moving into a dorm with an unsuspecting roommate.

… Her story started unraveling this month, and now the university — and her stunned circle of friends and dormmates — are looking back on how a woman described as a sweet student could have pulled off such a ruse.

At my alma mater, you could audit a class. Talking to the right professor, you could get put on his or her role informally should there be room. Later, working in IT on an online class system, how students who didn’t exist in the student information system could take the online class was a frequently reoccuring question from faculty members.

Jan

7

No More Public Anonymous Photos

Filed Under Interweb, Philosophy, Photography, Privacy | Leave a Comment

Early in the history of the WWW, people thought a document which did not have an inbound link, a link from some external location to the file, was private. Search engines looked for content on web sites in locations for which there was not a link already pointing. To truly respect the privacy of those sites, these search engines would have only index content from sites which asked to be index AND only indexed content which that web site pointed a link.

Just because SiteB links to a location on SiteA doesn’t mean SiteA wished it to found in a search, an example is deep linking. Note the court cases (1, 2) in which judges rule in favor of the SiteAs who go to court about SiteBs who make such links. Note I made deep links in order to demonstrate the deep links. :)

On Privacy and Polar Rose - Polar Rose Blog : On Privacy and Polar Rose

It should come as little surprise that we believe that Polar Rose adds tremendous value to the photo web. We think we’re as harmful to the photo web, as Altavista, Yahoo!, and Google have been to the text web. By sorting the text web, these search engines exposed the wonderful resource of public documents that web had already become. The side-effect was that information which was not meant for public consumption, but which was kept private by obscurity, was suddenly exposed and searchable.

By Polar Rose’s logic, because people acclimated in general to losing textual anonyminity, they will do the same for facial recognition. Just what does the lack of a label mean? The photographer may be protecting the identity of someone, a minor for example. The uploader may be lazy. The uploader may not know. The uploaded may not own the copyright to the photo.

On the whole, I think facial recognition is a good thing. The cases in which there are likely going to be privacy concerns are going to be more likely uncommon than common. Those who it affects are going to be most upset all the same.

If anything, then I think we have a tendency to underestimate how badly such things are going to violate the privacy of our lives. For example, look how often search engines exposed Social Security Numbers on web sites.

Dec

24

Unplugged for the Holidays

Filed Under Interweb, Personal / Relationships, Philosophy | Leave a Comment

How to spend a long holiday weekend - Lifehacker:

Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, most likely you’ve got the day off this coming Monday. I hope you’ll spend it doing as little as possible.

Forget the email, the IM, the RSS feeds, the Google searches, what Wikipedia has to say about the origins of Christmas, installing that latest Firefox update or running a defrag. Unplug and enjoy. You made it through another year and you’re wiser, more experienced and best of all - you’re alive. Pat yourself on the back for a job well done, spend some good quality face time with the people you love, and have a very merry happy festive unplugged weekend. We know we will. Happy holidays to you and yours from all of us here at Lifehacker.

LOL, I unplugged for Thanksgiving (more because I didn’t bring a charger for the lappy) back at home. It was near withdrawl! Yikes. So I haven’t for Christmas. :P I’m spending quality time with the family. They are on their computers too!

Aug

21

Smalltalk

Filed Under Personal / Relationships, Philosophy | Leave a Comment

The Smalltalk Question (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought):

One of the minor puzzles of American life is what question to ask people at parties and suchly to get to know them.

“How ya doin’?” is of course mere formality, only the most troubled would answer honestly for anything but the positive.

“What do you do?” is somewhat offensive. First, it really means “what occupation do you hold?” and thus implies you do little outside your occupation. Second, it implies that one’s occupation is the most salient fact about them. Third, it rarely leads to further useful inquiry. For only a handful of occupations, you will be able to say something somewhat relevant, but even this will no doubt be slightly annoying or offensive. (”Oh yeah, I always thought about studying history.”)

….

I propose instead that one ask “What have you been thinking about lately?” First, the question is extremely open-ended. The answer could be a book, a movie, a relationship, a class, a job, a hobby, etc. Even better, it will be whichever of these is most interesting at the moment. Second, it sends the message that thinking, and thinking about thinking, is a fundamental human activity, and thus encourages it. Third, it’s easiest to answer, since by its nature its asking about what’s already on the person’s mind. Fourth, it’s likely to lead to productive dialog, as you can discuss the topic together and hopefully make progress. Fifth, the answer is quite likely to be novel. Unlike books and occupations, people’s thoughts seem to be endlessly varied. Sixth, it helps capture a person’s essence. A job can be forced by circumstance and parentage, but our thoughts are all our own. I can think of little better way to quickly gauge what a person is really like.

I kind of like this. Its doesn’t seem to roll off like the others, but that could be due to never having used it. The lack of effectiveness with the others means I will gladly use any seemingly good alternative. I am going to use it.

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