I was linked to this study in the PLOS on the apparent spread of science denial and disinformation that has become symptomatic of the Internet Age. Below are my somewhat lengthy comments in response to Twinxor’s concerns in the D&D thread. For the Record, PLOS is a legit peer-reviewed scientific journal, but is licensed under Creative Commons, so it free and open to the public. What’s more, they allow commentary by readers. I am thinking of revising this comments and attaching them to the article, so any editing advice would be appreciated. Twinxor posted: I can live with the existence of wackos with silly beliefs. The trouble is their influence – widespread doubt of HIV’s importance is very bad, because it leads people to ignore safe sex practices and a lot more people die. As I see it, the big challenge is to demonstrate the reliability and correctness of science, which inoculates the public against conspiracy theory. This is a strange claim to make, because the job of science is to demonstrate the reliability and correctness of its claims, and at least in these cases science has already done an admirable job of justifying its conclusions. Moreover, this article demonstrates that science is already well inoculated against pseudoscience, so much so that it can incorporate pseudoscientific practice as part of its dataset. This suggests that science is not challenged by pseudoscience. Leaving aside the obviously huge problem of scientific funding, pseudoscience seems to present no epistemological problems for the status of science itself. If science is primarily an epistemological enterprise, then what’s the challenge? The answer, I think, is mentioned in the title of the paper, but seems relatively absent from the article itself: namely, the effect of the ‘Internet Era’ on scientific practice. Before internet, people were obviously free […]

I think this little snapshot of history is quite telling. How Do Post Office Machines Read Addresses?‘ Not until Christmas of 1997 did the USPS and the University of Buffalo’s Center for Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) deploy its first handwritten address-reading prototype, which rejected 85 percent of envelopes and correctly identified the address in only 10 percent of those it read with a 2 percent error rate. … Today, the large majority of letters sent through the post office are read and sorted entirely by computer. According to Srihari, current reading success rates are above 90 percent… the first human eyes to examine the envelope are those of the postal carrier approaching your mailbox.

Baka Robocup

If you haven’t been watching Flight of the Conchords’ show on HBO, you should be.

Back in January, Vermont Governor Jim Douglas proposed turning Vermont into the first ‘e-state’ in his inaugural address. Wireless communications and broadband internet access are near the point of convergence – meaning the technologies that support each will be the same. More specifically, modern telecommunications will be based on Internet Protocol, or IP, a digital language that can support voice calls – like cell phones and standard telephones – as well as internet communications – such as email and web pages. Building on these technological advances, I propose that by 2010, Vermont be the nation’s first true “e-state” – the first state to provide universal cellular and broadband coverage everywhere and anywhere within its borders. When you turn on your laptop, you’re connected. When you hit the send button on your cell phone, the call goes through. There would be no more endless downloads, no more hopeless hellos, and no more “can you hear me now.” This goal is within our grasp if we move quickly and decisively during this legislative session. |via| Vermont moved both quickly and decisively on this issue, and passed H.248 back in May, allocating 40 million bucks as seed money for generating the 200 million or so to put the plan into action. Is this a good thing? Keep reading. I have to praise Douglas for speaking intelligently about technology issues without sounding like an idiot; that’s a pretty rare thing in politics. And the “Internet for All” slogan makes me want to cheer out loud. But anyone familiar with the history of broadband infrastructure in America ought to be skeptical of this kind of rhetoric. Specifically, the talk of ‘coverage’ is suspicious. “Internet for all” is ambiguous between: Everyone has the option to buy a private connection owned and operated by a telecommunications company. […]

I am an information technology omnivore

One last post before I batten down the hatches and push through this last week of work on the east coast. I wrote the following in response to TiCK’s commentary on the Fox News vs Channers video that’s been rolling round the internet. TiCK posted: I read that shit all the time and I don’t give it another thought, because, after all, it is the internet. However, the second someone says something like that on television news it comes off as incredibly shocking and horrible (rightly so). Here’s the difference: On the internet, there are literally millions of things you could be doing at any one time. So in order to do anything effectively on the internet, you must be able to discern what is worth your attention and what isn’t. Call this “internet literacy”. Internet literacy is a special case of media literacy. In fact, I would say it is a more sophisticated form of media literacy since the internet is interactive. Not only do you need to discern the importance and meaning of particular items, but you also need to know how to appropriately respond to those items. If you are scrolling through hundreds of YouTube comments, one racist remark just fades into the background noise. It is barely worth attention, and not at all worthy of a response. Anyone who is internet literate knows this; otherwise, then the internet is just an overwhelming chaotic mess. On television, however, FoxNews can only show you one particular thing at one particular time, so they decide what is worth your attention, and everything that is put on the screen is something they think you should see. This gives everything on television an exaggerated importance. A racist comment shown on TV isn’t just background noise, but it is the most important […]