Right to the City maintains a Homes for All campaign that has done some excellent research into city housing crises across the US. My favorite report from their network is this catalog of alternative models and their uses, which has gotten hard to find online:
People-driven alternatives to an unjust housing system (2018) (local copy)
And a second catalog of tales, with fewer interconnections : Valène’s incomplete catalog of 179 stories from the Fifty-First chapter of Life, A User’s Manual, a life-work of Perec, poetic puzzlemaker and one of the great writers of the 20th century, lovingly translated into English by the meticulous David Bellos :
1 The Coronation at Covadonga of Alkhamah's victor, Don Pelage
2 The Russian singer and Schönberg living in Holland as exiles
3 The deaf cat on the top floor with one blue & one yellow eye
4 Barrels of sand being filled by order of the fumbling cretin
5 The miserly old woman marking all her expenses in a notebook
6 The puzzlemaker's backgammon game giving him his bad tempers (more…)
Updated for the new year: with specific things we can all start doing 🙂
Wikipedia currently tracks and stores almost no data about its readers and editors. This persistently foils researchers and analysts inside the WMF and its projects; and is largely unnecessary.
Not tracked last I checked: sessions, clicks, where on a page readers spend their time, time spent on page or site, returning users. There is a small exception: data that can fingerprint a user’s use of the site is stored for a limited time, made visible only to developers and checkusers, in order to combat sockpuppets and spam.
This is all done in the spirit of preserving privacy: not gathering data that could be used by third parties to harm contributors or readers for reading or writing information that some nation or other powerful group might want to suppress. That is an essential concern, and Wikimedia’s commitment to privacy and pseudonymity is wonderful and needed.
However, the data we need to improve the site and understand how it is used in aggregate doesn’t require storing personally identifiable data that can be meaningfully used to target editors in specific. Rather than throwing out data that we worry would expose users to risk, we should be fuzzing and hashing it to preserve the aggregates we care about. Browser fingerprints, including the username or IP, can be hashed; timestamps and anything that could be interpreted as geolocation can have noise added to them.
We could then know things such as, for instance:
These are just rough descriptions — great care must be taken to vet each aggregate for preserving privacy. but this is a known practice that we could do with expert attention..
What keeps us from doing this today? Some aspects of this are surely discussed in places, but is hard to find. Past discussions I recall were brought to an early end by [devs worrying about legal] or [legal worrying about what is technically possible].
Discussion of obstacles and negative-space is generally harder to find on wikis than discussion of works-in-progress and responses to them: a result of a noun-based document system that requires discussions to be attached to a clearly-named topic!
What we can do, both researchers and data fiduciaries:
Without this we remain in the dark —- and, like libraries who have found patrons leaving their privacy-preserving (but less helpful) environs for data-hoarding (and very handy) book-explorers, we remain vulnerable to disuse.
Stanislaw Lem‘s Cyberiad is a miracle of 20th century literature, and of translation. I want to preserve parts of two stories here in as many languages as I can find. Sources wanted for both, if you have a copy in your language:
Footprints in a self-similar river. The occasional passing act of will that remains and is amplified downstream, so that at some future moment, perhaps fording at another spot altogether, you discover a print announcing to you alone that you have been there before.
A decade ago, I once spent too long creating a stylesheet for a tiny “how-to” template: the numbers in boxes laying out a three-step process, whether to switch fonts, bold, padding, background and border colors. Making the css just right to work on screens of all sizes.
It looked something like this. >>
In fact, almost exactly like that. Some things worked, some didn’t. I tried to add padding to the left of the roman numerals, tried to remove the pixel of whitespace above the bordered boxes, without success. Should the roman numerals be left-aligned but the boxed text centered? Since then, scores of similar templates have copied and remixed it, changing text and context but not style. The color palette I settled on, almost content with it, shows up on hundreds of pages. It would now take a script and many hours to find and tweak each instance of the design.
I run across one myself every few months, and experience river-shock: the sense of seeing something simple you did once that has a quiet, pervasive mark that cannot be undone. This is quite different from the sense of pride or dismay that comes from seeing the expected result of a major endeavor: a book in someone’s hands, a clinic building in use or in disrepair, a student now teaching others.
Another memory: One week I set about compiling a collection for a museum, a complete series of parts, diagrams and XO laptops: a few boxes full. I had sent background context by mail, but at the last minute took a fine-tipped sharpie and attached clarifying notes to post-its on each cluster.
Years later, visiting the museum with a friend, I ran across the display as part of a history of computing; the electronics beautifully preserved as I had hoped, as I saw with pride. And – river shock – a handful of my post-its, with small diagrams and 8pt-font notes to the curator, exactly where I had placed them. Anyone with access to the materials could have chosen one of each and put them in a box; my handwriting made it seem like my own workdesk, enclosed in perspex and on display.
On occasion a visitor will find one of the historical texts I’ve preserved against linkrot and plagiarism, like the acquiantance checking up on the man trapped in Charles de Gaulle airport, or a friend running across their favorite college essay or spellpoem, and I have a shadow of that frisson. A passing fancy, created to be found anonymously by others, appearing at least once more in the endless river of daily life.
January is gray, and this now is the Ur-Jan, but today for a change was bright. Thanks to the snain, red lettering, h’rissa and light.
And to you, dear Reader, for truth, presence, and ideas catalysed in telling – rarities that should be commonplaces. And for this box of potential thoughts about thoughts I will think Thursday.
I still have so many things to ask: what you know of supersimultaneity, quantified serendipity, if you feel a cool thrill in the small of your back when a crux or potentiality approaches, foreshadowing and afterimages. Sometimes I wake with the certainty I must pursue such things with all who might answer, before my pulse cools and I file it away as dream residue for review. Next time.
Today drew out instead improvements in preservation and propagation: idiogenics, cryogenic Seed Vaults and Culture Vaults, a vicariant Greenland. Advances in meme propagation as a critical piece of biological development, including RNA and human speech, but countless other innovations besides. Revisited a recurring dream of a summer camp (memezoo!) for animals who have learned to communicate with humans, to demonstrate relevant universalities. These prodigies & their humans could spend time with the most precocious of their own species, sharing their newfound memetics, solving puzzles together, creating cross-species pidgins and developing contextual slang, to see what emerges // a place where Batyr and Kosik could have met, and Kanzi could build language bridges with more than just his step-sister.
And what is Earth herself but a planet methodically coated by a memetic zoo? Once we have a more balanced sense of non-human memetics, we may be able to see our own more clearly, in both historical and current context.
Then Tech Sølidarity met in a converted warehouse, 150 people totally focused on the moment, technologists listening and thinking for over an hour. At most a handful of computers out, checking data or taking notes for the room. But the same narrow cross-section as before, 80% men, 90% white.
We agended aligning national efforts towards: visualizing data for local politics, streamlining calls to city pols; visualizing gerrymandering & voter disempowerment; securing voting machines; coordinating and sustaining responses to alt-facts (like the Guardian’s dangerously wrong WhatsApp bashing); listing things tech design decisions have broken & proposing fixes; devising mottos for technologists (Protect the Vulnerable?); building toolkits for curators and reviewers to ward off vandals and trolls. And finally, looking for interfaith groups holding similar gatherings of religious leaders, with which we might cross-pollinate.
I worked with the group gathering voting-machine tech & policy wonks who could provide checklists and advice that we could adopt and share with city councils and mayors. We glissed an arpeggio of steps from procurement & policy to auditing & security, which could each be adopted by someone. Only pranksters whispered about blockchain, but agreed we needed a tacky sign to raise whenever the word came up. Next time.
They too agreed not to wait too long before the next, and to endeavour|fail|evolve rather than simply passing on the meme.
Recently, statistician Andrew Gelman has been brilliantly breaking down the transformation of psychology (and social psych in particular) through its adoption of and creative use of statistical methods, leading to an improved understanding of how statistics can be abused in any field, and of how empirical observations can be [unwittingly and unintentionally] flawed. This led to the concept of p-hacking and other methodological fallacies which can be observed in careless uses of statistics throughout scientific and public analyses. And, as these new tools were used to better understand psychology and improve its methods, existing paradigms and accepted truths have been rapidly changed over the past 5 years. This shocks and anguishes researchers who are true believers in”hypotheses vague enough to support any evidence thrown at them“, and have built careers around work supporting those hypotheses.
Here is Gelman’s timeline of transformations in psychology and in statistics, from Paul Meehl’s argument in the 1960s that results in experimental psych may have no predictive power, to PubPeer, Brian Nosek’s reprodicibility project, and the current sense that “the emperor has no clothes”.
Here is a beautiful discussion a week later, from Gelman, about how researchers respond to statistical errors or other disproofs of part of their work. In particular, how co-authors handle such new discoveries, either together or separately.
At the end, one of its examples turns up a striking example of someone taking these sorts of discoveries and updates to their work seriously: Dana Carney‘s public CV includes inline notes next to each paper wherever significant methodological or statistical concerns were raised, or significant replications failed.
Carney makes an appearance in his examples because of her most controversially popular research, with Cuddy an Yap, on power posing. A non-obvious result (that holding certain open physical poses leads to feeling and acting more powerfully) became extremely popular in the popular media, and has generated a small following of dozens of related extensions and replication studies — which starting in 2015 started to be done with large samples and at high power, at which point the effects disappeared. Interest within social psychology in the phenomenon, as an outlier of “a popular but possibly imaginary effect”, is so great that the journal Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology has an entire issue devoted to power posing coming out this Fall.
Perhaps motivated by Gelman’s blog post, perhaps by knowledge of the results that will be coming out in this dedicated journal issue [which she suggests are negative], she put out a full two-page summary of her changing views on her own work over time, from conceiving of the experiment, to running it with the funds and time available, to now deciding there was no meaningful effect. My hat is off to her. We need this sort of relationship to data, analysis, and error to make sense of the world. But it is a pity that she had to publish such a letter alone, and that her co-authors didn’t feel they could sign onto it.
Update: Nosek also wrote a lovely paper in 2012 on Restructuring incentives to promote truth over publishability [with input from the estimable Victoria Stodden] that describes many points at which researchers have incentives to stop research and publish preliminary results as soon as they have something they could convince a journal to accept.
In Snow Use’s kitchen there stood a large stove,
And what she cooked on it she cooked with much love.
She used chunks of chocolate, melted in steam,
And sugar and egg-whites and oodles of cream.
(And, for effect, an occasional scream!)
She stirred it and mashed itinto a thick paste,
And added some cognac to give it more taste.
(As to the calories: they went to waist)
She poured the concoction into a strange mold;
Then into the freezer until it got cold.
(With a note saying: Please do not spindle or fold)
And when it was frozen so-o-o pleased was Snow Use,
For she had made Thidwick, the chocolate mousse
Bruce recently recommended an essay on the historical public voice of women, by noted classicist Mary Beard.
Beard is a fine and provocative writer; it is good rhetoric.
But I don’t think it gives much insight into historical causes, or ways we can bring about change. Women face deeply gendered and hateful criticism today, particularly online. The argument that this is due to Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions, or the Western literary canon, is unconvincing. I see selection bias in Beard’s examples.
I would love to see a version of this essay that gets nuances right, and tries to explain changes in the past century based on its arguments.
Left out:
+ The complexity of women’s voice in Rome, from Fulvia and Livia to Irene of Athens;
+ Greek admiration of Gorgo, Roman admiration of Zenobia;
+ Conflicting views of leaders in adjacent cultures (Boudica, Cleopatra, Dido);
+ The Old Testament (Deborah and Esther ?)
Misused for effect:
– Ovid: No metamorphs of any gender could speak; Io for one was changed back.
– Fulvia: First by describing her as someone’s wife, though she was one of the most powerful figures in Rome; then by framing her hatred of Cicero as a matter of gender.
On a tangent: Two speeches I love, to lift the spirits. (Both American; I know less oratory from the rest of the world. Suggestions welcome!):
Frances Wright on global patriotism and change:
# Independence Day speech at New Harmony (1828)
Margaret Chase Smith on an issue too great to be obscured by eloquence, thankfully no longer a concern today:
# Declaration of Conscience (1950)
XBRB – stories from the Singularity.
A Blue/Red/Brown production.
Here is a gallery of great pope memes celebrating the awesomeness emanating from Catholicism’s new Pope.
After a Pope who sometimes made one despair that global religious leaders could inspire perspective, this is a daily source of happiness.
misplaced ideas with corollaries, antonyms with alternatives, symmetry with simulacra.
and then I am back in the moment. recalling, lives ago, looking forward to this future, married to my (smart, lovely, mad) sweetheart. perennially fighting over homes and children and unmeant slights and trivia.
I chose otherwards, nor ever doubted that, though it would have been sane and not wrong. now she has colonies of frozen fertilized embryos waiting for the next wave; you have families to love and sweat and curse and laugh about; I have corollaries yet beginning. different paths are necessarily incommensurable; and to the extent they can be directly compared, they all come out to the same possibilities in the end. never demean where you are; find the joints and levers at hand and use them with confidence and joy.
Help continue projects Aaron believed in, in person or online.
I’ll be at the Cambridge event and aftermath throughout the long weekend.
En Puerto Varas, para ser precisos. Un articulo por Sebastian. ᔥmadre.
“Hay paisajes extraordinarios, pienso, y luego este. Esos campos y poblados guardan un centenario orgullo que emociona.”
Wikipedia The Movie, a wiki-amusement started by Mark Pellegrini during the Chrome Age of Wikipedia, is hard to describe, and not exactly what you might expect. It is a surreal cataclysm of in-jokes pretzled together into a tilable shape. Its pieces have been polished by those who appreciate it: editors with a sense of humor, reflecting on a larger community whose relationship with humor is more nuanced. In short Dalí-scented scenes, and the language of cafeteria gossip, it captures something about the projects in a way that is honest to the madness of humanity. Enough to make any committed editor wince/smile. It makes me wonder what a similarly frank slice of subtext would look like for other large-scale projects.
While I remember the original being written – not called ‘Episode 1’ at the time – I only discovered last year that it had been turned into a franchise, slowly unfolding year after year. And I can’t complain that I was cast as my favorite Shakespearean fragranceur.
And then there is the musical version. For you who have shared the private hallucinations of those who breathe too deep of lemony Huggle vapour, give over a few minutes of your day to a stroll down memory’s phantasmagoria:
My power animal: Hildebrandt’s starling. Similar to some butterflies, these starlings are colored by the microscopic structure of its feathers, not pigment.
Putting peacocks (and the stray chalybaeus) to shame for 2,000,000 years.
HT: Gaia. via Wikimedia Commons. (this one is from Tanzania)
“A snub,” defined Lady Roosevelt, “is the effort of a person who feels superior to make someone else feel inferior. To do so, he has to find someone who can be made to feel inferior.”
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