Yesterday’s Thoughts

If we can’t have democracy in the US?

Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs is complaining about the law firms that are representing, or attempting to represent Guantánamo detainees. According to the
New York Times, Mr. Stimson appeared on Federal News Radio earlier this week questioning the role of lawyers from almost 150 US firms in providing legal representation to detainees and suggesting that the corporate CEO who also employee these firms should reconsider. “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

What’s wrong with Stimson’s argument?

Well first off he appears unable to recognize that few to none of those detained at Guantánamo are guilty of anything, much less being guilty of attacking the US in 2001. The administration continues to maintain this fiction that everyone detained at Guantánamo, is in fact guilty, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. By July of 2005, 175 detainees had been found to not be enemy combatants, by the government’s own findings.

Secondly, if these detainees are guilty, there is only one was to establish this fact. A legitimate trial, with established rules of evidence and adequate legal representation. There is no other way. These attorneys must be present to establish Mr. Stimson’s claims.

Finally, Mr. Stimson, despite being an attorney in the Virginia bar doesn’t seem to understand democracy. The right to a fair trial by your peers is a fundamental tenet of democracy going back to the Magna Carta. If Mr. Stimson, as a representative of the US Defense Department, doesn’t understand the most basic aspects of democracy, how is that same Defense Department going to export democracy to Iraq?

Gerald Ford’s policy of healing and moving on, whether it was the right thing to do, or the wrong thing to do, was a failure. Rather than allowing honest conflict of opinion to flourish and consensus to form, Ford attempted to shut down debate and paper over conflict.

The debate addresses whether Ford was right to pardon Richard Nixon in order to heal the country and allow “the nation to move on“. Somehow this debate seems to only only occur in the abstract moral and political terms about the objective. Was it right to pardon Nixon?

What about in terms of whether the objection succeeded or failed? Did the pardon heal the country? Has the nation moved on?

I think that in those terms, it is clear the plan of healing and moving on, has failed abysmally. The mere fact that the question continues to surface, shows that the nation hasn’t moved on.

In addition, the questions that were in the air about Nixon’s behavior in 1974, remain in the air today. If the President does it, is it illegal? Is the President above the law? When should the United States intervene in the affairs of other countries? If we choose to intervene, how much force should we use? Was Vietnam a failure of will, or a failure of policy?

If the country was healed, and the nation moved on, why are we still debating these questions? I think the answer is clear, whatever the apparent merits of Ford’s pardon, heal and move on strategy in 1974, in 2007, it is clear that the strategy was a failure.

What’s laughable about the Alicia Colon piece I blogged about yesterday?

The claim that The Drudge Report is a liberal site is laughable in general. How could you know anything at all about American politics and make this claim?

Here is her supporting evidence:

The propaganda of the enemedia — an excellent descriptive term coined by one poster to Lucianne.com — continues to sully news coverage, thanks to Mr. Drudge. A study of press bias by a professor of political science at the University of California-Los Angeles, Tim Groseclose, listed the Drudge Report as one of the most liberal sites on the Web because it consistently posts articles from left-of-center sources.

This Groseclose study seems to have received a lot of play from economists and other social scientists (although not enough to cause the authors to fix the broken html on the linked page). It’s obviously nonsense in absolute terms, the ACLU is reported as right of center by this study, and my citing of the New York Post’s here means I’m a conservative, but even if it weren’t, Colon’s citation of the findings are wrong and belie her first name (Alicia means truth, according to her). The Drudge Report is not one of the most liberal sites on the web according to the Groseclose study. It is the 14th most liberal out of the 20 sites that were surveyed. Truth would require Colon to say that the study listed the Drudge Report as one of the slightly more conservative media outlets.

The claim of this survey was that the media were more liberal than the average member of congress and according to this study there were only two media outlets that were more liberal that the average member of congress. Drudge’s collecting leads from all sites forces him to appear to be more liberal than it really is, according to the Groseclose formula. It’s not that it is “one of the most liberal sites on the Web because it consistently posts articles from left-of-center sources.” It’s that since according to this study almost all sources are liberal, Drudge has to score as a liberal on these measures. Drudge merely collects news, he doesn’t generate (very much) fresh reporting. If Drudge were merely a neutral aggregator his site would be at the middle of all the sites surveyed in this group, not 4 spots to the right of there. Given the relatively greater numbers of news stories that the liberal sources produce compared to the conservative sources produce (the top 3 most liberal are the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal and CBS Evening News, the top 3 most conservative are the Washington Times, Fox News Special Report and Newshour and Groseclose doesn’t give a breakdown on how many stories that the produced only the period of time over which they were followed) it must require a Herculean effort on Drudge’s part to select enough stories from the right side of the Groseclose scale to not fall into the center or even left side of the scale.

When you come down to it, you have to judge Drudge not on the sources he cites, but on the sources that cite him. That doesn’t leave any room for alleging that Drudge is a liberal.

In this laughable op-ed from the New York Post, the author concludes by making a big point about her name:

My name, Alicia, means truth, so here it is.

I wouldn’t go there if I were her.

Her last name is Colon.

In Hunting the elusive search strategy Jon Udell proposes to study the methods that people use to effectively search. He proposes capturing individual cases of searching for something and then analyzing those cases.

The point is to help people learn to search.

That’s an interesting approach, and it would benefit from having some good tools to capture the steps of a particular search in a way that the process could be simple annotated. I assume that Google is constantly mining their users search histories to improve their results. Of course, they don’t have any direct access to the users thoughts (or do they?, bwahahaha) but many cases are probably pretty obvious, especially if you can see where the user eventually ended up.

On the other hand, I already have conscious mental model that I use when searching. Maybe others would benefit by it. It has the advantage of being a concrete physical task instead of an abstract logical or mathematical concept. This kind of model is easier to grasp in your mind because it is actually possible to grasp in your hands. Having held the objects in your hands and manipulated them demystifies the process. There is an enormous area of your brain devoted to your hands. Let’s use it.

The mental model comes from an old information retrieval technology called edge-notched cards. When I was a child you could purchase special index cards for research note taking and filing. The cards were about 5 x 8 inches and had rows of holes along three edges. There were two or three holes deep and probably 40-50 columns of holes along the top and 20-30 along the sides. The center was lined like a conventional index card. A corner was cut off so that if you had a deck of cards, you could be sure that all the cards were oriented the same way.

The idea was that you would take notes on subject and then “file” the cards by using a special cutter to notch the holes into slots. You would search by inserting a rod into the holes of the card that you had decided would be associated with the search term and lifting the deck. Those cards that match your search term were notched and would fall from the deck. If you wanted to narrow your search further, you could repeat that search on your smaller deck. If you wanted to widen your search, you could go back to the main deck and pull out more search terms.

The power of this approach was that the “terms” could be anything. You could have a term be “Rasputin” or your term could be “Stories of the debauchery of Catherine the Great,” or it could be 1917. You could have as many index terms as you had holes in the card. The downside is that you had to have a pretty good idea what your terms ought to be when you started and that you could run out of holes. I don’t know how these problems played out in practice.

There is something about this concrete metaphor that is very useful and accessible. I know about databases, set operations, boolean logic, tagging and the mathematics of searching, but this concrete image of cards in a deck is what comes back to me when I am searching.

It also gives rise to a mental model of what the search landscape looks like. There are certain areas or the landscape that are easy to find. If I search for my name, or this domain name, there aren’t that many documents returned. Searching is easy when you have terms that return a small number of documents.

As I have blogged before about searching, it is normally pretty easy to find a very specific phrase, such as an error message. Just quote the non-varying part of the message in a search, and magically pull the right result out of the web. This is becoming more difficult as the search landscape is polluted by application trace files and logs. (As an aside, my experience is that it is becoming more and more common to do a very specific search and to find a log file where the same error is seen, but without any assistance. Google’s decision to index log files increases the noise of the search space.)

The search for the name “Edge-notched cards” was hard. I was sure that the cards had a name. My experience with them was seeing them sold in the pages of a Heath Kit catalog, which must have called them something. There are many pages that refer to “index cards” and there is no shortage of pages that refer to both “index cards” and “hole punch”. The landscape is busy in these areas. Apparently both office suppliers and teachers are prolific producers of web pages that use both of these terms.

By searching for “index card holes filing” (no quotes) I did manage to find this page where Matt Neuberg reviews a product called SlipBox. Apparently Matt is using the same mental model for search as I am, and he has the advantage of having used the cards for a significant project, but if knows what they are called, he isn’t telling. Adding “search” to the terms, moves Matt up the page, that’s a good sign, and another rule for Jon’s list, but doesn’t add anything useful.

A Wikipedia article, Index Card from searching ‘”index cards” hole information search’ says that these are called “Needle cards” and asserts that they were the precursor of Hollerith (”punched”) cards. The article also asserts that needle cards were a 20th century innovation. As I know independently that Hollerith cards were used in the 1890 census, I see that the article isn’t entirely consistent. I’m also dubious of the claim that needle cards were precursors of punched cards in any case. The cards are the same, but the technology is not. They are more like two forks of a tree instead of lineal descendants.

A Google search for “Needle cards” refers most frequently to the cards that needles are sold on and apparently are collectable. (No help here.)

Going back to the Wikipedia entry for Punch Cards there was a reference to the Wikipedia entry Edge-notched card, and here we have a winner. These were invented in 1896 (so I was right about them not being a precursor of punch cards). Here is the orignial source for the above picture.

There are many Google results for edge-notched cards and my searches indicate that edge-notched cards is the term of art, but this article says,

A variety of names, generic and trademarked, have been used for marginal punched-card systems: edge-notched cards, slotted cards, E-Z Sort, Zatocards, McBee, McBee Keysort, Flexisort, Velom, Rocket, and many others

I have been reading The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs.

It was published in 1969 which means I have been walking around blindly for the past 37 years not noticing it. I don’t know how that is possible. So many of my interests intersect in this single thin book, the history of agriculture, the development of cities, the ecology of city life, the impacts of communities on innovation, and yet I had never heard of Jacobs or her work until her death earlier this year.

An significant thing that I grasped from my first reading of the book was the effect of distance from the city on innovation. She is working to paint a picture of the development of the city as proceeding the development of agriculture. This is the opposite of what I learned in elementary school and college - agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent and the storage of grain was the germ that permitted the development of cities - and this understanding permeated the rural cultures that I have grown up in and around.

Her key argument is a convincing story of how agriculture could have been created in trading cities, so I don’t know the status of the evidence in support of her theory. Presumably the past 37 years have produced some evidence pro or con, but as I never came across her work in any of my smattering of undergraduate anthropology and archeology courses, maybe her theories never made it into the academic mainstream. I’ll have to Google about for some research.

The interesting thing that I want to capture here is Jacob’s ideas about the comparative richness of innovation in urban and rural areas. In the city, innovation reinforces innovation. Suppose I’m a trader of obsidian. I have a number of problems in my business, but for concreteness consider the costs of shipping. If I had an easier way to carry obsidian, I could increase my profits on every trip by carrying more. As I walk around town, I observe weavers making cloth, tanners curing hides, carpenters building boxes. I have several different possible sources for creating containers for shipping. I don’t have to rely on my skills, or those of my immediate neighbors, for innovation. My opportunities for innovation are greater, merely because I have more opportunities. It is possible to combine the work of the carpenter, the tanner and the weaver because they can all work together and learn from one another.

On the other hand, rural areas lose out on these possibilities in several ways. The further from the city, the more times knowledge must be transmitted. Information is lost at every step. Having fewer neighbors means fewer skills in the neighborhood. If you are a farmer, even if you have an idea for an improved shipping container, you have less potential for realizing this idea because you and your neighbors know less than is know in a neighborhood 100 times as large.

[This post was written in the last quarter of 2006, but ended up with a timestamp of January 12th, 2007. I've changed the date back 2 months.]

In honor of Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, quotations from Rumsfeld’s Rules

• It is easier to get into something than to get out of it.
• If a prospective presidential approach can’t be explained clearly enough to be understood well, it probably hasn’t been thought through well enough. If not well understood by the American people, it probably won’t “sail” anyway. Send it back for further thought.

For an examples of these rule in action any standard history of the Iraq fiasco, although the second sentence of the second rule was obviously violated. The operative principle there was, “If you have some half-baked idea with absolutely no evidence to support it that you want to ’sail’, get someone with a national reputation to tell a tale of outright lies.”

Perhaps that rule should be attributed to Rove (or Orwell.)

[Comments closed March 7, 2007. Spammers seem to love this topic.]

[Fixed a typo, August 20, 2007. On the plus side, I am the first result when you search for prospecIftive.]

From Inside Tri comes this nugget about training to swim at race pace:

If you have a hard time hitting your desired race pace during a given workout, try shortening your intervals until you can. For example, if your goal race pace is 1:20 per 100 meters, but you can’t hold that pace over 100 meters, try breaking up your speed work into shorter intervals with rest in between. In this case, I would suggest the athlete try 100’s at a 1:20 with 15-20 seconds of rest in between each interval. As the athlete grows stronger, he or she can add 25 or 50 meters to the length of each interval.

If my goal for an Olympic distance triathlon were to swim 1500 meters in 20 minutes (1:20 per 100 meters) and I currently could not swim a single 100 meter interval in 1:20 of swimming, I would be readjusting my goal. Maybe I don’t understand my own athletic potential.

On the other hand, even if I decided that 15 continuous repetitions for of 100 meters on 1:20 were a reasonable goal, I don’t understand how swimming 100s on 1:20 with 15-20 seconds rest is possible if I am not able to swim a single 100 on 1:20.

Regular readers know have a handful of disparate phenomena that are interesting to me because they are mathematically similar. Each is a process that traverses a probability tree and becomes more or less probably as the number of branches in the tree increase. My posts on Wiio’s Laws, network effects in rural economies (Jane Jacob’s work, I’m working on a post for the future), probability and the justice system, take the first available turn, and analyzing an argument all bear on this subject.

The first phenomenon of this class that I ever thought deeply about was distillation. Read the rest of this entry »