The Hacker Crackdown

I got this book because the author, Bruce Sterling, is a science fiction writer, so I thought he would have an interesting point of view on the topic of computers and criminals. Soon it became apparent that the book is required reading for anyone who uses a computer. It's also a captivating genesis story of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

Bruce Sterling, Bantam, 1992

• The ghost in the machine was another person: on the other end: When you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing the cold output of a machine -- you were speaking to another human being. Once people realized this, their instinctive dread of the telephone as an eerie, unnatural device swiftly vanished. A "telephone call" was not a "call" from a "telephone" itself, but a call from another human being, someone you would generally know and recognize. The real point was not what the machine could do for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a person and citizen, could do through the machine. (p7)
• GURPS Cyberpunk was thought real by secret service and taken as evidence in the great Hacker Crackdown. (It was science fiction). (p148)
• "ad-hocracy" (bureaucracy) (p192)

The E911 Document and the Trial of Craig Neidorf aka Knight Lightening

Neidorf had deliberately and recklessly distributed a dangerous weapon. ... Neidorf had put people's lives in danger. In pretrial maneuverings, Cook had established that the E911 Document was too hot to appear in the public proceedings of the Neidorf trial. The jury itself would not be allowed to ever see the Document, lest it slip into the official court records and thus into the hands of the general public and, thus, somehow, to malicious hackers who might lethally abuse it.  Hiding the E911 Document from the jury may have been a clever legal maneuver, but it had a severe flaw.

There were, in point of fact, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people already in possession of the Document, just as Phrack had published it. It's true nature was already obvious to a wide section of the interested public (all of whom, by the way, were at least theoretically , party to a gigantic wire-fraud conspiracy.) Most everyone in the electronic community who had a modem and any interest in the Neirdorf case --already-- had a copy of the Document. It had already been available in Phrack for over a year. (p260)

Oh Behave

This book was written in the 60's, and appears to me as California-centric, written at Berkeley, and between the Universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania. The author, Ervin Goffman, spent a lot of time in mental institutions, observing the residents there. 

Partially related image credit: Perseverance on Mars - 2021

He wrote lots of books, and this isn't the most popular. I'm not sure how I came to it. It's supposed to be about deviance, but really it's everyday social interactions, broken down to a level of analysis and explanation that will make you feel like the alien, looking back at yourself.

I read the whole thing sitting outside a cafe, across from a public park, watching in real time as the hypotheses in the book were being confirmed over and over. 

Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings

Ervin Goffman, The Free Press, New York, 1963. 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/256.Behavior_in_Public_Places

• On Co-Working Spaces and Assigning Non-Person Status - involvement shield, darkness for sex, for darkness can allow participants to enjoy some of the liberty of not being in a situation at all...Thus the sharing of an office with another often means a limit on work, because extreme concentration and immersion in a task will become an improper handling of oneself in the situation. Some coworkers apparently resolve the issue by gradually according each other the status of nonperson, thus allowing a relaxation of situational properties and an increase in situated concentration. This may even be carried to the point where one individual allows himself half-audible "progress grunts" such as "What do you know!" "Hm hm," "Let's see," without excusing himself to his coworker. -Edgar Schein has suggested that if an individual feels obliged to affect deep immersion in some focus of attention, he may of course affect these expressions. (p62-63)
• On Women in the Factory (and Masturbating with the Sewing Machine) - "a suffocated cry, followed by a long sigh, was lost in the noise of the work room." The foreman advised her to "sit fully on her chair, and not on its edge." As I was leaving I heard another machine at another part of the room in accelerated movement. The foreman smiled at me and remarked that this was so frequent that it attracted no notice. (p68) -Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Random House, 1936; -L'Onanisme chez la Femme, Pouillet, Paris, 1880
• On Social Clothing: A class of auto-involvements, "creature releases," fleeing acts that slip through the individual's self control and momentarily assert their "animal nature." They appear to provide a brief release from the tension experienced by the individual in keeping himself steadily and entirely draped in social clothing -- momentary capitulations to the itches that plague a performer who does not want to sneeze in his role. (p87ish)
• On Civil Attention (and Social Clothing) - for example, it's bad form for a newly married couple when going to a party to enter the room together. Someone else should take her in. ... On all occasions appearing in public, the pair should not be exactly together. The recognition of that relation should as much as possible be confined to the fireside. It is not pleasant to see persons thrusting their mutual devotedness into the eye of society. (p169)
• On Handshakes (and Avoiding Situational Impropriety) - for example, should long separated friends meet [at a funeral] it would be difficult for them to do justice to their relationship without committing a situational impropriety. ... Apparently the very warm handshake provides a solution to this problem, allowing a strict situational solemnity to be maintained in appearance, while in fact a shielded involvement is occurring whose depth and alienation from the occasion can be sensed only by the two participants. 
• On the Transcending of the Workplace via Clothing in Blue Collar vs White Collar Workers: Tightness, looseness, and social rigidity...fitting into social gatherings, alienation...In this context it is worth considering the relation of work and clothing to the problem of fitting into gatherings. Some clothing, like that worn by deep-sea divers or firemen, is inextricably geared to the task at hand. These personal fronts can hardly serve in nonoccupational situations nor can the possessor, unless he changes clothes. Even during the coffee break, we will be showing a certain kind of devotion to the job. In the case of white collar tasks however, work clothes transcend the workplace and enable the worker to merge into gatherings occurring off the job. Correspondingly, when he is on the job, there will be part of himself that he need not submerge into the work, and this in fact provides him with one basis for self possession and dignity. Those who must wear a uniform at work, and who cannot leave it in the locker room when they leave the premises, are likely to feel that they are under special constraint to give much of themselves to work and to carry this contribution to any nonwork situation in which they happen to find themselves. (p205)
• On Pajamas in Class vs Pajamas in Finals: A male college student who enters the classroom in need of a shave and in trunks, or a female who enters with her hair in curlers, is nakedly showing lack of attachment to the behavior setting; but when an exam is being held, and all students in the exam hall are engrossed quite deeply in school work, having studied devotedly for the previous two weeks, then there is already sufficient sign of involvement in schooling, and thus the informalities of appearance I have mentioned may well be permitted, no longer being symbols of alienation. ... The lawyer dressed with no jacket is disoriented, but on the weekend, "his mere presence in the office at an off hour is sign enough of regard for the work world." (p213)
• Drunk, Bums and Ambulatory Psychotics: Parks may maximize the acceptability of nefarious acts, minimizing the price of being caught. (p215)
• On the Implication of a Beard: And the status symbolism of personal front, Church of England's clergymen wearing laymen's clothing only while playing lawn-tennis, ... individual insignias such as uniforms in erupting social movements meant to proclaim distance from the ordinary course of social life, in sailors who use tattoos to express solidarity to each other and separation from land society, "Something of the same effect is obtained by college students and beatniks (and their fellow-travellers) who express distance from the employed adult population by a full beard, or a two-day growth, and by bedraggled clothes (p222) -The Holy Barbarians, L Lipton, Messner New York, 1959

Baselines, Biases and Big Data Problems - The Secrets of Statistics and the Magic of Metrology

The paradox of big data spoils vaccination surveys

Dec 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-12-paradox-big-vaccination-surveys.html

Image credit: Labyrinth by Liqen, Miami 2011

So guess what -- big data is really good at minimizing sample size errors, but also at magnifying systematic biases such as nonresponse bias like how vaccinated people are more likely to respond and marginalized groups less so -- in other words, bad data. Yet because the sample size is so large, we are tricked even more into thinking it must be good data. "Biases in the data get worse with bigger sample size." -phys.org

Here's an example: "Two in 10 respondents did not have a college degree, compared with four in 10 of all U.S. adults—and race and ethnicity—the fraction of black and Asian respondents was only half of what it is in the general population."

"Worse than no survey at all" they say.

Thanks Facebook, but you can keep your invasive mass surveillance system of the entire American population to yourself. 

via Harvard: Seth Flaxman, Unrepresentative big surveys significantly overestimate US vaccine uptake, Nature (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04198-4

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04198-4

On research methods and data quality:

Meng said he began thinking about the problems posed by big data during a visit to Harvard a decade ago by a U.S. Census Bureau official. The official met with a group of statisticians and asked them about the handling of data sets that were becoming available covering large percentages of the U.S. population. Using the hypothetical example of tax data collected by the IRS, he asked whether the statisticians would prefer a sample covering 5 percent of the population that they knew was representative of the larger population or IRS data that they weren't sure was representative but covered 80 percent of the population. The statisticians chose the 5 percent. "What if it was 90 percent?" the Census Bureau official asked. The statisticians still chose the 5 percent, because if they understood the data, their answer would likely be more accurate than even a much larger set with unknown biases.

-phys.org

And now for the hard stuff:

Completely unrelated image; I'm just collecting pictures from science articles of people holding vials in their fingers: Wastewater Filtration, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Andrea Starr, 2022

Drinking alcohol to stay healthy? That might not work, says new study

Nov 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-11-alcohol-healthy.html

This is such a great example of how statistics works (and how it doesn't). The key word is "baseline".

We've been told for years, forever?, that one glass of red wine a day is not only not-bad, it's actually good for you. In health-speak, they call that "protective".

But this study shows us that there is no group of people that we can use as a baseline, who ---doesn't--- drink and yet who also ---doesn't--- have other health issues caused by having a history of substance abuse. In other words, when the only people who don't drink are people who are recovering from being addicted to alcohol (gross exaggeration), it means you can't find a baseline for a "normal" person. And if you can't find a baseline, then you can't measure anything. 

The majority of the alcohol abstainers at baseline were former alcohol consumers and had risk factors that increased the likelihood of early death. Former alcohol use disorders, risky alcohol drinking, ever having smoked tobacco daily, and fair to poor health were associated with early death among alcohol abstainers. Those without an obvious history of these risk factors had a life expectancy similar to that of low to moderate alcohol consumers. The findings speak against recommendations to drink alcohol for health reasons.

-https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003819

I tell my friends this story, and they ask the first question, a good question -- what about people like Seventh Day Adventists, or Muslims, they don't drink, why can't we use them? And the answer is the reason why health science is hard.

The reason you can't use groups of people who don't drink, is because that group would likely not represent the much larger group of, let's say, all the people in America. It doesn't even matter if it's a small group; making it bigger won't help. It doesn't work because it doesn't match. You can't compare the two groups because the people aren't the same. 

Another way we see this, and one which is becoming more evident to those who can fix it, is how certain groups of people (like undocumented immigrants) are under-represented in the data. If the majority of the datapoints are White, Christian and middle class, and you're none of those, then it's possible that the data is not relevant to you. Your baseline isn't represented, so whatever health effects you're trying to measure, they aren't being compared to someone like you. 

via Public Library of Science: John U, Rumpf H-J, Hanke M, Meyer C (2021) Alcohol abstinence and mortality in a general population sample of adults in Germany: A cohort study. PLoS Med 18(11): e1003819. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003819

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003819

Partially Related:

This is also a correlate to the story of how lead was discovered in the air -- a geochemist was trying to do such sensitive work (to measure the age of the Earth!) that he kept picking up extra lead in his results, and could not figure out where it was coming from. But it turns out that it was in the air, having been vaporized in the internal combustion engines in our cars. And that story implies that until then, all other experiments being done were "wrong" because they didn't exclude the excess lead from the otherwise "normal" background. 

Last One -- Palmar Sweating:

During a nuclear war scare (1950's), all experiments into palmar sweating at a research institute had to be abandoned because the base level of the response had become so abnormal that the tests would have been meaningless.  (p188)

-The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris, 1967

Collective Computing and Manipulating Possibility Space

I'm watching a presentation by David Krakauer at the Santa Fe Institute. They do complexity theory, and he gives a good lecture. 

These pictures are screenshots of his presentation. I'm keeping them here for my own notes, because I thought there was some pretty deep stuff in here. 

First -- noise is essential to the system, because, as written here, it allows for the exploration of all possible states. How else are you going to optimize?? Noise delineates the operation-space.

Next, he gives us a picture of what I would refer to as a Lévy flight, but which simply be called "foraging behavior"; it's where you take a semi-random approach to exploring your environment, whether it's a field of blackberries or the information-space of artistic production. Artists do this throughout their career, where they spend a lot of time exploring -places, ideas, themes and then an abrupt and explosive execution of work that seems to crystallize out of all their recent experience. So the exploratory Lévy flight graph is paired with a more tightly integrated graph, the execution graph.  

Then he tells us that neurons are doing the same thing when we think, and especially when we make decisions. 

But this is where shit got crazy for me. Not only do our brains do this, but we as organisms in the larger superorganism of society are doing it also. 

He's saying that society is a circuitboard, where each of our relationships with each other creates a network of information flows, complete with bottlenecks and critical junctures, and evolving in real-time as it tries to optimize the flow of information. He is visualizing, and schematizing, the noosphere in action. 

And then the needle drops, and you remember why you like watching people like David Krakauer and places like the Sante Fe Institute: He calls these relationships "social circuits" and says we can predict the individual behaviors in the group: duration of a fight, who will fight who, who needs to be removed from the group for the fight to stop...

As we develop more sophisticated sensor networks, we will accumulate more and more data on bigger and bigger groups, and learn how to integrate that data into more complex network graphs like these.

And then we'll be able to predict adoption or rejection of social movements, of occupying military forces, of environmental regulations...

The private sector will have a half-assed understanding, yet sell it to all of us via third party business consultants who eat hype-flakes for breakfast, and we'll buy it all and use it and let it take over our lives, disrupt our hormones and dissolve our social fabric, even though it doesn't work (think AI today), while  governments will be years ahead, using it to gently manipulate its population into maintaining a society that disproportionately redistributes its resources to the already rich and powerful. The only way to respond is to get familiar in advance, and so thanks to people like this, we are. That is, if we're paying attention at all.    

If you're looking for more insights into the future, you can listen to David Krakauer, and a whole bunch of other thought-provoking, future-proofing professionals, on the behind the scenes marketing material called Science Fact vs Science Fiction, for the science fiction series Raised By Wolves on HBO (Season 2). They cover the topics of Robots, Space Travel, Human Engineering, Synthetic Biology, Metamaterials, AI, and Cosmology. 

Notes:

Collective Computing and Learning from Nature

David Krakauer of the Santa Fe Institute at the Foresight Intelligent Cooperation Group, Sep 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NZSL1hd6hk

What was really the secret behind Van Gogh's success?

(Exploration and exploitation lead to "hot streaks")

Sep 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-secret-van-gogh-success.html

Chaotic Lévy walks are a good strategy for animals

Sep 2020, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-chaotic-lvy-good-strategy-animals.html

Pedestrians at crosswalks found to follow the Lévy walk process

Apr 2019, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-pedestrians-crosswalks-levy.html

Musical melodies obey same laws as foraging animals

Jan 2016, phys.org

http://phys.org/news/2016-01-musical-melodies-laws-foraging-animals.html

Frankensteining the Built Environment and the Internet of Occupants

Taking a look at this book, about the place where we all share 90% of our time, the great indoors. 

Image credit: Negative capacitance engineered crystals, Ella Maru Studio, University of California Berkeley, 2022 [link]

The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health and Happiness

Emily Anthes, Ferrar Straus and Giroux New York, 2020

This book is about how buildings shape our behavior, but I'd like to think about how we, as users in an increasingly omniscient complex of distributed sensors and datacrunchers, will become the driving force in shaping our buildings. 

A few loosely related ideas webbed between the indoor microbiome, the coming avalanche of chemical sensor technologies, and the never ending and insatiable appetite that humans have for more information, are all converging on a building that is designed, operated and improved by the Internet-of-Occupants. 

Fossil diatom Anthodiscina floreata - Michael Landgrebe for Nikon Small World Competition - 2021

Let's start with the reminder that our buildings are already alive -- they're filled with micro-organisms, which will one day be seen as legitimate occupants sharing our indoor space with us. (SARS-CoV-2 would like to have a word)

• Microbial Forensics: Researchers tracked 3 families as they moved into new homes; each family's distinct blend of microbes colonized its new residents within hours. (p16-17) *Note: the residents didn't colonize the house, the house colonized the residents.
• The bacteria come from us, the fungi from the building; a stone house feeds different fungi from a wooden house. "Because unlike the bacteria, they're eating the house." -Dunn (p18)
• New techniques for reading DNA, which we're all now familiar with (PCR) is what allows us to finally do surveys like this, along with shotgun genomics for sequencing all the organisms in a random sample [link] 
• They conducted the biggest indoor microbial survey ever, and here's what they found: "more than forty thousand species of fungi, a number larger than the number of named fungal species in North America. We have found more than eighty thousand kinds of bacteria. We have found more kinds of Archaea (once thought to be denizens exclusively of extreme environments such as hot springs and belly buttons) than were known from Earth just a decade ago. And there is more. We have not yet gotten to the insect legs (though Anne Madden is working on it). We are only beginning to consider the plants." [link]  
• The Universal Sample Location: "Participants were instructed to sample the upper door trim on an interior door in the main living area of the home and the upper door trim on the outside surface of an exterior door" because a it's a sampling location that is found in every home, is unlikely to be cleaned frequently, and serves as a passive collector of indoor and outdoor aerosols and dust with little to no direct contact from the home occupants [link] 
• Persistent Omniscient Surveillance: "The fungi on the outside of the house are a measure of where the house is and what is going on around it, so much so that if you give us a sample of dust from anywhere in the United States we can tell you where it came from within about 100 km. We can tell you based on the composition of fungal life."

This makes it hard to ignore the value of nothing more than dirt for conducting geographically precise forensics. Think about this -- the dirt on your shoe can now tell us where you were in the past few days. And that's today. Extrapolate that a few years. In 2030, I will be able to swab a doorknob and find out every person who touched it, and then one level deeper to every person those people touched that day. Fingerprints?? That's some 20th century sh** right there. Give me your belly button and I will tell you your entire life's history. (Except for the guy with the dust very specifically from Japan in his belly button, who had never been to Japan in his life.) [link] 

• And further: They can tell whether you have a dog in the house, and what the male to female ratio is, and the secret is out, men, your lack of personal hygiene is showing up in the data: "Skin- and fecal-associated taxa were relatively more abundant in homes with fewer women. This pattern is probably driven by differences between the skin biology (and perhaps to body size and hygiene practices) of men and women." [link] 

Sources and further reading:

• Continental-scale distributions of dust-associated bacteria and fungi. Barberan A, Ladau J, Leff JW, Pollard KS, Menninger HL, Dunn RR, and Fierer N. (2015) PNAS 112(18): 5756–5761. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1420815112
• The Ecology of Microscopic Life in Household Dust. Barberán A, Dunn RR, Reich BJ, Pacifici K, Laber EB, Menninger HL, Morton JM, Henley JB, Leff JW, Miller SL, Fierer N (2015) Proc. R. Soc. B 282 20151139; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.1139. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.1139
• North Carolina State's Public Science Lab, "Wild Life of Our Homes" project in the Rob Dunn Lab, and with collaborator Noah Fierer via University of Colorado Boulder. http://robdunnlab.com/projects/wild-life-of-our-homes/
• The First National Inventory of All Household Life (on a swab), Wild Life of Our Homes blog, Aug 2015. http://yourwildlife.org/2015/08/the-first-national-inventory-of-all-household-life-on-a-swab/

"Inner Life of Network" - Hard time finding a source on this one.

Next, a reminder that the extent of the datastream coming from a building, today, is basically a thermometer in an HVAC duct. Sure there are occupant sensors for smart lights and CO2-based ventilation, but this is nothing compared to what can and hopefully will happen when we start using the small, cheap chemosensors being refined in labs today and tomorrow marketed to facilities managers, and maybe even the human resources department (and hopefully not federal and local authorities! just kidding Clearview).

• Montoring real-time environmental conditions inside: "Buildings are the last black boxes of the information age" -Marc Syp, architect (p99)

This guy is talking about thermal comfort like temperature and humidity. But I'm talking about microbiomes and biomarkers. Datalogging exhaled isoprene can tell you about rising levels of employee stress. Profiling microbiomes on door handles can give you some idea of different diseases floating around in the air. Monitoring sewage data can tell you how many of your staff members are taking drugs like amphetamines, caffeine, nicotine, anti-depressants, wow you name it. And the sensors won't have to be in the sewer, they can be deployed right on the fixtures. 

And why would you want to know all these things? Your imagination will have to take over from here. 

Breathing BioMetal Regulates Building Temperature - A Moonshot Project w Doris Kim Sung 2013

Finally, the end result of all this integration between occupant behavior and building design and operation looks like a building that really is alive. Nothing says "I'm alive" like a heaving hunk of Frankenbricks:

• The Breathing Building (Adaptive Buildings) matches your own breathing pattern, a tent-like structure "inhales and exhales" with you ... strong occupant reactions ... when the system shut off abruptly, one person felt a jolt in his chest. -Holger Schnadelbach and the Exo Building via Nottingham University (p178-179) [link]

Notes:

How indoor environmental quality affects occupants’ cognitive functions: A systematic review. Chao Wang, et al. Building and Environment, Volume 193, 2021, 107647, ISSN 0360-1323.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2021.107647

Calling All Biophiles

Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species 

E. O. Wilson, Harvard University Press, 1984

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis

Image credit: Megumi, Red Maple, Matts Bonsai Blog

This book is full of inspiration, and quotes so good they should be etched in stone:

• In the Prologue - Biophilia - the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.
• Also in the Prologue - existential = exotic - "The word extraterrestrial evokes reveries about still unexplored life, displacing the old and once potent exotic that drew earlier generations to remote islands and jungled interiors."
• On an ecosystem he observes, and on "the uncounted products of evolution" - "Their long cenazoic history was encyphered into a genetic code I could not understand." (p7)
• Caprophage (eat, shit)
• "Penetralia of the soil" (things in the dirt) (p9)
• "Coexistence was an incidental by-product of Darwinian advantage that accrued from the avoidance of competition." (p9) "During the long span of evolution the species divided the environment among themselves so that now each tenuously preempted certain of the capillaries of energy flow. Through repeated genetic changes they sidestepped competitors and built elaborate defenses against the host of predator species that relentlessly tracked them through matching genetic countermoves. The result was a special array of specialists, including moths that live in the fur of three-toed sloths." (p9-10)
• But further - "The unique operations of the brain are the result of natural selection operating through the filter of culture." (p12)
• New York, greatest of machines (p12)
• On Superorganisms and Agency-Flipping (a la What Technology Wants and the Extended Phenotype) - The leafcutter ant colony is a superorganism. ... The social master plan is partitioned into the brains of the all-female workers, whose separate programs fit together to form a balanced whole. ... The superorganism's brain is the entire society; the workers are the crude analog of its nerve cells. ... Through a unique step in evolution taken millions of years ago, the ants captured a fungus, incorporated it into the superorganism, and so gained the power to digest leaves or perhaps the relation is the other way around: perhaps the fungus captured the ants and employed them as a mobile extension to take leaves into the moist underground chambers. (p36-37)
• On Sudden Perception: "One commanding image synthesized from several units, such that a single complex idea is attained not by analysis but by the sudden perception of an objective revelation." (p67) ... He then goes on to explain how science is a combination of creative imagination and scientific process. "Through the repeated alternation between flights of the imagination and the accretion of hard data, a mutual agreement of the workings of the world is written, in the form of natural law." (p67)
• On the First Stages of Original Thought (a la Fleck) - "It is controlled growth, a disciplined spread of the mind into hidden recesses where concepts and linkages are still embryonic or non-existent." (p78)
• The 20% Redundancy Rule?! - Using electroencephalograms in the study of response to graphic designs the Belgian psychologist Gerda Swets found the maximal arousal (measure by the blockage of the aplpah wave) occurs when the figure contains about 20 percent redundancy. That is the amount present in a spiral with two or three turns, or a relatively simple maze, or a neat cluster of ten or so triangles. Less arousal occurs when the figure consists of only one triangle or square, maze or an irregular scattering of twenty triangles. (p79) (This is some art theory I've never heard of.)
• Culture in turn is a product of the mind, which can be interpreted as an image-making machine that recreates the outside world through symbols arranged into maps and stories. (p101)

Electronic Drugs and Addiction by Design

I ran an image search for the word "panopticon", looking for a good thumbnail for this post. This picture looks great, but I have no idea what it is, and it's not sourced. Is it an artificially intelligent big data brain? A neutrino chamber? Does it have anything to do with panopticon design (think Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia)? No.

It's a building, called L’Hemisfèric, in the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, designed by architect Santiago Calatrava circa 2015. The reflection in the water makes it look like one big eye, and it does. So maybe it's partially related here.

Back on track -- Commercials for online gambling end with a disclaimer about where to call if you have a gambling problem.

I always thought it was strange that you could have a commercial for addictive things. If they're already addictive, why do we need to advertise them? Or better yet, if something is addictive, shouldn't we not be allowed to advertise for them? Especially in today's world of targeted advertising; we're literally using the word "targeted". 

In China, they call video games "electronic drugs", and they have new regulations against private companies targeting their citizens with addictive algorithms (governments not so much). 

Ten years ago, this book was written about slot machines, and today it will blow your mind. That is, if you can handle some basic ideas of statistics, probability, and randomness:

• Machine gambling as an example of flipping the workplace organizational psychology of the 1900's factory back on the "new product" (you) -- the user, and analysing them, the new worker, to get them to "work" longer, better, faster (by getting sucked-in to the machine and controlled by it), for you! (the employer or the owner). (p57, Foucault, Marx)
• "The gambler not only can't win but isn't playing to win, while the gambling industry is playing to win all along." (p75)
• Random number generators (RNGs) are at the heart of every slot machine.
• From hardware to software - Between the actual reel that you see spinning and stopping in front of you, and the automated RNG that actually decides your fate, there is now a virtual reel, which weights the outcome by mapping a pre-planned algorithm ahead of your actual reels, so that it's no longer about the machine, the reels, the lever, the hardware. It's about crafting a perfect probability for both the industry and for the gambler. 

The Virtual Reel Map - Figure 3.2a - Educational illustration of virtual reel mapping for a machine containing 32 virtual stops and 22 actual stops. The first 11 positions on the 32-stop virtual reel are mapped to the 11 symbols on the actual reel, but the rest are mapped to blanks, such that the odds of hitting a winning symbol are less than they appear to be. In addition, via a disproportionate number of virtual stops are mapped to blank spaces just above or below the jackpot symbols. This ensures that they will appear more often above or below the payline than they would by chance alone, enhancing the "near miss" sensation among players. Courtesy of Game Planit, Inc. (p88)

• Note that in the image above, which represents an actual reel map, positions 1,3,5,7 are "real", whereas 2,4,6 are not; they're blanks. Yet they're doubled by the map loading, so you "almost" get it more often than chance (out of the actual 11 symbols). AKA Phantom Symbols, AKA Loading the Dice (p92)
• On the new machines (which are designed to hack your nervous system to bits and then feed it back to you as a dopamine drip) - "They love them; They can literally play all day." (p126) -IGT Game Developer
• "Tracked gamblers are treated less as individual subjects than as "dividuals" in the Deleuzian sense -- bundles of traits and habits (associated with pin numbers, codes, passwords and personal algorithms) that can be systematically compared with those of others, allowing casinos to more precisely identify and market to distinct customer niches (ft 15). Casinos also can triangulate any given gambler's player data with her demographic data, piecing together a profile that can be used to customize game offerings and marketing appeals specifically for her; although she has been broken down into discrete data points in the process of tracking in the moment of marketing she is reassembled as a distinct individual who can be examined form every angle." -The Rise of Player Tracking, Chapter 5 Matching the Market

From the book, Addicted by Design

"I am watching everything. I see it all."

-Executive at Harrah's

This quote feels like it could be the introduction to this book on marketing and advertising:

The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information

Oscar H. Gandy Jr., 1993

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/979404.The_Panoptic_Sort

The Social Behavior of Optical Quantum Gas

Liquid light shows social behaviour

Oct 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-liquid-social-behaviour.html

Too many whats all in one place. I had to read this one carefully.

First of all, Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) have been a favorite over here at Network Address for a long time. It's one of those metaphysical-sounding things that doesn't behave how we expect. It's considered two-dimensional, a description used to organize lots of materials (like graphene, or twisted nanosandwiches) that behave so alien to our understanding of physics that they seem to be operating in another dimension.

Like other metamaterials, BECs also use super-something to describe their behavior, like superconductor, superinsulator, superfluid. They usually require absolute peace and quiet in order to do this magic condensation trick, which means it needs to be really cold, like absolute zero cold. But these scientists have figured out how to do it at room temperature, and that's is a pretty big deal.

In this case, the BEC is made of photons, hence "liquid light" -- they created a structure of microcavities and mirrors that condense photons in an optical medium of rhodamine dye and a thermo-responsive polymer, and turn them into a two-dimensional superfluid.

But wait, there's more -- when trying to explain the behavior of these super-photons, there is talk of the liquid "deciding" what to do, and of "social behavior". (Sociothermodynamics perhaps?)

I should mention that 1. the writer calls the photon fluid a liquid, but the scientists call it a gas, and 2. the writer quotes the scientists as using the term "social behavior", but that term is not in the paper itself, and I definitely don't understand this enough to get the analogy. (Although it may have something to do with "backreflection" like the backpropagating feedback loops characteristic of neural networks.)

via University of Twente, Netherlands: Mario Vretenar et al, Modified Bose-Einstein condensation in an optical quantum gas, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26087-0

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26087-0

Image credit: Quantum Thing, Getty Images, 2021

Post Script:

Here's some quantum eye-vitamins:

Image credit: Quantum Field Theory Liouville Bridge by Olena Shmahalo for Quanta Magazine, June 2021

Image credit: Quantum Field Theory Infinity Bridge by Olena Shmahalo for Quanta Magazine, June 2021

Just BECs in the news:

Researchers guide a single ion through a Bose-Einstein condensate

Jan 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-ion-bose-einstein-condensate.html

via University of Stuttgart:  T. Dieterle et al. Transport of a Single Cold Ion Immersed in a Bose-Einstein Condensate, Physical Review Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.033401

http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.033401

Characterization of Memetic Propagation via Digital Media and Algorithmic Amplification

AKA The Semibotic Socialization Machine

Ludwig Fleck already detailed much of this behavior in his 1935 book Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, a staggeringly prescient work when read in the zeitgeist of today. 

Controversy elicits engagement, and engagement facilitates polarization, since humans polarize themselves naturally. Or maybe it's the information polarizing itself, through us. Nonetheless, digital media enables algorithms to accelerate this natural dynamic. Now let's spread those two sentences over the next two pages:

Disagreement may be a way to make online content spread faster, further

Jul 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-07-disagreement-online-content-faster.html

Computational Simulation of Online Social Behavior (SocialSim) program of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: exists

23,000 "controversial" posts about cybersecurity were seen by nearly twice the number of people and traveled nearly twice as fast when compared to 24,000 posts not labeled controversial (the Reddit definition of controversial is to have increasing numbers of both likes and dislikes). The controversial posts had 60,000 total comments, vs 25,000 for the non-controversial posts.

via University of Central Florida's Department of Computer Science: Jasser Jasser et al, Controversial information spreads faster and further than non-controversial information in Reddit, Journal of Computational Social Science (2021). DOI: 10.1007/s42001-021-00121-z

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s42001-021-00121-z

Here's a good example of what happens when we automate socialization with revenue prioritized over the public good:

"In a recent video, @jameslxke asks his followers why TikTok’s algorithm puts trans users in harm’s way by promoting their content on conservative For You pages. If the algorithm is smart enough to know each user’s identity and is intent on keeping users on its platform, @jameslxke reasons, then why does it put vulnerable users at risk for what he calls a “digital lynching”? In the comment section of @jameslxke’s video, users speculate that creating conflict serves the platform’s bottom line: “tiktok does it on purpose bc arguing/dialogue keeps people on the app & the shock value of sending videos to ppl who wont enjoy it boost their app.” By sharing experiences, asking questions, and crowdsourcing answers, teens are developing an algorithmic folklore while discerning the potential motivations behind TikTok’s software engineering.

-Strategic Knowledge: Teens use “algorithmic folklore” to crack TikTok’s black box, by Iretiolu Akinrinade for the Data & Society Institute on Jul, 2021 [link]

Viral true tweets spread just as far as viral untrue tweets

Nov 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-11-viral-true-tweets-untrue.html

Correction -- in self-similar and metalogical form, the viral meme that fake viral memes spread farther and faster than the truth is actually not true. (If you're ever trying to make shit up that's crazier than what's really happening in the world, then you will fail.)

The problem is that we all know "a lie has spread halfway around the world before the truth has put its pants on". So when we hear that fake news is more fit, as in survival-of-the-fit, it makes perfect sense, and it sticks. Kind of like accidentally eating spiders in your sleep?

In this study, they looked at a part of network dynamics called "cascades", which follow the path a tweet takes as it spreads through the network. In this case, the cascade takes the form of retweets. It turns out that the cascade of true and fake tweets are indistinguishable. Now let's see how long it takes to correct this one. 

via Cornell University: Jonas L. Juul et al, Comparing information diffusion mechanisms by matching on cascade size, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2100786118

http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2100786118

People unknowingly group themselves together online, fueling political polarization across the US

Dec 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-12-people-unknowingly-group-online-fueling.html

They found that when people are less reactive to news, their online environment remains politically mixed. However, when users constantly react to and share articles of their preferred news sources, they are more likely to foster a politically isolated network, or what the researchers call "epistemic bubbles."

Once users are in these bubbles, they actually miss out on more news articles, including those from their preferred media outlets. Users seem to avoid what they deem as "unimportant" news at the expense of missing out on subjectively important news, the model shows.

Polarization of online social networks emerges naturally as people curate their feeds.

People who consume and share fake news might be inadvertently isolating themselves from everyone else who follows mainstream sources.

via Princeton: Polarized information ecosystems can reorganize social networks via information cascades, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2102147118.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2102147118

Why false news snowballs on social media

Dec 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-12-false-news-snowballs-social-media.html

When a network is highly connected or the views of its members are sharply polarized, news that is likely to be false will spread more widely and travel deeper into the network than news with higher credibility. Even if people are rational in how they decide to share the news, this could still lead to the amplification of information with low credibility.

Important to understand the idea of "cost" in sharing information (and thus in the greater idea of memetic propagation) - "Nominal cost, for instance, taking some action, if you are scrolling on social media, you have to stop to do that. Think of that as a cost. Reputation cost might come if I share something that is embarrassing. Everyone has this cost, so the more extreme and the more interesting the news is, the more you want to share it." If the news affirms the agent's perspective and has persuasive power that outweighs the nominal cost, the agent will always share the news. But if an agent thinks the news item is something others may have already seen, the agent is disincentivized to share it.

Talking about information cascades, or news cascades, they say the credibility threshold is lower the more connected the network is and the more surprising the news is. But also, in a polarized network, where many of the nodes are likely to spread extreme views, the credibility threshold is also very low. 

"For any piece of news, there is a natural network speed limit, a range of connectivity, that facilitates good transmission of information where the size of the cascade is maximized by true news. But if you exceed that speed limit, you will get into situations where inaccurate news or news with low credibility has a larger cascade size," Jadbabaie says.

If the views of users in the network become more diverse, it is less likely that a poorly credible piece of news will spread more widely than the truth.

via Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Chin-Chia Hsu et al, Persuasion, News Sharing, and Cascades on Social Networks, SSRN Electronic Journal (2021). DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3934010

http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3934010

Post Script:

Adaptive Metamemetics, Infectious Disease Networks, and Ludwig Fleck's Thought Collectives, 2020

https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2020/03/adaptive-metamemetics-infectious.html

Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Ludwig Fleck, 1935 (Switzerland). Edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton. Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn. Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn. Published by University of Chicago, 1979.

What Even Is 'Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior' on Platforms?

Wired Opinion. Sep 17, 2020. [soft paywall]

What Is ‘Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior’?

Snopes, Sep 4, 2021. [link]

This Moment in Art History

AKA The One She Drew Back

This is the Ghislaine Maxwell sketch of her sketching the sketch artist Jane Rosenberg Reuters, but I call it The One She Drew Back, pastel on Canson, 2022.

I like to read the news. You see a lot of courtroom sketches in the headlines, and I don't think too much about them. I also don't go for superhyped stories like the Ghislaine Maxwell. But there was something striking about the thumbnail for this article, so I saved it for posterity. 

There's a lot going on here. First is the gaze, the subject of many art history theses. You don't see the person in the courtroom looking at the artist like this, it just doesn't happen long enough that the artist would end up catching it or devoting a portrait to it.

She was staring at the sketch artist because she was sketching the artist doing the sketching, which is good enough as it is, but we'll get to that in a moment. For now, it's a big deal because as a picture, she's not looking at the artist, she's looking at you, the viewer, which is a little unsettling because she's on trial for sex crimes, and she's looking right at you, staring into your soul, and for as long as you keep your eyes open to look.

That's the power of the gaze in art, and that's enough to make this a noteworthy piece. Not to mention the artist, Jane Rosenberg, has been at this for 40 years; she is an absolute professional in her field. Norman Rockwell was a commercial illustrator, until he became recognized as a fine artist. 

But let's get to the good stuff. The reason we get this shot, of her staring for so long at the sketch artist that we get a sketch of her direct gaze, is because she's sketching the artist. And the artist knows this, and she's then drawing the sketch of herself in the sketch. 

(We have to mention that during this very intense trial, they are staring at each other the whole time this is happening, long enough to do this sketch. )

This isn't Velázquez in Las Meninas, or M.C. Escher in the crystal ball, or Norman Rockwell in his studio. She's not drawing herself into the picture, she's drawing someone else drawing her into the picture. You came for the gaze, but you stay for the recursive lasagna. 

"Cult leader Charles Manson used to draw his sketch artist in court, she added."

-(Another) New York-based Illustrator Elizabeth Williams, New York Post article, link

The Gallery, by Jane Rosenberg for Reuters, 2022:

I almost forgot about the mask, which looks basically invisible to me right now, but likely will not in ten years: 

It’s much harder to sketch someone wearing a mask, but thankfully Ghislaine had very expressive eyes. Because that’s all I’ve got, eyes and hair. We basically have a half face to work with during the Covid era. People might think it’s easier, but it’s not.

Towards the end of the Maxwell trial, the Omicron variant became a big concern. They started making us wear these N95 masks that I couldn’t properly breathe in. The rules must have changed as Ghislaine was no longer able to hug her lawyers. It all just got so scary.

-"I was the court artist who Ghislaine drew back"  Jan 2022, Jane Rosenberg, The Independent, link

Tools of the Trade:

I bring prescription binoculars that I can wear on my head, a tripod, a thermos of coffee, a backpack with lunch, and a cushion to sit on on those hard bunches. ... I sketch in pastels on Canson paper. I bring latex finger cots because my skin gets so dried out from digging into my pastel box. 

In those days [the 1980's] there was always a camera person waiting outside the court for the sketch. I had to rush out of the courthouse and tape it up to the side of a truck. They’d take a copy and a motorcycle courier would rush it back to the newsroom. Later on, they’d send a satellite truck to send it back to the newsroom. Now I take a digital photograph of my sketches and send them by email.

-The Independent

Order in the Court:

Jane Rosenberg’s sketch of John Evans in 1983 electrocuted three times before he died.

Although some state courts now televise trials, American courts have historically resisted allowing cameras – because photography is considered distracting, and can turn courts into media spectacles, and because of the risk of compromising the identities of jurors or protected witnesses. (New York permits photography on a case-by-case basis, but federal courts strictly prohibit it.)

‘My life is weird’: the court artist who drew Ghislaine Maxwell drawing her back

Dec 2021, J Oliver Conroy, The Guardian, link

Witness Protection:

When courtroom artists sketch jurors or sensitive witnesses they often leave their faces blank. Rosenberg’s illustrations of the Maxwell trial and other cases include poignant portraits of anonymous witnesses with ghostly, blank faces, their features sometimes further obscured by hands clutching tissues.

-The Guardian

The Post Script:

I'd like to connect this post with the Art Cop, another niche-world art professional, also from New York City. 

And this photo, the crediting an artwork in itself:

Court sketch artist Jane Rosenberg, Courtesy of Jane Rosenberg, no credit necessary, 2022, The Independent, link

The Art Cop

I wanted to talk about Robert Volpe, the New York City Police Department's art theft sleuth, but the page I had saved is apparently no longer active. Luckily, the very helpful web browser Brave automatically asks me if I'd like to check the Wayback Machine for an archive, which I do, and which it has, and which I will re-paste right here just for furthering the sake of posterity. Although I should note that the main reference here is a New York Times article from 2006 titled Robert Volpe, Art Theft Expert, Dies at 63. You can read more in a book titled Art Cop from 1974 (see below).

Robert Volpe (December 13, 1942 – November 28, 2006), was a painter and New York City police officer and detective, specializing in art theft.

Born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Volpe studied art at the High School of Art and Design, Parsons School for Design and the Art Students League of New York. His art career began with paintings of tugboats during his teenage years, and later, in the 1970s, his abstract work sold for as much as $1500. After a stint in the army, he joined the New York City police force and initially worked undercover on organized crime cases, including narcotics work related to the French Connection. After making several art crime arrests, in 1971 he was appointed the sole member of the New York City Police Department's bureau for art crime, the only bureau of its kind in the nation.

His work was varied, including art theft, vandalism, and forgeries, and he took as many as 40–50 calls per day from around the world. In 1981, he recovered an 1858 candelabrum once owned by the king of Egypt only 11 days after being notified of the theft by British authorities. Over his desk hung a congratulatory photograph from the foreign minister of Italy for recovering two ivories worth $1.5 million stolen from a museum in Pesaro. After Volpe's retirement in 1983, art crimes began to be handled by the burglary division.

Here's an even older article from which I've copied a few portions:

Art People: City's art policeman. By Michael Brenson, New York Times, May 20, 1983. 

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/20/arts/art-people-city-s-art-policeman.html

Mr. Volpe is the art squad of the New York City Police Department. For almost 11 years, he has worked this beat alone in a city he describes as the ''clearing house internationally for art.'' Not only is he the one-man art squad in New York, but he is also the only detective in the United States ''designated to investigate artrelated crimes,'' he said. Internationally, he added, there are about a dozen art detectives, including four-man units in Britain and Italy.

The 40-year-old, Brooklyn-born son of a banker, whose formative years with the Police Department were spent as an undercover agent for the narcotics squad, knows the New York art world as well as many artists and dealers know it. In his boots, dungarees and sweater, with his thick mustache, he is a familiar figure in galleries. ''I guess you could say some of my best friends are dealers,'' he said.

Mr. Volpe also keeps abreast of what goes on at the auction houses. He was at the Sotheby Parke Bernet galleries on April 18, the day before the theft of a diamond valued at $500,000 to $600,000 was discovered. He has been called in to work on the case with detectives of the 19th Precinct, who have jurisdiction over it. ''I know all the players in the game,'' he said. ... collectors, curators, dealers, framers, restorers and packers. 

...

Before Mr. Volpe began the job in 1972, a police art squad did not exist. ''I was brought in to make a survey and see if there was something in this area,'' he said. ''Instead of coming back with a report, I started coming back with arrests and recoveries. So, obviously, there was a need.''

In the last few years, he has been deluged. He said he received up to 50 telephone calls a day, ''anything from reports of theft, to requests from private dealers and from police departments here and around the world, to someone asking me what kind of acrylic brush to use.''

...

[One of his most memorable cases] "of little significance," he said. It involved a Brooklyn artist, now dead, whose sculpture tools, along with seven statues of rabbis he had made, were stolen. The artist was so distressed by the robbery, Mr. Volpe said, that he wound up in an intensive-care ward.

"I did something unprofessional," the detective recalled. "I promised him I'd get them back. I dropped everything I was doing and went out on the street. I talked to hookers and junkies. I found out that a couple of pieces were being sold at subway stops for $5 each. Eventually, the information started fitting together. I got all the pieces back. A week and a half later, he got out of the hospital, and I presented him the pieces and helped him find a new studio."

And another good story about him here:

Robert Volpe; World-Renowned 'Art Cop', By Adam Bernstein, Washington Post, December 1, 2006.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113001503.html

Once, he portrayed a gay Rhode Island art dealer named Damien Renar. When he arranged to meet the thieves, he was dressed in a white linen suit, and he relished the dramatic showdown, he said, when he could pull his police revolver from its holster and shout, "Freeze, you [expletive]!"

"Grade B movie stuff," he told the Times. "You find you have to behave that way. You don't come off with authority, you're done."

When he retired in 1985, he estimated that he had recovered tens of millions of dollars worth of Byzantine ivories, Oriental rugs, Greek marble heads, Tiffany glass, Matisses, Raphaels and other treasures. For a period, he noted a particularly high trade in faux antique French furniture.

"If all the old French furniture was real," he told the Christian Science Monitor, "there would never have been a French Revolution. Everybody in the country would have been too busy making furniture."

And ^THAT is a good lesson to remember when thinking about the world of fakes, frauds and forgeries. 

Post Script, On the Charm of an Art Thief:

Overall, he said, the recovery rate for stolen fine art was at best 10 percent. He lamented to Time magazine that judges rarely gave harsh sentences to art thieves.

"An art thief is entertaining, romantic," he said. "I've seen cases where the thief has pleaded guilty and gotten no sentence at all."

-Robert Volpe

Notes:

Art Cop: Robert Volpe, Art Crime Detective, by Laurie Schneider Adams on Dodd, Mead & Co. in 1974. ISBN13: 9780396070207. [goodreads]