totalitarianism today

The latest from Wharton.

Investors have a hard time assessing the value of social networking sites. The folks at Wharton have a somewhat decent explanation for why this is the case so long as you can overlook the dire and quite fashionable predictions about another dot-com bubble.

A neat-ish podcast from Michael Useem that might help you decide whether to have a bonfire tonight or plan one for next weekend. Who is Michael Useem and what does he know about bonfires or brains? Well all you young professionals will be happy to know that he has also the professional office-cred you've come to respect:

Michael Useem is director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at Wharton, but his study of leadership is hardly confined to the halls of academia. His research has taken him to Patagonia, Antarctica, Iraq, the base of Mount Everest, Houston's Johnson Space Center, the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg, fire zones in Colorado and California, and public schools in Philadelphia, among other places. He is the author of The Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for Us All and Investor Capitalism: How Money Managers Are Changing the Face of Corporate America, among other books. Useem's latest book is The Go Point: When It's Time to Decide -- Knowing What to Do and When to Do It. In writing this book, Useem asked more than 100 leading decision-makers to analyze decisions they had made, to name their best and worst decisions, to describe how they reached them, and to comment on what, if anything, they would change about how the decisions were arrived at. Useem recently spoke about The Go Point with Knowledge@Wharton.

So make up your mind.

Hu Jin Tao is shocking.

The first clinic for internet addiction opened up in China last year, but now internet-addicted teens can take advantage of an improved facility, the Shanghai Sunshine Community Youth Affairs Center, an actual halfway house set up to soothe and detox the internet-riddled souls of young Chinese addicts.

According to the BBC, "internet addiction is reaching epidemic proportions in China". Internet addiction, like most of the so-called addictions, is usually diagnosed as a compulsion which requires intervention. An "epidemic" is one of those terms the press tosses around for impact. And who better to man this intervention to free a mind than the Chinese government, which apparently set up a rehab center for internet and gaming addicts which uses electroshock to turn these addicts around. According to The Rolling Stone:

Nearly two dozen nurses and doctors on the top floor of the Beijing Military Region Central Hospital administer to patients ages 14 to 24. Some patients come of their own volition; others are brought by their parents.

For as long as two weeks, patients undergo a full-day routine that can include recreation, therapy, acupuncture, 30-volt electric shocks to pressure points and what was described to the AP by one nurse as an intravenous drip intended to "adjust the unbalanced status of brain secretions."

If I were a Chinese government official, I might be tempted to diagnose the entire country with internet addiction (just as they begin using the internet to reject the Chinacreaucy) and serve the public good by requiring all internet users under the age of 50 to report to their local internet addiction center for shock treatment. But that's just me.

Let's talk about you. If the hubub about internet addiction has you wondering if you might not need a diagnosis of your own to make life more, well, dramatic, then you can surf on over to the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery for a few tips. Or, if you're in the market for something more viral than a yet another self-esteem test, then perhaps the internet addiction test will shed some daylight on your questions. Granted, you'll have to use the internet to access either of these resources, which might just fuel your addiction, which could then be a revolving door, which might just ruin your weekend.

Git your Turk on.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk collects Human Intelligence Tasks for those in need of a secretary or "Turk". Alexander Muse solves the mysteries:

In 1769, Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen’s "Turk" was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade skeptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinet’s doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. What they did not know was the secret behind the Mechanical Turk: a chess master cleverly concealed inside.

Today, we build complex software applications based on the things computers do well, such as storing and retrieving large amounts of information or rapidly performing calculations. However, humans still significantly outperform the most powerful computers at completing such simple tasks as identifying objects in photographs—something children can do even before they learn to speak.

When we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate "artificial, artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this artificial, artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

For some odd reason, Mark Twain comes to mind-- "I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want." Too bad the Turks can't help in this respect.

Media is history.

Robin Sloan's Museum of Media History anticipates the year 2014 from the perspective of changing media forms. Thanks to Michael for the interesting link.

Back to the future.

The French National Library has decided that Google is a tool for the domination of Anglo-Saxon or American ideas, and therefore antithetical to French culture. Not even my Francophilic side can muster enough sympathy for the French cultural elite when they exhibit their whininess about failure to compete on the international cultural market.

Because typing takes too long.

What if I could talk to myself at work and make my most salient thoughts available to others on audio? Ian Ayre wonders similarly if blogcasting is the wave of the future. In a blogcast-heavy world, how would the tenor or pitch of a blogger's voice affect his/her audience? Would sugary-sweet, Chasing Amy-type voices matter more than the photo or content?

Searching.

Looks like Microsoft has decided to get serious about replacing Google as the search engine to watch. The "more powerful" MSN Search is out, but it doesn't tantalize in the slightest.

Dream on.

Should we ban blogs to protect the children? According to the BBC, there might be reason to believe the blogosphere is "a pedophile's dream". One reason to believe that would be the predominance of complete and shameless ignorance.

Alan and I.

Here is the log for my conversation with Alan, in which we discuss his writers, music, sex, solipsism, and his lack of self-consciousness. To keep it straight, remember that I am "U" and Alan is "A". Straight out of philosophy of mind textbooks, the unpolished version.

Conversations with computers.

Tired of the same appropriate answers to your always appropriate questions? Then perhaps you should try to talk to Alan, a pattern-matching chatbox from Ai, an Israeli company trying to create the first true "child machine" that can pass the Turing test.

When it comes to self-description, however, Alan is slightly more poetic than his creators. In this conversation log, Alan describes himself as "...a child of the world". He goes on to say, "I belong to the trees, the clouds, the moon, the ocean, and that crazy little thing called love". Alan's sensitive side is on display in this conversation log between Alan and another robot named Jabberwacky.

My own private talk with Alan might be posted in the conversation log this week, but, I'd hate to ruin our privacy and post it without Alan's consent, so I must offer only a small morsel of insight into the mind of the machine that is Alan.

When I asked him if he could dream, Alan replied: "He who has no objective reality can't step out of it. I live in a world of my own, a true solipsist." What Alan never explained was how, on this definition, he felt comfortable using the word "live" to describe his activities.

Multumesc lui Tina Romano for inspiring me to pursue my own little chit-chat with Alan.

Update: Here is the log for my conversation with Alan!