How does it Know?

There was an old Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner comedy sketch, “The Thousand-Year Old Man” where Brooks plays the role of the old man and Reiner plays a reporter interviewing him. Reiner poses the question,”In all of your experience, what do you consider to be mankind’s greatest invention?” Without skipping a beat, Brooks replies, “The Thermos Bottle”. Astounded, Reiner says, “The Thermos Bottle? (disappointed by this mundane choice) How do you figure that?” “Well”, replies Brooks, “In the winter, it keeps things warm... In the summer it keeps things cool. ....  How does it know?”

The joke in “How does it know” is based on the assumption that our technological tools 

have the capability to “know” something in the same way we humans know.  But,in fact, the Thermos bottle is not sentient, it is just obeying the laws of physics whereby the incorporation of a barrier within the thermos bottle retards the heat flow in either direction. This seems obvious for low-tech machines like Thermos bottles and cash registers and we are fast approaching a society that treats the newest computing technology as if it had a sort of intelligence.

But we are also willing to ascribe a certain amount of intelligence to many other animals..such as apes, dogs and cats, birds of all sorts (especially crows) and even sea creatures like dolphins and octopuses (octupi?) because we believe that intelligence requires a thinking process. But one  must be careful about defining “intelligence” because it’s a moving target. Just a generation or two ago the ability to add up a long list of numbers in your head was considered to be a sign of intelligence but when adding machines entered the picture, that ability was withdrawn as a criterion for measuring intelligence. As soon as it can be done by a machine, it does not qualify as an intelligent action.

Roughly 40 years ago, some researchers were beginning to describe computers as  “Thinking Machines” and in 1983 a company was formed with just that name. Its motto was:  “Some day we will build a thinking machine. It will be a truly intelligent machine. One that can see and hear and speak. A machine that will be proud of us.”  This bold claim was to be achieved using Artificial Intelligence or AI.

Be that as it may, advances in AI seem to be integral to the creation of an actual thinking machine. The reasoning is as follows: if the thinking process occurs in the mind and the mind exists in the brain then a computer could become a Thinking Machine if the  hardware and the software in a computer corresponded to the brain and the mind in intelligent creatures. As computer technology progresses, they more and more can act as if they possess intelligence --- thinking machines as it were.

But we have a long way to go. In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a scenario to determine if a computing machine could act intelligently: The simplest form of what has become known as the “Turing Test” is that of a Human in a room A  typing questions to an entity in a separate room B

that might be either a computer or another human. They can communicate only by keyboard. The human in room A  can ask any questions of what’s in room B. If, based on the responses from room B, the human in room A can not determine if Room B contains a computer or a human being or guesses wrong,  then Turing claims that we can say that the computer has demonstrated intelligence and the Turing test has been passed. 

One trick that humans have used to  distinguish between a computer or a human is to give it two large numbers to multiply; if the answer comes back too quickly, that’s evidence that it’s a computer and not a human being. And one way the computer can fool the human into thinking it’s not a computer is to make occasional spelling errors in response to questions.

Since then there have been many Turing tests resulting in contrary claims of success --- including that it is not even a valid test. One of the arguments goes: if a computer can fool you into thinking it’s a human being , is that enough to draw the conclusion that it is intelligent? Somehow an intelligence test that depends on the gullibility of a person doesn’t ring true. The counter is that the computer is not trying to fool you into thinking it’s human, it’s only trying to imitate a human. And  the back and forth continues. (see Wikipedia, “Turing test”)

Some believe the ultimate goal of AI is to construct an intelligence greater than our own. If we succeed, what is to stop these AIs from creating machines smarter that they are? Despite the contentious history of the human race, let us hope they will be proud of us and that we can live together in peace.

Immigrants and the Internet

I recently attended a seminar by  Professors Amy Montcastle, (Anthropology), Elizabeth Onasch, (Sociology) and Attorney Mark Schneider at the Institute for Ethics in Public Life at SUNY Plattsburgh where the topic was an examination of the current local migrant problems. Recently the Press Republican ran a series of articles about the individuals and families who were trying to immigrate to Canada via the Roxham road in Champlain. 

Overall, it was an enlightening experience highlighting the interactions between the cab drivers and the migrants. I was surprised to learn the cabbies were not all greedy capitalist entrepreneurs gouging the defenseless immigrants but many were very kind and helpful briefing the families on what to do at the border and even helping the disabled at the crossing.

All of this helped me to understand how complex the immigration proceedings are as well as sparking my interest in how the Internet plays a part in the process. Searching on queries such as “how does the internet affect migrants” returned more links than I needed for this column. What interested me the most was how the Internet helps and hurts the immigrants but before going further it is useful to review the distinctions between “Emigrate”,”Immigrate” and plain old “Migrate”:

“Emigrate” means to leave one's country to live in another. “Immigrate” is to come into another country to live permanently. “Migrate” is to move, like birds in the winter. The choice between emigrate, immigrate, and migrate depends on the sentence's point of view.

 (https://www.vocabulary.com › articles › emigrate-immigrate-migrate)

The most positive effects the Internet has on the migrants or immigrants is that it can keep them connected to the family members they are leaving as well to others on the same journey. The information passing amongst the migrants helps to make their journey more efficient and less unpleasant. It can range from sharing which routes are less dangerous and more accommodating  to posting the charges of cabbies so they are not ripped off on their final leg to Canada. These migrants are technology savvy --- they readily use WhatApp, Facebook and Skype to assist them on their journey.

At the other end, the Internet is used by organizations like Refugees Welcome International to match newly arrived immigrants with natives to ease their process of resettlement. Individuals and families in many countries (mostly in Europe) offer a spare room in their home or apartment to a matched immigrant. They are funded by local governments and private donations and is “convinced that refugees should not be stigmatized and excluded from society by being accommodated in camps. Instead, we should offer them a warm welcome. We believe we can establish a culture of open doors for refugees across the World.” Some call it the “Air BnB” of Europe. https://www.refugees-welcome.net

Of course, if there’s an upside there is usually a downside --- especially regarding the Internet.

The downsides of migrants using the Internet to help them is that the Internet is not like a book. After a book is published, it is finished, it does not change (ok, ok, until the next edition is published ). On the other hand, the Internet is in a constant flux: some of the information is new and reliable but some is outdated or incorrect and sadly, some is just not true. Many links are dead ends and cause everyone, not only immigrants a great deal of frustration and time wasted. “ It could mean applying for jobs that no longer exist. At worst, it could mean embarking on a dangerous migration journey based on incorrect visa or asylum information.”

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/digital-litter-downside-using-technology-help-refugees

Most of us find this rapidly changing behavior of the Internet as merely annoying but to an immigrant the results can be disastrous and can make them more susceptible to exploitation and physical harm.

There are many other avenues the Internet provides to immigrants such as language apps to help them assimilate and coding schools to learn how to program and widen their job opportunities, But actually everyone pretty much everywhere have these same sorts of Internet opportunities provided by sites  like Ebay and Amazon and Google and Facebook and Netflix and Youtube and ... there is not enough space or time to mention all of them because they are being created and going extinct at a rate faster than I can type.

I guess I should not have been surprised by how much the Internet influences the migration process --- within the last 10 years it seems to have spread into every nook and cranny of every society on this globe. Like it or not, the motto of the Internet age seems to be, “Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way.”

An Age of Distraction

An Age of Distraction

Out of the Age of Enlightenment came a burst of creativity that spawned a major leap in Science, Technology and the Arts. Man became the measure of all things.

It is my belief that the scientific method is  the best strategy that mankind has developed so far for explaining things. So if we want explanations we have science  and when we need machines that make life easier, we use technology. If we want spiritual fulfillment we have the arts and religion, if we want peace of mind we have meditation, if we want love and happiness, we have each other. 

Since this column is focused on technology, before we go further let me just say that in addition to making our lives easier there is, of course, a downside. Actually, several downsides. First off, technology in the form of the Internet has fostered a hyper-awareness --- we want to know everything about everything.  Every minute we click and follow a link is time that could be spent in face-to-face conversation with someone who is not a machine. Sure, there are tons of social sites where you can converse with others from all over the world but the Internet also makes it more likely that we will be talking past one another. Discussions can turn into arguments with virtually no chance of changing the other person’s mind as each accuses the other of using “Fake News” to back up their claims. Separating the wheat from the chaff on the Internet is like trying to drink from a fire hose.

The futility of this situation is cleverly shown by  a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine where a man is typing away  at his computer and telling his wife, “I’ll be right to bed as soon as I correct something someone wrote on the Internet.” The  original Internet was all about making connections but lately it seems to be fracturing our society by fostering tribes or clans of  people we trust and are loyal to one other. We have a place we can call home but at the expense of excluding the opinions of those who belong to other clans.

At the recent Iowa State Fair, a Trump supporter was asked why he voted for him and his response was essentially, "I voted for Trump because he isn't a politician ---- he seems to be a regular guy like me so I trust him."

The same day I heard an interview of a recent book by Adam Gopnik, "A Thousand Small Sanities" where he was asked to give the gist of his book and he replied that he believes the current caustic political divide we are experiencing is because most everyone acts according to one of  two competing desires --- for the good of himself or the good of society. Obviously one already knows what one wants for the good of one’s self (money, fame, peace and quiet , etc etc etc) but, according to actual studies, what one perceives as good for society usually wins over self interest, for example, going off to fight for your country.  For most of us it’s more important to belong to our clan than to chase fame or fortune...

Gopnik is claiming that the crux of the problem is that our society has fractured into these two clans --- we are no longer a melting pot nor even a mosaic; we have retreated back to trusting only those who belong to our clan and that overrides any altruistic goals we might have.

Thanks to technology and the omnipresence of the Internet, it’s easy to feel that we are leaving the Age of Enlightenment and entering the age of distraction, disconnection and dehumanization. But there is hope.

Years ago I was bragging to a physicist friend about a student who used the web to create a game for his developmentally different brother --- what a fine humane gesture it was. The physicist responded that it would have been even better for him to put his arm around his brother and give him a hug. Listening to Anne Murray singing,”Put a little Love in your Heart” suggests  that perhaps he was right.

Civility and the Internet

I remember life before the Internet. Just checking out a book from the library or making a “long-distance” phone call could be a time consuming chore. Taking pictures and getting them “developed” could be days or even weeks --- and you weren’t even able to edit them!
Nowadays, not only can I access most any book or manual almost instantaneously but can order most any commodity while sitting at my internet-connected computer. I can indulge in games ranging from Scrabble to massive multi-player war games joining a team whose members are most likely situated all around the world --- possibly fostering international understanding.  I can join social groups to find like-minded folks and keep in touch with friends and relatives. Today I can carry in my pocket all of the above plus take photos and edit them, make phone calls, watch movies, listen to stories while driving, set reminders, keep a calendar and....well, just go to your favorite app store to be inundated by all of the enticing choices available to fritter away your time.
On the Dark Side, the Internet facilitates one’s tendency to correct those whose views they believe  are incorrect --- and not in a nice way. I’m sure I’m not the first to realize that civil discourse will continue to degrade so long as the Internet continues to allow hate speech. According to Wikipedia, “The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment.”
 According to software engineer Brianna Wu in a recent New York Times article,”I Wish I Could Tell You It’s Gotten Better. It Hasn’t.” she describes how sexist hate threats disrupted her and fellow workers until they quit or gave up their careers.   Until we can find a  compromise between civility and free speech we are certain to keep kicking this can down the road.

But don’t get me wrong --- in a very very small way I was responsible for the creation of the Internet (many thanks to Al Gore who pushed Congress to appropriate funding for this project.) Way back in the late 60s and early 70s I was lured away from my job as a programmer-analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis in the DC area to work on the ILLIAC IV project at the University of Illinois.

I was part of a team who believed we could build a powerful supercomputer (the ILLIAC IV) to solve some of the nagging societal problems like weather prediction, how proteins fold to create the structure of DNA, and pretty much any issue that required massive number-crunching in a reasonable amount of time.  If we could get the ILLIAC IV up and running on some sort of a network connected to other supercomputers, we believed we were going  “to make the world a better place to live in.” Remember, this was “The Age of Aquarius”. It was an exciting, heady time to be alive.
We were funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency(ARPA) under the Department of Defense and they had additional goals for the project. Their main concern was to create a network of cooperating computers that not only would speed up scientific research but would also create  a network of computers  impervious to the loss of any individual computer on it. In an attack on the US, the network could survive by routing connections around the disbabled site with none of the remaining sites aware of the switching. In this way the working sites could continue to operate and cooperate. From a military point of view this made a lot of sense. In a short period of time the ARPAnet evolved into the Internet and its governance was turned over to several international governing bodies. For more information link to; icann.org

But enough history --- a half-century has passed and we are reaping the benefits as well as the unintended consequences of our creation: the Internet and the World Wide Web which runs on it. Unlike the myth of a Frankenstein monster (as portrayed in the film, not the book) we cannot easily destroy the Internet but let’s hope that with a little more respect toward others and a lot more introspection we can guide the course of its development in a more humane and useful direction.

Real-time Fact-checking

We all, more or less, know what the term “fact-checking” means but may not be familiar with what “real-time fact-checking” is all about.

“Autocorrect: How advances in real-time fact-checking might improve our Politics” by Jonathan Rauch (Atlantic magazine June 2019) describes a system, Autocorrect, designed by Bill Adair and his team at Duke University. 

Here is a brief example of how the Autocorrect system would work: 

Assume that your TV or Cellphone has the has the Autocorrect app installed and is executing in the background while you’re watching a political speech. The app will intercept the broadcast signal and delay it for 30 seconds while it searches the web analyzing the content of what the speaker has just claimed.  If the claim has already been verified or debunked by an independent fact-checking organization, the app returns one of three possible verdicts: “True, False, or Not the Whole Story” plus any other useful information found. As the author concludes, If the system works you will see the verdict as the politico speaks --- “no waiting for post-speech reportage, no mental note to Google it later. All in seconds,without human intervention. If it works.” Pretty impressive huh?

Contrast this with the current state of fact-checking which is to enter the claim into your favorite search engine and sit back waiting for the listing of the hits on your query. This method has many faults, the most obvious one being --- who’s got the time to visit all of the sites returned?

However,  this raises the larger and more important question,” Whom do you trust? “ How do you decide which of the numerous websites are legitimate or (in a worst case scenario) just trying to sell you a time-share in the Bahamas or change your political stance?

In an attempt to deal with the legitimacy of search results, I used my search engine to find, “sites that review the reviewer sites”.There were a few and the most interesting one (to me) was a review of Amazon product reviews called FakeSpot. According to the app, “ Fakespot provides consumers with a new way of filtering product reviews to find out what real users are saying about the products you want to buy. Our proprietary technology analyzes millions of product reviews, looking for suspicious patterns and incentivized reviews. We then weed out the reviews we think are unreliable and return a grade of A,B,C,D or F which grades the the authenticity of any particular review. But you may ask, “who reviews the veracity of these supposedly unbiased reviews of the reviews? Where does this investigation end? Whom do I trust?

I think trust is usually based on  a chain of beliefs. For example, I trust The Atlantic Magazine which trusts the author of this article and Rauch trusts Duke University which in turn trusts Bill Adair, the head of the group which creatPolitifact. So by following this chain of trust, I trust Adair’s claims. Now if you ask me on what basis I trust the Atlantic Magazine, that’s a tough one. The best I can do is say that it’s been around for over 150 years  and its articles compared to newspapers and tv news are longer allowing them to pursue the issues to a greater depth. Also important is that the Atlantic has stood the test of time and I think that the longer a news medium has existed, the lower the odds of its reporting fake news thus the higher its credibility.

So my final question is simply, “Is this a good or a bad thing? It certainly won’t increase our delayed gratification quotient  that a successful adult should cultivate. But it will increase our usage and dependency on the Internet further entwining it’s good and bad qualities into our everyday life.  Only time will tell or as our current President has replied on many occasions to tough questions from reporters, “We’ll see.” 

You can find podcasts describing Adair’s work  on Autocorrect at: 

https://sanford.duke.edu/people/faculty/adair-bill

A Review of a Review

This column will be mostly a review of Jia Tolentino’s interesting and informative article, “Eye Candy” in the April 29 issue of the New Yorker magazine where she points the reader toward the book, “In Digital Minimalis: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World” by Computer Science Professor Cal Newport. She quotes from Newport’s book to bind her views on the responsibility of the user and not just the government to regulate the Internet and she mentions the many schemes and websites she uses to avoid being sucked into the black hole the Internet has become.

Tolentino begins with the 1654 quote by Blaise Pascal, “All of Humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” I would agree but for the omission of the underlying causes of this inability noted by Franz Kafka: laziness and impatience --- although I would argue that impatience is just another instance of laziness. But I digress...

As an example, she notes that her daily phone activities use too much of her time: “Ninety minutes of texting, one hour of reading. Another hour of email, yet another hour of social media, and about seventy “pickups”, meaning that I check my phone about four times per hour. I carry my phone around with me as if it were an oxygen tank.”

Moreover, she quotes from Michael Goldhaber’s article in Wired magazine, “...the Internet drowns its users in information while constantly increasing information. This makes information a scarce and desirable resource --- the natural economy of cyberspace”. ( Another metaphor is that the Internet is like drinking from a fire hose.) It is unsettling that this was written over twenty years ago but seems truer every passing day.

Interestingly, she uses fire to fight fire using privacy software to protect herself from nosey corporate software used by Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Google who are all competing for her attention. As a retired professor of computer science I was gratified to learn about Freedom and Mastodon and indieweb.org that allow you to set up a personal (rather than corporate) website. Now that I have retired and I can no longer rely on my students to inform me of cool new software (now called apps) to look at I appreciate writers like Tolentino keeping me updated.

So, what is the core issue here? I believe that it is trying to solve the ancient question, “What is the Meaning of Life?” --- and no, it’s not just 42. It used to be the case that the main justification for using computers was that “they saved time”. It took the Internet to show us that we will gladly use computers instead to kill time. Is that what we really want?

There is a Zen Buddhist parable that tells the story of a monk who is invited to the city to speak to the local sangha. He is met at the subway station by a member of the congregation who says that they could walk to the sangha and save some time by cutting across the park. As they approach the edge of the park, the monk finds a bench, sits down and starts to feed peanuts to the squirrels. His guide, worried that they may be late asks, “What are you doing?” “Oh” replies the monk, “I’m just using some of the time we saved”.

What shall we do with the time we save? Tolentino suggests we not squander that precious resource; we should instead be cutting back on time spent with Internet connections and using more of our time making human connections. She is not so radical as to claim that the Internet is basically evil and we should cut all ties with it. She urges us to use the Web mindfully and become more conscious of why we use it. There is nothing wrong with texting a friend when thinking about them or using Skype or Viber to talk with family in the Philippines or playing Scrabble while waiting for the bus so long as we realize what is actually important to us and why. The business models of Google Facebook, Amazon and Twitter rely on capturing your attention for as long as possible --- the longer the better for them because that’s how they make their income from businesses, large and small, that want to draw your to their ads so you can buy their stuff and, hopefully, continue to buy their stuff. Their number one priority is sales, not our well being.

Two aphorisms from folk wisdom come to mind: “Everything in Moderation” and “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”

A Modest Proposal

It was with mixed feelings that I read the article, “CCC flips the switch on electrician’s degree” in the 3/9-10 edition of the PR. On the one hand, to quote a college spokesperson interviewed for the article,”This will be a big stepping stone for those students who think they aren’t interested in attending college...Now they can earn a degree doing what they love --- working with their hands.” Which raises the question, “Why ignore the liberal arts and sciences which involve working with their minds?” Is this really an either-or situation?

Almost 100 years ago, the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, in a
speech celebrating the opening of the Harvard Business School succinctly pointed out that “Education is for life, if not, what is it for?” At the same time there is also a need to offer practical courses which can put food on the table. In a 2015 article in the Washington Post,” What’s the purpose of education in the 21st century?” Arthur H. Camins writes:

“With each new workforce development or economic competitiveness demand on our K-12 schools, there has been push-back from those who want greater emphasis on a broader view of education. But it doesn’t have to be either-or. Education should prepare young people for life, work and citizenship.” I believe that all educational institutions would benefit from and strive toward this three-pronged prescription.

The difficulty in developing a curriculum for our children from Kindergarten through College is that each child is a unique learner and a single pedagogical approach is not effective. However, most subjects can be divided into theory and practice and using a combination of both lectures and laboratory projects is one way to address this issue.

The lab/lecture approach is baked into the Computer Science curriculum --- Lectures lay out the theory and the Labs help the students to apply that theory to a practical problem. It’s a symbiotic relationship: The theory informs the practice and the practice makes the abstract theory more concrete which helps the student to understand the theory. This approach is not new; it has been advocated by John Dewey (born Oct. 20, 1859, Burlington, Vt.) and is usually summarized by the phrase ‘learning by doing” then reflecting on what you’ve done and how you did it.

There is another practical reason for this dual lab/lecture pedagogy. In the lecture hall I ask the questions to determine if the students are understanding me or not, but they are my questions and not the students’. In the Lab however, it’s the students asking the questions so they listen much more intently and thus learn more effectively and enjoyably.




OK, with all that said, why am I worried that the education provided to students choosing a specific career such as Electrician need only take 9 credits in the liberal arts and sciences (3 courses) of their required 60 to graduate? Well, even if those three courses are in fact chosen from the liberal arts curriculum, is that enough exposure for the student to broaden their perspective to include reading and writing as well as many other courses in the liberal arts?

If I had to whittle the liberal arts curriculum down to just two topics, it would be reading and writing. Not only because reading and writing are necessary skills in most of the liberal arts but most of the liberal arts require a careful reading and analysis of ideas. Writing about them allows your teacher to assess your progress and learning level.

But I think that the biggest advantage to careful reading and then writing clearly, correctly and cohesively about what you’ve read is that it forces you to think about what you have written and reading other writers shows you how to become a better writer. You can’t bluff your way through a written piece, you can’t count on a litany of “ya knows’ in a reasoned explanation or argument. Writing not only clarifies your thoughts, it also can generate new ideas. I cannot count the number of times new ideas are born as I write --- the act of writing itself primes the pump so to speak.

Finally as a purely practical consideration, being able to write clearly helps with job interviews and subsequent promotions. Why? Because we are judged by our employers during the job interview on at least three criteria: first, how we look, second, how we speak and third, for promotion --- how we write. Like it or not, how we write is a part of how our intelligence is judged by others and it is the Liberal Arts and Sciences that hone that skill.

As my colleague Doug Skopp used to say, “The purpose of Education is to live a life, not to make a living” Of course, making a living is a large part of living a life. But to live and to flourish we must feed our minds and hearts as well as our bodies. The line from the poem/song, “Bread and Roses” sums it all up: “Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread, but give us roses.”

My Love/Hate Relationship with my Smartphone

Let me say at the outset and unequivocally: I love my smartphone --- mostly. It allows me to have my own personal alarm clock, a text messaging and email service that keeps me in touch with my loved (even just liked) ones, and lets me play word games when I need to take a break from serious work like writing this column. Also I get a “free” spreadsheet (I know, I know, anything touted as “free” on the Internet makes me and my information the actual product they are selling but I sold out years ago). I use this spreadsheet to keep track of finances for that wonderful hidden-gem organization, “Friends of Point Au Roche”.

I have access to reasonably-priced news from the New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Economist magazines. I can easily visit millions of websites around the world. According to “internetlivestats” there are over 1.5 billion websites in the world wide web today and of these, less than 200 million are active. As you read this there are 4,000,000,001 users of the Internet (I just read that there are over four billion users, so this updated estimate includes you if you are reading the online version of the PR).

Of course, this virtual (literally) cornucopia of goodies and services is not without costs --- in real life every endeavor has pros and cons. The first cost is that I’ll need security for my software and hardware to search and destroy various viruses, phishing attacks, and other malware which may cause harm to others as well as myself. Like spies and counter-spies, antivirus protection must be continually updated as hackers learn and improve their methods.

Another cost is that there is always the possibility of internet addiction inyo which smartphones have afforded a seamless entry. Lately, lots have been said about internet addiction but if you need to refresh, just visit my website at: tec-soc.blogspot.com, scroll to the end and enter “addiction” into the search box.

Oh, and they may or may not cause cancer. Your cell emits radiation when it’s used which may possibly cause a cancer to erupt near the location where you put it most which I surmise is either your ear or your that portion of your anatomy directly across from your back pocket..

I don’t want to play Cassandra and react like some folks did to the advent of television where parents were alarmed about the effects of TV --- not only the radiation (don’t sit too close to the TV) but also the effects of violent shows, on children. I recall them worrying about their kids becoming ‘couch potatos” and forcing them to play outside like they did when they were kids. In fact, there was a New Yorker cartoon a few years ago updating this dilemma where the mom is chastising her kid on his cellphone to, “Stop spending so much time on your cell, go upstairs and watch TV”

Like the advertising biz, websites develop methods to keep you engaged with the products they advertise. Back in the fifties, when TV started to take off, there was talk of “subliminal messages” being flashed on your screen for a few microseconds urging you to buy Ivory soap or some such product. The theory was that a message to buy the product was planted in your subconscious mind which would pop up later while you were shopping. Did it work? I’ll tell you. I don’t know (sorry about that Tevye). But the same impetus still exists as websites such as Facebook, Google and Amazon run with algorithms that purportedly encourage you to keep your eyeballs on their websites.. Why? This I do Know: because the longer you stay on their site, the more they can charge their advertisers and, as we all know, from the Beatles that “Love is all you need.” but the message from the musical, “Caberet” is also true: “Money makes the world go round”.

Also it’s a good idea to remember the Russian proverb touted by former president Ronald Reagan:, “Trust but Verify”.