EPA is on a web 2.0 kick. They sponsored a 2-day monster mashup exercise last Fall, the Puget Sound Information Challenge, and are making plans for further efforts. EPA’s CIO Molly O’neill talks a little about it here.
They’ve also been tracking and flirting with the semantic web, and are wondering how much effort to expend on a more full-on semantic engagement. I presented our semantic eco-blogging work at EPA headquarters in February, and was surprised at the turnout and enthusiasm. In response to a screen shot of a Fieldmarking post describing beach closings, a person from the Water Office related that he learned of the closing of his favorite Lake Erie swim-spot from a blog post. This made an impression on him, since, by rights, the closing should have been reported at the county level, up to the state level, and, ultimately, to his office in DC. It struck him that EPA should be systematically tapping the blogosphere for citizen sentiment and concern.
If they to do this, they will, implicitly, be saying to the citizenry “If you can’t be bothered to fill out the right form in the right office, at least blog about it, and maybe the machinery of the blogosphere will direct your thoughts our way.” I kind of like that. (This particular example - finding information on beach closings in a given area - can probably be done fairly efficiently with Yahoo pipes).
EPA will be hosting this week’s meeting of the multilateral ecoinformatics cooperation, and there will be participation from a wide swathe of EPA - I’m curious to learn of their plans.
You drop a pen on the moon. Does the pen
a) float off into space,
b) float where it is, or
c) fall down?
Disturbingly, a majority answers either a or b. When asked, as a follow up, why astronauts don’t float when they’re on the moon, the majority answer is “because they have heavy boots.”
If you have a hard time believing this, I encourage you to start asking around. I asked some educated teenagers I know, and the first three of them answered either a or b.
“And why don’t astronauts float on the moon?”
“Special equipment.”
“Heavy boots.”
“Heavy boots.”
I mention this because a theme of SciBarCamp was “10 Things Everyone Should Know About Science”. This was motivated by organizer Eva Amsen’s recently surveying a number of people about to receive PhDs, and finding that none of them knew what a gene is. She felt strongly that everyone should know that genes are segments of DNA that code for proteins, and started to wonder what else everyone should know. We all made suggestions on a large poster board at the Friday reception, and then had a panel and heated discussion on the subject Sunday morning. Eva has promised to post the results on her blog.
Strangely (and somewhat embarrassingly) there was not a single scientific fact on the list. Everything was about the process of science, the purpose of science, the practice of science, etc. In everyone’s defense, these are important topics that are fun to argue about. Passionate on the subject, I used my turn to speak about infant behavior as a model of inquiry. But, given the chance at a do-over, would anyone disagree that gravity deserves a spot in the top 10? In fact, shouldn’t it be number 1?
Tim’s away.
The blog is ours!
Now I can finally post about SciBarCamp, held last weekend in Toronto, and the most interesting meeting I’ve attended this millenium. Amongst its many highlights were two talks by Andrew Hessel. The first was about synthetic biology. Andrew helps run iGEM, which every year hands out “BioBricks” to high school and undergrad students around the world, and sees who can build the best genetic machines. Stunning successes have included a group of kids from Edinburgh who created a bacterium that changes the acidity of water, but only if there’s arsenic present. This enables individual wells to be tested at a cost of dimes instead of tens of dollars. (For a sickening account of why this is significant, click here, or here.) Another group invented a glowing bacterium which, I think, has a variety of computational and artistic applications.
The synthetic biology talk was part of a debate with Jim Thomas from etc, a group that monitors technology from a social justice perspective. Jim began by engendering sympathy for the Luddites, reminding us that in 1812, 14 Luddites were hanged near his alma mater in York, England. Before smashing things, Luddites would sometimes ask the people “is this harmful for the common good?”, and that’s the question Jim asked of synthetic biology. He didn’t exactly say yes, but he raised a number of concerns - security, safety, economic disruption, and concentration of corporate power. The only one which I really bought into was security; kids, as we know, do not use their creativity and hacking skills exclusively for good, and neither do adults. Part of Jim’s evidence was the case of Eckard Wimmer from Stony Brook, who built the polio virus from mail-order parts, just to show it could be done. The session ended before Andrew could respond.
Language models are widely used in processing both written and spoken language. They are used for part of speech tagging, sense tagging, disambiguation, text similarity metrics, and many other tasks, including predicting the words a person intends when typing on a telephone keypad. The last application has some interesting wrinkles, as this video we spotted on Language Log explains.
The most popular predictive text system in use today is T9, developed by Nuance Communications. You can check out the video’s examples using this T9 demo.
“For the past two months, 24 hours a day, MIT researchers have been collecting the electronic communications of millions of New Yorkers — but not for salacious gossip or to protect national security. They’ve been building a census that shows, neighborhood by neighborhood, New York’s telephone and Internet links to other cities across the planet and how those connections change over time.” (link)
Globe Encounters visualizes in real time the volumes of Internet data flowing between New York and cities around the world. The size of the glow on a particular city location corresponds to the amount of IP traffic flowing between that place and New York City. A greater glow implies a greater IP flow.
Visualizations from the NYTE project are part of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, which focuses on the use of technology in design.
“New York Talk Exchange illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world. In an information age, telecommunications such as the Internet and the telephone bind people across space by eviscerating the constraints of distance. To reveal the relationships that New Yorkers have with the rest of the world, New York Talk Exchange asks: How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time? How does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York?” (link)
The data was provided to the MIT researchers by AT&T from voice and Internet traffic after being anonymized to remove any personal information.
February 19th, 2008, by Tim Finin, posted in GENERAL
A total lunar eclipse will be visible from the US this Wednesday evening, February 20th with the maximal effect at 10:26pm EST. The eclipse will be visible from North and South America, and western Europe and Africa.
February 18th, 2008, by Tim Finin, posted in GENERAL, Humor
Screedbot is an “animated scrolling typewriter text generator” service. You enter some text, click CREATE SCREED and get an animated gif image. You can define the width, font size and colors of your screed.. Screedbot was written by Zach Beane in Common Lisp. (Spotted on Lemonodor).
“Their innovations transformed this approach from a theoretical technique to a highly effective verification technology that enables computer hardware and software engineers to find errors efficiently in complex system designs. This transformation has resulted in increased assurance that the systems perform as intended by the designers. … Clarke of Carnegie Mellon University, and Emerson of the University of Texas at Austin, working together, and Sifakis, working independently for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Grenoble in France, developed this fully automated approach that is now the most widely used verification method in the hardware and software industries.” (link)
“How often have you wasted time searching through page after page of e-mail messages, Web sites, notes, news feeds and YouTube videos on your computer, trying to find an important item? If the answer is “too often,†a San Francisco company, Radar Networks, is testing a free, Web-based application, called Twine, that may provide some robotic secretarial help in organizing and retrieving documents.”
Happily, the story mentions that Twine is using Semantic Web technology:
“Twine is based on technologies created for the developing semantic Web — foreseen as a smarter Web where machines may someday be able to process the meaning of words and phrases in documents and even routinely answer direct questions.”
“…a political resistance strategy in which small, independent groups (covert cells) challenge an established adversary such as a government. Leaderless resistance can encompass anything from non-violent disruption and disobedience to bombings, assassinations and other violent agitation. Leaderless cells lack bidirectional, vertical command links operating without a hierarchical command.” (link)
It’s challenging to combat a leaderless resistance because one can’t use the usual methods to discover participants by exploiting the social networks of known members.
Today’s new communication infrastructures make it easier for such distributed resistance movements to take hold and grow. Information, instructions and loose coordination can be spread via Web pages, Blogs, text messages, IRCs, mailing lists, etc.
A colleague Chris Diehl at JHU APL suggested the Estonian cyberwar might be a good example to study how the Blogosphere was used for this by combining sentiment analysis, geotagging and temporal analysis. This cyber attack was a subject of a recent colloquium at APL. It’s a great idea, but one made more challenging by the fact that the attack is over and would involve dealing with content in Estonian, which, although not exactly a low-density language, is also not one that has been extensively studied by computational linguists.
But maybe there is another example of an Internet-driven leaderless resistance, going on right now, that would be good to study as it unfolds. A group that calls itself Anonymous has announced it intends to launch an online DDOS attack on Scientology as part of a campaign against the organization.
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=JCbKv9yiLiQ]
The message is spread in part by YouTube videos starting on 21 January. There is also the Wikipedia page on Project Chanology which was created on 24 January 2008, an Anonymous Scientology Widget that counts down to (I suppose) when participating members should take action, and lost of mentions on forums, blogs and other forms of social media.
Linuxhaxor has instructions for what to do, which are offered only for educational purposes.
“This guide is for information purpose only, I, the site owner, do not encourage people to go about and follow these steps or Chanology in anyway to carry this attack, or any attack to any organization or any person. If you agree to follow these steps and help them carry this attack you are fully responsible for any consequences whatsoever. This act is illegal in many states and countries. ”
Finally, you can track the online interest through this Blogpulse trend graph comparing Blogosphere mentions of (1) “Tom Cruise” (2) Scientology and (3) anonymous+scientology and also the Google Trends graph comparing Google searches for the same three terms. Click on the graphs to see the current results.
Tom Cruise is in there because he’s rumored to be the second most important person in the Church of Scientology and his recent Scientology indoctrination video that surfaced on YouTube may have been the tipping point for some.
January 19th, 2008, by Tim Finin, posted in GENERAL, Humor
I just discovered (via del.icio.us/polular) an extraordinary proof of the halting problem by linguist Geoffrey Pullum, now at the University of Edinburgh. What’s unusual about it is that it’s written as a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss.
Geoffrey K. Pullum, Scooping the loop snooper: An elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem. Mathematics Magazine 73.4 (October 2000), 319-320.
It’s a marvelous proof, sure to liven up any undergraduate theory of computation class. But I noticed errors in the proof — not logical errors, but a transcriptional ones in the form of a mangled word, perhaps introduced by an OCR system. The third line of the fifth stanza reads “that would take and program and call P (of course!)” which has problems in syntax, semantics, rhythm and meter. I’d guess it should be “that would take any program and call P (of course!)”. Similarly, “the” in the third line in the third stanza should probably be “they”. Most of the online version I found had these errors, but I eventually found what I take to be a correct version on the QED blog. I’ve not been able to get to the original version in Mathematical Magazine to verify the corrected version which I include below.
Scooping the Loop Snooper
an elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem
Geoffrey K. Pullum, University of Edinburgh
No program can say what another will do.
Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll prove it to you:
I will prove that although you might work til you drop,
you can’t predict whether a program will stop.
Imagine we have a procedure called P
that will snoop in the source code of programs to see
there aren’t infinite loops that go round and around;
and P prints the word “Fine!” if no looping is found.
You feed in your code, and the input it needs,
and then P takes them both and it studies and reads
and computes whether things will all end as they should
(as opposed to going loopy the way that they could).
Well, the truth is that P cannot possibly be,
because if you wrote it and gave it to me,
I could use it to set up a logical bind
that would shatter your reason and scramble your mind.
Here’s the trick I would use - and it’s simple to do.
I’d define a procedure - we’ll name the thing Q -
that would take any program and call P (of course!)
to tell if it looped, by reading the source;
And if so, Q would simply print “Loop!” and then stop;
but if no, Q would go right back to the top,
and start off again, looping endlessly back,
til the universe dies and is frozen and black.
And this program called Q wouldn’t stay on the shelf;
I would run it, and (fiendishly) feed it itself.
What behaviour results when I do this with Q?
When it reads its own source, just what will it do?
If P warns of loops, Q will print “Loop!” and quit;
yet P is supposed to speak truly of it.
So if Q’s going to quit, then P should say, “Fine!” -
which will make Q go back to its very first line!
No matter what P would have done, Q will scoop it:
Q uses P’s output to make P look stupid.
If P gets things right then it lies in its tooth;
and if it speaks falsely, it’s telling the truth!
I’ve created a paradox, neat as can be -
and simply by using your putative P.
When you assumed P you stepped into a snare;
Your assumptions have led you right into my lair.
So, how to escape from this logical mess?
I don’t have to tell you; I’m sure you can guess.
By reductio, there cannot possibly be
a procedure that acts like the mythical P.
You can never discover mechanical means
for predicting the acts of computing machines.
It’s something that cannot be done. So we users
must find our own bugs; our computers are losers!
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