The Price of Democracy

"The price of democracy is eternal vigilance," our founding father Thomas Jefferson once said. I was reminded of this by an email from my mother-in-law Elena Schmid in response to my previous post, We Need a National Conversation.

With permission, I repeat Elena's email:

Democracy is never a given. Each generation has to renew its commitment to it, has to decide whether it is worth the effort. My generation had a number of issues it had to fight for - social equality, civil rights, unnecessary wars: yours will have to take on a move toward autocracy imposed by limiting dissent: your daughter's will probably be around technology's rights and privileges. Democracy is 'of the people' and the people have to decide what the breathe and depth of that democracy will be at any given time. It is a challenging system of government that does not allow for somnambulism if it is to survive. That's why freedom of speech (including blogs) and freedom of the press is so important.

We Need a National Conversation

If this article by Catherine Crier is correct, we desperately need to have a national conversation about what our constitution stands for and how we can allow religious fundamentalists in our country to live the lives they want to live without having them try to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. According to Crier:

Most of them would like to see the United States under biblical law. Comparable to countries like Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, all of which live by Sharia (the strict Islamic code of the Koran), America's right-wing fundamentalists seek a nation governed by Old and New Testament scripture. Born-again Christianity will supplant the Constitution. This is no exaggeration—purchase a DVD of either Justice Sunday event, buy a book by one of their ministers, or simply go to one of their web sites. They do not make a secret of it. What's more, they demand that all Americans adhere to their rigid and reactionary beliefs.

The Blog | Catherine Crier: CONTEMPT -- How the Right Is Wronging American Justice | The Huffington Post

Rising Tide of Unease

Maybe I just read the blue sorts of blogs. But I was surprised when otherwise technology focused blog http://www.bubblegeneration.com/ had a long complaint about the current admininstration -- and as with the technology posts you'll find there, it is well articulated. Here is part of the post that is particularly pointed:

You've seen: a vicious terrorist attack (horrible), a war on the wrong country (amazing), the devastation of an American city (unbelievable), systemic corruption at the top (disgusting), the total mismanagement of the country's money, rendering the US a future pauper (almost inconceivable) and now, almost every day, more and more evidence of the kind of cronyism this country hasn't seen since 1929 (stupendous; congratulations should surely be in order).

Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab

Read the rest.

That Isn't Going to Help

As if respect for the United States by the rest of the world hadn't already dropped to an all time low, now it appears that we can legitimately be accused of using chemical weapons:

Pentagon officials acknowledged Tuesday that U.S. troops used white phosphorous as a weapon against insurgent strongholds during the battle of Fallujah last November. But they denied an Italian television news report that the spontaneously flammable material was used against civilians.

AP Wire | 11/15/2005 | Pentagon used white phosphorous in Iraq

This is after the Pentagon had previously condemned the Italian report and stated that our troops had "never used chemical weapons in Iraq." Apparently the denial was based upon a disagreement as to whether White Phosphorus should be designated as a chemical weapon. According to an article in an Italian daily, "...on BBC radio on Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Venable said that the US State Department's recent assertion that white phosphorus had not been used in Falluja was based on "poor information" .

He also said that "white phosphorus is a conventional munition. It is not a chemical weapon. It is not outlawed or illegal." He said the US army used the incendiary munitions "primarily as obscurants, for smokescreens or target marking in some cases." "However it is an incendiary weapon and may be used against enemy combatants," he added .

ANSA.it - News in English - White phosphorus used in Iraq

According to Ansa, an international treaty restricts the use of white phosphorus devices, banning its use against civilian targets -- but the US is not a signatory of this treaty.

I see three patterns here that are troubling -- first there is the use of the "chemical weapon" which we should have been smart enough to avoid. Like the use of terror, this is an indication of a willingness to throw out the conventional rules of behavior which have guided our country up to the current administration, all justified by the "war on terror." As the world's only superpower, and one that has prided itself on being a voice for freedom and democracy, we cannot afford to stop doing what is right, even if it is inconvenient. We should feel a responsibility for setting a good example for the rest of the world.

But the two other patterns are equally disturbing -- as with so many issues that have confronted the Bush administration, there is an attempt at denial based on "bad information" or worse, technical differences in definition. No one in the rest of the world is going to care whether White Phosphorus is officially classified by treaty as a chemical weapon. They can all see the photographs and see the effect of WP and come to their own conclusion. So denying that we have used chemical weapons is a ridiculous statement to make in the face of the evidence.

Which brings us to the last pattern -- why are we (the US) so terrible at crises PR? From the US Government's own website:

In a crisis, the best course of action is to be forthcoming and honest and to do what it takes to facilitate stories. The media are going to write and air stories with or without your help. It's in your best interest to participate in a story — even a negative one — in order to have your position correctly represented. The alternative is for the media to write that a government official "would not respond to our inquiries," which only fuels suspicions and rumors.

A Responsible Press Office

So why can't we follow our own advice?

technorati tags: Iraq, United States

Favorite Flock Feature

I think my favorite Flock (http://www.flock.com/) feature is the ability to drag and drop text, photos, or the entire web site from a Flock browser window, into the built-in blogger editing and posting tool. Two suggestions, if the flock folks are listening...

(1) When I drag over the page URL, if I have highlighted text in the editing window - make that the link text.

(2) When dragging over text, I like how I can drag to the "Shelf" and then drag from the Shelf to my blog post. And I really like the additional benefit that you bestow on text from the shelf - that you insert the "blockquote" and "citation" HTML tags... but sometimes I want to drag straight from the web page into the blog post, in which case I just get the text... and if I wanted that, copy and paste is really just as easy. Why not insert those blockquote and citation tags when I drag straight from browser window to blog editor?

p.s. I find myself posting blog entries more often now since you guys have made it so easy!

technorati tags: Flock

To Lead: Power and the People

I caught the end of a very compelling essay by Richard Rodriguez, broadcast on Jim Lehrer's NewsHour program yesterday. The full text of the essay is here:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/essays/july-dec05/rodriguez_11-14.html

Rodriquez doesn't point his finger at Republicans or at Democrats specifically, but rather at the trend in America for power to have become dissasociated from the people. He writes, "In today's America, men and women are the working class and are paid to fight wars the powerful never risk." And goes on to point out:

The failed Boston cardinal is awarded a palace in Rome; the ex-con has her TV show again. The floodwaters recede to reveal a network of contracts and cronies.

My concern here is not with the falling popularity of Republicans or with the failure of Democrats to say what they stand for beyond an envy of power. My concern here is with the disconnection between power and leadership in America.

Online NewsHour: Richard Rodriguez Essay: To Lead -- November 14, 2005

Why you should try Flock

Flock has a good post listing all of the interesting ways in which they are pushing the browser model forward. Here is what they say:

Here's a list of thirteen things you really should try with Flock. We're bragging, of course, but at the end of the list you'll also find a few warnings about things we're still working on.

Flock

Give it a try. http://www.flock.com/

AI Running Google?

Fascinating piece by George Dyson about his visit to Google. I'll spoil the end by repeating his last paragraph:

For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings:

"When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain."

But go read the whole thing Edge.org

Amazon's Mechanical Turk

I have been playing with Amazon's new Mechanical Turk and I have to say it is quite intriguing. Awhile ago I had written about CAPTCHAs and mentioned that I had heard about Internet sweatshops overseas in which human beings were employed as a part of computer programs to perform tasks like cracking these visual passcodes... Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a commercialized version of this idea. There is a good write-up of it over on the Programmable Web blog.

So I logged on and tried it out. The current tasks are about linking a photo (taken with some sort of drive-by camera apparatus) to a business name and address. I did about 50 of these matches in half an hour, and they are valued at $0.03 per task. So if all of my tasks are "approved" I made $1.50 -- or about $3.00 an hour. While that is more than I make from doing this blog, it isn't going to pay the mortgage. On the other hand, $3.00 an hour is a princely sum for parts of the developing world -- although in its current form a grasp of English and familiarity with the web are a barrier to entry for the neediest of the unemployed.

All-in-all a fascinating experiment and an indicator of something I think we will see more of before we see less -- that is, humans becoming cogs in computer processing. Think about building an artificial intelligence made up of tens of thousands of people responding to the tasks put to the AI -- humans masquerading as computers masquerading as humans?

OK I'm sold on Flock

This is a much better interface than the Blogger web interface! Google take note! But I wonder what happens for blogs that require a captcha as my IP Inferno blog now does... Off to try it!

technorati tags: Flock, Blogger, Google

Test from Flock

My first attempt to use the Flock blogging tool was a failure... Flock completely hung on my machine. But the good folks at Flock have been releasing new versions every week, so here is a second attempt.

technorati tags: Flock

Good Customer Service from VW

As readers of this blog know, I am in search of a diesel to replace my current car, so that I can start burning biofuel instead of oil based fuel. One of the best options is the VW TDI engine (turbo diesel injection) as this engine can burn biodiesel with no modifications. We already have one in the family that my partner Erika drives.

I wrote to VW asking if they planned to again sell the TDI as a new vehicle in California, starting next year when California allows passenger diesel's to be sold again. California stopped allowing them to be sold in 2001 in order to reduce the amount of high sulfer diesel fuel that was being used. 2006 is the cutover year for all diesel supplies to be low sulfer.

While wrong in some of the details, I thought VW's email reply was thoughtful (although probably canned) and gave me the feeling (rightly or wrongly) that there was a real human being on the other end of the conversation. This is so rare that I thought I'd share their response. By contrast I received NO reply from Mercedes Benz after a similar inquiry:

Ted,

Thank you for inquiring to our Volkswagen website. The TDI engine option will not be available beginning with the 2001 model year in the state of California.

Although the TDI remains certified to meet California's tough minimum tailpipe emission standards, Volkswagen of America's decision was made to best ensure that California's corporate fleet average for emissions would be met. This complicated standard calls for all automakers to formulate and sell a predetermined mix of its models in order to meet a strict corporate fleet average for emissions.

The Volkswagen TDI engine is the cleanest passenger car diesel ever produced, emitting about 20 percent less CO2 than a comparable gas engine. Additionally, the TDI emits less CO and hydrocarbons than gas motors and because of its fuel's evaporative properties, it doesn't release harmful fumes into the air at the fuel pump. The TDI's remarkable fuel efficiency also helps us preserve our planet's finite supply of fossil fuel.

The TDI is certified to the tough minimum Tier 1 requirement - this is the stringent California standard for what is permitted from a car's tailpipe. The TDI could have been certified to even stricter requirements if not for NOX and particulate emissions, which are naturally higher in diesel engines because of their exceptional combustion efficiencies.

Volkswagen is confident these NOX levels can be lowered using new technology if the sulfur level in our nation's diesel fuel was reduced. For this very reason, Volkswagen and the other members of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers have advocated lower federal sulfur content standards in both diesel and gasoline fuels. It is a sad fact that the most technologically advanced country in the world uses the world's most sulfur-laden fuels.

We apologize for any disappointment and hope this information shares insight on our position. If we may be of further assistance, please respond to this e-mail. If you prefer to speak with a representative, you may contact the Volkswagen Information Center at 1-800-DRIVE-VW.

We certainly appreciate your interest in the Volkswagen brand and invite you to visit again in the future.


Ivan
Volktalk

It looks like I will have to purchase a TDI from out of state, or get one used that someone else has already imported into California.

I Voted

I am happily wearing my "I Voted" sticker, having just returned from the polls. I was having a little trouble this morning explaining to my eight year old step-daughter why only 6.8 million people in California are expected to vote today. She was concerned that the lines would be very long at the polling station this morning. I said no, there would be no line (there wasn't). But how could I explain to her that only 6.8 million of 15.8 million registered voters were going to vote today? Or the even more bizarre (and sad) fact that this is considered a strong turnout?

While I don't advocate her solution to the problem ("I thought everyone HAD to vote!"), it sure would be nice if people like Arnold Schwarznegger, the pharmaceutical companies, the teacher's unions... would spend some of their $300 million on getting people to vote on whichever side of the issue, instead of just the partisan (and, to me, often misleading) issue oriented advertising.

Internet Operating System

In 2000 I joined Borland as the company's chief strategy officer. My job was to try and figure out what growth options were available to this venerable independent development tools vendor. During my first six months there I worked on a number of possible directions, ultimately settling for entering the market behind Rational as the number two provider of the system of record for software development organizations... its a long story. But what I was more excited about was something people were just staring to talk about -- an "Internet Operating System." Now in 2005, Google and Microsoft have both committed to this new vision, and perhaps eBay's purchase of Skype is an indicator that there will be at least one other company at the party...

I thought the Internet Operating System (IOS) was a good name for this next generation of the Internet, as it helps to get people thinking about it as a deployment platform. Think about what a disk operating system is (or became over the past 20 years) -- effectively a set of device drivers that perform three main tasks: input, output, and storage. On top of this you have layers of abstraction -- the mouse is one kind of input device, the keyboard another.

In the new Internet operating system, or what some people are calling the read-write web, there are similar input/output and storage mechanisms. Flickr is a particular storage mechanism for photos, for example. Shutterfly could be thought of as an output device.

The next generation of software developers will have this enormous sandbox called the Internet to build applications within, connecting all kinds of "devices" to each other in more and more interesting and powerful ways.

Now does the Ebay acquisition of Skype start to make sense?

Creative Commons Party

Last night I attended a party in San Francisco to celebrate and support Creative Commons and to welcome Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, to the board. The party was hosted by Chris Anderson, John Seely Brown, Dan Gillmor, Joi Ito, Brewster Kahle, Ellen Levy, and Mitch Kapor. It was great to get a chance to see and in most cases talk with all of these folks. The event was packed with the usual Silicon Valley suspects.

Mitch was talking up his latest project called FoxCloud which is not really ready for public beta until next week... but sneak in and take a look. It is a tool that synchronizes your Firefox bookmarks from machine to machine...

James Joaquin, founder of When.com (sold to AOL) and Ofoto (sold to Kodak) was talking up the company he just joined as CEO -- XOOM -- which sounds like a great company. They are helping folks who would otherwise use Western Union to transfer money back to their families in foreign countries do so without the usurous fees... According to James Western Union will charge people as much as 25% to transfer their money. Xoom does it for about 5%...

Rob Labatt, ceo of ezboard was explaining how he is transforming that website into "community blogging" -- the closed trials of an entirely new version are about to open up on a GMail invitation-only basis in the next few weeks...

So many other people, what a great time! And a great cause. Now its time for you to click through to the Support Creative Commons page and donate money, or buy a t-shirt. As of now they have raised about $40,000 of the $225,000 they need to raise by the end of the year. Help them out!

What Separates the Sane from the Insane?

More research out this week demonstrating that the difference between those that our society judges to be sane and insane is optimism. Realists are the insane ones. Michael Parekh points to this article in the Wall Street Journal on the subject. A very wothwhile read:

"...brains have a remarkable talent for reframing suboptimal outcomes to see setbacks in the best possible light. You can see it when high-school seniors decide that colleges that rejected them really weren't much good, come to think of it."

I remember reading something a few years ago about a study of how individuals with mental illnesses view themselves, vs. how people in the general population view themselves. People with mental illnesses more often had a realistic view of themselves than "sane" people. Our sane citizens more often had unreasonably optimistic perspectives of themselves...

Passing the Turing Test

Back in September I linked to a very funny post by Jason Striegel about how he was encountering people randomly through IM and was having trouble convincing them that he was a real person. Here is the post by Jason again. Lately I have been thinking about this because I am increasingly encountering one version of the Turing test called Captcha.

You've probably seen these tests as well - an image that has certain letters in it which you must type in to prove that you are a human being. That is, for as long as computers can't do a good job analyzing these images and discovering the letters. Unfortunately, the Captcha project reports that this has already happened:

Thayananthan, Stenger, Torr, and Cipolla of the Cambridge vision group have written a program that can achieve 93% correct recognition rate against ez-gimpy, and Malik and Mori have matched their accuracy. Their programs represent siginifcant advancements to the field of computer vision.

But don't worry! The good folks at Captcha are hard at work on the next set of tests that will help separate the humans from the machines... Try out ESP-PIX for example, in which you have to evaluate four images and choose the best word to describe what the images have in common... Not only does it keep out the machines (for now) but it is also child-proof!

But there is an easier way to defeat these things. A number of people have already documented systems that parse out the problem of defeating a Captcha challenge to an eletronic sweatshop in India or China -- hundreds of people who go to work each day to sit there and defeat the Captcha challenges...

Why would anyone go to the trouble of having a room of people in India defeating Captcha? Unfortunately lots of reasons. The same reasons that companies like Google are now using Captcha on Blogger -- one example: if you can use computers to automatically generate web pages that link to your product, you can elevate the place that your prouduct shows up in results pages... ditto product rankings or the results of surveys... In factm Captcha got started because of an online poll about the best computer science school:

In November 1999, http://www.slashdot.com released an online poll asking which was the best graduate school in computer science (a dangerous question to ask over the web!). As is the case with most online polls, IP addresses of voters were recorded in order to prevent single users from voting more than once. However, students at Carnegie Mellon found a way to stuff the ballots using programs that voted for CMU thousands of times. CMU's score started growing rapidly. The next day, students at MIT wrote their own program and the poll became a contest between voting "bots". MIT finished with 21,156 votes, Carnegie Mellon with 21,032 and every other school with less than 1,000. Can the result of any online poll be trusted? Not unless the poll requires that only humans can vote.

So, where will this all end? Biometric challenges. It has to happen. How else will we be able to tell the machines apart from the people?

Worried About Climate

With Wilma the most powerful storm ever in the Atlantic, destruction of Cozumel and Cancun certain, and who knows what is to come in the US (one forecaster suggests snow and a powerful extratropical storm...) you have to worry a bit about climate change. And the latest issue of Scientific American has the rest of the story. Title: Climate Model Predicts Extreme Changes for the US.

"Climate change is going to be even more dramatic than we previously thought," says Noah Diffenbaugh, who reported his team's findings in the October 17 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ...Diffenbaugh's model predicts several events: the desert Southwest will have more frequent and intense heat waves, combined with less precipitation during the summer; the Gulf Coast will grow hotter and experience heavier rainfalls in short time periods; the Northeast will suffer under longer, hotter summers; overall, the continental U.S. will undergo a warming trend that will reduce the length of winter.

This isn't something that can be stopped. But it is something that we can be planning for - both as individuals and as a community. And we are not. That does have me worried.

Not Worried About Oil

For the past year my partner Erika has been driving a standard 2002 VW Golf on "biodiesel." It burns cleaner than gasoline (or diesel), emits fewer greenhouse gasses, and most importantly it does not come from the middle east, Venezuala, an alaskan wildlife refuge or offshore drilling rigs in California, Florida, and the Gulf. It comes from good old American soy beans.

Our government and media are doing a lousy job. We are constantly being scared by reports that oil reserves are running well behind consumption. This is an ECONOMIC problem, and NOT a science or natural resource problem. It is an economic problem for two reasons -- (a) we have an enormous infrastructure of gas burning products that would have to be converted to diesel and (b) the scale of production of biodiesel is, today, insufficient to get the some economies that gasoline production enjoys and thus the price per gallon of biodiesel is higher.

But during the recent price spike, the price of gasoline started to come close to the $3.50 per gallon price that we have been paying for biodiesel. And since most diesel engines get better gas mileage (20-40% according to Edmunds) than gasoline engines, the per mile price for most consumers would still be lower today.

So why all of the worry about the price of oil? With a concerted push by government and industry, we could start getting consumers and businesses to purchase diesel vehicles, and begin investing in biofuel manufacturing and distribution infrastructure. Over the next decade, as our national vehicle base naturally turns over, we would, as a nation, become increasingly less dependent upon foreign oil and eventually less dependent on oil altogether.

There are about 150 million passenger vehicles on the roads in North America today, and about 8 million new ones are purchased each year. This doesn't include figures for commercial vehicles which adds another 100 million vehicles, and another 6 million new vehicles purchased each year. Thus out of 250 million vehicles on the roads, we could be replacing 14 million, or 6% per year with biodiesel burning alternatives every year.

Gasoline accounts 2/3 of America's oil use according to the Department of Energy and represents 95% of our transportation energy use. For every 5 million biodiesel vehicles sold, we could reduce our dependence on oil for transportation by 2% and our overall dependence on oil by 1 1/3%. Add subsidies and incentive programs and the pace at which this conversion occurs could be significantly accelerated.

Biodiesel is no longer a strange topic to be left to hippies. It is a mainstream product, running in mainstream production vehicles. Adoption of biodiesel is an important step (although not the only one) in breaking the world's dependence on cheap oil to fuel our economies. I would rather see us burning hydrogen, but the technology and infrastructure for biodiesel is HERE TODAY.

My next car will be diesel. BIOdiesel.

Hurts Golf more than Wie

The disqualification of Michelle Wie this past Sunday has been widely reported as being bad news for Wie... but in my opinion this is much worse for the game of Golf.

According to reports, she dropped her ball about one foot too close to the hole, after a bad lie. Even the Sports Illustrated reporter who reported the infraction stated that he felt she had been "hasty" rather than feeling that she had in any way intended to "cheat."

If she had understood that the drop was closer to the hole, she should have added 2 strokes to her score (giving her 76 instead of 74). Her disqualification was for signing her score card without these two strokes.

Disqualify? Why not just add the two strokes, and re-determine the rankings based on her new score of 76? If all are in agreement that she did not intentionally cheat, that this was merely an error, why punish her in this way?

In my opinion, Professional Golf comes off as ridiculous in this dispute. After playing for days, to disqualify a player for a misjudgement that all would regard as difficult to be sure about, makes Golf look like a game for accountants, not for athletes. No offense to accountants intended.