Ben Piché

I just uploaded a new and much belated post to my blog about the Mass Humanities Cyberspace and Civic-Space symposium at BC, which was a hell of a way to spend a weekend, and not only because I got to speak to Evgeny Morozov, but also because I got to hear from folks like Chris Csikszentmihályi and Jonathan Zittrain. Fun times were had by all.

Yes, the Facebook “real names” controversy is a little more nuanced than the above graphic.  There’s a really good discussion here.

John Backstrom, graduate of Cornish College of the Arts (2010)  creates haunting images of the fractal ghosts in his digital dreams, imperfect echoes of our collective cultural subconscious. He has a gallery of digitally altered images from films on his site, which he explains as

...distorted screenshots from major motion pictures, meant to destroy the recognizable, branded imagery of cinema and replace it with something that the viewer can interpret and decode with their own imagination.

I first learned of Backstrom from another graduate of Cornish (and dear relative of mine), M. Recent forays into the wilderness of our consensual hallucinations had revealed a similar project to me earlier that day, and she drew a connection between the two works immediately. Displayed below, for your viewing pleasure: a sample image of that find.

Year of the Glitch is a wonderful tumbling blog by a man named Philip Stearns, who "explor[es] various manifestations of glitches (intentional and unintentional) produced by electronic systems". While most of the images I enjoyed on the front page were altered data from circuitbent/prepared digital cameras, one assumes the artist explores other media as well.

Gibson doesn’t need an introduction as an inarguably talented science fiction writer, but he does great stream-of-consciousness deconstructions of modern society, too. Take this, my favorite bit from his recent interview in The Paris Review:

I knew that cyberspace was exciting, but none of the people I knew who were actually involved in the nascent digital industry were exciting. I wondered what it would be like if they were exciting, stylish, and sexy. I found the answer not so much in punk rock as in Bruce Springsteen, in particular Darkness on the Edge of Town, which was the album Springsteen wrote as a response to punk—a very noir, very American, very literary album. And I thought, What if the protagonist of Darkness on the Edge of Town was a computer hacker?

He’s got a new compilation of interviews and essays coming out on January 3 called Distrust That Particular Flavor. Lev Grossman over at TIME included an excerpt in his brief review, which I’ll repost here. He’s talking about Steely Dan’s Two Against One:

[It’s] like being present for the arrival of a time machine. But not one from any particular past, or future; this music managed (as it always has) to transcend the duller registers of the cultural calendar. It’s as though it was composed in the time machine, in its own little pocket of temporality. I suspect that this is somehow the result of an encyclopedic sense of American music, an effortlessly graceful facility at collage and that patented Steely Dan studio wax, as though one were listening down through a hundred coats of hand-rubbed sonic carnauba …

[io9] via [TIME]

Boston.com’s The Big Picture has a great photo series today of life in the Russian Empire, featuring the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944). The series reveals a much more modern view of Russian life than I had expected, with its electric turbines, trains, and modern infrastructure. The traditional costume, however, reminds us where we are.

Because Gorskii used the three-color method of developing his film, the colors didn’t always line up. This series is also a great example of chromatic aberration.

[Boston.com] via [The Library of Congress]

A package arrived at my apartment yesterday. A simple brown cardboard box with mailing information and a return address to Kanagawa, Japan. It contained the most beautiful piece of machinery I’ve laid eyes on since I unboxed my Macbook Pro – the Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 AI-S: The Cream Machine. The King.

Nikon first introduced this lens in 1981, and continued production until 2006. For twenty five years, it was praised for its razor sharp focus and butter-cream bokeh. Though it has been replaced twice – first in 1995 autofocusing AF-D, and second in 2010 by the (brilliant) AF-S G, many photographers still prefer this model, and it’s the one I wanted. Plus, it’s cheaper! The AI-S is sharper than the AF-D, and doesn’t fade at the edges. The AF-S G doesn’t have an aperture ring, so you can’t use it on manual cameras.

So far, I’ve only used it with a tripod. Using it without one seems to produce blurry images, and Ken Rockwell warns not to use it handheld. I figure I’ll probably use my 18-200 or my 50 outside anyway.

Fairly reliable rumors surfaced today about the specs on Nikon’s newest full-frame dSLR, the anticipated D4. These come in addition to the (accurate, now-confirmed) rumors about the D800, which popped up a few months ago.

With the release of this new line of full-frame FX cameras, Nikon is redistributing their sensor technologies across product tiers in a way that departs from their approach with the previous line. Previously, the mid-tier professional FX cameras (the D700) simply featured a cheaper, higher pixel-density sensor than their upper-tier professional FX cameras. The contrast between landscape-quality sensors and low-light sensors was distributed between the two cameras in the upper-tier pro line (the D3X and D3S).

Now, Nikon is positioning the mid-tier pro D800 to carry their high megapixel, color-performant sensor, while the upper-tier pro D4 packs the high ISO/framerate sensor. I would wonder if it’s a trend the company will continue in the future, but I’m too busy scanning eBay to see if and when the price of the D3S will drop. [Nikon Rumors]

Tomorrow’s meeting of the Cambridge Semantic Web meetup will feature a demo by Lee Feigenbaum of Cambridge Semantics. He’s going to talk about SPARQL (a query language for RDF ontologies) and what we can do with it.

Lee is one of the co-founders and most dedicated members of the meetup, and he gives many of the talks. His last demo was a broad analysis of the state of the semantic web, which he presented as a huge 105-slide deck. It’s available here.

Here’s a really fun map courtesy of neweurasia listing the various surveillance technologies in use by different authoritarian regimes.  While this is great, I have no idea why the Chinese section of the map includes Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.  They didn’t annex both countries without anyone noticing, right?

Also, as far as the other Central Asian states go, there was a line in the country profile for Uzbekistan in Access Controlled about how Uzbek intelligence has shared information with Russian intelligence and supposedly collaborates with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Academy.  I haven’t probed deeply enough into what the SNB has done of late to say anything more concrete that what I said in my blog post on Uzbekistan, but i wouldn’t be surprised if the Uzbek government had or could acquire the same capabilities.

It’s hard not to be a fan of Gibson, if you’re working among the technorati. Our “sociologist of the near future” has predicted and coined a number of cultural/technological phenomena, and in “Idoru”, it seems to be the rise of big data. I’m reading it now, having just finished his “Virtual Light” a few weeks ago. The following passage strikes me not just because of its prescience, but its relevance to my own neurochemical disposition – a disposition that others in the field must certainly share.

 

 

 

 

 

“Coffee,” Laney said.

Laney was not, he was careful to point out, a voyeur. He had a peculiar knack with data-collection architectures, and a medically documented concentration-deficit that he could toggle, under certain conditions, into a state of pathological hyperfocus. This made him, he continued over lattes in a Roppongi branch of Amos ‘n’ Andes, an extremely good researcher. (He made no mention of the Federal Orphanage in Gainesville, nor of any attempts that might have been made to cure his concentration-deficit. The 5-SB trials or any of that.)

The relevant data, in terms of his current employability, was that he was an intuitive fisher of patterns of information: of the sort of signature a particular individual inadvertently created in the net as he or she went about the mundane yet endlessly multiplex business of life in a digital society. Laney’s concentration-deficit, too slight to register on some scales, made him a natural channel-zapper, shifting from program to program, from database to database, from platform to platform, in a way to was, well, intuitive.

And that was the catch, really, when it came to finding employment: Laney was the equivalent of a dowser, a cybernetic water-witch. He couldn’t explain how he did what he did. He just didn’t know.

I think that the correlation between developers and caffeine (and beer, and other substances) speaks to a real need for a “pathological hyperfocus” when doing computer research. Dive into any CS textbook or programming forum worth its salt, and you’ll see it right away: free software is “free as in beer”, according to Richard Stallman. The Java language is named for coffee, “said to be consumed in large quantities by the language’s creators.” Commentors on StackOverflow or Slashdot often jokingly offer each other beer in return for digital services. Substances are not just popular among developers, they are part of us, and part of the mythology of technology that we surround ourselves with.

At work, I drink several cups of coffee before any long project. Like liquid Adderal, coffee gets me in that pathological hyperfocus that Gibson writes about. I think it’s safe to say that coffee doesn’t just help me work, but I need it to work effectively. 

At the same time, people like Laney, myself, and others with ADHD seem to be predisposed to hyperfocusing naturally. Additionally, people with attention deficit disorders are at a higher risk for substance addiction. This begs the question – does the association between beer and caffeine indicate higher rates of attention deficit disorders  (because of chemical addictions) among developers?

My mom is a graphic artist and a webmaster. One of her most recent contracts was a redesign of the Southeast MA Appalachian Mountain Club chapter website. She and I have been members for a few years, and she’s been running the site as its site admin for at least as long. If you live in southeast Massachusetts and you like to hike, bike, camp, or just enjoy spending time in the woods, check it out! The SEM AMC is a great network of outdoors enthusiasts.

One of my best photographs is featured on the main header.

News today from a few sources that Cambridge, UK based Linguamatics has sealed a deal with Selventa, “a personalized healthcare company focused on stratification of patients and development of predictive biomarker panels based on disease-driving mechanisms”.  The official word is that Linguamatics is going to use their NLP engine to mine healthcare literature to “efficiently extract complex life science knowledge in a computable, structured, biological expression language (BEL)… that can be used to interpret large-scale experimental data”.

I was fortunate to meet a brilliant researcher from Selventa this September at a Cambridge Semantic Web Meetup at MIT. Dr Julian Ray gave a talk on the biological expression language (BEL). As the two companies have only just inked this deal, it was probably before they were licensing any Linguamatics lingware, but I was definitely impressed by what I saw. Selventa already brings some impressive technology to the table.

Reading between the lines, I think I have an idea of what’s going on here. Selventa’s model is to plug into a huge database of pharmaceutical research, and then search for statistical correlations between symptoms (sore throat, etc), existing pharmaceutical solutions (Tylenol, aspirin, etc), and proteins that occur often with these in the literature. The idea is that you can actually predict which new drugs will be effective treatments for symptoms simply by looking for compounds that occur often with them in experimental data, without actually doing any testing. Dr Ray called this predictive ability “the holy grail” of bioinformatic techology, because pharmaceutical companies could save shitloads of money and preepmt market trends. Unfortunately, this description of the technology underlines Selventa’s difficulties with performing good NLP on their sources. His presentation attracted a lot of criticism because of the low precision it got against the target corpus, and the possibilties for predicting the wrong (and potentially deadly) treatment for a symptom.

My guess is that they’re contracting Linguamatics to add the the British company’s secret sauce to their existing platform, so that they can achieve better precision and hopefully reach this holy grail of pharmaceutical text analysis. More power to them, I say – but they should watch out for other Cambridge startups like Entagen, who are already demonstrating more impressive results. More on them later.

[HiveFire NLP] via [Semantic Web] via [Drug Discovery and Development]

Just returned from over a week in Pittsburgh yesterday afternoon. Sitting here, back in the comfort of my apartment, only one thing really stands out from that competition:

Those kids were really talented.

I’m inspired. I can’t tell you how many teenage polyglots I met at CMU who spoke, variously, Icelandic, or Nahuatl, or Basque, or Kutchi, or barcode. An eighteen year old Russo-Canadian who spoke nine languages fluently; an eighteen year old Israeli-American who spoke Inuit, Basque, and dreamed in code; an eighteen year old from Pittsburgh who graduated high school at sixteen and is now interning at CMU, writing a pan-Bantu morphological analyzer. It’s hard not to be intimidated by prodigies like these, the smartest high schoolers in the world, and yet, here, now, I’m just inspired.

There was a long time in high school when, in retrospect, I was debilitatingly awkward and depressed and poured all of my angst into languages. I used to desperately live linguistics. Recently, over the last couple of years, I’ve hit a groove, and I think I got lazy, and I stopped being hungry. The teenage linguists at CMU reconnected me with that curiosity, and I’m ready to learn again.

Exhausted after another day doing paperwork, social media, and photography for the IOL. It was the first official day of the event, and between registering new teams and setting up for the opening ceremonies, it’s nice to have some time to defrag. I did get more time to relax tonight, and things are slowing down from the weekend – only had to edit and upload the 350 photos I took today and check in the Latvian team before I went to bed tonight. A nightcap, and another nightcap of historical linguistics conversation with some precocious teenagers.

My clean installation of OS X Lion is running well so far, but I do have a problem with the mobile/grandma iOS style they’re bringing to the desktop. Xcode installs from the App Store now, nowhere else. I had to restart my installation of that ‘app’ halfway through, and needed to trash the aborted files before I started it up again. Lion would rather I simply ‘tapped’ and ‘clicked’ the half-dead ‘app’ away into the ‘cloud’ from Launchpad. Now I’m stuck with Xcode’s tell-tale heart, permanently buried in the floorboards of my /bin, occasionally reminding me that this system, although convenient, is inexpertly implemented.