Author: Tom Slee

Two Cheers for Technology

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Being a little technosmug I recently volunteered to revive the website for the Kitchener-Waterloo NDP. The results so far are online at http://www.kwndp.ca. In getting this far I’ve learned a whole lot of new words and been hugely impressed by some of the software that is now available. It’s a new world out there kids. But of course, being also technosceptical, I have some second thoughts.

First things first.  I am lazy of course, so I wanted to make sure that not every change
to the web site had to go through me. Also, I wanted a system where
members can log in, so a database-hosted site of some kind made sense.
I found and went with a content-management system called drupal. To see whether this is widely used I did a google trends search and it seems like quite the thing these days, although not quite so much as its newer offspring joomla (google trends comparison here).
I went with drupal because it seems a little more open, if a little
less user friendly. It’s a PHP package that is usually hosted on a
MySQL server using the MyISAM storage engine.

There’s quite
a lot of install assistance for drupal. Basically, the ISP provides me
with an empty MySQL database on their server, and an admin login to
that database. I used filezilla to ftp the files to the ISP server, PuTTY to get a secure command line interface, and followed the
instructions. After one misstep, which turned a ten minute process
into an hour, I was able to open a browser, point it at the domain
name, log in using the admin password my ISP had provided, and there
was a drupal home page with items to create accounts and add content.
From here on, pretty much everything is done by browser.

There’s a drupal cookbook for beginners
which walks you through making some sensible settings. You can add
menus to each page, allow comments on pages (like the online
documentation initiative), add different content types (individual
pages, “books” which have several pages of related content, and so on). You can also create users and define roles, so that visitors (external
users of the site) see a web site, but users who log in can (depending
on what role I give them) can create content or carry out other tasks.
So I think drupal does the trick in allowing me to be lazy, while
keeping the site secure.

There are two ways of extending a web
site set up with drupal. One is themes – page layouts and colours. I’m
just starting to customize our site so it has a theme that reflects the
organization. The nice thing is that you can submit themes back to
drupal or share them with other sites, so riding associations in other
cities could, if they like the look of the KW site, adopt it too.

The second is modules, which are add-on packages. Some are simple, like providing a contact form.

I haven’t seen
wiki modules, but there are blogging modules so we could host a
candidate’s blog during the election campaign, and forum modules
(internal or external discussions).

Other modules are complete applications in themselves. For example, I came across something called CiviCRM,
which is a “constituent relationship management” package for community
groups. It helps to manage volunteers, fundraising and other campaigns.
So maybe the web site can be not just a public face for the riding
association, but it can also serve (once people log in and once I
assign them to a role that has the right privileges) as a tool for
managing membership, election campaigns (who has signs on their lawns
and so on) and all that. I’m just starting to look into it, but it
looks pretty cool and extensive. It installs as a drupal module, so it
should just add to the site I already have.

And all this drupal infrastructure (as you can see from the google
trends page) has been built in the last three or four years. Remarkable.

So I’m very impressed and pretty excited about
doing more with this.  Why only two cheers then?

Mainly because, if effective technology is what makes community groups and other volunteer-driven groups effective, we should be living in a golden age of participatory democracy, where larger numbers of people than ever are able to take part in everything from supporting their local orchestra to global projects. And while my friend Ruth disagrees, I don’t think we are. Participation in politics (as seen by voting rates and party memberships) is down across the board, I think, compared to a few decades ago; protests against the Iraq war have been, those big ones in 203 excepted, muted compared to previous wars. There’s a disconnect.

Technology is fine, but we should remember that it’s just one piece of the puzzle. So while an e-mail blast automated from a server is much more efficient than afternoons spent licking envelopes in a church basement or the constituency party rooms, it doesn’t necessarily free volunteers up to do other things. My own suspicion is because the social aspect of being in an activist group is essential to people, and while licking stamps may not be that thrilling (Principal Skinner’s opinion notwithstanding, if you remember the Simpson’s episode about the chocolate factory visit), the opportunity to hang out with other group members for an afternoon is part of what we join groups for.

So I’ll carry on with the site, and enjoy doing it. But I won’t kid myself that the success or failure of the site has much to do with the success or failure of the NDP.

Packaging

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I bought a pair of heavy duty kitchen scissors.

They are secured to a cardboard backing panel by two thick translucent plastic bands, one around the blade and one around the handles.

I need to cut these plastic bands.

I need a pair of heavy duty kitchen scissors.

Good Guys or Bad Guys in Afghanistan? It Makes Little Difference

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Following revelations that Afghans captured by Canadian troops have been tortured by the Afghan police and intelligence forces, Globe and Mail columnists Christie Blatchford and Margaret Wente rushed to defend the troops in separate columns last Tuesday.

Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, they say, are fine people. Blatchford writes that Canadian soldiers "treat their Afghan prisoners fairly and indeed often with gentleness." Wente writes that "I have deep sympathy for our military leaders, who genuinely want to do the right thing".

But these good guys are in a bad place. Blatchford says "Afghan justice is rough justice at best. This is a country steeped in decades of war and violence and vengeance" and Wente says "Nothing could be less surprising than the revelation that the Afghan secret police practise routine torture".

The problem is the Afghans themselves. Blatchford says that "not all of those who were detained and handed over by Canadians were merely mild-mannered farmers unfairly caught up while they tended their crops" and Wente says that "abuse of Afghan prisoners by Afghans" is  "regrettable, but what else can you expect?"

The idea that most people caught up in a war are innately good or innately bad is a destructive idea. A few are heroes, a few take to corruption and power like a duck to water, and most of us, as in all walks of life, muddle along trying to do the right thing, compromised by our own lack of courage. The tragic fact is that in war people of all stripes do terrible things, and it doesn’t matter a damn what their personal morals are. There is no difference between shot by a bad guy and being shot by shot by a good guy in a bad situation. The recent death of Kurt Vonnegut, haunted by the allied bombing of Dresden where he was a prisoner of war, is a reminder of that.

Wente and others who support this war sympathise with Canadians who can’t tell a good Afghan from a bad Afghan, but fail to sympathise with Afghans who don’t distinguish torturers from the troops who capture them and hand them over. They sympathise with individual Canadians stuck in a violent war but damn individual Afghans stuck in the same war. Wente writes " The question is not whether we can help them build a fair and just society. The question is whether they want one." and it is this dismissive attitude to Afghans – blaming individual Afghans for their collective misery while absolving individual Canadians of crimes carried out in their name – that will lead down the road to war crimes being committed by "our side" if they haven’t been already.

The virus of mistrust and prejudice caused by years of brutality and conflict affects everyone, and it is wrong to think it is something specific about individual Afghans (or Germans, or Americans) that produces such brutality. The further immersed in the war Canada becomes the more we will see cases of Canadian brutality too. That’s what war does.

Predicting hits may be like predicting the weather

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In the New York Times sociologist David Card physicist turned sociologist Duncan Watts writes about how cultural hits may be, like the weather, impossible to predict. It comes down to how much we like stuff because it’s good and how much we like it because other people like it. If it’s the latter, then it becomes impossible to predict at some point. What’s nice is that they did some experiments to demonstrate some of this in the lab too – you’ll have to click through to see it.

A side effect of this would be that there is a strong limit to the effectiveness of recommendation schemes from Amazon and Netflix and so on. Maybe our preferences are just too damn quirky to be captured, no matter how fancy the algorithm.

Here’s a few paragraphs from the article.

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in
cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of
the millions of individual people who participate in them. From this
common-sense observation, it follows that if the experts could only
figure out what it was about, say, the music, songwriting and packaging
of Norah Jones that appealed to so many fans, they ought to be able to
replicate it at will. And indeed that’s pretty much what they try to
do. That they fail so frequently implies either that they aren’t
studying their own successes carefully enough or that they are not
paying sufficiently close attention to the changing preferences of
their audience.

The common-sense view, however, makes a big
assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they
do so independently of one another. But people almost never make
decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so
many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on
our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway;
and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the
“best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other
people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

There’s
nothing wrong with these tendencies. Ultimately, we’re all social
beings, and without one another to rely on, life would be not only
intolerable but meaningless. Yet our mutual dependence has unexpected
consequences, one of which is that if people do not make decisions
independently — if even in part they like things because other people
like them — then predicting hits is not only difficult but actually
impossible, no matter how much you know about individual tastes.

The
reason is that when people tend to like what other people like,
differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative
advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one
object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the
right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result,
even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially
enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors
— a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly
effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun
many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of
competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate
different winners: Madonna
would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of
history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of
would be in her place.

Independent Bookstores in the UK

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I didn’t mean to write about things like book sales and so on, but one thing leads to another, so here I am.

The Guardian has an article about the shape of the UK book market and the surprising health of independent bookstores. Here is a graph based on numbers taken from the article (and taken, in turn, from the consumer research group Books Marketing). Click it to see it bigger.

Ukbookmarket

It shows that from 2003 to 2006 the big winners are the supermarkets and the online retailers – the twin jaws of the digital vice. No surprises there.

It also shows that the big losers are the chain bookstores (Waterstones in particular) and the direct mail book clubs. Again, no surprises.

The green line is the independent bookstores.  They are still bigger (for a few years anyway) than online retailers and have actually improved their share from 15.6 to 15.9% of the market.

There are some other statistical nuggets in the article. See if you can make sense of these:

Figures vary for the growth of book sales in Britain, but each source
points to at least small but steady growth. The Publishers Association
says that 459m books were sold in the UK in 2005, slightly fewer than
in 2004, but ahead of the three previous years. Nielsen Bookscan, which
only counts books sold at retail level (not including sales to schools
for example), says that 225m books were sold last year in Britain with
a value of £1.7bn. Nielsen draws a straight line of gains from 2001
when its records show 163m books sold with a value of £1.2bn.
Waterstone’s reckons the market is growing at a more sedate 2% a year…
If not exactly thriving, the independent book store is not in as dire
straits as many fear. According to the Booksellers Association, a trade
group for retailers, the number of independents has fallen from 1,700
in 2000 to 1,400 today. But that figure now appears to have stabilised.
There are an increasing number of small publishers targeting the
independents…
"Publishers are falling over backwards to sell to supermarkets at very
large discounts," he says. "The focus on celebrity memoirs and
potential bestsellers is relentless and the proportion of book sales by
authors in the top 50 is going up and up. The middle band of authors is
finding life increasingly tough. The spread has diminished and that
trend will continue in the short term at least as competition gets more
intense. It is having a substantial impact on what is published."

Infotopia

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Cass Sunstein is a University of Chicago Law Professor whose book, Infotopia, I got to read on a recent trip. The subtitle is How Many Minds Produce Knowledge and it’s all about mechanisms – particularly Internet-driven mechanisms – for combining the insights of many people to produce, as he says, knowledge. It’s a good, thought-provoking book and I recommend it.

Here’s something I had to struggle with: Sunstein is a big proponent of using prediction markets to make some kinds of decision, and he is very doubtful about the merits of deliberation: sticking people in a room and talking things out to come to a decision.

My first reaction is that I feel deliberation should be workable, and my first reaction to markets is suspicion – enhanced by the fact that Sunstein comes from the University of Chicago, where the very right-wing Economics and Law movement came from. I don’t know Sunstein’s politics, but it’s clear from the book that his heart is in the right place. He believes in the importance of marginalized people whose opinions and knowledge are too often overlooked, and in the contributions they can make. So is there a case for markets in the situations he’s talking about, in the aggregation of knowledge?

Let’s think about my hostility to markets.

Those of a libertarian right-wing outlook see the source of social problems as hierarchy, centralization, planning, bureaucracy, socialism, and the state. Socialists see the source of social problems as the concentration of wealth, privilege, and ownership in the hands of the few.

The dispute spills over into the realm of the mechanisms we look to as bulwarks against oppression.
Those of us on the left, believing in the ability of wealth to divide and conquer, look to collective action as protection against private ownership of property. It’s the old story – hang together or hang separately. Co-operatives, co-operation, unions, solidarity.

Those on the right see collective institutions as bearing the seeds of oppression and coercive suppression of individual liberty.  They look to individualistic mechanisms such as property rights and markets as protection. Free exchange respects individual autonomy and liberty – but those of us on the left see the potential for exploitation, the rule of money, and marginalization of those without the price of entrance into the market.

An economic way of phrasing this is that both sides see principal-agent problems as a root cause of oppression. The potential for moral hazard is there in both collective organizations and in any organization with market power: the temptation to oppress, to deceive, to lie, to mislead are all present. Failures of information (asymmetric information among others) and problems of transaction costs are ubiquitous.

In all this, it’s worth reflecting on what is central and what is secondary. What matters, after all, is liberty, equality, fraternity (and sorority as well). The questions of markets, voting, democracy, deliberation, are instrumental questions. To some extent we can separate them from the primary problem. My suspicion of and distrust of markets comes from a belief in the alienating effect and excluding effects of turning things that matter into commodities to be bought and sold – particularly in highly unequal societies.

So when it comes to using markets as a deliberation mechanism – including markets using virtual money – then my suspicions may not be relevant. Yes, the proponents of these instruments hark back to Hayek – whose politics I shy from –  and his The Use of Knowledge in Society. Does this mean I must object to the use of, say, prediction markets  to gain information? A clear-sighted view must say no.

Perhaps, at the same time, it would do me good to question the use of deliberation as a means of making decisions and pooling information. Feminists have long maintained, after all, that marginal groups get excluded from such discussions in a statistical manner, if not an absolute one.

Reading Infotopia was a great way for me to address these unasked questions because Sunstein himself presents the strengths and weaknesses of both sides of his argument. He may be a lawyer, but he’s not in court here, arguing for his client at all costs. The book has a balanced, open-minded approach that is a refreshing change from Some Other Book I’ve been reading lately. (Or maybe he knows that readers respond to indications of open-mindedness, and he’s just a more skilled proponent of his own point of view? Whatever, it works). His equivocation and insistence on making distinctions is welcome. It prompts questions in the reader, rather than diverting the reader past the problems.

So I recommend this book. It’ll make you wonder what’s happening when you are next with a group of people trying to talk your way to a decision. And it makes me want to look at some prediction market software for use at the workplace.

It does have limitations. The big one is that it’s really just a starter.  It could do with going a lot further in addressing the uses and limits of the tools he investigates. Markets, for example, seem suited only to questions that have numerical answers (price) or binary answers – but he doesn’t mention this limitation or what follows from it. He doesn’t distinguish cases where membership in a group is open from where it is closed, or compulsory participation versus voluntary. He briefly mentions a hybrid technique called Delphi, with a mixture of deliberation and voting, but only briefly. There is little about referenda, demand-revealing or otherwise, and little about other forms of voting or methods for achieving consensus in an inclusive fashion. Finally, he does not address the question of learning. Discussion, after all, is not just about decision-making but is also about learning, while markets separate the two. So the reader is left with a lot of open questions at the end of the book. But these would have turned it into a much bigger book too, and right now it’s good and short and thought provoking, which is plenty.

Starting Non-Fiction Books With Stories: Give it a Break

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I’m tired of the way so many business and cultural books start with a story. It was cute for a while, but I’ve had enough. It’s time for a change.

Here are the beginnings of ten books – not one of which is a novel. Aren’t they stupifying in their sameness after the first two or three? (Can you identify them? – Number 5 is a giveaway.)

  1. Don Verrilli might as well have uncorked the champagne bottle right then and there on the marble steps of the Supreme Court — the case he was about to argue was a slam dunk. It was late March 2005 and Verrilli must have felt like he was on top of the world.

  2. No one ever gave me directions like this on a golf course before: "Aim at either Microsoft or IBM". I was standing on the first tee at the KGA golf club in downtown Bangalore, in southern India, when my playing partner pointed at two shiny glass-and-steel buildings off in the distance, just behind the first green.

  3. It was late in the afternoon, on a typically harsh Canadian winter day, as Rob McEwen, the CEO of Goldcorp Inc., stood at the head of the boardroom table confronting a room full of senior geologists.

  4. In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.

  5. For Hush Puppies – the classic American brushed-suede shoes with the lightweight crepe sole — the Tipping Point came somewhere between late 1994 and early 1995.  The brand had been all but dead until that point. Sales were down to 30,000 pairs a year, mostly to backwoods outlets and small-town family stores. Wolverine, the company that makes Hush Puppies, was thinking about phasing out the shoes that made them famous. But then something strange happened.

  6. About six years ago, I went to the Gap to buy a pair of jeans. I tend to wear my jeans until they’re falling apart, so it had been quite a while since my last purchase. A nice young salesperson walked up to me and asked if she could help.

  7. One day in the fall of 1906, the British scientist Francis Galton left his home in the town of Plymouth and headed for a country fair. Galton was eighty-five years old and beginning to feel his age, but he was still brimming with the curiosity that had won him renown — and notoriety — for his work on statistics and the science of heredity. And on that particular day, what Galton was curious about was livestock.

  8. Croesus, King of Lydia, was considered the richest man of his time. To this day Romance languages use the expression "rich as Croesus" to describe a person of excessive wealth. He was said to to be visited by Solon, the Greek legislator known for his dignity, reserve, upright morals, humility, wisdom, intelligence, and courage. Solon did not display the smallest surprise at the wealth and splendour surrounding his host, nor the tiniest admiration for their owner.

  9. Early on the morning of April 8, 1994, the electrician arrived to start work on a new security system being installed at an upscale home overlooking Lake Washington, just north of Seattle. In the greenhouse, he found the owner of the cottage, Kurt Cobain, lying dead on the floor in a pool of blood.

  10. J-20. For those in the know the acronym is easily decipherable: July 20, 2001, the call for action transmitted to hundreds of thousands at the click of a mouse. J-20 – Genoa.

Its not only become predictable to start books this way, it’s patronizing.

First, the story is obviously a setup, selected precisely so that it illustrates the point the author wants to make, so we’re being led down a path here. It has the effect of making me suspicious – it’s misdirection: what’s up the author’s sleeve?

Second: it says to the reader "this is going to be an easy read: don’t worry, you won’t have to think too hard". Yet almost all these books claim to have important things to say (and a few of them actually do). Do we need this dressing up, this dose of sugar? I don’t think so. Get to the point please – if you have one. The idea that profound truths can be identified and transmitted without effort is seductive, but misleading.

Finally, when some of these books have business leaders saying "this book is deep and really influenced us" then you have to wonder about what their idea of deep thinking is.

It’s not that I think obscurity and dull prose are the mark of a serious book (or is it?) but this "who moved my cheese?" approach to avoiding proper thinking is a horrible trend.

Here’s a great way to start a non-fiction book. I’m cheating – it’s from the beginning of Chapter 2 – but Chapter 1 is a kind of preface so I think it qualifies:

Streets in cities serve many purposes besides carrying vehicles, and city sidewalks – the pedestrian parts of streets – serve many purposes besides carrying pedestrians.

It’s unfamiliar – who thinks about sidewalks and what they do? And what could these other purposes be? So it immediately raises questions in the mind of the reader, prompting active thought and questioning – rather than a comfortable, cocooning "Let me tell you a story" beginning.

Want more? A recent discussion at Crooked Timber lists many academic examples.

No prizes for guessing the most titles from those above – not even spare chocolate eggs – but I’d be interested if anyone can recognize some.