Preoccupations

Google Local

Google Local locates neighborhood stores and services by searching billions of pages across the Web, then cross-checking those results with Yellow Pages data to pinpoint the local resources you want to find. This innovative approach gives you access to the most – and most relevant – results for your search. To use Google Local, just include a zip code or the name of a town or city with your regular search terms at www.google.com. Your local results will appear at the top of the results page. You can also go directly to the Google Local home page to view only local results, see results on an area map, or limit your results to listings within a set distance from your starting point. ... For now, Google Local only searches for locations in the United States. We plan on expanding this service to other parts of the world once we work out the kinks in this beta product ...

John Battelle's take:

Today, Google launched a number of significant upgrades to Google Local, Google's local search service. These enhancements and new features are a result of Google's continuing effort to develop Google Local and make local information even more accessible and useful. The new improvements include:

• Enhanced user interface - a new, cleaner design that now includes maps on results pages displaying the location of businesses in the search results
• New mapping capabilities - users can now zoom and pan different directions on the maps without reloading the page
• Improved comprehensiveness - search results provide links to even more web pages like business homepages and related ratings and reviews
• More relevant results - improved relevance technology returns even more precise results

These features build upon the core technology of Google Local, which combines traditional business listings with relevant information from across the web. This innovative approach does not rely on pre-determined categories and enables Google Local to provide local information that exactly matches a user's search. For example, a woman in Palo Alto, Calif. could be looking for a restaurant but is on a budget. She would have trouble finding listings that provide this information in the yellow pages or on other local information sites. However, by simply searching for [cheap restaurants] in [Palo Alto] on Google Local, she would find a number of nearby restaurants to fit the bill. Google Local achieves this level of relevance by searching restaurant reviews and other related web pages, in addition to business listings, to return results described as [cheap] on the web.

Firefox & RSS

Firefox 1.0 pre-release is here — with Live Bookmarks:

Live Bookmarks is a new technology in Firefox that lets you view RSS news and blog headlines in the bookmarks toolbar or bookmarks menu. With one glance, quickly see the latest headlines from your favorite sites. Go directly to the articles that interest you -- saving you time.

A site is enabled for Live Bookmarks when you see this icon on the bottom right corner of the browser. Clicking on the icon and selecting an RSS feed will bring up the Add Bookmark dialog. Select 'OK' and you will see Live Bookmarks with the rest of your bookmarks. Many people find it especially convenient to save Live Bookmarks in their Bookmarks Toolbar folder.

Google Alerts

A new beta initiative from Google:

Google Alerts are email updates of latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story


• keeping current on a competitor or industry


• getting the latest on a celebrity or event


• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

You can also sign in to manage your alerts.

Islam today

A fascinating, lengthy and detailed piece in the New Statesman (link via 3quarksdaily) by Ziauddin Sardar, author of Desperately Seeking Paradise: journeys of a sceptical Muslim (published by Granta Books):

The Muslim world is changing. Three years after the atrocity of 9/11, it may be in the early stages of a reformation, albeit with a small "r". From Morocco to Indonesia, people are trying to develop a more contemporary and humane interpretation of Islam, and some countries are undergoing major transformations.

Much of the attention is focused on reformulating the sharia, the centuries-old body of Islamic law deeply embedded in a medieval psychology. The sharia is state law in many Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and the Sudan. For many conservative and radical Muslims, the sharia is Islam: it cannot be changed, and must be imposed in exactly the shape it was first formulated in the ninth century. Since 9/11, there has been a seismic shift in this perception. More and more Muslims now perceive Islamic law to be dangerously obsolete. And these include the ulema, the religious scholars and clerics, who have a tremendous hold on the minds of the Muslim masses. ...

Muslims worldwide are acknowledging the need for fundamental change in their perception of Islam. They are making conscious efforts to move away from medieval notions of Islamic law and to implement the vision of justice, equality and beauty that is rooted in the Koran. If such changes continue, the future will not repeat the recent past.

Flickr

Flickr continues to impress me. It has to be one of the most innovative and exciting sites on the web. The new, very fast Organizr is a pleasure to use, but so much innovation is coming on-line that it's not always being trumpeted as it arrives. Last night, whilst reading the Flickr forums, I discovered that you can now give your photos the Creative Commons stamp:

'You can choose to use a Creative Commons license to allow more liberal use and sharing of your photos while still maintaining reasonable copyright protection' (here)

'You can also batch-select a license for all previously uploaded photos' (here)

NB: you need to be logged-in with a free Flickr account to view these pages.

Privacy, transparency and reputation systems

Much on the ether, earlier this year and more recently, about both privacy and transparency (Ross Mayfield has a good overview here.)

Back in 1999, Scott McNeally famously said at a press conference, 'You already have zero privacy. Get over it' (localglobe, 26 April). Saul Klein added:

After spending much of the 90s in the trenches of the internet privacy debate, only to see its importance retreat, it's great to see that serial innovators like Google, Amazon and the founders of Skype are once again pushing the boundaries of what we understand as private and public space as they advance respectively into email, search and telephony. ... If, like Scott McNealy, you've already come to the conclusion that none of this remotely bothers you, or you think we're better off leaving these debates to the conspiracy theorists and policymakers then you probably stopped reading some time ago. But if even a little bit of you wonders whether we should actually be taking this seriously; or if you've ever used email, Googled, made an online purchase or considered making a free internet phone call, then there could not be a better time to join the debate.

A month later, Don Park posted this:

I used to think that privacy concerns in America were strong enough to thwart ideas like single-sign-in and Gmail from being realized. My study of the social networking phenomenon has gradually changed my opinion to a point where I now think the power of privacy concerns can be dispelled with the right strategy. Obviously, this can't be done by just anyone and serious commitments must be made in terms of time and resources, but I now believe it can be done. I have come to realize that concerns are temporal in nature and require constant reinforcements to maintain them. A primary source of that reinforcement is social pressures. If people around you are concerned, you become concerned. If they seem unconcerned, (the) level of your concern diminishes. People who do not conform to the group's level of concerns are pushed to the fringe and eventually cast out, either by the group or by their own choice.

And then there was Chris Allen's thoughtful suggestion that it is useful to distinguish between four kinds of privacy:

When people speak about privacy, they may actually be talking about very different forms of privacy: defensive privacy, human-rights privacy, personal privacy and contextual privacy.

As Ross Mayfield emphasises, contextual privacy is particularly significant for wikis: 'Negotiating context shifts over time proves to be the most difficult, socially and even legally, to let resources accrete value. Setting the mission and vision of a space requires a great deal of forward looking imagination while balancing the basic need to define a social context for sharing.'

Now comes news that the Riemann Hypothesis could be about to be cracked:

Mathematicians could be on the verge of solving two separate million dollar problems. If they are right - still a big if - and somebody really has cracked the so-called Riemann hypothesis, financial disaster might follow. Suddenly all cryptic codes could be breakable. No internet transaction would be safe. The Guardian

Proponents of transparency may see the tide turning in their favour. (See the Wikipedia article on The Transparent Society.) Smart Mobs carried an interesting item this month, Transparency Visions, which culminated with this quotation from the Panarchy site:

In an information civilization, the preponderance of data about anything and everything means that only the data that is most relevant will ever even be looked for in the first place. Most of the information about you as one of potentially nine billion human beings on the planet is simply not valuable in any meaningful sense. Furthermore, as information about you that is valuable is gathered, you will be able to see who is doing the gathering, i.e. you can reciprocally gather your own information about the gatherers. More to the point, information service providers will be available not only to gather information about you for them, but also to gather information about them for you. ... While this may seem heretical to those of us raised in an age of copyright protection, secrecy, and privacy, for the younger generation the benefits of transparency are already glaringly evident. After a local school shooting, parents and children were asked how they felt about installing metal detectors at the school. Nearly unanimously, parents reacted with shock and fear, using phrases like "privacy rights" and "violation of our civil rights." Even more surprisingly, the children who actually attend the school nearly unanimously came out in favor of the metal detectors. For them, the solution to security came not from individual rights but from stronger community rights via increased transparency. This is a lesson that the international system has yet to internalize, but in the future the final solution to international relations' "security dilemma" will be enacted through precisely these new norms, internalized and enacted by those self-same kids.

Of course, transparent communities would have to find ways of protecting the marginalised. The social pressures of Don Park's posting can quickly come to work against, for example, the least reputable members of a community:

Sometimes we need to listen to people who have bad reputations. Often they are the critics, the people with a talent for seeing flaws and problems none of us wants to face. Communities can't thrive if they never answer to the least reputable of their members. So, for now I'm waiting for a new community system, one whose wisdom will destroy reputations and replace them with something more meaningful. (Annalee Newitz, writing at AlterNet)

There's a lot at stake here, more even than issues of privacy.

Shakespeare quartos from the British Library

The British Library is putting online 93 high-resolution digitised copies of 21 of Shakespeare's plays. The texts date from Shakespeare's lifetime and are pamphlet editions of plays prepared to be sold after performances had finished. The printed works show how the text evolved and cast doubt on the idea of definitive versions of his plays.

'The quartos were cheaply produced and would have been available for as little as sixpence,' said Moira Goff, Head of British Collections 1501-1800 at the British Library. ... The texts of the plays are thought to be the closest versions to the way that the plays were actually written and performed. 'Given that Shakespeare left no manuscripts behind, the quartos are as close as we are able to get to what he actually wrote,' said Ms Goff. 'They take us behind the First Folio and different quarto versions of the plays provide clues to Shakespeare's own revisions of his works.'

The quarto editions are thought to be Shakespeare's working drafts, copies for rehearsals or records of versions remembered by actors. Quartos were not produced in large numbers because they were not very popular or profitable. Many pages have contemporary annotations. Many of the quartos featured in the online collection are from collections amassed by King George III and 18th century actor David Garrick. The different versions of plays show that some of the most famous lines in the Shakespearean canon changed from one performance to another. For instance Hamlet's famous line: 'To be, or not to be, that is the question' appears in a quarto from 1605. However in an earlier edition produced in 1603 it is written as: 'To be, or not to be, I there's the point'. ... Accompanying the online collection is background material, essays by Shakespearean scholars, commentaries, images and sound clips. Tools on the site allow scholars to compare different versions of the same play to track textual changes. BBC News

British Library:

On this site you will find the British Library’s 93 copies of the 21 plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642.

Hamlet

Henry IV Part 1

Henry IV Part 2

Henry V

Henry VI Parts 2&3

Henry VI Part 3

King Lear

Love's Labour's Lost

The Merchant of Venice

The Merry Wives of Windsor

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Much Ado About Nothing

Othello

Pericles

Richard II

Richard III

Romeo and Juliet

The Taming of the Shrew

Titus Andronicus

Troilus and Cressida

The Two Noble Kinsman

Tags & hierarchies

Taxonomies have been much in the news recently. Laughingmeme, for example:

complex hierarchies of information suffer from many of the same problems that hierarchies in general suffer from, in particular they're brittle. They adapt poorly as your domain/interests evolves and shifts, and lack the flexibility to deal with decision making/knowledge creation in diverse environments. ... Whether it is easier or harder for an individual to maintain their personal information systems as opposed to organisations/networks really depends on the individual.

Clay Shirky wrote: 'No hierarchy I have a hard time as seeing as inherently problematic — hierarchy is good for creating non-overlapping but all-inclusive buckets. In a file-system world-view, both of those are desirable characteristics, but in a web world-view, where objects have handles rather than containment paths, neither characteristic is necessary. Thus multiple tags “skateboarding tricks movie” allows for much of the subtlety but few of the restrictions of hierarchy. If hierarchy was a good way to organize links, Yahoo would be king of the hill and Google an also-ran service. There is a loss in folksonomies, of course, but also gain, so the question is one of relative value. Given the surprising feedback loop — community creates folksonomy, which helps the community spot its own concerns, which leads them to invest more in folksonomies — I expect the value of communal categorization to continue to grow.'

What Alex Wright had to say struck me as true through and through:

What irks me about some of the dialogue to date is an assumption (usually implied) that networked systems are somehow inherently more "fair" than top-down systems. Democracy, like unregulated free markets, are no guarantee of fairness. And while networked systems surely give users more opportunity for input, they also abide by power laws which, though perhaps ineluctable, are neither equal nor fair (especially insofar as they favor early adopters). Top-down systems, while seemingly authoritarian, may paradoxically do a better job of defending the interests of the individual. Just as mob rule is no way to run a country, so purely democratic classifications could lead lead to groupthink, favoring conformity and marginalizing dissent. ... I don't believe that top-down and bottom-up systems necessarily have to stand in opposition; the two models may ultimately prove consilient.

He quotes Kevin Kelly and this clip has introduced me to, and convinced me that I must read, Out of Control (see here for a summary):

In the human management of distributed control, hierarchies of a certain type will proliferate rather than diminish. That goes especially for distributed systems involving human nodes - such as huge global computer networks. Many computer activists preach a new era in the network economy, an era built around computer peer-to-peer networks, a time when rigid patriarchal networks will wither away. They are right and wrong. While authoritarian "top-down" hierarchies will retreat, no distributed system can survive long without nested hierarchies of lateral "bottom-up" control. As influence flows peer to peer, it coheres into a chunk - a whole organelle - which then becomes the bottom unit in a larger web of slower actions. Over time a multi-level organization forms around the percolating-up control: fast at the bottom, slow at the top.

Last word to Kevin Kelly:

The law is concise: Distributed control has to be grown from simple local control. Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work.

Speaking clearly

Last week, and before the terrible events at Beslan began, Joshua Micah Marshall, a Contributing Writer for the Washington Monthly and a columnist for The Hill, posted this (30 August; see Harry's Place, too):

"We have a clear vision on how to win the war on terror and bring peace to the world." George W. Bush, 30 July, 2004

"I don’t think you can win [the war on terror]. But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are — less acceptable in parts of the world.” George W. Bush, 29 August, 2004

The NYT picked up on this, and so the President's words came to be widely reported. To some, this all seems to amount to very little. Jeff Jarvis commented that he didn't get this 'minor dustup' and then proceeded, with admirable straightforwardness: 'we won't "win" against every terrorist and we should not fool ourselves to think that that day at the surrender table will ever come'. (Contrast Tony Blair's statement at yesterday's Downing Street press conference, when asked if he could define a "victory" in such a war: 'We can win the war on terrorism, and ultimately we will win'.) In the UK weekly (4 September), The Week, Jeremy O'Grady (Editor-in-chief) reflecting more generally about politics and politicians, wrote: 'Where it is virtue in a journalist to unravel complexity and avoid ambiguity, it is virtue in a politician to embrace ambiguity and fudge. How else can he build the fragile coalitions required to take political action? What we need most from our politicians is good results.'

All this may be worldly-wise, but from the outset the expression 'the war on terror' made many uneasy. The phrase has proved to be a most effective piece of political rhetoric. With 'rhetoric' at the forefront of my mind, I picked up the LRB and found Perry Anderson explaining the extraordinary, formative role of rhetoric in French educational life — rhetoric acting as a kind of hyphen, linking philosophy and literature:

The potential cost of a literary conception of intellectual disciplines is obvious enough: arguments freed from logic, propositions from evidence. Historians were least prone to such an import substitution of literature, but even Braudel was not immune to the loosening of controls in a too flamboyant eloquence. It is this trait of the French culture of the time that has so often polarised foreign reactions to it, in a seesaw between adulation and suspicion. Rhetoric is designed to cast a spell, and a cult easily arises among those who fall under it. But it can also repel, drawing charges of legerdemain and imposture. Balanced judgement here will never be easy.

The most valuable, recent commentary I have read on the phrase, 'the war on terror', and its rhetorical effectiveness comes from George Lakoff:

You've said that progressives should never use the phrase "war on terror" — why?

There are two reasons for that. Let's start with "terror." Terror is a general state, and it's internal to a person. Terror is not the person we're fighting, the "terrorist." The word terror activates your fear, and fear activates the strict father model, which is what conservatives want. The "war on terror" is not about stopping you from being afraid, it's about making you afraid.

Next, "war." How many terrorists are there — hundreds? Sure. Thousands? Maybe. Tens of thousands? Probably not. The point is, terrorists are actual people, and relatively small numbers of individuals, considering the size of our country and other countries. It's not a nation-state problem. War is a nation-state problem.

What about the "war on drugs" or the "war on poverty"?

Those are metaphorical. Real wars are wars against countries, and in the "war on terror," we are attacking countries. But those countries are not the same as the terrorists. We're acting at the wrong level. Meanwhile, by using this frame, we get a commander in chief, as the Republicans keep referring to Bush — a "war president" with "war powers," which imply that ordinary protections don't have to be observed. A "war president" has extraordinary powers. And the "war on terror," of course, never ends. There's no peace treaty with terror.

Orwell said that, in his time, 'political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness' ('Politics and the English Language', 1946). ... Writing in 2001, Garton Ash commented that,

(Orwell) 'does not just equip us to detect this semantic abuse. He also suggests how writers can fight back. For the abusers of power are, after all, using our weapons: words. In 'Politics and the English Language' he even gives some simple stylistic rules for honest and effective political writing. He compares good English prose to a clean window pane. Through these windows, citizens can see what their rulers are really up to. So political writers should be the window cleaners of freedom.

If I had to name a single quality that makes Orwell still essential reading in the 21st century, it would be his insight into the use and abuse of language. If you have time to read only one essay, read 'Politics and the English Language'. This brilliantly sums up the central Orwellian argument that the corruption of language is an essential part of oppressive or exploitative politics. "The defence of the indefensible" is sustained by a battery of euphemisms, verbal false limbs, prefabricated phrases, and all the other paraphernalia of deceit that he pinpoints and parodies.

Christopher Lydon's latest posting appeared on 2 September. It needs to be read in full, but this clip is pertinent:

The deep dread among all sorts of people I know is quite simply that 'since 9/11, our country has undergone a transformation from republic to empire that may well prove irreversible,' as Chalmers Johnson summed it up in The Sorrows of Empire. 'As militarism, the arrogance of power, and the euphemisms required to justify imperialism inevitably conflict with America's democratic structure of government and distort its culture and basic values, I fear that we will lose our country.'

Creativity ...

Creativity & Innovation in Science & Technology is a site that has something to offer any student, not "just" scientists. For example, the page headed Creativity Techniques lists

a number of creativity techniques to help with creative thinking. Like most tools, these creativity techniques all have their good and bad points. I like to think of these creativity techniques as tools in a toolbox in much the same way as my toolbox at home for DIY. It has a saw, spanner, hammer, knife and all sorts of other things in it; they are all very useful, but you have to pick the right tool (creativity technique) for each job. We will try and provide a little guidance along with each tool to let you know whether it's best used for cutting paper or putting in nails. There are at least 200 different creativity techniques and tools available. Listed below are some of these. Special thanks to the Open University for their kind permission to use material from their publication B822.