Nick Gall's Weblog

Saturday, August 07, 2004

Captology. Just came across a neat new term captology: "The word was coined by Professor Fogg in 1996 as a partial acronym—from the initial letters of Computers As Persuasive Technology—together with the ending -ology for a field of study. Someone engaged in the field is a captologist. Captology is defined as "the study of computers as persuasive technologies. This includes the design, research, and analysis of interactive computing products created for the purpose of changing people's attitudes or behaviors." An important subissue of captology (or any study of persuasion) is credibility. And the folks at the The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, where the term was coined, are spending a lot of time on the study of web credibility. Their survey on web credibility and material on web credibility guidelines seem especially useful. This seems very related to my recent entry on trustworthy opinion discussing slashdot's comment ranking system. The Stanford researchers cite a similar system, eBay's rating system, as an example of microsuasion ("elements of persuasion built into the user experience"). So I guess the proper academic name for trustworthy opinion is something more like web opinion credibility. 6:39:09 AM

Thursday, August 05, 2004

A lesson learned. A while back, I made the connection between Neurath’s Boat and the Ship of Theseus. I thought the lack of connection elsewhere on the Web was interesting. Only a site by M.R.M. Parrott (MP) mentioned both terms. So I emailed him  (see below), hoping he might be a kindred spirit. MP did not find it interesting and his reply seemed a bit snarky, especially a comment about trolling, and what appeared to be a sig block with a quote about stupid (see below). So I originally posted his full reply on my blog so I could comment on it. However, a few days ago, MP discovered that I had quoted his email and emailed me to delete it. Guess what, this email was snarky too. Obviously, I was pissed off. I felt like telling MP to f-off. Instead, I made myself think about his request for awhile. Certainly, given that he had sent the original email to a total stranger, he had no legitimate privacy concern. As for copyright, clearly my quotation would be within the realm of fair use, since I was commenting on it and deriving no commercial value from it. So I decided to visit his site to see if it would reveal something about his personality or attitude that would help me decide what to do. While there, I read his article on wikis, thinking this would give me insight as to how MP felt about posting etiquette, including copyright issues. The article contained the obligatory reference to Wikipedia, but also mentioned a wiki I'd not yet heard of Wikinfo. To make a long story short, it appears that MP posted a Wikipedia entry about himself, which was voted for deletion because it was self-promoting. MP then joined Wikinfo, partially in response to this, where he could post an entry about himself, given Wikinfo's looser point-of-view rules (compare SPOV to NPOV). Though I do think MP's pseudonymous self-promotion is unbecoming (others may disagree), I do admire his independence, talent, tenacity, and industriousness. Helping to build a spin-off encyclopedia with the posting rules of one's choosing, rather than merely submitting to the authority of others, is a great example of the freedom the open source and open content world is enabling. I especially value the XML import innovation of Wikinfo, which is a great step towards better wiki federation (e.g., I can post MY views on subjects in which I have a POV in my wiki, but link to other wikis for subjects in which I have not [yet] expressed a different POV). This might come in handy for a wiki project I am considering. In the end, given the sensitivity he displayed in the thread re deleting his entry, I decided to honor MP's request. I post this story here only to demonstrate that if one takes the time to get to know someone else better, instead to returning slight for perceived slight, one can learn something interesting and useful, and perhaps avoid an escalating conflict. From: nick.gall@metagroup.com To: "pixel" Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 6:56 AM Subject: "Neurath's Boat" "Ship of Theseus" I recently discovered that essentially (no pun intended) the same paradox has two different names, both quoted in my subject line. Of course I googled the two phrases in quotes and your "Generation of 'X'" was the only hit. (There's a googlism for a search that returns exactly one hit, but I can't remember what it is.) What struck me as curious, and hence motivated this email, was that you did not seem to notice the connection. The two phrases are used in distant parts of your book. Did you think they are the same paradox? If so, why no connection in your book? If not, why not? Given that both are fairly well known paradoxes, I'm surprised that no one has made the connection. I guess I will have to do so on Wikipedia and my blog. -- Nick MRM's Signature Block: "Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid." - http://users.gurulink.com/drk/humor/flame.html [BTW, this flame is indeed the best flame I have EVER seen. -- NLG] 1:08:08 PM

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Trustworthy Opinions. The Review of Reviews. In the New Your Times Editorial Page for Tuesday, August 3, 2004, there is an editorial about Amazon.com's Real Names program, which is "designed to prevent reviewer fraud, your reputation depends on what others say about what you say." This is another example of the emerging trend towards mechanisms for ensuring what I am calling "trustworthy opinions". (I'm sure there's already some other name for it out there, I just haven't seen it.) Another example is the very sophisticated system used by Slashdot, which has arguably one of the most challenging signal/noise ratio problems of any site, given the volume of postings and its empassioned and technically clever posting (i.e., gaming the system is built into their genes). It uses a combination of automatically selected distributed moderators, meta-moderation (i.e., moderating the moderators), karma, and friends/foes tagging (i.e., trusted/untrusted) to enable very fine-grained filtering of useful, trusted content from useless, untrustworthy content. For an interesting history of how Slashdot's moderation system evolved see How did the moderation system develop? 12:11:02 PM

Sunday, August 01, 2004

Prions and the Windows monoculture debate. My friend Keith recently sent me an email with the subject Self Organizing containing a link to the following New York Times article  Scientists are reporting that, for the first time, they have made an artificial prion, or misfolded protein, that can, by itself, produce a deadly infectious disease in mice and may help explain the roots of mad cow disease." The findings, being reported today in the journal Science, are strong evidence for the "protein-only hypothesis," the controversial idea that a protein, acting alone without the help of DNA or RNA, a cousin of DNA, can cause certain kinds of infectious diseases. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/30/national/30protein.html?hp I wonder if the Science article mentions the concept of enzyme in discussing prions. Prions (technically PrP-sc prions) strike me as being protein catalysts (enzymes) since they shape a chemical reaction (formation of a new protein) without being consumed by the reaction. In fact, they seem to be a unique form of self-transforming enzyme. A prion doesn't replicate (compose copies of itself from parts), it transforms the shape of an already existing (normal) prion (PrP-c) in a new (abnormal) prion (PrP-sc). This new shape can then reshape other normal proteins until all of them have been reshaped. This ability to transform from whole vs. assemble from parts is why a prion, unlike all other infectious agents, does not need genetic material. I think of a prion as an autocatalytic enzyme, self-catalyzing enzyme, or self-copying enzyme. This leads me to think of my blog entry on standards as templates. If the template has a flaw, it can prove catastrophic after millions of copies have been made from the template. Which reminds me of an email debate on the Microsoft monoculture I intended to blog but never did. Here is an excerpt that summarizes my opinion: I've resisted the urge to jump into this fray up til now because I think the issues around monoculture vs. biodiversity are so hotly debated and politically loaded in the life sciences, why would we look to them to gain insight into technological diversity? For example, if monoculture is such a bad thing, then life on earth is in trouble, because we are all based on the same set of four DNA nucleotide bases (A, G, C, T)! And ohmygod, we're all based on the same 64 codons of the "genetic code" that maps DNA to amino acids. If any hostile entity were able to inflict damage due to this fundamental "DNA monoculture" shared by all life on earth could be used to devastate the planet! Nooooo! If only evolution had been wiser and had evolved life on earth with diverse genetic architectures based on different nucleotides or different codons, we'd be at less risk out complete annihilation from one threat. I'm NOT saying diversity provides or doesn't provide benefits, inherent or otherwise. I simply point out that it is an open and interesting research question in the life sciences as to the benefits of varying degrees of biological diversity. At certain layers of the ecosystem we see massive diversity (orchids, insects), at other layers, none at all (all life uses the same four nucleotide bases; homo sapien is the only extant species descended from homo habilias-sp?), at others we see something in between (typically there are fewer "top predator" species than prey species in an ecosystem). I have my own pet theory about some of the factors that appear to govern diversity (e.g., when one layer spans another, diversity decreases in the spanned layer, and increases in the layer above the spanning layer), which I'll write down one of these days. Bottom Line: No one knows the general laws of equilibrium or optimization of diversity vs. homogeneity in biological ecosystems, so why go around spouting dubious monoculture analogies to software ecosystems. Talk about useless FUD. It now strikes me that the existence of deadly prions is a perfect biological analogy to the Windows monoculture risk. Just as the whole world is at risk from a single Windows virus because we all use Windows, we are all at risk from a single prion (PrP-sc) because we all use the same protein shape in our brains. Is having massive numbers of identical PrP-c's (ie, a prion monoculture) in our brains good or bad? Its good because it makes the brain possible, its bad because it makes it vulnerable. 5:10:08 AM