Technology

I’ve been a holdout on upgrading to a smart phone, in part because I haven’t paid over $100 for a mobile phone since they were the size of a brick. But after finding that I could get a Droid 2 Global on Verizon for $20 via Amazon Wireless a couple of months ago, I made the leap. My initial experience was negative–Amazon sent me a phone with instructions to go to Verizon’s web site to activate. Verizon’s website wanted me to enter a code from a Verizon invoice. No such invoice was included, and none of the numbers from the Amazon invoice worked. So I had to talk get through to a human being, at which point activation was fairly simple. But one more hurdle arose when I had to login to a Google account, which was an obstacle of my own creation–I use very long randomly generated passwords with special characters, and have independent Google accounts for different services, so I had to choose which one to use with the phone before I knew what all the implications would be. (I chose my GMail account, which has worked out OK.) I wanted to set the phone up to use my own email servers, and to connect over VPN to gain access. This proved to be an obstacle that took a few days to resolve, due to inadequacies and bugs in Droid applications. The default VPN client doesn’t support OpenVPN, so I had to gain root access to install an OpenVPN client. This turned out to be the only reason I needed root access on the phone, and I managed to get that working without much difficulty. The Email application, however, refused to send outbound mail through my mail server, which allows outbound port 25 client connections from internal hosts with no authentication but requiring TLS. This combination simply doesn’t work–I ended up setting up port 587 (submission port) with username/password authentication via Dovecot. Though I would have preferred using client certificate authentication, I couldn’t get it to work. I still run into periodic problems with Email refusing to send outbound messages for no apparent reason–and the server shows no attempts being made. There doesn’t seem to be a way to select an individual message in the outbox for an attempt to re-send. I managed to get contact and calendar synchronization working with my Mac, but I ended up exporting my iCal calendars to Google Calendar and using them as my primary calendars. Most of the correlation of contacts in the phone from multiple sources (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, and my Address Book) worked fairly well, but some contacts are duplicated due to name variations. Synchronization with LinkedIn is somewhat buggy, with first and last names showing up in contacts as “null null." The Calendar app is even more buggy–I’ve created events on the phone that disappear, I’ve seen error messages in Portuguese and events with names that appear to be leftover debugging messages. I was also surprised to see that spelling correction was performed, without any prompts, on events I imported into the Calendar app from GMail (it incorrectly turned an acronym, “JAD,” into the word “HAD”). I’ve received an SMS text message from one person which was identified as being from another person–looking at the specific contact information showed that the telephone number of the sender was associated with the correct contact, yet the name and photo displayed on the phone was of a different contact that had no association with that telephone number. The phone’s camera capability is pretty good, but when I connect the phone to my Mac, it launches iPhoto but doesn’t find any photographs. I have to import them manually by pointing iPhoto to the correct location on the SD card. I’ve seen the phone crash repeatedly, especially when using location services (Google Navigation, Maps, and Yelp have been repeat offenders). There also seems to be some caching of location information that gets out of sync with other location information. For example, I saw Yelp correctly show me nearby restaurants, but refuse to allow me to check in to the one I was sitting in because I was “too far away”–and Maps showed my location being somewhere else I had been earlier. In one case, thousands of miles away–an attempted Yelp check-in after returning from a vacation in Hawaii showed my location on the map as still being in Hawaii. In at least one case, I was unable to get my location to update for Yelp until I rebooted the phone. I’ve had issues doing things as simple as copying and pasting a URL from Firefox to Facebook or Twitter. I copy the URL, verify that it’s in the clipboard correctly, but when I go into Facebook or Twitter to paste it, it is truncated. The number of bugs I run into seems awfully high for very basic applications. The problem is no doubt in part due to the way development occurs between Google, Motorola, and Verizon, and Linux development, which also seems to be an obstacle to fixing security vulnerabilities. The May 2011 issue of CSO magazine reports that Coverity has done two scans of Android source code for the HTC Incredible, finding 359 defects (88 critical) on the first scan last November and 149 defects (106 unfixed from the previous scan) on a more recent scan. Accountability for the code is distributed across the aforementioned groups. (Also see this CNet story, or the Coverity report itself.) I wonder if I would run into problems like this with an iPhone. UPDATE (May 19, 2011): And now there’s a security vulnerability identified in version 2.3.3 of Android and earlier (I’m on 2.2, and can’t update until Verizon pushes an update), which potentially exposes contacts, calendar events, pictures, and other items stored in Google-hosted services, if users access those services via unencrypted WiFi. Although the connections to those services are over SSL-encrypted HTTP, there is a returned authToken that can be intercepted and used for subsequent logins to those services. I’ve never used my Droid on unencrypted WiFi networks, but I’ll now take extra care to make sure that I don’t. Version 2.3.4 fixes the problem for contacts and calendars but not for Picasa photos. UPDATE (November 16, 2011): It’s still been a horrible experience, and I still see regular crashes, particularly when using map and location-related applications. A new discovery today while traveling is that the World Clock widget does not know when Daylight Saving Time occurs–the option labeled “Daylight Savings[sic] Time: Adjust displayed time for Daylight Savings” appears to just set the clock forward one hour, not display the correct current time taking into account the date and whether Daylight Saving Time is in effect in the given location. I traveled to the east coast and saw that my World Clock widget time for New York was one hour ahead of the actual time in New York. It’s utterly ridiculous that this widget requires the user to check and uncheck this option manually when Daylight Saving Time is in effect or not–that’s exactly sort of simple task that computers are equipped to do on our behalf. ...

I’ve joined the team of Global Crossing bloggers–please check out my initial post at Global Crossing blogs, “Forget passwords!" (BTW, my friend and colleague Glen Walker independently wrote a blog post making a very similar recommendation.)

Veteran software tester Abe Heward has started up a blog on software testing, which I’m sure will also include many items of epistemological, economic, and skeptical interest. He’s already got posts on how the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is relevant to software testing, why good testers aren’t robots (and the flaws in one company’s attempt to treat them as if they were), and on opportunity cost and testing automation. Check it out at www.abeheward.com.

James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (about which I’ve blogged previously) talks about how the state imposes standards in order to make features legible, countable, regulatable, and taxable. J. Stephen Lansing’s Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali describes a case where the reverse happened. When Bali tried to impose a top-down system of scientifically designed order–a system of water management–on Balinese rice farmers, in the name of modernization in the early 1970s, the result was a brief increase in productivity followed by disaster. Rather than lead to more efficient use of water and continued improved crop yields, it produced pest outbreaks which destroyed crops. An investment of $55 million in Romijn gates to control water flow in irrigation canals had the opposite of the intended effect. Farmers removed the gates or lifted them out of the water and left them to rust, upsetting the consultants and officials behind the project. Pesticides delivered to farmers resulted in brown leafhoppers becoming resistant to pesticides, and supplied fertilizers washed into the rivers and killed coral reefs at the mouths of the rivers. Lansing was part of a team sponsored by the National Science Foundation in 1983 that evaluated the Balinese farmers’ traditional water management system to understand how it worked. The farmers of each village belong to subaks, or organizations that manage rice terraces and irrigation systems, which are referred to in Balinese writings going back at least a thousand years. Lansing notes that “Between them, the village and subak assemblies govern most aspects of a farmer’s social, economic, and spiritual life.” Lansing’s team found that the Balinese system of water temples, religious ritual, and irrigation managed by the subaks would synchronize fallow periods of contiguous segments of terraces, so that long segments could be kept flooded after harvest, killing pests by depriving them of habitat. But their attempt and that of the farmers to persuade the government to allow the traditional system to continue fell upon deaf ears, and the modernization scheme continued to be pushed. In 1987, Lansing worked with James Kremer to develop a computer model of the Balinese water temple system, and ran a simulation using historical rainfall data. This translation of the traditional system into scientific explanation showed that the traditional system was more effective than the modernized system, and government officials were persuaded to allow and encourage a return to the traditional system. The Balinese system of farming is an example of how local knowledge can develop and become embedded in a “premodern” society by mechanisms other than conscious and intentional scientific investigation (in this case, probably more like a form of evolution), and be invisible to the state until it is specifically studied. It’s also a case where the religious aspects of the traditional system may have contributed to its dismissal by the modern experts. What I find of particular interest here is to what extent the local knowledge was simply embedded into the practices, and not known by any of the participants–were they just doing what they’ve “always” done (with practices that have evolved over the last 1,000 years), in a circumstance where the system as a whole “knows,” but no individual had an understanding until Lansing and Kremer built and tested a model of what they were doing? [A slightly different version of the above was written for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology core seminar. Thanks to Brenda T. for her comments. More on Lansing’s work in Bali may be found online here.] ...

Chapter 3 of Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor (1988) is titled “Techné and Politeia,” a discussion of the relationship of technology and politics that draws upon Plato, Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson to recount historical views before turning to the “modern technical constitution.” The contemporary “interconnected systems of manufacturing, communications, transportation” and so forth that have arisen have a set of five features that Winner says “embody answers to age-old political questions … about membership, power, authority, order, freedom, and justice” (p. 47). The five features are (pp. 47-48): ...

Wikileaks is releasing over 500,000 U.S. national text pager intercepts from September 11, 2001, over the next two days: From 3AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3AM the following day (New York Time), WikiLeaks will release over half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The first message, corresponding to 3AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, will be released at 3AM November 25, 2009 and the last, corresponding to 3AM September 12, 2001 at 3AM November 26, 2009. Text pagers are mostly carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the collection range from Pentagon and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults to their operators as the World Trade Center collapsed. This is a significant and completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entry into the historical record will lead to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how this tragedy and its aftermath may have been prevented. While we are obligated by to protect our sources, it is clear that the information comes from an organization which has been intercepting and archiving national US telecommunications since prior to 9/11.The Transparent Society getting closer, it appears…

Numerous mass media outlets and blogs are reporting on the misdiagnosis of Rom Houben of being comatose for 23 years when he was really conscious, according to Belgian neurologist Steven Laureys, who has claimed for years to be able to treat patients allegedly in a persistent vegetative state with electric shocks and find that they were really in a minimally conscious state. Videos of Houben show him allegedly communicating via a keyboard which is pressed by a single finger on one hand–but his hand is being held by a facilitator, and he’s not even looking at the keyboard. Some still photos show the facilitator looking intently at the keyboard, while Houben’s eyes are closed. James Randi observes that this looks just like the self-deception of Facilitated Communication that was promoted as a way to communicate with severely autistic people, and Marshall Brain at How Stuff Works seconds that conclusion. I think it’s a bit too fast to conclude that Houben’s not conscious–brain scans could indeed have provided good evidence that he is. But what would be worse than having “locked-in syndrome”? Having somebody else purporting to speak for you with ideomotor-driven Facilitated Communication, while you were helpless to do anything about it. I’d like to see some double-blind tests of Houben, where he’s asked questions about events that occur when the facilitator isn’t present, as well as fMRI results during the process of facilitation (since there are brain activation differences between active and passive activities, which have been used to study such things as the perception of involuntariness during hypnosis–it shows features of both active and passive movement). I’d also like to see further opinion on Laureys methodology and diagnosis–it seems he has significant self-interest in promoting this case. UPDATE: Brandon Keim at Wired Science has finally asked the questions that those who have reported this in the mainstream media should have been asking. Here’s a 2001 review of the scientific literature on facilitated communication. UPDATE: The video on this story shows the facilitator typing for him while his eyes are closed and he appears to be asleep. UPDATE: A Times Online story claims that Houben’s facilitator, Linda Wouters, spent the last three years working with Houben to learn to feel tiny muscle movements in his finger, and that Dr. Laureys did tests to validate the technique: ...

Yesterday I heard Joel Garreau speak again at ASU, as part of a workshop on Plausibility put on by the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO). I previously posted a summary of his talk back in August on the future of cities. This talk was based on his book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies–and What It Means to Be Human. Garreau was introduced by Paul Berman, Dean of the Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law at ASU, who also announced that Garreau will be joining the law school faculty beginning this spring, as the Lincoln Professor for Law, Culture, and Values. He began by saying that we’re at a turning point in history [has there ever been a time when we haven’t thought that, though?], and he’s going to present some possible scenarios for the next 2, 3, 5, 10, or 20 years, and that his book is a roadmap. The main feature of this turning point is that rather than transforming our environment, we’ll be increasingly transforming ourselves, and we’re the first species to take control of its own evolution, and it’s happening now. At some point in the not-too-distant future, he said, your kid may come home from school in tears about how he can’t compete with the other kids who are more intelligent, more athletic, more attractive, more attentive, and so forth–because you haven’t invested in the human enhancement technologies coming on the market. Your possible reactions will be to suck it up [somebody’s still gotta do the dirty jobs in society?], remortgage the house again to make your kid competitive, or try to get the enhanced kids thrown out of school. What you can’t do is ignore it. He then asked people to raise their hands who could remember when things were still prevalent: ...

The #1 “trending topic” on Twitter is “No God," apparently started by re-tweeting of “Know God, Know Peace. No God, No Peace.” This prompted atheists to jump in promoting the “No God” part of it, and then angry theists to complain about “No God” being the top trending topic–but perpetuating it with each of their complaints. The topic is generating lots of hilarity, as Attempts at Rational Behavior (@rationalbehavio) has pointed out in a couple of blog posts, with some people trying to start “Yes God” as an alternative topic–but including the words “No God” in their tweets! UPDATE (4:41 p.m., Arizona time): Twitter has decided to censor its “Trending Topics” list, and has merged tweets matching either “No God” or “Know God” into a topic labeled “Know God." If you actually click on that link to see the matching tweets (it explicitly does a search for either string), there are still a lot more that match “No God” than “Know God." UPDATE (10:10 p.m., Arizona time): Benjamin Black offers this entertaining commentary of what almost happened, which provides a better explanation of “Trending Topics” for those unfamiliar with Twitter. ...

Today I attended a lecture at ASU by Washington Post writer Joel Garreau, author of Edge Cities and Radical Evolution, about the future of cities. What follows is a rough sketch of his talk based on my notes. He began by saying that he’s interested in culture and values, and isn’t a “gear-head” about the emerging technologies that he’s written about (“GRIN” technologies–genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology). He currently studies cities–how they are shaped by technology, and how cities shape us. He started with a slide of an old Spanish map of the New World, which was mostly accurate, except for an oversized Florida and drawing California as an island. Why was California shown as an island? Because explorers in the Seattle area saw a body of water that went very far to the south, and explorers in the Baja California area saw a body of water that went very far to the north, and they just connected the dots. That error took 100 years to correct. Spanish explorers would land in Monterey Bay and carry boats inland, expecting to hit water, and they always commented that the Indians in the area seemed to be friendly. Garreau suggested that they were actually laughing at them for pointlessly carrying boats inland. When the explorers would fail to hit another body of water, they would report back that the map was wrong, only to be told that they must not have been where they thought they were. It finally took a decree from the King of Spain to change the map. His next slide was of the Los Angeles area, pointing out what he called “edge cities,” which he called “the biggest change in 150 years of how we build cities.” “Edge cities” are major and new urban centers around old big cities. They have a large amount of office and retail space, lots of jobs, and didn’t exist 30-40 years ago. They are popping up everywhere there is major growth. The area around John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, is an edge city–it has 5 million square feet of office space (more than Memphis), 600,000 square feet of retail space. It’s not a suburb, or sub-anything. It’s not a bedroom community. It has the features of office parks and all traditional city functions. The edge cities in New Jersey in the greater New York area have more jobs than Manhattan. Phoenix was one of the earliest places to recognize that it was going to have more than one city center–we have major centers downtown, uptown/Central Avenure, Camelback/Biltmore, South Mountain, and Tempe (among others), and these were recognized as centers that would exist by city planners a couple of decades ago. Paris has La Defense as an edge city, as well as Marne-la-Vallee, where EuroDisney is. When superior locations for growth are first found, the rich people move in first, and tend to go uphill, upwind, and upriver, byt Marne-la-Vallee was a poor area that was planned to be an edge city by selecting it as the location for EuroDisney, and it succeeded. Boston edge cities include the Burlington Mall area, MIT area, downtown, Quincy/Braintree, and Framingham area. One major factor that has changed cities are the available modes of transportation. Chicago was formed as a rail town, based around inter- and intra-urban rail. Detroit was formed as an automobile town. The last industrial age downtown built in North America was Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1914. In 1915, the one millionth Model T Ford came off the assembly line, and ended the old downtowns. The old industrial downtowns were from the 1840s to 1914, and existed because of the necessity of collecting raw materials in one place and having thousands of people there to work on those materials. Prior to those downtowns, cities were places like Jefferson’s Charlottesville, Washington’s Alexandria, and Lincoln’s Philadelphia. Most people earned a living from the land, and lived outside of cities. The automobile suddenly made places outside the old industrial cities far more valuable, like Long Island. Until 1955, the southwestern-most Major League Baseball team was in St. Louis, because movement by train placed constraints on scheduling. The Cardinals were thus the team rooted for by everyone further south and west. Once airplanes came into the picture, baseball could spread, and other cities could become major cities–Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, Seattle, Houston. Garreau asked, if Chicago were leveled, what would you rebuild first–O’Hare, or downtown. O’Hare is more critical today. But the changes caused by automobiles and airplanes is nothing compared to the networked computer, which is making changes more significant and more rapidly than the automobile. He showed a photograph of a Kresge’s in the Capitol Hill area of D.C., explaining that it was a discount 5 & dime store, the K in K-Mart. He said Kresge’s is dead, and K-Mart is dying, but do you think the building is still there, and if so, what is it? The first guess–Starbuck’s–was almost correct. It is a coffee shop. He argued that Kresge’s and K-Mart has been killed by Wal-Mart, which is really an IT company that happens to sell sneakers. He claimed that when you buy a pair of sneakers at Wal-Mart, a process kicks off at check out that starts to make a replacement pair in Malaysia within 24 hours. So why are coffee shops popular, and why do people pay $4 for coffee? Is it the free wireless? He argued that it is a social thing, only marginally about the coffee and the wifi. The main factor around the physical environment is that the rare stuff we can’t digitize, like face-to-face contact, has much higher relative value than it did before. Bill Mitchell of the MIT Media Lab, and former head of the architecture department, has catalogued 87 forms of real estate in cities, all being transformed by information technology. One form is super markets. Garreau asked, if you could get hamburger and toilet paper delivered to your home for free, why would you get in your car to go get groceries? To buy produce or meat, was the answer suggested by the audience. He then showed a photo of a Freshfields, a modern farmer’s market, and showed a photo of booths with tables inside it–it’s also a place to sit and socialize. Another type of building is a prison. He suggested that we don’t need as many prisons if we use GPS anklets or bracelets for nonviolent offenses. He then argued that Moore’s Law will continue to hold for the forseeable future, and we’ve already seen 32 doublings in processors since 1959. The only thing comparable is railroad capacity doubling, which saw 14.5 doublings before leveling out due to requirements of coal, steel, and land, and being superseded by the automobile. The IT limits are the laws of physics, the marketplace, human ingenuity, and our culture and values, and he argued that only our culture and values set real limits for the forseeable future. (In a class yesterday, one of my professors said that a physics professor speaking at ASU last year said that we’ve reached the physical limits for silicon chips, and won’t see any more doublings, but a subsequent new development has already refuted him with a four-times improvement due to nanotechnology–presumably this.) Sequencing the human genome was thought nuts, impossible, and/or would cost a fortune, but was done in 2000 at a fraction of the expected cost, far sooner than anyone expected, thanks to Moore’s Law. Garreau suggested that ten years from now, anything you can put in a lab for $1 million will be something you can put in your home for $1,000; anything you can get now for $1,000 will be “pocket lint.” He used USB memory fobs as an example of today’s “pocket lint." He showed a photo of students at CMU in a computer lab, and asked, “Is there a future for physical university campuses?” He gave a yes, on the grounds that this is where you “meet your first spouse and friends for a lifetime”–the social aspects. Distance learning has been around for a very long time (Benjamin Franklin did learning-by-mail), but it’s always a second choice. Shopping malls, he said, are turning into entertainment spaces. He cited his friend Jaron Lanier (a virtual reality pioneer), who suggests that the first thing to disappear will be escalators, replaced by rides–so when you go up by ferris wheel and come down by water slide, think of Lanier. He observed that if you go to a mall at 10 a.m., you’ll see the senior mall walkers, and if you go in the afternoon, you’ll see “drug dealing rugrats.” (He didn’t note, but I thought of how Arizona Mills Mall in Tempe has turned one space into an indoor miniature golf course.) Office space–is there any future to it? Again, he argued for the social aspect, and maintained that the accidental casual face-to-face contact is impossible to digitize, yet he finds the random conversation at the printer jam (the modern equivalent of the water cooler) to be his most productive time of day. To this, Prof. Brad Allenby objected that there is casual contact in World of Warcraft and Second Life, and we shouldn’t assume that such things can’t be digitizable. Another audience member suggested that because human beings need touch, we need real physical contact. (But that assumes the impossibility of tactile telepresence.) Yet another pointed out that movie theater attendance is up, even though you can watch online or at home cheaper. Garreau said, supposed you decide face-to-face matters, but only need it two days a week–how would that affect where you live? If you only needed it 3 days a month, then where might you live? He said some cities will live, if they are good for face-to-face contact. Others will die, if they aren’t. We’re headed to a profound shift of what is urban/urbane, and cities like Santa Fe are the future. It has 63,000 people, opera, restaurants, second-hand boot stores. The top fastest-growing metro areas are smaller cities that are like villages with face-to-face spaces and are somewhat dispersed. The top ones are Wenatchee, WA, Provo-Orem, UT, Grand Junction, CO, Gulfport-Biloxi, MS, and Myrtle Beach, SC. The top states for real estate price appreciation are Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Other example cities in this model include the Adams-Morgan area of D.C., Tempe, AZ, and Marrakesh. He then briefly turned to other technologies. He said that Craig Venter says that by the end of this year he will have an organism that “eats CO2 and poops gasoline.” (And his company has just received $600 million in funding from ExxonMobil.) Nanotech may build membranes that purify water. These things will impact where cities become feasible. “Is Darfur the next garden spot?" He then referred to a book by Leo Marx of MIT, titled The Machine in the Garden. He argued that in the industrial age, we suffered a split–we had to come into the cities and leave nature behind. Now we’re trying to put what we like about cities into a garden. In the final Q&A, he said he has a hidden assumption that we will continue moving forward and not go back to pre-industrial society; he said “no petroleum engineers think we’re running out of oil, only cheap oil." He said that we’re seeing a new explosion of religious fervor, and included environmentalism in that, saying that it has its own saints and heretics. He thinks human beings are “hardwired to have faith–even Russia made Marxism into faith,” but said that he’s “a hardcore rationalist” even though “rationalism doesn’t seem to be emotionally satisfying.” He said, following Popper, that “science can’t tell you what is true, only what is false, but it can changes minds without killing people.” (I disagree with his statement that science can’t tell you what is true–theories that keep passing tests do at least approximate truth.) An audience member commented that virtual environments can convey mental and physical aspects, but not emotional and spiritual. Garreau agreed, but I think both (and a few other questioners) were making an unwarranted assumption that virtual environments will not be able to reach a point of being indistinguishable (or very nearly so) from real environments, and thus allowing effective conveyance of body language, subtle gestures, and so forth, perfectly adequate for transmitting emotional information. (As for spiritual properties, I think they’re in need of demonstration before we worry about them–and given claims that have been made about them, it’s surprising that the questioner thought physical proximity was a limitation.) In a conversation with Prof. Allenby afterward, he also pointed out that we may be better able to make judgments of trust in a virtual environment because we are more alert to the possibility of a partial presentation of a personality and to intentional distortions. There are also some types of cues that are more accurately picked up audibly, while visual information can overwhelm those cues. Prof. Allenby also noted that major technological changes may turn what we now think of as fundamental truths into contingencies, and that may include some aspects of what we call human nature. Garreau ended by observing that past predictions of what the future will be like have usually been wrong, becasue things are more complex and more expensive then we think–and then we get blindsided by innovations like the iPhone. ...