Son of "I am Google..."

I've just read "What digital literacies?", on Steve Wheeler's Learning with 'e's.

One of the digital literacies which he identifies is “Reusing/repurposing content”, which (given the trains of thought which I have been pursuing yesterday and today) linked in my mind to my two "I am Google" posts. (But the connection is mine and mine alone.)

For anything put up on the web, traditional copyright concerns are purely theoretical. Any material on this blog, for instance, could be copied and "reused" or "repurposed" by anybody else ... I'd be unlikely to even know about it, never mind have any realistic chance of doing anything about it. I don't have any problem with that ... I try to be punctilious about crediting my own reuse of others' work, but recognise that if I post something then the reality is as it is ... if I don't like it, I shouldn't post digital material.

But (this, if you were beginning to wonder, is the point): in the long run, both copyright and copyright law are, pragmatically at least, going to have to change. Both were invented in days when reproducing (and reusing or repurposing) were much more physically difficult. Laws of this kind can only really be enforced while their breach involves crossing a hurdle of some kind ... and these days there are no real hurdles to cross in breach of copyright.

Intellectual property remains important, both morally and economically ... but how the future will deal with it, I'm b*##*r*d if I know!

This is not an original thought, of course. The music industry has been grappling with it for decades, and one of the possible solution sets there has been provided by bands which treat downloadable music as a disposable hook into other, more controllable and financially activities or assets. Still, the situation is in flux and nobody knows which models will turn out to be stable and sustainable in the long run.

"Learned journals" have a similar problem: how to make use of the technology as an economic way to disseminate and capitalise upon content without losing control of it? The solution there makes the best of a bad job. If I want a copy of Pfning's Ferret wangling as a metacultural pursuit, (don't waste time looking it up – I invented and its author) I can either persuade an institution to purchase access or I can go to the journal in which it was published and pay to download a PDF copy ... but, either way, there is nothing beyond my own sense of things (and, of course, the number of people I know who have the slightest interest in ferret wangling) to stop me then providing copies to all and sundry. They rely on the fact that, by providing access, they minimise the growth of bootleg supply. The timing of DVD release and television network rights for films is similar ... hold onto the original cinema version long enough to maximise return, release legally purchasable copies soon enough to minimise the economic viability of piracy, then drop the DVD price for the same reason when television right kick in.

Back in education, which is what Steve Wheeler had in mind, it seems fairly clear that institutions which accept the free flow of information and content beyond their own cell wall (that's a biological metaphor, not a criminal one) through communal web reuse and repurpose are likely to do better than those who try to lock it up in their own VLN*. Maintaining miserly control involves costs and absorbs energy which could be better deployed in more positive ways. Any perceived loss in traditional terms is balanced by gain from the same process as material from elsewhere is reused and repurposed inward. Allowing your material to be accessed from elsewhere gives an institution kudos and reputation which has economic value of its own. And there are cross fertilisation benefits on both sides which probably swamp all other considerations. The only real benefit of guarding content accrues to those providers (institutional or commercial) who can provide an active, service based product which the client finds it more beneficial to buy than to duplicate.

None of which solves my agonising over digitisation of Jay Appleton ... but does provide a welcome alternative path down which to wander!

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* VLN: Virtual Learning Environment

Synchronicity, yet again...

My brother recently asked about the (social interaction) process by which I arrived at the "On the bench" photographs. (Several others have asked related questions.)

In the course of answering, yesterday morning, I made reference to portraiture as a joint enterprise between portrayer and portrayed (in this case, photographer and subject). While still thinking about that, I found the following Unreal Nature extract from Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image:

“… The author takes a step towards his characters, but the characters take a step towards the author: double becoming. Story-telling is not an impersonal myth, but neither is it a personal fiction: it is a word in act, a speech-act through which the character continually crosses the boundary …”

Which seems much the same thing ... and could apply as much to characters in a novel as in a film. Perhaps all arts are a similar contract. Perhaps social interaction itself is, too.

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• Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 : the time-image. 2005, London: Continuum. 0826477062. (Original: Cinéma II: L'image-temps, Collection "Critique", 1985, Paris; first English trans 1989).

Only (dis)connect

In comment on the article to which my "Only connect" post links, Dr C says:

“I have been wondering lately some things, reflected in what you say in your article, whether someone who has been carried along by the flood (e.g. texting, Facebook, iPhone, GPS location, implantable chip) can't voluntarily turn the other way. Do a sort of Thoreau maneuver and walk away from it all. I feel actually chained to my cell phone and I am expected to be there, one heartbeat away from an anxious parent. I don't really mind it but I can't imagine all of society barreling down the road with our every action, every movement, analyzed by someone in Washington, London or Paris (actually in Bangladesh).”

Removing my scientist's hat (UFO shaped, in a padded fluorescent orange synthetic satin, carrying the words "Kiss me quick, Igor") and replacing it with my vigilant citizen headgear (a frayed and sunbleached beanie, with floral hippy insert) ... this is something that concerns me, too.

The answer, I think, is that (as with almost any aspect of social organisation) one cannot easily walk away from the ICT revolution as a whole and still remain connected to the main of society as a whole ... but one can pick and choose amongst its manifestations to a considerable extent.

I have indicated before my lack of personal enthusiasm for sites of the FaceBook variety (and an alternative approach to the same requirements). On the other hand, here I am making use of another online strand – the blog – and I am an enthusiastic exponent of wikis for many particular purposes. The thing is, in my view, to decide what serves your needs and what makes you serve it ... embrace the first, shun the second, and be aware that the distinction will be different for each person who asks the question.

In his third sentence (“...cell phone ... one heartbeat away from an anxious parent”) Dr C says, in my opinion, more about himself than about the technology. A warm and compassionate person, with a strong professional conscience, he feels that a device which makes him more available to a concerned parent must be used to do just that. My own cell phone, by contrast, is a vital component of my life but spends most of its time "on silent", taking messages which I check regularly but to which I respond when convenient (hmmm ... it suddenly occurs to me that perhaps I have painted myself into a corner here ... perhaps I am, also by contrast with Dr C, a cold and unfeeling...)

About a decade and a half ago, commenting on exactly this, I used the metaphor of “a free fall parachutist, compelled to fall downward but riding tiny variations to a choice of the available landing points”. It still seems to me, after all this time, a reasonable description of what needs to be done.

Kindling a new inequality

A TTMF post sent me to a Santa Fe Reporter article which is interesting to a European reader for the unusually European (as opposed to USAmerican) cast of its analysis. That's not why I mention it, however. What made be stop and think was the following interesting and thought provoking para in relation to a textbook:

“Should she get it from Amazon or download the Kindle version? Bowles quickly rules out the Kindle because it makes the text impossible to share. Reading between the lines, Bowles’ choice reveals the hidden symbolism of each medium: If the paperback is Karl Marx, the Kindle is Ayn Rand.”

I've always made my book format selections on personal and/or practical bases. I generally prefer paperbacks to hardbacks because they are lighter, more compact, easier to use on the fly. I æsthetially enjoy reading paper books more than electronic ones, which is important to me. Electronic text offers mass portability, instant access, powerful searching, so has the edge for reference. Though I have a Kindle, I never use it; other electronic platforms work better for me.

I've not considered, before, the impact of electronic texts on inequality of access to literacy (I use the word literacy, rather than literature, deliberately). I shall, in future, do so. The advantages of electronic access remain and, in the case of (for example) Gutenberg Project texts, sharing is in many important ways enhanced; but the restrictive downside will from now on be a factor on the other side of the scales.

That electronic life

Having recommended Steve Wheeler's summary of where we have (digitally) come from, I should also point you to today's post in which he peers into a glass darkly in search of where we are (both digitally and actually) going.

This electronic life

Steve Wheeler, of Learning with ‘e’s, is always worth reading. I don't always agree with him ... in fact, disagree as often as agree ... but that's OK: if I always agreed, it'd be a lot less stimulating. His first post of the new year (and, he would say, of a new decade: one area where we disagree), "2010: the year when we fake contact", looks critically at one of the downsides to social networking. This is unusual for him: like me (though with differences) he is an evangelist for ICT as a platform of personal learning environments in the widest possible sense. Nothing is pure positive, however, and reflecting on how to get the best while minimising the worst is essential in any area of life ... social networking not excepted.

While on the subject of Learning with ‘e’s I should recommend the recent series of summaries which closed the old year, charting the rapid mycelial spread of personal electronic communications through our lives in the past ten years. They are, in sequence:

1. Networked noughties 2000-2002
2. Networked noughties 2003-2005
3. Networked noughties 2006-2009
4. Noughties ... but nice

The last is a separate entry, but its inclusion seems appropriate to me.

I dislike the label "noughties" ... but, I confess, have failed to come up with an alternative. Perhaps we are embarking on the tweenies...

Sensible nonsense

A fixture of the interactive web, these days, is the distorted text image which you have to type into a box (proving that you are not a robot) before continuing with some action. I have no doubt that the spammers and other assorted barbarians at the gate will eventually crack this; but not yet.

I am regularly impressed by the words offered on Blogger sites where I need to enter the magic password before my comments are registered. Not only are the words more easily readable than in many other instances, but they consistently manage to be pronounceable as well.

Both characteristics make transcription errors less likely, minimising the risk that I will stomp off in a sulk and not bother to comment at all. Thought has clearly gone into the system.

I'm not a natural or enthusiastic programmer. Perhaps the making of pronounceable nonsense words is trivial to those who are; but to me it's a small wonder.

I have written a spreadsheet which generates passwords for sites to which I must restrict access. It throws up twenty five groups of random alphabetic characters at a time, and I hit recalc until one of these groups is pronounceable. Since I set a single password for a period of time, and a usable group comes up fairly quickly, it's not an onerous process ... but it's not efficient, either.

Whatever algorithm Blogger uses is not just a simple matter of alternating consonants and vowels (though come to think of it, I might modify my spreadsheet to do just that). Over at JSBlog, for instance, I've just been asked to type in "madmast"; previous visits have asked for "svalploen", "omchak" and so on. I have seen "valvsnagorm" but I never get consonant groups like that "lvsn" at the beginning of a word. Clearly there is a fairly sophisticated rule base which specifies which letters can be used together in which circumstances.

As I type this, and think through the logic, it becomes clearer ... I still have no intention of trying to program such a mechanism, but I do begin to see how it would be done. Nevertheless, to see a different pronounceable but meaningless word pop up every time still feels like magic.

LyX 1·6

This review began with the resolution of a need: to unify the efforts of several hundred volunteers into a single live, multilingual, frequently updated and heavily mathematical information flow from and within an ongoing study. LyX is a free, open-source document-processor system underpinned by LaTeX. No user knowledge of LaTeX is necessary (though it certainly does no harm). Once users have adjusted from word-processor habits, this greatly simplifies both content-editing and style conformity management, for both text and mathematics.

Compiled versions are currently available for Linux, MacOS and Windows, covering most users. [More...]

Flow

Luke Palmer, aka AcerOne, wrote yesterday: "...working together is a fundamental graffiti ethos ... Talking thing over ... discussing styles, composition, colours, shading, 3D ... you learn ... produce new art. I think the ‘flow’ of graffiti art is born of people just doing graffiti..."

He's right ... but not, in my opinion, just about graffiti. I don't see a lot of difference between one type of artist and another, nor between artist and scientist or anyone else who feels impelled to do something (anything) by an inner urge.

Unreal Nature recently drew ("The Russian Sense Of Blueness") on one of Nabokov's essay series “The art of translation”, from the archives of The new republic. I haven't read that for many years (so long, in fact, that I had completely forgotten it) so was glad to have it brought back to me. Additionally, it happened by chance that the title of that post pulled at me in a particular way.

I am, and have always been, a complete failure at learning foreign languages; an embarrassment in a family which otherwise shows aptitude in that area, and a definite disadvantage in life. Oh, I can scratch along. I can rapidly accumulate fistfuls of nouns, verbs and adjectives that permit survival level communication; I can decode written expository text, given a good dictionary and a grammar book; but I cannot converse, never mind create. Nabokov, who despite his "thin" English (his word, in the essay) managed to write sublime and luminous prose in his second language which I could never dream of producing in my own native tongue, is a wonder to me – as are my Italian students who display a deep understanding of Alice in Wonderland or Joyce's Ulysses.

So when, at one point in the distant past, I spent a lengthy period of intensive time in close contact with a particular group of Russians, communication was a hard fought business. Their English was the same sort of utilitarian grab bag of essential words as my Russian, and with the same lack of grace. Both they and I had similarly poor (but not necessarily coëxtensive) scratched together collections of French, German, Arabic and Tigrinya words. Every simple exchange of nonessential conversation became a philosophical and linguistic adventure. And one of the things I learned, to my everlasting wonder, was that "blue" meant different things to them and to me. In particular, they saw different blues as at least two different colours and not, as I did, variants on one.

A couple of days after Unreal Nature's post, a Polish friend gave me a copy of Cosmos and Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz.

I say "by Witold Gombrowicz", but of course these are English translations – because I cannot read Polish. My admiration for Stanislav Lem (also Polish) is also based entirely on English translations. I did, as a teenager with dictionaries in hand, battle my way through some Dante, Proust, Chaucer, and so on, in the original; but in some ways (and Nabokov makes clear why), I get closer to the truth of the original when I don't understand the words at all than when I seek to decode them: the rhythms and sounds come through more truly than the content – I listen to the songs of Sevara Nazarkhan in the same spirit.

I knew nothing of Gombrowicz when I started reading (the English translation of) Cosmos. I read it at face value, and was captured by the play with language: not just the language of words, but of gesture, physical juxtaposition, visual symbol, and so on. He reminds me (in translation) of Flan O'Brien's The third policeman.

Whose language am I reading, when I read a translation? The translator's, of course. And yet, discussing Cosmos with Agnieszka who gave it to me and who herself knows it in her native Polish, I find that my impression of that play is the same as hers. I will never know whether the play I am hearing is the same as the play she hears, but I do know that we both hear play.

Over the past few months, Agnieszka has also been discussing T S Eliot (particularly "Gerontion") with me – in English, my language and also Eliot's but not hers. I have learnt a tremendous amount in the process: and have gradually realised that reading in a second language is giving her a new set of insights generated by the process of crossing the language barrier itself.

This may seem irrelevant to visual imagery, but it is not. Different cultures accrue different visual associations. Moreover, the process of crossing into another mind is as radical in its way as (perhaps even more so than) crossing into another language.

When I posted the Today 090607 image (shown here on the left) used as an example by Jim Putnam (see "Catch as catch can"), I received an email response from painter Gayle Reynolds: "I found a whole robin's egg in my new garden two days ago and this looks just like it." Then Unreal nature's Julie Heyward posted an "equivalent": a fractured blue eggshell on grey stone. Both responses taught me a great deal about what I had and had not seen; but together they taught me much more than twice as much.

When I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I joined camera clubs. They were, to be honest, inhabited by people I would now find tedious ... but also very kind and generous in sharing with me what they knew. I learned a lot of craft from them, as well as what I did not want to do or be, and I am grateful to them. Now, many years on, what Luke calls "flow" is, though not under that label, vital to my continued growth. The flow is not limited to one area of endeavour, nor to one kind of interaction. Agnieszka, J S Bach, Elisabeth Louise Vigée-le-Brun, Dr C, Gayle, Jim, Julie, Luke, Ray Girvan, Ivor McGillivray, Sevara Nazarkhan, W Eugene Smith, Chris Waller: my interaction with them, and with many others, is in some cases face to face, in others virtual, or both, and in many zones of life from mathematics or science through business to the arts (often all at once). With every book I read or image I see or song I hear, the interaction is only one way – but no less part of the "flow", and no less so if it is either not in the original or not in a language I can read transparently.

The "flow" has not been limited to the local since writing was invented. It has never been limited to one direction or one modality. But, with time, it gets ever richer and more multi threaded.

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• T S Eliot, "Gerontion" in Collected poems, 1909-1962: London : Faber, 1963 (2002 printing). 0571105483 (pbk.)
• Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos and Pornografia: two novels. (Trans: Eric Mosbacher & Alistair Hamilton)1985, New York: Grove Press. 0802151590.
• Vladimir Nabokov, "The art of translation" in The new republic,
• Flann O'Brien, The third policeman. 1967: London, MacGibbon & Kee (hbk).
  Most recent edition (at time of writing) – 2007, London: Harper Perennial. [978]0007247172 (pbk.)

Networking for researchers

Communication between people who would never otherwise have met (or even heard of one another) is one of the things which the internet and world wide web can be very good at. Finding and developing the best ways to harness this is always a live issue, and one promising model was launched as a beta in July of 2007, and as a full live product at the end of the year, by publishers Elsevier. I’ve been using and exploring it since October (late in the beta phase), both through my own account and with the coöperation of other users willing to act as stalking horses.

In essence, 2collab is a networking site – like Facebook or Bibo for social life, LinkedIn for business reputation structures, Advogato and ITToolbox in the computing world, Friends Reunited and so on – but designed for researchers. Not necessarily science or computing researchers, but the material which each user sees is easily tailored. To quote the original announcement of the 2collab beta: 'The history of science is based on working together – it’s all about sharing and learning. And this is what 2collab is all about.' [read more]

Measures of dispersion

After a couple of years or more of doing nothing with it, I've stirred myself to participate in Photo.Net.

So far, it's mostly past work that I'm shifting there, so anyone reading this will probably have already seen it - but for anyone interested, the alphabetical slide show index is here and the most recently added folder will always be at the top of the list here.

This is part of a general (if slow) move on my part to shift material from private web space to public spaces such as here at Blogger, the new 2collab project from Elsevier, and so on. As an example, I recently moved an educational dataset resource to a Blogger base ... then placed a link to it in a new 2collab educational resources group ... where, I hope, others will join it as and when I find the fragments of time necessary to transfer them. And an archive of the "Difference of Opinion" column which Ray Girvan and I wrote from 1997-2000, to which access is often requested, and of which Ray and I have until now maintained private copies, has now made the same transition.

Why do this?

Well ... partly it's selfish (who would bother, otherwise?): I shift the webspace, housekeeping, bandwidth and other concerns onto somebody else. It also makes functional sense, though: the user who wants (for example) an educational data set resource is much better off hunting for it in a small and relevant pool than across the web at large, while the producer is better occupied producing than in maintaining websites and reinventing wheels. And in the case of 2collab, the whole project is based on ready made mechanisms for collaboration. Personal websites can often be valuable, but can also sometimes be triumphs of ego over commonsense; the difference lies in deciding when they are the best medium for the purpose at hand and when something better exists.

This seems to me a logical next phase of web maturation and evolution. I don't see myself abandoning a discrete web presence in the next few weeks or months; but I do see that being a possible long term result ... and by long term, I may not mean more than a year or two.

My own website has always, to be honest, been a neglected place which I tended to only fitfully and inadequately; it gives access to only a small fraction of the material which lurks in the space behind it, to which relevant people make direct links. Moving it out to other, purpose designed, generic platforms seems the only sensible course

Avoid wind and welds for successful manufacturing

I've been intermittently tied up with two different challenges over recent months. Both were concerned with industrial quality issues but, despite that superficial semblance of a link, they couldn't have been more different. One was in a large plant, part of a regional economic development plan with government start-up funding; the other concerned a small village co-operative. One could offer me live access to its own data stores. The other had no process records or quality assurance expertise of any kind, until I started to design some; no telecommunications either, and the staff would have to do most of the work themselves under my intermittent direction. Both were concerned with manufacture of containers: milled steel in one case; fired clay in the other. Losses in the first, though so eye-wateringly large that my contingency fee was a pinprick, were being covered by deficit funding in the interest of public relations; those in the other were tiny, but would quickly cripple the co-operative, if not stemmed.

The two cases called for different approaches to a similar question: what production factors led to delayed fracture faults in a significant minority of the finished units?

I had encountered a detective-style case similar in some ways to the milled steel problem a couple of years ago, putting a review copy of Statistica Data miner release 6 to good use. I learnt a lot on that job, and applied the knowledge to the current concerns. It also happened, by a happy coincidence, that Statistica release 7 had just come to hand as this current pair of challenges hove into sight - so I earmarked it immediately for the larger-scale plant. The small village enterprise, though, called for a very different approach: something that could be applied by inexperienced and untrained users, so that every stage didn't have to wait on communications back to me. I had a copy of SigmaStat 3.0 lying around, which had impressed me by the ease with which it was accessed by novice users during a trial run in another industrial context; Systat International advised that a new 3.1 update was available, and sent a copy of for use in the co-op. [more...]