Jonathan Stray

When you have to freeze your phone, technology is too complex

February 15, 2010February 15, 2010frustration, iphone, technologyLeave a comment

My iPhone seemed to work better on ice, so I spent the last two hours alternating between chilling it in the freezer and pressing buttons. The WiFi kept cutting out, and I read somewhere that one of the failure modes for the iPhone radio was thermal. Amazingly enough, it worked, and the WiFi would run for maybe three minutes after ten minutes of chilling. I desperately needed it to work, because my 3G service was down until I could install Ultrasn0w, the iPhone unlocking software. Which can only be installed by a program called Cydia, which only downloads new software over a WiFi network. I have to use unlocking software in the first place because US model iPhones are keyed to work only with AT&T, which doesn’t exist in Hong Kong. I successfully unlocked my phone months ago, and everything was working fine until I upgraded the firmware, which I did in the hopes of fixing the WiFi which failed last week.

If you didn’t follow that, consider yourself fortunate. You’ve never needed to wonder about such things.

It gets better. When I reset my phone it lost the WiFi password to my home network. I couldn’t find it written down. I couldn’t remember the password to log into my router to look it up. The internet told me how to reset the router at the hardware level, but to reconfigure the wireless I’d need to connect my laptop to it with a cable. Which I didn’t have. Luckily, I eventually remembered the router password.

I started drinking.

Password problem solved, every ten minutes I’d open the freezer door, reset the WiFi on my phone, wait for Cydia to download its package list, then tell it to download the mere 50kb of Ultrasn0w and hope to hell the radio didn’t blink out in the middle of the tiny transfer. Now I know exactly how many bars I get in the back of the freezer.

After eight or nine tries, I opened the freezer door to find my phone on the 3G network. Success!

Actually, it was way more involved than this. I left out a bunch of steps, all the things I tried that didn’t work. And of course the firmware upgrade did not fix the WiFi, so this experiment put me right back were I started and wasted six hours of my life and two tumblers of rather nice whiskey. At least I didn’t have to go out of my way to retrieve the ice.

Jürgen Habermas says he’s not on Twitter

February 1, 2010October 10, 2018Habermas, media, twitter37 Comments

Over the last several days there has been considerable hubbub around the notion that pioneering media theorist Jürgen Habermas might have signed up for Twitter as @JHabermas. This would be “important if true”, as Jay Rosen put it. Intrigued, I tracked him down through the University of Frankfurt. I succeeded in getting him on the phone at his home in Sternburg, and asked him if he was on Twitter. He said,

No, no, no. This is somebody else. This is a mis-use of my name.

He added that “my email address is not publicly available,” which suggests that perhaps he didn’t quite understand what I was getting at. In fact, the father of the public sphere doesn’t seem to understand the internet very well at all, judging by his few previous references to the topic.

I know many people will be disappointed, especially @bitchphd who tweeted “JURGEN HABERMAS is on twitter. definitive response to all future articles about how stupid twitter is.” Personally I believe that Twitter is significant even without Habermas, but it’s clear that this is an issue for the next generation of theorists to decide.

UPDATE: here is an audio recording of my question and his answer.

Identity, Anonymity, and Controlling Trolls

January 25, 2010January 25, 2010anonymity, discussion, identity, social media, social software4 Comments

Flame wars and jihadist rants and generally worthless behavior in the comments: that’s the problem I’m trying to solve here.

And I’m trying to do it while preserving anonymity. Internet conversation can get nasty when the participants are anonymous, which has led to proposals of tying all online identities to “real” identities. This is the wrong solution to the troll problem, because it destroys privacy in a serious way. I want to build discussion systems that allow anonymous comments, yet remain orderly, civil, and enlightening. I think this can be done with filtering systems based on reputation.

Reputation is a thing that sticks to an identity. Historically most people had only one identity, closely tied to their physical presence. But now, online, every one of us has multiple identities: think of how many user names and logins you have. There’s some consolidation going on, in the increasing acceptance of Google, Twitter, and Facebook logins across the web, and this is mostly a good thing. But I don’t think we want to aim for a world where each person has only one online identity. Multiple identities are good and useful.

Multiple identities are closely related to anonymity. Anonymity doesn’t mean having no identity, it means not being able to tie one of my identities to the others. I want to be very careful about who gets to tie the different parts of me together. I’m going to give two arguments for this, which I’ll call the “does your mother know” and “totalitarian state” arguments. They’re both really important. I’d be really if sad if we lost anonymity in either case. And after I’ve convinced you that we need anonymity, I’ll talk about how we get people to behave even if they don’t leave a name.

Keeping the different facets of ourselves apart is the essence of privacy. We’ve always been different people in different contexts, but this was only possible because we could expect that word of what we did with our friends last night would not get back to our mother. This expectation depends upon the ability to separate our actions in different contexts; your mom or your boss knows that someone in the community is going on a bender/having kinky sex/voting Republican, but she doesn’t know it’s you. The ability to have different identities in different contexts is intricately tied to privacy, and in my mind no different than setting a post to “friends only” or denying Amazon.com the details of your personal life. Although the boundaries around what is “personal” are surely changing, if you really think we’re heading toward a world where everybody knows everything about everyone, you’re mad. For one thing, secrets are immensely valuable to the business world.

And then there’s China. I live right next door to the most invasive regime in the world. The Chinese government, and certain others such as Korea, are trying very hard to tie online and corporeal identities together by instituting real name policies. This makes enforcement of legal and social norms easier. Which is great until you disagree. Every damn blog comment everywhere is traceable to you. Every Wikipedia edit. Everything. China is trying as hard as it can to make opposing speech literally impossible. This is not theoretical. As of last week, you can’t send dirty words through SMS.

When the digital panopticon is a real possibility, I think that the ability to speak without censure is vital to the balance of power in all sectors. Anonymity is important to a very wide range of interests, as the diversity of the Tor project shows us. Tor is a tool and a network for anonymity online, and it is sponsored by everyone from rights activist groups to the US Department of Defense to journalists and spies. Anonymity is very, very useful, and is deeply tied to the human right of privacy.

Right, but… how do we get sociopaths to play nice in the comments section if they can say anything they want without repercussions?

The general answer is that we encourage social behavior online in exactly the way we encourage it offline: social norms and peer pressure. We can build social tools into our online systems, just like we already do. A simple example is the “flag this” link on many commenting systems. Let’s teach people to click it when they mean “this is a useless post by troll.” Collaborative moderation systems — such as “rate this post” features of all kinds — work similarly.

Collaborative moderation is a really big, important topic, and I’ll write more about it later. There are voting systems of all kinds, and the details matter. Compare Slashdot versus Digg versus Reddit. But all of these systems rate comments, not users, and I think this makes them weaker than they could be at suppressing trolls and spam. Identities matter, because identities have reputations.

Reputation is an expectation about how an identity will behave. It is built up over time. Crucially, a throw-away “anonymous” identity doesn’t have it. That’s why systems based on reputation in various forms work to produce social behavior. There are “currency” systems like StackOverflow‘s karma where one user can give another credit for answering a question. There are voting systems such as the Huffington Post‘s “I’m a fan of (comment poster)” which are designed to identity trustworthy users. Even Twitter Lists are a form of reputation system, where one user can choose to continuously rebroadcast someone else’s tweets.

And in the context of online discussion, you use reputation to direct attention.

That’s what filtering is: directing attention. And this is how you deal with trolls without restricting freedom of speech: you build collaborative filters based on reputation. Reputation is powerful precisely because it predicts behavior. New or “anonymous” identities would have no reputation and thus command little attention (at least until they said a few interesting things) while repeat offenders would sink to the bottom. Trolls would still exist, but they simply wouldn’t be heard.

NB, none of this requires tying online identities to corporeal people. Rather than being frightened of anonymity and multiple identities, I think we need to embrace them. We need to trust that we can evolve the right mixes of software and norms so that collaboration overwhelms vandalism, just as Wikipedia did. This field is mostly unexplored. We need to learn how identity relates to trust and reputation and action. And we need to think of social software as architecture, a space that shapes and channels the behavior of the people in it.

Simply trying to make it impossible to do anything bad will destroy much that is great about the internet. And it lacks imagination.

The Surreal World of Jakarta Malls: A Photo Essay

January 15, 2010January 15, 2010consumerism, culture, developing world, indonesia, jakarta, photography10 Comments

Jakarta malls are strange places. They’re islands of air conditioning in a town of near-slums. They’re the only thing to do if you have any money in this deeply unequal town. They have laughing Santas and Starbucks and skin whitening cream. I find them deeply disturbing.

At Christmas, all the malls had decorations in them. It was a big thing. Little Muslim children lined up to sit on Santa’s lap. Whenever I asked, people shrugged and told me that Christmas wasn’t really about religion in Jakarta.

On Friday nights, the malls are packed. The fashionable kids, speaking a mixture of English and Indonesian, flood the white marble floors. The malls have very loud music, and sometimes DJs.

Continue reading The Surreal World of Jakarta Malls: A Photo Essay

We’re Seriously Not Giving These Guys an Education?

January 4, 2010January 4, 2010education, law, math1 Comment

Stumbling through the intertubes, I came across an extraordinary blog post by a math teacher who volunteers in San Quentin prison, near San Francisco:

Math 50 is a is a numeracy and pre-algebra course that is a prerequisite for enrollment in math courses for college credit. … San Quentin is the only prison in California that has a college program, and only some 50 of its 5000+ inmates are enrolled in Math 50. Since there is no public funding in the state for prison education beyond the GED or a high school diploma, all instructors are volunteers, and only a prison located so improbably close to a cluster of universities can staff a college program. Working with these students on Friday nights, I wonder at how little it really is they are asking for, how unnecessary it seems that the public will not afford this opportunity to anyone who would make use of it.

So… the state of California is not making pre-college education available to prison inmates. That’s fucked up, especially in the country with the highest fraction of its population in prison of any country in the world. Of course, realistically only the younger and more ambitious inmates are going to attempt college after their time is served (note the enrollment rate mentioned above.) But given that inmates already have a hard time finding work upon their release, not providing preparatory courses to those who might want them seems like a losing strategy for everyone.

The author of this post, a woman named Hanna, goes on to consider whether the denial of education would constitute “differential punishment”:

I wonder, also, whether some argument can not be made that restricting access to education at this level amounts to a kind of differential punishment above and beyond that meted out in accordance with law for whatever misdeed was committed. By analogy, suppose that a person with diabetes commits a crime and is imprisoned. If that person in addition to being confined is deprived of necessary medication and medical supervision to control his illness, that would constitute a differential punishment beyond that implied by his sentence – his punishment would in reality be different from and more severe than that given to a healthy person who had committed exactly the same crime. Can something similar be said for undereducated persons who are incarcerated? To the extent that a certain level of education is necessary in order to function outside the institution, and to the extent that learning meets fundamental human needs, I would say yes. If two people commit the same crime, and the one has a master’s in engineering and the other does not know how to distinguish adding from multiplying, then deprivation of opportunities for learning constitutes a differential punishment, a more severe consequence, for the undereducated person. Restricting access to math at a level afforded by most high schools constitutes a consequence beyond that included in the prison sentence.

Indeed. I don’t think humanity actually knows very much about how to rehabilitate criminals, so I don’t expect miracles, but surely withholding education is not a good idea.

A Two Block Walk on New Year’s Eve in Jakarta

December 31, 2009December 31, 2009culture, developing world, indonesia, jakarta2 Comments

I saw the blue sky today for the first time in weeks, though the smog is even thicker than usual this afternoon. There’s something tense on the street, something more than the usual noise. I can feel it instantly when I step out of the restaurant air conditioning.

Indonesia’s first democratically elected president died last night. It’s been a turbulent decade.

The air smells like exhaust, food, people, and kerosene from cooking stoves. Bright orange three-wheeled bajaj taxis are lined up on the street, many more than usual. The sidewalk vendors are thick today, everywhere selling cheap cardboard horns. Their nasal wail pierces the traffic every minute or so. Some people are dressed up and obviously on their way out, though it’s early yet. The street is bustling. I walk as best I can down the sidewalk which is crowded by vendors and food stalls and motorbikes taking shortcuts.

It’s 30 degrees and oppressively humid. It’s always 30 degrees and humid.

Nobody stops at the crosswalk so as usual I have to time my crossing to miss the turning motorbikes. The trick is not to stop. Try to dodge them and they’ll hit you as they aim for where you wouldn’t have been. The haggard prostitute on opposite side gives me a little nod. At night she sometimes grabs me as I walk past. I pass her and make my way through a series of street restaurants built out of carts and plastic tables and awnings over the sidewalk, then turn.

The little alley twists through the innards of a huge block, and it quieter here. It’s lined with small houses, and open sewers a meter deep. On bigger streets the sewer trenches are covered with slabs of concrete, but not here. It smells bad. Children play. A fruit vendor prepares his cart for the evening, arranging bags of cut mangoes around blocks of ice. This is a pretty nice neighborhood, actually. The houses are concrete and right in the center of town. A man casually throws a piece of litter into an empty lot filled with garbage. Skinny cats wander.

I step out of the alley into Jalan Jaksa, the restless and slightly scummy packbacker district. The blowdart seller is talking to two pale young Europeans. He’s been working the street for 28 years. The old drunk guy is sitting on his usual corner in his usual clothes, nodding off. The local fixer nods at me, smiles his best, and thankfully doesn’t ask me again if I want a massage. It doesn’t smell as much here. A man sorts through a pile of trash on the street. From a story in the newspaper, I know that scavenged bottle caps go for about 50 cents per kilo, when sorted. I’m paying $25 US dollars a night for a clean room with air conditioning. A poor expat, a rich Indonesian.

And out of the chaos comes the evening call to prayer, the muezzin’s clear voice ringing out from the little neighborhood mosque. In the fading light it seems a moment of peace.

A motorbike with no muffler shatters it. Traffic resumes. I walk through several more food stalls, including my favorite juice place. In the evenings after work I like to order a fresh starfruit juice.

There’s going to be a big party tonight. Hundreds of thousands of people. It used to be at the center of town around the huge phallic monument but the police have moved it this year, saying that the revelers always trash the place. You can feel the surge of millions toward the center, you can already hear the odd firecracker popping out the last few hours of the decade. There’s nothing to do but make noise in this noisy city, to press ever closer together and celebrate.

Night begins to fall, fast.

A thirty-something woman in a very short skirt saunters down the sidewalk with nonchalant confidence.

I’m almost at the door of my hotel, where I will shower and change.

The proprietor of the coffee stall across the street sits at his one table reading a newspaper, waiting.

The city draws a breath–

Comments on the New York Times’ Comments System

December 30, 2009May 12, 2024comments, journalism, social media2 Comments

Here are some problems I see with the implementation of the commenting system on the New York Times web site. Assuming that they want the discussions about their content to be taking place on their site. The way things stand now, I suspect that they’re actively sending many readers to Facebook instead of keeping them on nytimes.com.

How come some articles allow comment and others don’t? Is the policy of which articles get comments explained anywhere? Arriving at Times content from a link, I’m confused about whether I can expect a good discussion or just broadcast.
Even for articles that we are allowed to comment on, the comments are hidden. Sometimes there’s a pull-out quote (which is cool!) but more often we see only this:
The number of comments on each article is not visible from the front page or the section pages. There’s no way for readers to see, at a glance, which discussions are hot.
The “recommend” button on each comment is welcome, and serves as a useful way to filter comments. The “highlight” button which seems to appear on the more recommended comments is a little more obscure — does it just put the comment in the “highlight” list, or is there editor moderation involved? The “what’s this” tip doesn’t clear this up (click image below for larger)
There is no comment view that is sorted for both relevance and freshness, which is the most useful way to track a discussion. Digg and others get this right by adding a time-weighting to a comment’s position in the list.
There is no way to reply to someone else’s comment. This makes it impossible to have a real discussion on the site. Many other commenting systems organize comments into threads. By not supporting this, the Times is saying that we can talk to them, but not to each other.
The comments on an article close after a certain point. Although I can see that this might be due to moderator workload issues, it’s also a way to drive away future traffic — as when that link goes viral a week later, or the discussion lasts for months.
Speaking of which, the comments are moderated. This topic’s a little more complex: there are advantages and disadvantages to this. But I’d like to note that there are plenty of civil discussions happening on the internet in unmoderated places. The strategy of putting a “flag this” link on each comment that sends it for human review is relevant here.
From the comments FAQ: “We appreciate it when readers and people quoted in articles or blog posts point out errors of fact or emphasis and will investigate all assertions. But these suggestions should be sent by e-mail.” Really? Why? Wouldn’t claims of possible errors of fact be the among the first things you’d want readers to see? Your comments are moderated anyway. And I’d like to point out that your own journalists and editors read the site too — you need those corrections up quickly for internal communication (see: the hilarious Washington Post vs. Public Enemy “911” correction saga.)

In short, the comment system seems to be to have been designed by someone who has never responded to a message that says “there’s a great discussion about that going on at [link].”

Comments?

Nobel Winner Patiently Shows Adam Smith Wrong

December 22, 2009December 22, 2009economics, nobel1 Comment

Elinor Ostrom won this year’s Nobel in economics for a lifetime’s careful study of the ways that communities work together to manage shared resources. Her real-world case studies include pastures, ground water, and cleaning the fridge at work. To an optimist of human nature, the idea that people can learn how to cooperate seems so blindingly obvious that it’s not worth writing papers about, yet classic economic theory predicts “the tragedy of the commons” for things that aren’t under centralized control in one way or another. That is what Elinor shows to be false, through decades of careful field work.

The above video is an overview of her work given shortly after she won the prize. Crooked Timber also has a good discussion:

Lin’s work focuses on the empirical analysis of collective goods problems – how it is that people can come up with their own solutions to problems of the commons if they are given enough room to do so. Her landmark book, Governing the Commons, provides an empirical rejoinder to the pessimism of Garret Hardin and others about the tragedy of the commons – it documents how people can and do solve these problems in e.g the management of water resources, forestry, pasturage and fishing rights. She and her colleagues gather large sets of data on the conditions under which people are or are not able to solve these problems, and the kinds of rules that they come up with in order to solve them.

In other words, Elinor went out in the world and studied the use of common resources in real situations, rather than starting with the supposition that everybody acts in purely self-interested fashion all the time. The concept of self-interest has been at the core of economic theory since Adam Smith first postulated the “invisible hand” of the market, and it really does correctly predict a great deal of human economic behavior. But it doesn’t explain everything, and overuse of that assumption leads to predictions that simply aren’t true. (Besides which, it’s a mistake to conflate a theoretical model with a moral stance, take note Wall Street.)

From a really nice NPR interview with her:

The core is still an individual, but the individual is a little more complex than the caricature of “me first always”. The “me first always” caricature model can be used, mathematically, to predict outcomes when the problem is pure private goods and you have a highly competitive market. But we have to also understand that humans are more complex than immediate material self-interest as the only goal. So humans learn norms and ways of expressing themselves, and the importance of love of brothers and sisters and their spouse, and members of their community. Then, instead of taking my individual interest only into account, an individual outside of a really narrow market situation can take the broader community into account.

Which is something that hippies have been saying since, I don’t know, the invention of sitting around and getting stoned together, but Elinor puts academic rigor behind that — the kind of careful analysis that is necessary if you are government policy maker and it’s your job to figure out how use the natural resources of your country in a sustainable way.

For the immediately curious, here‘s a bit of her thinking:

Analysing the design of long-enduring common pool resource (CPR) institutions, Elinor Ostrom (1990) identified eight design principles which are prerequisites for a stable CPR arrangement:

1. Clearly defined boundaries

2. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions

3. Collective-choice arrangements allowing for the participation of most of the appropriators in the decision making process

4. Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators

5. Graduated sanctions for appropriators who do not respect community rules

6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms which are cheap and easy of access

7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize (e.g., by the government)

8. In case of larger CPRs: Organisation in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small, local CPRs at their bases.

Analysing the design of long-enduring CPR institutions, Elinor Ostrom (1990) identified eight design principles which are prerequisites for a stable CPR arrangement:

1. Clearly defined boundaries

2. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions

3. Collective-choice arrangements allowing for the participation of most of the appropriators in the decision making process

4. Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators

5. Graduated sanctions for appropriators who do not respect community rules

6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms which are cheap and easy of access

7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize (e.g., by the government)

8. In case of larger CPRs: Organisation in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small, local CPRs at their bases.

Further revelations await in this 2000 paper of hers, “Collective Action and The Evolution of Social Norms.”