Friday, February 28, 2003

John Brady Kiesling's resignation letter has been posted in many places, but it is sufficiently important that I feel compelled to post it here. [...] We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America's ability to defend its interests. [...] [Steve Crandall's Surf Report 2.0] Independently of the merits of particular policies regarding Iraq, this is the greatest failure of post-cold war politics. Whether in the present crisis, or in Bosnia, or in Kosovo, or in North Korea, or in Rwanda, or in Afghanistan, or in Chechnya, all of the economically dominant countries of North America, Western Europe, and Asia have been unable to articulate and create a new model of international cooperation, security, and development. Kiesling addresses the US Government, as he should, but he should have had counterparts in Germany when that country recklessly played with the tensions in Yugoslavia, or in France in its many abdications of responsibility in Africa, including Rwanda, or in many other wealthy countries regarding the AIDS crisis, or Palestine. The disaster of 9/11 was paradoxically a second opportunity to start building stronger international standards of behavior. The development of modern legal institutions has been the evolution of mechanisms to balance cooperation and competition so that we all may survive to play another day. The same is needed among nation states. Absolute sovereignty is no more tenable in the age of mass destruction than absolute individual freedom. The current crises are so intractable because they have been ignored in favor of short-term advantages by the countries that could have created the foundation for a new model of collective security. Unfortunately, this is not so surprising. The same breakdown of will seems to be built into all of us. 9:56:19 PM

Jim Allchin: "Google's a very nice system, but compared to my vision, it's pathetic," he said. Allchin said his goal is to have computers learn about the user, helping set the context for searches. "Whether it's Google or any of the other search engines, the amount of random stuff you get back is pretty overwhelming," he said. "But if you knew a little bit about me — for example, I love music — so when I'm searching for 'strings,' you know they should know this guy's probably thinking about guitars." [Scripting News] Allchin believes we can program meaning into computers. Google believes that meaning emerges from connections created by (Web) language users. Programmers like Allchin are used to creating an information world from whole cloth, and tend to formalized, normative views of human communication. but human communication is for the most part an evolved artifact, always breaking out of norms under evolutionary pressure. Even mathematical language is refractory to formalization, because it is a moving target. Geoff Nunberg wrote a wonderful piece on the failure of normative approaches to English and the decentralized evolution fo English spelling in a increasingly liberal society and the academic normalization of continental languages under more authoritarian regimes, which unfortunately I cannot find a reference to. The constant subversion and reinvention of language undermines any attempt to cast it into fixed representations and algorithms. Google's great insight was to build on the distributed views of Web authors without prejudging their intentions. This is very hard to accept for programmers used to getting their way. 9:33:13 PM

Dave Winer muses in the middle of the night: He gets one thing wrong, there is nothing more they can do to improve the search engine with Blogger content Why? See how Google uses the links in CiteSeer to give more relevant answers to queries for research topics and authors. The Google-CiteSeer connection improved my research life more than any other use of the Web for scientific information since the invention of the Web. Now it becomes clearer, thanks to Martin's comments, that they just want to put ads on our stuff. If you have the best guide of relevance for the Web, and you need to turn a profit to keep going and repay your investors, what else would you do? I find the ads unobtrusive, sometimes amusing because of placement algorithm goofs, and sometimes quite useful. Now what the world needs to replace Google is a Google like the one that we fell in love with, one that's working for the greater good, that points off site for no reason other than it's the right place to point to. Now with their patents, and their captured content, Google is no longer that. I thought that in capitalism “the greater good” was spelled “enlightened self-interest”. I suggest a quick (re-)reading of Robert Wright's The Moral Animal for a better understanding of how selfishness and morality are not separable. As for romantic love toward a company: only in Silly Valley. Excerpts from [Scripting News] 9:25:49 AM

This is interesting - prices are starting to fall in the pay as you play WiFi access game. [...] The report suggests few people use the pay services (which is what I've observed). My own belief is that coffee shops are better served by sponsor nets - the examples I've seen are much better than the paid services. [Steve Crandall's Surf Report 2.0] Recently stuck for two days in the Bay Area waiting for Philadelphia airport to reopen after the big snowstorm, I experienced the surprising lack of WiFi access in Palo Alto. The only access point I found in a cafe was a paid service. I really needed to log in so I paid, but registration and authentication were a big hassle, and the service didn't work that well. In contrast, a Penn campus cafe has a free service and attracts many students and faculty against a local Starbucks because of that (it also has better coffee and food...). A country-wide registry of cafes and hotels with free high-speed access (802.11 or wired) would be a great way for those enlightened provides to advertise to out-of-town travelers. When I need to stay overnight near SFO, I use the Millwood Inn, which is comfortable and inexpensive and has free wired access (t would be good if their ISP fixed their reverse DNS, though). 8:41:09 AM