May 2006

Recover sounds from the ancient world

cool stuff, history, technology / /

From Christer Hamp’s “Archaeoacoustics“:

By archaeoacoustics I mean the recovery of sounds from the time before the invention of recording. This implies that such sounds would have been recorded inadvertently, while intending to do sometring else. Not much has been written about this subject and only very few experiments have been made, but I find the subject fascinating enough to dare the deep waters of the unproven and often scorned.

So far no ancient sound has been heard, and the experiments conducted have been attempts to reproduce the conditions at which such recordings would have been produced, successful attempts, according to the papers published.

What is probably the first publication on the subject appeared in 1969, when Richard G. Woodbridge, III related four experiments in a letter in the Proceedings of the IEEE1. In the first experiment, he could pick up the noise produced by the potter’s wheel from a pot, using a hand-held crystal cartridge (Astatic Corp. Model 2) with a wooden stylus, connected directly to a set of headphones. The second experiment yielded 60 Hz hum from the motor driving the potter’s wheel. More interesting were the following experiments, with a canvas being painted while exposed to sounds. In the third experiment the canvas was painted with a variety of different paints while exposed to martial music from loudspeakers. Some of the brush strokes had a striated appearance, and “short snatches of the music” could be indentified. For the fourth experiment, the painter spoke the word “blue” during a stroke of the brush, and after a long search the word could be heard again when stroking the canvas with the stylus.

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Flow defined

commonplace book, education / /

From Mihaly Csiksczentmihalyi’s “Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience“:

Pleasure by itself does not bring happiness. We can experience pleasure (e.g. eating, sleeping, sex) without an investment of psychic energy. Enjoyment on the other hand, happens only as a result of an unusual amount of attention. Pleasure is fleeting and, unlike enjoyment, does not bring complexity (growth) to the self. If one only invests energy in new directions solely for extrinsic rewards, one may end up no longer enjoying life, and pleasures become the only source of positive experience. Without enjoyment life can be endured and can even be pleasant. But it can be so only precariously, depending on luck and the cooperation of the external environment.

Eight Components of Enjoyment

1. Confronting tasks that we have a chance of completing.
2. Concentration.
3. Concentration is possible because the task has clear goals.
4. Task provides immediate feedback.
5. A deep, effortless involvement removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life.
6. Enjoyable experiences allow one to exercise a sense of control over one’s actions.
7. Concern for self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over.
8. Sense of time is altered – hours pass by in minutes.

When experience is intrinsically rewarding, one’s life is justified in the present, instead of one being held hostage to a hypothetical future, but we must constantly re-evaluate what we do, lest habits and past ‘wisdom’ blind us to new possibilities. The flow experience – like anything else – is not “good” in an absolute sense, but only in that it has the potential to make life richer, more intense and meaningful. One must distinguish between useful and harmful forms of flow, making the most of the former and limiting the latter.

Commencement of learning something is a flow situation – everything is new and flow absorption is present as one struggles to master the skill. As one progresses, either boredom will ensue because there is no more challenge (the skill has been learned at that level) or anxiety occurs because a bigger challenge than we can cope with presents itself. Either way, one wants to get back to flow, either by overcoming the anxiety challenge by becoming more skilled, or taking on a challenge that will overcome the boredom, thus getting back into flow at a more complex level.

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Why are some people really good at some things?

commonplace book, science / /

From Stephen J. Dubner & Steven D. Levitt’s “A Star Is Made” (The New York Times):

Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, … is the ringleader of what might be called the Expert Performance Movement, a loose coalition of scholars trying to answer an important and seemingly primordial question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good? …

In other words, whatever innate differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person “encodes” the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task – playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. …

Their work, compiled in the “Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance,” a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers – whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming – are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. …

Ericsson’s research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love – because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t “good” at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better. …

Ericsson has noted that most doctors actually perform worse the longer they are out of medical school. Surgeons, however, are an exception. That’s because they are constantly exposed to two key elements of deliberate practice: immediate feedback and specific goal-setting.

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Word of the day: pareidolia

language & literature, word of the day / /

Pareidolia (from Greek para– amiss, faulty, wrong + eidolon, diminutive of eidos appearance, form) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (usually an image) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable. Common examples include images of animals or faces in clouds, seeing the man in the moon, and hearing messages on records played in reverse.

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Malware focused on theft above all

law, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From AFP’s “70 percent of malicious software aimed at theft: survey“:

Seventy percent of malicious software being circulated is linked to various types of cybercrime, a study by security firms Panda Software showed. …

The survey confirms a shift from several years ago, when malicious software was often aimed at garnering attention or exposing security flaws.

“Malware has become a took for generating financial returns,” the report said. …

About 40 percent of the problems detected by Panda was spyware, a type of malicious code designed for financial gain, primarily through collecting data on users’ Internet activities.

Another 17 percent was trojans, including “banker trojans” that steal confidential data related to bank services, others that download malicious applications onto systems.

Eight percent of the problems detected were “dialers,” malicious code that dials up premium-rate numbers without users’ knowledge; “bots,” a scheme involving the sale or rental of networks of infected computers, accounted for four percent of the total.

The e-mail worm, which was recently considered a major Internet threat, made up only four percent of the total.

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Clay Shirky on why the Semantic Web will fail

language & literature, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Clay Shirky’s “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview“:

What is the Semantic Web good for?

The simple answer is this: The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms. A syllogism is a form of logic, first described by Aristotle, where “…certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so.” [Organon]

The canonical syllogism is:

Humans are mortal
Greeks are human
Therefore, Greeks are mortal

with the third statement derived from the previous two.

The Semantic Web is made up of assertions, e.g. “The creator of shirky.com is Clay Shirky.” Given the two statements

– Clay Shirky is the creator of shirky.com
– The creator of shirky.com lives in Brooklyn

you can conclude that I live in Brooklyn, something you couldn’t know from either statement on its own. From there, other expressions that include Clay Shirky, shirky.com, or Brooklyn can be further coupled.

The Semantic Web specifies ways of exposing these kinds of assertions on the Web, so that third parties can combine them to discover things that are true but not specified directly. This is the promise of the Semantic Web — it will improve all the areas of your life where you currently use syllogisms.

Which is to say, almost nowhere. …

Despite their appealing simplicity, syllogisms don’t work well in the real world, because most of the data we use is not amenable to such effortless recombination. As a result, the Semantic Web will not be very useful either. …

In the real world, we are usually operating with partial, inconclusive or context-sensitive information. When we have to make a decision based on this information, we guess, extrapolate, intuit, we do what we did last time, we do what we think our friends would do or what Jesus or Joan Jett would have done, we do all of those things and more, but we almost never use actual deductive logic. …

Syllogisms sound stilted in part because they traffic in absurd absolutes. …

There is a list of technologies that are actually political philosophy masquerading as code, a list that includes Xanadu, Freenet, and now the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web’s philosophical argument — the world should make more sense than it does — is hard to argue with. The Semantic Web, with its neat ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective and shared worldview is harder to create than we often want to admit.

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The structure & meaning of the URL as key to the Web’s success

commonplace book, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Clay Shirky’s “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview“:

The systems that have succeeded at scale have made simple implementation the core virtue, up the stack from Ethernet over Token Ring to the web over gopher and WAIS. The most widely adopted digital descriptor in history, the URL, regards semantics as a side conversation between consenting adults, and makes no requirements in this regard whatsoever: sports.yahoo.com/nfl/ is a valid URL, but so is 12.0.0.1/ftrjjk.ppq. The fact that a URL itself doesn’t have to mean anything is essential — the Web succeeded in part because it does not try to make any assertions about the meaning of the documents it contained, only about their location.

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The 1st software patent

business, history, law, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Robert X. Cringely’s “Patently Absurd: Why Simply Making Spam Illegal Won’t Work“:

Software patents have become inordinately important for something that 25 years ago we didn’t even believe could exist. After several software patent cases had gone unsuccessfully as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, the general thinking when I got in this business was that software could not be patented, only copyrighted. Like the words of a book, the individual characters of code could be protected by a copyright, and even the specific commands could be protected, but what couldn’t be protected by a copyright was the literal function performed by the program. There is no way that a copyright could protect the idea of a spreadsheet. Protecting the idea would have required a patent.

Then on May 26, 1981, after seven years of legal struggle, S. Pal Asija, a programmer and patent lawyer, received the first software patent for SwiftAnswer, a data retrieval program that was never heard from again and whose only historical function was to prove that all of the experts were wrong — software could be patented. Asija showed that when the Supreme Court had ruled against previous software patent efforts, it wasn’t saying that software was unpatentable, but that those particular programs weren’t patentable.

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How patents ruined the Wright brothers

history, law, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Robert X. Cringely’s “Patently Absurd: Why Simply Making Spam Illegal Won’t Work“:

Nobody can deny that the Wright brothers were pioneers. Their use of a wind tunnel helped define the science of aerodynamics and had influence far beyond their time. But their secrecy and litigious nature held back the progress of flying, and eventually lost them their technical leadership. The Wrights flew in 1903. They made a small public announcement 100 years ago, then went silent until 1908 as they worked to solidify their patent position. While they continued to fly from pastures around Dayton, Ohio, the brothers generally did so in secret, waiting for patents to be issued.

When the Wrights finally appeared in public again five years later, first in Washington, DC, and later in France, the performance of their aircraft still astounded the world. But that was it. Once the brothers filed a patent infringement suit against rival Glenn Curtiss, their attention was totally turned to litigation and their aeronautical progress stopped. Curtiss and Wright eventually merged and built aircraft into the 1940s, but the creative energy by that time was all from Curtiss. By then, Wilbur had died and Orville was best known as the man who signed every pilot license. Though their patent was upheld, they didn’t in any sense control the industry they had invented.

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OmniPerception = facial recognition + smart card

security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s’ “Face Forward“:

To get around these problems, OmniPerception, a spinoff from the University of Surrey in England, has combined its facial-recognition technology with a smart-card system. This could make face recognition more robust and better suited to applications such as passport authentication and building access control, which, if they use biometrics at all, rely mainly on fingerprint verification, says David McIntosh, the company’s CEO. With OmniPerception’s technology, an image of a person’s face is verified against a “facial PIN” carried on the card, eliminating the need to search a central database and making the system less intimidating to privacy-conscious users. …

OmniPerception’s technology creates a PIN about 2,500 digits long from its analysis of the most distinctive features of a person’s face. The number is embedded in a smart card-such as those, say, that grant access to a building-and used to verify that the card belongs to the person presenting it. A user would place his or her card in or near a reader and face a camera, which would take a photo and feed it to the card. The card would then compare the PIN it carried to information it derived from the new photo and either accept or reject the person as the rightful owner of the card. The technology could also be used to ensure passport or driver’s license authenticity and to secure ATM or Internet banking transactions, says McIntosh.

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Face recognition software as an example of “function creep”

security, social software, technology / /

From Technology Review‘s’ “Creepy Functions“:

Consider one example of function creep. The Electoral Commission of Uganda has retained Viisage Technology to implement a face recognition system capable of enrolling 10 million voters in 60 days. The goal is to reduce voter registration fraud. But Woodward notes that the system might also be put to work fingering political opponents of the regime. And Uganda probably isn’t the first country that springs to mind when someone says “due process” or “civil rights.”

From Technology Review‘s’ “Big Brother Logs On“:

Take the fact that the faces of a large portion of the driving population are becoming digitized by motor vehicles agencies and placed into databases, says Steinhardt. It isn’t much of a stretch to extend the system to a Big Brother-like nationwide identification and tracking network. Or consider that the Electoral Commission of Uganda has retained Viisage Technology to implement a “turnkey face recognition system” capable of enrolling 10 million voter registrants within 60 days. By generating a database containing the faceprint of every one of the country’s registered voters-and combining it with algorithms able to scour all 10 million images within six seconds to find a match-the commission hopes to reduce voter registration fraud. But once such a database is compiled, notes John Woodward, a former CIA operations officer who managed spies in several Asian countries and who’s now an analyst with the Rand Corporation, it could be employed for tracking and apprehending known or suspected political foes. Woodward calls that “function creep.”

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Smart World of Warcraft Trojan

security, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Information Week‘s’ “ Trojan Snags World Of Warcraft Passwords To Cash Out Accounts“:

A new password-stealing Trojan targeting players of the popular online game “World of Warcraft” hopes to make money off secondary sales of gamer goods, a security company warned Tuesday.

MicroWorld, an Indian-based anti-virus and security software maker with offices in the U.S., Germany, and Malaysia, said that the PWS.Win32.WOW.x Trojan horse was spreading fast, and attacking World of Warcraft players.

If the attacker managed to hijack a password, he could transfer in-game goods — personal items, including weapons — that the player had accumulated to his own account, then later sell them for real-world cash on “gray market” Web sites. Unlike some rival multiplayer online games, Warcraft’s publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, bans the practice of trading virtual items for real cash.

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