Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Over at Architectures of Control I find this posting about a patent application from Apple that points out a means of securing hardware by limiting which battery chargers are allowed authorized to work with the device.  I have had quite a family of ideas along these lines over the years.  Most of these emerged from slew of wonderful standards stories.  You see you can always use non-standard as a means of service denial.  The example most of us have seen are the plugs in hotels to make it more inconvenient to steal the hair dryer; a historical example is adopting a non-standard railroad gage or bullet to make an invading army’s life more difficult.  My favorite story of this class: when they build the world trade center some vendor convinced the contractor to use light bulbs during the construction period that twisted into the sockets the wrong way, counter-clockwise.  Nominally that was to prevent the workers from stealing the bulbs but to my mind it was a great way to assure vendor lock-in.

The Apple scheme involves having the charger handshake with the charging subsystem in the device to see if it’s authorized.  It’s notable that the charging subsystem’s computer(s) can be kept closed and proprietary while leaving the rest of the system and open platform.  Obviously you could do something similar in the graphics chip or the network controller, i.e. any where you have a reasonable smart interface chip.  I mean, some of the printer manufactures even do it with their ink cartridges.
There are plenty of variations on this idea.  The coffee shop DHCP sign-in rituals are an example. Airports and other public spaces could have lots of non-standard plugs and then rent adapters which grant visitors access.  IT managers could have non-standard network connectors to help control access to their infrastructure by building visitors.  We can put a lot of wit into a very small package these days; and we know, form the counter-clockwise light bulbs, that people love to get increased control over the littlest things.

The papers have recently been full of stories about yet another interesting pattern that researchers have gleaned from the data collected in the Framingham heart study. You can get a taste for the result by watching this annimation. What is shows is a social network (genetic and friends) changing over time. The primary focus of attention is body fat, and over time the member of this community get fatter, a lot fatter.

The sound bite associated with this study is that fat is contagious; and indeed the study showed that friends of fat folk had a higher likelihood of becoming fat than other people. Social networks exhibit a tremendous amount of “birds of feather flock together.” If I buy an conditioner, take up bicycling, start wearing a hat, or take a particular political position it is likely that I am following the lead of some of my friends and that my choice will lead others to come along.

While all behavior is socially viral I am troubled by the way that lots of people have gotten the impression that this study proves that weight gain is viral; i.e. the association with fat people is effectively dangerous because becoming fat is dangerous. I have trouble seeing how that conclusion isn’t exactly like the presumption that association with poor people (think here of the local high school) is likely to make you poor. While both of these may well have a modicum of truth to them the puzzle is exactly how concerned about the risk should a person be?

Reading the paper I’m struck by the apparent absence of references to other work on how ideas, behaviors, and real viruses spread across social networks. I.e. there id no framing of exactly how contagious this effect is relative to other things.

I’d love to see similar animations for other behavioral affectations. For example people who own air conditioners, folks who drive large cars, eating out at chain restaurants. It is inconceivable that the modern marketing industry doesn’t have reams of data like that. The this study is looking at something with a strong health component colors how we think about this. If the same data showed internet usage, or cell phone adoption, then we would presume that the primary driver certainly as much or entirely techo-economic rather than dragging in questions of individual will and infection. Of course ideas like choice, memes, viral spread would remain interesting but the wouldn’t be so highly energized.

Causality is very complex stuff; but I don’t see how this study is a big help in getting at the root causes of obesity. If we had a similar drawing that showed the association with internet users substantially increased the chance of adopting becoming an internet user would we announce that it was contagious? What about gun ownership? What about being a Republican? This animation looks to me like a simple illustration of how a behavior gains market share; i.e. decreasing barriers to adoption enable increased market share. That adoption trickles across the social network seems mind bogglingly obvious and actually quite unexceptional.

I always enjoy reading about the rules for the presidential debates. For example sometimes they have a rule that the candidates may not point out audience members or bring props. The rule against props is presumably so they don’t start pulling documents out of their pocket and going “Right here it states, oh my most ‘honorable’ oponent, that …”; but the rule always gets me to imagining they are going to start juggling, set their hair on fire, break out in song, or something.

Presumably the only reason why the uTube debate stunt makes any sense at all is because these random uTube dudes can speak truth to power since unlike a full time journalist they have zero chance of every getting asked back again.  They can burn their bridges with every question; and use props!

If you have participated about in topic-free email lists for any period of time you’ll know that if a topic arises all possible positions on that topic  will, sooner or later, be trotted out. Ask about your crab grass problem and before long people will be suggest: gobal warming, ferrets, lack of good personal hygiene, while others will point out these suggestions are likely illegal or unethical. It’s part of the fun to try and predict which points that haven’t been made yet will be raised before the thread dies out.

So the whole uTube debate thing is totally bogus. They solicited questions from the masses; and presumably they got a reasonable sample of every question that could possibly be asked. Then somebody selects from the set of all possible questions the ones that actually get asked.

Who ever selected the question controlled the agenda. Pretending otherwise is just silly. The only question I have is exactly how big a Cheshire Cat smile they adopted each time one of their more edge selections was played. Pretending that this is somehow more democratic is either lying or naive.

I like “Identity is a Story“. Story is a very nice metaphor for what most people mean when they talk about some thing’s identity. He quotes:

Rorty says in her introduction:

“Why are we interested in someone being the same person, and not merely the same human being or physical object? One reason is primarily retrospective: we need to know whom to reward and whom to punish for actions performed when “they” were acknowledgedly different in some respects from the present population. But we have more forward-looking reasons as well: we want to know what traits remain constant so that we can know what we can expect from the persons around us. We assign crucial responsibilities to individuals, assume important continuing relationships to them in the belief that certain of their traits are relatively constant or predictible.”

and then goes on to suggest that the useful definition of identity is as a story.

The story metaphor is very nice. It’s very rich and complex. Stories have chronology, characters, statements, a story teller; and often a hero. The story creates an identity for the hero. Which is just one of many such stories. The story teller is sometimes omniscient; and this is how some people view the modern state, but sometimes he’s just another protagonist.

Implementors of simple identity systems often mistake account relationship for identity. In the story model of identity we don’t need to call it a mistake because it is just a particular kind of story.  One with only two characters, and usually the story teller is the implementor and his product manager.

I’m enjoying reading the last Harry Potter in part because so many other people on the train are reading it.  Last summer there were banners on the Libraries in Cambridge announcing that Cambridge was reading some book and they got me to imagining what that would be like.  Stepping onto the bus, chatting with the bus driver about a particular scene or character.  Waiting at the corner for the light and striking up a conversation with another pedestrian about that plot twist in the third chapter.  You can do that with the Harry Potter, and people do; the book acts as a kind of gang colors inviting the conversation.

The ebb and flow of block busters in the culture is part of the symptoms of the highly skew’d distributions that permeate networks.  The book I’m reading on cities includes an argument that mass media was extremely corrosive to the civic sphere.  At one time cities had an unimaginably rich ecology of civic groups.  To put it simply, with the arrival of television everybody suddenly just stayed home; and the civic groups evaporated.  It’s the bowling alone story or the collapse of social networks story, but much earlier.

A friend pointed this out to me this morning, an early form of cinema

That would travel about, tickets were sold, a man would read a narration, the hand painted scroll would be displayed to the gathered audience.  Now we look at uTube on our iPhones alone, later maybe, forwarding them to our mySpace contacts.