Saturday, December 24, 2005

While in Whistler between the NIPS workshops and a meeting in Seattle, I took a day tour in the area of the Spearhead Glacier, guided by ACMG mountain guide Chris Lawrence working that day for the Whistler Alpine Guides Bureau. The day was cold. Ongoing snow squalls impaired visibility but laid a couple of inches of nice fluff on top of mostly windpacked snow. The picture shows a view of the glacier from one of the cols we climbed (more pictures). The bleak landscape offers an intense contrast with the lush coastal forest around Whistler, and with the shopping mall atmosphere of Whistler Village just a few miles away. It's a cliché, but I felt really small on the rock and ice of the Spearhead, crawling along on skis or scrambling up crumbling ridges to reach various cols. The counter-clockwise route is sketched approximately on the topo map fragment. We went from the Blowhole at the top of the Showcase T-bar to the Blackcomb glacier road via a traverse along the top of the Blackcomb glacier, a skin up to a col behind Blackcomb mountain, a short drop and traverse to a scramble to another col (on the Spearhead ridge above the glacier, I believe), a ski down avoiding a few crevasses, skin up to another col (with a fortunately idle helipad, thanks to the bad weather), a nice descent down to the glacier on the new fluff, still carefully avoiding crevasses, a skin up to a steep snow slope, bootpacking and rapeling the rest to the col above Corona bowl, descending the nice snow at the top of Corona Bowl, and then side-slipping, scrambling, and glacial gravel/dirty snow skiing down to the Blackcomb glacier road, for a long traverse back to the Blackcomb gondola mid-station for downloading. Round trip time, with breaks, around six hours. 4:55:35 PM

In Wiretaps said to sift all overseas contacts, Boston Globe: Alane Kochems, a lawyer and a national security analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said, ''I don't think your privacy is violated when you have a computer doing it as opposed to a human. It isn't a sentient being. It's a machine running a program." I'm not qualified to discuss the legalities of this whole story, but having worked on artificial intelligence, natural-language processing, and speech recognition, I think I'm a bit qualified to comment on this deeply confused statement. (I leave aside the possibility that the author is just spinning on behalf of ideological masters.) The program was written by someone, with the intent of performing a particular cognitive task on behalf of its human masters. The machine that runs the program was bought, installed, connected to its data sources, and loaded with the program with the intent of performing that task. It doesn't matter if the task is performed by an army of human scribes with quill pens, or by a computer running a program. It is the intent of the masters of the system that matters with respect to privacy. As a matter of operational necessity and legal requirement to support court orders, telecom companies record and save for several years the so-called "call detail records" of calling and called numbers on their networks, time of the call and call duration. By themselves, these databases are not an invasion of privacy, since they just sit there inertly for the most part. Whether any retrieval from the databases, by people of program, is a violation of privacy depends only on its intent and legal framework, not on the particular means used. Let's not confuse the issue by pretending that mechanical means of augmenting human capabilities are somehow immune to the criteria that we apply to the exercise of those capabilities unaided. 10:57:09 AM