I’ve been a big fan of Click and Clack for years, in this full edition of NOVA they examine the cars of the future. They look at the horsepower phenomenon, and how SUV’s are the new station wagons to start with and then travel to Iceland to look at Hydrogen cars.
Also I”m not too happy with Amory Lovins, anti-nuclear kook in this, but what he has to say about car weight vs strength is true.
I would laugh, but it’s not funny. President Obama is still waffling on releasing Abu Ghraib photos five years after the fact, and closing Gitmo, but at the same time the American public has pretty much zero visibility to where Tarp money is going, where auto bailout money went, or analysis of how the coming climate legislation is expected to affect them economically.
While Al Qaeda in Iraq is trying their own “Re-surge” with a spate of suicide bombing aimed at reopening sectarian conflict our President proposed releasing five year old photos that are certain to enrage now calm militias in Baghdad.
How is it open to propose then revoke on Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and Tarp? The American public is certainly more interested in how the government is spending Trillions in their tax dollars and managing the offshore loans against our future.
We have no clear policy directions on Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Pakistan yet. How open is that?
We don’t know when taxes will be added, or what taxes will be added – how open is that? We don’t know whether the Bush tax-cuts will expire, how open is that? ( knowing the tax structure in advance is critical to planning most medium to large business’ in the US. Most of the bean-counters still don’t know what to plan for two to three years out and it’s crippling our ability to grow the economy back.)
This isn’t open government, it’s posture and charade.
This is an important fossil find due the the age and completeness of the fossil, and coming from 47 MYA it’s at an important branch in evolution. It’s not the missing link, it’s another missing link. Please watch the report, keep in mind that the news story is a bit overdone as is the style of all Murdoch outlets, and come to think of it most science reporting everywhere.
More on how this might not be “the” missing link that that news outlets are painting it as at Evolving Thoughts. It’s definitely important and shows some characteristics that are exciting, but more data needed before it can be known if IDA is mainline or offshoot from our path.
More from Carl Zimmer
PZ Meyers has more at Panda’s Thumb
Charles at Little Green Footballs has more as well in the ongoing debate over science and the Republican party. This is just the latest fossil that the shills at the Discovery Institute and their flacks are working to dismiss, a tedious kneejerk reaction.
The hype, the documentary, the book has the science community all abuzz with how this was released. There’s a good and bad side to it. Sensationalizing science does gain public attention to science which is sorely needed in the years ahead, on the other hand overblown reporting allows misinterpretation, and niches that Discovery Institute can claw into with “controversy” in mind. With their stable of prolific spin meisters and outright liars they’ll have the conservative public believing this is a plastic model before you know it.
In the last essay I spoke of how we are on desolate shore, our tide receded. The picture is bleaker than the allegory might initially suggest: the tide that put us so far ashore will not come back in tonight, tomorrow, or for a long time – our ship is beached, and we are a small army on foreign shore. We are behind enemy lines, and there’s no relief or support coming anytime soon.
Basic demographics tell this better than I, here’s a gallup chart that should not only open your eyes but also make your hair turn white:
The first thing you should notice is that the Republicans are the minority in all age groups. The second is the much wider spread between younger voters where the Dems hold a clear advantage. If you average this out then the spread doesn’t seem so bad -only 7-8 points, but if you look at what’s coming longer term it should give you serious pause if you are Republican.
As this younger demographic ages we cannot hope for them to get mugged by reality and turn into Republicans by magic. It’s not likely to occur – stark reminders of the real differences between parties are pretty rare in history.
If you look at where Republicans are strong it’s in the older age groups, and with 78 being median life expectancy we are going to lose many of those voters before elections in 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016.
This point spread is going to continue widening if we don’t become more appealing to younger and middle aged america -and for some reason we don’t seem to think we need a farm team anymore. Look at the rash that was given Michael Steele when he proposed reaching out to the hip hop generation.
When you bring this up to conservatives they will tell you “well young people don’t vote in great numbers.” That truism works for this coming election, but not for future ones. We are walking ourselves in lockstep to the elephant graveyard with that mentality.
So the very first thing on the agenda has to be building the farm team back up. That means outreach to youth, to minorities, to our service people returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It means not branding anyone who doesn’t trumpet exactly in unison with the elder herd as a RINO.
This means either throwing the Paleos out or separating them from their bileous last century hate and pulling them into the present. It means being for specific things rather than being against anything that smells like progress or science.
In a century where technology and science are both accelerating at a furious pace it means being pro science and pro technology. In a century where Gen X and Y’ers grew up seeing gay relationships on TV as a matter of course it means being pro-life and pro-family without being rabidly anti-gay. If you look at the Generation X and Y farm team, social issues are just not high on their list. They are more worried about the future of the planet, energy, and population. Most of all they are worried about their fiscal futures. Republicans used to be about prosperity, free trade, liberty, minding your own business — in my several years in the party (which goes back to voting for Nixon,) I’ve seen the core drift away from that.
Our priorities now seem to be stasism the way Virginia Postrel defines it in her book “The Future and its Enemies”. Meanwhile, is that rotting elephant hide I smell ahead on this path through the jungles and plains?
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What positive directions could the Republicans offer?
Prosperity – not just for us, but for the world. We want to be rich, but being rich is even better if our neighbors are rich too.
Cleaner environment through high energy environmentalism – we live in one of the cleanest countries in the world and it’s that way due to our use of high energy. (see the Gore Lied, People died in the sidebar for more about high energy environmentalism)
Peace through trade
Deficit free government – balanced budgets, concrete reductions, sunsetting outdated commissions, subsidies, foreign aid, committees, and departments
Defense that works, a future war is likely coming sometime before the end of century, and we need to be ready for it, not the last.
Term Limits
New Millenium Education Reform: critical thinking skill vs indoctrination, empirical history vs. interpretation, lifetime subscriptions to updated knowledge in your field instead of a diploma that devalues like a new car off the lot as soon as you leave campus.
Open culture not multi-culture – it’s time to end the ability of small tribal splinter groups to wrench the US and the world around through contrived conflicts and perceived disparities. Your skin or your sex or your religion is neither your identity nor your destiny, not in this country.
Pro-family without the small asterisk and footnote that says “except for gays”
Pro-life working within the constraints of democracy and reality
Then there are the three great challenges of this century: Population growth vs. Global Warming vs long term survival for humanity.
The list of challenges is as great as what we could offer since every challenge comes with opportunity and we know that the Democrats will not solve these problems, that’s not their nature. They would rather have the problem around to run upon next election, the one after, etc. It’s time Republicans re-assess what the real challenges are – here’s a clue: Science is not one of them.
I’ll have more on these ideas in future essays in this series. Don’t steal the text, but feel free to borrow and enhance any of these ideas. Also note that this is a work in progress: this is the sketch, not the final painting.
Much more analysis of the poll at The Moderate Voice
Michael Steele Promises new Ideas
Here’s a pic of Chewey waiting for a French fry at Sonic. This was taken with my “hideout cam”, a Sony DSC a bit older than the one shown in the link below. It takes great pics and slips in a pocket, glove box, or backpack side pocket easily due to its size and slim profile – there aren’t projections to snag on things when it’s flipped off.[amazon-product]B00153WWRK[/amazon-product]
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As we gain more people on the network, more content on the network, and more raw data on the network we have to get smarter about how we use it and our tool-kits are going to grow in ability; but can the tools keep up with the pace?
One attempt at this is Wolfram Alpha, a tool designed to answer natural language questions approximately intelligently with an assemblage of pertinent data in a page, somewhat like a mash-up of data filtered by your parameters from what I have seen. Think of it as a rosetta stone for types of factual data accessable on the internet since it does conversions, comparisons, and charts.
After watching one demo video it does appear exciting, but I fully expect WA to run into some of the same problems that Natural language Interactive Voice Response units have (NL-IVRs,) along with the problems that Google and Wikipedia both have.
You’ve probably met one of these NL IVRs over the phone, they generally go into their spiel and along the way tell you to “just ask” for what you want.
Taking away the voice recognition faults and dictionary tuning tasks, using a natural language dictionary for even limited applications like directing customers between the billing department or the customer service department does take some skill because you can’t guess all combinations of how the customer might ask for billing or for customer service. One might say bill, another billing, another pay, another the name of the product and collections, etc. etc. There’s also that question of what you do when someone asks for something outside the standard menu.
Wolfram’s advantage is that it doesn’t have to deal with interpreting language and dialects from sound, but on the other hand it does have it’s own “mispronunciations” in the form of typos and colloquialisms.
Wolfram also has greater advantage over NL-IVR’s in that the entire language is out there on the network and defined, and Wolfram will have access to all of that. On the other hand it wouldn’t hurt Wolfram’s success chances to have a chat with some of the NL-IVR industry leaders to see what they are struggling with in practice every day. Like some of the first natural language sound dictionaries (University of Oregon and their 800 number survey collection of dialects comes to mind,) and the major search engines, I suspect that Wolfram will use some crowd-sourcing to iteratively tune itself.
As the net grows millions of more people are added annually, new sources of raw data come online, and the content is becoming much richer. That said, the poor signal to noise ratio from those additions is quickly becoming alarming. When I was a roadie it was very important to keep the signal strong at the starting point, and as you amplified it was important to keep each amp in the chain leading to the last mixer at maximum strength without distortion if you wanted clean pure sound ( let’s forgive the distortionists and their wall of mud sound for the moment, it was interesting as a primitive artistic experiment, but when the day is done you want to hear the expression of the individual instruments and voices woven together cleanly – and those are the songs that will truly last.)
For a search on any specific you have to wade through a morass of sites, some using keywords and Search Engine Optimization to just get you to eat their search of links rather than the one you first chose. Some are not information sites, but instead splogger, retread, and disinformation sites – they have all the right words but they are telling lies or redirecting to nonsense and away from the original or actual content. They are the distortion and the noise in the net. How do we get to authority, how do we get to relevant searches, how do we get to trusted and genesis sources?
The major search engines have made sorting signal from noise into their business – but they are beginning to fail under the load. Merely cataloguing data and ranking through keywords, links, and page hits as authority measures and popping that stack when searched for just isn’t enough. Indeed it’s rather a simplex approach as the protagonist found out in Samuel Delany’s “Empire Star/Babel 17” upon meeting the simplex culture of the Galactic Encyclopedia the first time. (That pair of linked novellettes also explore linguistics, their nature, and how they shape culture and so are an interesting and entertaining read in their own right.)
Back to the subject at hand: the tools we have for transforming raw data to usable information are improving, and you can see that Wolfram is taking advantage of those – whole databases have been put online and places like Gapminder.org and others are working on methods to take that data and turn it into useful information in the form of tweakable charts. That is to the good, but as more data comes how do we get from simple line graphs to the search that pops up the right control chart for a specific question? How do we insure that the right data set is chosen? Therein lies the rub in taking data from raw to information form. The next step in the chain is taking that information and converting it to usable intelligence and we really haven’t quite got there anywhere that I’ve seen yet, perhaps Wolfram is the first reach to crack open that door.
In the meantime we are saddled with the growing babel of search optimization as commercial interests compete with social networks to steal the search mojo. In that open environment what tools can be used to get to factual pertinent content and genesis sources where required? There are various means in practice, but right now they amount to measuring popularity through a few means, and popularity does not usually equate to trustworthy or authoritative sources. Few of us have 100 years to live and poking through three pages of links to get to the pertinent sites needed is a waste of valuable time. The novelty of noodling through the net is also wearing off in the general public, they want what they want now, not yesterday – they are growing tired of distortion and wall of mud searches.
Both Commercial and Social ranking sites have created another phenomenon of the web, something I’ll call “yellow searchalism” for now. The snarkier and the more sensational that your headline, excerpt, and tags are the more chance that your article will get higher ranked. It’s like the yellow journalism of the past – the more alluring the headline sold more papers, the more obnoxious or sensational tagline also gets more hits.
There are also problems in communities that ding up and ding down, such as Digg and Little Green Footballs. While having completely different political bases each has “thought leaders” who if they plus something up are more likely to be followed by others who plus things up. Yellow searchalism and time of day also affect ratings at these sites. An article posted at right time of day with a snarky headline is more likely to go up in rank than the same article posted off-peak with mundane, factual headline. Each community is attracted to specific interests and you are more likely to find technology, entertainment, and humor on digg while LGF is more news, politics, science, and technology.
To Charles Johson’s credit Little Green Footballs is also pioneering with a filter system in the form of “monitor lizards” who remove links to non-factual sources, kookspiracy or hate sources, and they also clean out some of the hysterical and hyperbolic, while Digg doesn’t appear to have any similar mechanism in place.
One of the means of search ranking is through a mix several methods: number of hits, links to that page, number of times your terms appear, and similar quotes and citations. Most search engines will not divulge their full means since that allows you to “hack the stack..” But as seen with Google bombs and search page ranking races that’s not working effectively more than half of the time. People who were once attacted to the salacious and attractive are getting frustrated now because they aren’t getting exactly what they asked for – distortion and walls of mud searches are going out of style.
We have to get better at honing in to what is truly asked for versus what’s popular or what’s highly pimped, and some are trying through tailoring to stated individual preferences and past preferences. Some examples of this are Itune’s Genius, Youtube’s “recommended for you,” and other examples are in this article. The negative with “tailored for you” approaches to ranking is that it boxes individuals into a room of the same and they can lose all sight of the new. When wanting a new view of new things coloring that with past bias is not really a good thing, and it can stultify creativity.
The other factor that weighs heavy on the net: search engines can’t tell when you are looking for empircal fact or when you are looking for entertainment or fantasy, and there are no dotted lines between the information and disinformation. So when searching for the empirical you might end up at a speculative entertainment site, a political site with bias, or others. One example: if you type in “carbon dating accuracy” five of the top ten links will take you to young earth creationist pseudo-science sites that will tell you that carbon dating is bunk when it’s really a proven method.
So what means are there for trust and authority? Here are a few, some in use, some not:
Now if you mix those all together and drive it with pseudo AI in a well mannered way, you might improve the system. The first ones to do this well have a great chance to displace Google. Also keep in mind that with the “get your raw data online and accessable” movement well underway, similar tools will be needed for authority of databases and as we move to a full rich media world, how do you mine a video for tags? Will natural language voice recognition be woven into search engines for audio and video content that right now relies on users and others to hand tag it with text?
Finally: What other means are there to classifying, codifying, and sorting the net? What are your ideas on it?
Sea Gull photographed at a beach in Southern Florida in 2007.
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The perps had a trailer full of screw-studded plastic shields manufactured from stolen traffic control barrels and molotov cocktails stored at an apartment. Mckay was perfectly ok with police deaths or injuries:
During the same conversation, while discussing the use of Molotov cocktails, McKay was heard saying that he could leave the scene with a police officer burning or dying, and that “it’s worth it if an officer gets burned or maimed.”
more details here.
Warning: Links below come from radical left anarchist sites.
The FBI has labeled this group as the “Austin Affinity Group” but the affidavit doesn’t really state who they had affinity for. Kudos to law enforcement for a job well done in preventing domestic terrorists looking to use demonstrations as cover for their “red actions.” Sarcastic golf claps for the light sentencing from the court.
Notice that at Houston Indymedia they were immediately screaming “frame up” etc. in comments.
Expect these people to become heroic icons of the left ala Ayers and Dorn on their exit from prison. Also note that you see the traditional “But he was a good boy” protests that always follow terror convictions everywhere.
Kasey has a new friend who comes to visit once a week.
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