Technology going to the Dogs

In this day of information acceleration and subsequent overload it’s comforting to learn that the latest technology for sniffing out drugs is, well, a dog’s nose. So, how did it come to be that the canine olfactory system is the latest and greatest technology for locating drugs?  In the Jan 4 PR was an article, “Supreme Court ponders drug dog’s sniff” which, if you missed or cannot recall the details, let me summarize:

On an anonymous tip and without a search warrant, the Miami-Dade police department had their chocolate lab, Franky, sniff just outside the house of Joelis Jardines to detect an illegal marijuana operation. After Franky had signalled that he sensed the drugs inside the house, the police used that evidence to get a search warrant from a judge and, in fact they confiscated 179 plants from the house with and estimated street value of over $700,000. Jardines pleaded not guilty and his attorney challenged the search, claiming Franky's sniff outside the front door was an unconstitutional law enforcement intrusion into his home which is protected by the Constitution.
 

The Florida Supreme Court ruled that the arrest of Jardines violated the Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable search and seizures” and has been challenged by the State Attorney General of Florida. The US Supreme Court will decide this issue this year. (Source:http://www.telegram.com/article/20120104/NEWS/101049967/1052/news01)

This new twist tests the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution once again. Is it a violation of our constitutional rights for a police dog to sniff outside our house for the prescence of drugs inside? Before you answer that question, let’s review some of the history of some prominent  Fourth Amendment Supreme Court cases involving technology.  In a previous column celebrating Constitution Day, I described two cases that dealt with this issue:  Olmstead vs US in  1928 where a bootlegger’s phone was tapped and the court ruled for the US government although Judge Brandeis, in a dissenting opinion, argued that the Fourth Amendment’s protection should extend to electronic communications. He pointed out that when a phone is tapped, the control of personal information at both ends of the connection are compromised --- not just the suspect’s privacy. In this fashion, “the tapping of one man’s telephone  line involves the tapping of the telephone of every other person whom he may call, or who may call him.”

Brandeis’ view was upheld and Olmstead overturned in 1967 (Katz V. US)  where a bookie was apprehended placing illegal bets in a bugged phone booth. Katz won and  Judge Potter Stewart summarized the court’s decision when he wrote, “The Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.”

It appears that the Jardines/dog sniffing case will be settled in Jardine’s favor also, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision on 1/23/2012 (US vs Jones) where the court ruled that police violated the constitutional rights of Jones when, as part of drug operation,  they secretly attached a GPS device to his SUV without a warrant.. The majority of the Justices  ruled that placing the GPS device on Jones’ vehicle for the purpose of tracking his movements constituted a search of his property and therefore required a warrant. Thus the ruling was about protecting citizens’ property rights and not their privacy. The Court purposely deferred ruling on whether technology like surveillance cameras or cell phones which can track users is a protected right of privacy under the Fourth Amendment. However, the worrisome issue seems to be how technology manages to worm its way into our private lives.  In fact, Chief Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. faulted the majority for trying to apply 18th-century legal concepts to 21st-century technologies. What should matter, he said, is the “contemporary reasonable expectation of privacy”.

If you’re curious about the fate of  Mr. Jardines, lower courts can reprosecute but cannot use the evidence gathered from the illegal intrusion into his home.  It would have been more thoughtful for the cops to have secured a search warrant before they utilized the services of their drug-sniffing dog, Franky. What Franky thinks about all this has not been disclosed.

Jan 8, 2012 Pros and Cons of Social Media: Part Two

 “A recent study by the online security firm AVG found that 92 percent of children under 2 in the United States have some kind of online presence, whether a tagged photo, sonogram image or Facebook page. Life, it seems, begins not at birth but with online conception. And a child’s name is the link to that permanent record.” --- Allen Salkin, New York Times, Nov 27, 2011

"One particular advantage of social media is that they help a reporter see the intellectual and social network of a source. For example, in Twitter I can see whom you are following and who is following you. I can see what you have re-tweeted and what links you have selected. Therefore, I can understand more fully your social context." -- Jerry Zurek, professor of English and communication department chair at Cabrini College

Are the above quotes arguments for or against social media?  Here is some more information to help you make up your mind:

“Twitter was so important to the Iranian protests after the Iranian presidential election in June 2009 that the US State Department asked Twitter to delay a scheduled network upgrade that would have taken the website offline at a busy time of day in Iran. Twitter complied and rescheduled the downtime to 1:30 am Tehran time.

Proponents of social networking sites argue that these online communities promote increased communication with friends and family, familiarize people with valuable computer skills, and allow contact with people from around the world.


Opponents argue that social networking sites expose children to predators, increase vulnerability to computer viruses, lower worker productivity, and promote narcissism and short attention spans.” (source: http://socialnetworking.procon.org/)

If you follow the above link to the procon website, you will find over 1300 more words devoted to the pros and cons of social networking websites --- much too many to reproduce here. But, if you were to ask me, I would say the strongest and most general arguments pro and con are:

Pro: Social Media contribute the happiness of both the individual and society.

Con: Social Media contribute to the unhappiness of both the individual and society.

Of course, our next problem would be to define more precisely what we mean by “happiness”. I am happy when I am afforded the pleasure of being able to turn over and get a couple more hours of sleep --- but that’s just me. Someone else may be happy in knocking over little kids blocks or tormenting their cat. And even if we could all agree on a common definition of “happiness” --- how would we go about measuring it?

 Sociolgists have bravely taken on a huge problem when thay attempt to make statements about human beings, especially regarding measurement of our satisfaction or happiness. There are so many variables that can quantitatively describe a person that it is currently not possible to run truly controlled studies by keeping all the variables except one constant and measuring the effects of varying the one of interest. Granted there are some powerful statistical techniques which allow polls or samples of an appropriate size to ascertain how a certain variable (like intelligence or happiness) is expressed when a social network is applied. But most statistically-based studies are run under the assumption that there is a one in twenty chance the outcomes are a result of random chance and not the result of application of a social network. The math can be improved to one in one hundred and so on,  but never achieve full certainty, and to be fair, this is true of all experimental science.

We just need to be mindful that the mathematical theory that underlies inferential statistics is based upon the study of uncertainty.

Addendum: My editor, Lois Clermont, commented that my previous column had implied “ that print has only one-way communication, when actually the Press-Republican, for example, has robust two-way communication through our online story comments and Facebook.” She is cerainly correct in pointing out that we've already moved on to a sort of hybrid print-internet model.

December 15, 2011 Social Media: Part One

http://www.flickr.com/photos/geekandpoke/2544805902/

Last month I attempted to rebut the view that texting was morally objectionable. This time I want to present a more balanced analysis and discuss the issue more broadly. The broader issue subsumes texting and is generally referred to as Social Networks or Social Media. There is much to say about the effects of social media on society and vice-versa. In fact, so much that it will not fit into one column. So, rather than omit every other word, I’ve decided to deliver this column in two installments.

What exactly is meant by the term “social media”? We might already know that media is the plural of medium and that we are probably talking about media like print (e.g. books, magazines and newspapers), tv , radio and the Internet. Further, the media must somehow facilitate social interaction.

I find that classifying social media into the two categories: “One-Way” vs “Two-Way” communication is a useful way to understand social media. For example, print, tv and radio are One-Way communication media because their content is broadcast to us from a single source and we usually cannot interact with it (except very slowly as for Speakout and the Letters to the Editor).

On the other hand, Two-Way communication allows us to respond via the medium to its content which may be represented by text, sound, or images. Examples include telephone and the Internet and within the medium of the Internet we have email, blogs and chat. Two-Way allows many-to-many connections while One-Way allows only one-to-many connections and is perceived as less useful in the world of social media.

“What about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ ?” --- you may well ask. All of these are quintessential social networking sites that are a mashup of email, blogs, and chat(not to mention video games and advertisements) that allow many-to-many communication. However, as my granddaughter has pointed out to me, “Twitter is like Facebook except you update your status every few minutes rather than every few days…” She uses Facebook regularly and Twitter not at all. She is also thirteen going on twenty-five so if she is representative of the upcoming generation it would be wise to see the future through her eyes.

Blogs I would rate as 1.5-Way and Letters to the Editor as 1.25-Way because the factors which determine a medium’s place between 1 and 2-way communication are the quantity and the speed of information.

None of the aforementioned media exist to make a society neither flourish or even to entertain. These may be the side effects but the main goal is simply to make money for their owners or stockholders. If they cannot do that one thing, they perish.

To make matters even more complicated, “media” has a different, more specific meaning in the world of computers where it refers to memory hardware for data storage and retrieval. Thus, computer media examples would be hard drives, memory sticks, CDs and DVDs.”

On a much deeper and philosophical level, Marshall McLuhan back in the sixties proclaimed that “The Medium is the Message” and although today we tend to call the “message” the “content”, the gist of what he meant was that the medium has a greater effect on society than the message itself. Again, from Wikipedia:


“McLuhan understood "medium" in a broad sense. He identified the light bulb as a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."

And, from another source: (http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm)

“McLuhan defines medium for us as well. Right at the beginning of Understanding Media, he tells us that a medium is "any extension of ourselves." Classically, he suggests that a hammer extends our arm and that the wheel extends our legs and feet. Each enables us to do more than our bodies could do on their own. Similarly, the medium of language extends our thoughts from within our mind out to others. “

In the next column we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of social media.

November 13, 2011 Is Texting Evil?

In the Parade magazine that came within your Oct 9 Press Republican was an interesting article “Generation Wired” by Emily Listfield in which she examines how children are being affected by wired (and wireless) technology such as smartphones, music players, video games, the Internet and the various permutations and combinations of all of them.

To quote the cover, “Being connected 24/7 is changing how our kids live.  And it may even be altering their brains.”  This raises the  important question: is it altering our brains in a positive or negative way or both? In his article, “The Waking Dream” by Kevin Kelley,  Editor-at –Large of Wired magazine, he writes, “We already know that our use of technology changes how our brains work. Reading and writing are cognitive tools that change the way in which the brain processes information. When psychologists use neuroimaging technology such as MRI  to compare the brains of literates and illiterates working on a task, they find many differences --- and not just when the subjects are reading. … If alphabetic literacy can change how we think, imagine how Internet literacy and ten hours a day in front of one kind of screen or another is changing our brains.” Kelley goes on to make the case that, overall the Internet is a good thing --- in some cases it may be a terrible waste of time, but like dreams, perhaps it might be a “productive waste of time.”!

Regarding texting, Listfield quotes Dr Sherry Turkle, director of  MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self and author of “Alone Together”  as writing, “Kids have told me that they almost don’t know what they are feeling until they put in a text”.  Listfield uses this example as a negative  cost of technology but I can envision it as a plus, as a benefit and not necessarily a cost. Let me explain:

When I was working as a Professor of  Computer Science, much of my research was on developing teaching  strategies to facilitate development of problem-solving skills in students, particularly in freshman as that would have the maximum benefit for the student over his and her college stay. I decided to use  a combination of computer programming (in a simplified language called Logo) and writing exercises as my pedagogy.  The main idea was to combine the discipline of writing with the discipline of computer programming which uses both a priori  and  a posteriori reasoning to solve problems. As explained by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori)

'”’a priori knowledge’ is known independently of experience (conceptual knowledge), and 'a posteriori knowledge' is proven through experience .”

In a nutshell, a priori reasoning is “armchair reasoning” (you don’t have to get up and go door-to-door  to ascertain  the number of  married bachelors in the greater metropolitan Plattsburgh area)  while a posteriori is experimental reasoning, the basis of all science so you can’t just solve the problem in your head.

But just as important as logical, scientific thinking for problem solvers is writing.  Writing is arguably the best method  for clarifying our thoughts. When I have a hard problem that I am struggling with I find that I can begin to make progress by sitting down and “writing myself a letter” describing first how I feel (usually frustrated) and then what the problem seems to be and finally offering myself suggestions for its solution. It’s a wonderful pump priming process. By first slowing down enough to really pay attention and examine the problem, I gain clarity. And as I gain clarity, I also gain confidence, perhaps the single most important behavior of good problem solvers. When I look down the hill on my skis and say to myself, “Oh No, I’m going to fall” I most certainly will. But if  I say, “This should be fun” I have a good chance to make it the bottom in an upright position.

This is why I think that texting can be a  positive outcome of  technology. So long as the kids are texting (and not while they’re driving), they are writing and writing clarifies thinking. And (in addition to “Love, sweet Love”) clear thinking is what the world needs right now.

October 9, 2011 The Constitution and Technology

In (belated) honor of Constitution Day I would like to examine how advances in Technology have affected the interpretation of the Constitution in terms of the court cases that have made it to the Supreme Court. I will be using two examples cited by  Laurence Tribe, Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School in his 1991 paper: 

"The Constitution in Cyberspace: Law and Liberty Beyond the Electronic Frontier" (http://epic.org/free_speech/tribe.html) Although the paper is 20 years old and some of his examples of technology will seem dated, his reasoning and insights are not. 

Tribe uses two Supreme Court cases which center on the Fourth and Sixth Amendments to make the case that we are inconsistent in our consideration of technological effects on our values(freedom, truth, justice etc). 

The Fourth Amendment states: “'The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The Sixth Amendment contains the  “Confrontation Clause” which states:  “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right … to be confronted with the witnesses against him”.

 Tribe discusses “Maryland V. Craig” where the Supreme Court upheld the power of the state to try an alleged child abuser with the accuser not in the courtroom but by means of a one-way closed-circuit TV  to spare the child trauma. The decision to allow a new technology that was unknown to the framers of the Constitution was based on a cost-benefit analysis taking into account the three stakeholders: the accuser, the defendant and society at large. But what is the intent of the Confrontation clause? Is it to make the accuser more likely to tell the truth when confronted face-to-face with the accused? Or is it for identification purposes only? Tribe agrees with dissenting Justices that the accused rights were abused and that the introduction of  new information technology had the effect of withholding the protections of the Bill of Rights .

The Fourth amendment case Tribe presents is “Olmstead V. US” . Without a warrant, federal agents wiretapped Roy Olmstead’s phone to gather evidence against him for bootlegging during Prohibition. Although wiretapping was illegal under state law (Washington), the evidence was allowed and Olmstead convicted. The Supreme Court ruled that no “search and seizure” occurred because the Fourth Amendment “itself shows that search is to be of material things – the person, the house, his papers or his effects” and thus “there was no searching” when a suspect’s phone was tapped because the Constitution’s language “cannot be extended and expanded to include telephone wires reaching to the whole world from the defendant’s house or office.”  Judge Brandeis, in a dissenting opinion, argued that the Fourth Amendment should extend to electronic communications in it protection. He pointed out that when a phone is tapped, the control of personal information at both ends of the connection are compromised --- not just the suspect’s privacy. In this fashion, “the tapping of one man’s telephone  line involves the tapping of the telephone of every other person whom he may call, or who may call him.”

In this case, Tribe once again agrees with the dissenters; however, Olmstead was overturned in 1967 (Katz V. US)  and it was Tribe who, as a law clerk to Justice  Potter Stewart helped to write the majority opinion which included the famous phrase, “The Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.”). But this privacy issue continues to bubble and befuddle: in this session, the Supreme Court will review whether the government, without a court warrant, may track suspects’ movements by hiding a GPS device on their vehicle.

Tribe sums up, “… “Olmstead” mindlessly read a new technology out of the Constitution, while “Craig” absent-mindedly read a new technology into the Constitution. But both decisions had the structural effect of withholding the protections of the Bill of Rights from threats made possible by new information technologies.”

In other words, Technology is a double-edged sword and we must be mindful of its use.

Can’t argue with that.

Sept 11, 2011 Plus and Minus

Sept 11, 2011 Plus and Minus

On this somber day, let me add my voice to those who have vowed to “never forget” the atrocities that occurred ten years ago and to work toward a better, more peaceful world. I was teaching a computer lab on 9/11/2001 and, as usual, not every student was being studious and following the worksheet instructions. In fact several were on the Internet and following the news. That’s how I first learned at 9:15 AM that an airplane had crashed into one of the World Trade towers setting it afire. As the drama unfolded, the second tower was hit and it was apparent we were under attack.  The students were agitated (especially a young man from Egypt) and  I wrestled with the decision  to dismiss class or to continue it.  I finally decided to continue because there was nothing we could do about the situation just then and I thought the lab exercises would help take the student’s minds off the tragedy at least for a little while. After class we could all share our feelings with our friends and begin the slow process of grieving, acceptance and resolve to insure that this would never happen again.

That said, I want to explore the question: Does computer technology bring us together or does it isolate us? In the short story, “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster, written about 100 years ago, all humanity lives underground (presumably because of some environmental disaster) in separate hive-like cells. All of their needs are attended to by the “Machine” --- what we’d currently call a Computer. Everyone has a “plate” in their room through which they can communicate with everyone else on the planet --- today we’d call that the Internet or the Web.  Forster’s cautionary tale is a dire warning against becoming so isolated from each other and so dependent on a Machine so complex that no single person fully understands how it works or how to fix it if it breaks. Hello? Does any of this sound familiar? As you might guess, the outcome of this story is not pleasant but it does end on the hopeful note that we might be able to start over and recover our humanity.

On a related note, a recent Speak Out contributor has pointed out that while technology has certainly made many of our tasks easier, it is also responsible for displacing jobs formerly held by human beings. This raises an interesting question: does the automation made possible by technology decrease the amount of human jobs or does it actually increase them? Does it destroy more than it creates?

Certainly, one could argue that the quality and the pay of the jobs that automation creates are usually better than the jobs they replace.  A software engineer who uses computer technology to design automobiles is a much more creative and high-paying job than the assembly-line worker (who is also being replaced by technology). However, it is not generally possible to retrain a worker on the line to become a software engineer. And the situation is more muddled. Even the software designer relies on automated tools to make her/his job easier and more effective and no humans are displaced in the process. And, to make matters more muddy, there is no definitive research data indicating whether automation, in the long run, creates more jobs than it destroys. There is, however some research which seems to confirm the hypothesis that automation is more beneficial to skilled  workers with more education and/or experience than to unskilled ones. This means that those least likely to benefit from automation are those that probably have the greater needs. Not such a bad situation if you believe in Ayn Rand’s economic philosophy but a terrible state if you tend more towards Karl Marx. In any case since computers are much more effective than humans in performing repetitive and often boring jobs, the writing seems to be on the wall.

It is also clear that this is a complex problem, so it is well to remember the words of that great journalist/philosopher Henry  Lewis  Mencken, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

August 14, 2011 The Purpose of Computing

August 14 Column: The Purpose of Computing

Early in my career as a programmer, I was working on a project that required using some mathematical techniques from the text, “Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers” by R. W.  Hamming.  I  have forgotten which methods I actually used but remember vividly his inscription: “The Purpose of computing is Insight, not Numbers.” That was a cautionary aphorism because all of the software being developed at that time produced pounds and pounds of paper filled with columns of numbers and it was easy to lose sight of the real purpose: to gain insight into the solution of  some problem.

Today, it seems that picture has radically changed. Computer systems are no longer behemoths filling whole rooms with dedicated cooling systems requiring a staff of operators and programmers.  They have evolved into much much faster, smaller machines that can be used by everyone from pre-teens to seniors. In a sense, computers have been democratized and socialized --- their power now flows directly into the hands of the people. This is a Good Thing, right?  Maybe yes, maybe no. First we must ask ourselves what is the purpose that computers fulfill in our society. Is Hamming’s insight still valid? Well, modern computers certainly make oodles of information available to us via the Internet and one could reasonably argue that we can use this information to gain insights into problems ranging from medical advice to how to get into and out of kayaks.  On the other hand,  we can also access informational distractions (e.g. gossip, pornography, etc.) whose only purpose is to  provide us with a diversion from boredom.

For example, I recently attended a wedding and the group at our table were swapping ideas for summer reading. I had recently  heard a radio discussion of a book that I had not yet read but sounded intriguing --- it was about a future where most all forms of cancer had been cured which, on its face, sounds like another Good Thing, right? Wrong! The novel elaborates some of the unintended consequences of this event which include destructive bands of jobless young men harassing the new cohort of older people who are not retiring to make room for the next generation  because cancer has been cured and most everyone is living longer. Unfortunately I could not remember the title or the author of the book. However I did remember that the author was also a movie actor and producer who reminded me of the comedian Al Franken and that he had appeared in a movie with Holly Hunter with the title, “Network News” or something like that and that he usually played the role of a loser. While I was sharing these rambling thoughts my niece was using  Google on her iPhone and had already found the author and the title of the book: “2030”, by Albert Brooks.

My question is: what insight had been gained from this process?  It did scratch the itch of curiosity and it did provide the practical information needed to access the book in question but what did we learn and how did we change for the better? Perhaps this is asking too much from a mere machine but  surely we expect more from ourselves. Does our computer technology  actually promote a  sort of mental laziness? And if it does, should we update Hamming’s aphorism to “The purpose of computing is titillation not insight” ?

I think not.  According to Jaron Lanier, author of “You are not a Gadget”, the purpose of digital technology is to enrich human interaction. In one sense, the human interaction at our wedding table was enhanced by the digital technology of Google and the iPhone via the Internet. It did scratch the itch of curiosity and it did provide the practical information needed to access the book in question but only in a shallow way.

If the computer is to become a  partner in our evolution, it will have to enhance our existence beyond petty pandering to our desire to alleviate ennui. It will have to provide us with more than arousing diversions. To mashup Hamming and Lanier, “The purpose of any technology is to enhance our humanity, not degrade it.”