Taxi to the Dark Side/Talking to the Taliban

  By

This is not what I usually write about here, as I have little to add to the discussion over the war in Afghanistan, but two things have made a big impression on me in the last couple of weeks.

The first is the series of interviews with 42 members of the Taliban organized by Graeme Smith of the Globe and Mail (link). In particular, there is this:

Almost a third of respondents claimed that at least one family member had died in aerial bombings in recent years. Many also described themselves as fighting to defend Afghan villagers from air strikes by foreign troops.

…and this, which I guess many people better informed than I already know:

Aerial bombings and civilian deaths have both increased: The United Nations estimates more than 1,500 civilians were killed last year, as compared with the 900 to 1,000 civilian deaths counted by two studies of the previous year. An analysis of the first nine months of 2007 found the number of air strikes was already 50 per cent higher than the total for 2006.

Civilian bombings emerged as a major theme of the war last year. President Hamid Karzai … Continue reading

Here Comes Everybody

  By

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky, Penguin, 2008.

"We are living", says Clay Shirky, "in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations" [p. 20]. Digital technologies are now part of our social fabric, and all "the phones and computers, the e-mail and instant messages, and the webpages are manifestations of a more fundamental shift. We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of the change" [20].

Here Comes Everybody is an accessible and challenging introduction to these changes – to the many ways every Shem, Shaun and Issy can now share, collaborate, and act together. It combines some great stories with non-technical introductions to some of the key ideas (a little game theory, a little network theory, a few power laws) and is well worth reading — but it should be read with caution.

The reason for this mixed verdict is the dual nature of the book itself. Here Comes … Continue reading

The Anarchist in the Library

  By

The Anarchist in the Library, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Basic Books 2004.

Siva Vaidhyanathan (see here and here) sees the central problem of the Internet and of society as a whole, as the tension between decentralization/freedom/anarchy and centralization/control/oligarchy.

The great challenge in the new century is to mediate between two divergent trends — anarchy and oligarchy. In the war between distribution and concentration of information, the issues and conflicts seem intractable. [xvii]

In the world of the Internet, at least in the years leading up to 2004 when the book was published, these poles of anarchy and oligarchy manifest themselves technologically. Anarchy is the "ideology of peer-to-peer systems" such as the file-sharing and media-sharing networks that have followed Napster; it is characterized by a fluid, decentralized architecture in which "all the ‘thinking’.. happens at the end point" and in which there is "no discernible command-and-control system" [17]. On the other side, digital rights management is the technology of oligarchy, imposing controls on what you can and cannot do with the software and media that you buy (or, increasingly, license). I don’t usually buy the technology-determines-behaviour line, but his discussion of what it means for a technology to "have … Continue reading

Long Tail of News? Actually No.

  By

Second in a series.

Ironically, Wired points to a report by the (American) Project for Excellence in Journalism on The State of the (American) News Media 2008. Here is a little excerpt from the Executive Summary.

The state of the American news media in 2008 is more troubled than a year ago.
And the problems, increasingly, appear to be different than many experts have predicted.
Critics have tended to see technology democratizing the media and traditional journalism in decline. Audiences, they say, are fragmenting across new information sources, breaking the grip of media elites. Some people even advocate the notion of “The Long Tail,” the idea that, with the Web’s infinite potential for depth, millions of niche markets could be bigger than the old mass market dominated by large companies and producers.1
The reality, increasingly, appears more complex. Looking closely, a clear case for democratization is harder to make. Even with so many new sources, more people now consume what old-media newsrooms produce, particularly from print, than before. Online, for instance, the top 10 news Web sites, drawing mostly from old brands, are more of an oligarchy, commanding a larger share of audience than they did in … Continue reading

Mr. Google’s Guidebook

  By

Whimsley Hall is now strewn, like Miss Haversham’s house, with cobwebs and dust. Most visitors no longer come in by the front door to take a tour. Instead, Mr. Google (a travel agent who doubles as our butler) directs them straight down to the basement where the family archives are kept and tells them to look at one particular historical document called The Netflix Prize: 300 Days Later. They  read this and then they walk right out.

I shouldn’t complain. It’s nice that they visit at all – much better than rattling around here by myself – so I should be very grateful to Mr. Google for bringing these people to visit, but it does leave me wondering why he always sends them to look at this same corner of the house. I have a few other items lying around that I think are just as pretty but Mr. Google takes the visitors right by them without so much as a glance.

So when he brought me the sherry decanter the other day I challenged him on it. I thought it was an innocent enough question to ask of one’s butler. Little … Continue reading

Quantum Breathing

  By

Chris next door works at the Perimeter Institute; he is a physicist in the field of quantum information and I’ve been trying to read some of his papers. Interesting, if a bit beyond an ex-chemist. But reading quantum things again reminded me of The Best Quantum Thing I Ever Learned, which – outside chemists – seems little known. So I’ll tell the story here as briefly as I can – Wikipedia now has a good set of entries on this if you want to know more, including fancy moving pictures: start at haemoglobin. All the images here are borrowed from Wikipedia.

Breathe in.

What’s going on? You draw oxygen into your lungs; from there it passes to the bloodstream; from there to muscles and nerves. To make that journey oxygen molecules (O2) stick to molecules of haemoglobin in red blood cells, which carry them until they get to a place where they are needed, at which point the oxygen molecules hop off the haemoglobin to do their work.

More precisely, an oxygen molecule sticks to an iron atom at the centre of one of four "haem" or "heme" groups that are part … Continue reading

The Clintons

  By

Names matter.

16 years ago Hillary Rodham became Hillary Rodham Clinton became Hillary Clinton, so that Bill would not look emasculated. Now her opponents talk about "the Clintons". She is tied to the presidency of her husband, unable to be judged for herself. She has paid a big price for changing her public name.

Continue reading