Some are More "Legally Equal" than Others...

Poor Mr. Dotcom.  All that copywritten material on his web site and no way to control it.

So the USA took over his Virginia server farm and now plans to "delete" all the content there (see this).

But I wonder...

Why does no one consider, say, Google's (YouTube's owners) founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page as similar sorts of "criminals"?

After all, I can jump on YouTube and enter "Neil Young" to see this (no doubt this link will fail soon so make up your own popular artist and note that this link is for the purposes of reporting on copyright infringement as well as its impact on society):



"Down by the River" - Why do I doubt that this video was placed on YouTube by the copyright owner (Ledzep69man is probably not really Neil Young, eh)?

(I chose Neil Young because as a geezer its unlikely he authorized these uploads.  You can also search for "Adele" - a mere youngster of twenty something - on Google and discover videos likely to be uploaded by some group Adele-related because they have ads as well as those that were clearly not such as this with a million and a half or so views.)

But don't worry - Google's not helping you infringe - even by displaying video thumbnails.

YouTube, as a live performer, is a wonderful source of copywritten content for learning songs.  The songs are always around and there are always many versions (the above link showed me 172,000 similar hits).

Yet no one cares, apparently, at least not in the same vaunted laws of legal "correctness" that followed megaupload.com to its intended legal destruction...  Google/YouTube must play in the right Hollywood social circles.

Using the law as a weapon is not limited to the US Government/Big Hollywood Complex.

(I also read that Apple has negotiated its iCloud storage agreements with "Big Hollywood" to make the lawsuit-proof - as it were...)

Next consider this article.

Terrorists using EU human rights law, when captured, to claim that deportation violates their "right to family and private life" such as "studies, employment, friendships and sexuality."

Nice, eh?

The guy (a Mr. Qatada) who trained Mohammed Atta (famous for the 9/11 attacks) can't be deported from the UK because he might suffer harm at "home."

So terrorists and big Hollywood have something you and I don't...

A legal "chance" in life.

You see, we are not "legally" equal.  There is no such thing as legal equiality.

Like the pigs in "Animal Farm" some, like the RIAA, are apparently more "Legally Equal" than others.

Supporting and funding terrorism these days merely means finding hard-up-for-money human rights "lawyers" to think up new and clever ways to use the law against everyone but their clients.  There are so many laws and wondrous new "rights," particularly in the EU, that virtually any prosecution of a terrorist will run afoul of at least one.  Hence Mr. Qatada now has a monthly government welfare stipend of £1,000 a month as well as his freedom.

Nice...

And Mr. Dotcom - as I see it no more or less guilty of copywrite infringment than Google's founders - has a heavy multinational legal battle ahead of him (I still predict his exoneration - though your files will still be victims).

And you and I, if we had anything legitimate loaded into megaupload.com, are going to have it deleted.  (Everyone admits that there is a lot of non-infringing content involved.)

Would the law delete all of YouTube's US content I wonder?

Particularly without a trial or conviction.

The RIAA and Hollywood are so powerful that your megaupload files or mine can simply be deleted - not even seized like boats, houses and cars in DEA cases for auction.  Not even after a trial.  Simply seized and destroyed.

Destroyed without concern of rightful ownership, value, or anything else.

And last I checked Mr. Dotcom was not found guilty of anything yet.  Especially here in the USA.

Still - our content will be deleted...

So now we, as citizens, are the target of weaponized law.  Weaponized against us, the normal everyday joes, who don't go around blowing up building, uploaded stolen content, or anything else wrong.

Now in thinking about it there are several words that describe this as the idea is not new:

- Schmuck

- Fool

- Schlep

- Dupe

Where will this lead?

I'll tell you...

In the future you'll hear the air raid sirens - but instead of guns pointed skyward to shoot down the enemy a single lawyer will appear.

The lawyer will produce a single complaint on a sheet of paper.

And the evil doers will have us all rounded up and taken away - our property destroyed.

Weaponized law strikes again.

Not even the US IRS has this much power...

One of the reasons for all this is that law is not hierarchical in any way.  Law is law.  So stupid laws can lock horns with good laws leaving us, the dupes, paying the local Mohammed Atta trainer his monthly stipend.

The law was never intended to be used against citizens in this way.

Something needs to be done...

Social Media = Social Consumption

This article at www.physicsworld.com caught my eye: "On-line Tools are a 'Distraction' for Scientists."  In this article the author says, among other things, the following: "Few physical scientists use blogs, Twitter, Open Notebook Science, social networks, public wikis or other "public-facing" technologies to share research information, the report finds, although some particle physicists and astrophysicists use internal, private wikis."

Yet the large bar-chart above from the original article shows something quite different, at least relative to computers and IT Technology.  The question asked a variety of "hard science" practitioners was "[what is ] ...the most common strategies employed for finding new research?"

Clearly Google is an "on-line tool" and 83% of the respondents (physical scientists, nuclear scientists, etc.) to the study for the article indicated that Google was a source of "new research" - whatever that is.

This blog is "Google driven" is approximately the same way - much of what I write here is indexed and researched via Google (even though I write bad things about them some times).

But the physicworld article talks about "on-line tools" as social networks, public wikis, and so on - something far different.

The underlying article describes how "hard science" scientists use software and information technology:

It also describes "soft science", e.g., humanities and shows how practitioners in those fields use software and information technology.

Its very interesting to compare the two images above.

One imagines that as you move toward a less technical audience the chart's shaded blobs move left until literally you have people who never use computers.

This as well as other comments from people like the founder of RaspberryPi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/) seem to me to indicate that what people think computers, and science too, I suppose, is changing.  Ebon Upton of RaspberryPi created his company because kids no longer have interest in computers like they once did...

Things like Google (not really even a "program" in the technical sense) are no longer for the masses either, apparently.

Only "social networking."

Computers are now no longer visible to "social users."  They are the means by which Facebook works.

Clearly the original article's author can't even distinguish between scientists using computers for work and scientists using computers for social networking.

To me this is an interesting phenomena.  Ten years ago people were busy buying computers like mad to "go on the internet."  A desktop computer might have cost $800 - $1200.

But today computer prices are dropping and dropping fast.

Why?  Because they are no longer the focus of people's interests per se.  Its what they bring, i.e., social networking, that people are after.

You see it even with Apple (I have many posts about Lion).

Lion seems to be an attempt to make the computer more like an iPad or iPhone - hiding the "computeresque" aspects of how it works.  While this is fine if all you do is network its not if you need to create products - the very technical aspects of the computer required to make something like a Facebook are starting to disappear.

What does this all mean?

I think it means that people are vain and really only interested in themselves.  Social networking driving the world economy (or what's left of it)...

The more pressing question is why?

Don't we have cellphones to keep in touch with?  (Nearly every day some mad woman comes flying past me on the road while I jog cellphone pressed to her ear.  Often they don't even pull away from the edge of the road - I have to run off into the weeds.)

I wonder what they are talking about that's so important as to risk killing a pedestrian?

Sooner than later they will all have smart phones so they can text as well...  I see this at the local shopping mall.  Women (often young) stopped at the light texting like mad.

Again - what's so important?

The country's $15 Trillion USD debt?  Elvis sighted at the mall?  What???

Its probably a good thing some people are not "distracted" by all of this... 

Someone needs to hang around to clean up all the mess when the frenzy is over.

Destructuring Society Child by Child

Alison Gopnik writes some interesting stuff in "What's Wrong with the Teenage Mind?"

The very short version is that modern culture is extending childhood well into people's thirties and, during this process, robbing children and young adults of a variety of development experiences that, in the past, made their brains develop into adult brains.

Radical stuff from a UC Berkley Professor of Philosophy.

However, readers of this blog would not be surprised by this in the least.  I have written here (and on the personal blog) time and again about how modern life has changed what's important with regard to raising children and families (see "Anthropological Mom" and "Women are Insane, Men are Stupid").

But Ms. Gopnik takes these ideas a bit further and suggests that we are harming out children by abandoning how they have been traditionally raised.  Harming them by not providing their brains a proper sociological context in which to grow into adulthood.  (Who in adulthood is taken care of all day like you are at a modern school: breakfast, lunch, pickup before dinner?  Prisoners I think...)

I think that this is simple to see today:  Extended childhoods into thirties and soon forties.  Lack of motivation.  Uselessness.

When I was a kid life and your potential future were far different than today.

My friend in best friend through third grade lived on a far a mile away.  I could ride my bike there and we could work on the farm.  That's right - work.  Drive tractors, milk cows, and get paid.

My grandchildren today, with similar ages, can only think about twiddling TV or game knobs.

Why?  Because they live in a world where the life of their parents dominates.  Not that that wasn't true in my childhood, parents obviously dominated their child's lives.  But today its different.

It seems like a parents need for fulfillment, lost in their own childhood, is now replaced by the need to have a full life for themselves and by force create such a life for their child.  But instead of free play and the opportunity to take on responsibility in simulated adult roles today's children are trundled off to "activities" - sports, school, daycare, and so on.

The problem is that these activities are pointless as far as making a child a proper grownup because they aren't real in the sense that they are things adults really do.

In my childhood we participated in the adult world.

For example, my father, an architect, took the kids along in the car as he went to job sites (probably a federal crime today).  Many times we sat for long hours in the car but often we went with him into the construction sites.  There was a lot to learn and see: plumbing, electrical, telephone, building, concrete.  Now my father wasn't a doer in the sense that he did these sorts of things at home - but he designed them.  So I learned (to some degree) how to draw, lay out construction activities, and so forth.

You might think that, well, your father was an educated man - you had more opportunity.

But you'd be wrong.  My friend Joe (I mentioned above) farmed.  He probably still does.   He learned from his father in the same way.

My toys as a child after I could travel with my father involved materials scavenged from construction sites.

Gopnik's point is, I think, that this is lost today.  Adults are too busy today to bother with children in this way so the children do "activities" instead.

Now even at six or seven years old it was clear to me what work was.  I like talking to the various people at the construction sites - I was always treated respectfully.  The men working their knew that "by example" is where future tradesmen, workers, bosses, customers, building owners and so on came from.  Almost like a silent fraternity of knowledge.

I think the 60's "me" generation is to a large part responsible for this.

Parent's before this time treated their children like family members from the start - involving them in the family activities and work (and no, not in the child labor sense).  This developed their brains because it gave them a context to grow into - whether they stayed in the family business or not.

Gopnik says, and I agree, that we are robbing children of this today because the faux lives we create for our children and pointless from the context of "growing up."

Powerful stuff - and well beyond the "Tiger Mom" in some ways.  Though I expect that the Tiger Mom in her own way created something of the same effect.

I see this today as a grandfather.  Other grandparents say - oh look, I've bought a house near little Suzy and her child so I can be with them every day to take them to swim class, day care, etc.

My actions are different.  I expose my grandchildren to real things - work or play - and treat them like someone who wants to be a grown up.  I'm not "so nice" as the other grandparents - I am gruff and colorful - but at the same time I keep an eye on what the kiddies are up to.

Modern life and its attendant elements like feminism have created this, I think.  But Gopnik, at least in this article, does not address the causes.

As a society we have lost our way, particularly in the area of rearing children so it's little wonder we have the results we do today.

This also says a lot about UC Berkley - I guess the radical thinking has gone around full circle (or almost as no one is probing the causes of this yet) back to "traditional thinking."

Alison Gopnik at TED:


What does this say about the value of motherhood?

What if your mother is not their to support this?

What does this say about our society and what we've done to it?

This is perhaps the most profound thing I have seen so far in writing this blog.

Our modern society is doing its best to turn small children into what we think "adults" are but, in the process, actually ruining their innate ability to grow into adults.

XCode 4.2 the Lion is Crying...

A couple of months ago I purchased a new Mac to run Lion as well as to do Synthodeon development on.  I wanted a Lion machine to keep up with the latest Apple technologies. I also wanted it to be separate from the other machines I develop customer software on  because Lion was known to have "issues," particularly with software development, and I didn't want to be in the position of not being able to service my customers or have Lion somehow pollute my products.

(This is easy to see by simply moving a relatively complex piece of software in XCode from 3.2.6 to 4.2 on Lion.  Magically thousands of errors appear and currently working applications (that compile with no errors on 3.2.6 or even 4.0) won't even compile at all.  I can see it now, "Why yes, Mr. Visa provider, your mail won't go out until I can debug my new Mac/Lion/XCode world..."  Even in .NET things are better than this...)

I've been sidetracked from Mac development for a couple of months.  An eternity in "Apple Land" - numerous software releases (on both iOS and Lion) have come and gone and I am still sitting in the now distant (epochs ago) past. 

Worse, its been so long that my last developer profile expired as well.

Lastly, I upgraded my machine and OS to Lion.

So no problems with old XCode 4.0 projects on Lion - they do build and seem to work in the Simulators - but I am working on something more complex that involves porting code and other complexities.

So now its time to test my latest work on an actual iOS device...

And all hell breaks loose.

Nothing will work, bizarre KeyChain and other Organizer errors - "Oh No! You're Super Secret Magic Encryption Key Failed to Validate!!!" and so on.  In actuality "Valid signing identity not found” and "XCode could not find a valid private-key/certificate pair for this profile in your KeyChain."

Huh?

Little red (!) things by each provisioning item in the Organizer.

So after some head scratching I figure that its a new machine, right?  So initially I figure I probably need to go to the iOS Apple Developer portal and create a new .mobileprovision file.

I do but no dice - still "Oh No!" errors...

I am not alone...

This.

This.

So after some tinkering and an hour of Googling I resolve the issue.

Start over with setting things up.  (Warning - I am a small developer with a few machines for which doing this is not a problem.)

1. Log onto the iOS Provisioning Portal.

2. Choose "Certificates" on the upper left.

3. Given a new machine, expired provisioning portals, etc. I simply "Revoked" the existing Certificate.  You then have to "Apply" for a new one (this is instantaneous I guess - but you have to refresh the browser to see it).

4. You have to download this and load it into KeyChain by clicking on it (steps here).

5. Then you have to re-provision each device.

There will be a lot of "download" and "click on" things to do during this because somehow the KeyChain app works in different ways depending on the different Certificates.

I had to restart XCode and KeyChain a couple of times.

And then, in the end, you have to make sure that you've set up the right Scheme in XCode.

I finished and it finally displayed no Organizer errors but nothing worked.  The first time it was some issue where the real errors just stopped coming out.  The second time it built for 5.0 but my iPad had 4.3.5 on it and the errors made it appear as if the Certificate and provisioning munging had failed...

Random Google and Other Thoughts

Jango Listener Profile

Your Google Profile

What your Google profile says about you: (click here) as described in arstechnica.

My profile tells Google this about me:

Search interests are Arts & Entertainment - Music & Audio - Music Equipment & Technology - Samples & Sound Libraries Computers & Electronics - Software - Multimedia Software - Desktop Publishing

 

Shopping in World Localities: North America (USA) - Mid-Atlantic (USA) - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA)

Not much to get steamed up about in terms of privacy - every item here is on this blog or one of the related blogs.

What's interesting is how little else it really knows about me: Age: 35-44 (Wrong) Gender: Male (Correct).

That's basically it.

Really Big File Systems

When you read this blog you are likely using something called GFS (Google File System).  This, like S3 from Amazon and Hadoop (Facebook), is the backbone of today's internet - be it social media, movies, video, you name it.

 

Petabytes (thousands of terabytes, millions of gigabytes) of data across thousands of servers.

If you're interested in how these work see this article.

Semi Autonomous Road Trains 

I found this article about chaining together collections of vehicles on the highway.

The idea is that with advanced technology you can link the control systems of modern vehicles (braking, steering, etc.) though a local WiFi.  This allows the leader to pull along trailing vehicles.  The "trailers" can follow very closely because the lead vehicle handles all of the braking and steering for them.

 

Personally I don't see lawyers letting this happen - too much could go wrong.

I have always been interested in this kind of linked-vehicle technology.  I "invented" an infra-red technology years ago that you could use on "convoys" of semis.  Each semi would have a infra-red transmit/receive on its front and back at a standard height.  When semi's became a convoy they could switch of their CB radios and instead talk on the infra-red channel to prevent others from overhearing what they were saying.

 

Each truck would relay the audio to any trucks in the convoy.

I never built one but I spend a lot of time on the design.

Jango and Marketing to the Cloud

A few months ago I purchased an account on www.jango.com.  Jango is a kind of world-wide internet radio station.  You can pay money to have your songs injected into play-lists so people will hear your music.

This is exactly the opposite of VDP and highly targeted email and PURL marketing.  I thought I would explore this because I have zero experience in mass marketing and I figured it would be good to learn something about it, especially considering that I will need this research and knowledge for my work with Synthodeon (www.synthodeon.com).

No one knows who you are and you have to induce them to listen based on the quality of your content and the cleverness of working with Jango.  Jango works by having you indicate what artists your music is similar to and then when people listen to "stations" with those artists your music is inserted into the play-list.

So the first step is to figure out what your music is like, i.e., who you are marketing to.  Then you use their interface to add those artists to your profile.  When that's completed you purchase "plays" which cause your songs to be inserted into the play-lists as I described above.

Basically the only real measure of success is by monitoring "Organic Plays" which are how often people listen to your music when its on in rotation on play-lists.

I've spent a couple of hundred dollars over the last several months experimenting with this and come up with what, at least for me, are counter-intuitive results.

For one, people seem to listen more to your songs if they listen to a lot of songs in general.  That means that even if I mix my music into play-lists of artists who have a similar type of music I won't do as well as if I put my music into play-lists with very popular artists, e.g., Adele.

Volume is king, I suppose.

Secondly, Jango allows you to have "fans" - people that have explicitly gone out of their way to say "I like your music."  My biggest listeners are younger women (18-34 -see the graphic above). I suspect this is because younger women listen a lot to Jango in general but there is no way to tell.

Again, volume is king.

So the bottom line in non-targeted marketing - with which I have zero experience - is getting a lot of people to get the message - the more the better.

Initially I was thinking that the genre of music mattered more, i.e., geezers would listen to certain types of music and younger people different types.  Apparently this is not true and Hip Hop listeners, at least those who listen to a lot of music, will become fans of music outside their genre.

Frying Your Way to Good Health

More than a year ago on my personal blog I wrote "Type 2 is not Diabetes." Basically the idea is that the use of bad, manufactured oils in our diet is killing us and "Type 2" diabetes is one way that's happening.  (Toxic oils include vegetable oils, canola, genetically modified oils like soybean, and so on.  The only "good" oils I know are olive, fish (like cod liver), hemp, flax and coconut - there are probably others but I cannot recall them off hand.)

One thing oils are used for today in the US is frying: french fries, chicken, and so on.  And you will be admonished by doctors and health professionals alike not to eat fried food because its bad.  Bad, of course, because frying with oil will stuff you veins full of cholesterol and you will die.

Now in Spain doctors, knowing how bad frying is, conducted a study over twelve years of those eating fried food (now remember this Spain where they use good oils for frying.)  Low and behold there was not increased chance of death from heart failure (study described here).

According to the MedPage article "This result may seem surprising because frying is generally considered an unhealthy way of preparing food..."

Except in this case this is not so.

No detectable increase in coronary deaths due to frying, none.

You see, the convention wisdom in my book is totally wrong.  The problem with fried food in the US is how its prepared and what its fried in - not the fact that its fried.  (Certainly fried food has a lot of calories but so do a lot of other things - that's not the issue because eating too many calories regardless of where they come from is bad - studies show this as well).

No on seriously studied consumption of fried foods like before this because everyone knew they were bad.

Or, er, rather, they must be bad, right?

 After all frying is evil, like cigarette smoking...

I believe that most researchers today have grown up with all sorts of "truisms" - smoking is bad, frying is bad, this is bad, that is bad... and they are taken simply as fact in the sense that no one thinks to question them.  They sky is blue, after all, so there is no need to study it.

This is a problem in modern science today because its preventing science from seeing the real problem in this case: manufactured oils are killing us.

The Spaniards in the linked study ate on average 5 oz of fried food each day - potatoes, meat, fish.

However, these folks used things like olive oil and were careful not to degrade the oils by heating them too much - something else that's common in the USA.  (They use a Mediterranean Diet there - see this.  There is also the Paleo type of diet which uses similar ideas.)

In December of 2010 I wrote this in part:

Personally I plan to acquire some guaranteed unrefined oils immediately and add them to my diet.


The healingmatters.com fats link (again here) is particularly disconcerting because it describes how triglycerides, cholesterol, and all these usual modern medical obesity and diabetes "suspects" are systematically and routinely contorted into false and misleading information.


Some other topics touched in this article:


Cooking: "When cooking with fats and oils it is important to do so in a manner that does not destroy them. Use only butter, Coconut oil and animal fat for cooking." and "Margarine, artificial shortenings, refined oils and all Hydrogenated edible products are long term toxic to the human metabolism".


Manufacturing Cooking Oils: "It is the high temperatures used in the refining process that ruins even previously good oils."


Cholesterol: "by excluding high Cholesterol foods from our diet, our liver simply makes more Cholesterol in an attempt to maintain a homeostasis (normal level) of Cholesterol in our blood stream."

Now in the Wolf household we changed our use of oils to only healthy oils - mostly coconut and olive - though we do use animal fat as well on occasion.  No more vegetable oils.  No margarine.

(BTW, one of the things I think is that 30 years or so of modern TV-based margarine sales has contributed greatly to our health problems as Americans - on the scale of cigarette problems.  But because margarine is considered to be "healthy" its okay that it kills us...)

This was not very easy to do because, among other things, it means you cannot buy salad dressing from a store because virtually all of them, including things like Newman's Own with Olive Oil are full of soybean oil.  (Soybean is bad and its virtually all from Roundup Ready genetically modified plants.)  Today we make our own with only olive oil.

But we've managed to do it.  Its also more expensive because vegetable oil is far cheaper.

Manufactured oils appeared in the 1920's and their rise in the American diet coincides nicely with the rise of "obesity" and Type 2 diabetes.

(Why are "manufactured oils" bad, you ask?  Read this - after which you will not use these oils either.  Among other things because they are processed with petroleum-based solvents, bleached, filtered and heated to 450 degrees.)

Gamifying Your Life (Away)...

Surgeons could gamify their work!

So now the software industry, dominated by geeky males for the most part, has invented a new "low" for software development: gamification.  That's right, a new word meaning "to make a game of."  Typically software development is a complex and tedious task: specifications, understanding, design, coding, testing - just to mention a few elements of the process.

For old school programming types like me the joy has always been in the satisfaction gained from doing the job right.  Does it work like its supposed to?  Is it cool?  Is it written with skill and style?  Is it elegant?

Good programming has always been part art, part science, part mathematics, part magic.  What's the best way to write that loop?  Can you optimize that code to shave off 50% of the execution time?  There have never been good metrics to measure it either.  Its always been "you know elegance when you see it."

So I a happened on this Wired article (here) about gamification.  It seems that some programmers at Microsoft took on the task of gamifiying .NET - Microsoft's software development platform.  Write "better code" - get a gold star.  (It's also listed here on Reddit.)  Some sort of plug-in that mindlessly applies metrics to the code to measure how "good" it is.

And its not just Microsoft.  IBM, according to the linked article, has done research on the topic as well.

Are they serious?

Yes, at least to a point. 

This is, I suppose, the bleeding edge of the gamification of society.

I grew up before "games" made their way into the entire consciousness of society.  When I was a boy a "game" came in a box and had plastic or metal pieces that moved around on some kind of cardboard surface.  Dice or spinners where often involved.

Video games showed up at the "mall" by the time I was in high school in the 1970's but the "mall" was far away and it cost a $.25 in 1970 money to play.  My first real job was fixing video game boards (black and white arcade games) built from 7400-series discrete chips on 12 x 18 double-sided circuit boards.  It was hard work and repair almost always involved soldering problems or bad chips.

So for me games were work.

But these days I have become more involved with iOS development: iPhone, iPad, etc.

To do this requires game skills: game-like UI ideas, motion ideas, feedback, and so on.  Apple requires them - the UI must be engaging and beautiful, blah, blah, blah.  I had to go out and buy a PS/3 and learn how to play games because without that insight I wouldn't be able to create the proper sort of UI or interface.  I know lots of gamers and while I get the idea of the games themselves there is a lot of art and science in how they work - skills I must develop.

But all this is different from making my day-to-day "job" a game.

Making work into a game takes me back to grade school and nursery school before: sit in a circle and listen to story books about little pigs singing while they build a house.  That sort of thing.

I've spent some 35 or so years writing code and I think I know what I am doing.  I don't need a game to make it fun or to give me "approval" through "gold stars" for not using a GOTO.  (BTW, I do occasionally use "goto" because you need to - real problems are not all solved by "simplified languages" without them.

Gamification I think is spawned from an underlying societal problem: children don't receive enough hands-on positive (or negative) feed back because adults are too busy or involved elsewhere to pay attention to them.  So adults (and society) invent "systems" to provide gratification to the youngsters via other means (gold stars, etc.) - gamification being a good example.

I am happy to write good code because, in and of itself, to me that's a satisfying thing. The code works, the customer buys it, I make a living, the customer does real work.

I don't need a game for this... 

What if surgeons used a system like this? 

Put on a 3D VR helmet with sound effects.  Oh look!  You cauterized that vein neatly!  A bell could ring - gold coins would rain down - cha ching - cha ching.  On the other hand if you cut that nerve running to the patients finger tips a sad face with tears could appear along with the sound Pacman makes when the ghosts eat him.

Maybe I could have an iPhone app that gives me a gold star when I pick my child up from daycare on time...?  When I drive from home to work without texting?

Honestly... this is totally insane.

This all stems from the fact that a generation that has spent most of their lives glued to Hi-Def game displays has now reached the work force (albeit late, say at age 35).

They simply don't know how to do much else so everything becomes a game.

What about their marriages? 

Oh! I need an iPhone app for that too... 

Did I kiss the spouse today?  Ding Ding - hearts could appear!

Did I hug my child? Gold coins could rain down.

Did I not look at my phone or text while we had sex? 

Ding Ding - my app can remind me - take out the garbage.  If it detects that I didn't come home from work and sit for too long playing games I get a gold star!  (Isn't GPS inside your house a wonderful thing!)

Really?

IBM research on this?

How about research on the collapse of modern society?

Where did we lose the fact that we are grown ups?

Can Your "Social Presence" Get You Hired?

Nice to see where our tax dollars are going...

I guess that the internet is changing how people think about hiring, at least according to this WSJ article.

Companies interested in your "social presence" as well as your ability, or, worse, just in your "social presence."  The article describes how one company uses the "web" to determine if a potential employee is a "good social fit" for his company.

There's another description of a woman who compiled "... a profile comprising her personal blog, Twitter feed, LinkedIn profile, and links to social-media sites Delicious and Dopplr, which showed places where she had traveled" in order to get a job.

(I guess I won't be getting "hired" anytime soon...  "Why does he have a long beard?"  "He makes small children cry when they see him!"  My blog says far to much about me for that!)

To me this really doesn't seem to be about working at all.  Instead it sounds much more like "we have an exclusive social club" and we only want people "like us" to work here.  People seem to be less interested in raw talent or ability (which may be masked by social ineptitude) than "sameness."

One of the things I learned over many years of hiring and firing (at one time I owned a mailing company with fifty full time people) is that no amount of interviewing will ever really tell you about what another person is like.  Though to that extent I have to agree that "looking elsewhere" for information on people is good.

But there's a problem with that. 

What if I find things about someone I don't like but are illegal to use in making a hiring decision?  Certainly I don't want trouble from the EEOC...

So what if I look over your social profiles and discover your a satanist or into death metal?  Satanism's a legitimate religion (I suppose) these days.  Or maybe you just like to sing about killing people... Should I hire you to help out at my daycare? 

Can you sue me if I don't?

People create a lot of "fake" information about themselves on the web for many reasons: to impress the opposite sex, to stoke their own vanities, and so on.  Really, what place does using material like that have to do with realtime kernal programming in C++?

Not much, I'm afraid.

Of course I am biased coming from a background were "the geekier the better" generally rules.  Though I suppose in geek-driven environment would search for the "opposite" - oh oh, I can't hire you because you have a nice social profile!  Look, you're wearing clean clothes in that picture!  You're hair is combed...?

Then there is the issue of "bias."

If I hire people who think "differently" than me I might gain insight into things - "oh, I never thought about it that way..."  If I only hire people who think "like" me then things will be great so long as I have the right vision - and its likely that no one I hire would thing outside the box - even if things were going wrong.

This seems to me to be a sort of natural form of "discrimination."

People will hire only the most "attractive" people.  Wow! So-and-so is really hot... Call that one in.

And certainly in the past like-minded folks got themselves into trouble in hiring.

There is also the issue of "hacked accounts."  Oh, those racist or sexually suggestive comments on my Facebook aren't really mine, my account was hacked... (Right.)  Except now there is no hope of employment.  (On the other hand, no one can "hack" a paper resume...)

Personally I think places like "linkedin" are a joke - sites for job seekers to "collaborate" looking for work and whine about the fact they have none.  Shameless self-promoters vying for your attention.

Right now there aren't enough jobs. 

The current "debt economy" has created a huge surplus of millions of workers, particularly in the realms where things like Facebook are popular, i.e., with young people.  So this kind of nonsense I suppose makes sense to those using it.

"How do I weed out serious people and find people who are 'just like me...' "

No thanks.

I want people to question me as a boss.  I might make mistakes.  I might not see the best solution.  I might forget something.  If all my employees are "yes men" (or I suppose "yes persons") then what will happen to me when I make bad decisions?

Everyone will agree...

True diversity is a good thing, particularly in work environments, because it makes the work product better.  Why?  Different perspectives make it possible to see problems or make improvements that might not otherwise be noticed or made.

But I don't think social sameness makes for a "good thing" at work...

Of course, I'm an old geezer who thinks work is, well, work.  I want to hire people that know how to do their jobs and work since my work is not socially based.  For the most part I could care less what else they do so long as its not a problem that comes to roost at my door step.

If your social agenda is so overwhelming that you can't do anything else (like work) you're not much use...

From a social media perspective its hard to assess someone's "work ethic."  Certainly one can be committed to a "cause" - but that doesn't mean they actually work, as in labor, at it...

At the end of the day this social presence work stuff is all nonsense. 

The world is a complex, dangerous place and using nonsense like "social media" to steer your workplace future is going to be fraught with danger.  Its hard enough to make a living these days without this kind of think mucking up the waters.

Its discriminatory.

Its lame.

More Lion Woes...

So my daughter brings over a movie someone burned for business on a DVD.  I put the DVD into Lion and it complains the media is in a format it doesn't "recognize."  Nothing happens and I can't view it.

I take the same disk to Snow Leopard and viola the movie plays with no issues right in the DVD app.

Some Googling reveals various unfixed "issues" in this regard.

Next woe.

I hook up some nice monitors to a Lion laptop (MacBook Pro).

Click, pop, click...

Hmmm....

No audio playing, nothing going on to make sounds, clean signal pro path that I have used before.

More Googling...

Oops!  Another Lion problem recognized by many, not resolved.

The worst one I found, though, I could not find much on.

I have a JamMan looper pedal.  It has a USB port which you can connect to anything that recognizes the standard, simple "camera" file system.  Basically files and folders.  I have a 10.4 Mac as well as others and this has worked on all of them without a problem for a couple of years.

You simply plug in the USB and you see a mounted file system.  You drag and drop files in the finder.

Except on Lion.

Lion sort of pretends this is working but in fact does not show the files you drag onto the JamMan.  So suppose I have a folder of a few files.  I drag it from the laptop hard drive to the JamMan.

Normally you would see a little progress window, it would process, end of story.

On Lion you see the progress window but the bar in it doesn't move.  Some of the files copy, others don't and it just sits there.  I gave up after a minute or two (the files were about 15 Mb and should have copied in seconds).

Lion then reports the folder copied.

Hmmm... I thought - perhaps the progress window is broken.

Nope, the folder was there but only on file in it (I had to navigate via the terminal window to discover this).

During this fiddling I had at one point renamed the folder.  That didn't work either - the folder kept the old name.

Eventually the only scheme that worked was to navigate via the terminal window to /Volumes/JamMan and copy the files there.

Come on Apple...  This is terrible!!

Something that worked for a decade now craps out on the vaunted Lion.

And worst of all it behaves like Windows!!  No errors, randomness, and terminating in failure.

I know the JamMan works okay USB wise so I did not bother to test Lion with other USB devices.

I also did some testing with a MOTU 828 via firewire.  I bought the laptop specifically to ensure I had all the right connectivity.  Sadly there were more problems there.

Clicks, pops, noise on the optical line.

I've had the MOTU for probably seven or eight years - never a problem until Lion.

Maybe I'll have to check out Windows 8...

The Art of Medical Deception (Part III)

So now we have a "risk" but the detailed mechanism of why they are dying are unknown to the villagers.

But there is still a definite "risk."

A "risk" just like finding out that people who have higher cholesterol also get heart attacks in ads these days.

But that does not mean the two are directly related (risk does not imply cause).

The sniper might be killing them because they are easier to see in the clearing, for example.  Or because light reflects off the surface of the water being fetched. Or because those who use that particular well wear colorful clothing that makes them easy targets. Or for any other number of mysterious reasons.

No one knows except the sniper and he is not telling.

So next we have the "patent medicine man" who comes to town. He discovers the research about the well so he starts selling bottled water.

No more need to go to the well.

And the million billion trillion dollar question is: does the bottled water really reduce your chance of dying?

Now let's remember risk is a predictor of something, a chance, as I wrote about "Cholesterol, Heart Disease, and Magical Thinking" - its not concrete.  So to talk about risk we have to look at the population of the village, the number of deaths, and the places where people went, i.e., the well.

So if over a year seven people die in the village (both from the sniper as well as other causes) then there is a 7% (7 out of 100) risk of death.  So let's say that four people die by the well, or a 4% risk.

So 4% divided by 7%, which gives our epidemiological risk, is a 57% risk of going to the well and dying.  But that's only if you're going to die.

Wow, not sure I would want to go to the well with that level of risk.  But that's not the "chance" I would die - its the potential increase in chance from dying in general over dying by the well.

So let's think about how this works in advertising.  A 57% risk of something bad is pretty scary.  People easily deal with small risks, .01% in things like sky diving, mountain climbing, and so on.  But 57% is almost 2 out of 3.  That's because the chances of actually dying in these situations is small.  But these ads don't talk about chances because they are unknowable in this context and everyone has a 100% chance of dying - so that's not news either.

So the ad starts out by talking about something bad - in the case of our village dying when you go to the well.  "System 1" as defined by Kahneman will immediately pick up on this because its a threat and one of "System 1's" jobs is to react to threat.  "System 1" cannot differentiate between "risk" and "chance" in this context.  ("Danger" - whether there is a risk or chance - is simply bad as far as its concerned.)

So the first thing the ad does is get our attention because it scares us, or rather, our "System 1".

Next the ad will say something like "Our bottled water will reduce your risk of death."

Now in the sense of "truth in advertising" they will say more (either very fast or in small print) but not in a way "System" 1 will notice - and this is on purpose.

So "System 1," who feels threatened, will pick up on the solution to its fear: "reducing risk".

"System 1" hears this and things "I better by this bottled water so I can be safe."

In truth its unclear whether this will actually reduce your chance of death or keep you alive longer.  For one thing, we don't know why the sniper likes the well - their can be many reasons: clothing, actions, the fact that there is a clearing, and so forth.  And in fact we don't even know that it will make you safer - we know that "things staying as they are" if you go to the well less often then you may have a reduced chance of dying.

Its not that you will have a reduced chance - you might.  The bottled water changes the ratio of the 4%/7% but the sniper doesn't know or care about those numbers.

So this is quite a bit different that showing pictures of "sizzling pizza" to make you hungry.

If you eat the pizza you will be less hungry - "System 1" knows this too.

Your chances of dying may not be changed by drinking the bottled water.

But that's not what the ads make you think.

And that's simply lying.

Yet from "System 1's" perspective the two types of ads seem the same: purchase X and gain satisfaction.

Personally I think ads based on the adjustment of "risk" should be banned.  The cause of heart attacks is not cholesterol - its inflammation.  This is well known to the medical community but you would never know based on the TV ads.

I think that the old FCC was right to ban this type of ad in the past.

People are not equipped to understand the notion of "risk" as defined by "Big Pharma."

Mega Oh Oh!

www.megaupload.com

I have been reading stories about the "takedown" of megaupload.com and Kim Dotcom.  (Indictment here for the "Mega Conspiracy".)

Thieves, crooks, pirates, criminals... according to various stories like this one.

So its a "free" upload site - how do you make money from that.

A little research turned up this article at howtodothings.com.

The basic idea seems pretty simple according to this.

Its an upload site - you upload material and you or anyone you tell about your upload can download it.

Alright.

So how does Kim Dotcom make $50 million USD a year doing this?  After all he would be out of pocket for file storage, web costs, etc. and there would be no income.

The answer is he doesn't.

The howtodothings site reveals a much more complex scheme involving you.

First off you set up an account on megaupload.com.  You pay for it.  You set up a paypal account too.

Next you go around and find things to upload: books, music, movies, etc. Do you own them?  No doubt there is a Terms of Service that you must click saying you do...  (I would check but megaupload.com is shut down... Damn, my book on turning lead into gold along with proof is stored there along with the only scan of my original Gospel hand written by Mark, the location of three lost Da Vinci's, the document clearing you of that incident with the 16 year old babysitter a while back and my complete set of cures for cancer - but those are just gone now.  No doubt the take over of megaupload will involve the FBI folks trolling through the gazzillions of terabytes steal my stuff and yours... so it will turn up on some other megaupload in a few weeks.)

Now megaupload.com offers a scheme so you get paid if someone downloads your files.

But no one is going to download your files, are they?

Why?

Because they won't know the files are there.

So you have to tell other people that you have these files uploaded that they might want.

How do you do that?

Why you have to market your uploaded content.

So, let's ask a stupid question?  Who is doing all this work?

You.

Now, I can buy an amazon.com S3 storage account (like the one the FBI uses to store its seizure URL) and do the same thing.

But there is only one difference.  The FBI won't shut down amazon.  It will shut me down instead.  The S3 account is just like a telephone carrier signal - the crime is what its used for, not the fact that criminals make phone calls.  The phone company is not a criminal - you are because you used it for criminal purposes.

megaupload.com, from what I can see, is in exactly the same boat.

Yet their situation is magically different.

Perhaps its because they are enticing others to do wrong with a wink and a nod?

Maybe like the old Apple slogan "Rip. Mix. Burn."?



Of course, Apple did not suggest you "steal" anything; at least not directly.  Just convert things to a format your iPod could sue use.  Now its in mp3 format, what else can I do?  Maybe upload... No. No. that would be wrong.

So, like everything else megaupload is taking one for the team because of what other people do with their site.  (I italicized you in each of the steps you needed to do to make money on megaupload.)

Let's see.  Googling "megaupload games" I see things like

Download Full Version Pc Games Free Megaupload Mediafire

www.gamerslove.com/

Compressed Ripped Free Full Version PC Games Download - In Mediafire, Megaupload, Filesonic, Fileserve, Hotfile Download Links With Games Under ..."

So is Google involved too?  Aren't they putting up ads while this displays to make money?

Like BitTorrent.

Seems to me like megaupload is the shlamazel.  (The shlimiel is the waiter who trips, the shlamazel is the guy who the food the waiter was carrying lands on - Old Yiddish Humor).

Probably not kissing the asses of the likes of the big Hollywood studios, Johnny Depp, not saving the whales, and so on.  Probably having big fun in New Zealand without inviting the required Hollywood peeps...

Because as far as I can see megaupload is just like Apple and Amazon.

Can you say "Hipocrisy?"

This is our rights being taken away.  If you steal music then you are the criminal.  Not the guy who manufactured the CD-R you burned with the music on it.  Not the ISP who's connection you used to upload the RIPed content to the internet.

You.

But from the point of law enforcement and Hollywood tracking down all the actual criminals would be just too much work.  megaupload.com supposedly had one billion hits a day and millions of customers.  No doubt only a few percent were really misusing it (the site has numerous legitimate uses just like Amazon S3 and just like RIPing CDs to mp3's).

But imagine the work involved in sifting through all of that information and then weeding out the kiddies who had stolen mommy's credit card to do this (mens rea).  And then there's the bad publicity the RIAA got for suing folks.

Nope, this is much better.  Take this guy down as an example.

Look at this big fat guy with the last name "Dotcom."

He has to be guilty, right?

All those fancy, high class hookers women (and he's a fat guy), expensive cars, parties, rifles, no one will be sympathetic to him...

But I bet this back fires...

I bet Mr. Dotcom also has a crack international team of lawyers too.  No doubt he never even imagined this would happen - nope - he's just a dumb crook.  Just happened upon a web site for sale that did all this.  Just happened to set it up in a jurisdiction where the legal idea of "intellectual property theft" are clear on the fact that its the "sharer" that's the crook - no the "dial tone."

And I bet that in various other countries the "you" I describe is probably actually the real criminal because "you" did the crime - uploaded content you didn't own, shared, made money from it.

I can see why Anonymous is busy taking revenge.

I don't want my rights taken away.  I have legitimate business uses for things like S3 storage (or any of its equivalents).

And what about those that stored legit information their accounts?

No, this is big government making a big show.

To scare you...

The Art of Medical Deception (Part II)

The well in the clearing...

I started this with Part I a few days ago.

I'd like to think about the difference between advertising medicine and advertising food.

Its been known since the time of Pavlov (the late 1800's) that animals (including humans) process stimulus-based links - ring the bell every time you feed the dog and soon the dog salivates when the bell is rung.

I suspect that in the Kahneman "Thinking, Fast and Slow" world of "System 1" this is how System 1 is trained.  Anyone who owns a pet knows that the pet usually learns the habits of its owners.  My dog knows me so well he goes and lays in the shower right before I take one...

Like Pavlov's dogs we respond directly and predictably to stimulus.  Show a picture of a big, juicy hamburger or fresh, hot pizza on a TV and the phone lines start to ring with orders.  Show a fantastic looking body and people call the "weight loss" clinic.

"System 1" doesn't usually wait around to figure out if calling is a good idea, it simply creates a desire for whatever it thinks would be good for you.

After all, its always, at least historically, a good idea to eat when food is available.

Similarly in the animal world.  Before civilization and pets you ate when you could because you could not predict when you would be able to eat again.  I think in large part this is how our thinking about things like food (which is stimulated with sight as well as other things) evolved.  See the food, go after it.  Those that saw food and thought about, say, taking a nap, probably didn't do as well over all.

Now let's compare this to medical ads.

First of all food is something that is driven with immediate satisfaction - no one usually goes more than eight hours with eating.  The results of eating are a state of "fullness" that tells you you don't need to eat more.  If you see a vacation spot that attracts your attention - you think about it or order tickets.  If you see a weight loss ad you call up or go online and join up.

But in all cases there is a direct "result" - a membership, an airline ticket, a full stomach, nice memories.

Now when I think about medical ads (say something like Lipitor) I believe the model is different.  Since these things are generally sold to "reduce the risk of X" its not the same as, say eating.  Eating is generally good and it keeps you alive.  The medical version is vague and there is no obvious immediate direct benefit, i.e, a full stomach, and long term there may or may not be a measurable benefit associated.

So let me try and make an analogy (I am going to try and pretend to be like Kahneman):

Suppose you live in a primative village on a remote ridge.  You live there with one hundred or so other folks.

On a far away ridge there lives a sniper.  He has a high powered rifle with a silencer that shoots magic bullets that kill you but leave no obviously identifiable marks.

On average the sniper kills five people each year.  To do this he uses a high-powered scope and, sitting on his porch, he picks off one of your villagers.

In your village people are periodically found dead of no obvious cause.  Your job is to study this and figure out why.

So you make up a table listing all the dead people on the left and you make columns to the right listing facts about their deaths: time of day, where they were found, various facts you can associate with each death.

Since life is primitive death is no stranger but there does seem something odd about this.  One thing you notice is that, near the clearing where the well is, more people seem to die of the mysterious and unexplained cause than any other.

So in your primitive scientific mind you associate the deaths with a location.  But now, what's the cause?  Could the well water have something to do with it?

To find out you tell everyone to draw water from the other will in the woods - its inconvenient but the water's good and the deaths associated with the old well diminish - people still die but there is no apparent concrete cause like the well.

So for medical ads we now have an analogy for "risk."

There is a known risk with drawing water from the well in the clearing.

The root cause is unknown be there is demonstrable showing that time around the well is hazardous to your health.

So to conclude this portion of my post here is the question for you to think about for next time:

Why do more villagers die when taking water from the well in the clearing?

What could a village do to increase or decrease their risk of death?

SOPA, Your Child's School, and Vietnam

War Coverage from the 1960's....

In 1969 students at an Iowa school came to school wearing black arm bands to protest the Vietnam war.  The result of this was a supreme court case now know as "Tinker" (Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969)).  The upshot of Tinker is that  school officials must demonstrate that “the forbidden conduct would materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school.”

Hence the black arm bands were allowed because they did not "materially and substantially interfere" with the discipline at the school.  Did they cause discussion?  Sure.  But education still occurred.

Why do I bring this up?

Because social media and the modern age has rankled educational professionals today in the same way...

Consider this case: In Pennsylvania the Blue Mountain School District suspended a 14-year-old student (J. S. in the linked opinion), who mocked the principal.  She created a fake MySpace profile that insinuated the principal was a pedophile and sex addict.

This was done at home, user a family computer, without the knowledge of her parents, on her own time.  Apparently J. S. had had a run in with said principle recently and was upset.

The myspace profile used an image of the principal taken from a school sponsored web site.  Though initially public J. S. made the profile private after a friend notified her that it was publicly visible.  (The opinion does not say whether the image used was a link or a "cut and paste."

Eventually the principal discovered that the myspace existed and demanded J. S. print out a copy and bring it to school.  J. S. complied.  As a result of J. S. bringing the print out it was decided J. S. would be given a 10-day suspension (the printout disrupted the operation of the school in a material way).

At this point the principal considered filing legal charges against J. S. and ultimately her parents for a variety of charges.

(Personally I wonder why this is not fair use of the image as parody... especially considering what people say on TV today.)

Ultimately the US Supreme Court refused to hear this case leaving a lower court decision stand that said that the school had violated J. S. s right to free speech under the first Amendment of the Constitution.

However schools today consider that any speech by a student that "materially and substantially interfere(s)" with the school, no matter when or where its made, as a basis for action (even legal action).

To date courts have used Tinker as the decision point in considering these cases and use Tinker to block the schools efforts to expand their reach beyond the Constitution.

But schools want this to change.

So how is this like the SOPA debate?

For one thing I see the "schools" as overreaching substantially.  Students, particularly in middle and high school, are developing a sense of themselves and are likely to express this in a variety of was that might be considered offensive or unpalatable by school officials.  However, as the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) says, schools cannot limit free speech.

One imagines that today's principal's making hefty six figure salaries would have the required training to deal with a clever 14 year old girl - but perhaps not.

SOPA is in effect like the schools reaching out into the student's life to control it - except the control is your behavior on the internet.

And I see this as wrong.

Just like if I am stopped by the police why should they immediately suspect me of drunk driving?  I don't drive drunk.  But because many police stops involve this they treat everyone like a drunk driver.

SOPA says you're a thief just because some others are.

And in this case J. S. must give up her rights just because she is a student.

I was in high school from 1971 to 1975.  During this time those that graduated ahead of my class went to Vietnam - which by some was considered tantamount to a death sentence.  So sitting around in study hall you had a lot of 18 year old guys whose next stop was literally, as the song says, "Vietnam."

People had a lot to say about this and the point of education at that time seem to me to be developing a model of "mutual respect" for opinions about the war as well as respecting the job of the school.  The school knew full well where these boys were going after graduation.

I lived in a rural area and there were no real protests or marches.  (Though there was a bombing at the University of Wisconsin earlier.)

Before Vietnam there was no televised war coverage - WWII and Korea had only news reels (heavily edited by government and studios).

TV was the disrupting influence (like "social media" is today).  Had there been no TV coverage of Vietnam on the nightly news I doubt very much things would have been the same.

But the same generation that graduated in those years is now in a position of power in the US.

And instead of the notion of "free speech" that was used to ensure the public knew about Vietnam and saw the reality of it we have one of censorship - probably by the same folks who openly protested the war forty years ago.

The very thing that people died at Kent State for - free speech - is now being threatened by that same generation via SOPA.

How troubling is that?

My guess is the 60's rebels have now grown comfortable with their big incomes, much like the "military industrial complex" of the 1960's, and is acting to "protect their interests."

The bottom line is new technologies will be developed regardless, like Facebook or mySpace.

And 14 year old girls will find a way to use them in unexpected ways (just like sexting and cell phones).

These new ideas will blossom into the "norm" of the next generation: in a few years kids won't remember a time without Facebook, for example.

SOPA is just a means to control - and a disingenuous one at that.  No one is requiring movie studios to put movies on DVDs so they can be RIPed and burned or Torrented.  Yet the law is trying to control us even if we ourselves do not do that.

Just like the principal is trying to control was J. S. does with her own resources.

Just like those in the radical 60's fought against with the military industrial complex.  The war, like the revenues of DVD's to Hollywood Studios today, generated profits in the military industrial complex - profits that those in charge fought to keep. 

Studios could keep their films only on actual film and supply no DVDs, strip search those who have access to the movie during production to ensure that no illegitimate copies are made, but they don't because there's too much money to be made.

So they work to take your rights away instead.

In the 1960's TV coverage changed how war was viewed, just like the internet today is changing the landscape of copyright.

My how what goes around comes around...

The Art of Medical Deception (Advertising, Part I)

 One of the things that's so interesting about Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is the notion of "self deception."

Basically as I understand what he says there is "What You See Is All There Is" or WYSIATI.  WYSIATI is what your "System 1" uses to assess your current position in the world and it does this by only using what it can see, i.e., if I can't see it I'm not worrying about it now.

Since you really cannot see that much of what's around you at any given point in time your "System 1" (the part of your mind that grabs sensory input from the outside and draws conclusions, e..g, "there's my friend Bob") manufactures the rest of the reality it needs to complete its world view (like what's behind Bob, what's Bob wearing, and so on).

Much of the first part of the book (I am now about 1/2 way through) is relegated to how this happens, experiments conducted by Kahneman that demonstrate how "System 1" leaps to conclusions with very little data and how hard it is to detect this, i.e., you don't consciously realize that you are drawing these conclusions yet you act on them.

I interpret this all to mean that your mind (at least "System 1") is a vast, holographic pattern matcher.  Visual, auditory and other sensory input is continuously received and shoveled into the pattern matcher.  The pattern matcher takes all of this and jumps to a simple conclusions about your current "world state"  The patterns match at all levels - this is my house, my dog, the route to work, I'm hot, its raining, and so on and so forth and yield a kind of "how I am now" state in your mind.

Things that are not easily matched get "ignored" by "System 1" basically sweeping them under the rug, as it were.  This is why people do double takes, why you can hide things in "plain sight" (your mind simply ignores them as if they were not there - which is why you "overlook" your keys lying right in front of you), why you can drive on "autopilot" (I don't remember driving to work yet here I am), and so on.

The patterns get matched into states of consciousness I guess, e.g., I am home, I am at work.

Your mental "model" of the world is updated - but not directly by all the sensory input - only when your actually realize something is new or different.  "System 1" I think says "you are at work" - and the rest of your brain handles the model of "work."  (This is why when someone moves a chair in a familiar room you have to bump into it a few times - your mind does not work off of what you see but instead a mental model of the room and the "moved chair" doesn't fit in at first.  The chair is just "assumed" by "System 1" to be where it always was so it not looking for it somewhere else.)

Now what about the state of your body?

At least so far Kanheman does not relate these ideas to how "System 1" models your internal body status.

But I think it must, and in the same general way.

As I wrote in the last post new studies show that your "brain and digestive system" are connected (Duh!) in ways that modern medicine has not thought about (this article).

But it makes sense if you think about.

You don't normally have conscious recollection of, for example, the details of what your small intestines are doing while digesting your dinner - somehow your brain translates those experiences to high-level ones: I'm full, I'm sick, I have gas, and so on.

Yet clearly your brain is controlling them (either directly or indirectly).

One thing I think "System 1" does relative to your digestive system is focuses on things you need to eat, i.e., cravings.  Anyone familiar with a pregnant woman knows this: "I need licorice and pickles right now, honey...".  Presumably "System 1" received input to this effect.

Your mind must understand what your bodies nutritional requirements are at some level and directs your conscious mind to act on those needs.  Similarly for things like thirst, going to the bathroom, and so on.  At least for me when I am really thirsty I imagine or "see" images of a large glass of cold water, etc.  You probably do too.

Even the dog knows when he needs to go out, eat, etc.  He nudges your arm, pulls your foot, barks, scratches at the door.  Clear even his animal brain is able to convert bodily needs into "higher level" functions like "scratch at the door."

"System 1" also understand about things like timing: "Should I pull over at this rest stop or the next one...?"  It can provide you a model of what will happen to you if you don't pull over now: squirming, stopping at the side of the road, etc.  Again your bodily needs are translated into simple high-level thoughts by your brain and body automatically and without thoughtful intervention on your part.

More intriguing is the relationship between your gut bacteria, your health and what your brain thinks is going on.

But what's the point of all of this.

I guess a couple of things.

First off, it seems pretty clear that from the perspective of what you body is doing medical science has a long, long way to go.  Last post I mentioned it was like trying to understand an oil refinery with a microscope.  I think that's a pretty accurate analogy.

While the microscope reveals what is going on - its only at a small scale relative to the entire refinery and its without knowledge of how what is being observed fits into the larger picture.  (Of course the more microscopes and coordinated effort the more pieces you can obtain and, hopefully, correctly fit together.)

But this is like the keyhole problem - you don't know how much you don't see.

Sure you can find a wire, tap in and send in a signal to toggle a relay - but what does that do the overall refining process?  Does it work better?  Maybe it turns off something so the refinery works with less energy, that is, until it explodes.

I guess this is the reverse of WYSIATI: You Don't Know What You Don't See (YDKWUDS).

Our minds have to simplify what they perceive in order for us to make immediate sense of the world (another of Kahneman's points).  In doing this he has shown that our minds are perfectly happy to take short cuts (often incorrect ones) without out conscious knowledge (again documented by Kahneman).

So I am thinking that our minds generally are unable to process the wealth of information that flows to them every day through all the various media sources because they are not designed to function in that way.

Our minds are not designed to handle today's information flow.

On the medical side we might see ads for various medications, read articles about various health problems, but at the end of the day our "System 1" has to pattern match all of that into something it (and the conscious you) can easily grasp and identify with.

So we get things like "cholesterol is bad," "nicotine causes cancer" and "I want to be able to have sex when I am old."  All "System 1" gross generalizations of what otherwise occupies many, many researchers and millions or billions of dollars.

Secondly I see that unscrupulous marketers take advantage of that by packaging things in such a way as to amplify the generalizations - often by using a sort of "reverse placebo" effect.

You see an ad for a woman holding her stomach and looking uncomfortable.  "System 1" hones in on it.  "Buy my yogurt!" says Jamie Lee Curtis.

Is the yogurt going to solve my problem?  "System 1" doesn't care because the image you saw relates through the pattern matching I described to how you feel about yourself (or someone else).  Maybe I have gas for other reasons, but because of YDKWUDS you can't process what else might be the cause - at least not quickly. Maybe I just feel as if the product might help me because I might (reverse placebo) have the same problem.  In fact, maybe I'll start to worry about it, my stomach will hurt, and I will buy the yogurt as well.

So, for example, the marketing company is literally targeting your brain/digestive system interface with these yogurt ads because of the visceral reaction you might have through "System 1".

Kahneman has shown that this reaction really cannot be controlled.  Your reaction is almost fully automatic.

So if you have a gurgling stomach I believe that your mind is going to leap to the conclusion that this yogurt product is something I must buy (unless you've had a lot of conditioning to the contrary).  Your "System 1" brain is linking its feelings about your internal body state (gurgling stomach) with the image on TV of a happy customer eating yogurt.

This linkage happens in milliseconds, is beyond your control and so fast that you cannot react quickly to the result (your "System 2" - the "thinking" part of your mind is lazy, according to Kahneman), and so if "System 1" thinks the yogurt is a good idea it goes on the shopping list almost outside of your control.

The same for sizzling pizza when you're hungry.

The same for Cialis if little "mr. happy" is feeling blue or troubled.

And so on.

Personally I think that medications and food are two different things as far as advertising goes.

You can decide if your hungry or not fairly easily on your own.

But what about that nagging cholesterol thing...?

Then there is the social aspect: what if I am the only person at the party not on Lipitor?

Google Ads: Old News is Bad News...

Why do Google's customer's pay for old, tired data?

Several weeks ago I bought a new keyboard - the old one was on its last legs and much of it no longer worked.

So I did a lot of Googling through December for a new one and ultimately decided to purchase a Korg Kronos.  No doubt Google recorded everything about my searches.  Each page, how long I spent on it, etc.


I ordered it three weeks ago; it came in last week.

Now I did not buy it on line - I got a better deal somewhere else - so there is no internet "record" of the purchase - as if I purchased through somewhere like Amazon (not that Amazon shares my private data).

But since then I continue to see ads for keyboards where I go (that uses Google Ads) on the internet.  Lot's of them.  Very targeted toward me and my Google searches.

Ditto for some other equipment I also bought as well as ebooks (but this has gone on for a while).

I buy a lot of those one dollar jobs - and I see ads for them over and over - but at least they are advertising things I don't already have.

These ads have been running for weeks - showing me keyboards and other options that I will never use or purchase.

I wonder how much these folks are paying these ads?

Displaying ads to me, who will not purchase their products.

To me this seems to be a big flaw in the Google ad model.

How do they know when you buy something?

The keyboard I bought was expensive - its part of the Synthodeon project I am involved with - but I need it for a variety of reasons, e.g., Karma.

The answer is they don't - yet the probably run these ads because they know I am planning (or thinking) about spending a lot of money.

They don't know exactly what I write about - only that I am writing.  So for mentioning health or something related up pop ads - even if I am trashing the topic.


Interesting...