Maybe it's too soon to tell, but the alliance of Google and Verizon seems a bit fishy to me.

Fifth, we want the broadband infrastructure to be a platform for innovation. Therefore, our proposal would allow broadband providers to offer additional, differentiated online services, in addition to the Internet access and video services (such as Verizon's FIOS TV) offered today. This means that broadband providers can work with other players to develop new services. It is too soon to predict how these new services will develop, but examples might include health care monitoring, the smart grid, advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options. Our proposal also includes safeguards to ensure that such online services must be distinguishable from traditional broadband Internet access services and are not designed to circumvent the rules. The FCC would also monitor the development of these services to make sure they don’t interfere with the continued development of Internet access services.

Sixth, we both recognize that wireless broadband is different from the traditional wireline world, in part because the mobile marketplace is more competitive and changing rapidly. In recognition of the still-nascent nature of the wireless broadband marketplace, under this proposal we would not now apply most of the wireline principles to wireless, except for the transparency requirement. In addition, the Government Accountability Office would be required to report to Congress annually on developments in the wireless broadband marketplace, and whether or not current policies are working to protect consumers.

This sounds quite a bit like a tiered net and a lot like cable TV with its premium channels and pay-per-view. It sure doesn't sound like net neutrality.

The WSJ has an article about a couple of companies called [x+1] and Demdex. The companies are essentially web miners. In the case of [x+1], it sounds like they store a cookie when you encounter one of the ads using their service. When you next encounter one of their ad servers, they can display a different ad, and by tracking your cookie history, possibly a more relevant one. Demdex, provides something they call a behavioral bank. It sounds like they mine corporate data and apply some sort of quality score, called a TraitWeight, to individual features. Their website is heavy on jargon and low on information. The WSJ article says New York-based Demdex Inc., for instance, helps websites build "behavioral data banks" that tap sources including online-browsing records, retail purchases and a database predicting a person's spot in a corporate hierarchy. It crunches the data to help retailers customize their sites to target the person they think is visiting. "If we've identified a visitor as a midlife-crisis male," says Demdex CEO Randy Nicolau, a client, such as an auto retailer, can "give him a different experience than a young mother with a new family." The guy sees a red convertible, the mom a minivan. As if. I wonder how they define "mid-life crisis" and what TraitWait that gets. Maybe they can do what the WSJ claims or maybe the WSJ reporter fell for some corporate hype.

The article has some examples of [x+1]'s analysis of users of a credit card web site. It's a little difficult from the article to get a handle on how much information was knowingly supplied by the users and how much was inferred by [x+1] and what they are reading from you browser history and cookies. Most of inferences seem to have came from location based information available from an IP address.

What I find troubling about this sort of thing is not web mining itself. I don't care if sites track me to present more relevant ads. The credit company in the article says they only use click mining to present more relevant ads to users of their web site. But it doesn't take much imagination to realize that there are many others who will want to use it for such things as looking at your bowser history to decide if you are a terrorist. The thing that bothers me is the ratio of false positives to true positives for this sort of thing. If a company display an irrelevant ad to me, too bad for the company, but it's not a big problem for me. If Homeland Security, has a high ratio, it will lead to many innocents being hassled and the bad guys slipping through.

I worry about this because I do a lot of mining of biological data, simple stuff like DNA sequences. When attempting to find simple patterns, we are often confronted with a high false/true hit rate and this is for simple data and searching for well defined characteristics, Features like "mid-life crisis" and terrorist are so ill-defined that even characterizing a true positive is likely to prove problematic.

BTW, [x+1] has to be one of the worst corporate names I have run across. Try googling it. You get a billion hits with only one relevant.

I really should restrain myself and not comment on this, but really what the hell is wrong with these people? Sarah Palin called on "Peaceful Muslims" to "pls refudiate" the project via her Twitter feed. She was soon joined by Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's call to prevent the building of any mosques near Ground Zero "so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia" Even the the Anti-Defamation League has gotten into the act. First of all, the mosque isn't at ground zero, it's a couple of blocks away and the people involved with mosque aren't the ones who caused 9/11. They say their aim is, "steering the world back to the course of mutual recognition and respect and away from heightened tensions." Interestingly, Blake Hounshell in FT calls on George W. Bush to speak out against this madness, arguing he's the only conservative left who can speak out against this insanity. Does the conservative movement really want to be identified as a bigotry movement?

"Information wants to be free" is slogan that has been thrown about lately by folks whose goal is the opposite. For example, John Ridding of teh Financial Times, who says "information wants to be free is an absurd notion." or ASCAP's Paul Williams, who has been running around making disparaging comments about the Creative Commons, but refuses to debate Larry Lessing.

Like a preacher quoting from the bible to make a point, these folks like to quote part but not all of the statement, losing the context. Here's the rest of the quote:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other


Of course, information doesn't want to be anything. Information is just the change in uncertainty between before and after you receive some bits. The problem is a question of how much that change in uncertainty is worth. The bit sellers seem to think it's worth a lot more than the public seems willing to pay.

The amount charged for information often doesn't reflect its true value. For examples, if your kid swallows a household cleaner, the information provided by the poison control center is priceless, but it comes at no direct monetary cost to you at the time. On the other hand, the arrest status of Lindsey Lohan is essentially worthless information, but if it resides behind a paywall, you will be forced to pay for it along with a large amount of marginally useful information and an even larger amount of useless information.

A term from economics is information utility - the value given to a product by virtue of the fact that it can provide the user with information that is useful. The problem with the paywall concept is the low utility of the general news media. I'm willing to pay for Science magazine because it has high utility in my work. I wouldn't pay a dime for a year's worth of People magazine because it provides no utility to me. Until information utility and information cost come into line, newspaper paywalls will fail. The problem isn't that people won't pay for information, it's that the news has low utility density.

I just downloaded Rakudo Star, the latest beta of Perl6. I've been a Perl user for over 10 years, using it for bioinformatics. I tried an early version of Parrot the Perl6 byte code interpreter and even wrote a simple Lisp in it. But due to the slow pace of Perl6 development I lost interest in Perl6. Finally, after 10 years, Rakudo Star has been released. It claims to be a usable, but incomplete version of Perl6. I'll give it try.

I have been dubious about the Perl6 project. It's taken a long time. For quite a while, it stalled Perl5 development. But over the last few years, Perl5 has made great strides, particularly with the Moose object system. I wonder if the language wouldn't be better off if the efforts put into Perl6 had been put into Perl5. Would we have the feature set of Perl6 working by now?

This pretty much sums it up: there is a very real danger that the Obama administration will enshrine permanently within the law policies and practices that were widely considered extreme and unlawful during the Bush administration. ACLU, Establishing a New Normal

Wikileaks recently released over 95,000 formerly secret documents related to the war in Afghanistan. Obviously, this has caused quite a buzz in the news media. Boing Boing and Dan Gilmore are expecting backlash from those who keep secrets. Me too, I guess. However, from what I've read about the documents, are there really surprises? The following aren't surprises, even to someone like me who doesn't pursue war news in depth: the war is going badly; lots of civilians are killed; US troops commit war crimes; Taliban and Al Qaeda are even worse; the Pakistani ISI aren't really our allies, but often work for the Taliban etc. Haven't we been hearing this for the last couple of years? Maybe that's why support for this war is declining rapidly.

The Whitehouse response is interesting. It's along the lines of That's so 2009. Things are better now and Pakistan is our ally. Yeah, right.

This is the golden age of music. I'm not referring to the quality of the music produced, although there's a tremendous amount of wonderful music being made right now. Rather, I mean the ability to listen to whatever you want, whenever you want it. Pick any tune or performance and google it and you'll likely find it available to be streamed or downloaded, usually legally. The streaming music services have improved over the last year so much that they represent an alternative to having your own collection. The popular services have millions of tunes of all type.

I subscribe to Rhapsody, probably the most complete library, but there are a number of other streaming services with similar libraries: MOG All-Access and Rdio to name just two others.

The three mentioned above require a monthly payment, although they all have free trials. Grooveshark is a free service where you can stream music uploaded by other people. It has music that doesn't show up on the other services, Zappa for example.

Of course, there's still lots of net radio, despite SoundExchange's attempt to kill it. The best web radio, of course, is WFMU, the greatest radio station in the universe.

stumbled on to yooouuutuuube.com today. yooouuutuuube takes videos from Youtube and creates a shifting panel of frames from the video. It's a big improvement fro those boring videos that are put on Youtube consisting of a few simple images while playing a song. It turns a simpleminded video into a psychedelic vision.

The large media companies (ABC, Disney etc.) think of the net like television - a delivery vehicle for content, which they own. I think content delivery on the net is great, but the idea that the content is property that can or should be controlled limits its power and usefulness. To many, such as Youtube music video posters and more importantly folks like yooouuutuuube creators, other people's art is raw material for their own. The model of creative activity typically involving high development costs and thus creators requiring a monetary incentive and thus a large amount of control over their products is breaking down rapidly. The net is turning that model on its head. The image of a solitary creator or small team of creators is breaking down. anybody with broadband and a laptop can be a collaborator - download a few tunes, a few videos and re-mix. It may seem unfair that original creators are being paid, but it's no more unfair than the fact that the "original" creators took ideas and material, albeit indirectly from others.

The net has started to eat newpapers (Newspapers face 'unending losses,' says Warren Buffet). Television is next. Companies like Time-Warner are desperately trying things like bandwidth caps to protect their cable business, but bandwidth caps are the new DRM. We know how well that has worked. TV is dead because it's passive. There is a whole world of people who see TV, music, and movies as raw material. The big money in the near future is in finding a way to let them do just that and making a buck on it.

Aram Sinnreich and Masha Zager have an interesting article at TruthDig. They point to the increasing restriction on digital free speech. Many of these come about because of commercial restriction on transferring information, for example DRM which restricts what devices you can use to play music. Various laws and treaties get the government in the act as agents for corporate interests. As part of the article, they coin the term e-speech, making the point:

Without a name for the big picture, it’s difficult to do anything about it. Imagine trying to reverse global warming, reduce pollution and save species from extinction without the umbrella of the word environmentalism connecting the issues. Therefore, we propose the term e-speech as a concept to unite these issues, and to discuss potential solutions to the problem they collectively pose.

I don't know if e-speech will catch on. It sounds like something Apple would dream-up, although they would call it i-speech. But the concept is a good one. The increasing restriction of free digital expression has to become an issue that is debated in the mainstream. Our rights to free-expression may be dying from a million paper cuts.

However, there are contrary views. I have felt that the DMCA was a travesty, but this article in Wired argues 10 Years Later, Misunderstood DMCA is the Law That Saved the Web. The article argues that immunity to ISP for copyright infringement by their users has prvided the freedom for the growth of the web. Paired with the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which provides immunity against noncopyright claims like defamation, the DMCA made it possible for everyone to provide forums for users without constant fear of being sued.

I'm a bit dubious about that argument given the heavy-handed way the DMCA has been wielded by corporations. A major problem is that it is very difficult if not impossible for a single user to defend their free-use of digital material against a litigious corporation with deep pockets. Once sent a takedown notice, what do you do? You can certify that the material is noninfringing, but if the corporation decides to sue, can you afford to defend your rights?

This sort of activity even hurts the big guys like Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, who voted for the DMCA. McCain has been reusing snippets of broadcast news footage in his online campaign videos, and a variety of news outlets have been getting the videos yanked from YouTube with takedown notices. The McCain campaign is probably within their rights to use these snips, but can they afford to fight all the battles during an election campaign?

One big problem with DMCA is that it fails to recognize fair use. Until it is changed so that it does, it's a one sided law that penalizes the little guy while giving corporations the power to restrict speech.

Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote anything. I wish I could point to a good reason, but I have none except laziness.

An article at Open.salon titled Intelligent Design Rules Out God's Sovereignty Over Chance argues that the intelligent design folks have it all backwards. They argue in favor of supernatural intervention and against chance as a mechanism of evolution. To be fair to the IDers, many argue that there is some natural evolution, but at certain points, the divine hand intervenes. They may argue that the hand isn't divine in the sense that it's necessarily the Christian god, but as the Dover trials showed that's a smoke screen. The linked article argues that in addition to being bad science, ID is bad theology. Chance has traditionally been seen as a means of god working in the world. For example, the apostles supposedly cast lots to determine a new apostle to replace Judas. This was seen as letting god make the choice. So if chance is god's method of working, why the need to invoke a divine hand to directly alter an organism to add a flagellum, or whatever this month's ID favorite example of something that real biology hasn't gotten around to explaining yet. ID seems to imply that god isn't in charge of the whole process, but just a magician who shows up from time to time to muck around with certain species. It seems like a strange attitude for believers to profess.

I can't say I agree wholeheartedly with the notion that god determines chance. My notion of what passes for god isn't something that runs things. Or at least if it does, it's also the things it runs, if that make sense. Personally, I think anything said about god is wrong by definition. The god you can name is not real god. The less said the better.

An article from The Telegraph called Future wars 'to be fought with mind drugs' has been getting a bit of commentary lately. The idea is that advances in neuroscience offer the prospect of change in the way in which wars are fought. No longer just bullets and bombs, but land mines releasing brain-altering chemicals, scanners reading soldiers' minds and devices boosting eyesight and hearing could all one figure in arsenals. However, the most interesting commentary on the whole issue comes from Susie-Q

so, let’s connect the dots with this one shall we? big pharma- check, defense industry- check, torture department- check, mental health services (see big pharma)- check. is there enough money in the world to fill these coffers?

Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, but I doubt that he could have foreseen the military-phrama complex. While there is the possibility that this sort of sci-fi stuff, and most of it is just people talking through their hats, could make some wars slightly less lethal, military technology finds it way back home. Does anyone think it's likely that governments would want this sort of technology to control the populace?

According to this Australian article, doctors should ask their teenage patients what type of music they prefer to determine if they are at risk of developing a mental illness or committing suicide.

Here's the rundown on musical types and social problems: Pop - Conformists, overly responsible, role-conscious, struggling with sexuality or peer acceptance; Heavy metal -Higher levels of suicidal ideation, depression, drug use, self-harm, shoplifting, vandalism, unprotected sex; Dance - Higher levels of drug use regardless of socio-economic background; Jazz/R&B - Introverted misfits, loners; Rap - Higher levels of theft, violence, anger, street gang membership, drug use and misogyny.

I think I'm doomed. Here's what I listened to today while I worked: Eklektik Radio - obscure and classic new wave, surf, spy, exotica, weird (sadly, going off the air); Paul Weller - pop; Weather Report - jazz; Hank Crawford - jazz; Muddy Waters - blues. Right now I'm listening to some downtempo stuff on Rhapsody - dance.

No heavy metal or rap so far. I guess i don't have to worry about suicide or committing any crimes tonight. I guess I'm just an overly responsible, role-conscious, struggling with my sexuality or peer acceptance, drug using, introverted loner and misfit. Oh, well.

Probably this only applies to teenager. Most adults fall into the overly responsible, role-conscious mode anyway. Maybe that's why they listen to pop so much.

It's a bit hard to tell from the news article whether there is anything to this. My bet is that there isn't much. This seems like a case of confounding variables and weak correlation. If you surveyed all heavy metal listeners, would the suicide rate be higher than for opera listeners?

The notion that the American Physical Society (APS) has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming has been making it's way around the net. Articles stating this have recently appeared on a number of right leaning blogs. Most point to a non-peer reviewed paper by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley stating the conclusion is that, perhaps, there is no “climate crisis”, and that currently-fashionable efforts by governments to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions are pointless, may be ill-conceived, and could even be harmful.

One problem with the idea that the APS has changed its position is that it's not true. Here's what the APS home page says:

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

I don't want to attribute bias to the bloggers who jumped on this story. Most of them are not scientists and don't distinguish between peer-reviewed articles and conference papers. Many conferences base acceptance on an abstract only but it should be noted that the Monckton's paper was presented at a conference on Physics and Society, not at a conference on the physics of climate change. I don't have the background to know whether Monckton's work is correct or not. I don't think he's a climate scientist, but rather a former policy adviser to the Thatcher administration. I'll leave the details to folks who know more about climate models. However, it is curious how people can deny the results of thousands of models that don't match certain prejudices and accept the one that matches them.

You can find a flowchart of the new vs. old FISA laws at the Ketchup and Caviar blog. One of the more interesting aspects of the law is that it removes the requirement that there be probable cause that the foreign subject whose communications are being intercepted be a suspect of any kind. Basically, the law allows dragnet surveillance of communication between Americans and non-Americans. Knowledge of who talks to whom, even without details of the communication is extremely valuable to government and business. Supposedly, one of the functions of the great firewall of China is to accumulate data on who talks with Chinese citizens for economic analysis. Would the US government use a law supposedly designed to catch terrorists for economic analysis? Would elements of the US government feed data about who competitors talked with to their friends in business, particularly, since oversight is weak or non-existent? Nah, couldn't happen here.