Archive for the ‘ Software ’ Category

Being an Idiot is not Smart

I had a long telephone conversation recently with my best friend from High School (1950-1954). I was one of the persons responsible for his getting a computer a couple of years ago. I almost wish I hadn’t.

If you depend on a computer (as most of us do) you must know something about it. Otherwise, your computer is quickly taken over by God-knows-what.

Being computer-literate is not too hard – but it does take some work – and the determination to not be an idiot. To my amazement, this is what most people seem determined to be. Because this is what they are supposed to be.

I have another friend down here in Costa Rica, a young man, who works for a call center, providing technical support (in English) for a tablet sold by an American company. (This is not uncommon, since people are so much cheaper down here.)  He hates his job (with a passion) because the people who call for support are so stupid.

What can I tell him? That he is stupid too – to not realize this?

I stay computer-literate partly by subscribing to various newsletters. Today I got this Understanding SOAP and REST Basics. This is excellent! But you have to be determined to not be an idiot.

2013
01/08
CATEGORY
Internet
Philosophy
Psychology
Software
Technology
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Poetry Written by a Computer

I am taking a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) on Modern and Contemporary Poetry from the U of Pennsylvania. It has been a learning experience – as it was intended to be. But what I learned was probably not what was intended – which in a way, is a tribute to the open-mindedness of the course.

What I could not help noticing as the course progressed (see the syllabus here) was how mechanical it was becoming. Sometimes this was conscious, with poets like John Cage who used algorithms to make their poems (and their music). But usually, with poets like Gertrude Stein – unconsciously. With all kinds of mixtures in-between.

I am nervous about being a critic of poetry – a very esoteric calling. But, on the other hand, I have suffered from it (as well as benefited from it) and am stubbornly determined to have my say. And the subject of people and their machines is dear to my heart.

It does seem to me that poetry should be more aware of this. That poets, of all people, should be more sensitive to the effect of the Machine.

I am sure computer technology can be useful in analyzing poetry – and even in composing it. The human ear is probably the best overall, but the computer is best at routine drudgery. It never gets bored.

But poets are not programmers. And they are not much good at detecting the unconscious effects of anything in their work. They have always imitated each other (mostly unconsciously) and they now are imitating the computer.

I remember when I was attending the U of Illinois in the late Fifties (where I became an Engineer) that there was a professor writing programs that created classical music in the style of various composers (such as Mozart and Beethoven). I never heard any of his music – and evidently it wasn’t too impressive, because I never heard of it again. But the idea is intriguing – he no doubt learned a lot about classical music from writing his programs.

Computers are now used routinely to write all kinds of fairly ordinary things - such as TV scripts. There is no reason they could not write routine poetry. Artists would still be needed for overall direction, or to fill in the details.

I am reminded of Marlboro billboards, where standard images are manipulated in fancy computers to create eye-catching effects – the outline of this image is printed in sections – the sections are mounted on a large frame – and artists paint in the sections – using a little creativity themselves to enhance the overall effect. Which sells lots of cigarettes.

Or animations – with characters people like even better than real actors.

There is only one problem to all of this – few people are interested in poetry – in contrast to cigarettes.

2012
11/11
CATEGORY
Poetry
Software
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The Ethic of Divinity

I am still reading The Righteous Mind, and learning a lot from it. Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist, a new kind of social scientist. He is making the point that there are many ethics, as he calls them – different cultural obsessions. And one of these is religion.

His approach is eclectic: each culture has its own matrix of morals, and each matrix can include religion as one of its values. He does not go into a discussion of how Christianity arose and evolved (an interest of mine) but observes it as an anthropologist might, in its social context – especially its American context. Although he also went to India to observe (and participate in) a Hindu culture for contrast.

He experienced, at a gut level, what he had only known intellectually before. That each culture has its own moral soup of values – that makes perfect sense to it, but not to anyone else.

I am also listening to The Winds of War, a historical novel about WWII. It is excellent, and I could not understand why it was not more popular – since it goes into Nazism in considerable detail. Then I realized this was precisely why it was not popular – our culture (globalism) is totalitarian itself, and any comparison to Nazism makes us uncomfortable. We would rather not see how war-oriented we were (and still are).

Religion is a huge subject, and I cannot resist making some comments on it. Being raised in a religious family I consider myself an expert on the subject. I will also make some comments on psychotherapy – which I also consider myself on expert on.

People always want to know what religion our family was. But this involves a lengthy explanation I do not want to go into. I will insist on limiting myself to saying we were Missouri Mormons – distinct from our Utah cousins. This is a common tactic, Protestantism has become so fragmented they also refuse to go into the subject and insist they are only Christians.

This has always excluded Mormons, which as far as they were concerned were not Christians. The Mormons considered themselves, however, super-Christians – which did not help any. However, now that the Mormons have become rich and powerful, Americans are more willing to accept them as religious eccentrics – and overlook their weirdness.

The reason I bring up Mormonism is because its theology is so strange – and this shows how strange the subject of religion is. Religion is hard to define logically – but easy to feel intuitively. Even Mormon-haters will agree it is a religion.

Many people will insist that religion is only a superstition, but I think Haidt makes a good point that it is much more – one of the fundamental flavors of morality – along with many more. This is one of his basic points, and it is a good one.

This means that people cannot be considered computers – the basic assumption of many rational therapies, that believe people can be re-programmed. As historians of science have pointed out – the belief in reason is just another religion.

I am not disparaging reason, it is an important human trait, and we should make maximum use of it. But we should not expect too much of it. We are intuitive beings, and always will be.

And religion is one of our intuitions.

2012
10/25
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Religion
Sociology
Software
4 comments

The Pig or the Chicken?

SmartBear

This clever video is intended to illustrate one of the problems of software development. But it overlooks an even bigger problem – how software development exists only to serve business.

It claims that the leaders of business must be interested in the success of their companies. When this is not true at all – they are only interested in themselves, and not the companies they are supposed to be managing. I must amplify on what I mean by themselves in that last sentence.

They are nothing but the rich and powerful, intent on making themselves richer and more powerful. At everybody else’s expense.

Software developers (and therefore software) are indispensable in helping them do this.

2012
10/24
CATEGORY
Business
Political comment
Software
1 comment

Objects and Models

One of my projects is to reverse-engineer software techniques into social techniques.

We desperately need to get a grip on our problems, and the computer has given us some new tools to do this – or to be more exact, software and the Internet has given us these tools. Software geeks are some of the most socially-unaware people on the earth. If I tell them that software development is a social process, all I get from them is blank looks.

But these guys (and gals) barely know enough to find their way to the bathroom – and can be safely ignored. The knowledgeable ones, however, know immediately what I am talking about – and promptly amplify on it. However, at the same time it must be said that their focus is entirely on software, and applying their findings to the world at large never occurs to them.

Software become obsessed (and that is not too strong a word) with Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and all the Chicken Littles in the industry (the majority, by far) immediately started kissing its ass – with fervor. And cranking out garbage applications.

I am not too bright myself, and I could only watch this mass insanity in astonishment.  But their basic idea, the idea of the object, has a lot of potential – if it is transferred back to the human world. I will explain.

The newest technique, and the most powerful one, in the social sciences is the idea of using a model to represent the world. As they will immediately say, this is nothing new – thinking of any kind requires some kind of representation, or simplification, of the world being thought about.

I once had a brain hemorrhage (a temporary one, fortunately) which knocked out the language centers in my brain. I could not talk, but only but blabber nonsense. I knew what was wrong with me, but without language I could not say what was wrong, even to myself. It was very frustrating, believe me. But it taught me a lesson: thinking required language – something few people realize.

And language (our most important invention) is a way of modeling the world in our brain. Immediately, this gets into Linguistics.  And I still have the book The Atoms of Language: The minds hidden rules of grammar unread in my library. I am not smart enough to understand it – and I suspect I am not alone.

But I can understand the basics of programming – which are simple, just a list instructions: do this, then this, then this – in short, an algorithm. A software object contains just such an algorithm. This is what constitutes its smarts. And this immediately brings up an important objection.

Can a algorithm model something so complex as a person – or even worse, a society? People like to say emphatically “No!”. They think they have a magical ingredient that cannot be analyzed. Madison Avenue knows better – it has been analyzing people, and manipulating them for quite a while. It doesn’t know exactly how people work – but that doesn’t matter, approximations are good enough. And their approximations keep getting better and better.

Here we are getting into Cognitive Psychology, which has learned quite a bit about how people work. Its findings have made it abundantly clear that we are not logical beings – something we have known for a long time, actually – but it also knows how we are not logical – very important information that we could use to understand ourselves – if we wanted to.

We are now closer to being able to model human behavior – using objects to represent us. Some scientists are trying to model the human brain – an admirable, if very difficult task.

But that is not necessary – all we have to do is model our behavior, as I said in a recent posting Good Economics. The model here is simple, and does not need a computer to interpret it. There is only one problem – people are ignoring it!

And this is the overall problem – people are incapable of using their noodles, computers or no computers!

I will stubbornly press on, however, and write as though someone could understand. You will be hearing more about this.

2012
10/12
CATEGORY
Psychology
Sociology
Software
2 comments

Agent-Based Objects

These are basic to Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and to Object Oriented Programming (OOP) where they are simply referred to as objects. Neither discipline seems to have heard of the other – which is strange, because each of them could learn from the other.

Agents are things that have agency, that can make decisions, that have smarts. In CAS they are hard to put your finger on, but in OOP they are very well defined.

In a computer, all the smarts are contained in the Central Processing Unit (CPU) which is the miracle product of our time, and are now so cheap they show up everywhere. The CPU can do some basic things (such as add x to y) which depends on what the computer is for. The computer for a car, does different things than a computer for a microwave.

Software is nothing but a high-level list of instructions – do this, and then this, and then this – which are compiled into low-level machine language for the CPU. Software design is a very active field, and back in the Sixties it decided to go with objects, as related by Wikipedia.

OOP became a mania, everybody claimed to be using it, although few really understood it. This is when they could have been helped by CAS, but they never heard of it. Programming claims to be a science, but it is really not – and tends to live in its own world. Scientists do not understand them, and they do not understand scientists. And the world goes to Hell.

In OOP, an object is a self-contained computational unit – it contains its own instructions, its own data and does its own thing. It communicates with other objects by sending messages to and receiving messages from them. This is a world of independent objects talking to each other. Hopefully, they all accomplish some overall task – but it takes a lot of hard work to make sure this happens.

Often, they end up talking to each other – but not to the end user – who is stuck with software that doesn’t do what he wants. The user (who is usually not very bright) assumes he is the problem, not the software – and just gives up, and uses Facebook instead.

But let me return to objects. As it turns out, they are useful for other fields, such as CAS. Here, they are assumed to be crude approximations of human behavior. I must emphasize the word crude. I already have a posting A Human Cannot be Modeled which makes this clear.

However, in some situations, approximations are useful – as long they are not taken too seriously. And it is useful to assume that humans have a limited repertoire of behaviors. Any novelist or playwright knows these, and exploits them – in endless complications we never tire of.

This is also what the new breed of social scientist does – figure out what these hidden subroutines are. Unfortunately, people do not like this – and start screaming “This is not real Science!” Science is supposed to make them rich and powerful. And a science that shows them as they really are (not “a little lower than the angels”) is not to their liking.

People should be interested in software – after all, it now runs their world. But they have been so badly damaged by centuries of industrial society they are hardly capable of understanding anything.

Science should be making this clear, but it is scared to death of doing this. And carefully tip-toes around the problem.

2012
10/03
CATEGORY
Psychology
Sociology
Software
1 comment

A Human Cannot be Modeled

This is so obvious, I wonder it hasn’t been said before – and said over and over. The reason, of course, is that computational modeling is new, since it requires computers. And computer people have avoided applying their science to people – since it was obvious to them that computers and people were two entirely different things. But this did not stop people who understood neither from doing it anyway – and claiming this mashup was the Holy Grail.

It cannot be denied that computers are useful in analyzing the behavior of large groups – in analyzing huge amounts of data. And making predictions based on what they find. Politicians love this, and work it to death – without bothering to see how well these models work.

I once helped my cousin canvas for Obama. We had a computer printout of the people we should contact. We contacted them, but I could not help but marvel at the low quality of the people I met doing this – and saying to myself “If we are depending on these people – Heaven help us!”

Marketing does the same thing – but with considerably more sophistication. They assume people are herd animals, and work hard at discovering where the herd is moving. And they are not above influencing the mental images the herd responds to – with advertising aimed at the lowest common denominator.

No one can see anything wrong with this. They are all on automatic pilot, responding to unconscious impulses.

None of the social models I have seen include the unconscious – even though this is where most of the action is. Perhaps this is assumed – but it is in poor taste to say so.

It is clear to me that we all have multiple personalities – and can switch between them instantaneously (although a 200 milliseconds processing time, or so, must be involved). Cognitive psychologists have researched this, and shown how defective this kind of reasoning can be.

This is important information we should be aware of, and compensating for.  But we are not. I can visualize a model that would include this behavior easily – stupidity is not hard to model. What is hard to model (or imagine) is the situation that produced this stupidity.

Where on earth did this come from?

2012
10/02
CATEGORY
Business
Political comment
Psychology
Sociology
Software
2 comments

Another Call for Abolishing Patents

slashdot

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

This conclusion is one I already fully support – but I worried about putting it on my blog – where my readers, as far as I knew – had little interest in technical and business matters. I did time in the trenches of the high-tech world – from which I emerged somewhat shell-shocked. But I could not see how others could relate to my experiences.

But after thinking about it, I decided that they too were seriously impacted by the sad state of the economy – and the sad state of our technology-dependent workplace.

Instead of investing in technical progress (which they usually do not understand), companies are investing in patents – and in vicious patent wars (something they can understand). They think intellectual property is like any other property – something they could grab and hold onto.

This is not the way software works. There, innovators want others to imitate them – so everyone can get on the same bandwagon (use the same standards), and ride off into a great new world. The want everyone to connect to their stuff, and use it.

This is not just the way products get made – this is the way jobs get made too.

And we need jobs desperately.

2012
10/01
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
Software
Technology
3 comments

Complex Systems Theorists Predict We’re About One Year From Global Food Riots

Slashdot

From the paper from the New England Complex Systems Institute – in careful academic prose:

In 2011 protest movements have become pervasive in countries of North Africa and the Middle East. These protests are associated with dictatorial regimes and are often considered to be motivated by the failings of the political systems in the human rights arena [1{4]. Here we show that food prices are the precipitating condition for social unrest [5{12] and identify a speci c global food price threshold for unrest. Even without sharp peaks in food prices we project that, within just a few years, the trend of prices will reach the threshold. This points to a danger of spreading global social disruption.

This happens to coincide with my online course on Modeling. Some 30,000 – 40,000 students are taking the course, and and Coursera seems to be overwhelmed by its success. This is no excuse, any online program should be able to cope with this easily, but the course has fallen apart.

The instructor Scott E. Page (who talks far too fast in his videos) makes the basic point that informed citizens of the world need to understand modeling. If the predictions of this model do not happen, this will not be too surprising – models have failed before, but they are getting better all the time, and should be taken seriously.

2012
09/11
CATEGORY
History
Software
Technology
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The One Place Where America Excels

Polyglot: No One Language Will Rule the Cloud

This place is software, a Wild West where change is so rampant it is almost out of control. But it is also the technology that runs today’s world. A technology we should understand, but cannot.

I struggled through the linked article, but could barely understand it – and only thirty years ago I was a programmer myself! Software (and the Software Industry) is charging off into the wild blue yonder, dragging us after it.

The government should be helping us on this, riding herd on all those cowboys. Letting us know what is going on. But it does not even realize there is a problem. When the sky falls in – as it will – we won’t know what hit us.

We will only say “Things got out of control!” having no idea what those things were. We have let an unknown force control our world – a force only interested in perfecting itself and nothing else.

I am all in favor of wonderful technology, I practically worship the stuff, but you have to carefully peek under the covers once in a while to see what is really going on there. To see who is fucking who – and often it is us.

2012
09/04
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
Software
Technology
2 comments
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