harpojaeger.com

On the road with limited Internet connectivity right now, but this is a big deal:

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

This is concrete evidence that the current administration really gets how important the Internet can be, and is willing to put time and money into helping people use it even when their governments won’t.  Says Hillary Clinton:

“We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations,”

More of this, please.

On the differences between the NYT and partisan news outlets:

The first is that we believe in verification rather than assertion. We put a higher premium on accuracy than on speed or sensation. When we report information, we look hard to see if it stands up to scrutiny

…

Being right is necessary but not sufficient. We also strive to be impartial. We are agnostic as to where a story may lead; we do not go into a story with a preconceived notion. We do not manipulate or hide facts to advance an agenda. We strive to preserve our independence from political and economic interests, including our own advertisers and including our own government. (NPR, whose news coverage I admire, must surely be wondering whether a federal subsidy is worth its vulnerability to the riptides of Congressional politics.)

…

But just as doctors and lawyers, teachers and military officers, judges and the police are expected to set aside their own politics in the performance of their duties, so are our employees. This does not mean — as one writer recently scoffed — that we “poll people at both extremes of any issue, then paint a line down the middle and point to it as reality.” It does not mean according equal weight to every point of view, no matter how far-fetched. (Sorry, birthers, but President Obama is an American citizen.) Impartiality is, for us, not just a matter of pretending to be neutral; it is a healthful, intellectual discipline. Once you proclaim an opinion, you may feel an urge to defend it, and that creates a temptation to overlook inconvenient facts when you should be searching them out.

I think this last part is exactly right.  And I also like that Keller doesn’t fall into the traditional “this is all the fault of the bloggers” line of reasoning.  In fact, he even takes a shot at that precept: “…worrying that the accelerated competition of Web news has undermined our premium on accuracy.”

There’s still, and will continue to be, a place for real, verifiable, reporting.  Some if it is done in newspapers, some of it is done in blogs.  There’s also a good deal of shoddy journalism in both.  It’s heartening to see an executive at one of the finest news organizations in the country talking frankly about the structural incentives that shape the way news is produced and consumed.  That’s the first step to better aligning those incentives with the public interest.

Although I can’t blame my now-ending posting lapse on it, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how bloggers, or indeed any information synthesizers / analyzers remain relevant.  Especially now that there are so many smart people writing about pretty much everything, it becomes difficult to actually say anything original.  I don’t think this is a reason that one shouldn’t write (or speak, or whatever) – if you aren’t willing to try to contribute, you can’t develop your opinion, and even if you are repetitive at times, it’s worth it in the long run.  But it is a consideration.

It doesn’t seem that there’s a single ingredient that makes for always-relevant material.  Focusing solely on national or global issues certainly puts you in a pretty big pond, but getting too local makes you irrelevant to anyone outside where you live, or worse, anyone who lives differently than you do, even in the same location.  So while I intend to start focusing on local issues more frequently, I’m not planning to give up analysis of larger affairs, particularly because I think there’s a dearth of attention being paid to some of them (climate change comes to mind).

Some upcoming blog-projects: a series on drug policy, maybe a review of the upcoming Northampton Coke plant expansion (“Lane wrote that without a local property tax break, freedom from having to pay for infrastructure upgrades, state tax credits and job training funds, Coke’s investment here was no sure thing.”), and some stuff on the Northwestern DA election and the pros/cons of statutory rape prosecutions.  Also working on a new title for the site (yes, “working on.”  It’s a big decision!)

Tonight marks the launch of the newest entry to the projects section of this site, currently called the text reassembler (if you have a better idea for a name, please let me know).  It’s something I started over a year ago that’s languished undeveloped for much of that time.  I decided to put in a bit of time to get it viewable, and put it up as a work in progress.

The project is based off of something I saw demonstrated at by Prof. Allen Downey at Olin College in the fall of 2008 while I was visiting.  Although I didn’t end up applying there, I really liked the presentation he gave, on various computing methods and some of the ways of using computers to produce humanistic output.  Particularly, he demonstrated a program that accepted inputted text, and broke down that text into an associative array with the following properties:

• the array keys were each word in the array (so the text “hello how are you” would generate an array with keys “hello”, “how”, “are”, and “you”)
• the value of each key was a non-associative array consisting of a list of every word that followed the key somewhere in the text (so the text “I saw you and he saw her” would be (in PHP format): array(“I”=>array(“saw”),”saw”=>array(“you”,”her”),”you”=>array(“and”),”and”=>array(“he”),”her”=>array())

This sounds complicated, but bear with me; the next step will make it make more sense.  Once the program has generated this array, it begins to iterate through it in the following manner:

1. it takes key from the array and outputs it
2. it selects a random item from the list of words following that key (the array stored in that key’s associate value) and outputs it
3. then it jumps to the key entry for that word, and moves back to step 2

It repeats this until it encounters a word that has nothing following it (the last word in the source text if it appears nowhere else) or until it’s output a specified amount of words (much more common).  Thus, if you take any two adjacent words in the resulting text (which sounds uncannily similar in tone to the original and sounds like it should make sense, but is complete nonsense), you’ll be able to locate them, still adjacent, in the source text.  It’s legitimately one of the most fascinating and beautiful things I’ve ever seen a computer do.

I came home determined to write a copy, and made a bit of progress.  It lay around for a while, I did some more work on it some point, but I never completed it.  I rediscovered it this evening and just manned up and made it work well enough to be publicly viewable.  When finished, it will accept input in a text field, or will be able to read input from a specified URL.  At the moment, though, it’s just dealing with block of text I hard-coded in (thus it’s not accepting any user input right now), and a word output limit imposed the same way.  Both the source of the text and the length are displayed on the page.

I’ve been using Apple products all my life.  I’ve always found them to be of terrific quality, and I’ve always been better treated by the company in sale and support terms.  I’ve also spent years as an Apple Certified Macintosh Technician.  I camped out for an iPhone 3G and spent a long time arguing AT&T into giving me a subsidized 3G S after the 3G was stolen.  I have just about as much loyalty to the Apple brand as anyone.

But I know which way the wind is blowing.  If Apple keeps going down the road of intense user control, doesn’t give up the exclusivity contract with AT&T, and continues to break with Google, I’m not going to stick with them.  Google Android, Chrome, and Chrome OS once it exists (not to mention more well-established software like Ubuntu, which I already consider second only OS X), are all completely viable alternatives.  I already have all of my email addresses (including MobileMe, which I get for free as a certified Apple Sales Professional) redirecting to Gmail, and it provides all the services MobileMe does, except for Find My iPhone, and for free.  See my general rule for computing.  It still applies.

So, while I think that Apple is still a generally moral company, one that is providing terrific services to its users, I hope they realize that down the road they are only going to be able to restrict us so far.  Google has done an incredible job of making it really easy to switch to their services, and as we offload more and more of our data storage and processing power to the cloud, that ease of transition and context-switching is a big advantage.  Either it will keep Apple honest, or I’ll switch.  I’m definitely not enough of a fanboy to stick with Apple when there’s a better alternative.  Until that point, I’ll continue to defend them as the best hardware and software provider, but I’m not blind to reality.

Thus, I publicly declare Apple not to be the infallible god that its fanpersons so often claim it is.  And I call on its directors and customers to take it in a direction that continues to provide good products and services, rather than one that treats its customers, as so many other tech companies have, as endlessly ignorant moneybags.  I, for one, will not put up with that.  We’re used to getting good value from Apple, and if we stop getting it, we’ll move on.

I said before that I would share some biographical information about myself, so here it is. The real reason I’m writing this post is to talk about some issues that I thought of while deciding what sort of biographical information to share. One criticism of the internet that I hear a lot, particularly regarding blogger, concerns anonymity. People don’t like the idea of someone being able to write whatever they want without their name or identifying information attached to it. I’ve been thinking about what this means from a Jewish perspective. What ethical responsibilities do I, as a blogger, have to those who read my writing? Do I owe them information about myself? I don’t think I do. There’s no reason a blogger can’t write responsibly, with well-researched and well-cited information, while still maintaining anonymity. I personally have no problem with people on the Internet knowing who I am, but there a lot of cases where that’s not true. The key is this: there’s a difference between anonymity and cowardice. I can write under a handle without ever linking that handle to any kind of real-world information, but I still have a responsibility to provide honest content and to respond honestly to criticism. Using anonymity as a shield for ignorance or deception is not acceptable. That’s true in any field, and the blagotubes are no exception. Neither is it acceptable to use my anonymity to spread lashon hara. So from a Jewish ethical perspective, as well as one of scholarly responsibility, with great anonymity comes great responsibility. Given the pitfalls of anonymity, are there any advantages? Well, if one provides useful content free of charge (most bloggers dont’ get paid), it could be considered a form of tzedakah. I’m not trying to sound self-centered here, but ideally blogging is a useful form of information and perspective, in donation form. Maimonides said that one of the higher levels of tzedakah is giving anonymously to an unknown source. So if a blogger writes an anonymous post, they’re engaging in a high level of charitable giving. They don’t know who’s going to read their post; it could be anyone in the world. That’s the beauty of the medium. And the person reading it doesn’t know who wrote it. So there’s been an exchange of significant information between two people, neither of whom have any idea who the other is. There’s no ego involved (“look how much I know about this topic”), just learning. That, to me, exemplifies both the ideals of Jewish text study or chevrutah and those of journalism; the pure exchange of ideas. So in this case, as in most, the internet makes it easier to do really good work or really bad work. The question is, which one will you choose?

This post originally appeared on Jewschool.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of this site’s transition to WordPress, and, thus, the one-year anniversary of my beginning to blog in earnest.  This is a good opportunity to reflect on some stuff I’ve learned and look to the future of this site and my interests.

I’ve gone through a lot of different phases with this blog.  I began by using it as sort of a journal of my actions and thoughts.  Coupled with the WordPress client for iPhone, I did a fair amount of spontaneous and short blogging, expressing ideas I had, things I saw, and so forth.  As school began, I started becoming more introverted, focusing on the way I felt (usually being under a lot of stress, as it was senior year).  In January, my iPhone was stolen, and I lost the ability to blog at anytime.  I started blogging almost compulsively when I got home every day, almost as a way to let out my feelings.  Because of everything that was going on at school, it felt good to have a place to write about what I thought it all mean.  Sometimes it’s hard to articulate that sort of stuff when you’re still in it.  You need to take a step back.  Blogging has definitely helped me do that, in other areas of my life as well.

When I got a new iPhone in early July, I started using Twitter for uses other than just tracking this blog, and shortly thereafter joined Facebook.  Now I use those as two methods of communication (they’re closely integrated), and have begun to regard this blog as more of a place for contemplative, well though-out concepts or arguments.  A lot of my writing has been inspired by the increasing amount of other blogs I’ve been reading, including Paul Krugman‘s The Conscience of a Liberal, Jewschool, CAP, and Climate Progress, to name a few.  In a lot of cases, doing this writing has helped me solidify my own thoughts on subjects, and opened my mind to new points of view.

In the future, I want to blog more regularly than I have been recently; at least a couple times a week.  Interestingly, it was easier for me to blog regularly during the school year than it has been now.  I’m planning to blog a couple times next week from the NHC Summer Institute about the program and some issues that I will be considering during my time there.  There’s a plan for facilitation of a dialogue about the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict (although I don’t really like calling it that), so I’m expecting to get some interesting stuff out of that.

As I begin school, I will almost definitely be undergoing some serious life changes in terms of how I spend my time and what I work on.  I intend to keep this blog an important component of my work and thoughts, and I hope to attract a wider audience as I meet new people and discover new ideas.

It’s been an incredibly rewarding year in many ways.  I look forward to many more.

I was invited to open a free Google Voice account, and so far, it’s pretty cool.  I get an online inbox, free text messaging (although it may forward them to my phone, causing AT&T to charge me, I’m still figuring that out), and free calls anywhere in the US.  It can also transcribe my voicemails, screen my calls according to my contacts, and allow me to listen in on messages.  I also got a FABULOUS phone number.  I’m probably going to mess around with the settings a little more before I start giving out the number, but I think this could be pretty useful.  Probably its best feature is the ability to ring more than one phone.  If I have a dorm landline at college, I will definitely configure this; I can save some serious money and always be reachable on campus.  And I won’t have to give my number to anyone I don’t want to.  I can just block them or screen them if I want.

I have four books that I need to read right now, five if I count one for Brown (summer work!).  One is not in the library yet – Seeds of Terror, which is about the connection between Al Qaeda and the Afghan opium poppy trade.  I saw the author being interviewed on The Daily Show, and she was one of the smartest people I had ever seen.  So I reserved the book right then, and am waiting to read it.  I have with me The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while and I think will start tonight, The Cluetrain Manifesto, which is about the way the Internet is changing business, and a book by the Motley Fool about direct investing.  I think I will write reviews of each after I finish.

A lot has happened recently.  I’ve been involved in some very complicated issues at my school.  It looks as though they are progressing favourably.  I’ve also gotten a Facebook.  I had been resisting this, but I think it had to happen.  I suppose it will make my life easier and all, but I’m still skeptical.