My most recently completed knitting project is this beaded mohair shawl, my first attempt at knitting with beads. I followed the “Patagonian Night Sky Shawl” pattern from Knit and Crochet with Beads by Lily Chen, though I included more repeats than the book called for since I wanted a slightly larger shawl. the yarn was a remaindered machine knitting cone that I got cheap a few years ago and had been looking for a purpose for; the beads are iridescent black glass beads – see the detail photo below.
It turns out that knitting with beads is fairly easy, though you have to be a bit careful about keeping the beads on the correct side of the work. The mohair helped, because it had good friction. But, stringing the beads was a huge pain and I had my yarn break a few times because it couldn’t take the stress of having hundreds of beads slid over it. A nice surprise is that the beads give the shawl some good weight, so it seems a bit less likely to slide off my shoulders.
Now I just have to wait for fall to really roll around for me to be able to use it!
Data Boom
It’s almost become a cliche to say that we have so much information now that our biggest challenge is finding the relevant pieces, not making sense of them. And this is a fairly representative article cheerleading for the new technologies that will help with data search, focusing on data mining and the construction of a federated solution that can normalize across very different data sources with different base formats. But this is also a representative article in the misleading way that it blithely says what technologies will allow us to do, with no discussion of where we are now on these projects, what the hard problems remaining are, and realistically assessing how far away these solutions really are. As just a sampling of claims:
“By automatically classifying, summarizing, and discovering the “who,” “what,” “where” and “when” of each document, publishers, government organizations, and enterprises can do more than ever before — on a massive scale.”
“Visualizations allow users to quickly sift through and locate information and patterns in hierarchical, relational, tabular, or time-based data sets;”
“This new generation of solutions will need to go deeper than keyword search — it will require a deep understanding of language, to lend structure to unstructured data for use in downstream analysis and assessment.”
and the closing statement :”The world’s data is at your fingertips – where it should be.”
There is a single acknowledgment of fallability when it is mentioned that people can look at the output of an information extraction system to give feedback to improve the accuracy. But overall, this article reads as if all of these promises are a year or two away. Particularly when it comes to all of the claims about systems being able to handle widely diverse data sources in widely different structural formats, including free-form text, this is just flat wrong. On top of that, the ethical barriers to developing and deploying such solutions aren’t mentioned at all.
All of the technologies mentioned do come out of the problems researchers want to solve, but the business community is not going to get the universal tools that are described here any time soon.
What’s in a Name?
There have been many, many stories about the demotion of Pluto, but I was interested in this story because it;s about a counter-vote by elementary school students to keep Pluto a planet. Which is very sweet, but it’s hard to tell from the story if the students really understood that this wasn’t just a decision about Pluto, with the vote slogans being things like “Pluto makes the world go round!” and “Boo Pluto!”. The vote was not pro- or anti-Pluto. Pluto is still there, after all.
The question, after all, is what we mean when we say the word “planet”. Less well covered than the implications to Pluto were the implications to other celestial bodies to the various definitions proposed. For those students who wanted Pluto to remain a planet, which of those definiteion did they then prefer? Or, as it seems from the article, was that not really the point of the “teachable moment”? I think it’s great to tie in actual modern science with a hook that students can get interested in. But I question whether asking students to vote on a topic that they probably don’t understand helps support the sciences. I fear they were left with an image of scientists as cold-hearted people who voted poor little Pluto out of the club. Too bad the teachable moment couldn’t be that sometimes science has to rule against its preferences, if that is what the data you are faced with requires.
Myth Confirmed
I had a sense of deja vu watching tonight’s episode of Mythbusters (Episode 59: Crimes and Myth-Demeanors 2) where they test the claims that various high tech security systems are intrusion proof – including fingerprint scanners! As I mentioned in my entry earlier this month, my Cyberattacks intersession course tried this same thing, though only with the small computer access scanner, not the major door access scanner Mythbusters featured. They, too, were able to beat the scanners, using more sophisticated techniques, but also being able to use a more plausible method of fingerprint capture. Whereas I like to think that my class and I were testing the myth that these things are vulnerable to spoofs using household materials.
The entire episode is actually worth catching in reruns (which the Discovery channel seem to run constantly) – they came up with some ludicrously simple methods for testing thermal and sonar sensors as well. It’s really fairly damning.
Obscured by trivia
I’ll admit up front that I’ve never been a fan of books of trivia so this discussion of the growing popularity of trivia books was both surprising (there’s really interest in those things?) and interesting [via A&L Daily]. The supposition made is that increased interest in trivia is a symptom of an increased desire for information mixing with an increased desire for instant gratification. There is also the suggestion that a focus on trivia reflects a loss of “the patience required to mine the deeper satisfactions of old”.
There is no rigorous support for these claims, but they sound plausible to me. I think about the recent fashionability of spelling bees. I have no particular problem with spelling bees, and I certainly value the correct use of language, particularly in formal settings. But they seem like a prime example of extensive memorization being equated with intelligence, at least in their mass marketed presentation. I know that, in order to be competitive at a high level in spelling bees, one needs to know the influence of the etymology of a word on its spelling. But I would be really curious to see statistics on the number of spelling bee participants who go on to become linguists. Because, in the presentations I have seen of bees, there isn’t any focus on the deeper understanding of the structure and evolution of language that could be built on top of a comprehensive knowledge of its constituent parts. And that may be due to the bees being presented for a trivia-focused society, but I have suspicions otherwise.
It is interesting to see the article describe trivia books as a offspring of the information age. This is unintuitive to me. As someone who has an always-on internet connection, I cannot imagine buying a trivia book. If there is a tidbit of information I want, I can likely find it on the internet, and if I can’t my library’s on-line catalog can help me find a credible source that will not only include that fact,but generally also an interpretation of it. And that is, I think, the key to why some people bemoan an interest in trivia. Facts are only interesting when you add interpretation. (Any students who have gone through my Fundamentals of Information Systems course with me are now flashbacking to our inforamtion = data + context forrmula….) Trivia is very carefully written to be striking without much interpretation – my guess is that the strikingness is often related to its ability to give a pat summary to a very complex topic. It doens’t invite analysis and can even be phrased to discourage it. The first example in this article says “the first paved road was 7 1/2 miles long and 6 feet wide and was built in Ehypt… 4,600 years ago”. After the initial expected response (I imagine) of “wow – that’s long, and that’s longer ago than one would have thought” the statement gives you nowhere else to go. All of the questions that scream to be answered – why was it built? what was it used for? *how* was it built? how is “paved” being defined? and how do we know this is the first paved road? – just sit there. The shame is that people have gone to the effort to collect all of these facts, but instead of building on the attraction of these nuggets to jump into these more interesting questions, actually stiffle those types of questions by quickly jumping on to the next context-free nugget.
There are obvious educational implications, both for the types of evaluations that we value of our students, and for the expectations of our students for what “learning” means. They reinforce the importance, in our “information age”, of teaching students how to process and analyze – how to be active participants in information consumption.
The Final Soution Review
In the further adventures of catching up on book reviews, I give you my review of The Final Solution by Michael Chabon, reproduced below for your convenience.
On the Importance of Being a Nit-Picking Language Geek
In the case of the $2.13 million comma, misplaced punctuation in a contract will allow one of the parties to withdraw earlier than intended, as the contract-cancelation clause was inadvertently attached to the entire contract, and not just a restricted time period [via Language Log]. It’s a lovely example for use in any course where the instructor might want to justify grammar “counting”. I think it also illustrates the value of practicing the skill of proofreading.
Security Holes
Of course, having decided to try browsing via RSS feeds a few days ago (and, btw, I am loving the convenience of seeing which of the pages I read regularly has new content), Slashdot has to link to a whitepaper describing the security risks in subscribing to RSS and Atom feeds. They’re what you would expect – the standard potential for the site owner to insert malicious code in the feed, along with concerns that, because of the ability to put third-party feeds in what might be an otherwise trusted site, feeds allow insertion of exploits into new realms. The advice seems to be to only subscribe to feeds at trustworthy sites, be careful about subscribing to feeds that include third-party content such as comments if they aren’t filtered for malicious code, and set your browser preferences to disallow embedded code from running amok on your computer.
I’ve actually been catching up on my security reading the past week, and it reminded me that I never posted a link here to my write-up of our end-of-the-course project in my Cyberattacks class this past January, where we spoofed an APC and a Microsoft fingerprint scanner using modeling clay, wax, and other household materials. I managed to capture some video of the spoofs working, which is linked on the page, but I also tried to give a fairly detailed description of what did and didn’t work.
Sweet, Delicious Data
OMG! Google has announced that not only have they been collecting n-gram data from a training corpus they have built from on-line sources of a trillion works, but they’re goiing to make the n-gram data available via the UPenn Linguistic Data Consortium in the near future. I don’t even have a need for this data at the moment, but I’m drooling over the idea. I’m sure there’s some way I can make use of this in my current project…… [via Language Log]
Grade A Milk
You’re Amazon. You decide to branch into the on-line grocery sales business. It’s still an Amazon store, so you show a photo, list product features, and, sure, you allow product reviews. And then, inevitably, people review your milk [via Boing Boing]. And your bananas. And your cucumbers.
By the way, don’t ever have dinner over at Amazon – they think that baked “scooped out [cucumbers] halves with buttered break crumbs, top with parmesan cheese makes a great side dish”.