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So, I'm interested in advancements in robotics, especially those with nifty practical uses, like the Roboking robotic vacuum cleaner and the Banryu guard robot
But today, I was looking at pictures of these things and thinking about them zipping around my house vacuuming and guarding and I thought, John Henry and Charming Billie would just kill those things dead.
A researcher in Seattle says that how couples interact and whether they stay together or divorce can be predicted mathematically:
In The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models (MIT Press), which he wrote in collaboration with four mathematicians, Mr. Gottman uses the tools of calculus to describe the interactions of couples like Angie and Dave. The models presented in the book, he says, offer insights into the heaven and hell of couplehood that he would never have found by sifting through his data with standard linear statistical tools. He has already begun to apply those insights in his therapeutic work -- including with Angie and Dave themselves, whose conversations are transcribed in the book.
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Both "validating" couples and "conflict avoiding" couples tend to have marriages that are stable and long lasting. Couples are in trouble, though, when they have mismatched influence functions. Consider the "hostile detached" couple, where the slopes for the husband's and the wife's influences look very different. When the husband behaves positively, he has almost no impact (slope of 0.02) on his detached wife.
Bob Edwards, host of NPR's Morning Edition, has an editorial in the Lousiville, KY Courier Journal about freedom of the press, information, corporate dominance and government:
...We are currently a nation at war and the free flow of information and ideas is never more important than it is at times like these. But monopolies choke that flow, allowing only the information and ideas that facilitate that other flow — the flow of dollars into their pockets.As exhibit A, I give you the Dixie Chicks, one of the hottest musical acts in the country — or at least they were until one of the Chicks, in a bit of anti-war fervor, said they were ashamed that the President is from Texas. The backlash against the Chicks for making that remark is fine if it comes from ex-fans who say they won’t buy any more records by the Dixie Chicks. The marketplace is a respectable forum for freedom of expression. The Chicks have a right to their opinions. Music fans have a right to tell the chicks to go to hell and to boycott their concerts and refuse to buy their records. Free speech is never really free — it always costs something. But here’s what’s wrong with this picture. The backlash against the Chicks is spearheaded not by fans, but by Clear Channel Radio, owner of 1,250 radio stations....
...But back to Clear Channel, which daily tells Bush and Powell that it loves them. Is Clear Channel’s move on those Dixie Chicks an expression of patriotism or a business decision? Should Clear Channel have the right to ban the Chicks from its 1,250 stations? I think what individuals do is fine — burn the CDs if you want. What industry does is another matter. Clear Channel can say the Dixie Chicks are tools of Saddam if it wants to, but it should not be allowed to kill the livelihood of any recording artist based on politics....
The Republican National Committee has invited me to become a Charter Member of the President's Victory Team.
They must be high....
I've always been a big defender of faculty, academic freedom, and tenure.
After today, they are all bloody on their own.
I expect this will be a huge blow to them.
Cisco says ethics are not a business concern (from a Declan McCullagh column at C|Net):
Do you have any moral problems with helping to make surveillance technology more efficient? I have some moral and ethical issues, but I think quite frankly that the place to argue this is in Congress and in the courtroom, not a service provider's machine room when he's staring down the barrel of a subpoena.There are two sides. One is that Cisco as a company needs to let its customers abide by the law. The other is the moral and ethical issues. There are two very separate questions.
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The Arcata City Council 'Anti-Patriot Act' ordinance:
The ordinance cites the Patriot Act's provisions for searches and access to confidential records as unconstitutional. When the City law was first proposed, little controversy emerged but there were lots of questions about what would happen if the feds actually ask City of Arcata employees to assist their Patriot Act-sanctioned investigations....
And an employee who violates the ordinance and complies with unconstitutional requests would be subjected to the same penalty that's levied for any first-time infraction offense: a $57 fine.
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The Arcata Eye also has a police log:
10:51 p.m. In an incident cloaked in ambivalence, a person either suffering with or enjoying a state of "elevated behavior" was reported either screaming or yelling.6:22 a.m. A man said his son had called from a phone booth in the Plaza area saying he was depressed and may want to harm himself. Police checked the area, finding only the usual ambient aroma of free-floating malaise.
5:22 a.m. Another small red car in Valley West, and another report of someone going to "kill" a husband. It all dwindled off into yet another bout of Arcata's favorite pastime - parking lot yelling.
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If people are going to talk about Vietnam (and use it to make points about Iraq), then I wish they'd at least learn more history. The New Republic says this:
Of course United States forces in the North could have subdued the North Vietnamese army and captured Hanoi, bringing the Vietnam War to a close: if the United States only had to fight North Vietnam.
and this...
Frustrating as the imaginary line between North and South Vietnam was to U.S. military leaders, there were reasons that line was drawn.
Which completely ignores that most of South Vietnam didn't want us there either, that we had been involved in policy in Vietnam since the 1940s (even when we were pretending that we weren't), and that the 'reasons that line was drawn' had relatively little to do with what the people of Vietnam itself actually wanted.
From an article in the Chicago Sun-Times about libraries and the PATRIOT ACT:
A Department of Justice spokesman said actions by libraries to warn patrons or to regularly discard certain records are legal and don't violate the Patriot Act. But such steps are "an unfortunate waste of their time," Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said.The Patriot Act is used only to gain information about terrorists or foreign spies, so libraries don't need to take steps to protect their patrons' privacy, Corallo insisted.
From Crypto-Gram Newsletter and Bruce Schneier:
Assume a simple database -- name and a single code indicating "innocent" or "guilty." When a policeman encounters someone, he looks that person up in the database, and then arrests him if the database says "guilty."Example 1: Assume the database is 100% accurate. If that is the case, there won't be any false arrests because of bad data. It works perfectly.
Example 2: Assume a 0.0001% error rate: one error in a million. (An error is defined as a person having an "innocent" code when he is guilty, or a "guilty" code when he is innocent.) Furthermore, assume that one in 10,000 people are guilty. In this case, for every 100 guilty people the database correctly identifies it will mistakenly identify one innocent person as guilty (because of an error). And the number of guilty people erroneously listed as innocent is tiny: one in a million.
Example 3: Assume a 1% error rate -- one in a hundred -- and the same one in 10,000 ratio of guilty people. The results are very different. For every 100 guilty people the database correctly identifies, it will mistakenly identify 10,000 innocent people as guilty. The number of guilty people erroneously listed as innocent is larger, but still very small: one in 100.
The differences between examples 2 and 3 are striking. In example 2, one person is erroneously arrested for every 100 people correctly arrested. In example 3, one person is correctly arrested for every 100 people erroneously arrested. The increase in error rate makes the database all but useless as a system for figuring out how to arrest. And this is despite the fact that, in both cases, almost no guilty people get away because of a database error.
The reason for this phenomenon is that the number of guilty people is a very small percentage of the population. If one in ten people were guilty, then a 0.0001% error rate would mistakenly arrest one innocent for every 100,000 guilty, and a 1% error rate would arrest approximately one innocent for every guilty. And if the number of guilty people is even less than one in ten thousand, then the problem of arresting innocents magnifies even more as the database has more errors.
...via Shifted Librarian and BoingBoing
I have two Rottweilers.
I have a small back yard.
If rabbits were even remotely intelligent and not just suicidal death maniacs, wouldn't you think they could find someplace better to hang out than RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY BACK YARD?
(Note: no actual rabbits were harmed in the making of this post)
Natalie Jerimejenko has information here and here detailing her feral robots project:
OUT THERE, in happy family homes, in the offices of corporate executives, in toy stores through out the globe, is an army of robotic dogs. These semi-autonomous robotic creatures, though currently programmed to perform inane or entertaining tasks: begging for plastic bones; barking to the tune of national anthems; walking in circles; are actually fully motile and AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
If the dogs were, for example, modified with an off-the-shelf gas sensor, they could be released on building sites to prowl, take readings, and send back data.
I just hope they're smart enough not to get between a real dog and a piece of meat...
...via BoingBoing
Serenity of A Life Less Ordinary is married to a soldier and is against the current war in Iraq. She gets questions (no surprise), to which she has graciously supplied answers:
2.) How do you think it makes your husband feel to know you don't support him?
Now here is where I have the biggest bone of contention with folks. Don't support my husband -- are you insane? I left the relative security of my old life, and everything I owned behind when I moved here to live with my husband; although it was painful, I did it willingly, and I did it because I support my husband. There is no one else who stays up until 1 am polishing my soldier's boots or ironing his uniforms. I do that, and I am happy to do it. I work a full-time job to help support our household, and make it possible for my soldier to have a more comfortable life. I put aside a portion of my check every payday to create a savings from which we will have money for the items he needs when he deploys to Kuwait -- to include a new laptop computer, which, while not on the packing lists given to him by his unit, was something he wanted to take with him to Kuwait.
Real support in this household does not mean going to a support-the-troops rally, siding with the President, smashing my Dixie Chicks CD, refusing to watch West Wing or even wearing a yellow ribbon. It means taking the time and doing the big and little things it take to make my husband's life a comfort and a joy while he is here, and helping him to be more comfortable when he is away. It means seeing that his needs are met, his wants and desires are fufilled to the extent that I can do so, and I do all those things -- willingly, happily and with pride. I don't have to be a warmonger or supporter to do that.
Of course, if you feel I am not doing a good job of supporting him, then by all means, I invite you to come over here and do better. His day starts at about 4:30 am, and he likes at least two cups of coffee before he goes to PT. Good luck.
We used to have a cat who would open the back door and let the dog out.
This is even better:
The matriarch of a herd of elephants in South Africa opened a gate with her trunk to free antelopes being held at a camp in the east of the country, conservationists said on Tuesday.
...via BoingBoing
...an excerpt from Daniel Ellsberg's book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
(I don't say I agree with this completely, but that is not its point. Its point is that there are other ways of viewing the world and sometimes understanding those views changes everything)
A young woman was sitting almost directly across the lunch table from me. From India, wearing a sari, she was dark, almost black. On her forehead was a dot of red dust. She was talking, in a litling voice, to some friends on my side of the table. I wanted not to stare at her and didn't try to listen to her conversation. Then, in a moment of silence around us, as she responded to someone's remark about "enemies," I heard her say, "I come from a culture in which there is no concept of enemy."A strange statement. Hardly comprehensible. No concept of enemy? How about concepts of sun and moon, friend, water? I came from a culture in which the concept of enemy was central, seemingly indispensable--the culture of Rand, the U. S. Marine Corps, the Defense and State departments, international and domestic politics, game theory and bargaining theory. Identifying enemies, understanding and predicting them so as to fight and control them better, analyzing the relations of abstract enemies: All that had been for years my daily bread and butter, part of the air I breathed. To try to operate in the world of men and nations without the concept of enemy would have seemed as difficult, as nearly inconceivable as doing arithmetic, like the Romans, without a zero.
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The sense of what she said in our protracted discussion was this. First, in answer to my question: In Gandhi's teaching, no human should be regarded or treated as being "an enemy," in the sense of someone you have a right to destroy, or to hate, or to regard as alien, from whom you cannot learn, for whom you can feel no understanding or concern. These are simply not appropriate attitudes toward another human being. No one should be regarded as being--in his or her essence or permanently--evil os as utterly antagonistic. No people should be seen as being evil persons, as if they were without good in them, a different, less human order of being, as if one could learn nothing from them or as if they were unchangeable, even if what there were doing in the moment was harmful and terrible, indeed evil and needed to be opposed. Thus the whole notion of enemy was both unneeded and dangerously misleading.
This was so said Janaki, even though what people do is often terribly wrong, in the extreme sense that it demands not merely to be condemned but to be resisted, nonviolently but militantly, at personal cost to oneself, even at the risk of one's own life. This was the very sense in which one could characterize certain ways of acting--though not the actors themselves--as "evil." Yet in opposing people's wrongdoing, even the worst sort, evildoing, in trying to change their hearst and their actions and, above all, to protect others from their harmful behavior, one need not, should not, attempt to destroy them or threaten them with physical harm.
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Nearly all evildoing, she pointed out, like nearly all coercive power, legitimate and illegitimate, depends on the cooperation, on the obedience and support, on the assent or at least passive tolerance of many people. It relies on many more collaborators than are conscious of their roles; these include even many victims, along with passive bystanders, as in effect accomplices. Such cooperation could be withdrawn with powerful effect. Actions of individuals could ignite organized noncooperation, as the example of Rosa Parks led to the Montgomery bus boycott. Her refusal to obey a command, valid under the law in Alabama, to yield her seat on a bus to a white male passenger, her choice to suffer arrest instead, challenged the habits of obedience of all black people in Montgomery....
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She spoke a good deal of Martin Luther King and urged me to read his Stride Toward Freedom, which she had just quoted to me. I had never though much about King, and I certainly hadn't know his concept of militant nonviolent action. I had scarcely been aware of the strength of King's opposition to the Vietnam War since 1965. I was impressed by her description of the stand he had taken at the Riverside Church in New York City almost exactly a year before, April 4, 1967. Against the urging of many of his allies, black and white, he had risked losing support for the civil rights movement and sacrificed his access to the White House by denouncing the war uncompromisingly because, he began by quoting, "There comes a time when silence is betrayal."....Janaki urged me to meet with him--she thought she could arrange it--and I decided I must. Her account gave me a sense of hope for what might come to happen in American that I had also found, just in the last few months and in a different way, in Robert Kennedy.
We didn't go back to the conference. We stayed together and talked throught he next day as well. Late that afternoon, April 4, 1968, we turned on the evening news and learned that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been killed. Washington was burning.
I've been meaning to write about these books in more detail, but haven't gotten to it, so here's a list of books I've finished recently:
I will mention briefly that Warriors Don't Cry is wicked excellent. It's a memoir written by one of the nine black students who integrated Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Melba Patillo was fifteen years old when she went to Central High. Her mother, a school teacher, was divorced so her household consisted of Melba, her mother, her grandmother, and her younger brother. They were threatened by phone, by men with shotguns, by rocks thrown from cars and by threats of bombs. Melba and the other students were harassed every single day and their lives were often in real significant danger. The teachers and administration did little to support them, the only time they felt even a modicum of safety was when the 101st Airborne was walking them to class--protection that was pulled out as quickly as possible. None of them reported how really bad things were because they were afraid the whole thing would be shut down and the chance might never come again. And yet, those nine students (only one didn't finish the year) managed in spite of everything to go to school and to survive and they made it through the school year more or less intact.
Sometimes you read about historic decisions like black students at Central High or young women at the Citadel and you think that it's pretty much over when the students finally get their chance to walk through the door. The rest of us--those who aren't right there--move on to other things, and we don't always know what happens afterward. These young men and women, the first ones, like Melba Patillo Beals, never really get their dream, the school is never for them what it is for those who have always belonged there, it's worse, in fact, that what they left and it the opportunities it offers others (the ones who 'belong') will never be offered to them. But because they are willing to make the sacrifices they make, they change the world and the future for the rest of us.
I was just over at This Modern World--the weblog reading this entry which begins:
I just got a call from Ethel Kennedy...
and my first thought was--there's something that's never going to happen to me....
I love the idea of globalization working for us, instead of so often being a way to make people fearful, stressed, and poor.
James F. Moore at Harvard has an excellent article on the rising second superpower:
There is an emerging second superpower, but it is not a nation. Instead, it is a new form of international player, constituted by the “will of the people” in a global social movement. The beautiful but deeply agitated face of this second superpower is the worldwide peace campaign, but the body of the movement is made up of millions of people concerned with a broad agenda that includes social development, environmentalism, health, and human rights. This movement has a surprisingly agile and muscular body of citizen activists who identify their interests with world society as a whole—and who recognize that at a fundamental level we are all one. These are people who are attempting to take into account the needs and dreams of all 6.3 billion people in the world—and not just the members of one or another nation. Consider the members of Amnesty International who write letters on behalf of prisoners of conscience, and the millions of Americans who are participating in email actions against the war in Iraq. Or the physicians who contribute their time to Doctors Without Borders/ Medecins Sans Frontieres....
How does the second superpower take action? Not from the top, but from the bottom. That is, it is the strength of the US government that it can centrally collect taxes, and then spend, for example, $1.2 billion on 1,200 cruise missiles in the first day of the war against Iraq. By contrast, it is the strength of the second superpower that it could mobilize hundreds of small groups of activists to shut down city centers across the United States on that same first day of the war. And that millions of citizens worldwide would take to their streets to rally. The symbol of the first superpower is the eagle—an awesome predator that rules from the skies, preying on mice and small animals. Perhaps the best symbol for the second superpower would be a community of ants. Ants rule from below. And while I may be awed seeing eagles in flight, when ants invade my kitchen they command my attention.
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Now the response of many readers will be that this is a wishful fantasy. What, you say, is the demonstrated success of this second superpower? After all, George Bush was almost single-handedly able to make war on Iraq, and the global protest movement was in the end only able to slow him down. Where was the second superpower?
The answer is that the second superpower is not currently able to match the first. On the other hand, the situation may be more promising than we realize. Most important is that the establishment of international institutions and international rule of law has created a venue in which the second superpower can join with sympathetic nations to successfully confront the United States. Consider the international effort to ban landmines. Landmines are cheap, deadly, and often used against agrarian groups because they make working the fields lethal, and sew quite literally the seeds of starvation. In the 1990s a coalition of NGOs coordinated by Jody Williams, Bobby Muller and others managed to put this issue at the top of the international agenda, and promote the establishment of the treaty banning their use. For this, the groups involved were awarded the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. While the United States has so far refused to sign the treaty, it has been highly isolated on the issue and there is still hope that some future congress and president will do so.
Brad DeLong gets to the heart of the strategy issue:
The point is clear. Even if, as Mr. Yglesias says elsewhere, it might be that "the cakewalk scenario, though wrong in retrospect, was the best reading of the available evidence," Rumsfeld's force planning was still lousy. It's not his job to plan for the most likely case, or for the best case, or for a good case. It's his job to plan for all cases: so that there is not just a path that leads to victory, but all (or almost all) paths lead to (rapid, nearly bloodless, and decisive) victory.