July 2005

The BBC showed “a programme the other day”:http://www.blackjackscience.com/bbc/BBC%20-%20Science%20&%20Nature%20-%20Horizon%20-%20transcript.htm about the history of card counting in blackjack and how the casinos eventually defeated the card counters using facial recognition technology. Having traced suspected card counters to MIT, Griffin Investigations, the agency employed by the casinos, then fed the faces from the MIT yearbooks into their databases. When a face appeared in a casino and the software matched it to a suspect, that person was shown the door. The relevant bit of the transcript:

NARRATOR: It was then that Beverley noticed something unusual. Many of the big winners had given addresses from around the same area, Boston. Then she noticed something else, most of her suspects played only at weekends, and they were all around college age. Beverley made the connection. Could these card counting team members be students at M.I.T.? To find out Beverley checked the M.I.T. student year books.

BEVERLEY GRIFFIN: And lo and behold there they were. Looking all scholarly and serious and not at all like a card counter.

NARRATOR: The M.I.T. yearbooks viewed like a rogue’s gallery of team counters. Beverley now realised she was up against some of the smartest minds in America. So the casinos began to develop facial recognition technology, for quick and accurate identification of team play suspects. The basis for the database were the M.I.T. yearbooks. From the moment a suspected counter entered a casino they could be monitored by the hundreds of cameras on the casino floor. Snapshots could then be downloaded for computer analysis.

TRAVIS MILLER: Each time he moves I try to see which shot is going to be the best for him, that we can use to match him up further down the road. This would be the perfect shot, he’s directly in the centre of the photo, all we see is his face, he’s looking straight ahead in to the shot.

NARRATOR: Facial recognition software analysed the relative position of over eighty coordinates on a suspects face. As individual as a fingerprint this information could be run through the Griffin database of suspected card counters, and an identification made.

I’m guessing that if casinos can do this with MIT students then states and security agencies could certainly employ the same technology to keep anyone photographed at a “Hizb ut-Tahrir”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hizb_ut-Tahrir meeting (or similar) off the London Underground or Heathrow Airport. As soon as a match appeared, they could be stopped.

I hasten to state that the civil liberties implications of any such system are horrendous. But my interest here is in whether it would be technologically feasible. Could it work for a large system? How many false positives and false negatives would there be? Any answers?

Kevin Drum is “mystified”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_07/006789.php by “cricket slang”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/cricket/england/4711875.stm. Me, too. The important thing to remember is that England are losing in a really entertaining way.

There have been several ten-year anniversaries this year in the Web world. Yahoo! celebrated with its Netrospective, a neat look at 100 Web moments. C-Net celebrated with a bunch of Top 10 lists including a list of Top 10 Web Fads. Fortune has a story on Remembering Netscape: The Birth of the Web on the tenth anniversary of Netscape’s IPO. A dozen of the players tell the story in their own words. These sites offer a fun walk down memory lane or an opportunity to catch up with what you may have missed.

Today is a particularly relevant day for me to post about this, because on July 24, 1995 my first homepage was up and running. Of particular note is that the page at that same location is still available (granted, in a much truncated form). It’s been a fun ride ever since.

Something to meditate on, from the pen of “Jim Henley:”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2005/07/23/4474

bq. If they really do “hate us because we’re free,” the Bush Administration’s approach to civil liberties constitutes “appeasement” of the first water.

Via “Tim Lambert”:http://timlambert.org/2005/07/lott-libels/, some evidence that these two properties might still be orthogonal. Tim reproduces an email exchange between John Donohue and a representative of the Federalist Society’s chapter at University of Chicago. They are trying to organize a debate between Donohue and the awful John Lott, but they fail through a sequence of scheduling problems exacerbated by Lott’s efforts (on his blog) to make it look like Donohue is afraid to face him in public. You have to give the Federalist Society person credit for an evenhanded and respectful demeanor in the face of relentless provocation from Lott’s trademark mix of misrepresentation, slander and evasiveness. Eventually the head of the Chicago chapter writes to Donohue telling him they’ve withdrawn Lott’s invitation to speak because of his repeated refusals to remove the libels of Donohue from his blog. So full marks to them for being on the up-and-up. The fact that the American Enterprise Institute remain happy to have Lott as a senior fellow, on the other hand, speaks for itself at this point.

Simonetta Agnello Hornby’s “article”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/04a67d56-f8da-11d9-8fc8-00000e2511c8.html on the Italian mafia in today’s _FT_ is a little impressionistic for my tastes. Its final paragraphs, however, have a nugget of insight about the pervasiveness of the Mafia in modern Sicily.

bq. “Mafiosita” lurks within me, and it came out powerfully last summer. I was at our family estate in Sicily. My grandchild cut his hand; while I was holding him in my arms, blood flowed copiously. I rushed to the telephone and called a friend: “Whom do you know at A&E?”, I asked. Had I been in London, I would have gone straight to the local hospital. I thought long and hard on that episode, and was shamed. Distrustful of the ability of the local health service to deliver services without an “introduction”, I had resorted to the “known ways”: personal contact. My friend is just a friend, but for people less privileged than I, the Mafia is always ready – at a price – to be the “best of all friends”, and it has friends in all places.

What she’s saying here is very reminiscent of Diego Gambetta’s “classic essay”:http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/papers/gambetta158-175.pdf on the Mafia and trust. Gambetta argues that Mafia members have come to play a key role as interlocutors, purveyors of introductions and guarantors of relationships in a society, such as Sicily’s, where people don’t trust strangers readily. But mafiosi have a strong interest too in ensuring that individuals don’t come to trust each other independently of their contacts through the Mafia. Hence, they act not only to guarantee relationships, but to reinforce the social belief that unless you deal with the Mafia and are under their protection, you are liable to be rooked. The Mafia and the culture of _raccomandazioni_ (personal introductions and recommendations as an alternative to impersonal transactions) are intimately intertwined with each other. As Hornby notes in passing, there also appear to be close linkages between the Mafia and Silvio Berlusconi’s _Forza Italia_; one of the reasons why publications such as the _Economist_, which might otherwise have been expected to support a right-of-center party with a purported interest in liberalization, have such distaste for Berlusconi and his doings.

Digg.com is an interesting site that “combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control”. Users post links to sites of interest. Others can then decide to digg them, which constitutes a vote for the recommendation. If enough users digg a link then it gets moved to the front page. Each link can have a few sentences of description and comments are enabled on all posts. Although similar services already exist (Kuro5hin and Slashdot come to mind for different reasons), digg seems to be simpler and quicker. That is, the time and effort involved in becoming a user, rating sites, submitting a link and getting it to many people seems to be lower. There is a list of top users, which may motivate people to post more.

I think digg could also function as an alternative to blogs for those who mainly use their blogs to post links without much commentary. It is possible to bring up a page with links by user, either featuring all of the links they digg or just the ones they submitted. Since comments are enabled, a discussion can follow, which is a nice feature not available on such sites as del.icio.us.

Unfortunately, the site only features tech topics. Granted, it is broadly defined to include categories such as music and movies, but it doesn’t take long to realize that the coverage of topics is restrictive (I guess depending on one’s interests). I wonder whether they will be expanding or whether other topics could be included on another similar service. The system would work well with all sorts of other material from politics to science, from health to travel, from recipes to humor. Another shortcoming (although I see reasons for this) is that a link can only be tagged by one category. That is also somewhat restrictive.

The site does have some glitches. When submitting a new link, the site performs a search to see whether the link is a duplicate. Unfortunately, the search does not check for duplicate URLs, just duplicated topics that don’t always catch previous mentions of the same link.

Overall, the site has a helpful layout and is user friendly. I have been digging around it for a few days now and have found some interesting material. I recommend checking it out.

Create your own flipbook or browse others’ from the archive containing over fifty thousand.

I only just found this call for papers for a volume on Metallica and Philosophy. It says:

Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following: Search for Meaning—“Frantic” and “Through the Never”; Nuclear Fear and Politics—“Fight Fire with Fire” and “Blackened”; Capital Punishment—“Ride the Lightning”; Politics, Economics, and Ethics—“…And Justice for All” and “Some Kind of Monster”; The Problem of Evil—“Creeping Death”; Alcoholica: Free Will and Addiction—“Master of Puppets” and “Fixxer”; Appearance and Reality—“Enter Sandman” and “Escape”; Foucault and Metallica on Madness and Insanity—“Sanitarium” and “The Frayed Ends of Sanity”; Truth—“Eye of the Beholder”; Hypocrisy and Inauthenticity—“Leper Messiah” and “Holier Than Thou”; Hume and Augustine on Moral Motivations and Inordinate Desire—“Sad But True,” “The Unnamed Feeling,” and “Master of Puppets”; Emotion: Love and Anger—“The Struggle Within” and “St. Anger”; Heidegger’s Being-toward-death—“Fade to Black” and “The Four Horsemen”; War—“Disposable Heroes” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls”; Sorrow, Redemption, and Forgiveness—“No Remorse,” “Harvester of Sorrow,” and “The Unforgiven”; Violence—“Seek & Destroy” and “All Within My Hands”; Masculinity and Warrior Virtues—“Metal Militia,” “Don’t Tread on Me,” and “Shoot Me Again”; Existentialism—“Wherever I May Roam,” “Nothing Else Matters,” and “My World”; Selling-Out, Commercialism and Marxism: Why did Metallica start making videos?; Napster and Intellectual Property; Group Identity and Personal Identity: Are the group members the same persons they were 20 years ago? Is it the same group it was 20 years ago, given the changes the members have undergone and given the changes in bass players?

I thoroughly approve of the Pop Culture and Philosophy series, but would have to rule myself out of this one. NWBHM and Philosophy, maybe. Thin Lizzy and Philosophy, almost certainly. Loudon Wainwright III and Philosophy, no question… oh, sorry, that was popular culture and Philosophy. Maybe Rufus, then.

Unfortunately the deadline for abstracts was July 1st, but I would bet you anything that the editors would still consider an abstract from an eminent philosopher like Brian.

I’ve just finished reading Paul Park’s “A Princess of Roumania”:http://www.powells.com/search/DTSearch/search?partner_id=29956&cgi=search/search/&searchtype=kw&searchfor=Paul%20Park%20Princess%20Roumania (warning: mild spoilers ahead). The book deserves to become a modern classic; it’s as good and as serious as the first two books of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials.” I’ve been an admirer of Park’s novels for a long time. His previous books are wonderful, but there’s a clear progression from the gorgeous, baroque, but slightly undisciplined prose of his first book, _Soldiers of Paradise_ and its somewhat inferior sequels, through _Celestis_ to _Three Marys_ which is written in language as plain and lovely as a stone. “A Princess of Roumania” is better again – strange images rendered more striking by the very matter-of-factness with which they are described. His first novel for young adults, it takes a standard plot – a girl and her companions catapulted into a strange new world of magic and enchantment – and does unexpected things with it. John Holbo has just written a “post”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/if_we_must_have_fish/ on the Valve about novels in which the characters come to realize that they are inhabiting a fictional world, in which “the laws of the universe are the laws of genre.” Much of the power of _A Princess_ comes from its _refusal_ of the cosiness that this all too often implies.

bq. “We’re not going home,” she said. The flatness, the sureness in her own voice surprised her. And it wasn’t true – she’d read a lot of books like this, where the girl wakes up and she’s a beautiful princess in another world. But she always goes back again. She always goes home. “We’re not going home,” she heard herself repeat.

I’ve a theory, which I suspect is hardly original to me, that the magic in really good children’s fantasy draws its resonance from a child’s perception of what it must be like to be grown up. When you’re a child or a pre-adolescent, the adult world seems an attractive and terrifying place. Adults have power, but are driven by forces and desires that a child can only dimly understand; wild magic. Thus, for example, when Susan rides with the daughters of the moon and the Wild Hunt in Alan Garner’s _The Moon of Gomrath_, she’s glimpsing for a moment what it will be like to be a woman. In contrast, the magic in mediocre children’s fantasy is all too often domesticated, rationalized, and stripped of its real force. _A Princess of Roumania_ seems to me to be an oblique rejoinder to the kind of children’s fantasy in which magic is under control, in which the child goes home. There’s no returning for Miranda Popescu; her entire world (our world) turns out to be an elaborate fiction, a shelter from reality that quite literally disappears in a puff of smoke. She and her friends are propelled, only half grown-up into the world of adulthood, of complex responsibilities and obligations. A world where magic exists, but isn’t really understood, where adults lay complicated plans, but don’t know what they’re doing most of the time. In most fantasy, the hero or heroine is fulfilling a plot, a prophecy, a pre-ordained destiny – at the pivotal moment in _A Princess_, Miranda refuses the path that has been laid out for her, and the power of adults to decide what to do with her life, instead deciding herself. All this, and the Baroness Nicola Ceausescu, perhaps the most wonderfully described, and _sympathetic_ villainess that I’ve ever seen in a YA book. I can’t say more than to reiterate that the book is a delight.

Do you know what RSS means? If you do then you are more savvy than the majority of American Internet users.

The latest memo from the Pew Internet and American Life Project examines an important topic: people’s awareness of Internet terms. In a survey administered to Internet users across the U.S. the researchers found that only 9% of users have a good idea of what the term “RSS feeds” means while 26% claimed never to have heard of it. “Podcasting” is the other term with least recognition as 23% had never heard of it and only 13% claim to know what it is. Of concern from a privacy/security perspective is that only 29% have a good idea of what “phishing” means, 52% for “Adware”, 68% for “Internet cookies” and 78% for “Spyware”.

Not surprisingly, familiarity with the terms is related to age, but even among the youngest, most connected group (18-29 year olds) only 12% claim to understand “RSS feeds” and “podcasting” (as compared to 5% of those 65 and above).

Regular readers of CT may recall that all of this is close to my interests as an important aspect of my work is looking at people’s Internet skills. My paper examining proxy measures of actual skill is coming out this Fall. (I’ve mentioned it here before.) In it I show that the types of knowledge items on which the Pew researchers just collected data are better predictors of people’s actual skill than traditional proxies such as amount of Internet experience or even self-perceived skill (a very common proxy in the literature).

Why does all this matter? First, I think it is helpful to remember what people may or may not know when one is enthusiastically trying to recommend things to them (as I tend to do) or why some people’s machines get overrun with malware (and why some may find it easier to just buy a new computer instead of trying to get the current infected one fixed). Second, as the Web matures (in both good ways – more sophisticated services – and bad ways – more unwanted disruptions) the divide among users will likely increase. This is what I have referred to as the “second-level digital divide“, differences among those already connected (as opposed to the plain old-fashioned “digital divide” that points out the differences between users and non-users).

In addition to being related to age, Internet know-how also tends to be related to education. The Pew report does not break this down for us, but I have found this in previous work (both in my dissertation and in a paper with my graduate student Amanda Hinnant) exploring similar data. (I can point to a conference abstract, but the paper is currently under review so I am not posting a full version.) The point here is that those in already privileged positions (e.g. higher levels of education) tend to be more savvy about the Web and may well benefit from its uses more than those in less privileged positions. This means that instead of leveling the playing field, Internet use may contribute to social inequality.

The Pew memo comes out just as I am putting some finishing touches on a similar survey (although much longer than what they probably had here). Due to budget constraints I will not be administering it on a nationally representative random sample, but still believe the findings should be of interest. There is much more research to be done about what it is that people do and do not understand with respect to their Internet uses.

[Link noticed on digg.]

“Jonathan Cohn”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/7/18/114013/338 asks whether there’s any good reason to believe that nice guys do indeed finish first in the business world.

bq. I’d love nothing more to believe that treating employees well is actually better business than treating them shabbily. But at the moment, anyway, count me as skeptical.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, Gary Miller has used economic theory to make exactly this argument, in a series of publications over the last fifteen years (this “piece”:http://www.isnie.org/ISNIE99/Papers/millerg.pdf co-written with Dino Falaschetti, gives a good flavour of his work). Miller uses social choice theory and game theory to argue that managers, if they are to get workers to deliver their full effort, need to be able to make credible commitments to them that their efforts will be rewarded over the longer term. It’s thus a good idea to keep a strict separation between management and owners. Efforts to make the interests of stockholders and managers coincide with each other are going to weaken management’s ability to credibly commit to workers that they will continue to be employed, as managers become more interested in chasing short term stock market gains than in ensuring the long term health of the company. Long term success, for Miller, is produced through “gift exchange” in which managers credibly commit to insulate workers from the pressure for short term profits, and workers reciprocate by giving additional effort. One of Miller’s examples of a firm that used to do this very well is rather timely. From Miller’s 1992 book, “Managerial Dilemmas”:http://www.powells.com/search/DTSearch/search?partner_id=%2029956&cgi=search/search/&searchtype=kw&searchfor=gary%20miller%20managerial%20dilemmas :

bq. Another condition for the achievement of cooperative equilibria in a repeated game is the mutual expectation that the relationship will go on long enough to justify the investment in cooperation. This was achieved at Hewlett-Packard by an early decision by the two founders not to be a “hire and fire company,” but one in which employees would have the security of employment commitment. In the 1980 recession, this policy was tested severely, but everyone in the organization took a 10 percent cut in pay and worked 10% fewer hours so that no one would be fired (Peters and Waterman 1982: 44). This confirmed everyone’s subjective belief that the relationship was long-lasting and that employee efforts were not going to be exploited for short-term gain by Hewlett-Packard.

How “things have changed”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_07/006756.php.

Harry’s post on consequentialism and opportunity costs, as applied to the Iraq war, raises a couple of important points about consequentialism, and also leads me to suggest a specific correction to my post on this topic.

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This is a quibble with something in John’s long discourse on the war. It’s more of a question, than a quibble, really. John rightly points out that, in assessing the true consequences of some policy or action, we have to take into account the opportunity costs:

A second common feature of pro-war analysis is a failure to take account of the opportunity cost of the resources used in war. The $300 billion used in the Iraq war would have been enough to finance several years of the Millennium Development project aimed at ending extreme poverty in the world, and could have saved millions of lives. But even assuming this is politically unrealistic, the money could surely have been spent on improved health care, road safety and so on in the US itself. At a typical marginal cost of $5 million per live saved, 60 000 American lives could have been saved. This is morally relevant, but is commonly ignored.

Please don’t think about the war, or John’s more general argument about it, for the moment. Assume that all we are doing is trying to figure out the consequences for the purpose of moral evaluation (whatever weight you think the consequences should have — for me, its less than for John, but more than for some). What are the real opportunity costs that we should figure in?

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