Cultural Reverse Engineering

In what I assume is a very successful attempt at proving that I have too much time on my hands I drew myself into solving a non-puzzle that appeared on the back cover of the April 2, 2012 New Yorker magazine:

In the setup our hipster guide has said "I could use a latte", and Siri, rather than answering, "You are not late for any appointments", correctly offers up four nearby venues. I noticed that there were distances to each of the locations and figured that I could triangulate where in San Francisco's Mission district our protagonist was standing. So I went off to Google Mopes and plotted out the locations.

The first interesting thing was that the hippest of the hipster locations was called out on a fairly large scale map but that one had to zoom in two more clicks to see the names of the other three -- I wonder how that is decided? Anyway, I've been to the hippest, albeit over three years ago. It was chock full of folks plugged-in to notebook computers, which I would presume, not yet being re-cycled to the recherché status of portable typewriters, are rather declasse now. All one heard was the hiss of the espresso machines and the clicking of keyboards in a background of earbud leakage.

The second interesting thing is that the distances don't match any ground truth:

The blue pins are our target locations. The black circles are the radii given by Siri. They do not intersect. So I took the liberty of somewhat arbitrarily adding 100% or subtracting 50% from the given distances. That's the dotted black circles. That gave me the option of standing in the crosshatched zone, near 20th and Valencia. Which does NOT look like the background in the ad. Unless things have changed rather drastically...

This leaves only one real question: Why doesn't our iPorn-4S using hipster already know that he's within a stone's throw of his optimal environment?

Local Color VIII -- Kinks in da'Hood

By a process of default thinking I declined to respond to a medical call at 01:45 Saturday morning -- one of those, "The go-getters will go get it," things. It turns out to be a wise decision because there were shots-and-tasers-fired and our Med unit wasn't released until 08:00, so everyone got to stay up all night waiting for the taser barb removal ritual. This all happened in my neighborhood, which, combined with multiple recent calls further down the street to transport intoxicated inhabitants to rehab, is making my colleagues in the VFD a bit suspicious of my general geographic sanity level...

Case #0212004766 -- 03-31-2012
Aggravated Assault On A Law Enforcement Officer and Mental Evaluation Hold

Location: E. Sunlit, Seton Village area, Santa Fe, NM

Arrested: Charges pending, name witheld for actve/on-going investigation

On Sunday March 31, 2012 at 1:43 am Santa Fe County Sheriff's Deputies received a call for service in regards to a suicidal female. Santa Fe County Sheriff's Deputies arrived on scene and the suicidal female barricaded herself in the residence with a small, black in color, semi automatic handgun. Deputies attempted to negotiate with the female to surrender the weapon and come out of the residence. The female was not complying with any verbal commands at which time Santa Fe County Sheriff's Deputies encountered the female in a hallway pointing the weapon at them. Santa Fe County Sheriff's Deputies advised the female to drop the weapon and the female wouldn’t. One shot was fired by a Santa Fe County Sheriff's Deputy, not striking the female, and the female sought cover within a bedroom.

Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office S.W.A.T. Team was activated and arrived at the scene. The female was still irrational and not complying with any verbal commands. The female demanded her purse be brought to her and Santa Fe County S.W.A.T. complied with the demand. The female attempted to retrieve the purse from the porch at which time Santa Fe County S.W,A.T. implemented the use of a Taser. The female was struck with the Taser and then taken into custody without incident at 7:40 am on today's date.

The female was transported to Christus St. Vincent's Hospital for a mental evaluation where she currently remains with an involuntary hold for observation. This case is under investigation and charges are pending.

Loss of Function

I wrote this a few years ago and was recently reminded of my non-prescience. The failure of the Raspberry PI folks servers under the stress of a botched launch-day load brought it all back. They hacked a fix by removing all active content from their website and just serving up static pages containing actual information. I can't imagine how everyone survived not being able to flame other people's comments. But I was re-reminded today by an article about some GawkerGeek: Have online comment sections become 'a joke'? which may trigger a big backpedal in site mechanics.

Emailigent Design

 

In the Beginning God created the ones and the zeros that there might be data upon the face of the earth. In this data his subjects found information and from the firmament of the user partitioned file system BBN produced electronic mail, that their chosen people might communicate amongst themselves even though they be not all in the same room at the same time. And God looked and was well pleased because, by any common measurement, much information was exchanged.

These early Users were blessed with the opportunity to evolve the email system to fit their needs and desires. ARPAnet line-oriented teletypes became Wyser character terminals with random addressing which made the using of Mail all that much more fulfilling. A few of the chosen were granted the power to bend mh to their will and thus became sendmail gurus worshiped by all their bretheren, for it was only then that Messages could be re-ordered and saved to arbitrary folders, which was seen to be a great good as they had been fruitful and multiplied unto the ends of the earth. And, by most common measurements, much information was shared throughout the globe, all the while using 1200 baud dialup.

But one day a snake slithered through the Parc into the academic grove of Elm and Pine and up the Apple tree. And that beast did offer the issue of POP and Eudora a bite of the knowledge of GUI. Thus were MCI and Compuserv linked to the Internet and HTML, with all its fonts and sizes in both bold and italic, was injected into email. The Outlook seemed grim as executives everywhere woke up to find their memos appearing to be more professionally composed and therefore, imposing. Yea, though it was at 9600 baud, by most common measurements, the same amount of useful information was transmitted. 

And in this way it came to pass that a great wickedness was loosed upon the land. The people worshiped the false idols of variable-width fonts and in-line images and the imagination of their hearts was no longer pure. Through the Gates of ISDN and 28Kb modems were unleashed the twin scourges of Spam and Attachments, and thus the chosen people were driven from the garden of communication delights into the online world. But even then, by most common measurements, the same amount of useful information was available, it just required more filtering to be found. 

For now, behold, email was available to all the peoples of the earth and Word was made manifest and distributed indiscriminately, thus fulfilling Bloat's adaption of Parkinson's Law of Work: Software expands to overload available capacity. And the population began to mock the chosen with photos of their pet rabbits and multi-megabyte movies of other people's grandchildren. Thus was Plain Text forever lost amongst the myriad attachments that were forwarded throughout the net. And so, by most common measurements, about the same amount of useful information was received using a 100Mbit connection to a 2GHz Pentium containing 500MB of memory and a disk greater in size than all of the early adopters combined. 

The moral of the story is this: Anyone who believes that a perceived quality of design is evidence for, or against, the existence of an Intelligent Designer, has never worked in the Software Industry.

xxx

© 2007 M. Schippling

Turbulence

I applied for, and more amazingly, was accepted to do an installation in the Axle Contemporary mobile gallery during the ISEA conference in September (mostly in ABQ but spreading out through NNM). Axle is the really swell idea of two local guys who had an extra truck lying around and turned it into an itinerant gallery to show local artists, and the overall theme of the conference is Machine Wilderness. Thus I should be in good company:

 I gotta fill this van with, well, something. Packing peanuts came -- almost, after ping-pong balls and balloons -- immediately to mind. Of course, I can't just leave it alone so it has to be kinetic and even responsive to viewer input somehow.

That's a lotta peanuts. So I'm leaning towards fleshing it out with hot air...a bunch of fans to keep things moving and a few sensors to make the fans do stuff when folks are around.

Wednesday I got an acceptance email from the conference folks (I heard from Axle a couple weeks ago so I wasn't taken completely by surprise) which asked for a description and high resolution photograph of the work, by Monday, so I cobbled together a Bricoleur's Conception:

We Are Experiencing Some Turbulence

After all my whingeing about Art and Science* and how they should really go hand in hand I'm thrashing about on how to rationalize this.

First there is the idea of random behavior and how we perceive it, which has been a bit of a focus for me lately.

Then there's self-organized criticality -- rice piles and the like -- but they're not so easy to setup and control (strangely enough?). However I realized that it's really just the surface angle of the pile that's of interest, so I can build a slope that will encourage some avalanche behavior.

Then, while poking at self-organization, I, again, found Cosma Shalizi's articles which mentioned turbulence and the Reynolds number. That lead to this nice gif from wikipedia:

Then. While talking it over with my friend John Miller concerns about static electricity raised their ugly head. So I might have to work lightning into it as well -- or add anti-cling sheets in the mix.

So. There is hope that the experimental process will lead to an interesting combination of the above which can self-start-and-run in late September temperatures. And be more than just didactic or entertaining. Stay Tuned to this Tag...


* The whole Art/Sci/Tech thing has been another of my ongoing concerns. Ending with Systems Art in the 1970's I think the ideal of A/S/T integration has deteriorated into MTV. But that's a different story. Of concern here is that most, if not all, group projects fall into either the artist-gets-access-to-cool-toys or the scientist-gets-access-to-cool-presentations categories. There's not a lot of actual collaboration involved. And most, if not all, artist-conception-of-science projects are either critiques (usually a good thing) or scientism -- taking on the trappings of bubbling test tubes and the like -- with no real understanding of what goes on beneath the surface. There are exceptions. Hopefully my effort here may provide an example.

Local Color VII -- Kicks on 66

Police notes, March 6, 2012

(Something to which I look forward for my upcoming birthday celebration...)

Lawrence Vigil, 60, 804 Alarid St., was arrested at McDonald's, 1621 Pacheco St., at noon Sunday after he was found drinking rubbing alcohol mixed with Powerade. The report also said there was an open warrant out for his arrest for failure to pay fines.

AI Class RIP -- My Final Review

By popular demand (i.e., my friend Jen) here's my final comment on Stanford's online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class. It appears that things went so well for the professors that one (Sebastian Thrun) has resigned his tenured position in order to found an online "university": http://www.udacity.com/. For various reasons I will not be participating.

After it was all over, but before the fat lady sang the grades, this question was posted on the forum site:

Did the top students find the questions ambiguous?

This forum keeps talking about the ambiguous questions. Perhaps we should be asking “ambiguous to whom?” My hunch is that the top students didn’t find the questions ambiguous, although I could be wrong. To test my hypothesis, perhaps Irvin and the Profs could give some data to work with, and we could (or they could) test this statistically.

Define a “top student” as a student who achieved say 90% or more on the mid-term (or mid-term + homeworks perhaps). Then look at how many got the “ambiguous” questions correct before the alternate solutions were accepted, vs. the non-top-students. If my hunch is right, it will be the non-top-students who found the questions ambiguous, which tells its own story.

It will also mean that the top-students’ rank overall won’t change too much from the introduction of the alternate solutions, as it will lift all those who got say 80% or less to say 85%. The ranking of students up above 90% won’t change a great deal.

Just a hunch.

Well. I managed to eek out a 96.5% (thanks to a reversal of answer fortune on one of the so-called ambiguous final questions where "they" gave in and accepted both answers as correct). This only put me in the top 25% of the class(!!?). Tough crowd. Here is my reply to the above. (It attracted not a single discussion comment nor have I seen it displayed in the blurbs for subsequent classes):

I too (believe that I) am in the 90%. I found many ambiguities in the lectures, homework, and exams. And I found each one very annoying because I felt I was being graded on how well I could guess what the professors really meant (why I cared about a grade is still a bit beyond me...). My general feeling is that grad students should have taught this course because they are closer to the assumptions being made, senior researchers are bound to "forget" that, e.g., their definitions of Stochastic or Partially Observable are built up over many years of experience. From the beginning certain things were not clearly defined, vis "Rationality" which was only mentioned in the summary of the first video lesson.

My biggest problem with this course was the inability to get answers to questions from definitive sources. First there was no real forum to ask them, and then when aiqus came on line, almost every question went unanswered because it related to open homework or exam questions. I finally realized that there is no point in taking a class where I cannot ask questions and am unlikely to take another online course because of that.

As an example, I got on the wrong track with Particle Filters early on and it was only by dint of repeated reading and listening that I stumbled on the right one. And the only way I knew that I had finally gotten close was that I got the exam questions right. A TA in a study group would have been able to correct my tangent in about 5 seconds...

The chief thing I learned in the class was that I am not very interested in Artificial Intelligence. I discovered that there are sister fields, Computational Intelligence for one, that are more in line with my interests but each has an academic rivalry that keeps them distinct. For instance, there were a couple references to RA Brooks early robotics work (in the book -- I forget if it came up in the videos), especially the 1991 paper "Intelligence Without Representation", which were somewhat dismissive -- because it seems that our professors are still more aligned with the symbolic AI school of thought.

Perhaps if this class had been a survey of the broader field rather than a (kind of) detailed study of specific techniques I would have found it less frustrating. One of my friends who was auditing the class said: There's a bunch of "Oh, that's how they do that" moments but it's missing the big picture.

Local Color VI -- Rural Renewal Program

Case#: 0212002168/ Unlawful taking of a Motor Vehicle,
Criminal Damage to Property/ Date: 02/09/12

Location:  1700 block of State Road 14, Galisteo, NM
On 2/9/12 between 1500 and 1530 hours unknown persons took a 1970's model Oldsmobile from the area for scrap metal.  While leaving the area unknown persons backed into the fence and caused $200.00 worth of damage.  Estimated value of the vehicle is unknown due to the vehicle being parked in the area for 20 years.


(I know, I know, I should post something new...I'm working up to the idea...and it should be State Road 41).