Facing fears

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, forecasting, social trends

What makes you worry, or at least wonder, "What if THAT happened?" Mike Pearl, with his column in Vice, "How Scared Should I Be?", is the professional worry wart we all need to take a whack at such questions. His book The Day it Finally Happens: Alien Contact, Dinosaur Parks, Immortal Humans—and Other (im)Possible Phenomena tackles nineteen such questions.

In the Acknowledgements Mr. Pearl confesses to suffering multiple panic attacks while writing the book. For someone who is disposed to think things through, then realize just how plausible many of these things are, the occasional panic attack is justified.

There is only one chapter that touches on a concern I also have, "The Day Antibiotics Don't Work Anymore". The author doesn't delve into the troubles antibiotic resistance is causing already (in the US, almost 3 million resistant infections and more than 35,000 deaths in 2019: on a par with auto accidents). Rather, his focus is what happens when every infectious pathogen is fully resistant, when getting a paper cut becomes a life-threatening event. Every chapter begins with a scorecard. For this one:

Likely in this century? Yes
Plausibility Rating: 5/5
Scary? Extremely, but probably not the Apocalypse
Worth Changing Habits? Yes

The follow-up question I have is, "Will alternative biocides such as bacteriophages be developed (re-developed) soon enough?" I say re-developed, because bacteria-eating viruses (bacteriophages) were in use and effective, and research into developing more of them was a growing technology when antibiotics were discovered and effectively torpedoed phage research. It is ramping up again.

On another matter of which I am rather fond, the author's take on our getting a confirmed signal from intelligent ET's posits a radio reception from a star 13,000 light-years away. In the early days of the first science fiction boom in America, some 60-100 years ago (the days of "Doc" Smith and R.A. Heinlein and a great many others), the universe was usually imagined to be full of alien species, some vaguely similar to us, and others more like semi-familiar animals, and others quite fanciful. This was almost taken for granted by Sci-Fi readers, but few others gave it any thought. The pendulum has swung in a more pessimistic direction since then, with a brief pro-"lotsa aliens" swing brought on by Star Trek and Star Wars. Pessimism rules at present. More and more people realize that stars are far away, very far; that getting somewhere in less than years to centuries or more is about as possible as learning to pole vault a mile; and that life like that of Earth might be so rare that no other planet in the Milky Way is likely to have living things bigger than E. coli. This is actually a pretty good time for an alien signal to be intercepted and verified.

Here's one for keeping Digital Natives awake at night: "The Day the Entire Internet Goes Down." Here is the scorecard:

Likely in this century? Yes
Plausibility Rating: 4/5
Scary? About as scary as it gets
Worth Changing Habits? It would be a disaster. How up-to-date is your disaster preparedness kit?

The only thing he finds more scary is the prospect of nuclear annihilation (Plausibility 2/5), to which he devotes 20 pages, the longest chapter. The "Internet" chapter and one about the closing of the last slaughter house (also 2/5) are tied for second, with 18 pages. He dwells at length on the way the Internet works, and what it would really take to bring it all down. One of the next books on my reading list is 2034 (Stay tuned), about WW3 (or 4?), with China, which reveals just how dependent we are on the Internet, even the military (BIG mistake, Generals!): in the novel China selectively "blinds" the U.S. This leads me to consider that an attempt to destroy the Internet is the most likely scenario at present for triggering a nuclear attack or exchange.

Personally, total annihilation is less scary than almost-annihilation. My wife, born just after WW2 ended, can tell you a thing or two about growing up in a country whose capital (and hundreds of square miles around it) was fire-bombed into oblivion. I have read quite a number of post-apocalyptic stories and novels. None of them seems grim enough to be realistic. I guess I'll leave that right there…

I'm not the sort to fret nearly as much as Mr. Pearl. Reading his treatment of things that must represent his greatest fears was enlightening and enjoyable. Really! He is clearly laboring to allay his own fears and in so doing he makes each of them, if not less fearful, a bit more comprehensible.

Barriers to communication

kw: social trends, religion

A couple days ago I had a mini-rant about atheism and theism, and since then I've been thinking about it from another angle. Any spectrum of opinion or attitude typically has about seven "positions", which represent "mental distance" and express the ranges over which communication is possible. My classic example is the abortion scale, or the "choice-versus-life axis". The great majority of people (at least in the West) fall into one of these groups:

1. "Abortion for any reason is a right that must be protected."
2. "Abortion is allowable under most circumstances, and such choices should be protected."
3. "What's the big deal?"
4. "Life should be protected from conception on, except under certain circumstances."
5. "All abortion is murder."
   

People in a two-position range (such as from 1 to 3) can communicate, though they may not agree on much. Two people who differ by more than two positions are not likely to understand one another at all, and groups 1 and 5 cannot communicate at all. Above I mentioned seven positions. Position 0 is "I'd kill to defend the right to choose" and position 6 is "I'd kill to prevent an abortion." Both kinds of killings have occurred, so these are not just theoretical.

Now to the religious divide. As a prelude, take a look at this Google Ngram that shows published accounts in English containing the words atheism, theism and deism, in order. Click on the chart to see it more clearly. You can see that atheism in its modern sense was practically invented about 1790, and the other two terms, now having a reason for being, came along for the ride. The heyday of atheism lasted until about 1900. These terms have a suspicious synchrony with a signal political event, the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1789. People had no option to be openly atheistic in America prior to that date.

I deliberately left out the word Christian because it completely swamps all the others. In literature and much philosophy, "Christian" became synonymous with "human" by the end of the Enlightenment in Europe, so it is meaningless to pull statistics on it.

Like any new thing, atheism spiked to its greatest popularity in about a decade, then slowly waned for a half century, leaving a small, vocal group who are also the ones that most frequently use either "theism" or "deism" in their writings. Committed believers in a God or gods may use the term atheism, but very seldom the other two.

What then are the seven positions along the religion axis?

1. Evangelical theist: "I really believe in God, and I'd like to tell you about it."
2. Lukewarm theist: "Sure, I believe in God. I even go to church … usually."
3. Deist: "Yeah, there's a god out there, but we don't interfere with each other."
4. Agnostic: "I don't know (and I don't care)".
5. Nontheist or Atheist: "There are no supreme beings."

Again, I left off 0 and 6. These are the murderous ends of the spectrum. Let us take note, however, that historical slaughter in the name of religion was primarily political in nature; the perpetrators were typically entirely cynical about religion (that is a different axis, which crosses this one at position 3.5). In modern times, I would place those rare folks who call themselves "evangelical atheists" at about 5.5; not murderous, but more radical than the non-angry non-theists. Position 0 is possible (as is 6) but is much less commonly seen, at least outside China, than murderous pro-choice. I would then place the most extreme theists, those who want laws passed hindering atheistic practice, at 0.5; not murderous yet, but not far from it.

Where should governments stand? American experience has shown that the government is least damaging when it is slightly deist, in the 3.5 range, but not cynical. Rather, indifference is best.

The strongly theistic and the strongly atheistic among us cannot communicate meaningfully. Both can (barely) communicate with those in the middle, and they look to them for converts. The murderous extremes along any social spectrum need to be controlled by government. Otherwise, it is best to let folks argue it out their own way.

Newer news

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, news, social trends

What happened to these? Gone the way of the buggy whip, for sure! You can still buy a buggy whip, particularly in Amish country, and you can still obtain a Mergenthaler Linotype, if you want to produce printed text the way it was done from 1886 to about 1975. But technology has advanced, and few people alive today have even seen one of these, though our libraries are full of older books and other materials that were typeset on them.

One of my father's first jobs, as a teenager, was to hand-set the headlines for a newspaper, in the compositor's corner, where the rest of the room was full of Linotype operators. My first paying work was as a paperboy, from age 11 to 15, when I could get a "real" job. We paperboys (and a girl or two) got the chance to visit the newspaper production floor yearly to Ooh and Aah over the machines. In the 1950s, Linotypes and roll/web presses still ruled.

Now we can all publish at will, using MS Word or Corel Wordperfect or OpenOffice Writer and a laser printer or inkjet printer. Or we can do virtual publishing, like blogging, tweeting, or filling our Facebook Wall with our thoughts. It may not be long before lithographic offset printing is completely superseded. If you take a daily newspaper, it is still printed on a roll/web press, though the ink plates are produced by phototypesetting machinery. But there aren't any 11-year-old paper carriers any more; they've joined the Dodo.

What about this guy? Also going the way of the buggy whip, or of the Dodo? Not so fast! News is changing, and changing fast, but we still need someone to gather it and write it up. There will probably always be a place for the professional journalist, but they are getting competition from the amateurs, and the thought of journalism as a "day job" is definitely on the way out, even though the profession itself remains with us.

Journalistic trends and technology's impact on the news form the core of Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get by Ken Doctor. The author has formulated his thesis as twelve "laws"; as listed on the back cover of the book:

1. In the age of Darwinian content, you are your own editor
2. The Digital Dozen will dominate
3. Local: Remap and reload
4. The old news world is gone—get over it
5. The Great Gathering; or, the fine art of using other people's content
6. It's a pro-am world
7. Reporters become bloggers
8. Itch the Niche
9. Apply the 10 percent rule
10. Media learn how to market, marketers learn how to make the most of media
11. For journalists' jobs, it's back to the future
12. Mind the gaps

I don't propose to detail these twelve Laws; that's the author's job, after all! But three key terms stand out: Darwinian content, the Niche, and the Gig model (from the 11^th Law).

First, Darwinian content: The news has escaped the newsroom, and is all over the Web. Stewart Brand once made complementary statements: "Information wants to be free" and "Information wants to be expensive". Based on the proverb that two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead, once information is produced and distributed to a few, it is bound to get out to all. On the other hand, producing information is not free. If it takes someone a couple of hours to gather the material for a short news item, and another hour to type it up and proofread it (something not many will do), who is going to pay a few hundred dollars for the time spent? Bloggers like me write because we love to write, and enjoy the interaction from readers, in the form of comments and e-mails. But I have a day job to pay my bills. If I had to live from my writing, I'd firstly monetize my blog, and you'd begin seeing banner ads or pop-ups, so I could get click-through revenue. I'd do a few other things differently also, such as write freelance material for magazines.

But someone, paid or not, wrote 72,000 news articles containing the word "recession" in the past hour, according to Google News, which I just checked a few minutes ago. Making the same search at Yahoo News yields only 137 articles, but they have been curated and edited, rather than aggregated by a search algorithm. Even 137 is an overwhelming number. No matter how a certain four or five stories make their way to the top of Google or Yahoo's list, those are all I am likely to read. On average, among avid readers such as myself, that is all anybody is going to read. The rest are "selected against", in Darwinian terms, and their ideas, worthy or not, die a-borning.

Many of those articles may be from "citizen reporters" (the Pro-Am model), but at least some of them were written for pay. They are free to me because some advertisers are hoping I'll click on their ads, which tightly surround the list of search results, and maybe buy their stuff.

So if I can get all of this stuff free, why do I still subscribe to the daily newspaper? To tell the truth, I spend more time on the daily crossword, Sudoku and cryptogram than I do reading. But I do read, and I read mostly from the Local section. My wife, not a puzzle worker, spends about an hour a day, and reads mostly national and world news from the A section. She tells me what she finds interesting there, so I let her read first.

This brings us to local reporting and special interest reporting. Back at Google News, if I enter "recession" and the city where I live, this more focused search brings back just eight articles written in the past week (and none for today, yet). Now that I can read. Half of these articles, or edited portions, are likely to wind up in the newspaper, where I'll read them anyway. So focused content is of interest to me, such that I pay for it. This is likely to continue, which is what "Itch the Niche" is all about. If the Google Search robot has been gathering my searches (I use three computers, so it is harder for them), it knows my interests by now, and can target news stories to me. Or I can be nice and go to the Google News Agent and get articles e-mailed to me about search items of interest to me (I wonder if they'll ever figure out the Hong Kong connection, though). By the way, "niche" does not rhyme with "itch", though the author seems to think it does. It rhymes with "wish". But I guess the alliteration was too good to pass up.

Finally, as the giant news operations have been breaking up, journalists have been returning to the 1880's model of working as a stringer, doing all freelance reporting. This is the Darwinian model of the journalism job market. How is an honest reporter to make a buck? The best ones are getting richer than if they'd kept their day job, but most of them are scraping by while doing their own marketing, which takes time away from writing. They are also blogging and tweeting up a storm. The biggest category of blogs has always been News or Current Events (depending on which blog aggregator you look at).

We are part way (probably much less than halfway) through a transition, but the current shake-out is this:

• Tweets yield the most immediate news.
• Blogs are next with more content and sometimes decent writing.
• News aggregation sites archive either the best (AP and Yahoo, for example) or nearly everything (Google, the Hoover vacuum of content), in case we missed a story on Day 1.
• By the time a story hits newsprint or the radio or TV, it is pretty old news in today's culture.

So there you have it. The news scene is today's news, and will be for some time to come. Maybe micropay models will one day allow journalists to make a more steady buck again. For now, they're suffering, along with a lot of out-of-work editors. "Daily" papers come three times a week some places. In another generation, only a few old fogies like me will still enjoy the feel of a paper news sheet or printed book; everyone else will have Kindles, iPads, or whatever supersedes them. We're getting there, if our journalist friends can just hold on while the rug gets pulled out from under them another five or six more times on the way to a new news world.

Ambiguotopia

kw: book reviews, science fiction, social trends

Cory Doctorow pulls no punches. He has a garden path down which he will lead you. Makers: A Novel of the Whirlwind Changes to Come compelled me to ruminate on the trends on which it is based. Will small, robot butlers one day be as disposable as the $5 keyboard? Heck, for me, computers are almost as disposable as that: my sixth computer is just a year old, and I am actually a slowpoke. Only six since 1981, when I first got a TI-Pro? My son already has three computers plus an X-Box 360.

Makers features several protagonists, all of whom are rich or get rich. But they are surrounded by those who don't. The author sees no end to "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer." There is a little bit of "rising tide lifting all boats," but not enough.

It is also a love story, or three love stories. Perry and Lester, the über-makers who get everything rolling, each get their girl, but the primary love story is the two of them, two techno-weenies who just want to make cool stuff, like if Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were frat brothers, bouncing ideas back-n-forth. Success eventually drives them apart, and the perspective of middle age brings them back together. Like many a married couple, who might say, "Can't live with him/her, but can't live without him/her."

In between, they enjoy quite a ride, and I do mean Ride. Their initial foray into world-changing is almost an accident; funded by a corporate merger become venture capitalist, they invent "New Work", in which the coolest things may be disposable, but also become indispensable. It is all based on 3D printing technology. Buy cheap "brain" chips from anyone who makes them, and print the rest, from a self-loading toaster to a collective of five cute robots that can drive your car, all the while chirping to one another to maintain coordination. The Open Software movement of today becomes the Open Hardware movement of tomorrow (the setting is the 20-teens). Tons of inventors and small teams make profits at incredible multipliers.

Then it all goes bust, but one relic remains: a ride invented by Perry and Lester, like a theme park ride but self-reconfiguring, has become the most popular experience on the planet. Because people are story-tellers (and story-thinkers), the Ride becomes a Story, with a cult following. Riders can participate in its reconfiguration, by bringing artifacts or downloading idea files. But guess what? Copyright and trademark violations creep in, then flood in, and the lawsuits begin. Most of the book's action is amid this legal (and not-so-legal) wrangling, even as clones of the Ride multiply. Disney is the big bad guy here, but there is a denouement, a twist that left me spinning.

In real life, once lawyers get involved, nobody has a good day. That which was broken cannot be fixed, and monetary settlements are poor satisfaction. A crucial element is an end-run around Disney's legal powerhouse. Unlikely, but fun to read. The book is like semi-sweet chocolate. A mostly happy ending, with a bite.

Will we really become such a disposable society that we dispose of society? That is the value of such fiction. Maybe we will, but by thinking about it beforehand, perhaps we'll find a different path, and a better one. I think Orwell's 1984 did a lot to prevent the world becoming a Stalinist dystopia. Perhaps Makers will help avert the dystopian parts of its own vision.

Are we all just followers?

kw: book reviews, science fiction, social trends

There are many kinds of ant, and certain caterpillars, that follow pheromone trails. They can be found going from place to place, marching in lines. If you divert one member of the group from the trail, and quickly erase some of the trail ahead, wiping with a wet finger for example, you can sometimes coax the new "leader" to follow a circular path until it, and the members following, are going in a closed loop. As they go 'round and 'round, the pheromone trail gets stronger, for each member adds a bit as it goes. It has been said that such a loop will follow itself until they starve, but this is unlikely. Nonetheless, they will circle about for quite a long time. This has been proposed as a model of society. All following, but effectively leaderless. Most "leaders" that do rise up are found to be following things like polls, and are thus part of the leaderless circle themselves.

Put this thought together with chaos theory and its "butterfly effect" and you have the background for Bellwether, by Connie Willis. I found it a real page-turner, as is usual for her work. The title comes from a large section of the book in which researchers who cannot obtain monkeys for their research, substitute sheep. A clerk who was raised on a sheep farm tells them how the sheep will follow one that is a little bit hungrier and more aggressive, but only a little bit, and that this one is the bellwether. Lead it and you lead the flock.

Embedded in this environment, we find a number (at least two) talented researchers living in a ghastly, novel-length Dilbert cartoon, with a clueless boss labeled Management, colleagues who are either too self absorbed to get any work done (but quick with the TLA's – that's Three Letter Acronyms) or too predatory to spend time doing anything other than writing grant applications or figuring out how to write them more effectively.

Layered on top of that we find a love story with an amusing triangle situation, or maybe it is a quadrangle… plus a perverse guardian angel/demon and a host of lesser demons. And the top layer? Science progresses in as random a fashion as natural selection does. A researcher who is trying to track social trends (the author's First Person) finds that they are often sourceless, as hard to ascertain as the identity of the bellwether in a flock. Her colleague O'Reilly, a chaos theorist, is trying to teach a new skill to a sheep, and see if the others will learn it. He gets exactly nowhere, as you'd expect of sheep. Though when the bellwether finds out how to unlock the paddock, a seeming new force of nature is unleashed in the corporate halls.

The author is well read, and the novel abounds with literary allusions and historical references. This is a good thing (It was one element that made the original Star Trek series so entertaining: Kirk and a few others had a good education that showed). The corollary of "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" is "those who learn from others' mistakes are free to make new and improved mistakes." But all science progresses from an encounter with the unexpected, the surprise that prompts a "Now where did that come from?"

I just have to tell this, for it is so in keeping with the way this long Dilbert cartoon unfolds. I once produced a piece of mapping software that was as close as you can get to the ideal oil exploration manager's dream: a green blob that begs, "Drill Here!" I got to demo it at several exploration offices, and in one place, a fellow began to label the green blogs, saying, "OK, this one is the X field and that one is Y…but what is that?" I replied, "I don't know, but it probably means money." Can you guess the result? My company sold their interest in "that" and the other oil company made a pile of money from it.

It is all just numbers

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, mathematics, computer science, social trends

Do you sit in front of a computer at work? At least part of the time? It is possible, though still a bit clumsy, for your company to track your work habits. If, as I do, you are in a "managed desktop" environment, there could be an app running in the background that logs your activity. While the times of "no activity" may reflect several kinds of "break"—think time, a pit stop, getting a snack or drink, a phone call or colleague's visit—the ratio of active/inactive is just the first ratio a logging program will produce. Perhaps the program also notes time spent in MS Word, Excel, your e-Mailer, surfing with Firefox (and the search terms you enter). Today's PCs have sufficient power to obsessively gather every click and keystroke and when they occurred, while running your applications, seemingly without noticeable impact.

Now consider: if you wear an RFID-tagged badge all day, as I do, it is possible to track your movements about the facility. The PC you are currently not typing at may not "know" why, but a building system could determine whether you really are in the restroom, break room, hallway, or in front of the screen (reading this), and prehaps if the phone is in use. The tag readers that I use to enter my building need the tag to be waved within six inches (15 cm). Who knows whether more capable readers are located throughout the building? I don't. One thing is sure: someday they will be.

Life gets easier once you get home. Off goes the badge. For most of us, the TV doesn't watch us back. But there are test being conducted, particularly for the sake of the elderly, of weight-measuring floor tiles, motion sensors with full-house coverage, perhaps widgets attached to refrigerator, stove and microwave, recording personal habits. When those habits change, or there is a sudden change in weight or in level of activity, someone can be alerted to see how the "subject" is doing. For many frail folk, this could be a godsend. At what point in your life would it go from being "they know too much" to "I need it"?

These are a few instances in which numerical modeling of data being continually gathered is gaining impact in our lives. How soon will it be that the grocery cart in your favorite market will recognize you and show you a route on a GPS-enabled screen, optimizing the route you need to take to fulfill your shopping list—and it already knows what your usual shopping list contains. You could tell it three extra items, and a new route will reflect your new list. It may also lead you past a display or two, calculated to entice you to make an impulse purchase that accords with your (known) tastes. How many people would run screaming from that store, looking for a Mom-N-Pop grocery with "dumb" carts? How many of their children would accept it without even a shrug? Give it time.

In his new book The Numerati, Stephen Baker makes these and other points, though a little less starkly, among his interviews with many of the leaders of the many efforts to turn everything that happens into data, and crunch that data on stacks of supercomputers. When will it be that there is a stack of numbers somewhere, that comprises a mathematical model of Polymath07, knowing my tastes and proclivities, my favorite color (and favorite vice), my favorite everything, my political tastes (or lack thereof), the kinds of people I prefer to be with, my favorite kinds of reading material (a summary of this blog will comprise that part), and whether I prefer having a cat or a dog (I'll never tell; let them find out), or both? What do I collect? Do I have house plants? What kinds? Do I mow my own lawn or hire someone? (Ha! You found out I have a lawn!!).

There was a time that "efficiency experts" such as Frank Gilbreth (of Cheaper by the Dozen) walked around the factory floor with clipboards, optimizing each worker's routines. We will soon be outnumbered by our virtual efficiency experts. Is that a good thing? After chapters showing what the Numerati are working on, in the realms of the workplace, the home, the hospital, the voting booth, national security, even dating services, Baker begins to tell us, Learn to use the numbers for yourself.

We won't all be mathematicians. But we do have some control. Don't like your bank selling your data? How about selling it yourself? From page 205:

One nonprofit organization founded in 2005, AttentionTrust, … provides Web surfers with the tools to amass their own data and sell if, if they choose, to advertisers.

Does that sound like a good idea? It may be. I looked for the organization, but the links are all dead. They may be defunct already. If they are, someone else will probably try soon. What else could one do?

It is hard to say. To date, most people have relied on "security by obscurity." Be ordinary, do ordinary stuff, don't get noticed, and you'll be ignored. Now that the computer power exists to crunch through all the data we all generate, all the time, that is less possible. An idea I like? Be just a little bit subversive. Do you have a "loyalty card" at the supermarket (or several – I carry five)? Get a second one at the same market. Use a variation of your name. Shop differently when you're using the alternate card. Use a different credit card, or cash. When the smart cart arrives, go ahead and follow its path. Then take some of the paths not taken; see what specials are being offered in the other aisles. Think: what does the grocer want from me? Shift your buying pattern to inject confusion into the process. You can extend such ideas into many areas of life.

You may find that adding some randomness and serendipity into your routines will make life more fun! Data-analysis routines are designed to figure out your predictable behaviors. Be less predictable. A side note: In my lifetime, I have taken training classes in several martial arts. The best advice I got was from Joe Begala, the author of the Army's 1940s "hand-to-hand combat" training material. He taught a "Self Defense" class at my college in the 1960s. He said, "If you have to fight, don't stand in any particular way. I can tell if a guy knows Karate, or Aikido, or Boxing, by the way he stands. Then I know something about him. I don't want him to know that about me." I can say this, his class should have been titled "Applied Street Fighting".

Will our grandchildren live in a world not just measured, but controlled, by the Numerati? The Numerati will try. It is up to all of us to keep them off balance.