Monthly Archives: October 2006

Computerised hostility detection

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Fascinating article in today’s New York Times…

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.

Such a “sentiment analysis” is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said.

Researchers at institutions including Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah intend to test the system on hundreds of articles published in 2001 and 2002 on topics like President Bush’s use of the term “axis of evil,” the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the debate over global warming and the coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

A $2.4 million grant will finance the research over three years.

American officials have long relied on newspapers and other news sources to track events and opinions here and abroad, a goal that has included the routine translation of articles from many foreign publications and news services.

The new software would allow much more rapid and comprehensive monitoring of the global news media, as the Homeland Security Department and, perhaps, intelligence agencies look “to identify common patterns from numerous sources of information which might be indicative of potential threats to the nation,” a statement by the department said.

It could take several years for such a monitoring system to be in place, said Joe Kielman, coordinator of the research effort. The monitoring would not extend to United States news, Mr. Kielman said.

“We want to understand the rhetoric that is being published and how intense it is, such as the difference between dislike and excoriate,” he said.

Even the basic research has raised concern among journalism advocates and privacy groups, as well as representatives of the foreign news media.

“It is just creepy and Orwellian,” said Lucy Dalglish, a lawyer and former editor who is executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Andrei Sitov, Washington bureau chief of the Itar-Tass news agency of Russia, said he hoped that the objective did not go beyond simply identifying threats to efforts to stifle criticism about an American president or administration.

“This is what makes your country great, the open society where people can criticize their own government,” Mr. Sitov said…

BTW: “Sentiment analysis” is what this stuff is called in the comp.sci community.

The pleasures of Amazon

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When I got back from work today, the postman had delivered two delights. One is this collection of David Remnick’s journalism. He’s such a graceful writer — the kind that leaves you staring at a sentence and wondering how anything can be so succinctly elegant.

The other delight is Bob Dylan’s new album, Modern Times. It’s astonishingly original and fresh, with some tracks (Thunder on the Mountain, The Levee’s Gonna Break) which remind one of why rock music changed the world.

The CrackBerry habit

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British employers are being warned they could face multi-million-pound legal actions from BlackBerry-addicted staff on a similar scale as class law-suits taken against tobacco companies.

Research by the University of Northampton has revealed that one-third of BlackBerry users showed signs of addictive behaviour similar to an alcoholic being unable to pass a pub without a drink.

The report found that some BlackBerry users displayed textbook addictive symptoms – denial, withdrawal and antisocial behaviour – and that time with their families was being taken up with BlackBerry-checking, even at the dinner table.

Professor Nada Kakabadse, joint author of the study, said that lawsuits were a growing issue for employers who were being sued for failing in their duty of care to staff and in following health and safety guidelines.

In one case in the US, a female business consultant claimed that her marriage fell apart because she was constantly checking messages. She ended up losing custody of her children and sued her employer for damages.

“Enlightened companies that issue BlackBerrys as standard like pen and paper should also have policies on how to use them, so that people can use technology in a way that doesn’t have an addictive side,” said Professor Kakabadse of Northampton Business School.

The BlackBerry backlash has already begun in the US, where firms are settling out of court to avoid negative publicity.

[Source.]

I’ve had a BlackBerry for well over a year. It is by far the most useful gadget I’ve ever owned. But I don’t recognise any of these symptoms. Could it be that most BlackBerry users haven’t figured out how to filter their mail? In my case, the only mail that reaches my phone comes from:

  • a few selected colleagues in the various organisations where I work
  • my kids
  • a few special friends
  • my editors on the Observer.

    Everything else goes to my computer, as usual. The result: really important email reaches me instantly. Everything else has to wait until I’m at a computer.

    • Press the Space bar

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    This is from a series of images provided by NASA of the latest Shuttle mission. The laptop on the left looks like an IBM Thinkpad. Hmmm… wonder if it’s running XP.

    Colliding with death at 37,000 feet…

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    … and living to tell the tale. Fascinating piece by the New York Times Business Travel correspondent, Joe Sharkey.

    SÃO JOSE DOS CAMPOS, Brazil, Oct. 1 — It had been an uneventful, comfortable flight.

    With the window shade drawn, I was relaxing in my leather seat aboard a $25 million corporate jet that was flying 37,000 feet above the vast Amazon rainforest. The 7 of us on board the 13-passenger jet were keeping to ourselves.

    Without warning, I felt a terrific jolt and heard a loud bang, followed by an eerie silence, save for the hum of the engines.

    And then the three words I will never forget. “We’ve been hit,” said Henry Yandle, a fellow passenger standing in the aisle near the cockpit of the Embraer Legacy 600 jet.

    “Hit? By what?” I wondered. I lifted the shade. The sky was clear; the sun low in the sky. The rainforest went on forever. But there, at the end of the wing, was a jagged ridge, perhaps a foot high, where the five-foot-tall winglet was supposed to be.

    And so began the most harrowing 30 minutes of my life. I would be told time and again in the next few days that nobody ever survives a midair collision. I was lucky to be alive — and only later would I learn that the 155 people aboard the Boeing 737 on a domestic flight that seems to have clipped us were not.

    Investigators are still trying to sort out what happened, and how — our smaller jet managed to stay aloft while a 737 that is longer, wider and more than three times as heavy, fell from the sky nose first.

    But at 3:59 last Friday afternoon, all I could see, all I knew, was that part of the wing was gone. And it was clear that the situation was worsening in a hurry. The leading edge of the wing was losing rivets, and starting to peel back.

    Amazingly, no one panicked. The pilots calmly starting scanning their controls and maps for signs of a nearby airport, or, out their window, a place to come down…

    Clinton goes Open Source?

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    Steve Bell’s cartoon in the Guardian of September 28. Note top right-hand corner. What can this mean?

    Later… Mystery solved. James M, from whom nothing is hidden, writes:

    In his speech to the Labour Party BrownNoseFest [Clinton] introduced the word Ubuntu as expressive the interelationships of people and their circumstances in South Africa. He also mentioned the software connection.

    Every little helps?

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    According to today’s Guardian, Tesco is moving into software…

    First Wal-Mart. Now Microsoft. There is, it seems, no global giant that Tesco is not prepared to take on.

    While a new division of the UK’s biggest grocer is currently working on a £250m plan to open 150 supermarkets in the mighty Wal-Mart’s US backyard, the supermarket chain is also about to launch a range of own-brand software that will compete head on with the company whose products are loaded into 95% of the world’s computers.

    Tesco is aiming to substantially undercut Microsoft, offering software titles for less than £20. It claims to be the first retailer to offer a range of own-label software, taking the same approach to the world of technology as grocers have traditionally taken to baked beans and soap powder. The initial range includes an office suite, two security/anti-virus products, a personal finance tool, CD/DVD burners, and a photo editing product. Microsoft Office sells for up to £300.

    The Tesco software will be available in more than 100 Tesco stores from this month, with plans to roll out the range across the UK over the coming year. It will complement Tesco’s entry into the computer hardware market earlier this year…

    Hmmm…. This may be less exciting than it appears. The software will be provided by an outfit called Formjet, a Cambridge-based organisation which “acquires territorial rights to ‘alternative’ software products, and markets, sells, distributes and supports these products in place of the vendor in the UK”. The office software Tesco will be selling is a suite written by Ability. It retails already in the UK for £29. So basically, this isn’t about Tesco getting into software, just about Tesco selling other people’s software, much as it sells other companies’ baked beans. Still, it’ll be interesting to see if the supermarket giant’s formidable marketing power can dent the MS Office monopoly in the UK.

    Dave’s Dilemma

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    The Conservative party is no longer riven with ideological division in the public way it once was, but the “mods” and “rockers” are still there, tooled up and ready to rumble. Indeed some suspect that the peace exists precisely because Cameron has steered clear of making tough ideological pronouncements.

    Amassed to the right of him there are those who have never forgiven the party for dumping Margaret Thatcher — a group that one moderniser calls “the head-banging Europhobic tax-cutters”. They want to see a flash of the old, a firm commitment to reducing taxes and an end to the “namby-pamby” politics of equal rights and work-life balance.

    On the other side are the “über-Cameroons”, metropolitan-based modernisers who want their leader to go further in burying his party’s unpopular past and set out a more principled compassionate agenda. They value social workers above tax cuts and cheered Cameron’s recent apology to Nelson Mandela on behalf of the party for having once branded him a terrorist.

    In short, there is a turf war going on for the soul of the Tory party and Cameron is caught in the middle of it. Until now he has made good mood music and given neither side anything substantial to get angry about. Now he is being asked to produce the beef.

    [Source]

    Brown vs Reid: the ‘people meter’ verdict

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    Frank Luntz is an American pollster who believes in ‘people meter’ research — where members of a focus group indicate — second by second — by moving a knob whether they’re approving or disapproving of a political speaker. He did some of this research for BBC2’s Newsnight last week and was roundly criticised for his pains. Here’s part of his response.

    In the past weeks a number of Labour-leaning columnists have laid out the case for why Gordon Brown should be the next leader of Labour. But what you never hear is why he will be the next elected prime minister.

    Interestingly, the voters in my session came out clearly in favour of John Reid, not Gordon Brown, as the next party leader. Polly Toynbee, writing in The Guardian last week, suggested dismissively that it was just because of the “hesitant” Brown response to a reporter’s questions about his role in the leadership coup and “the full-on harangue” Reid recently unleashed against the legal system.

    Actually, she’s correct — but she ignores the significance in her conclusion. You be the judge. Here’s exactly what Reid said that made the Labour-leaning voters sit up in their seats, nod their heads and cheer: “Any system which allows foreign prisoners back on our street without even considering deportation has something wrong with it — full stop. No qualifications. A court judgment that puts the human rights of foreign prisoners ahead of the right to safety of UK citizens is wrong — full stop. No qualifications. A Parole Board decision that emphasises the rights of a convicted murderer over the rights and safety of his potential victims is tragically, murderously wrong — full stop.”

    The “people meters” soared, and it was the single best-received language of the evening. To Toynbee that was a full-on harangue. But to Labour-leaners and floating voters it was good plain common sense. Could you imagine Brown speaking with such emotional clarity? Could you imagine Brown with such steely determination?

    I dislike Reid intensely. He is a typical ex-Communist thug who has simply done a 180-degree ideological shift. These guys never change their spots. But there is one silver lining in the cloud of a possible Reid leadership. Roy ‘Fat Boy’ Hattersley has declared that he will shoot himself if Reid becomes Labour’s leader.

    McCain shows Cameron the price of power

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    Insightful column by Andrew Sullivan on Dave Cameron’s new friend — and conference speaker — John McCain.

    Last weekend turned into a pivotal moment in his [McCain’s] career. For the past four years he has fought the Bush administration’s attempt to authorise interrogative abuse of military detainees. As a victim of torture himself McCain’s credentials for this fight were enormous. And, to his credit, his legislative efforts have indeed put a stop to the widespread abuse that has occurred in the regular military since the winter of 2001.

    But he wants to win the Republican nomination; and Karl Rove, Bush’s political guru, has decided that the only way to rescue the mid-term elections is to run on who can be tough enough on terror suspects. If McCain had refused to compromise over torture he would have essentially been destroying the Republican game plan for retaining Congress. So Bush called him out.

    The deal they struck was simple: Bush wouldn’t formally renege on Geneva and wouldn’t formally authorise waterboarding, hypothermia and other horrors.

    But he was given legislative leeway to decide what to do with terror suspects (including waterboarding and hypothermia) and had authority to train an elite squad of CIA “coercive interrogators” for the purpose. His civilian officials would also be given complete legal impunity for possible war crimes committed in the past.

    What did McCain get in return? Some cynics in Washington say the answer is simple: the nomination. And McCain has been doing his best to recruit many Bush loyalists. Did McCain sell his soul for power? That’s what his sharpest critics would say.

    […]

    The Tories will cheer him this week. He is certainly much more congenial to the party of David Cameron than Bush, Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld. But McCain is also a symbol, along with Bill Clinton, of how power is never without its costs. One day Cameron may have the opportunity to share their pain.