zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — history was minted here ]
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Today is the fortieth birthday of Plato Notes — the “first permanent, general-purpose online conferencing system”, brainchild of my online friend David Woolley.

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You can read Brian Dear‘s PLATO Notes released 40 years ago today for the general story, or David’s own PLATO: The Emergence of Online Community from 1991 — but best of all perhaps would be this video, which will give you a sense of the man as well as the relevant history —

— and historic this truly was.

Happy fortieth, David — and more thanks from so very many of us than I quite know how to express.

Ahem….”I told you so“.

“Congress intended to allow the intelligence communities to access targeted information for specific investigations. How can every call that every American makes or receives be relevant to a specific investigation?”

                                                             – Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin)
                                                                 A primary author of The Patriot Act 

“We have not yet seen any evidence showing that the NSA’s dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records has produced any uniquely valuable intelligence. Gen. Alexander’s testimony yesterday suggested that the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program helped thwart ‘dozens’ of terrorist attacks, but all of the plots that he mentioned appear to have been identified using other collection methods. The public deserves a clear explanation”

                                                                 – Senators Ron Wyden (D- Oregon) and Mark Udall (D- Colorado)

“What I learned from our journalists should alarm everyone in this room and should alarm everyone in this country….The actions of the DoJ against AP are already having an impact beyond the specifics of this particular case. Some of our longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking to us, even on stories that aren’t about national security. And in some cases, government employees that we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone, and some are reluctant to meet in person. This chilling effect is not just at AP, it’s happening at other news organizations as well”

                                                               – Gary Pruitt, President of the Associated Press 

“The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry….But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”

                                                              – Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City 

“One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.”

                                                                -Thomas Friedman, NYT Columnist 

“Toll records, phone records like this, that don’t include any content, are not covered by the fourth amendment because people don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy in who they called and when they called, that’s something you show to the phone company. That’s something you show to many, many people within the phone company on a regular basis.”

                                                                 – James Cole, Deputy Attorney-General 

“In the abstract you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a program run amok, but when you actually look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance.”

                                                                 -Barack Obama, President of the United States 

While we need intelligence services, including the formidable collection capacity of the NSA, we don’t need a mammoth repository of information being continually compiled on every American, held in perpetuity by the US government.

First, the mere existence of so massive a database on the data of all Americans is itself a critical strategic vulnerability and a potential risk to the national security of the United States because it centralizes for any would be spy or hacker not just anything, but virtually *everything* they would want to know about *everyone*. The greatest testament against the strategic wisdom of this scheme from a counterintelligence perspective is the erstwhile Mr. Edward Snowden – breach just one security regime and you walk away with the whole store or as much of the store as you have time and brains to snatch.

How many Snowdens have we *not* heard about because they were quietly fired by a contractor? How many other Snowdens working for foreign intelligence services eluded government detection and got away with who knows what?  Or are still doing it now?

Not exactly a resilient system from a cybersecurity perspective, is it?

What the USG has done here is not dumb. It is fucking dumb with a capital F. Sometimes we get so caught up from a technical viewpoint in what we might be able to do that no one stops and seriously considers if we should do it. From such unasked questions come the unwanted second and third order effects we live to rue.

Unless, of course,  building a draconian comprehensive digital dragnet for a  “leaky system” is what was desired in the first place. If so, bravo gentlemen.

Which brings us to the second point: the surveillance state as currently configured in law with the legal equivalent of string and chewing gum is inimical to the long term survival of the United States as a constitutional Republic. This is not an attack on any particular person or politician or three letter agency. It’s a hard world filled with extremely bad men who would do us lasting harm, so we need our spooks, but the spooks need proper constitutional boundaries set by our elected representatives in which to operate and somewhere in the past decade we have crossed that Rubicon.

The United States of America has had a historically remarkable run of 237 years of good government and in all that time the system failed us only once. That one time cost the lives of approximately 630,000 Americans.

On a level of moral and political legitimacy, we have created a bureaucratic-technological machine, a sleepless cyber  J. Edgar Hoover on steroids that contradicts our deeply held political values that define what America is and aspires to be. There is no way to reconcile cradle-to-grave digital dossiers on the 24/7 life of every American with the provisions of the US. Constitution. Really, an ever-watching state was not in the cards at our Constitutional Convention, even with the delegates like Alexander Hamilton who privately thought George Washington might make a fine King.

On a more pragmatic level, in creating the SIGINT-cyber surveillance state we have made not an idiot-proof system, but an idiot-enabling one that represents an enormous potential reserve of power that will be an unbearable temptation for misuse and abuse. The long, bloody and sordid record of human nature indicates that someone, eventually, will not be able to resist that temptation but will be smart enough to get away with it. If we are greatly fortunate, it will be a lazy person of limited vision looking merely to enrich themselves and their friends. Or a malevolent minor bureaucrat like Lois Lerner looking to punish “the little people” who raised her ire.  If we are unlucky, it will be a gifted figure of ill intent and outsized ambitions, an American Caesar.

Or an American Stalin.

In the long term, our Democracy will not be healthy when the government – that is, the Executive – monitors everyone and stores everything  we do forever. While most of us are not that interesting, reporters, public figures, newspaper publishers, members of Congress, aspiring politicians, their campaign donors,  judges, dissenters, writers and so on are very interesting to people in power. The Congress, for example, cannot do it’s job properly when it’s cloakroom is bugged and their email is read anymore than can the editorial office of the Associated Press. What we have built, if it existed in a foreign country, would be frankly described as a “Deep State“.  Nations with deep states are not pleasant places to live and they usually do not work well. At best, they look like Russia and Turkey, at worst they look like Pakistan and Iran.

Rolling the surveillance state back to targeting foreign enemies, it’s proper and constitutional role, instead of every American citizen – yes, we are all, every man, woman and child of every race, creed, color and political persuasion being treated as potential enemies by the Federal government – is up to us and only us.  Tell your Congressman, your Senator and the President what you think in a respectful and thoughtful way – and then make this an issue that decides your vote.

If we do nothing, we have no one to blame but ourselves for what comes next. We can at least console ourselves with pride in the fact that the US had a good go at making freedom work unequaled in world history, but that democracy may had had it’s time.  Others in the distant future, may profit from our example the way we learned from Athens, Rome and Britain. Or we can leave while the door still remains open.

Enjoy your Fourth.

                                                “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

                                                                      – Mrs. Powell

                                             ” A Republic, if you can keep it”

                                                                      – Benjamin Franklin
                                                                         Signer of the Declaration of Independence
                                                                         Delegate, Constitutional Convention

[ by Charles Cameron — achieving something like closure on a post I started for Adam Elkus here, with a side dish along the way here ]
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It’s astonishing to me how closely complexity science is related to Hermann Hesse‘s Glass Bead Game.

Adam Elkus recently pointed those who follow him to Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, Methods and Techniques of Complex Systems Science: an Overview, and just a quick dip there gave me the graphic I’ve put at the head of this post, together with this quote about “patterns” as Shalizi understands that term:

I mean more or less what people in software engineering do: a pattern is a recurring theme in the analysis of many different systems, a cross-systemic regularity. For instance: bacterial chemotaxis can be thought of as a way of resolving the tension between the exploitation of known resources, and costly exploration for new, potentially more valuable, resources (Figure 1.2). This same tension is present in a vast range of adaptive systems. Whether the exploration-exploitation trade-off arises among artifcial agents, human decision-makers or colonial organisms, many of the issues are the same as in chemotaxis, and solutions and methods of investigation that apply in one case can profitably be tried in another. The pattern “trade-off between exploitation and exploration” thus serves to orient us to broad features of novel situations. There are many other such patterns in complex systems science: “stability through hierarchically structured interactions”, “positive feedback leading to highly skewed outcomes”, “local inhibition and long-rate activation create spatial patterns”, and so forth.

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Let’s start with patterns. The “people in software engineering” Shalizi mentions gleaned their use of the term “pattern” from the architect Christopher Alexander, author of the extraordinary, seminal book A Pattern Language, which in turn has hugely influenced computer science. Alexander distilled the essence of his thinking in his “Bead Game Conjecture”:

That it is possible to invent a unifying concept of structure within which all the various concepts of structure now current in different fields of art and science, can be seen from a single point of view. This conjecture is not new. In one form or another people have been wondering about it, as long as they have been wondering about structure itself; but in our world, confused and fragmented by specialisation, the conjecture takes on special significance. If our grasp of the world is to remain coherent, we need a bead game; and it is therefore vital for us to ask ourselves whether or not a bead game can be invented.

Manfred Eigen, Nobel laureate in Chemistry, called his book with Ruth Winkler-Oswatitsch Laws of the Game — and it deals with molecular biology, cellular automata, game theory, and games. But not just that — it is specifically written with Hesse’s concept in mind:

We hope to translate Hermann Hesse’s symbol of the glass bead game back into reality.

While we’re on about cellular automata, what about Stephen Wolfram? I don’t know that he talks about the Glass Bead Game himself, but at least three people talk about Wolfram’s book, A New Kind of Science, and/or his search engine, Wolfram Alpha as being strongly analogous to Hesse’s game — Jason Dyer, Graeme Philipson, and most recently, Mohammed AlQuraishi. Here’s a key para from Quraishi’s piece:

I think the Game is an intriguing concept, and I think it may one day be realized. In fact I think we are already on our way toward realizing it. In the simplest and most general sense, mathematics and programming languages allow us to formalize all knowledge. Contenders for the language of the Game already exist, at least in principle. But we are further along than that. Search engines like Wolfram Alpha have already begun the process of formalizing diverse pieces of knowledge, unifying them in a single medium, and providing the means to connect and reason about them. A repeated example in the book, the mapping of musical compositions to mathematical formulas or even historical events, is eminently doable within Wolfram Alpha. Much remains to be done of course, and there is no “game” yet that can be played across the vast sea of all human knowledge, but some enterprising individuals have already gotten started on creating it.

And then there’s John Holland, the “father of genetic algorithms”. Holland told an interviewer:

I’ve been working toward it all my life, this Das Glasperlenspiel. It was a very scholarly game, starting with an abacus, where people set up musical themes, then do variations on it, like a fugue. Then they’d expand it to where it could include other artistic forms, and eventually cultural symbols. It became a very sophisticated game for setting up themes, almost as a poet would, and building variations as a composer. It was a way of symbolizing music and of building broad insights into the world.

If I could get at all close to producing something like the glass bead game I can’t think of anything that would delight me more.

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I’ve been working on a playable variant on the Glass Bead Game too, for twenty years quite consciously, and more if you count subterranean stirrings. And I don’t think glass beads, or stones, or chess or go pieces, or beads on an abacus, or strings of ones and zeros, or cells in an agent-based model for that matter, are the way to go. Which is not to say those approaches shouldn’t be tried, or don’t have remarkable things to teach us. I just don’t believe they give us quite what Hesse envisioned:

a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

I think what’s important in Hesse’s game is that concepts that humans can grasp should reveal their stunning interrelations to heart and mind. And for that reason, the “moves” in my games [Hipbone, and more recently Sembl] consist of concepts — musical, verbal, visual, mathematical — and the links, the analogies, the “semblances” between them.

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And thus the game is a search for analogies.

The human mind must inevitably perform what Shalizi calls the “trade-off between exploitation and exploration”. Some thoughts are proximate to others, they can be developed without any special insight by regular “linear” thinking. We do this every day, every minute — but it is not particularly revelatory. It doesn’t solve thorny problems, much less create beauty. There is another mode of thinking, however, that leaps between thoughts that are not so “close” but are nevertheless deeply related. To leap the apparent distance between such deeply related thoughts, we deploy analogy and creative thinking, and that is where the aha! of revelation occurs.

So I would suggest there is a close analogy here with the point Shalizi is making with the diagram atop this post. The human mind, to slightly paraphrase Shalizi’s caption, will “exploit the currently-available patch of food” for thought by linear, inside-the-patch thinking, but at full stretch it will also “explore, in hopes of ?nding richer patches elsewhere” — the “elsewhere” being attained precisely by “creative leaps” — by seeing semblances, patterns, analogies.

And to return to my earlier post, Thinking outside the cocoon, of which this post is a continuation, and perhaps the completion….

Shalizi’s “random walk” is thus also the archangel’s “zig-zag wantonness” in that great poem, Tom O’Roughley — when William Butler Yeats asks, “how but in zig-zag wantonness / could trumpeter Michael be so brave?” and writes, “wisdom is a butterfly / and not a gloomy bird of prey”…

[by Lynn C. Rees, with points from John Boyd]

Earlier this year, Scott kindly shared a PDF index of the John Boyd Papers (see tail end of PDF here). While PDFs are good for preserving document layout, they’re poor at storing clean text data. Since I wanted the index in a spreadsheet to facilitate searching and sorting, this was a issue. Data extraction into machine readable formats remains painful. Data extraction from PDFs remains even more painful: the priority of PDFs is prettiness for the human eye not prettiness for the machine.

Fortunately, pdftotext can extract the text data to plain text. But, even then, the John Boyd index text was misaligned and out of order due to its formatting in the original document. It also needed to be broken down into useful chunks that could be mapped to spreadsheet cells. I decided to use Freeplane to reformat the text into a form appropriate for piping into a spreadsheet since it has elements of asynchronous text editing.

I don’t know if a true asynchronous text editor exists. I’m not sure I know what one would look like. But I have some notion of what it isn’t. Most text editors and word processors are good at sequential editing of text. They only sort of approach asynchronous text editing where text is moved around and reordered freely without copy and pasting. Asynchronous text editing was what I wanted and Freeplane kind of does it.

I pasted the plain text into Freeplane and started breaking it down. Progress was slow. A lot of awkward and time-consuming cutting and pasting was required and this  was annoying. I had to create additional text manipulation tools for Freeplane. Then things moved along nicely.

Due to intervening time constraints, the Boyd Papers index hasn’t made it to spreadsheet form yet. However, it is broken down in Freeplane. Though mind maps are most commonly used as a brainstorming tool, they are also useful for rearranging existing text data in a hierarchy. Since the John Boyd index mind map is a useful example of this, here’s what’s done so far:

• the index as an image (5.9 MB in size, require some magnification within the browser)
• original Freeplane mindmap (536.7 KB in size) 

[ by Charles Cameron — bemused again, “jihad” (the word) in the news, “big data” too, plus Google expecting Mahdi ]
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I suppose I should be glad — or should I? — that the word jihad is now in the news.

It’s about time. Jihad (the word, the concept, the interpretations) should have been in the news at least since 9/11, don’t you think? or since the World Trade Center bombing in February 26, 1993, perhaps? or at least since Osama bin Laden’s Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques of September 2, 1996?

In any case, the word finally seems to have arrived, if the entry from the National Geographic site last month (upper panel, above) can be trusted:

And Big Data (lower panel)?

President Obama launched his Big Data Initiative on March 29, 2012, but I’m not sure how long the term has been in active use. I’m told there’s no “big data” listing in the 2009 Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM, I have the sense that three days ago’s Foreign Policy is far more up to date than last month’s National Geographic in any case — and just a month or two ago the CTO of CIA, Ira “Gus” Hunt, situated Big Data somewhere between “the cloud” and right now, telling his audience at GigaOM:

Big Data was so last year, right, all those breathless articles and all the front page covers — I was expecting BD to be Time’s Man of the Year, right. This year what we’re really talking about is how do we get value out of the stuff?

That quote, of course, is so “two months ago”…

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So what does National Geographic tell us about jihad?

The Boston marathon bombing has focused attention on the word “jihad.”

Vice President Biden characterized the alleged bombers as knockoff jihadis.” The Associated Press reported that the elder brother had “vaguely discussed jihad” with his mother over the phone in 2011.

Origins

“Jihad” is derived from the Arabic word juhd (meaning effort, exertion, or power) and literally translates to “struggle” or “resistance” for the sake of a goal. Used 30 times and in multiple contexts in the Koran, jihad most often denotes a struggle against external enemies, the devil, or one’s self. One example from the Koran (49.15) is: “The believers are those who believe in Allah and His Messenger … and jahadu (do jihad) with their properties and selves in the way of Allah.”

Mark Wilks, an early 19th-century British author, introduced jihad into the English lexicon, defining it as a Muslim “holy war,” in his Historical Sketches of the South of India. It’s retained that meaning in English; the Oxford English Dictionary defines jihad as “a religious war of Muslims against unbelievers.”

History

Because of its roots and context in the Koran, jihad has a positive meaning to Muslims. Whatever form jihad may take, the struggle is always noble. When the term is evoked against external enemies, it can be used only during just or defensive wars.

I’m sorry, but that last para beginning “Because of its roots and context in the Koran, jihad has a positive meaning to Muslims” isn’t terribly clear. When al-Zawahiri talks about jihad, for instance, does the writer imagine all Muslim readers imagine he’s talking about something noble? I fear there are some subtleties being missed her that not everyone who reads National Geographic may understand.

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And what does Foreign Policy want to tell us about Big Data?

The promoters of big data would like us to believe that behind the lines of code and vast databases lie objective and universal insights into patterns of human behavior, be it consumer spending, criminal or terrorist acts, healthy habits, or employee productivity. But many big-data evangelists avoid taking a hard look at the weaknesses. Numbers can’t speak for themselves, and data sets — no matter their scale — are still objects of human design. The tools of big-data science, such as the Apache Hadoop software framework, do not immunize us from skews, gaps, and faulty assumptions. Those factors are particularly significant when big data tries to reflect the social world we live in, yet we can often be fooled into thinking that the results are somehow more objective than human opinions. Biases and blind spots exist in big data as much as they do in individual perceptions and experiences. Yet there is a problematic belief that bigger data is always better data and that correlation is as good as causation.

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Mr Orange had something to say about the word “jihad” in his War Tracker blog the other day, under the title What’s in the names of terrorist groups (1): Jabhah al-Nusrah li-Ahl al-Shâm min Mujâhidî al-Shâm fi Sahât al Jihâd:

… they still use a religious term in their name: One that is quite negatively understood in the West but not so in the Arab and Muslim world namely Jihâd.

They are Mujâhidîn – those who do Jihâd (religious struggle – in this case fighting) – on the fields of Jihâd. Mujâhidîn has a positive, religiously legitimizing ring to it – see here is someone who struggles for the religion – and is furthermore including. Whether you are with the FSA (even one of the rather secular parts of that group mind you) or with an independent Islamist group or with Jabhah al-Nusrah all do use the term Mujâhîd and all may be identified by that term (Granted there was a time when Thuwâr (revolutionaries) was en vogue but no longer so).

That, IMO, gets us a lot closer to understanding a term that has a range of meanings, a range of users, and a range of audiences — from something along the lines of divinely obligated warfare to something akin to conscience (or what Rilke calls “being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings”) , and from those who use it for glorious self-identification to those for whom it is a euphemism for terrorist (irhabi), and from those itching for a fight to those longing, praying and working devotedly for peace…

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So — since we’re talking big data and jihad, here’s a tiny snippet of jihad-related skew from Google, one of the giants of big data…

I came across it via SelfScholar, who posted a very interesting response re the Iranian nuclear fatwa issue here a few days ago, in a post titled Google Translate’s Khomeini Problem.

It appears that Google Translate has a distinctly unsecular view when it comes to major figures in Shi’ite theology — specifically, it adds religious honorifics to their names when translating from English into Farsi. As you might imagine, I wanted to know how they dealt with the Mahdi — and behold, my prayer was answered:

So Google awaits his blessed return?

It seems pretty clear that SelfScholar would be skeptical about that. He ends his blog post, in fact, with an indication that he neither awaits nor expects it — choosing for his final example “to highlight the inanity of it all, just one for the road…”:

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Prof. Dr. Muhammad-Reza Fakhr-Rohani has an interesting piece titled Rendering Islamic Politeness Markers into English, which he concludes thus:

There remain some Desiderata to be dealt with. First, the Arabic pre-nominal honorifics as well as post-nominal honorific-cum-optative sentences must be re-translated with a view to remove the items which make the language sound odd, and perhaps ungrammatical. Secondly, appropriate abbreviations must be devised for them. Finally, they must find their ways into English dictionaries, hence registered as part of the language.