Steam

On the always interesting Poddelusion podcast, I heard a description of an incident in an interactive science demonstration in Bristol. A volunteer member invited a passing spectator to look at kidney cells through a microscope. She did so, then responded "why does a Kidney need cells"?

This is a fairly typical area of "unknown unknowns", i.e. in some cases we don't know what we don't know. In the days before the internet, despite what people think, we were just as capable of looking up information in a miscellaneous way; but in general we are more likely to learn information in a familiar tree like manner - expanding the tree branch by branch. We would probably learn roughly what a cell was, and then that body organs are made of cells.

Not only can we very easily jump to branches that are not connected to our trunk of knowledge today, we are actively encouraged to do so. It's as if our tree of knowledge can be temporarily extended by the internet. But of course, it cannot. Despite the increase in information access, the human brain has not made any great leaps in the past 50 years and we are all subject to the same short comings and biases.

This has nothing to do with increased general intelligence, as opposed to increased ability to access wikipedia. When reporting news events, most of the exterior branches of a story are left in, because the average audience member is quite capable of making the pruning decision themselves. That does not imply they know what to do with the information, or more critically, that they know what they don't know.

In recent events, two details have been repeated many times: "Boston Marathon" and "pressure cooker bombs". Both of these things were integral part of the outrage, but neither are central to supposed Islamic ire - which we have been urged to assume this was the cause. Boston is a city on the United States' Eastern Seaboard like New York, but has no other particular significance to terrorism. A Marathon is a race notionally based on the Greek original, but again has no significance to terrorism. I'd seriously wonder whether pressure cookers are a commonly recognised form of cooking anymore. I know my mum used one but I haven't seen any recently. I don't think there has been much Islamic meditation on pressure cookers. It's good for bombs, but so is any metal pot.

Yet the terms now have unpleasant associations added to their previous meanings. Indeed, these associations may well eclipse any previous meanings. From now on public events in Boston may always be considered a risk, and pressure cookers gain a worse reputation than they already had.
With large amounts of narrative information competing for our attention, we are largely forced to choose an arbitrary point to start understanding from, however much we can take in. That "arbitrary point" is, of course, normally defined by others.

There is no battle between deep and shallow knowledge; cell biology is not a topic many people need to know in depth though we seek to know the basics. We know what we need to know. But there may be an increasing problem with rootless knowledge. It's hard to examine something that appears to have no clear predecessor in your mind.

Take Guantanamo Bay. Is it a prison? Why is it situated in Cuba? Is it military or civilian? Do you have to be proven guilty to be there? We know it is a real place, but what else is it similar to? Why does anyone want to shut it down? Why can't it be shut down? This is an example of an object that appeared as fully formed but has challenged reporters and legislators alike to actually describe what it is. That does not stop it appearing regularly in media, as if it was a fairly standard thing.

Unfortunately, it is usually only after disasters that people give long consideration to the things they thought they understood, but evidently didn't.

Island life

In 2007 I referred to both Boris Johnson and Gary Bushell - two prospective London mayors at the time - as "whackos". One succeeded in his ambition, while fortunately the other has disappeared into much deserved obscurity.

Mr Johnson's popularity would not be much dented by pointing out that he is still a whacko; the controversial point being whether he is a lovable rogue or dangerous buffoon with it - nothing that hasn't been covered extensively elsewhere.

But one aspect that I certainly agree with him on is the future of air travel in London. While there are several options, putting something into the Thames estuary (leading to the amusingly named 'Boris Island', which sounds too much like a place of exile) is one of the grander solutions.

Whatever innovations happen with flight, people are going to fly more, not less often. And people will travel in and through London no less often. In all seriousness, a major city airport isn't a bit of trophy infrastructure for a prime minister (or mayor) to show off - it supports the viability of the country, especially one that is already an island. Successive governments have delayed decisions, hoping that this will play well with the parts of Britain that think the South East sucks up too many resources already. But when jobs and growth are needed, this posturing won't last.

The area around Heathrow is blighted in such a way that expanding it makes no sense. There are moribund hotels, and isolated little villages. This area is stuck in a limbo - no one wants to develop it, but it can't be abandoned. Once you reach any city airport, you then have to travel into the city itself. This is dependent on efficient infrastructure - not the apparent proximity of the airport to the city itself. Heathrow suffers from being close enough to London to be part of the traffic problem, but not close enough to function as community in itself.

The argument against building a new hub is the massive upfront cost, and in some ways the slight bizarreness of building anything out in the Thames estuary. But by not starting again, we are chaining ourselves to 1950's travel infrastructure. When things are going smoothly, the terminals are pleasant enough - but put under even the slightest stress and suddenly you find yourself in the middle of a UN disaster zone.

Ultimately the argument isn't so much the viability of an airport in one place or another - there are examples of every type of configuration of city and airport all over the world to chose from. The question is why would you want to pour any more money into a dead part of West London that cannot be improved, as opposed to making something new.

WYSINLWOG

When was the last time your search returned results in the wrong language? Or the wrong thing entirely? Google will show you search results based on the little your laptop knows about you, as well as the wealth of knowledge Google already stores about you.

In most cases, this saves a lot of time. When I enter "ruby" into my work laptop browser, I see the results that reflect the fact I'm a software developer, not a jeweller.  There are search services such as duckduckgo that promise not to use any context information to massage results, but they can be quite painful to use.

The result of this is that What You See Is No Longer What Others Get.

One of the new ways in which information is increasingly reflective is something Gavin Barwell now appreciates, after failing to understand that the ads he saw on a Labour press site were based on his own browsing habits:

The Arab girls he saw being advertised were specifically there for him, so to speak, perhaps because he had previously sought them before.

This is an aberrant feature of the web; it wasn't designed to be personal. The web was designed as any other Turing system; you make a request and you get the relevant information back. The same site would behave the same way again whoever used it. The concept of a log-in and seeing "my" account required cookies and strange back-end paraphernalia - a warping for the business world. Even today this everyday concept causes design stress. A book, a film and indeed most games do not show different people different content (although with the wonders or region blocking, a DVD may show you no content at all)

But maybe in the near future, other media will get personal.

BBC are experimenting with "perceptive media". As the BBC's Ian Forrester puts it:

Perceptive Media adapts the story to the audience without them having to explicitly interact with it, it uses information about the audience to adapt the story within a scope defined by the storyteller.

The "information" would initially be attributes like your sex, where you live etc. but might stretch to considerably more, so that the script could tailor itself to seem more familiar. Perhaps positioning the story in your milieu.

In the film that shares the same name as this blog, you may remember that adverts started talking directly to Tom Cruise character as he tried to escape undetected under constant eyeball surveillance.

Aside from the concerns about privacy, the future will be much more about you. Not just you, but you and your things. The "internet of things" will ensure that many devices are capable of sending and receiving information actively with other things. It is also likely that instead of asking for your information via a form, servers will find other sources of information about you.

By focusing on privacy issues, we may miss the strangeness and inevitability of a world that is configured just for you  and yours. Adverts are just the tip of the data mining iceberg; virtually all smart objects could represent themselves specifically for you. From your car's dashboard, to a toilet in a Japanese hotel.

This makes it ever more essential to understand what your digital public identities consist of. You may of course already have too much; but it is just as likely you will have too little, and that will increasingly mean the things around you will work poorly.

Drive by

Marissa Mayer's decision to stop homeworking at Yahoo probably wasn't quite so definitive as was initially reported. The machinations of the tech industry are not something short on verbiage, but I think an odd principle was set.

It isn't the case that homeworking is or isn't an issue - it may well have been abused at Yahoo.  You certainly won't be very innovative if you can't get your smart people together. I suspect that managers will simply ask employees to make their best effort to work in the office.

But this is hardly of interest to anyone outside of Yahoo. Nor is it some sort of weather signal for the future - people don't want to spend their lives working in an office with hours spent in traffic that they could have spent with their families.

The better question is why employ smart people, and then tell them how to behave? I'm fairly certain the issues about collaborating together and homeworking are well understood by any team.

What Mayer actually did was to make a decision for Yahoo employees, inferring that they had lost sight of how to work effectively. Or, worse, she made a decision for the middle management because they couldn't get their teams to perform.

There is significant differences between "leadership" and "management". A lot of waffle has been written about these qualities but to use the simplistic motor car analogy; steering requires leadership, the engine requires management.

You would expect someone to improve overall conditions, especially in macro decisions that individuals cannot change. Whether the fridges have water in them; there is enough parking etc are all decisions that need to be taken, but none of them are unique to making Yahoo a better (or even valid) business.

I suspect Mayer was hired to help define what Yahoo do to make (more) money, and how to get there. That is, to steer the car. Not to attempt to manage the hours the staff put in - however interested she may be in that.

There seems to be a bigger problem with how people define themselves at work. Despite employing people, firms find they need to ask employees what they do in continuous rounds of "performance management". The need to break arbitrary bits of the company up and then ask how profitable they are also leaves workers wondering whether they are in "the wrong bit" of a firm. A lot of employees do not actually know what aspects of the work they contribute to the company are valued. Time in the office? Innovative ideas? Accuracy filling in forms? This may explain why someone who thinks only their time is of value, figures that they might as well stay at home and spend it from there.

Update: A similar point is made here

Cow

The full text of this t-shirt reads:

they lied to us
this was supposed to be
the future
where is my jetpack,
where is my robotic companion,
where is my dinner in pill form,
where is my hydrogen fueled automobile,
where is my nuclear-powered levitating home,
where is my cure for this disease

This anti-paean to progress was added extra weight when the t-shirt it featured on was modelled by a guy in a wheelchair. This is a theme I have covered before in many guises, but a coincidence of events brings it back to mind.

In an Economist article this week, sub headed "innovation pessimism", an attempt is made to counter the assertion that progress is really slowing down. The author thinks that we are just not waiting long enough for effects. I'm not sure the problem is speed, more direction. As the article does imply, we celebrate the social benefits of networks like Twitter, ironically forgetting how many tweets concern the difficulty of actually travelling to meet people. I don't think wishing for flying cars should be seen as a silly affectation of science fiction lovers - there is considerably more potential traffic space in the sky than there is on the roads. Maybe we currently live in an information boom, not a transport one. Which is why the problems of copyright, intellectual property and patents can't be ignored.

The untimely death of one fairly notable data thief is a reminder that the free flow of information in a world with many legal blocks concerning the ownership of that information highlights a limitation in capitalism. Not capitalism itself, more the way we think about "metering" knowledge. The law views the need to attribute ownership of a cow to a farmer in much the same way it attributes ownership of Harry Potter to J.K. Rowling.

We are still no nearer to resolving the concerns of those who want to own information like a cow. We like to think the internet will route around obstacles, but really our minds must do so first. Letting the cow wander about a bit might be the key to releasing a lot more human potential and getting those flying cars.

Wolf

After yet another American gun massacre, commentators have unsurprisingly pointed to the number of assault weapons that members of the public own as a likely cause of woe. But as the slaughter apologists in the National Rifle Association (NRA) correctly point out, it is not the case that gun ownership must lead to misuse. Obviously gun ownership in the States is abnormal, but it's the cartoon like way in which they are treated that is dangerous. The first victim of the latest tragedy was the mother of the shooter who "had her own personal arsenal of weaponry" as "shooting was her biggest hobby." Had she shared a love of venomous snakes with her children, she would of course be detained indefinitely.

I am reminded of the scene from Pulp Fiction in which John Travolta's character shoots a back seat passenger in the face quite by accident. It's one more violent scene in a violent film, but the slapstick element sticks in the mind.*

Switzerland is definitely not a nation known for slapstick (or humour of any sort), but they have always expected citizens to hold their own guns. As Switzerland is effectively one big standing army, and a citizen is defined as soldier with voting rights, it is interesting to look at how they deal with guns. Like Americans, the Swiss are keen on shooting for sport.

If firearms are respected as much as they clearly are by the Swiss, i.e. weapons and ammunition must be secured etc., the chances of angry teens getting hold of guns on a whim is much reduced. If everyone had to pass a certified army course, just like driving a test, then you would expect that guns may be taken for granted a lot less.

Of course, the Swiss do this as a definition of an armed state - whereas Americans specifically want to hold guns to mitigate against a powerful state. Perhaps a better way to do this would be with more civilian oversight of the armed forces, instead of the over arming of civilians.

It is almost certainly the case that with so many weapons floating about in the public sphere, gun play is much more likely. Yet, it is important not to act as if the best way to avoid risk is to remove all the dangerous things. You have to do that with children, but it's a bit odd to continue that way with adults.

*At this point in the film, the villains with the dead body in the car seek out help from The Wolf.

Casual intrusions of a sexual nature

"I just want to keep my kids safe." is not a message that anyone wants to be seen to disagree with.

We all understand how fast moving traffic can kill children. While we still insist that children learn the equivalent of the green cross code, it is incumbent on society, and thus government to help reduce traffic speeds and remove dangerous drivers from the road.

So, following on from that, why can't we protect kids by keeping porn off the internet?

The issue here is a heady mix of taboo and politics; the conservatives feel there is a genuine need to "defend the family", though the evidence is that many adults have seen through the rhetoric and do what they can without wanting more civil liberty abuses.

The first and obvious problem is "what is porn?" and more deeply "why would I want to entrust the state to define it?" Whether you think the UK is sexually conservative or not, very few would trust a group of civil servants to control this definition.

Unlike the road traffic example where it is clear what the government can do to reduce traffic accidents, think about the more personal problem of school bullying. If you discover your child is being bullied, you would probably contact the school, talk to the headmaster and try to find out as much as you can from your child. But would you expect a minister to stand up and announce that the government will "ban bullying?". Is there a speed camera for bullying? Seatbelts?

From a technical point of view, you cannot "block porn". Porn is not an absolute thing, that can be referenced in a definite way. You can however stop direct queries to sites that self identify themselves as porn-mongers. Companies do usually take responsibilities for their own users "abuse" - businesses do hire people to spot pictures of erect penises on their site and remove them - but that's about it.

Effectively, we usually use the term "blacklisting" to create a list of sites that we know we don't want to visit for some reason. Sex industry sites themselves don't want minors either, because they probably don't have good credit. Sites that host the sort of the "Dark corners of the Internet" that David Cameron mentions, probably do so intentionally and can be marked out for exclusion. But beyond this, the unwelcome can appear anywhere - and the perfectly good may get mistaken for the bad. And the situation changes every second of every day.  I've been blocked at work from recommended technical articles because they once featured ads that might have had lingerie. Far better for parents to either monitor where their children go (like they do when they visit other homes) or to use blocking services that they can control as they wish. But these solutions put the onus on parents.

There is no need to talk about state censorship; in this case the state has given itself a silly task. As with bullying, the correct action is local - you start by talking to your own children. The internet is a miraculous thing that will doubtless serve mankind in ways we cannot yet imagine. Explaining to kids that images of bestiality, buggery, fetishism, etc do exist but are not something they should be seeking may prove counterproductive. But it is still better than asking your ISP to emasculate your connection. As with water and electricty, the internet is a service that comes directly into a home but needs caution to use.

Of course, behind blaming the internet (or top shelf magazines, or Lady Chatterley's Lover, or foreign influence) the real problem is that many people don't educate their children about sex. Or worse, they expect the rest of society to maintain a wall of silence so as not to disturb their fiction. This is beyond tackling; the important thing is not to allow a problem in one area of life to needlessly pollute another.

Ironically, households that have children in them also by definition probably have sexually functioning parents who are too busy raising kids to have the sex life they used to enjoy. Oddly, this is partly what the sex industry considers its customer base...

As described, the problem is best defined as a progress trap. There is no shame in this. But too many attempts to stifle the internet are not only pointless, they will lead to a much bigger division over time between the new digital natives and the old cultural hierarchy controllers.