Made out of people

Editing Memory

This story in Strange Horizons presents a different perspective on how, and why, one might wish to edit memories. It's a very different view than Eternal Sunshine

More on Fingerprints

A bit back, I wrote about statistical probability and fingerprint matches.

Via Crooked Timber, a few new points have come to light.

• The FBI had had the matching person under surveilance already. That's good news to me: it suggests that this wasn't a random-database match, but instead against a restricted set.

• The FBI has now apologized for the bad match.

Upon review it was determined that the FBI identification was based on an image of substandard quality, which was particularly problematic because of the remarkable number of points of similarity between Mr. Mayfield’s prints and the print details in the images submitted to the FBI.

For the moment, I'm relieved. While Belle of Crooked Timber is more worried about the FBI, their surveilance habits, their choices of databases, and their eagerness to detain "materal witnesses"--and perhaps she well should be--I will take some consolation in the fact that the statistics, at least, weren't quite as badly abused as I'd feared.

More attempts to unify the interface

I just found a link to Aduna AutoFocus via the Mapping-Cyberspace list.

AutoFocus helps you to decide what you are looking for. Suppose you look for information on your latest project and you enter the name of the project. AutoFocus responds quickly by giving you a list of documents. Next to that it presents you a list of suggested terms for refinement on your initial question. In this list you might see for example that there is information about project management, meeting notes and project targets. This automatically generated list helps you to refine your question.

The query interface is a keyword-network; documents appear in clusters that match keywords. Their clever interface seems to nicely summarize partial matches and incomplete sets.

Haven't downloaded the demo yet to see how it feels.

Technical Vocabulary

Today, giving a practice for my upcoming job talk, I presented to several colleagues who didn't know my work at all.

One of them, a social network analyst, was very confused during a few of my slides. He had me pause, explain a piece of the talk, and then explain again. Then he stopped, and nodded.

"Ah! This is the disintermediation of the intermediary in a transitive triple!"

I can't say that sequence of words had ever occurred to me.

Temporality of Political Science

Via Crooked Timber and a discussion of the "best political science and political philosophy papers of the last ten years" (a fascinating discussion, since my poli-sci is fairly strong around the 17th century, but not so good in the 20th), What Time is It

Irritatingly, the article appears to be cut off by a server error.

Starkly put, political time is out of synch with the temporalities, rhythms, and pace governing economy and culture. Political time, especially in societies with pretensions to democracy, requires an element of leisure, not in the sense of a leisure class (which is the form in which the ancient writers conceived it), but in the sense, say, of a leisurely pace. This is owing to the needs of political action to be preceded by deliberation and deliberation, as its "deliberate" part suggests, takes time because, typically, it occurs in a setting of competing or conflicting but legitimate considerations. Political time is conditioned by the presence of differences and the attempt to negotiate them. The results of negotiations, whether successful or not, preserve time: consider the times preserved in the various failed attempts to deal with the secession crises prior to the Civil War. Thus time is "taken" in deliberation yet "saved." That political time has a preservative function. is not surprising. Since time immemorial political authorities have been charged with preserving bodies, goods, souls, practices, and circumscribed ways of life.

When Dogma hits Sigma (and, er, oral sex)

I like to think that my morality is justified on all sorts of levels. I'm not only right with my conscience, I like to think, but with science. That is, I am correct on both the means and the end. I don't think I'm unusual with this: indeed, philosophers who discuss rightness often debate both means and ends. I We get profoundly uncomfortable if a belief that we hold strongly ("XXX is wrong") turns out to be false.

Where "false" means, I guess, "doesn't cause the good effects that I want it to." Most people are, I think, at least somewhat pragmatic: when presented with obvious, short-term evidence that they are doing something that is leading to bad ends, they often wish to change their way of doing it.

I think I will suggest the uncomfortable position of the "pragmatic dogmatic." That is, one who has their beliefs as absolutes, but tries to justify them to others for pragmatic reasons. "I believe that eating shellfish" (say) "is wrong; you shouldn't eat it because it may contain toxins."

But this disconnect--setting up the belief as a sort of "boundary object"¹ where two groups may agree--is vulnerable. (I'm not treading new ground here. Star's treatment of boundary objects is a staple in several different research fields; this sort of notion is also explored in other research contexts).

There are any number of subjects where this dichotomy might be fruitfully explored. In the news recently, some are asking if torture, for example, is legitimate when it leads to useful results? Whatever your answer, there seem to be two sorts of answers: those that attack the means ("torture is bad!"), and those that attack the ends ("torture doesn't get good information!").

But the debate over the efficacy of torture is still open, at least in some contexts; so let's look at a different, also interesting issue². Several years ago, there were a series of studies suggesting that condoms in schools reduced teen pregnancy and STD rates Followup studies seemed to vertfy these results. Of course, this led to a political battle.

Some conservative groups have staunchly opposed such programs, saying they send the wrong message and in effect encourage and enable teens to have sex before marriage.

Which brings up the important question, of course. Is sex before marriage a bad thing in itself, or are its various negative effects? There was a time when these were inseperable, and that question didn't need to be answered.

This becomes even more difficult with new studies: as the Guardian phrases it (in the most colorful way possible): Oral sex lessons to cut rates of teenage pregnancy

A sex education course developed by Exeter University trains teachers to talk to teenagers about 'stopping points' before full sex.

Now an unpublished government-backed report reveals that a trial of the course has been a success. Schoolchildren, particularly girls, who received such training developed a 'more mature' response to sex.

The study by the National Foundation for Educational Research found youngsters were 'less likely to be sexually active' than peers who received traditional forms of sex education, dispelling the fears of family campaigners who believe such methods actually arouse the sexual interest of teenagers.

So where does this leave dogma? Statistically, it's apparently wrong. I am welcome to believe that oral sex is a first step to more intensive things, that condoms lead to promiscuity--but it isn't true. I may dislike teaching teens about oral sex in high school, but I can no longer argue that it's got (short-term) bad effects.

This leaves one with the possibility of arguing for its long term danger, of course. "Over decades, a system that allows teaching oral sex will encourage students to have more premature sex, and that, in turn, is potentially problematic." These are probably the way the debate will restructure itself; it often does. But what happens when we have ten year studies of condoms, or thirty year?

Sometimes, tides just shift. Today, newspapers are allowed to talk about condoms without being seen as indecent. (It is an interesting question whether Howard Stern could read aloud the Guardian article without being fined). And maybe in thirty years, this conversation will seem horribly naive.

But today, I suspect that no matter how many newspaper stories precede it, "State assembly votes to require teachers to discuss oral sex" would cause a tremendous uproar.

--

¹ An object which is "stable enough to circulate, ambiguous enough to be an object of multiple meanings." In this case, the belief that "eating shellfish" is shared by the two groups; however, their interpretations of why--"for religious reasons"; "for health reasons"--give it different meanings.

See, for example,

Star, S. L. and J. R. Griesemer. 1989. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations,’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907 - 1939.” Social Studies of Science 19: 387-420.

² I also choose these two examples in order to cause uneasy feelings on oppostite sides of various American political divides. No one is free to declare themselves "the rational party" and go on from there: we set up many beliefs in advance of knowing the outcomes of those beliefs, and always need to re-evaluate.

³ Here I am treading, roughshod--this is a blog, but it still itches a little--over entire fields: sex research, public health, and many others.

The End of Innocence

Sorry to all of you reading this with one or another RSS readers watching various entries appear and disappear and reappear. I was just attacked by a spammer selling US Government Grants. Who knew?

This is a result of my 15 seconds of fame: when Crooked Timber tells the world about you, the Government Grants guy hears, and posts a comment to every single entry. So I spent the morning cleaning up the carnage, and then installing MT-Blacklist (after trying to get Scode working and deciding--after a number of false starts--that it wasn't worth it.)

(I am fascinated, by the way, that there is an entire genre of spam dedicated to improving rankings on Google.)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I just came out of (finally!) seeing "Eternal Sunshine." I'd kind of thought about it, I guess, but I still hadn't forgiven Kaufmann for the masturbatory (can I say that on a blog?) mess that was Adaptation. Yes, he was willing to tell some awful truths about the creative process, ones that any grad student knows too well--but the movie was stilted, strange¹.

And I knew very little about the director, and Jim Carrey isn't necessarily a positive ad for a thougtful movie. This movie is just as much a Jim Carrey movie as it is an Elijah Woods movie. And that's without the pointy ears.².

But Metamanda saw me at CHI, and insisted that I MUST see the movie. And then four other people standing around said, "What, you haven't seen Ethernal Sunshine? Go see it!"³

So--without spoilers, without discussion of the stunning editing and directing and design and storytelling; without commenting on its brilliant meditiations on how relationships are, and how they end--I will simply shout, as loud as I can, "Go see it!"

¹ It didn't help saw it the same weekend that I saw The Crime of Father Amaro which is a lesson that controversy + star power does not necessarily add to a good movie.

² It is, however, something that doesn't surprise Tom Wilkinson and Kate Winslet fans.

³ Yes, they liked it more than Barbarella, the Musical even!

Forensic Mathematics

Earlier this week, I wrote about the probabilities of fingerprint mismatches. I was pleased and startled to find out that there is such a thing as a "Forensic Mathematician."

Charles H. Brenner is one such. For example, he has a useful article on how to interpret the meaning of, say, "one in 7000 match." (Here's a New York Times interview with him.)

Other discussions at Forensic Evidence

Abusing Network Analysis to Understand Eurovision

Last year, Kieran Healy wrote

The anonymous juries pass judgement on the cultural worth of their neighbors, which makes for indignation and outrage all round. Ireland, for instance, is well known for generously forgetting 600 years of English oppression and routinely giving the British entry a decent vote. The Brits, by contrast, rarely vote for Ireland at all, except perhaps to give it a derisory deux or trois points, which is almost worse than nothing. (This may not be true, by the way, but these prejudices are themselves an important fact about the contest.) Similarly, the Scandinavian nations have been known to do a lot of neighborly backscratching.

This year, he tested it.

Confining ourselves to a group of countries who competed during (almost) all these years, we can aggregate their voting scores into a directed graph representing their preferences for one another’s songs over the years. Given that Eurovision songs are (to a first approximation) uniformly worthless, we can assume that votes express a simple preference for one nation over another, uncomplicated by any aesthetic considerations.

A sculptor with three tasks

I feel, right now, like a sculptor who has been comissioned for a grand project: a sculpture, formed out of soft clay. Of course, to go with the sculpture must be a lithograph of the top-end of the sculpture. And last, we need a limited-edition plushytoy. Every time he makes progress on the plush toy, it reminds him of the fact that the hands of the clay version need work. Work on the lithograph requires a redesign of the plush toy. And so on...

That's pretty much the sensation of writing my dissertation (which is, in turn, assembed of various past presentations and papers), writing a book chapter (which will be chapter 7, it will be chapter 7), and putting together the hour-long presentation for job talks.

And the annoying bit is that a lot of my time is spent perfecting the color of the nail polish on the sculpture's left hand. Crucial, sometimes, but not giving me a good sense of progress.

What is your airplane downloading?

As our flight began to depart Heathrow on its way back to the states, the seatback TVs all went blank. Then this message appeared. I suppose they were just getting the program and controls for the next flight, but it was a fairly odd experience to see an entire plane full of seatback displays all "downloading."

The use (and abuse) of statistics

Spanish investigators found a piece of evidence in a white van 20 miles from the blast that they did not reveal: on a plastic bag containing bomb materials, investigators found a "perfectly formed" fingerprint they couldn't identify, a Spanish official tells Newsweek. Spanish police didn't find a match for the print, but when the FBI ran it through its archive, the computer unexpectedly logged a hit: the mystery print, U.S. authorities say, belonged to Brandon Mayfield, a small-time lawyer who lived in Portland, Ore. Mayfield had been fingerprinted years earlier, when he served in the U.S. Army. ( Newsweek )

Now, I don't know the accuracy of fingerprint recognition. Clearly, though, there's some level. (This website advertises a system with 1 in 2.5 million accuracy. Another article¹ cites a number more like 1 in 16 million.)

I completely believe that if you have a suspect who you have good reason to believe was at a crime scene, than one in a few million is a great narrower. But this did the reverse technique: it filtered through the entire US fingerprint database, and it found a hit.

Now, remember that if you are "one in a million," there are 293 of you in the USA--and there are 6,367 of you in the world (according to the US census bureau).

There's no other evidence on this man. His passport is expired, and there's no record that he's left the country. He's being held as a "material witness" indefinitely. Which means--to my reading of the article--that he's being held on the basis of a statistical measure.

Update 5/14/04. The Newsweek article gives a different degree of detail:
bq. Law-enforcement officials today provided few details about the evidence against Mayfield, but said the alleged presence of physical evidence tying the man to the Madrid bombing made it an extremely serious matter. Sources said Mayfield's fingerprints were found on a bag containing bomb material connected to the Spanish attack. But officials said considerable uncertainty remained about Mayfield's role.

Crooked Timber also asks about the justice of the material witness law, especially as it links to this issue

-

¹ # S. Pankanti, S. Prabhakar, and A. K. Jain, On the Individuality of Fingerprints, IEEE Transactions on PAMI, Vol. 24, No. 8, pp. 1010-1025, 2002

People taking pictures of themselves

I'm not really used to seeing this sort of advert in the US--I saw at least two or three billboards of people taking pictures of themselves. Note that this isn't just taking pictures with your cellphone--of your groceries, of your friends, of tourist sights--but of yourself.

Not sure what this means. Except that everyone who cleverly thinks they're the first person to point a digital camera at themselves is wrong. Do advertisements like this excite people (man, I need to get one of those cameras!), or does it stifle reinvention?

More signs

Last week, I gave you a collection of unusual, incomprehensible, and just interesting signs from Vienna. This week, some more, starting with the fabulous Ashtray Pig of Westbanhopf. Smokers stub out their last cigarette here before descending into the train station, the only smokeless place I found in the city.

Update: Nikita points to those wonderful rendundant clocks on the building-side. So I decided I'd show just how redundant they are. No, I don't know why this (Hungarian) building has four similar-not-identical clocks showing almost-the-same time. Or why these are on the bottom of one larger, also nearly identical clock.

Warning! Well-muscled Socialist realist men at work!

All sorts of people may cross--men with hats, men with bags.

Even little grey aliens.

Some places, men with children may go, others they may not.

Some places, children may play, others they may not.

Exercise: Putting together what you have learned from previous images, what does this one mean? Does the red X at the bottom negate the rest?

Exercise 2: What about this one? (I think it is "Caution! Gas may be found 50 meters to your right, day and night, although you may not park.")

Is this a warchalker sign? Are Hungarian hoboes this formal in their work? What does this mean?

Upgraded EPS dump

This is just an update to my previous post on the EPS dumper. After spending a little bit of time fighting with the image dumping code that was producing bad EPS, I've now commmented it out.

Which means that the system can now dump VALID, full screens in EPS--however, scroll bars, bitmaps, and other graphic decorations will look a little off. Here's an example of an EPS with this new system.

Download file

The shape of the future

We were promised food pills. Instead, we got conveyor belt sushi bars with cute babes miming karaoke tracks on stages surrounded by wall to wall plasma screens playing anime 24 by 7, and robot drinks trolleys that apologize to you when they nearly run you over on the way to the lavatory. In Edinburgh. Three years ago. While sushi rice may have evolved as the original mediaeval Japanese answer to the science fictional food pill, the presentation is infinitely more stylish.

Charlie Stross, on the future via BoingBoing

Budapest on the 1st of May

Travelogue, again:

Thursday, the night after the conference, was busy. I made it to the opera¹, talked with my advisor and a future student about fornicating baboons², and then stayed up late talking job search and school gossip and possible collaborations and all sorts of happy life events. We found a bar called Yellow³, and talked late into the night.

And Friday was a mellow morning. After so tiring a conference, the day of outgoing flights is a quiet one. A cup of coffee, some orange juice to nurse a headache, a little talking while the Vienna streetside goes by. Then I met a friend of the family, Veronika, who drove me down to Budapest for the weekend.

Veronika lives in Krems, Austria, but visits her family most weekends. Which, in turn, means she passes through passport control on the Austrian-Hungarian border each week. On Friday, she passed that checkpoint for the last time. (I will have to admit that the border guards did not, perhaps, put much care into the task.) On Saturday, May 1st, Hungary joined the European Union; the checkpoints and border crossings were reduced and taken down.

Updated 5/10 with pictures

This once-Communist country, scarcely a decade old, is joining with France and Spain and Germany to form a part of the growing union. The feelings thoroughout the country are fascinatingly mixed. Rumors fly about what life will be like within the EU. We will be unable to eat poppyseed cake! fear some of the older generations: the EU's stricter drug controls may limit poppy imports; the popular home poppy gardens might be seen with disapproval; and the traditional, mildly narcotic bread, made densely out of pounds of the seeds, might be controlled⁴. But overall there is a great deal of excitement: that fifteen years ago they needed to wait for years to visit the West, and now they are part of it!

I spent the weekend with Veronika, with her mother (a woman old enough to remember the rise of Communism as well as its fall, who has lived at various times in California, Italy, and both sides of Germany), and with her nephew (raised under a Communist government, but lived for 13 years in Florida). They were happy to share their thoughts about this momentous occasion.

The younger generations are angry at the leadership. Yes, joining the EU is probably the right long-term move, they agree. But in exchange for providing a hungry consumer market to the Union with greatly reduced taxes, they want something back. Poland apparently negotiated for a fairly substantial subsidy, and kept the negotiations active until the very last moment.

The Hungarian government--some say with a bit of a sneer--capitulated. It's the same scoundrels as during communism, but now they act capitalist. They point out that the prime minister was recently revealed as a former secret police officer; that the local Museum of Terror (looking at both the German and Soviet periods) has pictures of many cabinet members from the old files, and so is periodically threatened by the government. And why not? They spent the years before obeying Moscow; now Paris and Berlin speak, and again they say "yes sir."

And how does that make them different from the rest of the Iron Curtain? Their stunning lack of military success⁵. Since the 15th Century, I was told, Hungary has not won a war. It has temporarily taken Vienna; it was then conquored by the Habsburgs for the Austro-Hungarian Empire... and the Austrians, my friends said, definitely wore the pants. It was the Austrians who led the empire into yet another losing war in 1914. Austria survived that largely intact; Hungary was humiliatringly It joined with Germany in World War II--and was occupied twice in a row, once the Germans to keep them from running; then liberated and occupied by the Soviets.

Now, perhaps, they have hitched their fortunes to a more winning horse. Or so they hope. Perhaps this will be one with fewer wars, and more success stories.

There will be a few years of hardship--the farmers are scared of competing against French subsidies; the economists want to control climbing interest rates and inflation; the government will lose tarrifs--but everyone thinks that things might someday look better. Immigrants will come looking for jobs; the educated might be more able to leave and send money home. How, and when, all those changes will happen still seems a little mysterious. My guide, who works for a large multinational, is worried that local businesses still aren't used to the new capitalist system and will get crushed by the newly-incoming hordes. The corporate email about unification came out on Wednesday. We were called in on Friday, at 2 in the afternoon to try to turn over all the systems. And when I asked what happens to our supply trucks in transit--who are suddenly experiencing a change in regulations--my supervisor shrugged. "They'll figure it out," he said.

The celebration, then, is something to note. The entire city--indeeed, much of the nation--comes out for the parties on the 30th, as a big sand-timer counts down the hours until unification. The 1st of May is International Worker's Day; like everything else associated with Socialism in the US, it is viewed with a little bit of distrust. In Europe, it is celebrated with picnics and parties. And now that day has another layer of meaning; it is unification day. The city had taken its various famous bridges and modified them for the occasion: the Chain Bridge is a pedestrian pathway; a second has been layered with sod and planted with trees; the last has fountains pouring off either side, and huge silk-screens of a water-polo scene. The Danube-side on both edges is packed with people wandering through booths representing the various nations (Greek Gyros; Italian tourism; Dutch beer; British fish & chips; Swedish fighter jets). Concert stages at Heros' Square feature a wide variety of international bands; the city park is a fair-grounds, turned over to beer-halls. The glossy papers declare "EUphoria," while a museum runs a racy exhibit, "EUrotika".

Planes fly over a bit later: helicopters, classics (both Soviet and American); passenger. The new Swedish fighters--subjects of tremendous controversky--do not show, however. Last a stunt plane zips under the chain bridge and then climbs, spiralling and tumbling over the Danube river. At sunset, fireworks lit the sky. This city, which ordinarily matches its postcards in calm beauty, is thronging with celebrating crowds, shouting at each other in Hungarian.

Walking again through the city that night, it looks a little different. The parties are settling down and the bars are closing, but for the drunkest few singing to old songs on the radio. The ground is covered with a layer of trash--empty cups of Coke and beer; chicken wrappers; glossy programs detailing the celebration to join the EU. May 2nd celebrates mother's day in Hungary, and you have to look good enough to bring her flowers and introduce her to your date.

Just how bad will the mess and the hangover be?

¹ There is something very pure about going to an opera like the one I saw in Vienna at the Volksopera. It was "La Traviata," in Italian with German subtitles. I didn't understand a word, and the sets were highly modern, gray highlights over dancing clowns, trying to suggest that the whole play might largely be the fever-dream of a sick young woman. And so I felt obligated to neither the words nor the plot, the sets nor the actors, and laid back and let Verdi wash over me for two hours. It was perfect.

² About which I need not repeat if you know; if you do not know, you ought to hear it from him rather than me.

³ One of our party taught the bartender how to make dirty martinis. This seems to be an obscure drink out here. "Wait--you want me to put olive brine into a vodka martini. Are you sure?"

⁴ My host thought that American poppyseed use--sprinkled lightly for texture and decoration--is largely funny.

⁵ Remember that web search for "French Military Victories"? Hungarians will tell you that France has done far, far better than they have.

Quote of the Moment

Ladies and gentlemen, I am afraid my subject is rather an exciting one and as I don't like excitement, I shall approach it in a gentle, timid, roundabout way.
Max Beerbohm in a radio broadcast
Quoted in "The Roots of Coincidence", by Arthur Koestler

Book Review: "Wonder Boys" by Michael Chabon

I've mentioned before Michael Chabon, and my astounding discovery that he has a website. This reminded me to buy more of his books. For these long international flights, I bought his earler "Wonder Boys." I don't love it the way I love Kavalier, but I certainly resepct it: it's delightfully written, and--while a little brutal--definitely entertaining. It lasted me from Los Angeles to London (including sleep time), London to Vienna, and a jetlagged evening or two after I landed.

Chabon is worth reading, though, for his astounding use of language. I give you this excerpt, when the narrator is in a creative writing class at Berkeley. Dry of ideas, he's just rewritten a plot of the Lovecraftian pulp-fiction author who used to live upstairs of his flat. He has just realized that a classmate of his has plagiarized exactly the same text. First he reconstructs his story:

After a couple of tests on hapless household pets, which he injured and then restored, our man persuaded his crippled little sister to to lie in the sarcophagus and thus heal her poliomyeletic legs, whereupon she was transformed, somewhat inexplicably as I recalled, into an incarnation of Yshtaxta, a succubus from a distant galaxy who forced the hero to lie with her--Van Zorn's genre permitted a certain raciness, as long as the treatment as grotesque and euphemistic--and then, having drained the life force from the unlucky hero, set out to take on the rest of the town, or so I had always imagined, half hoping that a luminous ten-foot woman with fangs and immortal cravings might appear sometime at my own window in the most lonely hour of the Pennsylvanian night.

I handed my story to the professor, and he began to read, in his manner that was flat and dry as ranchland and as filled with empty space. I've never been able to decide if it was his tedious way of reading, or the turgid unpunctuated labyrinthine senteces of Mocknapatawpha prose with which he was forced to contend, or the total over-the-top incomprehensiblity of my demysticized, hot-hot-sexy finale, composed in ten minutes after forty-six hours without sleep, but, in the end, nobody noticed that it was essentially the same story as Crabtree's. The professor finished, and looked at me with an expression at once sad and benedictory, as if he were envisioning the fine career I was to have as a wire-and-cable salesman. Those who had fallen asleep roused themselves, and a brief, dispirited discussion followed, during which the professor allowed that my writing showedf "undeniable energy."