There is a growing tendency amongst some Twitter users to "tweet" while they drive. I myself have occasionally succumbed to this temptation. Therefore I am posting the following cautionary tale about driving and tweeting.
I originally submitted this (true) story to Chiff & Fipple, where it was published in their July 14th, 2001 newsletter (entitled "Chiff & Fipple to Host 2008 Olympic Games"). Unfortunately it no longer appears to be available, so…
VII. JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO SUCK
Dear Dale,
I stumbled across your web site today while seeking (surprise, surprise) a way to reduce the moisture build up in my Burke whistle (it had been great for about six months, but then...). The business card is about ready to be soaped as we speak.
However I thought you might be interested in a new danger I discovered while whistling in traffic the other day. (Whistling in traffic is an old danger). I keep a Clarke whistle in the car's sun visor, and have a habit of pulling it out a red lights or traffic jams--I usually manage to put it back before starting up again. (The Clarke whistle is really good for this, because it's tapered, it's much easier to slide into the visor's pocket very quickly when the light changes.) So last week I'm sitting in traffic, and there's a tune on the CD player I really want to try playing along with, so I pull down the whistle and start to play. All that comes out are squeaks.
"How odd," I think. Moisture seems unlikely, but I give it a big blow anyway. No difference. I turn the whistle around and blow the other way. Still no difference. So I'm sitting there staring at the finger holes, when I see a little ball roll by. I have a moment to wonder how (and why) one of my daughters had managed to stick a ball in a whistle that tapers down at the end, when I noticed that the ball had legs--lots of them.
The next few moments were not pretty. There was a lot of yelling, and waving the whistle violently out of the window, and my daughter in the back seat was extremely confused. It didn't help that the light changed to green just about then as well. All I could think was how normally I suck to clear moisture.
When I got back home, there was no sign of the spider, but the web still remains. It's a tough little thing, and I need to find a stick small and long enough to clear it out.
So next time you pull that whistle out of anything other than a whistle bag--check it first!
Kee Hinckley - Somewhere.Com
Dale writes: I read this account with a combination of the requisite horror and morbid fascination. This is because it is a part of whistle folklore that Clarkes have been known to house spiders. One can only presume it is related to the wooden fipple. In any case, this is the first credible account I've received. Sleep tight.
Next issue, we'll look into the legend that Generation whistles often contain toads.
Disney World in general is nothing but a big ad, with the lowest point probably being the ABC cafe in MGM, where you are subjected to mediocre food and hundreds of television sets that do nothing but advertise ABC television shows. (Which my 11yr old summed up as "Bad comedy, kissing, and guns.")
But Epcot has the hardest job. It's supposed to remain on the cutting edge of the future. I was reading a science fiction novel recently in which "cutting", as in "cutting edge" had become slang for "old fashioned"—I can believe it. But the Innoventions section, although it has some fun stuff to do, basically has very little that you wouldn't find in someone's living room. IBM was there advertising ViaVoice—a product I tried out at least three years ago. There were some heads-up displays and videogames made larger, but nothing awe-inspiring.
The most ironic moment came as I was sitting in a quiet spot working on my laptop. Periodically this guy would trundle by pushing a "robot" supposedly being taken somewhere for repairs. He and the robot were having some ongoing banter over something. This was supposed to be a glimpse of the future of course. But as I watched him, a tourist walked by apparently talking to his coffee mug (he had a bluetooth cell phone headset on, but the mug was at his mouth), and a Disney employee zipped by on a Segway. The guy pushing the robot on a two-wheeled lift looked positively cutting.
Originally posted on commons.somewhere.com/buzz, February 2004.
I originally wrote this for my online "'zine" called Buzz, hosted on commons.somewhere.com. That was in November of 2000, right after the Florida election fiasco. Although the specifics of that election are dated, the general information is not. This is about polls, how newspapers report them, and how our need for instant results just makes things worse.
"Margin of error" is a measurement of how confident you can be of a statistical result. My stats books have long since been relegated to a box in the basement, but if you want more specifics, try this link (http://whyfiles.org/009poll/math_primer.html).
The primary influence on the margin of error is the size of the sample, but methodology can also have an impact, although it generally isn't measurable until you discover just how wrong you were after the fact. That's what happened in the famous Dewey vs. Truman example (they polled via telephone, and people who had telephones at the time turned out to be a rather different group of people than the general population). Methodology problems also explain what went wrong with the predictions of who was going to win the 2000 presidential election in Florida, and why web-based polls (sell-selecting sample) are completely bogus. Of course, if enough people start refusing to answer pollsters, all polls will be self-selecting and invalid.
The problem is that, although pollsters report margin of error, newspapers seldom give them more than a footnote. So this year we've seen a lot of headlines like "XXX Takes the Lead" followed by an article that tells how the candidate is now two percentage points ahead, followed by something (buried deep inside) mentioning that the margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points. Let's be perfectly clear. If the difference in the polls is within the margin of error, then there is no difference. None. Any headline to the contrary is making up something that doesn't exist. If you did the poll again it might well show XXX losing by two points--and that wouldn't mean anything either.
But of course, margin of error in polls is a pretty trivial problem compared to margin of error in vote taking machinery. The reports I've seen (sorry, I've lost the reference) say that these lovely punch card machines are, when working absolutely optimally with absolutely wonderfully punched cards, 99.9% accurate. That sounds nice, until we consider that the machines in use throughout polling machines in this country are almost certainly not in optimal condition, and we know for a fact that the cards weren't well punched either. On top of it all, 99.9% sounds nice, but the results of the Florida elections were so close that the difference between the candidates was less than .1%. Or in other words, the difference was within the margin of error of the counting machines. Which means, just like in polling, the difference is statistically insignificant. It doesn't mean anything. Do it again and you might get a different result. However, in this case the errors tend towards a particular type. Punch card voting machines have trouble with partially poked holes--they think nobody voted. This isn't necessarily because the voter screwed up either--you can poke the things and the chad still might not separate properly. So that biases the results in a particular direction.
So, we have a vote that is so close that it is statistically a tie. You can either treat it that way, or you can try and decrease the margin of error. That's what hand counting is all about. The real good news is you don't have to hand count every single vote. All you need to count are the ones that the voting machine rejected as being possibly in error. Voting machines don't tend to count unpunched holes as punched (and if they did, you'd get multiple votes--so those will be flagged as errors anyway). So by counting just a few (relatively speaking) votes, you can greatly increase the accuracy of the count, and thus decrease the margin of error. Meaning that even if the results are still off by a few hundred votes--now you have confidence that those votes actually represent the will of the people.
BTW. If punch cards are so inaccurate, how come computers used them so easily? Two reasons. One, you didn't punch computer punch cards by hand--you used a special machine. You'd enter the data for a card, and then it punches out the holes. Secondly, computer punch cards, in recognition of the fact that you can have errors, tended to use a checksum to help ensure that if something did go wrong with a card, you'd notice. (An example checksum might be a parity bit--where a hole would be punched at the end if the result of adding the numbers on the card was even, and not if it was odd. If a hole became clogged, or the chad fell out, the checksum would not be likely to match, and the card would be rejected.)
So, what was that about instant gratification?
Some people (primarily pundits and candidates) have been making much of urgency to bring the election to resolution as soon as possible. This sounds reasonable because we are used to our election results being announced nearly as soon as the polls close (and sometimes before). But in fact, the whole concept is silly. The elections are not over until the electoral college has made its decision. But even before that, as people are finally seeing in the Florida situation, there are three levels of "results" from an election. There are the polls, there are the unofficially tallies (often made by some organization jointly formed by the two major parties), and then there are the official tallies that the state certifies. You virtually never see the official tallies. That's particularly frustrating if you are trying to form a viable third party, since the unofficial tallies often don't even bother to count minor candidates. (Quick, how many votes did the Socialist Party get nationwide?) A few years ago I voted for a third party candidate for governor and I was never able to find out how many votes he received. By the time the official results were available, nobody considered it news--so the press never reported it. So far this election has taken no longer than any other election has ever taken. It's just that this time people actually want to know what the real results are, not just the fast food version.
My father's words teach me not to write or share all information about my people, my family, my life. It is not wise to divulge all knowledge, for once given, it no longer is ours. We protect our lives by not giving information. It is one method of survival.
Diane Bird, Santa Domingo Pueblo
from part of a presentation in the Santa Fe Museum of ???
I came upon those words at a museum exhibit in Santa Fe shortly after visiting the Taos Pueblo. If you read the history of the Pueblo people you realize that this is a truth that they have known for hundreds of years. Long before the "information age," the Pueblo people knew that their knowledge was the key to their survival against intruders. Later in the week we visited Mesa Verde, once home to Anasazi ("ancient ones"). Our guide was Pueblo, and he happily detailed all of the anthropological theories about who the Anasazi were, how they lived, and what they used the various rooms for. But ask him for his own theories, as someone who grew up in a home very much like this one, with the same construction, the same kivas, the same ancestors, and he would shake his head, tap his brow, and say only, "Think about it. These were people like you and me. What would you do?". Information is not something to be handed out freely; then or now.
Originally published in my Buzz 'zine on commons.somewhere.com, August 23, 1998.
I originally wrote this in January of 2004 but never got around to posting it. Unfortunately, it seems to be just as relevant now. As Bruce Schneier says, we spend a lot of time and money (and fear) on "movie plot" security. The point of terrorism is to inspire fear. I suspect the terrorists have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
Today I dropped my laptop off at the Junior High (excuse me, "Middle School") so my daughter could make a presentation in Science class. (Yes, they have computers there, but they are these Windows things that don't meet my daughter's standards for design or elegance.) The plan was simple. I'd go in, meet her at the classroom between periods, give her the laptop, and return at the end of the period to pick it up. (It's my primary machine, I'm not going to leave it with her for the whole day.) I was going to drop it off at the office, but she suggested that I go in the back door. I pointed out that it was locked. She said to knock on the classroom window or wait until someone came out. I said I thought the front door might be a better idea.
Well, the best laid plans.... I was talking to a neighbor just before I left, and she told me I'd better get a hall pass. Seems that last Halloween a parent went to a class party (with the teacher's consent) dressed as a gangster, complete with a wooden gun. On the way out after class, someone asked him if he had a hall pass, he told them he was just leaving. A janitor followed him, someone called the police, he seemed to be driving towards another school (kind of hard not to do that in our town), there was a lockdown there and the police arrested him and took him to jail.
So I decided to play things by the book. I went in the front door to ask for a pass.
"May I help you?"
"Yes, I'd like to take this bag down to my daughter's science class, she needs it for the next period."
"Nooo, may I help you?"
Well, that was kind of a weird response. So I tried again. This time she actually explained. No, I couldn't go to the classroom. I'd have to leave it in the office. So I left it in the office, with a note to my daughter telling her she should bring it back to the office after class. They then called the classroom my daughter was currently in, interrupting the teacher, to tell him to have my daughter come to the office after class. (I'm told that the phone often rings four or five times in the classrooms in a single class—who's brilliant idea was that? When notes had to be delivered in person, they got prioritized.)
Ironically, this was in fact my original plan, but I'd rejected it when my daughter suggested going straight to the classroom, because I realized that between getting her stuff out of her locker, and coming to the office, there was no way she was going to make it in the four minutes they allot between classes.
An hour later I returned to the office, explained to a different person there that I was waiting for my daughter to return the laptop, and waited in the office. When the bell (tone) rang, I went and stood in the hall. Being on edge from all this concern about me, I carefully stood where they could see me from the window, so they'd know I wasn't going anywhere. All was going swimmingly until Baltimore (sorry, very obscure song reference there). I said "Hi" to a few students I knew, nodded to a teacher of two. Then the assistant principal showed up.
"Do you have pass?"
"No, I'm just waiting for my daughter."
"You need to check in to the office."
"I did. They know."
"You need to wait in the office. I hope you appreciate our security."
Well, no, as a matter of fact, I didn't appreciate it at all. That's like the record companies encrypting the CD as a "service" to the customer. But anyway, I kept my mouth shut... that time.
So she escorted me ten feet to the office door and inside. She then attempted to explain to the office person what I was doing there (we both told her we already knew—what, she doesn't hear a word I say?) The office person asked what classes my daughter was between, I explained, she said that meant she'd be passing from the stairwell to the auditorium. I agreed. That, I said, was why I'd been waiting where I could watch for her.
Well, at this point the assistant principal spoke up again. I don't remember the exact words, but it was to the same effect as before. That I should be glad that they were providing this level of security for my children.
I told her that she didn't want to get in a discussion with me about paranoia and security.
So of course, she did.
This wasn't paranoia, she said. These days you needed to provide tighter security.
I told her that I didn't like bringing up my kids in this kind of environment.
She agreed, but said that that was just the way we had to do it because of the times we lived in.
I said a few more things, but rather than paraphrase them quickly, let me state them here more clearly.
These are not dangerous times!
Americans are safer now than ever before in history. Not because of recent increased "security", but because of general changes in our society, and in the world as a whole. (Surprise, surprise. The world as a whole is generally better too—could be even better if we'd stop treating enemies of enemies as friends, and start thinking about them as people rather than governments, but that's a topic for another missive.)
Hijaackings? School bombings? Kidnappings? Firebombings? Groups planning the overthrow of the government? Hidden cells plotting acts of terrorism against citizens and buildings? Those aren't things that are happening now. Those are things that happened frequently in the 50's, 60's and 70's. Has everybody forgotten all the hijacked airplanes to Cuba? Ransome threats? The SLA? Bombed churches and schools? This isn't recent stuff, this is old news. We didn't get paranoid then. Why are we paranoid now?
And the paranoia isn't healthy. Our government is attempting to declare U.S. citizens to be enemy combatants with no rights at all. That barely makes sense if they are found fighting in a foreign country against us. But we're talking about U.S. citizens captured in the the United States, with no evidence that they ever took any action against the U.S.. And we've tens of millions of citizens that think this is a legitimate power for the government to have! Has everyone forgotten J. Edgar Hoover and doctored evidence? Has everyone forgotten Nixon and the breakins? McCarthy? Those were people who had absolutely no qualms about faking evidence against their enemies. What could possibly persuade someone to give that kind of unaccountable power to our government? We have proof that given secrecy and power, our government officials will eventually abuse it. And yet we want to give them more secrecy and more power?
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-01-12-code-orange-cover_x.htm "Of the 14,000 names that were examined during the alert, there were 300 such "hits," the counterterrorism official says. None turned out to be a terrorist, the official says." False positives that high are very bad, not only do they make the system a huge annoyance (that's a very small number of people checked—imagine checking an entire airport) but after awhile you stop taking the reports seriously.
And then we have the fake security. Take checking names of incoming foreign nationals. It's not like we're doing it secretly, such that we might catch someone by surprise. Out in the open we are doing name checks that have over a 2% false positive rate (in other words, 2 out of every 100 people matches a terrorist and gets shunted aside, or taken off the plane, or causes the flight to be canceled). And who will this catch? Any known terrorist who has the idiotic lack of sense to travel into the U.S. on a passport in his own name. Now how difficult do you think that is to bypass?
But, you say. This is all different. It calls for extreme measures.
What is different? Terrorism in the U.S.? Hardly. Domestic terrorism has been a problem in this country since its founding. I didn't see anyone asking Christian ministers to stand-up and condemn the bombing of the Federal Building by a Christian. Foreign terrorism isn't new either. We have a family friend who was assassinated in a New Jersey parking lot. He was a high profile Bahai, and someone had him hunted down and killed. This isn't even the first time the World Trade Center was attacked—we didn't panic the first time that happened.
America is a very safe place to live. The problem is, the safer we get, the more we jump at shadows and worry about little things. This time we got hit with a big and successful attack. Our government has deliberately taken advantage of our fear to take steps that give the government more power, and the citizens less power and less freedom. One common misperception they've pushed, and I think it is more from self-delusion than a deliberate attempt to mislead, is that there is some danger of an attack on the American infrastructure. The World Trade Center was hardly a piece of American infrastructure. It was a symbol of American capitalism and of American arrogance (in the sense that it was an attempt to show off by building higher for the sake of building higher). It was attacked because, like almost all terrorism, this is a battle over ideas and a way of life (and democracy isn't the issue, so much as capitalism and democracy without moral direction). The Golden Gate bridge isn't a symbol of America, and so it's not a likely target. Killing lots of people by spreading nuclear fallout isn't the kind of thing that gets viewed as a move against foreign oppression. Domestic terrorists, fighting what they believe to be an internal war for control, attack that kind of thing. But this is a battle of symbols and press. If you want to look for targets of external terrorism, then look to things that symbolize the worst of the United States to the rest of the world.
But don't look to the local Junior High.
There is absolutely no reason for paranoid security at a middle school. Abductions haven't been suddenly climbing—they've been steadily declining, even before tightened security. Kids aren't innocent of the outside world, they are more aware. And Osama Bin Ladin is not going to try and take out the local Middle School. Furthermore, if some guy with a gun walks into the school and starts shooting the kids, forcing every parent (and even substitute teachers) to wear little badges is not going to slow him down one second. And if he really wants to be stealthy, is the work of a few minutes to make a fake badge that would escape all but the closest scrutiny. Finally, because it's a silly requirement, and because everyone knows in their heart that it's a not a big deal—it doesn't get treated as real. I spoke to half a dozen kids, nodded to several teachers. Did any one of them comment on the fact that I didn't have a badge? No. Not the teachers, the administrators or the kids. Not the ones who knew me, or the ones who didn't.
So what are we teaching in our schools? We're teaching people to be afraid and at the same time, that they should ignore authority. Silly rules breed disrespect. At first it's just disrespect of the silly rules. But it spreads. You stop having respect for the people who made them. And then you stop taking the sensible rules seriously. And throughout all of it is this general sense of fear. You're told that things are dangerous, but you can see that nothing real is being done about it. Either you stop believing anything they say, or you start believing you have no control over your future.
None of those things are lessons I want my kids to learn. And I'd far rather have them take their chances in the real world, than live behind a barrier of lies and half-truths.
So no. I don't appreciate security that manifests itself as distrust and lack of respect for parents and students, without providing any real security. And I'm appalled that people can look at the present and be so frightened, having completely forgotten that the past was much worse.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke wasn't just a "futurist" who wrote about possibilities. He was an integral part of the community which made our global society possible. His first novel, Glide Path, was based on his WWII experiences using radar for the first time as a means to help aircraft land. And most appropriately, he was the first person to realize the potential power of planting a satellite at 35,780km and using it for communications.
But Clarke's fiction wasn't about science and technology. Like the best science fiction authors, he merely used those to talk about what it meant to human. His focus was on communities, on the importance of understanding our own planet, and on reaching our greatest potential as human beings without forgetting that we have a responsibility to all life on this planet.
The best obituary you can offer him is to go and read one of his books. Or better yet, give one to a child to read.
I find it fascinating (and appropriate) to watch the remembrances as they wend their way through the time zones. Here is a sampling (via Tweet Scan).
vinta : Arthur C. Clarke 死掉了啊<<(2008-03-19 12:46:05)
carloshotta : 2a. lei de #Clarke: "A única maneira de descobrir os limites do possível é passá-los um pouco na direção do impossível." <<(2008-03-19 12:38:40)
jaysolo : Still haven't posted even a small bit about Clarke, but the whole world did that for me and little to add. <<(2008-03-19 12:38:33)
djgotga : Los grandes artistas y literatos se van siempre en triadas: Gary Gygax - Anthony Minghella - Arthur C. Clarke. <<(2008-03-19 12:33:02)
niklasgv : "Aún tiene que probarse que la inteligencia tenga algún valor para la supervivencia." (Arthur C. Clarke 1917-2008) <<(2008-03-19 12:21:48)
ourfounder : March is taking community thought leaders. Gygax and A.C. Clarke. Sigh. An obit for A.C. would require much wordsmithing. Or be a limerick. <<(2008-03-19 12:17:05)
yurusuke : "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." by Arthur C. Clarke <<(2008-03-19 12:14:08)
argent_bury : Another one of my memetic ancestors has passed away. Rest in peace, Mr. Clarke. Without you, I would not be here. <<(2008-03-19 11:47:20)
PragueBob : Arthur C. Clarke has died. I mourn his passing as one of the most inspiring authors of my youth. Another satellite is in the heavens tonight <<(2008-03-19 11:44:47)
brandonw : Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday. His "Childhood's End" was the first real novel I ever read. <<(2008-03-19 11:45:41)
LPI_Library : In library catalogs Clarke, Arthur Charles, 1917- is now Clarke, Arthur C. (Arthur Charles), 1917-2008. http://tinyurl.com/ypz6wt<<(2008-03-19 11:46:41)
Merras : Arthur C. Clarke blogkörkép: http://tinyurl.com/29be29 - ha valaki tud még ide ajánlani postokat, dobjon nekem mailt: merras@sfportal.hu <<(2008-03-19 11:29:29)
teledyn : The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. (Arthur C Clarke) <<(2008-03-19 11:17:51)
titanas : Πέθανε ο Arthur C. Clarke <<(2008-03-19 10:43:28)
oliver : Folllowing @adrianh call: today is Arthur C Clarke avatar day. <<(2008-03-19 10:40:35)
monkchips : @Blag no i love my red avatar. but arthur c clarke died, and we're giving him a shout out. avatars need not be static, any more than we are. <<(2008-03-19 10:42:00)
widgetapps : Thank you Arthur C Clarke, you will be missed! <<(2008-03-19 10:12:58)
elinwang : Arthur C. Clarke (1917 -2008, English Physicist & Science Fiction Author) formulated three "laws" of prediction: <<(2008-03-19 10:11:07)
elinwang : Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008, English physicist Science fiction author) <<(2008-03-19 10:06:01)
greenideas : gary gygax, and now arthur c. clarke. it's a rough month for geek heroes. <<(2008-03-19 10:01:21)
awerner : A.C. Clarke once denigrated religion as "a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species." R.I.P. <<(2008-03-19 09:58:15)
niklasgv : Obituarios en The Guardian: sobre el director de cine Minghella y sobre el escritor Clarke <<(2008-03-19 09:57:28)
pipperl : Retweeting @tmas68: Watching: BBC NEWS | UK | Writer Arthur C Clarke dies at 90。2001太空漫遊的原作者Arthur C Clarke 逝世。http://tinyurl.com/2qbwgo<<(2008-03-19 09:54:20)
Technoir : so I told a group of coworkers last night that Arthur C. Clarke had died. They asked me who that was. Almost made me want to cry. <<(2008-03-19 08:58:22)
TeeMonster : @steppek: Yeah....pretty freakin' creepy moment...I love my tech, but Clarke is always present, you know? <<(2008-03-19 08:50:31)
Daranifer : Anscheinend ist Arthur C. Clarke ex gegangen. Die Blogs quellen über. <<(2008-03-19 08:46:42)
lawboop : Arthur C. Clarke had his Rendevous With Rama today. Greg Boop <<(2008-03-19 08:43:57)
avyuro : Thank you Sir Clarke for so many wonderful dreams. <<(2008-03-19 08:42:15)
oedenfield : “A Short Pre-History of Comsats, Or: How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time”. Sadly, Arthur C. Clarke died. NYT has a good sto ... <<(2008-03-19 08:26:48)
aliengirlbr : Arthur C. Clarke, descanse em paz!! <<(2008-03-19 08:24:16)
randomquotes : "He was a rigorous extrapolator of what we know to what we don't know." Unknown tribute to Sir Arthur C. Clarke. <<(2008-03-19 07:53:27)
skyadv : painful day, today we lost the big one, the Master, a thinker interested in the future of the humanity Arthur C. Clarke we will miss you =(( <<(2008-03-19 07:53:43)
simplyarun : "How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean." - Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 19 March 2008) <<(2008-03-19 07:42:00)
markiddon : I'm so upset that Arthur C Clarke is dead. One of my biggest heroes and an inspiration throughout my childhood. Very sad news. <<(2008-03-19 07:22:49)
asesino : "Sir Arthur Charles Clarke" かぁ。今後は Wikipedia にあった「ナイトの称号」という言葉が気になる。Japones には関係ないか... <<(2008-03-19 07:21:52)
deantenea : addio Arthur Clarke... che moria 'sto mese. <<(2008-03-19 07:17:28)
madd0 : RIP Arthur C. Clarke. how cool is it however that Wikipedia is already up to date? http://is.gd/2mI not long ago this would've been sci-fi! <<(2008-03-19 07:11:28)
melissa_bxl : Ai-je dis que j'étais triste de la mort d'Arthur C. Clarke? Un de mes auteurs de S-F préféré! <<(2008-03-19 07:09:26)
JJFlash : Nel frattempo tramite @Bander apprendo della morte di Arthur C. Clarke. Molto molto dispiaciuto. <<(2008-03-19 07:05:41)
aribadler : RIP Arthur C. Clarke - you've begun your final odyssey... <<(2008-03-19 06:48:14)
weas : Arthur C. Clarke la ha palmado. Tenía ochocientos años o así, pero aún era un grande... <<(2008-03-19 06:08:24)
SuperErnie : Rob wilde nog vragen of ze Clarke had ontmoet (want dat had ze) maar er was geen tijd meer, zonde <<(2008-03-19 05:56:56)
Cryolite: Clarke 大先生なら「お疲れ様でした」って笑顔で送り出せるよね．今，仮に ( あくまでもしもの話ね！ ) 某 K 大先生がくたばったりでもしたら「テメー！ The Art of ナントカ書き終わるまでは絶対逝かせねーぞ！」っていってあっちから全力で連れ戻してく ... <<(2008-03-19 05:42:25)
"Backchannel" communication mechanisms like Twitter are going to revolutionize everything from meetings and classrooms, to our day-to-day relationships… but first we have to learn to deal with them appropriately. At SXSW, the Twitter backchannel turned an audience into a mob. The session leaders, not having access to the backchannel, had no idea what was happening, or why the mood of the audience had changed so rapidly.
I am not going to make any comments here about whether it was a good interview, bad interview, inappropriate topic, inappropriate people… that's not the point of this article, nor do I think it was really the reason why the audience at SXSW got so upset. Please keep any comments on topic, and away from the details of the interview. In particular, keep in mind that this was not the only session at SXSW that ended up with an audience verbally attacking the panelists and taking over the session.
At the SXSW Keynote interview, an audience of conference-goers acted unusually; they became a mob. I mean that in the sense (as Dave Winer does in his "Twitter is not a chatroom" podcast) of a crowd out of control—a crowd doing things that individuals would not. This is the kind of behavior generally seen at political events; or meetings where the audience is emotionally tied to the subject matter. An interview or panel that seems off-topic usually gets a few walk-outs and a bad rating in the "What can we do better next year?" survey; not an audience revolt. I find that very interesting, and I have some ideas as to why it may have occurred.
“Where are the yellow comment cards?” - 51 minutes
In the nineteen-sixties, psychologist Stanley Milgram ran a series of experiments which are probably familiar to anyone who has taken Psychology 101. He asked subjects to inflict pain on a person when that person made a mistake on a test. A number of interesting results came out of the experiment, but one variation in particular is relevant here. The willingness to administer shocks increased when the recipient was more remote. It's hard to de-humanize someone who is right next to you. On the other hand, if you can't see them, and don't know them, your emotional attachment is greatly reduced, and you will do (and say) things you would never do in person. This isn't news to anyone who has been involved in an email flame-fest, or posted something online that later got quoted face-to-face. We say things online that we would never say in real life.
“sarah lacey is in love with zuckerberg, me thinks”- 11 minutes
“someone offering me $20 to yell "Beacon Sucks". paying for my night of drinking if I do. I definitely should.”- 17 minutes
“Someone just yelled out, "BEACON SUCKS!" - yes, that's how this is going...u should be here :)”- 18 minutes “Holy cow, whoever this is interviewing Mark is horrible! I think she is in love with him. Hold on...she might go in for the kiss!" - 20 minutes
Mobs form when individuals feel anonymous, and believe that their feelings and behaviors are shared by others. When the behavior becomes visible, and when nobody reacts negatively to it, the behavior gets amplified, with more and more people joining in. But why would this happen in a technical conference on a relatively unexciting keynote topic?
The blame, of course, has fallen on Twitter, because it was through Twitter messages that the revolt first began to appear. More and more, services like Twitter are being used as "backchannel" communications mechanisms by which the audience can provide non-interruptive feedback to each other, and to the people running the event. In this case, the people running the keynote obviously weren't tracking the backchannel (perhaps "sidechannel" would be more accurate in that instance). Rationally, there's no reason to get frustrated that your Twitter comments are being "ignored" by someone whom you know isn't reading them, but frustration probably did play a role here as well.
One thing that wasn't clear to me in the discussions about the keynote, was whether the Twitter phenomenon was "real", or whether it was just the result of a lot of posts by a few (prolific) individuals. So I decided to see if I could gather up a collection of all the Twitter messages sent from the keynote, during the keynote.
There's a detailed methodology section at the end, but this is the quick summary.
Searched for all users who mentioned "SXSW" between Thursday and Sunday the week of the conference.
Searched for all users who mentioned "facebook", "lacy", "zuck" or "keynote" within a few hours of the event.
Manually narrowed down the resulting 4000 messages.
The final result was nearly 2000 Twitter messages, sent by 500 users. I know that some of the messages I included were irrelevant, and I'm sure I missed others. But overall, that comes to an average of close to one message every two seconds! There is no question that backchannel communications were very active during the keynote.
It is my belief that what happened was a combination of standard mob behavior with the side-effects of the behavior observed by Milgram. People sent messages, using the usual level of rudeness that occurs in electronic communication. Those messages were read by people also at the keynote. As the level of vitriol rose in the twittersphere, it also fed back into the people in the crowd. "Surrounded" by other people feeling the same way, the animosity and feeling of anonymity moved from the virtual world into the real world; and a virtual mob turned into a real one.
Is that what really happened? It's impossible to say for sure. Twitter is not a real-time protocol, and people take time to type messages, so it was impossible to directly connect a particular message to a particular time during the talk. Also, there is no way to tell who in the audience saw the messages (or heard about them from a seat-mate who did).
What I have done, is gather up the Twitter messages from the keynote, and overlay them directly on a video of the interview. I used the video posted on Viddler by allfacebook. It cuts off somewhere near the end, but was the most complete version I could find.
The following video is annotated with all the Twitter messages I collected. In some cases you'll have to pause to read them, since they go by too quickly. I grouped together any posts that occurred within one second of each other to make it a little easier to scan. Since I saw apparent lags of up to fourteen minutes between what some tweets described and what happened, I finally settled on a five minute lag for all tweets. So keep in mind that the tweets do not directly correspond to the current scene in the video, and two adjacent tweets were not necessarily written, sent, or recorded at the same time.
Because this version of the video is hosted at Viddler, you can not only comment on my blog, you can also make comments in the video, attaching them to particular frames. Please feel free to do so.
The Annotated Video
Note: The annotations will be easier to read if you expand the video to full size (click in the upper right hand corner of the video).
The Annotated Data
The following charts show the relationships between messages ("tweets"), users, content and time. I have actually done a minimal amount of analysis. Most of my time was spent filtering the data and annotating the video. If someone wants to examine things some more, I'd be happy to turn over the data and my (very) motley collection of Perl scripts.
The charts are all plotted against time, usually expressed as HH:MM and sometimes just MM. All values are the sum of the activity over a minute, or in some cases, five minutes.
Number of Messages Sent and Number of Users
The blue area shows the total number of messages being sent each minute. The red area shows the total number of new users (i.e. those who haven't previously sent a message). I actually have not spent much time examining what happens in the video vs. what happens in the tweets. Does something interesting happen around 45 minutes to cause a spike, or is that a conincidence?
The final total was 512 users and 1857 messages.
First and Last Sending Times (With Count) Per User
The following two charts (attempt to) provide a view of how often and how long people were posting messages. I could have done a standard mean/median/mode chart, but I wanted to include the start and stop times. In both charts the vertical axis represents the time at which someone sent their first message, and the horizontal axis indicates when they sent their last message. (So the diagonal line represents people who only sent one message.) The first chart uses the size of the bubble to indicate how many messages the person sent. The second chart uses the color of the square.
The most messages sent was 65 (by three people). A quick check indicated that the frequent posts seemed to be from people providing a running report on what was happening.
Frequency of Top 50 Words over Time
You'll probably want to click on the image and view the PDF version.
This chart shows how often each word appeared during a given five minute period. The most common words appear on the right. For instance, we can see that the words "audience", "people" and "crowd" grow in popularity over time; probably indicating that people were tweeting about the behavior of the audience as the interview progressed.
Frequency of Top 50 Words by User over Time
This chart addresses the question of whether the messages were being sent by just a few people, or many. Here the value for each five minute period is the number of people who used a word. Where the previous chart counted all instances of a word, even if used multiple times by a single user; this counts only one use per user. The chart appears very similar to the previous one, indicating that the use of the top fifty words was quite wide-spread.
Top 50 Words, Total Frequency, and by User
Like the previous chart, but showing just the totals. The red bars indicate the number of people who used a given word. The blue bars indicate the total number of times the word was used. Again, the usage appear to be fairly evenly distributed.
Conclusion
The Twitter transcript makes it clear that there was an early and constant stream of negative comments flowing from a large number of senders. The lack of accurate timing information makes it impossible to tell for certain whether that was something that started small and spread, or exactly how it erupted into real life. However, it is clear that the conversations in Twitter did lead to the same level of real life behavior and dialog. While it could just be attributed to the general decline of societal mores, I believe my original assertion as to the connection and influence of the virtual and real worlds is potentially valid. It would be interesting to see a more detailed and rigorous study of future events. (Sounds like a good Sociology/Psychology/Anthropology thesis for someone. :-)
Twitter provides a communication channel which augments, rather than interrupts, existing communications. As such, it makes it possible for people to communicate both within a group, and (in structured events) to the leaders of a group, all without disrupting the normal progress of the activity. If that sounds like too much for a panel discussion or interviewer to manage, consider that most reporters in traditional media (not to mention football quarterbacks) have similar mechanisms for receiving information while they work. Whether increased multitasking is a good thing from a quality standpoint is a different issue. For that, look at the research that Howard Rheingold has been doing in the areas of multitasking and backchannels.
The Twitter backchannel can definitely have a positive influence. As a remote observer of SXSW I was not only able to receive ongoing summaries of sessions, but I could suggest questions for attendees to ask, and provide resources to panelists while they were in an active session. The backchannel can provide a low-key mechanism for alerting presenters to issues, offering support, and of course organizing and coordinating group actions. The issue, is how to keep group actions from growing out of control. I believe that requires education (or perhaps just a new generation of users) about the differences between virtual and real communication, and the dangers of transporting emotions directly from one to the other. I believe it also requires responsibility on the part of backchannel spectators.
There is a tendency in online discussions to let flames burn themselves out. After all, it's the virtual world, not the real one. "Getting involved" can be a pain. But as the SXSW events show, the boundaries between real and virtual get thinner every year, and virtual emotions can cause real-world harm. I greatly admire Sarah Lacy's ability to deal with the abuse she has gotten and move on. A reporter has to have a tough skin, but it still can't have been easy. She didn't deserve the abuse that was dished out on Twitter, let alone what happened in the auditorium.
As citizens of the online world, we have a responsibility to step forward when we see people misbehaving. It doesn't take much to tone things down. People need to be reminded that the target of their frustrations is a real person. They also need to be reminded that their persona, though virtual, has its own reputation to think about. The members of an online mob are in fact far less anonymous than those in a real mob. I was rather shocked when I happened to notice that one of the tweets I quoted above was actually made by someone I follow on Twitter. It was more sophomoric than mean, but it still contributed to the overall mood. Finding out who said what during the conference is a simple task for anyone with access to Google. We need to live our online lives under the assumption that everything we say, and everything we do, no matter how private it seems, is going to contribute to our overall reputation. That's a good thing, but it takes getting used to.
“So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children.” –– Jean Louise (Scout) Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird"
Finally, when we misbehave online (as we all invariably do at one time or another) we need to own up and apologize. Fortunately, the same attributes that make it easier to screw-up online, also make it easier to apologize online. You don't have to do it face to face, a quick tweet or email message works just fine. If you were at the SXSW keynote, you might consider that.
Predictions
This experience, and the past month that I've spent intensively using Twitter, have led me to a few beliefs about where this all is leading us.
The first one easy. Anyone who runs a conference, panel or large meeting without monitoring the backchannel is simply asking for trouble. Ironically, SXSW did have an official chatroom for the keynote, but that did not receive as much traffic, nor was it being monitored as a backchannel should be.
The second one is longer term. For several generations social networking on the computer has been derided as not having the depth or value of real life social interactions. Tools like Twitter (and Facebook), which blur the lines between work and home, important and trivial, and which deliberately create a malleable and ambiguous set of simple tools ("status", "poke", "what are you doing") are the primitive forerunners of what the next generation will take for granted. The always-on aspects will surely migrate to phones and become a constant part of our online life. The interfaces may be crude, but I am already more connected to the lives of people halfway across the world than I am with my next door neighbors. That knowledge extends from the trivial (I'd love to have dinner at Adam Engst's house, he cooks a lot of interesting stuff) to the critical (Susan Reynolds' fight with breast cancer has led to a wonderful support group and a great funding effort). It isn't a matter of not spending time with the neighbors, it's that I don't have a real-time, ongoing conversation with my neighbors day in and day out! The next generation is going to look back at pre-computer-mediated social interaction and say that we are the ones who had no depth in our relationships.
Methodology
Searched for all users who mentioned SXSW between Thursday and Sunday the week of the conference (4068). For this I used the Terraminds Twitter Search API with a filter for the correct dates.
Searched for all users who mentioned "facebook" (256), "lacy" (80), "keynote" (290) or "zuck" (111) between 1pm and 4pm on the day of the interview.
I then took the list of 4232 unique users from the previous searches, and gathered every message they posted between 2:05pm and 3:15pm. (I initially gathered more, but then narrowed it down to those times as my best guess for the start/end times of the interview, as well as the most likely lag time for tweets.) The Terraminds search doesn't do per-user searching, so I used Tweetscan. Tweetscan doesn't provide an API, so I screen scraped the results.
Narrowed down the resulting 3562 messages by splitting them into two groups. The first group matched the previously searched keywords (2039), the second did not (1523). I scanned the first group for messages that didn't look like they belonged (wrong topic, different session). I scanned the second for things that I might have missed. Those were quick scans and sloppy. The end result was to remove 66 entries and add 30.
I should note that there are several things I didn't do but could have. That includes searching for additional keywords, and also checking the communication chains. E.g. If user @a sent a message to @b, then I should check @b's messages as well. I also did not include the Meebo transcriptsin the results, although that would be easy to add.
The final result was 512 users and 1857 messages. (One user was removed in post-processing, when I realized that "twitgeistr" was a bot that simply reported on keywords that it found in the public stream.)
I then spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to subtitle the video, including attempts at two different sub-title formats. The final solution involved Final Cut Pro and programatically generated XML files that specified text-effect overlays with differing offsets depending on the number of lines. If anyone at Apple wants to write a bit more documentation on FCP XML files, and provide a few more examples, that would be just fine with me. The annotations have all @user references changed to "@", and all links replaced with "[LINK]". The data is public, but I see no reason to make it easy to embarrass individuals.
The keyword processing is also done with a Perl program. Lingua::StopWords was used to remove common English words from the list. Lingua::Stem was used to stem the words (e.g. make "improve", "improves" and "improved" all map to the same word). Stemming exceptions were made to ensure that the words in the top fifty were all spelled correctly (stemming programs don't really care if the result is a real word, only that the mapping is correct. "improves" normally gets stemmed to "improv"). In addition, I added some other common mappings. "sarah", and "lacey" both map to "lacy". "mark", "zuck", "z" and "zuckerburg" all map to "zuckerberg". "fb" maps to "facebook", and so on. I also added some additional stop words. I tossed "just", "like", "now", "can", "go", "got" and a number of other words that were very common but which didn't really carry any emotional content.
The same Perl program generated the XML files, as well as a set of tab-separated data files for processing by DeltaGraph. DeltaGraph is a very powerful charting software (particularly if you are dealing with data sets with missing data), but some better (dare I say, "prettier"?) defaults and an updated UI wouldn't hurt.
If anyone is feeling particularly masochistic, I would be happy to package the whole mess up and make it available for download. Let me know.
Postscript
All the data gathering and analysis here were done by myself and for that, and any of the errors that are inevitable in such a rushed project, I am solely responsible. However, I'd like to thank a few people who contributed, knowingly or unknowingly.
Howard Rheingold is doing some very interesting work on backchannels and multitasking. His tweets on the daily progress of his Virtual Communities/Social Media class are quite interesting and relevant to this discussion.
At a recent Boston Tweetup someone from the SOURCEBoston group suggested that I do a word analysis; a suggestion which added several days to the project, but was definitely worth it. Unfortunately I don't remember who it was, let alone their name.
Also at the Boston Tweetup, Dmitri Gunn reminded me of the name of the other SXSW session which had a Twitter dustup, "Social Marketing Strategies Metrics, Where Are They?" (apparently that's what the audience wanted to know too) which in turn led me back to Jeremiah's excellent article on the different sessions where Twitter played a role.
Dan Byler gave me feedback on a preliminary version of this article and brought up the mob scene in "To Kill a Mockingbird".
Brett Peters reminded me that I hadn't gotten around to proving my claim that it wasn't just a few malcontents; thus sending me off to create two more charts just when I thought I was done.
To all of them, and all the wonderful folks I've met online and off this past month. Thank you.
The new Leopard menu-search field under the Help menu is a great way to search your Safari history. Just click on help and start typing in the field. A list of menu items will show up. Don't worry that it doesn't seem to make sense, just use the arrow keys to move down, and you'll see the history menu appear with each of the matching items.
via Twitter
I get the distinct impression that Link/ is getting hot. Design your own cartoon character so friends can put it in cartoons, or make your own cartoons using characters (and yes, there are plenty of political ones) that others have designed.
Once Apple has set up iTunes as a software store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, there is no reason they shouldn't leverage that functionality and presence to become the dominant software reseller for both Macintosh and Windows platforms.
iTunes has got to be the most inappropriately named application on the planet. Sure, you can play music, but it also synchronizes your photos, sends contacts to your phone and iPod, synchronizes your calendar with different services, let you buy games for your iPod, and now; will let you buy applications for your iPhone and iPod Touch. it is this last feature which particularly interests me.
IPhone applications will only be available via the iTunes store, to which the only interface is the iTunes application. All applications have to be approved by Apple, and all applications are digitally signed. This means that when you install an application on your iPhone, you know that it hasn't been modified from time the application developer first gave it to Apple. That's a very nice feature from a security standpoint, and one that is also available to programs written for the Mac OS Leopard operating system.
When Apple started selling music, the record companies didn't take them seriously, and never really saw what was coming. As a result, they lost control of the market for their music, and Apple gained the ability to become the number two music reseller in the United States. The only reason that Apple wasn't able to do this to the movie industry as well, is that the movie industry had been forewarned, and limited Apple's access to their content.
When I look at everything that Apple has to do in order to become a software reseller for the iPhone; I wonder whether they're really going to restrict their software to just the iPhone. The hard work in selling software for the iPhone has nothing to do with the iPhone itself. Apple has to set up marketing, digital signing, software evaluation, developer tools, download servers, software upgrade mechanisms, alpha and beta test processes, policies for handling sales and variable pricing, and all the other features that are expected of an online software store. After having gone to all this trouble, why is Apple going to stop with just selling software for the iPhone? Why not use the same software store to sell software for the Mac? For that matter, Windows Vista, also has digital signing support. Given the vast numbers of computers, both Windows and Macintosh, that have iTunes on them, Apple automatically has a huge distribution mechanism for software, and a pre-installed application for marketing, advertising and downloading that software. On top of that, because of the digital signing, Apple can advertise the software is being safer to download than the software that is downloaded off of other download sites.
If I worked at Kagi, Digital River, or one of the other companies that currently handle software sales and distribution (but not marketing), for independent software developers, I would start looking in my rearview mirror. Because iTunes is coming up fast, and has pulled out to pass.
(As a side note, this article was written using MacSpeech Dictate after only five minutes of training. It has worked extremely well, and I'll be writing a review shortly.)
The New York Times Washington Post has an amusing article on parents joining face book. I've been through a number of the situations that they mention there. Both of my daughters are my Facebook friends, and some of their friends have friended me as well. On the other hand, my younger daughter has refused to accept my "friend" request on MySpace. the problem with cross-generational "friending" isn't restricted to children complaining about their parents. There is also the problem of parents who would like to keep some of their activities somewhat private from their children. Until Facebook adds support for multiple separate personas, both parents and children have to be careful about what applications and other information they make available to whom.
I really like VisualHub's progress dialog. No "99% done" for 20 minutes. Instead: "Looks like I lied. It will be done when it's done."
Seriously, it may be funny, but at least it's telling the truth. A progress bar that spends 90% of its time in the last 1% is of no use to anyone. It not only doesn't tell me what's going on, it makes me worry that something may have gone wrong. Amusing or not, this is a better approach.
If you think legal circles don't have much love for "business method" patents, try bringing them up in software development circles. Far too many of these are things which anyone, sitting down to deal with a particular problem, would immediately come up with. We can hope that the Bilski case may change things, but I wouldn't anticipate anything earth shattering. As the article points out, the very concept of "business patent" is pretty vague; it's hard to ban something you can't define. Like porn, it's one of those "I know it when I see it" things.
However, if you'd like to help put an end to nuisance patents, there are a number of organizations you can support. Here are a few:
Swiss Bank Julius Baer has dropped their suit against Wikileaks. Link. See my previous coverage here and here.
Presumably they realized that a) this wasn't going to be a quick "shut them up while we go public" suit, b) it wasn't going to work anyway and c) it was making matters much, much worse.
A good rule of thumb for people who have embarrassing information about themselves posted on the internet. Feel free to try and clear it up quietly. But don't make a public fuss. No matter how bad you think the situation is, it can always get worse. And if you make it a public issue, it will get worse.
Meebo and Adium developers give their reactions to Open AIM 2.0. Link
The initial reaction seems to be that the provided libraries come with restrictions which make them unsuitable for use in most open source clients (like Adium) that use libpurple—a GPL'd multi-client IM library. However, the documentation of the Oscar protocol may open the door to new implementations, and those in turn might finally be able to support audio and video chat. That would certainly be good news for users, as the lack of a video and/or audio solution is the one thing that leaves people torn between using default solutions like iChat and AIM as opposed to multi-platform solutions.
WidgetBox (pointer thanks to Jeremiah Owyang via twitter) is a service which lets you create Flash-based widgets from blogs and other sources. It then lets you publish those to a variety of social networks. The publishing portion needs some work—they don't do a very good job of guiding you through the process. With Orkut, for instance, they simply provide a link and don't tell you what to do with it or where to put it. The widgets themselves are quite pretty (I've included the TechnoSocial widget below, in an odd bit of recursion). However, I wish people didn't use Flash when they don't have to, although it does seem to be the least common denominator for cross (social) network widgets.
If you're a heavy user of twitter, you know how overwellming it can be. Twitterrific is a great (Mac) program, but sometimes all those tweets in that one little window are bit too much. For a while I've been using a script which grabs all the unread tweets in Twitterrific and brings up a browser window with them. Yes, this seems a bit silly—why not just go to the twitter site? The main reason is that this window contains just the tweets I haven't read. But also, I have more control over how they are displayed. If people actually find it useful, I'll see if I can't provide template support so that it's easy to customize how your tweets display. Let me know in the comments.
The second tool is more recent. There's been a lot of buzz about Pownce lately, and people have been facing that far too frequent question of "how do I manage postings on multiple social networks. There are some applications that can handle both, but they aren't Twitterrific… So I wrote this little application which monitors Twitterrific and every time it sees a post that you have made, it resends it to Pounce. Since this was a quick-and-dirty application, it doesn't actually do the hard work itself. For that it uses MoodBlast. So if you want to use this one, you'll need to download MoodBlast as well. (That has some added advantages, which I describe in more detail on the software page.)
So if either of those sound interesting, you can check them out here, on the TechnoSocial software web site.
I'm the CEO/CTO of Somewhere, Inc., a company building a unified social networking layer that gives people the means to track their friends across multiple social networks.
