Posts Tagged internet
Running Shoes and Marketing Hype
Today, for the first time in years, I went to a brick and mortar running store and bought new shoes. Until this winter, I had been wearing the same make and model shoe for years. I wore the same shoe for most of my college running career and continued to wear it afterwards until I hurt my knee. Then, sometime after my knee surgery and before I started running again, the manufacturer discontinued the model.
I searched for a replacement, preferring to buy online since it’s easy to find the same shoe online for 30-40% less than in a brick and mortar store. From suggestions on Internet forums, I bought a similar shoe from an online retailer made by the same manufacturer. However, the new shoe felt like running in sandals compared to the discontinued model. It gave me no stability and very little cushioning in the forefoot.
Why do shoe companies insist on changing their shoe lineup every year? There isn’t a shoe model that either doesn’t get changed or discontinued on a yearly basis. The shoe that treated me well for so long was suddenly gone. I probably bought 15 or 20 pairs of that model, and what does the manufacturer do to reward me for my loyalty? They hang me out to dry.
There’s no functional reason to update, discontinue, or introduce new running shoes with such magnitude and frequency. Some research indicates people are better off without running shoes. However, shoes are generally made to accommodate a small handful of biomechanical differences in runners. With these differences identified, each manufacturer should make a shoe that successfully addresses these problems for most of the population and let things be. With the current cycle of drastic shoe changes, either running shoe technology is so terrible that the manufacturers are constantly scrambling to find shoes that work or human evolution is taking place at unprecedented levels.
Instead of producing something consistent and functional, shoe companies care more about generating marketing hype surrounding their products. They want consumers to crave the latest running shoe with its biodegradable materials, patented cushioning materials, and futuristic looks. I don’t care how many proprietary materials the shoe is made out of or what the shoe looks like, I only want it to keep me from getting injured. Every shoe I’ve ever bought goes from mostly white to a dirty, muddy mess in a matter of days, but as long as it keeps me in one piece, that’s all that really matters.
The constant shoe updates also force me to buy from a regular retail store since I have to try on several pairs to find a new one that works. Sizing changes from model to model, so I’m wary of buying a new pair without first trying it on. Retail stores mark up prices as much as 100% of what they paid the manufacturer, so it’s easy to find an online retailer who charges far less than the suggested retail price. Going to the store today, I’ve found that what was the $80 shoe five years ago is now the $100 shoe. Some shoes are nearly $200. All of them wear out in 300-400 miles, so what exactly is it that warrants the extra cost?
Running shoes shouldn’t be any different than a household appliance. Shoes should be something that do their job faithfully and can be replaced at the end of their lifespan with a model that performs exactly the same way.
Quotes of the week v.2
Here’s some more stuff that piqued my interest over the past week. While I find most comments on the internet to be extremely immature, the Slashdot moderation system really makes the good comments float to the top, producing a lot of good insight. I have to say that whoever came up with the Slashdot moderation system had a real stroke of genius.
Executive Compensation
Slashdot recently covered a story of a Sun employee commenting on the golden parachutes received by executives as their failing company was acquired by Oracle. Debates ensued in the story comments as to whether or not greed and apathy drives executives to place little effort into keeping their businesses afloat, completely disregarding the interests of employees and even shareholders. It reminds me of this Ambrose Bierce quote which I remember being narrated by Leonard Nimoy in Civilization IV:
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
One of the commenters of the story gave a blunt analogy:
To make it easier to understand and to make a more basic explanation, let’s replace “money” with “food”. Let’s say that the executive in charge of Sun has a machine that makes food for thousands of people. He runs the machine so poorly that it breaks down, and thousands of people no longer have access to the food it provides. In the process of breaking the machine, he manages to engineer it so that the very last time he runs the machine, it makes enough food to feed him, his family and his friends’ families for a couple hundred years if they manage the food he created properly.
It sure seems that executives certainly have the opportunity to obtain massive individual profit with little responsibility. Hopefully, for each story like this, there are hundreds of executives that run their companies well and think about their employees when making decisions.
Show me your papers…
In another Slashdot story, users commented on the heavy-handedness of Verizon blocking internet access to a popular website. Verizon alleged that a denial of service attack originated from the domain of the blocked site, which prompted comments that such attacks could be construed as terrorism and must be thwarted by corporations and governments. While I can’t really argue against the actions of Verizon or governmental involvement in stopping DDoS attacks, one commenter posted the following in response to increased governmental involvement on the internet:
When I was a kid it was popular to point to various things in the USSR like the inability to travel freely without “showing your papers” as evidence of totalitarian oppression. Here in 2010 “showing your papers” is as American as apple pie!
Oddly, I agree with the concept of this statement but not necessarily in the context of the internet. Air travel comes readily to mind. Nothing screams “show me your papers” more than flying. International travel is even worse, with arriving travelers powerless to stop searches of their computers and other electronic devices. What was once fun is now excruciating now that I’ve got to remove my shoes, take half of my stuff out of suitcases and into plastic bins, shuffle through metal detectors, and fumble for my ticket and ID. It really dampens my enthusiasm about going to Sweden in April.
Lowering the bar in Virginia schools
Virginia legislators have been desperate to get more Virginians into their public universities, even at the expense of revenue and quality of the student body. In the article, one legislator commented that he knew of several students with 4.0 GPAs that were denied entry to Virginia public universities. Well, when you loosen the grading scales in primary and secondary schools, there are going to be more students with higher GPAs.
I find it amusing that at one end, Virginia Beach students are whining that the grading scales are too strict and prevent them from gaining admittance to college. At the other end are complaints that too many 4.0 students are not admitted to Virginia colleges. Instead of high school students working harder to get into school or doing something that sets themselves apart from other 4.0 students, the prevailing wisdom is to just lower the bar. Fortunately, it appears as though the attempts to force 75 percent in-state enrollment is halted for now.
Those condescending liberals…
A piece written by a UVA politics professor argues that liberals are much more condescending than their conservative counterparts:
American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration.
From postings on the internet, musings from friends, and from stuff I’ve heard around my college campus, I agree that liberals seem to be increasingly intolerant of any dissenting opinions. Everyone just drinks the Kool-Aid and can’t reason independently of news columnists or political party leaders. Nobody tries to understand all sides of an argument and understand the reasoning of the opposition.
Freedom or Stability?
Windows and Mac users can download and install the newest Firefox version with a couple of mouse clicks. With Ubuntu Linux, however, no Firefox 3.6 is available in the Canonical package repository. Even worse, none of the developers plan to add any new Firefox versions to the repository until the next Ubuntu release. So, I attempted to install precompiled versions from the Mozilla website and the Ubuntu Firefox development build repository, but both installs really messed up the fonts, making them blurry and hard to read.
I tried desperately to fix the fonts, summoning the help of the Ubuntu forums. I tried editing font rendering settings in my local .fonts.conf. I deleted the font cache and reconfigured fontconfig. I tried adjusting a font quality parameter in Firefox’s about:config. For some forums posters, these solutions worked. For me, nothing seemed to help. Finally, I was able to get Firefox 3.6 installed with normal fonts by downloading and compiling the source code and installing the binaries compiled on my own system.
I’m not the only one who is frustrated by this. This was probably the first time I’ve resorted to compiling a third party application from source since first using Ubuntu and Debian in 2006. Normally, it’s just apt-get install whatever program you want. The package manager automatically updates everything and keeps out of my way, rarely nagging to reboot unless the kernel was updated. The package repository was one of the main reasons I switched to Linux in the first place: an easy, single step way to install anything and keep it up to date. No hunting for a download website somewhere on the internet or clicking through a bunch of dialogs in an install wizard.
With such lag before new third party applications get added to the Ubuntu software repository, plenty argue that Linux isn’t ready for the mainstream. I agree completely. Most people will have to go through similar steps as I to get many of the latest third party applications installed, and it can be a real pain. However, in Linux, I am free (as in speech) to customize or rewrite any part of the operating system and share my changes with others. It also gives me a free (as in beer), top notch development environment for my work. The problem is that such freedom comes at a cost: tinkering to get everything to work correctly. Every time I’ve upgraded to the latest Ubuntu version, something doesn’t work and has to be fixed. In another example, I recently installed the netbook remix version on my netbook and was rewarded by a flickering screen, which was fixed with a BIOS update.
Mainstream users just don’t want to be faced with flickering screens and BIOS updates, they want something that just works. Consequently, they are willing to give up some of that freedom (as in speech and beer) to have a device that boots normally and doesn’t have font rendering issues when they install the latest version of a program. Such users are better off with an Apple, and indeed Apple charges them a price in terms of money and control.
The iPad has launched a storm of controversy over its lack of user control. Essentially, the device is a large iPhone, except there is no phone. All applications must be purchased from the Apple-controlled App Store. The real question is: do mainstream users really need fine-grained control over their devices? One comment on a Slashdot post really makes an interesting argument:
What has choice done? It’s given us the chaos of spam, malware, worms etc… The average consumer should get a locked down device such as what Apple are proposing, a limited device with a closed market. And you do realise this is really no different to a games console. Full blown computers should be reserved for those of us who know how to manage them responsibly…Computers as they are today are simply too complex and difficult to manage for the average consumer, so you either give them something simple or you take the management out of their hands.
Combined with the “Linux is not for mainstream” argument, this really makes the case that perhaps devices that work well but allow little user freedom may be the best for most people. Most of the time, it’s the best choice for me. I’ve got a phone, media player, GPS device, and others that I want to just work and perform a very specific function. In these cases, I would rather they perform their jobs reliably than be extensively customizable. However, I do think that the option to exercise greater control should be there for those who want it, no matter how few. In the case of PCs, I’ll take that option, stick to Linux, and keep compiling from source when I have to.
Infographics: How reliable are they?
With the social media flood comes a torrent of infographics, most of which focus on presentation instead of information. It reminds me of the “mediaglyphics” in yet another Neal Stephenson novel: The Diamond Age. In the futuristic novel, mediaglyphics are used by corrupt governments and broadcast media to inform and entertain a mostly illiterate population. Infographics aren’t much different: they blast the reader with colorful line graphs, maps, and pie charts to present an implicit and oversimplified argument.
I’ve found many of these infographics to be packed with spelling and grammatical errors. For example, try to find the error in this visualization of U.S. debt holders. With enormous font sizes and few words, any spelling or grammatical error really stands out. Such easily identifiable problems make me question the integrity of the statistics (and implicit arguments) these infographics present. Where did the data come from and how reliable are the sources? Many infographics do not provide references, so how am I to know that it isn’t just some ten year old kid making this stuff up? What if multiple sources produce conflicting results? In such cases, it’s almost guaranteed that the infographic creator just picked the result/data that best furthered his or her argument. Lastly, what information is not presented? When reading an infographic, I always wonder if I am seeing the whole picture. With so little information actually presented, I have no doubt that most of these infographics leave out plenty, especially stuff that hurts the creator’s argument.
I admit that infographics pique my interest in a subject to which I haven’t given much thought. However, with minimal content and questionable integrity, they may be no more than chartjunk.
Going Mobile: Network Neutrality
The traditional approach for implementing solutions in wireless sensor networks is to use academically designed sensor motes, which provide an open hardware and software platform. Such devices have been good for addressing fundamental problems, like radio irregularity, routing, data aggregation, and power savings, all of which require fine-grained control (open source) over the software and hardware. While sensor motes provide a good proof of concept solution to some problems, more practical solutions are needed that are more attention-grabbing than a collection of weak, low power devices with limited sensing capabilities. Basically, there aren’t a whole lot of applications for sensor motes that would be useful to most people. A more recent approach is to use cell phones, which are increasingly becoming equipped with GPS, accelerometers, and microphones, providing a platform for interesting and practical wireless sensor solutions. However, the hardware and software of most cell phones are extremely restrictive, clamped down by manufacturers and wireless providers, effectively limiting the research possibilities. For example, one can’t just perform a clear channel assessment using a cell phone’s WiFi radio without less restrictive or open source drivers (even with Android). Such restrictiveness is hindering improvements in mobile devices and many of these improvements would be welcomed by everyday consumers.
Like landline phones, Internet users will eventually drop wired ISP connections in favor of wireless. This shift towards mobile and ubiquitous computing emphasizes that wireless infrastructure and usage policies will be critical in the coming years. With few exceptions, ISPs have followed the principles of network neutrality with respect to wired networks, permitting wired customers to use any device with any software using any communication protocol. However, such openness is not reflected in wireless networks with ISPs placing heavy restrictions on devices, software, and means of communication. To ensure competitive pricing, hardware innovations, exciting software applications, and available bandwidth for the surge in wireless traffic, wireless providers must follow the principles of network neutrality. Since wireless providers are hesitant do do so, the FCC’s decision to enforce network neutrality is a step in the right direction. The enforcement of the FCC’s network neutrality principles will allow researchers to push mobile computing to new and exciting levels and will allow consumers to get more functionality at lower prices.
The openness of the wired Internet has seldom been encroached upon by ISPs and rarely regulated by government, making the Internet the world that it is today. This freedom has been defined by the FCC’s four principles of network neutrality:
- A user can access any content over the network. All who access the Internet are provided access to everything on the Internet, whether it be an AP news report or the Unabomber Manifesto. No ISP restricts content: everything is available, even if it may be morally objectionable or illegal.
- A user can run any application or use any service over the network. Anyone can use any web service or application (Google, Mapquest, Facebook) without restriction from an ISP. No ISP prevents users from making Skype calls even if that ISP also sells landline telephone service.
- A user can connect any device to the network, given it does no harm. An Internet user can connect with any hardware, whether it be with a ten year old piece of junk running Linux or with a $10,000 top-of-the-line quad core processor running the latest Windows 7 beta. No ISP restricts a user’s Internet access because his or her computer is a piece of junk. Nor do ISPs force users to connect only with proprietary computers sold by the ISP.
- Competition among network, content, and application providers. A user is open to choose from one of several ISPs (if more than one are even available), and also has choice over competing web services and content providers.
This freedom has not always been maintained, even with the wired Internet. Two years ago, Comcast deliberately throttled the bandwidth of peer-to-peer protocols, limiting the upload and download speed of file sharing applications. With peer-to-peer using customers enraged over this finding, the FCC forced Comcast to abandon this policy. Other than this incident and a few others, the Internet has always been delivered equally to all who have access.
Unfortunately, such open policies of the wired Internet are not followed by wireless providers. From the very birth of cell phones, wireless providers have controlled everything:
- Unrestricted content. Wireless providers block (through restricted software) bandwidth-heavy content, such as streaming videos, voice/video communication, as well as file sharing. Such restrictions are in place to limit or prevent wireless network congestion. Improvements in wireless infrastructure could alleviate such congestion, but wireless providers have decided to restrict, rather than improve.
- Use of any application or service. Nearly all providers restrict the operating system and applications available on connecting mobile devices. Apple blocks the use of Skype when the phone is not connected to a WiFi network. Similarly, the Google Voice application was also removed by Apple and AT&T. Both applications provide features that could be seen as subversive to standard cellular voice calls. Instead of providing competing applications (maybe with better features), the ISP and application providers just block any competition.
- Connection of any device. Verizon’s network may be good, but their phones are terrible. A customer cannot just build their own tricked out phone and connect it to Verizon’s network. Instead, users are forced to choose from a handful of phones with menial features (only sold by Verizon, of course).
- Competition. Since content, applications, and hardware are restricted on most wireless networks, competition is limited. Only a handful of wireless providers offer large coverage areas, especially for data communication. Since the United States pays more for wireless than any other western country, it is clear that less restriction would provide more options and more competition for consumers.
Despite the crackdown on allowable hardware, software, and access, wireless executives somehow manage to argue that their industry is “perhaps the most competitive consumer market in America.” While unregulated competition would be great for consumers in terms of increasing wireless freedom, there simply isn’t enough competition to go around. There are only four major carriers in the United States, effectively forming a cartel that can set prices artificially high and extensively limit consumer freedom. With barriers to entry so high (infrastructure), few new carriers are likely to emerge. In cases like these, government intervention is the only solution. Fortunately, the FCC is investigating the lack of competition in the wireless market with respect to insane billing rules and lack of consumer freedom in comparison to the wired Internet. Of course, their latest decision to enforce network neutrality will also provide a strong push.
The end result should allow anyone to build their own phone, install a custom operating system, and connect it to the wireless provider of their choice without issue. Such a user should be allowed unrestricted access to the entire Internet without throttling or restriction of streaming video, large file downloads, or VoIP calls. Ultimately, text messaging and voice calls will be merged into wireless data plans, removing such unreal and confusing costs like $.25 to send a 160 byte message or “anytime” minutes, which are anything but anytime. Unrestricted hardware, software, and access will bring increased competition among existing wireless providers, fostering the development of better mobile hardware and cool applications.
Fixing the frustrations of the digital nomad
Current computing technology consists of a mishmash of devices, ranging in size, portability, usability, and design lifetime. Users are tied to their desks no longer: the future lies in mobile devices, and improvements to increase mobility and usability are key in the coming years. Without the following improvements, I think most users’ computing experience will become very frustrating. I’m hoping we’ll see:
A holistic computing solution
Everyone splits their computing time between a whole pile of devices: cell phones, media players, laptops, netbooks, desktops, and gaming consoles. Even typical cable TV boxes have a hard drive and user interface. The purposes and capabilities of such devices is becoming increasingly diverse and will probably continue to do so in the short term. However, it’s becoming a real pain to use a standalone device for a different task. Carry a cell phone for voice and text messages. Carry a laptop or netbook for working on the go. Carry a media player to listen to music. When at home, many people switch from a laptop to a separate desktop PC. It would be great to see some consolidation in order to reduce frustration with dragging around multiple devices and learning the quirks of each.
Since most people aren’t running weather prediction simulations, a single small mobile device would be sufficient for most people’s computing needs. Ideally, something the size of a cell phone would combine the functionalities of a phone, camera, media player, laptop/netbook PC, and even desktop PC. No longer would people with multiple devices need to synchronize information or become familiar with multiple interfaces. A single device would provide a user with most of the computing power and capability that he or she would need without the hassle of dragging around a separate phone, media player, and laptop. The device would be designed such that it could easily support and interface with different user input and output methods.
Improved user interfaces
Improved interfaces in mobile devices would make for a better user experience and improve productivity. With multiple gadgets to haul around, each comes with a different interface with varying levels of usability. For the most part, the smaller the device, the worse the user experience becomes. A desktop computer with a keyboard, mouse, and giant monitor provides a solid experience for most, with both ease of input and output. A netbook, however, may satisfy a user’s computing needs, but may cramp usability and productivity with its tiny screen and uncomfortable keyboard. Even worse, web browsing and writing emails or text messages on some cell phones can be nearly impossible. Personally, my experience with multi-touch phones has been horrible, since most of the time the phone selects something other than what I intended. Rethinking and improving the physical and software interfaces would permit a shift to a cell phone-sized holistic computing device.
Improvements to both physical and software interfaces would provide huge benefits for the end user. With respect to physical interfaces, improving multi-touch surfaces would be a big step in the right direction. Input methods that are simple and accurate would make phone calls, text messaging, and web browsing on mobile devices much more enjoyable. Output methods should extend beyond a tiny three inch screen, such as a wearable HUD or projector similar to that used in MIT’s SixthSense. With regards to software interfaces, most cell phone operating systems provide horrible user interfaces which make the simplest tasks a real pain. Most of these software designs inherit from heavyweight PC interfaces where input is made easy with keyboard and mouse. Mobile developers should focus on increasing usability by making tasks require the fewest amount of user inputs possible.
Behavior and activity recognition
Computing systems of tomorrow could predict a user’s intentions and act upon these predictions. With the introduction of accelerometers, GPS receivers, light sensors, cameras, and microphones in cell phones, plenty of research has provided ways to recognize user behavior and activities. Such research can help provide an augmented reality for users, pointing out suggestions as to what a user could do based on his or her surroundings, current activity and learned preferences and behavior. For example, a user traveling in an unfamiliar city could get instant suggestions as to where to eat when he or she normally takes a meal, with a mobile device providing directions to restaraunts that match the kinds of foods the user normally eats. A HUD would allow the device to paint a path directly on the streets to take without the user staring down at his or her phone. A device could automatically perform Internet searches and return data relevant to what a user is doing, whether it be retrieving a weather report before a user heads to the beach or providing real-time flight delay information as a user drives to the airport. Such intelligent systems could interact with the physical world and turn on the lights or adjust the temperature at a user’s home before he or she arrives. Also, behavioral and activity recognition would eliminate the need for user-generated Twitter and Facebook posts, performing automatic updates whenever a user changes activities or does something unusual.
Better inter-device collaboration
Figuring out how to get cell phone pictures off the phone and onto a computer can be a monumental task. It’s even more enjoyable to get a projector to correctly display a presentation on a laptop. Nearly every slideshow presentation I’ve witnessed, in classes and in conferences requires each presenter to wage war with his or her laptop and the projector to get the presentation to display properly. Improving inter-device communication would make everyday computing more seamless and a lot less frustrating. For example, a slideshow presentation could be loaded on a mobile device and a user could walk into a room with a projector, with the mobile device automatically connecting wirelessly to the projector and displaying the presentation. There would be no cables to plug in, no display settings to modify, and no buttons and inputs to fidget with on the projector. Synchronizing and moving data between different devices stands to gain significant improvement, for people are constantly upgrading their cell phones and laptops as well as sharing their data with others.
Longer design lifetimes
I’m guessing I’m not the only one with a pile of old hardware that’s worn out from too much use or discarded due to obsolescence. More robust devices with longer expected lifetimes would reduce the pile of useless junk in the closet. This would be especially helpful for mobile devices, which often wind up in mud puddles, toilets, or under someone’s steel-toed boot. Modular construction would allow for periodic upgrades without throwing away the whole device. An effort towards longer lifetimes and upgradeability would also significantly cut down on the amount of toxic e-waste.
Longer battery life
Most cell phones don’t last past a couple days of standby or two hours of talk time. Most laptops don’t make it past three or four hours. With an increased focus towards mobile and ubiquitous computing, improvements in battery technology, power savings, and battery recharging would do wonders. Apple has a new battery design in its latest laptops that double battery life, but more strides in this direction are needed. Efforts on power-conscious radio communication and CPU utilization will contribute to power savings through better software. Lastly, harnessing available energy sources such as motion, body heat, and the sun will also allow mobile devices to run unplugged for longer periods.
In general, these issues are what I think mobile computing needs in order to really take off. The current experience is haphazard and lacking, requiring a mobile user to carry multiple devices with poor interfaces and short battery life. With future applications, mobile devices will do a lot more than allow phone calls, web browsing, and text messaging. They will further the integration of the cyber and the physical world, helping a user interact with the environment and the Internet in ways currently unimaginable.
Paid Web Hosting: Is it worthwhile?
For a few years, I had paid hosting, but I realized that I wasn’t getting much out of the 5 bucks per month that I paid for it. The traffic I got (and still get) just doesn’t justify even the lowest bandwidth tier provided by most web hosts. Instead, I run this domain on a NAS drive in my apartment and I point all the DNS records to the IP of the drive.
I debated the pros and cons of paid vs. self hosting for awhile before I settled on hosting everything myself. Unless I get a serious amount of traffic, it just isn’t worth the money to me when I can just run the whole thing on my own. However, after manually updating the DNS records for my domain thanks to a service outage and new IP address assignment, I’m starting to wonder.
There are a few problems with self-hosting. First, service outages are a real pain, especially in the summer. The IT guys schedule weekend maintenance quite often in the summer and take the whole network offline for hours at a time. Power outages due to storms compound this and even an uninterruptible power supply may not prevent any storm-related service outages. Second, my IP address changes occasionally (usually due to the maintenance outages) and I have to update the DNS records. This makes for even more downtime since it may take awhile before I realize that the IP has changed. Lastly, I’m running this on a NAS, which makes access times pretty slow. If you’ve wondered why it takes awhile for the page to load, this is why. Sometimes the system will unspool the hard drive when it hasn’t been accessed in awhile, so it can take several seconds to spool back up and process the incoming page requests. This, on top of the fact that the machine can just barely run Apache/PHP/MySQL.
The good thing about self-hosting is that it’s free with no bandwidth restrictions. I can post as many massive pictures and videos as I want and it doesn’t matter. I can use the domain name and the NAS as a massive storage archive accessible from anywhere. I have complete control over the system and its configuration, so if I want something installed, I can do it without begging a hosting company to provide some feature (e.g. few hosts I know of provide Subversion repositories). Of course I also have to take responsibility to ensure everything is managed properly so that someone doesn’t install a rootkit and/or deface the site.
So the balance between noticeable downtime and no restrictions continues. For now, it’s acceptable, but I wonder if people ever get disappointed when they can’t get to my blog. Probably not.
Rise of the Machines? I think not.
Using machine learning in the realm of wireless sensor networks, I have been able to improve sensor node localization and provide event detection. Since I found the concepts of machine learning interesting, my adviser provided me with a book to get an overview: Machine Learning, written by Tom Mitchell of Carnegie Mellon. Most machine learning techniques are equivalent to function approximation and most also require a significant amount of human intervention to work properly. A machine learning model can be trained to take a set of inputs (such as sensor readings) and provide an output (a tank is hauling butt towards my base). However, the model has to be trained to know what the correct outputs are (tank is present or not present), so a human must provide a limited set of training data where the correct output is known.
Given the state of the art in machine learning, there is no way for an AI to learn on its own. There is reinforcement learning, but even in this case a human must decide the conditions and the amount of a reward or penalty for each AI decision or output. This is why AI in games is terrible: when there are a large number of non-deterministic game states and a large number of non-deterministic actions to take, it is almost impossible to determine the correct action to take at every decision point. This means that it is difficult or impossible to provide the AI with labeled ground truth or a reward for training. More to the point, labeling each output with the correct value would be a real headache. Instead, game developers resort to a rule-based system that still has trouble covering every possible scenario. As a result, NPC characters still wind up doing something weird, like running into walls.
I’ve been working with this stuff for awhile, realizing its capabilities and especially its limitations. Then, this weekend I see a headline reading: “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man.” Overblown media hype at its best. The article concerns a conference on machine learning attended by the aforementioned Tom Mitchell and futurist Ray Kurzweil. From what I gather, the conference dealt with mostly philosophical issues with respect to advancing technology and its integration with everyday life. There wasn’t much about strong AI taking over the world, yet it was plastered all over the news that a Skynet-esque entity would rise from the Internet and doom us all. In some ways, simpler systems have already taken over our lives: GPS tells us where to drive, automated tools read MRI scans and provide diagnoses, and viruses wreak havoc on our personal computers. However, strong AI has quite a ways to go, with most machine learning research peaking decades ago. As one Slashdot commenter on the NYT article writes:
Any computer scientist who is worried about AI taking over no longer deserves to be referred to as a computer scientist. The state of “artifiical intelligence” can be best described as “a pipe dream.”
All of this comes on the heels of a TED talk on the development of a brain simulator. The speaker indicates his current brain “implementation” is running on a 10,000 core Blue Gene system. The article gives few details, but it sounds like a large scale artificial neural network, which still needs supervised training data to learn properly. 10,000 nodes is still way too small, since the average human brain has 100 billion neurons with 7,000 connections each. Maybe in ten years the requisite computing horsepower will be in place, but I’m guessing the algorithms and the intelligence will not.
In a similar light, a team of scientists recently used DNA computing to solve the NP-Complete Hamiltonian Path problem. Instead of using some artificial construct or model, billions of DNA sequences, each representing a possible path, were randomly constructed such that those having a correct solution would glow a different color. While massive parallelism makes this a relatively fast solution to an NP-Complete problem, this approach really isn’t a doomsday AI either.
While specific solutions continue to be discovered for our technological problems, development of strong AI (and the development of Skynet) will sit on the back burner. Until then (and it’ll be awhile), everyone can take off their tinfoil hats.
Force Fed by Broadcast Media
If I see one more thing about Michael Jackson I’m going to puke.
As I was heading home from Rome, a guy in the seat in front of me had a USA Today with a full page spread and giant picture of Michael Jackson. I couldn’t read the text, but it was pretty obvious that he had died. Ever since I got home, every newspaper front page and every TV news station has been droning endlessly about Michael Jackson and rehashing every last detail pertaining to his death.
I don’t care and I don’t want to hear about it. It doesn’t interest me.
If I were biking somewhere outside of Williamsburg and crashed into a ditch and died where nobody could immediately see me, it could be a week before people even noticed I was missing. It might be up to two weeks before someone would think to file a police report and even longer before anyone would find my body. Few would care that I was missing or died, and such is the case for the thousands of people that die every day. None of them get news of their death plastered all over newspapers and television for days on end, and most of the world really wouldn’t care to hear about it.
The problem with this is that this is difficult to get away from when relying on broadcast media alone. Turn on the TV and it’s Michael Jackson. Turn on AM talk radio and it’s Michael Jackson. Open to the front page of the newspaper and it’s Michael Jackson. The good thing is that with the power of the Internet, and social networking, it’s easier to find alternative sources that give you the news you are interested in. The Internet is the great equalizer in that you no longer have to mindlessly read, watch, or hear what media executives want you to see. You can read about the topics you are interested in from a wide range of sources.
Those in broadcast media don’t like this paradigm shift. They file suits complaining of copyright infringement, claiming that they are losing money due to DVRs and piracy. The real issue isn’t as much monetary as it is control: broadcast media wants you to watch only what they feed you and only at the time they want you to see it.
Since broadcast media isn’t willing to embrace the Internet, they even try to restrict the freedom it brings in ways much more backhanded than traditional lawsuits. Recently, the New York Times worked with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to stifle edits about a Times journalist being captured in Afghanistan. While hiding the news about the capture was meant to save the journalist’s life, if it were anything but a journalist that was captured, news of the capture would be blasted all around the world by the same news outlets trying to keep this case quiet. It’s as if those in the media industry think they are on a plane above everyone else. They want to think our thoughts for us and only show us what they want us to see. Most people just blindly follow along as evidenced by comments in blogs and Facebook. It’s time to stop being sheep.
I find myself watching almost no TV and reading the newspaper less and less, skipping through most of the stories and only reading the things I’m interested in. Personalized Google News and Digg do a halfway decent job of filtering out broadcast media’s force feeding. Maybe soon everyone will realize that plenty of other things happened today than the decision of who is receiving custody of Michael Jackson’s kids.
Get Rich Quick: It’s too good to be true
After nearly ten months of work, I finally submitted a paper for review. At the end of next week, I go to Rome to give a conference presentation on work I had started over a year and a half ago. Research, like many things, takes a lot of time and effort to reach a milestone. There are no shortcuts to accomplishment, no matter what some sleazy TV salesman will tell you. People set out with dreams of instant gratification only to face the reality that only time and effort will provide them with reward. Instead of foraging on, they give up. In some cases, when faced with the prospect of immense effort for a small chance of success, others will just cheat. Why is this? What can be changed to provide motivation for long term efforts?
I recall a discussion in the locker room after cross country practice about a teammate I had never met. I don’t recall his name, but this guy had graduated before I even got to college. John, one of the well respected fifth year seniors said this guy wanted to go to NCAAs as part of the seven-man travel squad, but only “wanted to travel to the course, warm up with the team, and get a t-shirt.” He did not want to actually run the race. This guy never made the travel squad to NCAAs. To him, and many others, it’s all about instant gratification without any of the work. Running competitively isn’t like a movie where all the hard work is abstracted away and all that’s shown is the glorious win over the evil opponents. To date, our team has qualified for every national meet since 1997, one of only five schools. To do that takes considerable effort and years of training for hours every day. You can’t just fast forward to the good parts.
The zeitgeist of today is marked by a lack of intrinsic motivation to undertake any long term efforts. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell cites James Flynn’s work on how Asian students work harder and longer on problems than their American counterparts. Given a tough math problem, most American students will work on it for only a short while before giving up. This ethos carries over into other areas. An article in the New York Times states that 95 percent of blogs are abandoned, many of which only have one post. The torrents of traffic and commenters envisioned by these blog posters just doesn’t happen overnight. They think blogging fame will come immediately, but it doesn’t. It takes time to build a reader base. More to the point, the blog also has to have content that people are willing to read. I’ll be surprised if many people read this post or others like it concerning my opinions and everyday life, but most of my traffic comes from my software troubleshooting/debugging and knee microfracture posts. Even in my little corner of the Internet, I have made gradual traffic gains over the months. People just don’t swarm in overnight:
Apparently, the same is true for Twitter: most users either abandon their account after signing up or just make one post. Again, the problem boils down to effort: few are willing to make the effort and post meaningful content at frequent intervals. Followers just don’t appear because you signed up. Like blogs, it isn’t just the frequency of posts, but the value of the content: I really don’t care what you ate for lunch today. I especially don’t care that you got a front row seat at the Apple Developer’s Conference after waiting in line since 4 AM. Most Twitter posts aren’t much better than spam. To attract followers, the posts have to carry some value to those beyond a small circle of friends.
Everyone just wants the massive blog readership or the Twitter following, but couldn’t care less about the content required to generate such traffic. Sometimes, when the desired outcome can’t be achieved with lackluster efforts, many try to lower the bar. Currently, there’s an effort in Virginia Beach to relax the public school grading scale from 7 point to 10 point. Parents think this will even the playing field with other school systems that have switched to a 10 point scale, but it’s really just lowering the standards. Parents want their kid to get in to his or her college of choice and to do it by studying less. Also along these lines, a state representive recently proposed that more in state students should be accepted to Virginia public universities because a constituent complained that the acceptance standards were too tough and he didn’t get in. I’m guessing that this “constituent” was probably the representative’s kid. What is the real secret to getting in to your college of choice? It isn’t done by getting easier As or by pushing out extremely well qualified out of state students. Work harder, and anything can happen.
It’s pretty bad that so many people give up when they realize some effort is involved. It’s worse when people lower their standards of success when their current efforts are clearly lacking. Believe it or not, there are even worse characters out there that will do anything to get instant gratification: cheaters. Instead of working hard for ten months researching state-of-the-art, tweaking out a system design, implementing the design, testing the design against existing works, and finally writing and submitting a research paper, some people are willing to cheat. A recent study reports that an astounding 2% of researchers fake their results. In a similar instance, some colleges are willing to fudge the statistics to improve their rankings. They play with class sizes and give peer institutions poor reviews to improve their standing. Instead of improving the school in an honest way, taking the time to hire more and better qualified faculty, increasing employee pay, and attracting better students, Clemson faked its way up 16 places in U.S. News reviews.
What is the real solution to this lack of motivation? How can more people motivate themselves to post regularly on their blog? How can people stick with something and work hard enough to achieve just rewards? Some slick researchers tried paying students for earning good grades. This approach improved state test scores by nearly 40 percentage points. Did money provide the motivation for these students to work harder and longer on their math problems and not give up? Apparently. Proponents of this system argue that the “real world” functions much in this way: perform better and get paid more. But money can’t be added as an outcome in every scenario. How many blogs or Twitter accounts are raking in the dough? Almost zero, I would guess. Instead, people need intrinsic motivation to produce results over the long term. I don’t write this post because I envision piles of Internet surfers reading and commenting on this. I do it because there’s satisfaction in organizing my thoughts and ideas and writing them down. I don’t care that nobody else will read this, but if someone else finds it interesting, then more power to them.
Aside from writing these inane blog posts, it is intrinsic motivation that keeps me working on long research projects. It’s what gets me up in the morning with the hope that I’ll be able to run normally again after knee surgery. I run slow, go out every other day, only go ten minutes, and feel terrible, but I know if I do it enough I’ll be able to run faster and longer. By keeping at it and going one step at a time, things will get done.
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