The free thinker

This story on Morning edition made me laugh and laugh. The setup for the joke is that, as a result of the commitments that the Secretary of the Treasury has made over the last two weeks, the United States government is in the business of processing home mortgages and credit-card debt. This means that someone from the government will have to scrutinize all of those risky loans that our financial institutions made. Among recent mortgage loans, only about one in ten was evaluated properly by the financiers, but the government is going to have to look carefully at all of them if it expects to recover any of the money we’re shelling out.

It goes without saying, though, that the existing staff of regulators is far too small and too poorly trained to do all this difficult work. We need some experts. We need to outsource the problem to people who really know how to assess mortgage loans accurately and in detail. Where will we find such people? Where, oh where?

Well, it turns out that there are quite a few folks who have just lost their jobs with large financial institutions and have lots of experience in just this kind of work! Why don’t we hire them on? And, in addition, there are some surviving large financial institutions who are at somewhat loose ends, now that they aren’t making so many loans. They’re perfect sources of expertise about mortgage loans — they’ve made millions of them! Why don’t we just contract out the whole troublesome job to them?

The news story barely mentioned the next problem: oversight. Obviously neither the Congress nor the existing government regulators are capable of managing such a large staff of loan examiners to make sure that they work efficiently and accurately in the service of the public. Where, oh where, can we find administrators who really know how to manage financial institutions overseeing large quantities of iffy mortgage loans?

Along the lines suggested above for the loan examiners, I have a modest proposal. I hear that there are quite a few senior executives at investment banks and institutions like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae who are now looking for new jobs. They have exactly the kind of experience that the government needs to manage the bailout programs! Admittedly, they’re used to receiving exorbitant salaries — but, what the hell, we’ve got seven hundred billion dollars to play around with! We can afford to hire the best!

Filed by stone at 22:19 under Uncategorized
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Today I received an e-mail from a representative of a publisher that we’ll call “Foobar Instructional Publishing,” inviting me to review their spring line of new textbooks in computer science. Alas, the real purpose of the e-mail was to introduce me to the company’s obnoxious digital-restrictions management system for e-books, which we’ll call “BlingWise,” and to try to persuade me to use it and to require my students to use it. Before signing up, I looked over the BlingWise terms-of-service page. Then I replied to the publisher’s representative:

Would you like to start reviewing texts now?

Sure. I’ll be teaching one course in the spring: CSC 302, “Programming language concepts.” I expect to be using Essentials of programming languages by Daniel Friedman et al., but I’d be happy to look at alternatives.

Do you want a quick, easy, and “greener” way to view the Foobar titles available for your courses?

I’m not sure. What kind of digital-restrictions management have you imposed on the site? Usually such systems are a lot more cumbersome than having a hard copy of the text to work with.

BlingWise e-texts are a great choice! A BlingWise e-text has exactly the same content as the print version. Additionally, it provides a very convenient way to search for topics or keywords, create a shortlist of titles you might be interested in, make teaching notes in the text, or even email individual pages to your colleagues to get their feedback.

Section 5c of the Terms and Conditions of Service and Use for BlingWise specifies that an instructor who receives access to an ElectroniText may not “share … an ElectroniText, or any printed portions thereof, with any other person.” In suggesting that I might e-mail pages of an ElectroniText to my colleagues, you seem to be encouraging me to violate this restriction.

I note that, if I agreed to this section of the Terms and Conditions of Service and Use, I might be giving up my fair-use rights to use the material in the ElectroniText for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, as described in Title 17, Chapter 1, section 107 of the United States Code. I think I’d rather have the fair-use rights than the ElectroniText.

It is easy to sign in to your account. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to www.blingwise.com/instructors

Already you’ve got two Flash files for me to download and a third-party cookie from Google Analytics that you want me to accept. Lucky thing I’m running in Firefox with the NoScript add-on.

2. Select Sign In
3. Enter your faculty email address and select forgot password and it will be emailed to you within minutes

Well, (a) I didn’t forget my password, and (b) the e-address and password that I provided to BlingWise last March no longer work. So I
suspect that BlingWise forgot my password. This is not encouraging.

You don’t say how many minutes it will take to send the e-mail, but it’s been half an hour and no new password has arrived.

I hope this is a convenient way for you to review a textbook and that the features help you in preparation for Winter/Spring 2009. In the future, I would like to send you evaluation copies via BlingWise and then follow-up with a print copy if you need to see it to make a final decision.

I don’t think so. I have another problem with the Terms and Conditions of Service and Use: You presume to tell me (in section 6) what I can and can’t link to on my Web pages, for what purposes I can link to certain sites, and even what I can and can’t say on the pages that display the links. I’d prefer to decide for myself what I link to and why, and what I say in the documents that contain the links.

Until you fix some of the problems with the BlingWise interface and rewrite the Terms and Conditions of Service and Use to remove all of the ridiculous attempts to infringe on your customers’ civil liberties, I’d prefer that you just send the hard copies of books that you’d like me to consider.

Thanks!

Filed by stone at 11:09 under Uncategorized
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The text of my recent “Thursday Extras” talk is now available at my Grinnell College Web site.

Filed by stone at 9:06 under Uncategorized
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I wonder why the conservative pundits who are demanding that the United States go to the defense of Georgia don’t recognize Russia’s attack on that country as an application of the Ledeen Doctrine. Surely by now they understand that, when a powerful nation makes war on a weak one, it’s merely rhetorical.

Filed by stone at 23:19 under Uncategorized
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On the other hand, there are a lot of small pleasures in life in Grinnell. At the grocery store today, a first-time trainee was at the register, and an experienced checker was talking her through every step of the process. She rang up the items, painstakingly applied my bottle refund and the five-cent discount that I receive for bringing in cloth bags, and I gave her a check. The supervisor was interpreting each stage of the processing — type in the amount, enter the bank code, and so on. Then a notice appeared on the register read-out: VERIFY SIGNATURE.

A vision of what the author of the register software had in mind in coding up this notice flashed before me: In a large city, I’d have my two forms of photo ID in my hand at this point, and would be preparing to yield up whatever else the verifier might call for — a thumbprint, a quick retinal scan, a sputum sample for DNA analysis.  At the same moment, I wondered what the supervisor would tell the trainee to do at this point. She knows me well, since I’ve bought groceries at this store at least twice a week for twenty-five years, and in any case I have never been asked for supporting identification there. On the other hand, the register software was clearly demanding some positive action on the part of the cashier; it wouldn’t have seemed right to tell the trainee just to ignore it.

The trainee looked around at the supervising checker, apparently also wondering what VERIFY SIGNATURE might mean in this context. Without missing a beat, the supervisor explained: “Make sure the customer has remembered to sign the check.”

Filed by stone at 19:59 under Uncategorized
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“Does your house need a tail? Sizing up customer-owned fiber”
Timothy B. Lee
Ars technica, July 30, 2008
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/customer-owned-fiber.ars

A correspondent directed me to this recent essay, which deals with the problem of how to pay for a big infrastructure improvement in residential Internet service: laying down a fiber-optic connection from each home to a network peering point. The author describes a four-hundred-home pilot project in which the individual fiber strands are paid for and subsequently owned by the customers, rather than by any Internet service provider. The idea is to promote competition among ISPs by lowering the cost barrier of entering a local market (since it will be much cheaper to provide service only up to the peering point, rather than all the way to the customer’s residence).

The author gives several reasons why this scheme is unlikely to catch on. The foremost is that it’s not in the short-term interest of any current ISPs. And there’s another reason why it won’t work in rural towns like the one I live in: the local market isn’t large enough to attract competing ISPs — even running service to a local peering point isn’t cost-effective.

Usually, residents of rural areas just resign themselves the consequences of being on the trailing end of technological change, except in a few cases where it can be effected through individual initiative and investment (satellite dishes, solar collectors). Once in a long while there is a successful government program like Rural Electrification. Somewhat more often, it’s possible to form a cooperative to get the job done, although private companies tend to regard cooperatives as competitors (even when they themselves can’t figure out any way to make a profit doing what the cooperatives do) and persuade legislators to prohibit them.

Nevertheless, a consumer cooperative seems to me the most plausible approach to solving the last-mile problem in rural towns like mine. The large telecommunication companies have to reason to take any interest at all in markets this small.

Filed by stone at 9:11 under Uncategorized
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Movies derived from comic books are entirely too faithful to their originals: visually cluttered and superficial, with incoherent and implausible plots.  The dark knight isn’t an exception, though it doesn’t look quite as cheap as most of the genre.

Some folks who recommended this movie tried to tell me that it posed serious, thought-provoking problems in applied ethics.  I’m afraid not.  Presumably, they were thinking of a scene in which the lunatic terrorist villain sabotages two ferries, each carrying many people, in mid-voyage, and provides the captain of each ferry with a detonator that will cause the other ferry to blow up, with catastrophic consequences.  The villain promises to allow the passengers of one ferry to survive, if they use their detonator to blow up the other.  If neither blows up the other before a specified time, however, the villain will intervene and detonate both charges.

The two groups of passengers arrive at different answers.  One group dithers until immediately before the deadline, at which time one courageous man steps forward to accept the responsibility of throwing the detonator overboard.  The other group holds a referendum and announces the result, but then ignores that expression of the common will and dithers until immediately before the deadline, at which point one courageous man steps forward to accept the responsibility of blowing up the other ferry — and then funks the job.  Fortunately, in the nick of time, one courageous man steps forward to prevent the villain from carrying out his backup threat.

I don’t regard this as a serious problem.  First of all, one never cooperates with lunatic terrorist villains in such cases, since they’re perfectly capable of blowing up everyone involved no matter what.  This villain in particular would have found it amusing to lie to the captains, telling them that the detonators were cross-connected as described when in fact each one would blow up the captain’s own ferry.  Nothing in the slapped-together setup for this scene excludes this possibility.

In the second place, one should never cooperate with lunatic terrorist villains in such cases anyway, even if you have good reason to rely on their promises, since they’re trying to do things that are wicked, and by cooperating you become accomplices to their wicked acts.

Of course, fear for one’s life or for the lives of one’s family or friends might lead one to cooperate with a lunatic terrorist villain anyway, even though it’s obviously wrong to do so.  This is a dramatic situation, and a talented scenarist could use it to reveal character.  It is not, however, a serious, thought-provoking problem in applied ethics.

Filed by stone at 22:48 under Uncategorized
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A colleague has some fifteen-year-old BASIC programs that she’d like to revise and reuse, so I set up the free-software Yabasic interpreter on MathLAN, and we moved across a couple of the programs and started working on getting them running. Our experiments reinforced all the lessons of my essay “Keeping stuff: how to preserve course papers despite technological change.”

The first file that we looked at had the filetype .BAS, but did not contain the text of a BASIC program, but rather some representation derived from the program text, in a proprietary format designed to prevent any meddlesome outsiders from doing anything useful with the program without working through the original program-development environment — which was superseded twenty years ago and then abandoned by the company that made it.

With some difficulty, we found another program, which had fortuitously been saved as plain text. We started into it and found non-standard statement types and non-standard ways of indicating the types of variables. It was depressing to realize how extensive the changes to the program will have to be in order to get it working under Yabasic.

The lessons of “Keeping stuff”: Use free software, not proprietary software; save your work in standard file formats, not proprietary ones, especially not in formats that aren’t human-readable; use “empowering” software that cooperates with other tools, not “domineering” software that wants to do everything itself and tries to impede other tools; observe standards (admittedly difficult to do with BASIC, which had a very weak and incomplete standard).

Filed by stone at 16:56 under Uncategorized
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Little brother, by Cory Doctorow.  New York: Tor Books, 2008.  ISBN 978-0-7653-1985-2.

Summary: A high-school senior in San Francisco happens to be near the site of a catastrophic bombing that appears to be the work of terrorists.  The Department of Homeland Security arrests, interrogates, imprisons, and mistreats him and several of his friends.  After most of them are released, they become underground activists for civil rights, organizing  various kinds of demonstrations and protests over an ad hoc pirate network of repurposed Xboxes.  Their loose-knit organization becomes powerful enough to prompt a renewed attack by the DHS, which  underestimates the resourcefulness of teenagers and, in particular, their ability to use modern communications technology effectively.

The author intended this novel for “young adults,” a category that in this case seems to run from precocious eleven-year-olds to recent high-school graduates.  It is set in a dystopian near future in which the consequences of Americans’ willingness to trade liberty for security pervade society. For instance, the protagonist’s high school has security cameras everywhere, running gait-recognition software in a particularly inept attempt to track the movements of students and visitors to the school.  DHS officials are portrayed frankly as villains — goonish, occasionally sadistic bureaucrats.

Doctorow uses this somewhat melodramatic coming-of-age plot as a framework into which he can pack quite a bit of information about how to resist and circumvent governments’ attempts to intrude on citizens’ privacy and violate our civil rights.  This is less didactic than it sounds. Doctorow establishes the protagonist from the first page as someone who comfortably inhabits a high-tech world and has spent most of his childhood figuring out ways of breaking the ridiculous rules that authorities try to impose, so instead of a lecturer’s drone we hear the voice of a teenage enthusiast explaining to his friends how to beat the system.

The full text of the book is available for free download in many formats at the author’s Web site.  It’s under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0).

Filed by stone at 21:05 under Uncategorized
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My wife and I recently saw Across the universe on DVD.  It was much better than I supposed that it would be. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie that contained so many unexpected pleasures.  I’m not sure that someone who didn’t live through the late sixties or hasn’t heard most of the songs a thousand times would have the same reaction, but mine was that the director, Julie Taymor, had somehow retained a keen sense of the experimental and incisive nature of the Beatles’ music and managed to restore a lot of that radical freshness.

Before seeing the movie, I would have bet that no conceivable arrangement of “I want to hold your hand” could have given me any new aesthetic pleasure.  But I was wrong.

The guy who did the musical arrangements chose his general approach well:  Instead of trying to punch up the songs, to make them more “brilliant” or to update their rock elements somehow, he minimized them, taking out a lot of the most famous riffs, orchestrations, decorative chord transitions, and harmony lines, sometimes even leaving just the vocal and a sort of basso continuo effect.  Anyone who has heard the Beatles’ version often enough can fill in the missing elements automatically, and in a curious way they often sound better, or at least more appropriate to the movie, when they aren’t physically audible.

There are a few weak points: the “historical” elements are sometimes presented heavy-handedly, and it was a terrible mistake to allow Eddie Izzard to have even a small role in this film.  (He sings “For the benefit of Mr. Kite,” which must have seemed to someone like a clever idea when it was first proposed, but the execution was atrocious.  The DVD includes two additional takes of his performance.  They are equally bad.)

However, the presentation of most of the songs was amazing.  Even some of the songs that are nearly impossible to arrange coherently, like “Happiness is a warm gun” and “Helter skelter,” are performed in a way that makes them explicable (if not intelligible).

Filed by stone at 20:20 under Uncategorized
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