An (Incorrect) Alternative American Dream

No Impact Man posts about an alternative American dream, quoting a passage from Segal’s Graceful Simplicity and asking what would happen if the passage turned into reality:

“The point of an economy, even a dynamic economy, is not to have more and more; it is to liberate us from the economic–to provide a material platform from which we may go on to build the good life. That’s the alternative American dream.”

Great, except that Segal’s absolutely wrong.  The point of an economy, especially a capitalist economy, is to promote the transfer of goods.  Yes, even a dynamic economy.  The economy is not the problem.  It’s not even close.

Why is the economy not the problem?  Because, as much as people badmouth it, they overlook something crucial: culture plays as much, if not far more of a role in determining how a society behaves.  We have a materialist culture, not a materialist economy, that promotes the constant accumulation of goods and services.  Even those like No Impact Man fall victim to this culture to a certain extent, and to a certain extent, I would argue this cannot be negated.  The exchange of basic goods – food, water, shelter – is materialistic and highly tied to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  You cannot change economic reality – that’s been around for far too long, and the culture far longer.

But it’s the culture we grow tired of.  It’s the culture that No Impact Man rallies against when he decides to minimalize his impact, not our economy.  Change the culture.

Organizing the Inbox

Inspired by Nick Cernis and his blog post on Inbox Heaven, I’ve decided that I’ll try a partial implementation of his system:

  1. Attempt to remove messages from my Gmail inbox as fast as possible.  Star items that need immediate followup and delete items I’ll never reference again.
  2. Check the “Starred” list daily, at minimum.
  3. Use labels to track messages that are of interest to me that I may want to reference later (which is what I was previously using starred messages for).

Reading the Inbox Heaven post inspired me to go on a deletion binge and remove a few thousand e-mail messages from my account (most – if not all – of them list messages from back when I monitored Prius e-mail lists).

Alas, this won’t apply to my UW accounts, since the UW uses IMAP for mail retrieval.

Tautologies

A discussion in IMT 530 reminded me of tautologies – essentially, logical assertions based on variables.  Using tautologies, you can construct what are called truth tables – tables that show when a particular condition holds.  Thus, if I treat two variables – A and B as boolean values (true/false), then ask what happens when we apply the AND operation and OR operation to these two variables separately, you end up with a table that looks like this:

A B A AND B A OR B
T T T T
T F F T
F T F T
F F T F

This skips the formal notation.  You can go further – there are inference notations, NOT notations (an inversion), and I believe there may also be NOR and NAND (not or and not and), though these operations may simply be a combination of the AND/NOT or OR/NOT formulations rather than formal expressions.

Shared Blog Conversations

As some of you are probably aware, Sean Rees and I are both co-founders of Energy Soapbox, a web site dedicated to promoting sustainability and environmental awareness. This blog features posts that focus on diverse issues from the meaning of sustainability to sheepwalking (though I have slowly become the sole contributor as late).

With Dennis McDonald’s post on creating blog-based microcommunities, I actually wonder if we might have approached the Energy Soapbox project the wrong way. In a nutshell, McDonald has been working with another blogger to have a shared conversation posted on both their blogs. They then combine their RSS feeds on the topic and present them as a single page (with each blogger having his own copy of that page on their web site).  Would this have been a better approach for Sean and I to use – establish a common tag or category that would synthesize all of our posts together?  That’s not to say we couldn’t also use the Energy Soapbox domain for its current purpose of displaying a running record of the conversation, but the sort of split McDonald describes would denote the ownership of the ideas better and empathize that Energy Soapbox is merely an additional platform (or – ahem – an additional soapbox).

That said, there is still an important question here – when is it better to “spin off” these sorts of projects into their own space, rather than attempting to combine disparate resources to represent a conversation?  There aren’t any real criteria that answer this question, and that may well be for the best, but this still seems like an important conversation to have overall.

Spring 2008 Class Registration

I’ve now registered for Spring, which makes my Thursdays really freaking long, but that’s alright. The lineup is as follows, for 13 credits total. Descriptions are taken from the UW Course Catalog:

  • IMT 520A: Information Services and Resources (Metoyer, 4 credits)
    Description: Concepts, processes, and skills of information involving creation, production, distribution, selection, collection, and services to facilitate access. Analysis of the information mediation process, including determining information needs; searching for, evaluation and presentation of appropriate results; and modalities for delivery of services.
  • IMT 541A: Principles of Database & Semi-Structured Data Systems (Boiko, 5 credits)
    Description: Introduction of database management systems for teh storage and access of structured and semi-structured information. Examines the relational model, Structured Query Language (SQL), Entity-Relationship modeling, database design methodology ) conceptual, logical, and physical design), and Extensible Markup Language (XML) for storage, retrieval, and interchange. Prerequisite: IMT 540.
  • IMT 582A: Strategic Planning and Evaluation (Coker, 4 credits)
    Description: Studies and applies strategic information initiatives within an organization, including: readiness assessment, organizational mandates, information inventories, content management, information audits, and information architecture initiatives. Focuses on building business cases for and leading information initiatives in organizations.

It should be an interesting quarter, since I’m not sure at this point how these will end up connecting together (which is something that isn’t always obvious – another post on that later, more than likely).

Hearing as a Disability

On Monday, one of the iSchool professors associated with the iAccess project (which is part of the Information School’s research arm) came in to IMT 580 – Management of Information Organizations and administered a survey on the design of web sites for accessibility by people with disabilities.  Basically, the project they’re working on assesses why web sites are not designed for people with disabilities and what cultural norms or technical information might influence the decision to not design web sites with accessibility in mind.

Aside from the sheer need for this sort of research to be done (which I consider to be a bit of a gap in existing information about web site design), this got me thinking about my own hearing.  One of the questions on the survey explicitly asked whether I, as the survey taker, had a disability that significantly affected my ability to use the Internet and its resources.  I checked “no”, but still indicated that I had a hearing impairment in the section for people who checked “yes”.

Is this a technically accurate representation of my ability to use Internet resources?  Well, that would greatly depend on what type of resource we’re talking about.  If we’re talking about everyday Web usage or IM, the answer is most definitively “no”, since I rely on these methods extensively for keeping touch with friends and family.  However, if you talk about voice applications like Skype or Ventrilo, then the answer is, actually a little surprisingly, still “no” (although I don’t use Skype).  For those unaware, I have a severe discomfort (some might call it a “crippling fear”) with telephones.  To put it succinctly, I avoid them like the plague, and there are a variety of reasons of that, but the largest one is probably my fear of not being able to properly respond to or follow what’s going on in the conversation.  It is, to some extent, also a technical limitation, since not all phones are designed for hearing aid use.

But why the difference?  The phone involves voice interaction just as much as any voice chat application out there.  My opinion is that there are at least two technological factor here: first, as it stands, I have far more flexibility with sound adjustment and tuning with computer volume, speakers, and headphones than I do with phones (including those with speakerphone abilities).  Second – and I consider this key – I’m not limited to hearing with only one ear (again, with the exception of speakerphones, but this depends on the speakerphone having good sound quality to begin with).

This survey got me thinking about what it means to classify a hearing impairment as a disability.  I have never regarded it as a disability, though I have called it a disability in cases where it benefited me to do so in the form of additional assistance.  I also have gotten out of the habit of calling it a “hearing impairment”, since, as my father rightly pointed out long ago, that lumps me in with a category of people with far more severe problems than I actually can attest to having.  I simply say that “I hear hearing aids”, and that because of that, “I am very uncomfortable with phone usage” – there is nothing wrong with that statement, since it happens to be a fact of my life.  I have continually had people who didn’t even notice that I wear hearing aids react with shock or amazement when they finally noticed.  My own parents have been known to forget that I hear hearing aids!

So is it a disability that limits quality of life?  No.  Is it a disability that limits my usage of the Internet?  No (it actually increases it).  Is it a disability?  Not the way I approach it, but it, as with everything else in life, is not without its frustrations.

Firefox Speed Tweaks

I found these tips on speeding up Firefox here, and it does seem to speed it up significantly even on broadband. However, a couple of the flags (I suspect) refer to older Firefox versions than what I’m currently running (2.0.0.12). Here are the ones I set in the “about:config” screen:

  • network.http.max-connections: 48
  • network.http.max-connections-per-server: 16
  • network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy: 8
  • network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server: 4
  • network.http.pipelining: true
  • network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: 100
  • network.http.proxy.pipelining: true
  • Creating a new integer value:

    nglayout.initialpaint.delay: 0

I guess my only question at this point is (a) how much these settings increase the load on web servers and (b) whether these are changes that should really be made. It seems like most of the boost same from the last new integer value, if anything at all sped it up, since painting is now nearly instantaneous. All the other flags do is increase the number of connections the browser is allowed to make (and how it’s allowed to make them, if I’m understanding the pipelining setting properly). Is there any documentation on about:config values?

The Breakthrough Generation 2008 Conference

Hmmm.  Excerpts:

On April 10th, 2008, a small group of the country’s top young progressives and post-environmental thinkers and activists will come together in Washington, DC to outline a vision and a strategy for a new progressive movement, one that leaves behind the old generation’s narrow and complaint-based politics.

[ . . . ]

The Breakthrough Generation 2008 Conference seeks highly motivated and talented young individuals who are willing to challenge accepted social and political norms and possess an ability to think and work in new ways.

Notes: Using Uncensored Communication Channels to Divert Spam Traffic, January 31, 2008

This was a presentation given by Benjamin Chiao from the University of Michigan – he’s currently a PhD student at their Information School, but also has an economic background, which is where much of this talk was couched.

  • What’s the point of solving spam problem? Less time sorting spam, less economic cost for blocking spam, customers spend less money
  • $10 billion/year spent on spam related technologies
  • What is uncensored/open channel? keep inbox filters, no filters in special folder, guarantee delivery of messages into folder
  • Properly tagged messages will automatically be assigned to a folder/label
  • No new technological infrastructure required and fully reversible
  • Existing mechanisms to prevent spam: legal punishment, filters
  • Proposal of the open channel: decrease benefits of spamming by decreasing the number of recipients
  • Economics: micro-economic model shows open channels increase benefits to recipients, advertisers
  • This is not a unique mechanism – Chiao compared it to TV shopping channels: you don’t have to watch, but the information is constantly there
  • Open channel is like web sites – anyone can post
  • Not excluding the possibility of search within the open channel
  • Sender tags sent messages (as being part of the channel? This wasn’t clear in the talk)
  • The definition of spam used here specifically targets unsolicited commercial mass e-mails – no other message types are considered here
  • Current spam volumes are between 80-90% of total network traffic – 40% advertise medications, 19% is adult content, 41% other (according to Evett 2006
  • Spammers continue because they are economically supported – there’s a point where the supply of spam must meet demand
  • Why do we need open channel? Why not just search for the content via existing search engines? Sites selling these products disappear too quickly: 30% of domains created die within a day (according to MessageLabs 2005)
  • Spammers need to keep pushing information to inboxes because they must move rapidly due to legal reasons
  • 60% of spam messages are sent by zombies – computers hijacked for the explicit purpose of sending spam
  • The CAN-SPAM Act has essentially legalized spamming
  • The open channel proposal separates the current e-mail ecosystem into two ecosystems – one “open” (the proposal) and one “traditional” (the current model)
  • Audience observation: this system assumes that EVERY e-mail system implements the open-channel concept
  • Current technology already partially implements this idea (sort of)
  • Spammers might be happier on open channel! 😀
  • This is still a theoretical idea
  • Essentially create two channels: one open and one censored (I’m not clear on whether the “channels” are analogous to the “ecosystems” mentioned above)
  • E-mail recipients opt in to the open channel in order to maximize their own utility
  • The sender gets its current revenue from the advertising charge times the number of mails received
  • The sender’s current cost is the constant reestablishment of sending channels (zombies)
  • The open channel attempts to establish equilibrium between advertisers and receivers of spam (note that advertisers, senders, and receivers are independent parties)
  • There is not just a supply curve but a demand curve for UCM
  • The open channel method induces UCM to move out of the current e-mail system

I’m not sure Benjamin gave sufficient background to make any of us fully appreciate the idea – there’s two problems with it that I can see: first, it exists within the reality of economics, not the reality that we commonly deal with. Thus, it’s governed by the same economic laws that give me such a headache in PB AF 594, and understanding the concept requires a suspension of our own realities in order to appreciate the laws that govern the proposal. The second problem is that it’s not clear how this can be implemented within the current system. Is this a system that merely adds a tag to all messages that identify it as open-channel or “traditional”? How do you physically separate the two ecosystems without actually modifying the current e-mail structure, and how do you enforce proper usage of both ecosystems? An honor system in which we assume that the senders, the receivers, and the advertisers are all working to maximize their own utility (basically their net happiness) is perfect in economic theory because economic theory establishes that everyone will strive towards some theoretical maximum benefit, but in reality, it just doesn’t seem possible.

There was one thing that I want to follow up on – Benjamin mentioned the Attention-Bond Mechanism (Loder 2006) in his talk, so I’ll have to look up exactly what that entails (it’s a concept related to the acceptance or rejection of e-mail messages).