The Longest Now

¡Blogs.harvard is closing its doors for good!

Today is nominally the last day it will be editable, though it will stay up for archiving and export for another month. The WordPress dashboard lately has hadan expandable bar in the corner titled ‘Recent Updates’, but I’d never expanded it to see that it was local news about the platform, so this came as a surprise.

Checklist:

1)  ping people who still need to migrate
2)  draft final blog post, honoring the network

In the early days of blogging, Dave Winer was an energetic advocate of the form, as something important for writing and communication and not just another modern pastime.  He set up the first version of Blogs@Harvard while he was a Berkman fellow (a Manila instance hosted by the Berkman Center, at blogs.law.harvard.edu), and started blogging there as well as at Scripting News. It moved to WordPress in 2007. The community revisited it in 2011 to reaffirm the value in keeping it online. (JP, as the head of the center, warmly summarized the project history to date at that point)

Over the next decade, new blogs were only created by Harvard affiliates. In 2014, technical maintenance of the blogs moved to the Harvard Library’s Office for Scholarly Communication, and the domain changed to blogs.harvard.edu.  In 2018 its maintenance shifted to Harvard University Information Technology, and any old blogs run by authors who were not affiliates were closed [and taken offline, if they had not set up an archive]. This also affected a number of past affiliates who no longer had university or alum email addresses, including the pathbreaking info/law and j’s scratchpad, blog of the founding organizer of the Blogging Group.

Now the rest are being shut down.  While bloggers still at Harvard can migrate to the existing sites.harvard.edu, with a bit of effort, they are not being migrated by default, and most have not migrated.  Those without new posts in the past year were not notified of the change.  This also affects people like Doc Searls, a long-time pillar of free software and the open web who we’ve been lucky to have in the local eddy, whose active projects live on nearby.

There are plans for a full archive to be preserved; let’s make it one befitting this decentralized community, which has hosted many students and practitioners of digital creation and archiving.  Going through the archiving process myself reminds me of the [extraordinary, wonderful]  service of the Wayback Machine, which may also let us restore former blogs currently hidden behind its veil.

Checklist:

3)  Salvage old drafts
4)  Make a proper export

It is a curious sensation to revisit my old tempo of posting by seeing the proportionate tempo of unpublished drafts; some quite good and close to completion, but written in a week or month when many other works were going out.  These days I would publish a good three-section post without hesitation.  Most drafts removed or published; new “unfinished draft” category added.

I am also reminded that fully half of the links from over 5 years ago are no longer online; other websites having a much shorter time-to-linkrot than this blog family.  Again, Wayback is not only a default salvation but one of the only options; if it disappeared, readers, researchers, and historians would be entirely out of luck (short of bring up one of the Wayback mirrors).  If you are in a position to host a full mirror (currently around 100PB), please get in touch with the archiveteam or the Internet Archive.

Exports should be easy, though mine is not small.  Preserving the directory structure on import requires a target style that uses the same schema for dated posts.  Alternately, I could scrape the entire site into a .wacz file and restore its public appearance exactly as it stands today, then move to a different format for a future blog.  I’d like something more collaborative by nature; easy to have a cohort working together.  I have hopes that Tana could be turned towards this end, as shared writing is naturally a more social activity than just linking to one another’s blogs (and even here some of the best outlier blogs here have been multi-author, during times when many were active together)

https://blogs.harvard.edu/project-info/

The Kostoff knowledge ^_v.14

^{Updates: Elsevier retraction (5/9), concern (12/17). EIC Tsatsakis removed. (~3/25).
Analyses by Schneider (10/6) & Morris (10/14). Kostoff’s article is top 1% by Altmetric.
K. publishes 3× more extreme version (10/13). Tox.Rep’s CiteScore grows 5% in Oct.
15 of Kostoff’s last 18 papers written w. Tsatsakis, the other 3 in Tsatsakis journals.}

Earlier this month, Elsevier‘s Toxicology Reports ^{(CiteScore 6.4, top quintile)} published a special issue on the COVID-19 pandemic.  Its includes a remarkable article by Kostoff, et al., claiming that getting a COVID-19 vaccine is, “extremely conservatively“, 5x as likely to kill people over 65 as it is to save them, and even more harmful to younger people. ^{(Kostoff, et al., Tox. Rep. (2020), 7, 1448-1458)}

This echoes the fraudulent claims of German homeopath Harald Walach, who briefly published a similar article in MDPI Vaccines in June, before it was promptly retracted.  A few of the most outrageous claims are listed below. None of this is subtle – unbelievable assertions start in the second paragraph of the abstract; the lead author has no past experience in the field; and the article puts “pandemic” and “vaccine” in scare quotes, and makes regular use of bold italics to emphasize points that are exaggerated.

This is why we have peer review, and editors, to distinguish research from polemic. Access to a reliable + competent body of reviewers is, in theory, a primary service that giant publishers like Elsevier offer to editors. Another is their name: being an Elsevier journal means you will be taken seriously out of the gate, and added to the major indices.

We should all be concerned that our publishing model allowed such a deceptive essay to be given the veneer of legitimacy – for weeks now, without correction.  And we must hold both journals and publishers accountable for fraud that they support or legitimize – through deceptive practice, lack of claimed review, or inaction.

I want to come back to this, and discuss ways to remedy this, and some current steps in the right direction.  But first let’s look at this instance in detail – as the errors were the most obvious that I’ve seen, related papers have been retracted in recent months, and it is impossible to imagine even casual peer review missing them.  And because, as we will see, this particular Elsevier journal has been gaming the system for some time.

Article-level fraud (by the authors)

1. Extensive misuse of VAERS data: VAERS is an open public registry of unvetted self-reports of health events occurring after vaccination. Most events are not caused by vaccines, but this is a starting point for further analysis. Doctors are supposed to report any deaths or hospitalizations occurring within a week of vaccination, regardless of potential causal link.

The very openness of this data has led to it being widely cited in anti-vax propaganda, misinterpreting VAERS as a catalog of known harms and side-effects. ^{(“Don’t Fall for VAERS scares“)}

(more…)

Part 2 in a series.  (See also Part 1: The Great Dot Org Heist.)
Updates: Moz letter, El Reg, registry agreement, ISOC forum + letter, Wyden

Ethos Capital seems on track to complete their takeover of .org early next year.  ICANN claims it is powerless to stop the acquisition. ISOC president Andrew Sullivan suggested nothing but a court order would make ISOC change their minds. (If the sale concerns you, you can write to the Virginia state DA, who has to approve the sale via the Orphans Court.)

There are still many unanswered questions. Sullivan’s presentation of the offer to the ISOC Board highlighted a need for speed and secrecy. Details were redacted from the board minutes, and have been released grudgingly. Only last Friday did the price of the acquisition ($1.1B) finally emerge, which ISOC insists is a good price (or was before the price caps were lifted), but which most consider well below the market value of .org. (For reference, here’s PIR’s 990 and annual report:  $90M revenue, $60M gross margin, 77% renewal rate).

Sullivan shared some conflicting thoughts in an interview with The Register: he thinks not many people care about the sale; public pushback has been strong; the sale would not have happened if there had been public discussion.

Mozilla has compiled Questions about .org into a public letter, asking both ISOC and ICANN to answer them before concluding this sale.

Measuring the worth of a legacy registry

While there is a range of estimates out there for the true value of .org, the sale price is on the low end under conservative assumptions.  (more…)

Generalizing a Foucault comment from 1970 on accepted shared knowledge, truth, and power:

The system of [assigning value to statements] is essential to the structure and functioning of our society.  There is a constant battle around this – the ensemble of rules according to which [valued and devalued statements] are separated and specific effects of power are attached to the former.  This is a battle about the status of truth and the practical and political role it plays. It is necessary to think of these political problems not in terms of science and ideology, but in terms of accepted knowledge and power.

Here are a few propositions, to be further tested and evaluated:

1. Let τ be a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, [evaluation], and operation of statements.  A system linked in a circular way with systems of power that produce and sustain it, and with the effects of power which it induces and which extend it.  A regime of systems.  Such a regime is not merely ideological or superstructural; its [early stage] was a condition of the formation and development of its environment.
2. The essential [social, political] problem for designers and maintainers of τ is not to criticize its ideology or [relation] to science, or to ensure a particular scientific practice is [correct], but to ascertain how to constitute new politics of knowledge. The problem is not changing people’s beliefs, but the political, practical, institutional regime of producing and evaluating statements about the world.
3. This is not a matter of emancipating τ from systems of power (which would be an illusion, for it is already power) but of detaching its power from the forms of hegemony [social, economic, cultural], within which it operated [when it was designed].
4. These [political, social, economic, cultural, semantic] questions are not error, illusion, ideology, or distraction: they illuminate truth itself.

I have been thinking about this in the context of recent work with the Knowledge Futures Group and the Truth & Trust coalition gathered around TED.

^{(from an interview with Foucault first published in L’Arc 70.)}

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.

The Web is highly distributed and in flux; the people using it, even moreso.  Many projects exist to optimize its use, including:

1. Reducing storage and bandwidth:  compressing parts of the web; deduplicating files that exist in many places, replacing many with pointers to a single copy of the file [Many browsers & servers, *Box]
2. Reducing latency and long-distance bandwidth:  caching popular parts of the web locally around the world [CDNs, clouds, &c]
3. Increasing robustness & permanence of links: caching linked pages (with timestamps or snapshots, for dynamic pages) [Memento, Wayback Machine, perma, amber]
4. Increasing interoperability of naming schemes for describing or pointing to things on the Web, so that it’s easier to cluster similar things and find copies or versions of them [HvdS’s 15-year overview of advancing interop]

This week I was thinking about the 3rd point. What would a comprehensively backed-up Web of links look like?  How resilient can we make references to all of the failure modes we’ve seen and imagined?  Some threads for a map:

1. Links should include timestamps, important ones should request archival permalinks.
   • When creating a reference, sites should notify each of the major cache-networks, asking them to store a copy.
   • Robust links can embed information about where to find a cache in the a tag that generates the link (and possibly a fuzzy content hash?).
   • Permalinks can use an identifier system that allows searching for the page across any of the nodes of the local network, and across the different cache-networks. (Browsers can know how to attempt to find a copy.)
2. Sites should have a coat of amber: a local cached snapshot of anything linked from that site, stored on their host or a nearby supernode.  So as long as that site is available, snapshots of what it links to are, too.
   • We can comprehensively track whether sites have signalled they have an amber layer.  If a site isn’t yet caching what they link to, readers can encourage them to do so or connect them to a supernode.
   • Libraries should host amber supernodes: caches for sites that can’t host those snapshots on their host machine.
3. Snapshots of entire websites should be archived regularly
   • Both public snapshots for search engines and private ones for long-term archives.
4. A global network of mirrors (a la [C]LOCKSS) should maintain copies of permalink and snapshot databases
   • Consortia of libraries, archives, and publishers should commit to a broad geographic distribution of mirrors.
     • mirrors should be available within any country that has expensive interconnects with the rest of the world;
     • prioritization should lead to a kernel of the cached web that is stored in ‘seed bank‘ style archives, in the most secure vaults and other venues
5. There should be a clear way to scan for fuzzy matches for a broken link. Especially handy for anyone updating a large archive of broken links.
   • Is the base directory there? Is the base URL known to have moved?
   • Are distant-timestamped versions of the file available?  [some robustlink implementations do this already]
   • Are there exact matches elsewhere in the web for a [rare] filename?  Can you find other documents with the same content hash? [if a hash was included in the link]
   • Are there known ways to contact the original owner of the file/directory/site?

Related questions: What other aspects of robustness need consideration? How are people making progress at each layer?  What more is needed to have a mesh of archived links at every scale? For instance, WordPress supports a chunk of the Web; top CDNs cache more than that. What other players can make this happen?  What is needed for them to support this?

Help continue projects Aaron believed in, in person or online.
I’ll be at the Cambridge event and aftermath throughout the long weekend.

• Aaron Swartz Hackathon (site and shared IRC)
• Hackpad with related notes and coordination
• Project summary  and SF hacking:  Repeal the CFAA and more

• EFF overview of related projects
• GWOB announcement

140 characters, just like mom’s.

The sunset was pretty
in Cambridge. The ember
of Sun cast the city
in hues to remember.

When I tried to draw Rindge
and Latin, ’twas orange.

Anno-notes.  (thanks, piratepad)

From the “too good to be true (but it is)” dept: OneWeirdKernelTrick.com

↬ YanZhu

Read the Big Data and the Topologist series, from the “low-dimensional topology” blog, written by 5+ budding topologicians.

They maintain a handy list of open problems they have discussed.
↬Michael Stone.

96 days of altered consciousness and recovering from a psychotic break. Told with humor and self-awareness, in an epic 18-part tale.

Let’s say that every time I see a yellow car, you actually see what I would call a green dragon, and we’ve just adapted to different driving styles… Now let’s assume we both see an object descended from the Model-T, and not the offspring of a bat fucking an iguana in a wood stove.* Except now I’m secretly attaching the symbol of car to dragon.

* I say natural selection demands that if you did this enough times, something would survive, and I bet that something would be a dragon. If there are any crazy people reading this right now, you have your mission.

try and grok science
try and make a gun
try Sheldrake’s homing dove thought experiments

For dessert, some fraud:
listed, retracted, pharmed, 11-jigen (x6),
chilled(snapshot, comments).

Larry’s foresight to clear schedules seems fair, from that inverted space.

Mystery Hunt 2013 pitted teams against Enigma Valley to rescue the Hunt coins from a vault.

As usual, it was full of some of the best puzzle ideas in the world.   (more…)

As a former sysadmin at MIT, I was very curious about this case and eager for the facts to come out, and I guess they can, but not like this. Definitely not like this. I also had the job of chasing intruders out of a segment of MIT’s network (fairly light duty, actually), and having been there I will state the following publicly, because I am pissed off today. Seriously pissed off.

These over the top prosecution of nuisance intrusions makes sysadmins like me highly reluctant to initiate communication with the feds. The threat of criminal prosecution was enough to make Mr. Swartz back off from his actions. That’s why MIT and JSTOR backed off. Someone at DOJ decided to keep going, and he just made life harder for federal investigators in countless other cases, who will not be getting that first phone call from a sysadmin.

When an intruder is on my network, before I call the authorities, I want to know that the authorities will exercise judgement and prosecute accordingly. If he’s a criminal trying to use my resources for crimes, that’s one thing. If he’s a kid or a kook being a nuisance, then the authorities have a duty to exercise precisely enough muscle to scare him off my network and call it a day. If I have reason to think that the authorities will throw the book at a someone who is a mild nuisance, then I won’t make the phone call. I will investigate the intrusiion myself, kick him off myself, and keep my fucking mouth shut. These prosecutions are a waste of money, and today one of them became a waste of a life.

This just went out by email, from MIT President Reif, who was inaugurated president in September:

To the members of the MIT community:

Yesterday we received the shocking and terrible news that on Friday in New York, Aaron Swartz, a gifted young man well known and admired by many in the MIT community, took his own life. With this tragedy, his family and his friends suffered an inexpressible loss, and we offer our most profound condolences. Even for those of us who did not know Aaron, the trail of his brief life shines with his brilliant creativity and idealism.

Although Aaron had no formal affiliation with MIT, I am writing to you now because he was beloved by many members of our community and because MIT played a role in the legal struggles that began for him in 2011.

I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many. It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.

I will not attempt to summarize here the complex events of the past two years. Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT. I have asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it.

I hope we will all reach out to those members of our community we know who may have been affected by Aaron’s death. As always, MIT Medical is available to provide expert counseling, but there is no substitute for personal understanding and support.

With sorrow and deep sympathy,

L. Rafael Reif