rebel with rather too many causes
In the Peabody Essex Museum a couple weeks ago, I saw a beautiful landscape by Albert Bierstadt of Donner Pass whose label referenced the famous Donner Party of 1846 and their, "sensational story of privation, cannibalism, and death." I would reorder that sentence.
SeeClickFix makes a mobile application you can use to report Boston drivers using their smartphones while driving, while driving.
When you care for somebody, it is difficult to tell them "no." When you trust somebody, you will tell them.
Much of my academic research involves statistics and crunching through big datasets. To do this, I use computer clusters like Amazon’s EC2 and a cluster at the Harvard MIT Data Center. I will frequently kick of a job to run overnight on the full HMDC cluster of ~100 computers. Some of my friends do so nearly every night on similar clusters. Like many researchers and engineers, it costs me nothing to kick off a big job. That said, computers consume a lot of energy so I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation to figure out what the cost in terms of resources might add up to.
An overnight job that uses a 100 computer cluster might use 800 computer-hours. Although power efficiency varies hugely between computers, most statistical analysis is CPU intensive and should come close to maximizing power consumption. According to a few sources [e.g., 1 2 3], 200 watts might be a conservative estimate of much a modern multi-CPU server will draw under high load and won’t include other costs like cooling. Using this estimate, the overnight job on 100 machines would easily use 160 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy.
In Massachusetts, most of our power comes from coal. This page suggests that an efficient coal plant will generate 2,460 kWh for each ton of coal. That means that one overnight job would use 59 kg (130 lbs) of coal. In the process, you would also create 153 kg (338 lb) of CO2 and a bit under half a kilogram (about 1 lb) of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide each. It’s a very rough estimate but it certainly generates some pressure to make sure the research counts!
Of course, I’ve written some free software that runs on many thousands of computers and servers. How many tons of coal are burnt to support laziness or a lack of optimization in my software? What is the coal cost of choosing to write a program in a less efficient, but easier to write, higher-level programming languages like Python or Ruby instead of writing a more efficient version in C?
The Acetarium, where I live, runs what we like to think of as the world’s smallest artistic residency program by hosting artists, social scientists, hackers, and free software and free culture folks for periods of 1-3 months.
Our most recently graduated resident, Noah, built a lawn scrabble set on the Media Lab ShopBot and held a Scrabble picnic this weekend with some former Acetarium residents and others. I don’t really like playing Scrabble, so you can see me working on an essay (and verifying words) in the background.
Thanks to Ben Schwartz as I yoinked these pictures from his blog.
At the Copenhagen airport, Mika and I found the quiet room. It was a soft, well lit, room designed for prayer and reflection. During the hour I was in it, the only other visitor was a child cracking open the doorway to peer in. The room had a guest book with hundreds of messages left by other travelers over the last couple years. People praised the airport administrators for providing the room, made suggestions, and complained about the room, the airport, and the country’s shortcomings. They talked about themselves, their travels, their happiness and unhappiness with departing or returning home, and their thoughts about the world.
I spend a lot of time in airports but only rarely speak to my fellow travelers. It’s amazing how little I know about the thousands of people waiting in line with me, sitting near me on the plane, and sharing in the long, lonely, and often stressful experience of moving between countries and continents. The guest book provided a rare window into these people in what is normally the anonymous and depersonalized non-place of airports. In the quiet room, I could — for the first time — hear some of these fellow travelers speak.
It’s been reported for some time now that the number of active editors on Wikipedia (usually defined as people who have edited at least 5 times in a given month) peaked in 2007 and has been mostly stable since then. A graph of the total number of active editors in every month since Wikipedia’s founding is shown below. The graph shows the aggregate numbers for all language Wikipedias. English Wikipedia is the largest component of this and is generally more variable. That said, very similar patterns exist for most larger languages.
Felipe Ortega, who has provided many of these statistics, has warned against fatalist claims. Although there seems to be a decrease in the total number of active editors over the last two years, the situation seems to have somewhat stabilized in most languages. New editors in Wikipedia are replacing folks at almost the rate that they are leaving. It is also widely known that the number of readers of Wikipedia has been increasing during this period. According to the report cards released by the foundation using comScore data, the number of unique visitors to Wikipedia each month has increased by 61 million people in the last year — over 17%.
This discrepancy between rising readership and stable or sinking editorship should raise major concern. After all, the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission is two part: (1) to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content and (2) to disseminate it effectively and globally. Although the Foundation report cards include measures of raw levels of editorship, a better metric of engagement and empowerment might be the proportion of readers who engage in editing.
I could not find reliable data on the number of unique readers reached each month for more than a few months in the last year. What is available, however, is wonderful data on page views each month going back to 2008. Analysis of the data from available report cards show that, at least during the last year, there is a very stable ratio of 35 page views per unique visitor, as estimated by comScore. Using that measure, we can do a back of the envelope estimation on the proportion of users that are editors for the period where page view data is available, dating back from February 2008 ( marked with the grey dashed lined above).
The graphs below show the very different results you get when you consider the change in the number of Wikipedia editors and the change in the editor-to-reader ratio. Once again, these data are combined data for all language Wikipedias although graphs look very similar for most larger languages. The results are striking. Although there has been a 12% decrease between February 2008 and December 2010 in the number of active editors, there is a 42% decrease in the proportion of readers who edit at least five times a month. We can see that fulfilling the first half of the Wikimedia mission remains a struggle.
Although the graphs above do not say anything directly about the most active core contributors to Wikipedia, the fact that Wikipedia is being maintained by a tiny — and shrinking — proportion of its readership does mean that the idea behind Wikipedia is under threat.
Although none are as big as Wikipedia, there are lots of good encyclopedias out there. The reason Wikipedia is different, interesting, and important is because — unlike all those others — Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Wikipedia is powerful because it allow its users to transcend their role as consumers of the information they use to understand the world. Wikipedia allows users to define the reference works that define their understanding of the their environment and each other. But 99.98% of the time, readers do not transcend that role. I think that’s a problem. Worse, that the number is growing.
The Wikimedia Foundation recently ran a major successful effort to attract donations in its annual fundraiser. Jimmy Wales’ smiling mug is apparently enough in the way of motivation to get something like 1% of its readers to donate money to support the project. I think that’s very good news. If the Wikimedia community can entice even half of those people to contribute through an increased involvement in the projects themselves, they might do more than ensure Wikipedia’s continued growth. They would help take a step toward the empowerment and engagement of those users in sharing their own knowledge, and the continued fulfillment of a critically important mission.
Before heading back to graduate school, my brother worked full-time as a personal fitness and strength trainer. Like many trainers, he started out in an established gym and then struck out on his own once he had established an clientele base. Working on his own, he got almost all of his new business from referrals.
Although one might think that a trainer’s trusted long-term clients would be the source of most new business, it was mostly the newer, less established clients who referred new trainees. The established clients had already referred everyone in their social network that might be interested.
That’s how I learned about the weak ties of strength.
At LCA in Wellington — immediately after a trip to Japan where I saw sumo for the first time — a number of us created a game we called "monopedal sumo." Basically, the rules are those of sumo wrestling. Push your opponent either down or out of a ring before they do so to you. Unlike normal sumo, in our game you do so standing only one one leg. If your second leg touches the ground. That also counts as a loss.
It’s surprisingly entertaining. Try it!
I used to think that couples who share a single email address were just too cute. Then I saw this article which imported this whole "keeping each other honest" logic into the practice.
Mika and I have never even had accounts on each other’s servers.
When talking about free culture or free software, many people suggest that they would love to support free models, but that they don’t see how to make it all work. Until they have an alternate model in front of them, they cannot bring themselves to argue for a more ethical alternative. I disagree with this approach. Instead, I say, "this is the world I want to live in and, even though I don’t know exactly how to get to there from here, I’m going to refuse to settle for anything short of this ideal." Most people dismiss such thinking as "impractical" and "unrealistic." I think most people are being unimaginative.
Robot jockeys are one recent illustrative reason, among many, that I feel comfortable taking this position. Some background is necessary for those that are unfamiliar with the example. A decade ago, several Gulf emirates used thousands of young boys from Sudan and South Asia as jockeys for camel racing. Human rights groups campaigned against the practice and suggested that these boys were at sometimes held as slaves and intentionally underfed to keep their weight low. Despite criticism, camel racers resisted moving away from young boys as jockeys. If they moved to heavier adults instead of young boys, they reasoned, the camels would be much slower. Of course, they were right. But they were being unimaginative in the alternatives they were considering.
As the young jockeys became a increasingly unjustifiable public relations disaster for the states that supported it, law-makers in several Gulf states gave in to calls from UNICEF and others and created laws to outlaw the practice. Within three years of UAE passing strict laws against child jockeys, Swiss engineers, funded by racers desperate for an alternative, had created the first robotic camel jockey. Within several years these jockeys were lighter, cheaper, more responsive to the owner, and well on their way to being more effective than any young boy. When forced, by law and by an ethical prerogative, to come up with an alternative to young boys, racers created a solution that was superior, along nearly every axis, to the system they had fought to keep.
Although the costs to society of proprietary software cannot be compared to slavery and abuse, the basic same pattern of solution-seeking can be seen in the example of free software. Early free software advocates suggested that most programmers would likely need to take a paycut. As it turned out, vibrant and successful economic models to support free software have supported a large and growing free software industry. But we have free software business models only because a small group of principled individuals refused to settle for what they knew, came up with creative ethical business models that "just might work," and put their own paychecks on the line to try them out. As open source has shown, some of these creative solutions offered models superior to what we had before. In the world of software development, free software redefined "practical" and "realistic."
One can think of solving human problems as like searching for the highest point in hilly terrain in thick fog. It’s easy to get stuck on the top of the first little hill you walk up (i.e., a local maximum) and then conclude you can never do better. If we refuse to compromise and force ourselves to leave that first little hill, chances are pretty good we’ll find a "higher" peak.
Of course, it is also possible that we will find the global maximum or the best possible solution to a given problem. In those cases, any change will mean a sacrifice. But when dealing with most most social and legal dilemmas, there are enough variables involved that this seems very unlikely. Indeed, most big problems can be thought of as having many interacting dimensions — and only some of these will be ethical concerns. In other words, most social problems are more like the problem of child camel jockeys than they are like trying to transcend the laws of physics.
Business models and laws for the regulation of technology and knowledge are extremely complicated human creations. Do we really think we cannot create ethical systems to compensate cultural creators that are at least as good as what we have now? If we never force ourselves to be "impractical" and "unrealistic", we will never find out.
As I mentioned recently, I’ve been writing summaries of academic articles I read over on AcaWiki. You should join me and write summaries of academic articles you read or help improve the summaries other folks have shared!
Of course, you can also just read AcaWiki summaries. But while reading summaries takes less time that reading the full articles and books, a 500-1000 word summary is still too much for some very busy people. That’s why I created a new microblog on Identica where I post summaries of the summaries I post to AcaWiki. You can subscribe to AcaMako to follow along.
Due to a variety of people and places we want to see, Mika and I have regrouped around a more ambitious travel schedule in Italy for the next week or so. Our new plan is:
I know we’ll have an organized LUG meeting in Siena. The rest of the period is a little more open. As always, if other free software, wikimedian, or like-minded folks are around and would like to meet up in any of those places, don’t hesitate to get in contact.
In related news, inspired by Florence and by Mika’s domo-kun purse, I made a duomo-kun today.
Over the last couple years, I have begun teaching. At first just a reading group or seminar with a handful of attendees. Last term I helped teach two large lecture classes.
I know that, compared to some of my colleagues, I spend an enormous amount of time assessing and evaluating students’ assignments. I try very hard to give detailed, substantive, feedback on each piece of student work. At the end of the day, however — at my school at least — there’s always a grade.
For someone who went well out of his way to go to a college with no grades, there’s a tragic irony to the whole situation: I think grades mean little and are often worth much less. Today I am forced to to inflict them on people who, almost universally, do not.
Today I started to tell a friend about something from dinner the night before. Except that she was at the dinner. And sitting at the same table! Even when prompted, I couldn’t really remember!
This does not warrant a blog post. Anybody who knows me well knows that my memory for these kinds of more mundane details is pretty porous. This kind of thing happens all the time.
I’m writing this so that when I’m much older, and still forgetting things all the time, folks can use this as a reference point before concluding that senility is setting in.
I’m afraid that everyone else will forget my forgetfulness!
