Geek stuff – Page 70 – a sibilant intake of breath

How important is Facebook?

Facebook now has over 500 million users – a larger population than that of all but two nation states – as well as an upcoming movie. Perspectives on the site differ sharply, from those who see it as a successor to MySpace, and similarly doomed to eventual irrelevance, to those who see it as a key part of the future of the internet.

I think two things fundamentally distinguish Facebook from the rest of the web, and are important in combination. Firstly, there is the degree to which it is almost universally used. The great majority of my friends and co-workers have Facebook profiles. That creates powerful network effects. As with the telephone and other communication technologies, Facebook has become more useful and captivating as a larger and larger share of the population signs up. Secondly, there is the way in which the site imposes simplicity and standards. The internet is often a jumbled, confusing, technical place. By restricting the scope of what people can do, Facebook ensures that it will remain comprehensible, even to people without a great deal of technical knowledge.

Maybe the biggest thing Facebook has done is increased the level of social transparency in society. It has made the high school and college reunion largely irrelevant, since it is now easy to check what any particular former classmate is up to. Indeed, you probably don’t need to do any active research: their latest travel, relationship changes, photos, employment decisions, and more are likely to be displayed to you automatically if you sign in often enough. Suddenly, ambiguous romantic situations are perceptible to anyone who cares to investigate, and a much wider swathe of personal information has become readily accessible to future employers, co-workers, romantic partners, and friends.

Before the internet really emerged, I think a lot of people imagined that it would end up being much like Facebook – a centralized location for interpersonal interaction, in which physical location is not important. Clearly, the wider internet has developed to play many other roles, such as serving as a mechanism to gain access to specialized and niche products and information. That said, it does seem like Facebook is now a core part of what the internet does, taken all in all, and that the economic and social consequences of that could be significant.

GSM encryption cracking demo

I have written before about how the encryption used by GSM cell phones is not secure. At the upcoming Defcon conference, Chris Paget is planning to demonstrate how the cryptoscheme in GSM can be circumvented completely, using a man-in-the-middle attack, based around a device called an ‘IMSI catcher.’ Specifically, he is planning to “intercept and record cellular calls made by [his] attendees, live on-stage, no user-input required.”

This is a good illustration of some of the limitations of cryptography. Even very sound encryption algorithms are often used in ways that make them vulnerable to attack, including man-in-the-middle attacks where legitimate senders and receivers don’t realize their communications are being routed through a third party. The take-home message is: just because something is encrypted, don’t assume that other people won’t be able to access it.

Unusual things to do in New York

In the near future, I will be spending some time in New York City. I have been there twice before and already seen many of the obvious sites (Times Square, most of the museums, the Staten Island Ferry, Ellis Island, the Empire State Building, etc).

Is there anything less obvious that people would recommend? I would be especially interested in things like excellent and unusual geeky shops and hangouts, good places for photography, and anything random and unexpected.

Materialism and free will

I have written before about the apparent contradiction between free will and materialism (the idea that the universe is exclusively comprised of particles that obey physical laws). The problem is easy enough to state: if every particle in the universe behaves in a manner governed by a combination of random chance and predictable laws, how can a physical entity like the brain respond to stimuli in a way that is neither random nor determined?

Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington recently summarized some experiments on monkeys that illuminate this issue. They found that they could use a computer to predict how monkeys will respond to visual stimuli, suggesting that such mental functions are automatic.

Of course, there is a big difference between parts of mental life like maintaining a steady heartbeat and tracking a moving object visually and those like making ethical decisions. That said, I continue to be unable to see what mechanism could exist between the former and the latter, and which could square our intuitive belief in free will with what we know about the functioning of the universe. That being said, we do not have any reason to act as though free will does not exist. The reason for that is simple: if free will doesn’t exist, we don’t have any influence over what we believe or how we act, while if it does exist we certainly want to behave appropriately. As such, if we do have any scope to choose, we should choose to believe in free will.

Better two-stroke engines

Apparently, it might be possible to make efficient two-stroke engines that are less polluting than their predecessors.

Improving the efficiency of gasoline and diesel engines is an important undertaking, both because it will be a while before electric vehicles are ready for near-universal urban deployment and because there will be rural vehicles running on fossil fuels for quite a while yet.

Renting lenses in Ottawa

Photographic lenses are expensive things, especially professional grade ones. For example, Canon’s 24-70 f/2.8L costs $1600. Their 70-200 f/4L costs $1480, with image stabilization.

And yet, the 24-70 can be rented for a weekend for just $25, and the 70-200 is $30. Renting makes even more sense with esoteric lenses which are useful for certain projects or for producing a novel effect, but which it doesn’t make that much sense to buy. A good example is the 14 f/2.8L, which costs $50 to rent for a weekend but $2790 to buy. There aren’t a lot of people out there who will shoot more than 56 weekends worth of fisheye shots.

Located at 499 Bank Street, Vistek rents all of these lenses, as well as lighting equipment and other photo gear. My experiences with them have been very good, and they charge the same amount for a long weekend lens rental as for an ordinary weekend. They also have stores in Toronto, Mississauga, Calgary, and Edmonton.

I have already tried renting the 10-22 3.5-4.5 for some day and night photos of Montreal. Some other lenses I want to rent are the 50 1.2L, the 24 3.5L tilt-shift, the 100 2.8L macro, the 100-400 4.5-5.6L, and maybe the 14 2.8L.

Inception

This past weekend, I saw the film Inception. To a large extent, it felt like an updated version of The Matrix with dreams in the place of computers and less automatic weapon fire. It was also a pretty well constructed jewel heist type movie. It included some neat things conceptually and visually, and didn’t contain much that was frustrating or perplexing.

The image of a beach as where you end up when trapped at the lowest level of dreaming may have been inspired by what artificial intelligences can do to unwary hackers in William Gibson’s Neuromancer universe. It was also interesting to see who head related devices seem to be out, when it comes to mind-machine interfaces. Now, people connect tubing to their inner arms, probably to evoke the addictiveness and danger of intravenous drug use.

All told, I thought the film was well worth seeing.

Emotional responses to oil production

When I was a child, I remember seeing working on terrestrial or offshore oil rigs as an heroic profession: using knowledge and technology to do something difficult and important, at considerable risk to your personal safety. No doubt, that view was partly formed through exposure to advertising. Like the military and space programs, oil companies realized a long time ago that the combination of high technology with human dedication is an image that people find compelling. Throw together footage of people in hardhats riding helicopters between giant machines, with intense music in the background, and you can pretty easily create a sense of your company and personnel as impressive. Nonetheless, it still has a certain emotional validity, as long as the interactions you think about are all the voluntary ones: companies accessing oil reserves and then upgrading their crude contents into useful products that serve important functions.

Of course, when you start to think about the involuntary interactions, the waters get substantially muddied. Oil producers and users are both guilty of putting their own needs and desires ahead of those who are inevitably harmed as a consequence of their activities, through routes like air and water pollution and climate change.

Now, when I see ads for oil companies, I respond to them like personal insults. They look like taunts from powerful and politically influential companies that are fully aware of how much damage they are causing, but are happy to continue to do so, while continuing to try to foster the image I used to hold of them as brave technical experts.

Of course, there are still people out there who factually reject the idea that oil production and use causes significant suffering for third parties. From that mindset, it is almost inevitable that you would end up with a profoundly different view of oil producers and consumers. It is not all that surprising, then, that deep aesthetic and political disagreements about how the industry should be treated are ongoing.

Now, it seems like a real shame that so much energy, effort, and money have gone into building up an industry that has proven to be so harmful. If all the intellectual effort that has gone into extracting and processing fossil fuels during the last few decades had been applied instead to the development and deployment of renewable forms of energy, we would be a lot farther along the path to carbon neutrality today.

The stink about the census

One of the biggest challenges in statistics is collecting a representative sample: finding a subset of the population that will do a good job of approximating the whole group. When a dataset contains a lot of sampling bias and is not reflective of the general population, it is essentially worthless as a guide. That cannot be fixed by using a larger sample side, nor can it be dealt with via fancy mathematics.

The classic example of sampling bias is the ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ headline, from The Chicago Tribune in 1948. The newspaper got their prediction wrong because they sampled people with telephones, at a time when telephones were comparatively rare. Most of the people who had them were rich, and rich people were more supportive of Dewey. As a consequence, telephone polling provided bad information about the likely voting behaviour of the whole population.

This clearly relates to the decision of Canada’s federal government to make the 2011 long-form census optional. With a mandatory census, you more closely approximate an unbiased sample (it isn’t perfect, because some people will refuse to fill in even a mandatory form). With a voluntary census, you are always vulnerable to the possibility that the sort of people who will make the effort to complete it will differ from those who will not. In such a situation, the data in the census could be a poor reflection of the situation in the population as a whole.

That is why it is foolish for the Fraser Institute to advocate the use of voluntary polling or market research, in place of a census. The quality of data from such sources can never be as good, because sampling bias will always make it suspect.

Zoom also has a post on scrapping the mandatory long census.

The internet and confirmation bias

The issue of confirmation bias has come up repeatedly here before. Basically, people evaluate new information in a way that is far from impartial; new information that seems to confirm pre-existing beliefs is generally filed as evidence for the appropriateness of those beliefs, while contradictory information is downplayed or ignored. While this phenomenon is ancient, there does seem to be good reason to think that it may be especially acute now, as the media becomes more personalized and segmented.

That danger is highlighted by Harvard academic Ethan Zuckerman, who gave a TED talk on how social networks mislead us. Because we are exposed to the thoughts of people who are already much like us, we are at risk of being convinced that we are more typically than we really are, and our views are more mainstream and justified than may actually be the case.

How much of a problem would people say this is, both from the perspective of being well-informed citizens and in the context of being effective in promoting particular policies? Is there any way either social networks or individuals can combat this entrenching of confirmation bias? For my own sake, I have been trying to incorporate more articles from newspapers I disagree with into my daily reading.