Adventures in Egotism

Hey everyone who cares,

I’m in Seattle now and for the next six weeks. I’m working at University of Washington with Prof. Tanimoto, a great guy. Here’s my new address for you to send gifts and attestations of the void created by my physical absence from your life.

Turadg Aleahmad
608 21st Ave E
Seattle, WA 98112

I write this from Victrola café. They got some good coffee. The vibe is like a less hipster hyper version of Ritual Roasters in SF’s Mission District.

It hasn’t rained yet today, despite the forecast, so I hope it stays clear through the fireworks. Well, clear as in no water falling from the sky. It’s quite overcast. Apparently, that’s something Seattleans get used to, mostly by mainlining caffeine.

The CS department has its own espresso machine. Not one of those press-the-button rigs like in Wean, but a real professional barista style machine. And everyone knows how to operate it. I hope I don’t return to Pittsburgh a caffeine addict, but I fear that experimenting with shots and foaming will be too seductive to forgo.

Ciao for now.

my mosque photo

Originally uploaded by TfUnQ

My photo of a mosque in Esfahan made it into somebody’s blog post. Yay for Creative Commons.

Note, I don’t think Ahmadinejad is right about what the world needs.

UPDATE: I asked Ally how she found that web page and then I tried to find it myself. I did, along with this SFist page using one of my photos of Boogaloo’s. Fun!

I’m taking this blog more autobiographical. Here goes.

Ally and I spent 10 days surrounding Mother’s Day in California. We flew into LAX and stayed with my sister. I got reacquainted with LA’s car culture. We ate sushi. Ally was surprised that the temperature was cool, contrary to the LA portrayed in the liberal media. We hit the LACMA and thoroughly enjoyed the Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement exhibit. Time on Ventura Beach. Mother’s Day festivities. It was so good to see my family. Renewal. Oh, and we ate at California Pizza Kitchen. How can it get more California than that?

We rode with Micah up the coast to San Francisco. I got reacquainted with BART. I love the intersection and flow of people. (I had a video link for BART too, but it turns out that it’s on Atlanta’s MARTA, which has the same car design.) The weather in Berkeley was gorgeous, even by Berkeley standards.

We seriously lucked out, as the gorgeousness maintained through our spontaneous camping trip on Angel Island. “spontaneous” as in the product of a serendipitious exchange in which Robert and his rad friends invited us to join them. “rad” both as in “radical politics” and “super fun to camp with”.

Well, I’m not going to try to recount the whole time there. I don’t have links for everything. And I’m not sure how comfortable my friends are with me shouting out to them in a blog. (Oh, though I know Ann Larie is down. We caught up over sushi and the conversation was just getting rolling when we had to part.) Suffice it to say that I was deeply glad to see the people I managed to and wish I had time to visit more. I’ll be back in California in not too long for my next dose. Natural beauty, mass transit, multiculturalism, the intense odor of garlic driving through Gilroy, etc.

This message is to the 20 or so people subscribed to the feed for this blog.

I’ve been using FeedBurner’s Link Splicer to add into the feed a daily grab of my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia. I’ve been keeping those a while, and using the feed to share them with people who want to see the things I like to share.

Since Google Reader added sharing, and now notes, I find that I’m not using Ma.gnolia hardly at all anymore. For real bookmarks that endure, I’m using Foxmarks (which replaces Google Browser Sync because it works in Firefox 3). For timely sharing, that I used to use Ma.gnolia+Feedburner for, I’m using Google Reader.

If you want to see what I’m reading that I think is worth sharing, check out my Google Reader shared page. Better yet, load up Google Reader and add me as a Friend so my shared items will integrate into your other newsreading. While you’re at it, you can add the feed you’re reading, my personal about-me blog feed.

Cheers,
Turadg

William Cohen’s blog has a post about a long fascinating thread on a political blog that found out they were being analyzed by algorithms. The community investigates and some attempt to fight back by gathering and posting personal/private information on the researchers.

I found comment #303 particularly interesting,

Tae, let that be a lesson: Blogs are not inert things that can be studied dispassionately! Sometimes they can bite back — jump right up at you through the screen.

And the meaning of sentences cannot be dissected by computer analysis.

I wonder if this will happen more as people gain awareness that they’re being analyzed.

[by way of Matthew Hurst]

The Smiley Award has been getting lots of press. 

Press Release from Friday
CMU noted it Friday and now has it in releases
On the blog of the CS department head
And just now I saw a write-up on Yahoo’s Messenger blog 

I am pleased to be a co-recipient of the Smiley Award.  Because of the history of the Smiley and the goal of the award to highlight "projects that are both useful and fun" I think it’s nicely fitting that the first recipients are from the Art School and the School of Computer Science. Of course, it is primarily an art project and thus Jennifer’s baby.

When Jennifer told me that One Cold Hand was winning the Smiley Award I was really happy, and glad to have been asked to help.  Back in November it just seemed like a cute idea and I thought it would be fun to handle the technical side of things.  Since then, it’s been a long interesting ride.

I remember our giddiness when it hit the New York Times, as an Associated Press article and the hockey stick we saw on Google Analytics.  And the subsequent waning of interest.  And then the occasional peaks as it hit the home page of a big news site in Hungary, or Italy, or Brazil.  I don’t remember them all. 

All along I was happy to see Jenn get her due recognition in the interviews with BBC radio, Pittsburgh television, NPR, CNN, etc.  It was her baby.  To extend a metaphor, I was the ob/gyn who helped bring it into the world.  People take pictures of the baby with the mom, not the ob/gyn.  She’s the one who nurtured it to greatness.

When I suggested she submit One Cold Hand for the Smiley Award, we thought it would be the project that won or lost.  Really, the project has required a battalion of volunteers collecting gloves from boxes and interning with Jenn in her studio.  Not to mention the countless people taking the time to pick up a glove and carry it to a box, based on a simple and statistically improbable hope that it be reunited with its mate.

So now that this Smiley Award press is bouncing around the internet, I wanted to publically (as if anyone reads this blog) thank Jenn and all the volunteers for the great experience I’ve had with the project.

Thanks.

White people like many things. One of the main things they like is to be confronted with their “whiteness”. They want to atone for the sin of being white. Note that “being white” does not include shopping at Wal-Mart or following evangelicalism. “Being white” means acting in the manner of those white people who have power and interest in exploring their role in society. All of their attempts to better themselves or society though are in order to feel moral superiority or “less white”. White people who care about the pain of animals may choose not to eat them, but ultimately this is so they can feel as though they are helping the environment AND it gives them a sweet way to feel superior to others. White people who are excited by learning about other cultures do it in order that you know how special and unique they are.

Remember that white people are not poor people. White people are those with the privileges of computers and free time that they can spend it on a web site mocking them and providing ad revenue to the person generating generalizations of them.

Remember also that people “of color” (white people do not have a color—really they are so empty as to be translucent) do not exhibit the attributes above. Black people do not like coffee, Apple products, to study abroad, bicycles, or recycling. Black, yellow, red, brown, and purple people who do like any of the aforementioned things are not acting their color or being true to their cultures.

If you see a non-white person at Whole Foods, they are probably trying to be white.

p.s. white people also love the socially pacifying power of conspicuous irony

I keep another blog called News Mirror where I write about what I read in the news. Today I got ticked off at bad science, maybe prompted by Saturday night entertainment at the iSLC conference this weekend.

On bad scientific reporting and bad quantitative methods.

I’ve been waiting for the Privacy Lusitania, an event when the infrastructure fails and public opinion galvanizes around solving it. I think it’s a pretty apt metaphor. In WWI people thought everything was OK in the US until the vaguely dangerous power hit the US infrastructure by sinking a commercial transport ship. (Of course that’s all arguable.) 9/11 fits the same logic, but is way more complex in the social psyche.

When I read about the MySpace private photos leak, I thought this could be the I Lusitania was waiting for. But the press has been pretty quiet, by what I’ve seen. Why aren’t people up in arms? Why aren’t they suing MySpace? Does MySpace have any liability at all?

These pictures are on hard drives around the world in a big BitTorrent cloud. They will never go away. Accessible face recognition is here. Riya has been doing it for years and startup Polar Rose is rolling out a web service next quarter. Someone with enough time to make a point could easily run all these photos through face recognition and start putting together some pieces. They could make a wiki or ESP Game app where volunteers name the people in the photos. In fact, since the photos are linked to MySpace account IDs, there’s a whole lot that can be found out with some simple data mining. Those users can delete their accounts, but those pictures will live on in the torrent, undeletable.

Boing Boing recently had a headline, “Database leaks are as immortal and toxic as nuclear spills — let’s start acting like it”. I think now that Chernobyl is a better, albeit slightly ragged, metaphor. When will the public confidence in our privacy infrastructure melt down? It looks like it may be happening in England with those DVDs of private records lost repeatedly in the post. (And the article quoted in BB was from The Guardian.)

The power of IT to destroy privacy been advancing rapidly. Yet over last 7 years while we should have been working to preserve it, we’ve been convinced not to, in order to be safe. Don’t believe it. Security is not at odds with privacy. Security requires privacy.

I have a whole lot of work to do, so to procrastinate clear my mind I’ve started a new blog, Practict. It’s where I’ll share practical knowledge that I’ve found or created. This will help me focus this blog on myself, in accord with its charter.