Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

BOLO 2010 photos

My photos from yesterday’s blogging event are on Picasa:

I think I managed to get a shot of everyone who read, with a few of the crowd thrown in. Some more photos are in a Facebook album. I also have photos from last year’s event.

My thanks go out to David Scrimshaw, who had the cleverness and boldness to point a couple of the ceiling-mounted house lights at the microphone, greatly facilitating the photography of all present. Indeed, there were very few annoying flashes.

If anybody wants full resolution files, they can contact me. Keep in mind, the original files are about 10 megabytes a piece, at 5616 x 3744 pixels. Also, my internet connection is in terrible shape. Getting these on Picasa took hours, and many false starts.

They were pretty much all shot between 6,400 ISO and 25,600 ISO. I was expecting the venue to be a bit brighter, so I brought my 70-200 f/4 lens, whereas my 50mm f/1.8 might have been a better choice.

Blog Out Loud Ottawa 2010

Blog Out Loud Ottawa 2010, which I mentioned before, went very well. My thanks go out to Lynn from TurtleHead for organizing it, bringing together twenty four readers and dozens of audience members.

All the night’s readings were good, but some of my favourites were:

I had heard Evey’s entertaining Bus People on the radio a few days before.

I was the only one who presented a political post written in an editorial style – Why conservatives should love carbon taxes. Perhaps next year I will have some company. After all, blogs can be turned to serve many purposes, including advocating changes in public policy.

Does caffeine work?

You Are Not So Smart is a blog that seeks to catalog the many mental failings of human beings: from the confirmation bias to our ignorance about our past beliefs.

In one post, they argue that caffeine (coffee, specifically) mostly just alleviates caffeine withdrawal. Rather than lifting you up from ‘normal’ to a more wakeful state, it just brings you back to normal, from the depressed state that caffeine consumption establishes as your new norm:

The result is you become very sensitive to adenosine, and without coffee you get overwhelmed by its effects.

After eight hours of sleep, you wake up with a head swimming with adenosine. You feel like shit until you get that black gold in you to clean out those receptor sites.

That perk you feel isn’t adding anything substantial to you – it’s bringing you back to just above zero.

Neurologist Stephen Novella echoes this position on his blog:

The take home is that regular use of caffeine produces no benefit to alertness, energy, or function. Regular caffeine users are simply staving off caffeine withdrawal with every dose – using caffeine just to return them to their baseline. This makes caffeine a net negative for alertness, or neutral at best if use is regular enough to avoid any withdrawal.

As an experiment, I am going to try abandoning caffeine for a week or so. I will report on any notable effects, though it is always hard to determine which observed changes in ones mental life are the consequence of any particular change in circumstances, given all the complexities of life and all the failings of our mental faculties.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a collection of over 1,400 miniature lectures, delivered by one man via YouTube. They cover topics that range widely, in disciplines including mathematics, chemistry, biology, statistics, history, finance, and physics.

From the twenty or so I have tried, they seem to be quite accessible, at least for those with a basic grounding in mathematics. I had never covered matrices in high school or university math, but the videos in the linear algebra collection have left me with what feels like an adequate theoretical awareness of what they are, why they are useful, and how they fit into mathematics more broadly.

The whole collection is worth a look.

Now on Twitter

In the ongoing quest for eyeballs, there is now a new way to follow updates from a sibilant intake of breath and BuryCoal.com:

http://www.twitter.com/sindark/

http://www.twitter.com/burycoal/

Each will be updated when new content goes onto the site, for the benefit of readers who prefer to keep track of things that way. It won’t necessarily be every post that goes there, but I am hoping it will be a way to spread awareness of some more interesting or important ones.

RSS

By default, WordPress creates Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds that can be checked in an automated way using tools like BlogLines or Google Reader. sindark.com has a feed for posts and another for comments, as does BuryCoal.com (comments).

Facebook

Both sites also have Facebook pages: sindark.com, BuryCoal.com.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

If you are trying to make money from a website, search engine optimization (SEO) is a matter of vital concern. An enormous amount of web traffic arises from somebody, somewhere in the world throwing a search query into Google or Bing or Yahoo (but really Google) and then picking from among the results that appear.

This is perhaps an unprecedented situation in human history, because now website developers have an overwhelming incentive to produce pages that appear high in the rankings of popular search engines, when people put popular queries into them. As a result, these website creators are no longer just producing content designed to appeal to human beings – it also needs to stand out as special to the mathematical algorithms that drive the world’s search engines.

For the most part, I would say this is a bad thing. Algorithms can deal with fantastically more data than a person ever could. Google crawls through an impossible number of blog posts every day. At the same time, people are much more clever when it comes to telling a good site from a bad site. They rely on cues that it is very hard to teach algorithms to respond to.

Certainly, the world is much better off as the result of the existence of powerful search engines. That said, I hope that SEO proves to be a dying industry in the long term, as search engines begin to more closely approximate the behaviours and reactions of real human beings. When that happens, web designers and content producers may start optimizing their work for its human consumers, rather than for the robots that are often the intermediary between humans with a desire for certain kinds of information and the humans who can actually provide it.

(Full disclosure: This site does earn money from advertising, but so far that has very much been a matter of paying the cost of web hosting. In terms of income per hour of work, I would be enormously better off working any minimum wage job.)

Blogging out loud

I have attended and enjoyed a couple of Blog Out Loud Ottawa events, at which local bloggers read one selected post in front of an audience. This year, I decided to give it a try. The event is on July 7th, at 7:00pm at Irene’s Pub on Bank Street, just north of Landsdowne Park.

My contribution will certainly be outside the norm, as most people read posts that are narrative accounts of their own personal experiences. I will almost certainly select one of my posts on climate change.

The post is meant to be from between June 2009 and June 2010, but the selection is otherwise up to me. I want to choose something that is informative and accessible, even for people without much knowledge about climate change, politics, or environmental issues.

Suggestions?

HDstarcraft and HuskyStarcraft – viral marketing?

Blizzard’s Starcraft must surely be one of the most enduring computer games of all time. It came out when I was in high school, but is still actively played by a large number of people, especially in South Korea. There are even professional matches and tournaments.

Now, Blizzard is in the middle of a long beta release of Starcraft II. I think the key purpose is to balance the three races, so that good players will be approximately equally likely to use all three. The balancing is subtle and detailed: involving everything from the cost and time required for weapons upgrades to the potentially useful hexagonal grid projected by Protoss pylons, which could aid accurate placement of buildings.

Throughout the beta, there have been two internet personalities releasing high-resolution narrated replays of high level matches: HDstarcraft and HuskyStarcraft. They had one sponsored tournament, but generally don’t seem to advertise for anybody. That, combined with the relative professionalism of their operation and the sheer amount of time they are putting into it makes me wonder if they might be part of a viral marketing campaign run by Blizzard, designed to build anticipation for the forthcoming game.

This is pure speculation on my part but if it is true, it is a clever move on Blizzard’s part. The number of people watching each screencast has been rising steadily, and is now consistently over 100,000. The people watching may end up as some of the most active members of the eventual Starcraft II community, after commercial release. Even if Blizzard has nothing to do with these replays, I think undertaking such an extensive beta release (with more than 13 patches already) shows a good amount of respect for their customers, for whom the issue of balance will eventually be very important.

[Update: 14 December 2010] I no longer think it is at all likely that HD and Husky are part of a viral marketing campaign. Still, it would have been a pretty good idea on the part of Blizzard. I have definitely enjoyed their videos, and they contributed to my desire to buy and play Starcraft II.

Taking political positions in public

U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia is not a man who I often find myself in agreement with. That said, I do think a recent comment of his was both true and important. Opponents of gay marriage in the United States are seeking to have their identities kept secret, because they fear that they will suffer for their views. In response, Scalia said that: “The fact is, running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage.” He also said that: “you can’t run a democracy this way, with everybody being afraid of having his political positions known.”

Certainly, it is grossly inappropriate for people to be threatening the personal security of those who oppose gay marriage. That being said, having an active and effective public debate over issues of policy and law does require people to openly and honestly express their views. Furthermore, in a free and democratic society, we retain the right to reach judgments about people on the basis of their views. It is perfectly legitimate for me to think that someone is bad at evaluating complex information, because they are a climate change denier. Similarly, it seems legitimate to say that those who do not support equal rights for gay couples don’t really take human rights or the concept of equal treatment under the law seriously.

Whether you agree or disagree with that specific perspective, I think Scalia’s argument that society benefits when people declare their positions honestly and publicly is a strong one. Serious politics, based around competing ideas, relies on that sort of open discussion and debate. The alternative is a shadowy political world in which people try to advance their preferences obliquely, using whatever underhanded techniques might be effective.

Facebook and data mining

I have written before about privacy and Facebook, expressing the view that people should treat whatever they put on Facebook in the same way as they treat something they put on a completely public website at this one. It may be wise to give people more granular control over who can see what, but it isn’t intelligent as a Facebook user to assume that their privacy controls will always be adequate and that your information will stay safe.

In the wake of the latest Facebook privacy debacle, I have realized that there is an element to the situation that I hadn’t considered before. Especially now that Facebook is working to put everybody’s ‘Interests’ into a standardized format, there is a real difference between how information on Facebook can be used, compared to the wider web.

A person with some time and interest could scan through my blog, figure out about how old I am, learn what sort of books I read, discover my political views, and so on. It would be rather tricky to write an automated computer program that would achieve the same result. Blogs are non-standardized, and comprised of human generated text. By contrast, information on Facebook is increasingly organized in a manner that is easily machine readable. If I want to reach 25-27 year olds who enjoy reading Carl Sagan books and live in Ottawa, it is easy to do via the information on Facebook, but hard to do with information from the general web. That seems to comprise a different sort of privacy violation and/or data mining.

In response, I have stripped my Facebook account of everything that might be of interest to advertisers, at least where it is easily machine-readable: hometown, current location, music and films appreciated, etc. A determined human user could still learn a lot about me from Facebook, for instance by looking at status updates and communication with others, but this will at least make it a bit trickier for machines.