Monday, December 17, 2007

Danny Weitzner is working on a FOAF extension called 'REP' which stands for Reciprocal Privacy. I'll have to think about this - I've said before that Trust is a tough problem, and in solving that problem the 'beta' users are going to get screwed on the privacy front. 

Photos from Santacon. We saw quite a few of these people in the pub on Saturday. By 'quite a few', I mean - oh - six hundred or so. 

In other phone-related news, I've started a page on microformats.org called operator-phone-tests to try out different mobiles and see how they handle exported hCards, hCalendars etc. Test out your phone with Operator and add it to the page. 

classictelephonering.mid is a MIDI file that gives you a normal telephone ring sound. Useful if your mobile comes with some funky 'youth-oriented' ringtone that sounds like a incontenent parrot on crack, as Sony Ericsson seems to want my phone to sound like. 

A new Philosophers' Carnival is online, with discussions of everything: evolution and consciousness, utilitarianism and neurology and enough metaphysics to take your mind off the miserable, freezing cold. 

Saturday, December 15, 2007

PZ is worth reading primarily for the Comic Sans he slathers all over creationists. But he also says of The Design of Life (which I'm not reading, by the way): I've got the book he's talking about, and I'm partway through it. It ain't convincing. It's the same old bluster that Wells and Dembski have been pounding their fists over for the last decade; there's absolutely nothing new in it, just more rehashed chest-thumping from failed religious revolutionaries; I predict it will die a rapid death, simply because the IDers haven't been able to come up with anything we haven't already heard multiple times, and that has failed every time to convince anyone in the biology community with a scrap of sense. 

Nigel Warburton has an interesting blog post on Bernard Suit, author of The Grasshopper which is a defense of essentialism against Wittgenstein, specifically picking up on the analogy of games and play. Yet another book to put on my list of twentieth-century analytic philosophy texts. Budge up, Saul and Mikey D. 

Dembski has admitted the blatantly obvious. Well, there's no point pussy-footing with pretences, airs and graces, since the whole darn thing is pretty much dead. I feel rather silly (but vindicated in my conclusions) having written my undergraduate dissertation on something so obviously nail-in-the-coffin stupid. 

Though the purists may not like it, YouTube has some great archive footage (that's a bit of an anachronism - despite the Beeb and other's insistence that they own their archives, the Internet will end up as the archive to end allarchives) of a 1980 interview with Ayn Rand in five parts - Part 1 2 3, 4 and 5. The comments are no doubt idiotic, as YouTube comments almost universally are. 

If you picture the idealised life of a professional philosopher, what does one think of? Groups of middle-aged dons politely arguing about metaphysics over afternoon tea? Well, it that's your conception of it, then I have to burst your bubble with a nice little link - Brian Leiter and Stephen Law have both covered a rather large bit of what the 4chan types would call "drama" - or maybe simply scholarly disagreement - between Professors Colin McGinn of the University of Miami and Ted Honderich of UCL. The spat is over Professor McGinn's review of Professor Honderich's book On Consciousness. As for the substance of the discourse, I cannot comment - it is outside of my rather narrow areas of expertise - but the rhetoric is pretty fiery for a bunch of pipe-smoking dons. Har har etc. 

Keeping us safe from turrrrists? What a load of balls. More like rampant abuse of power. Good to know that the shoe screening process at Heathrow Terminal 3 is easily exploitable - not that it's doing anything except keeping a brainless bureaucrat in charge feeling satisfied. 

School leaving age 

Tony Howell from the Birmingham City Council LEA has suggested the unthinkable - lowering the school leaving age from sixteen to fourteen, desite the government going in the opposite direction of wanting to raise the school leaving age from sixteen to eighteen. Education being something I value (and schooling being an occasionally effective method of distributing the fruits of education), I can feel the paternalist argument for maintaining the school leaving age or even increasing it. I want people to be less ignorant about the world around them, and I want them to become educated citizens. And what I say may be determined by the fact that I've had what I'd consider to be a superb education.

I tend to favour a more paternalistic attitude in education than my usual easy-breezy libertarianism for two reasons. Firstly, for the 'higher pleasures' reason that Mill spelt out. My fourteen year old self would have quite happily left school without a single qualification. That's because my educational transmutation didn't happen until about seventeen (although it stirred a little earlier at about fourteen), when the shackles of a uniform education were removed a little and I could actually use my brain. My attitude to education was that it was pretty much a waste of time, and on the objective measures of schooling, I was at best average, at worst a slacker. I'm in two minds though. I would want to have left school at fourteen to have gone on to do some kind of vocational training course.

I think that, based on my personal experience, of going from being considered by my school to be a middle-of-the-road student to now, graduating from a pretty tough degree at a good university with a higher upper-second (not bragging or anything...) and getting prepared for a Master's, I think that the measures we use for students are not nearly as good as they could be. On the basis of where I was, the idea that I would get to where I am would be considered a near impossibility. Part of it was a realisation that I have to do something and part of it was a determination to show the bastards!

That's the problem I have with this. As much as we all do the politically correct thing of thinking that becoming a doctor and a hairdresser is just "different paths in life", we all know that there is a hierarchy. It'd be nice if the educational and career hierarchy were flattened a little, or at least if some of the distortion were pulled out of the hierarchy - but the hierarchy does exist. Money is only part of it. Social respectability and the degree of interestingness (are we allowed to use that word in non-Flickr contexts?) are an important part of it too. We don't all want to become City bankers, even though the pay is great. The hierarchy exists, even though it's a multi-dimensional hierarchy - money, power, social respectability, interestingness are all dimensions.

And I feel that there are certain people who have the capacity to climb to a much higher summit on the hierarchy who would be consigned to a much lower station in life by the ability to leave at fourteen, and thus missing opportunities that they might otherwise have if they stayed on in academic study. If you saw the quotes from the LA Times article the other day, you'll see how empowering getting access to a decent liberal education can be, even if it's via podcasting: I felt like I discovered the Fountain of Youth.

As I've said, I'm very ambivalent about the whole thing. There's just so much wrong with the education system, that things that should make it better on the face of it may end up making lives worse.

Friday, December 14, 2007

The BBC is reporting that the government is concerned about gender stereotyping on vocational training courses - ie. not enough men are on hairdressing courses. Well, not enough women are in IT. Good to know, then, that the graduating class in philosophy that I sat with in brown robes on Monday had an 8:6 female:male ratio. I was trying to find PZ Myers' blog post about the gender ratio in his graduate level biology classes but ended up finding a post about gender ratio in butterflies instead. I shall leave the psychoanalysis of this piece of serendipitous/incompetent Googling to your imagination. 

Scoble has video up of Nova Spivack talking about Twine. I hate to say it, but I think Twine isn't tremendously interesting. And I don't think that the Semantic Web is going to emerge from venture-backed California startups but really by accident. The unique selling point of Twine doesn't seem to be there. I can't understand why I would want to use it. Just being honest. 

Thursday, December 13, 2007

There's lots of things to get pissed off about in life. Dishonest politicians, crappy uncritical journalism, bullshit, equivocation, lies, death, the Spice Girls. Well, calm down. Paul Boutin has a cute doggy picture. And Flickr has a great tag cluster of amazing cute dogs. And cats too, but I'm definitely a dog person. Okay, normal cynicism resumes about... now! 

Good to see that Paddy's Valley is doing well. Congrats James and all the Irish entrepreneurs! 

Aral was making fun of me for wearing a suit the other day. Now David Weinberger is doing the suit thing too. Eeek! It's spreading! 

Who knew? Flickr has animated GIFs. You can see the source of this hotness by signing up for the new Flickr stats service. 

Ever wonder why we need straight-forward and agile technologies like Rails, Django and REST? Today's Daily WTF will show you. I have a sort of unofficial rule of thumb when doing Java development: when I see a class which contains the word "Factory" in the title, I know that pain may closely follow. 

Simon McManus on Web 2.0: I'm currently at the second day of the LeWeb3 Conference. For a long time I have disliked the term "web 2.0" for a number of reasons. It has no clear definition, different people take it to mean completely different things... I would love to see an end to terminology 2.0 but realistically I can only ask that if people insist on using these terms they follow it by an explanation of what they actually mean. 

If you thought using the word "open" was just a masquerade to promote one's platform, you'd be right. Just so you know, it's happening in the cellular market in the US. Networks are talking about how they are open, when in fact they are simply providing GSM service! Err, guys, this is what we've been doing in Europe for quite a long time. I've got more to say about faux openness, but not today. 

LA Times on Dreyfus and the dreaded podcast 

Today I was in IRC with David Weinberger and we were discussing various things - what the concept of leadership means on the Internet, whether or not leadership is in fact an American cultural point that's not as applicable outside of the US - and then the discussion turned to Hubert L. Dreyfus, the Heidegger scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. I then Googled and found that David had written about Dreyfus' On The Internet. I read Dreyfus a few years ago and shook my head in disagreement. Even if you take his Kierkegaardian presupposition of the authentic self seriously, I don't actually think that the Web is any more of a departure from the authentic self than any other medium, and it does have the ability to make us more accountable to one another and make us more honest and even slightly more human in the process.

All well and good. What do I found today, then? Nigel Warburton linked through to an article by Michelle Quinn in the LA Times about podcasting and philosophy, with reference to Dreyfus.

The LA Times article has a few nice quotes:

"We listen to relieve ourselves of mainstream television," Joe said.

He attended the University of Alaska in the 1960s and remembered only one thing from his philosophy class: the name Kant (which belonged to the 18th century German thinker Immanuel Kant). He worked as a wood and stone turner until the dust started bothering him. In 2002, he became a truck driver...

This spring, he found the lectures on iTunes. "I felt like I discovered the Fountain of Youth," he said.

Warburton also mentions that a Dreyfus fan blog has been setup. Nice. I'd count myself as a Dreyfus fan, even though I disagree with him about the Internet. I listened to his Existentialism and Literature lectures while I was studying Kierkegaard and found the alternate approach he brought extremely helpful. The University of California have published a new lecture series by Dreyfus on Heidegger and Being and Time. You bet I'm subscribed.

Now as for, as Warburton puts it, "[Dreyfus' argument] that face-to-face tuition is essential, particularly for Philosophy", I completely agree with it. Face-to-face tuition is a vital part of education, and something that - if available - should be taken advantage of - and that podcasting, blogging and all the other Internet media forms should be supplementary to a face-to-face education. This is why I think academia is important, and we need to think very seriously about how we are going to deal with academia in the future. The current model is broken!

It's broken due to bad decisions made primarily by politicians - namely the unification of academic and practical education. For me, practical education - learning some well-defined skill possibly with a craft or trade following - needs to be separated from ongoing, open-ended and exploratory education - like philosophy, literature, art or certain forms of science. It makes no sense to teach these side-by-side, and it makes no sense to see the latter as a gateway to employment. Instead, it is a process oriented towards making better people.

And that is what I think podcast lectures are doing. At the very least, they are transmitting knowledge. If they do this, they've succeeded. And if they go even a small way towards improving people's lives - then they are mission accomplished.

From the article: For their part, universities are experimenting to see what works. Mogulof said UC Berkeley had no plans to charge for the podcasts but acknowledged that the benefits were unclear.

And there's the nub of it. Universities should see podcasting their lectures as part of their public service remit - just as the BBC does for it's podcasts (and should for it's television, instead of wasting time and money arseing around with this iPlayer rubbish). While broadcast television and radio have sacrified themselves to a group-think producer class who think only in terms of ratings, the Reithian instinct has found a strong home online. Sometime in the future, administrators will try and fuck that up too by trying to come up with an objective measure like the Research Assessment Exercise to see exactly what 'value' there is in it all. Oh, wait, I don't speak too soon...

hCard, Trust and FOAF signing 

My humble contribution to building open social networks - namely, 'extendable hCards' that give you more information based on whether I know you - are covered on the microformats.org wiki. It's something that we are playing with in the Semantic Web community. Yesterday, Sean B. Palmer and myself had a discussion on #swig about the Trust layer on the Layer Cake. This is something that I currently satisfy using Web Of Trust, which is based on GPG.

This is not ideal. Much as I love GPG, it's so not ready for wide public adoption. And, as sbp points out, it has it's problems. I'm not sure where we should go next on Trust. I don't think OpenID is the complete solution to Trust problem. OpenID only solves part of it. I don't think any server-based solution can work. I just don't trust anyone else to hold my encryption keys. I trust my OpenID provider to let me into social networks and blogs and so on, but I don't trust them enough to replace cryptographically-secure identity signing.

So, let's open out the discussion here. There is not going to be one Trust solution. OpenID, OAuth, GPG, ssh-keys - all attack different pieces of the problem. We need to figure out what we are actually trying to do with Trust. We are trying to assert identity - prove that the person who is attached to a terminal is the same person time and time again. And we need a strong solution to that. We are also trying to make sure of document validity - ie. that this chunk of RDF or XML or HTML comes from who it says it does. This used to be pretty easy - check which server it's coming from. But in a world with aggregation, widgets, platforms and so on, we cannot be so sure.

Then there's the sort of trust we use for white-listing - do I trust that a person's assertions about others are true? This kind of trust is pretty easy to solve, and we are doing it already with FOAF+OpenID-based solutions.

If we are going to solve the Trust problem, we are going to need to slice it up into simple, well-defined chunks and solve them in a way that is applicable to all the different approaches - web sites, web services (REST, not WS-* insanity), microformats and light-weight data approaches, upper-case SemWeb, APIs... the list goes on.

I'm not the expert here. I'm just a guy who knows enough programming to be dangerous and has a philosophy degree. Let's start the conversation about the Trust layer.