My Thoughts Exactly

Overmind hires Rutgers to build PreCog Institute

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The so-called Homeland Security Agency is looking to use supercomputers & datamining to find latent terrorism in “open-source web logs” and other nasty & threatening instances of that pernicious “free speech” thing:

Leading the Rutgers effort is the university’s Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS). It will include partner researchers from AT&T Laboratories, Lucent Technologies Bell Labs, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Texas Southern University. This group will develop computing technologies that find patterns and relationships in data, such as news stories, open-source web logs, and other accessible information, to quickly identify emerging indicators of possible terrorist activity, and rate the consistency and reliability of the sources. Such information could give officials more lead time to investigate and potentially thwart terrorist plans.

“The challenge involved in this endeavor is not only the massive amount of information out there, but also how quickly it flows and how fast the sources of information change,” said Fred Roberts, director of DIMACS. “We will develop real-time streaming algorithms to find patterns and relationships in communications, such as among writers who may be hiding their identities, and to rate information sources for their reliability and trustworthiness.”

The Rutgers center will undertake nine research projects in its first year and will also create educational programs around the technology it develops, such as courses and certificate programs for undergraduate and graduate students. The center will also establish outreach efforts for high school students and community groups.

I do appreciate that Stasi throwback to “outreach efforts for efforts for high school students and community groups.” So very retro!

Heckova job, Rutgers! Heckova job!

Pains at the Panopticon

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With the help of my pal Gary, who formats my books for publication, and my pal The Waitress, who has copyedited my most recent hunk o’ words to prevent my most egregious stupidisms from seeing light of web, I have posted Chapter Three of The Pains.

On the evidence, this project is coming out of the induced coma it’s been in for nearly a year now. With any luck the next chapter will be up soon.

Note: attentive readers may notice some allusions to, and borrowing from, the work of the late Chis McKinstry, creator of the Mindpixel project. As far as I’ve been able to determine, there is no copyright holder. I’ll have more to say about this when the final book is prepared for publication, but for now I just want to make this acknowledgement.

David Broder, well known liar

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Being ancient is no crime, neither is it a crime to be an ignorant prissy mandarin. Nor, in most cases, is it a crime to be a liar.

But it’s my blog, and I would like to take this moment to call your attention to the fact that the ancient, ignorant, prissy mandarin known as David Broder, just back from a sold-out performance at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, is up to his usual lying ways.

Now please resume your deliberations over which of Harold Feld’s articles to recommend for the technical writing award.

Such a Deal!

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Hey Friends! How’d you like to support a struggling genius AND get a great deal on an excellent book (or two)? Today and tomorrow I’m offering my astounding novels at astounding discounts. If you dig Wetmachine, now would be a good time to show it, for once again the wolves are at the door. And if you just dig a good price on a good book, that works too.

The books in question are my Acts of the Apostles, a well regarded nanotech thriller, ostensibly about Gulf War Syndrome, which I wrote between 1995 and 1999 and published in 1999. Normally this goes for $15, but how does $5 sound, including shipping in North America? I’m offering the same deal on my Cheap Complex Devices and pre-orders of The Pains.

And of course, donations in support of the site (or any individual blogger: Me, Harold, Gary or Howard) are also always welcome.

Below the fold, more about these wonderful books, along with simple instructions for cashing in on these great, nay, scandalously great, deals.

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IMPEACH

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Impeach Cheney; Impeach Bush. Impeach Rice and Hadley. Impeach the whole festering, law-breaking, constitution-hating lot of them. Start at the top and work down or start at the bottom and work up, I don’t care.

Reclaim our country. Bring back the rule of law. Not only does our whole country deserve it, but the whole world depends upon it.

NOTE: As with every other posting here at Wetmachine, this one reflects the opinion of me alone, not (necessarily) those of my fellow bloggers.

The Legend of OpenLaszlo Legals

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I work for Laszlo Systems, Inc.., on OpenLaszlo, “the premier open-source platform for rich internet applications.” For the last year I’ve been working on the Legals project, which is a re-implementation of the entire platform — compiler, doctools, runtime-specific kernels, common core runtime libraries, you name it, while keeping APIs intact– in order to support compilation of source applications in our LZX language to arbitrary runtimes, starting with Flash and DHTML, but with SVG and Java on the horizon. This undertaking has been compared to the magician’s trick of pulling the tablecloth out from under the place settings — while dinner is being served.

Over the last calendar year, within the small but growing world of web application developers, the Legals project has gained increasing attention. Technorati shows that bloggers in China, Russia, France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, and elsewhere are paying close attention to our every move.

Amusingly enough, these very sharp developers have grasped the essential idea of the project, but have been bewildered by the project name, “Legals”. Even within the company Laszlo Systems, those not invloved on the project have been intruigued by the moniker. Well, yesterday we essentially began our Beta program, and the Legals codename is being retired in favor of the much more normative (and bland) “OpenLaszlo 4 Beta Release 1.”

Below the fold you’ll find a little story I wrote for internal consuption at Laszlo about how the code name “Legals” came to be. If you like geek arcana, I think you’ll like this. Some tidbits for context: Everbody mentioned is a hardcore developer, except for Amy, the erstwhile program manager, and me, the technical writer. David is the CTO and founder of the company, our big cheese. Max is also a founder of the company. Oliver is the original designer of the LZX language. (The OpenLaszlo website can tell you more about all these people.) I’ll only add that I’ve been in this business since 1980, and the people mentioned below the fold are the smartest developers I’ve ever worked with. Finally, to set context, I might admit that a year ago our company’s financial situation was, shall we say, not especially propitious. Since then we’ve put millions in the bank and things are really looking up. But a year ago, things were more scary.

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Virtual healing

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Here’s a feel-good story with a technophillic, Croquet-like feel to it: a network of children’s hospitals across North America get together to form a digital virtual universe for their patients and families. It was founded by Steven Spielberg and Norman Schwarzkopf.

In the demonstration presented at the conference, E.T. and the four-star bear, the on-screen characters of Mr. Spielberg and Gen. Schwarzkopf, were met by a child from Mount Sinai who presided as their tour guide through STARBRIGHT World. Together they joined friends from other hospitals where they explored the three virtual environments in STARBRIGHT World: Tropical World, Cave World and Sky World. In Sky World the group fell through a funnel cloud that transported them into a unique space where they can build sand castles, playhouses and forts, or anything imaginable – alone or with help of a few friends.

More on the story at Muniwireless.

To the barricades! Net Neutrality fight is on in Michigan

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Some background is here, at MYDD.

Harold, as always we’ll look to you for guidance in how to best help out. And of course factual analysis of the issues will help us too.

This fight is far from over. The good guys may be poised to take leadership positions in the Congress, but there are statehose battles raging as well. Now is no time to let down our guard.

Babelicioius Porn

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I saw the Cannes Film Festival “Best Director” prize winner Babel last night at the newly re-opened Capawok. This is the third film in a series, the other two being 21 Grams and Amores Perros.

After seeing the film I glanced at a few online reviews to see what others had made of it. Andrew O’Hehir of Salon, for example, liked a lot of what I liked about it and didn’t like some of the things that I didn’t like. Actually, I liked some stuff that he didn’t. He said it was philospophically lightweight, but I don’t think it was at all. Others have said it was more philosophically lightweight that the other two movies in this series, and there again I disagree.

However, no review that I’ve seen (I’ve only read a few) mentioned what to me was the most jarring thing about the movie, which was the exploitation of children; in particular of the child actors. There are scenes in this movie, whole themes, that very explicitly involve the sexual confusion of adolescents and the terror of very young children in bewildering, frightening situations. Especially in the case of the younger children, there is no way that they were “acting” confused and terrified. They were made so by the director, and he filmed them. The sexual scenes were in no way prurient, but I still found myself pulled totally out of the movie and thinking about the actors. Maybe I’m an old fuddy-duddy, but I think there are things you just shouldn’t ask young actors to do. I think the movie could have worked as well without several of the scenes; I’m thinking of the minor subplot about the boy and his sister in Morrocco. I’m less bothered by the Tokyo subplot because it’s about an older child and it’s central to the story. Nevertheless I think it was exploitative.

Are there certain things you can do in literature that you just can’t do in movies without breaking the implicit contract between children and adults? I think the answer is yes.

UPDATE

I sent a note to a friend of mine, a longtime working Hollywood TV/movie actor & recently award-winning producer. I asked him to tell me if I was being too prudish. Here was is his answer:


I liked Babel very much, flawed though it was. I thought the Japanese
segment was nothing short of astonishing- the disco sequence is far and away
one of the best pieces of cinema I’ve seen in some time. I think he
generally pushes the drama too far, bordering on ludicrous, but I also think
he manages a “reality” few filmmakers can come close to, and I believe
you’re suggesting this “reality” is too real for the kids in the film. My
answer is- I doubt it. I suspect that it’s all staged on the up and up and
that he’s just that good a director. I could be wrong, but the financing
deals alone for these type of film ventures demand very professional,
heavily insured productions, and there are laws about this stuff. If you’re
saying that “reality” or no, kids shouldn’t be in those kind of situations,
I also disagree. They likely do more/worse on their own, and the positive
lesson kids learn as they participate in discipline and hard work that goes
into actual filmmaking would most likely overshadow the situations they’re
depicting.

Plus, my wife tells me that the actress in the Japan story is 25 years old. To be clear, my concern was about the actors, not about the story being told or the characters portrayed by the actors. So maybe I went overboard. I’m not quite at Emily Litella’s “nevermind”, but maybe a bit closer to it.