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”.

Disruption and its Discontents

I was recently listening to the 11/18/18 edition  of “On the Media” from NPR which had several segments about strange bedfellows; the Country Store, Sears Roebuck, and Amazon. The main theme that ties them all together is Disruption --- which has many definitions; some laud it while others worry about its effects. The common dictionary definition is straightforward: “disturbance or problems that interrupt an event, activity, or process.” Now that would be an example of a negative interpretation of disruption -- who wants to be disturbed or interrupted? But that’s not how it’s applied in the world of commerce according to Wikipedia:

“In business, a disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market-leading firms, products, and alliances.”

The operative word here is “creates” which acts to soften the impact of “disturbed”. However, if the disruption is successful, it can lead to the destruction of the previous business model. A good example is cited by Robbins Research International is Blockbuster vs Netflix:

“When Netflix started, Blockbuster thought it seemed insignificant. Who would want to wait for DVDs to arrive in the mail? Blockbuster didn’t anticipate where the future of watching movies was going, which ultimately led to their downfall. When Netflix came to the rental giant to sell their business, Blockbuster declined...Blockbuster didn’t realize it was under threat until Netflix tapped into streaming services, unlocking the brand’s immense profitability. Then it was too late. Today, Netflix is worth billions of dollars and Blockbuster is bankrupt.”

OK, on that note, let’s consider the thesis: the Country Store was disrupted by Sears and Roebuck which in turn was disrupted by Amazon.

The Country Store served most all of the needs of rural folk. Just recall the early cowboy movies and what the inside of a country or general store looked like. Not only could you buy food but also other necessities like fabric for clothes and furniture. Except perhaps for the Trading Post which mainly dealt in animal furs , the Country Store was the first one- stop shop in North America.

The general protocol for the country store was that clerks accompanied customers, collected their wares and cashed them out. Whites were always served first (even if a black arrived before them) and clerks had the power to decide what blacks could and could not purchase. This Jim Crow policy led to an unintended consequence: It allowed anyone to purchase just about anything regardless of their color. In this way blacks could make an end run against this heinous Jim Crow policy.. At the same time it made it easier for Sears and Roebuck to disrupt the institution of the country store.

And so the country store was disrupted, indeed almost destroyed by Sears’ ability to deliver goods chosen from a huge catalog (the 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue was about 300 pages and when the last edition was offered in 1993 it had doubled). Choices ranged from houses ( “bungalows in a box” ) to hairpins --- you could even order opium! No need to travel into town to get your coffers filled, just order it from Sears and Roebuck then sit back and wait until it’s delivered to your door. Sears was smart enough to change with the times, evolving from a strictly mail-order enterprise into stand-alone stores to stores embedded in shopping malls. By the time Sears was declining due to other competitors like Walmart, Amazon.com entered the picture providing the the crushing blow: the disruption of Sears.

Like Sears, Amazon started with a single product (books) and expanded its offerings to other products --- lots and lots of other products. I could order parts for my lawnmower as easily as I had previously ordered books. It was a genius enterprise and I still kick myself for not buying shares earlier.

I remember the day during the mid Nineties when I nervously entered my credit card number into the Amazon.com website to purchase a book. Until then I was assiduously ripping up my carbon copies of credit card purchases to foil any would be fraudster. And there I was, sending that number over who knows what connections on its way to Amazon. For me, it took a giant leap of faith to reveal the key to a source of my current wealth. However, three days later when the book I ordered magically appeared in my mailbox, my elation quickly extinguished my previous trepidation. Yes, I did feel some pangs of guilt about not buying from my local Mom and Pop bookstore but the price was so good (plus no state tax back then), and I didn’t have to get off my butt to drive down to the store, look for a parking spot, then drive back home. Searching for a book was also easier and the genie at Amazon would even offer advice on other books I might like based on my previous book selections. These advantages easily overcame the three-day wait.

All of this is not to imply that all disruption leads to an inevitable destruction.

In the natural world we see instances of creative destruction everywhere: A tree dies and crashes to the forest floor and begins to decay providing a fertile rooting medium for future plants some of which will be a bit more suited to their environment. And so the Life cycle continues, just not the same individual life. To put a positive spin on this we could as well call this process “rebirth” instead of “disruption or destruction”. Today, many consider Amazon as the offspring of Sears.

Skip Twitter on Thanksgiving Day

In the beginning, there was the Internet. It was slow and it only displayed text (green text on a grey screen) --- it was so slow that you could actually see the characters as they streamed across the screen of your Personal Computer; at that time, I considered taking up knitting to put this time to good use. But it was cherished by the people because it connected you to the rest of world; you could read other country’s newspapers and find out what THEY thought about things and you could send and receive mail faster than even airmail, and you could join Bulletin Boards where members of a common interest could converse in a setting similar to an actual coffee house. Students could talk to students about music, cooks could share recipes, and shoemakers could wax eloquent ... about soles. It could also privately deliver pornography and allow you to surreptitiously cheat at word games like Scrabble. What’s not to like?

In short, you were no longer constrained by your neighborhood or limited to your local friends for interesting conversations --- you could make new circles of friends based on common interests not on geographical location. While the VCR was called a “time-shifter” (you didn’t have to watch your TV shows at the same time they were broadcast) , the Internet had become a “space-shifter” --- you could be anywhere conversing with anyone (who had access to the web that is) about anything. The headline no one ever read was, “ Man Finally Conquers Space and Time!”

All was going like clockwork until around the mid 90s When the term “social media” emerged to describe new websites like Facebook and Twitter and Google (remember Google Circles?) which displaced the slower and awkward interface of the previous generation chat rooms. These new social media websites hinted that the age of Aquarius was beginning. Families across the nation, indeed the world could share photos of reunions or Internet videos and articles (which contained videos) with other family members. When it was founded in 2004, the mission of Facebook was, “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.” It reminded me of the more straightforward mission of the ILLIAC IV Supercomputer: “To make the world a better place to live in” These were heady times It felt like it was a good time to be alive. Little did we know...

All was going well until we began to notice that some of our email was actually unsolicited advertising and this was deemed to be “spam” whose etymology was either a ham-like meat served in a tin in decades past or it was an injoke reference to a Monty Python sketch --- also decades earlier. So it was that spam filters were created that could recognize spam and send it straight to your trash can. We also learned recently that Google and Facebook were skating very very close to invading our privacy. They were selling what we assumed to be private information to companies that used that information to increase their sales under the guise of claiming that they were only trying to improve service. There was no profit motive involved. Right.

The next phase of this downhill slide was fairly recent when it became clear that the Internet had a dark side. It could do more than bring people together, it could also drive them apart. It could be used to foment social disruption by manipulating public opinion. Trolls could plant “fake news” specifically designed to elicit emotional responses from both sides of the political divide. Foreign interests began to see they could increase their global power simply by weakening our country. Vandalism has been supercharged thanks to social media on the Internet.

Twitter was either designed or has been corrupted to foment this type of corrosive discourse despite their mission statement: “To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” The flaw in this design is that while kindness begets kindness, fear leads to anger and anger begets anger. Angry responses spiral out of control as each response to the previous response metastasizes.

And so it is that I humbly ask you to consider the request in the title of this essay and eschew the use of Twitter (as well as social media of the same ilk) for just one day to see how that feels. If you feel withdrawal symptoms (as I’m sure I will) then consider the possibility of an addiction to be dealt with. And what better time to give it a shot than on Thanksgiving Day?

The Beauty of not knowing why it works

I am the Treasurer for the Friends of Point au Roche Association and one of my jobs is to periodically issue a financial reports. To this end, I use a spreadsheet supplied by Ma Google which is called, unsurprisingly, "Google Sheets".

The following description may seem somewhat technical but I'm relying on the ubiquity of spreadsheets in the business and real world and that most folks have learned to use them somewhere along the way to keep track of something. The Google Sheets are very similar to Excel Spreadsheets which are similar to Lotus 1-2-3 which was similar to VisiCalc, the first one to be tailored to the Personal Computer revolution of the late Sixties. Now, let me say right upfront that I immediately considered VisiCalc as a waste of time and money. I was of the opinion that a computer-savvy person could write their own version using the then popular (and free) language BASIC. I was so so wrong. I reveal this to warn you before askinig me for tech investment advice.

For those lucky enough to be unschooled in Google Sheets,here is a sample command in one of my spreadsheets: =SUM(("DISBURSEMENTS"!U58):("DISBURSEMENTS"!U64))

This command happens to be stored in a cell in a spreadsheet named, " Master " and it says to add up the values in cells U58 to U64 in another spreadsheet named "Disbursements" --- a very useful operation if you have a spreadsheet that needs to reference information in another spreadsheet. And yes, that exclamation point is not a typo.

It took me much too long poking around the plethora of mostly useless documentation and just plain trial and error to figure out the correct syntax for this moderately complicated operation.

.I admit that I did run across some more streamlined methods to solve this problem (using drop-down menus,) but I wanted my spreadsheets to be as portable as possible in preparation for the day when the next Treasurer uses them. Thus, the program should be written as close to Excel format as possible using Excel-like formulas rather than high level commands found only in the drop-downs. Most all spreadsheets can use formulas lsuch as =Sum(A1:A45) but usually never use the same menus. When I type this formula into a spreadsheet cell, the contents of the cell change from the formula to what the formula calculates; in this case it is the sum of the value from cell A1 To A45

Portability is also an important piece of the strategy of Reusability in the discipline of Computer science. Why is that and what do I mean by “Reuseability”? Let me explain with a simplified example.

Let’s imagine that I have written a spiffy spreadsheet program (think app) that helps another program to decide which ads the will flash up on your screen as you run the applications you normally use (remember, it’s the ads that make the app “free”). I decide that I and other programmers could use this program in many of other applications--- wouldn’t it be nicer and easier to use just one line of code which “calls” my app rather than rewriting the whole thing every time a new program needs to use it? Of course. The best part is that anyone can use my spreadsheet app without knowing the details of the actual code which implements it.

This greatly simplifies the effort of other programmers who want to share my nifty app; so long as the input to the app is correct they can use it WITHOUT KNOWING HOW IT PRODUCES THE OUTPUT. Sound dangerous? Well, when you switch on a light must you first understand atomic physics? Of course not. All you need to know is that when you flip the switch, if the light was on, it will turn off and vice-versa. Indeed, much of modern civilization is built on this premise. That’s why you don’t need to be an automotive engineer to drive a car or a mechanical engineer to run a washing machine.

As Alfred North Whitehead has written, “Civilization advances in direct proportion to the number of operations its citizens can perform without understanding them.” We don’t need to know why it works--- all we need to know is how to work it: up is on, down is off and to heck with electrical theory. Saves me a lot of time.

Of course the downside is that rarely can anyone fix anything by themselves anymore -- we always need to call in an expert.

And how will I spend that time I saved?