The article linked above describes a series of papers on reverse causality.  They postulate that some natural aversion by the Universe to the presence of Higgs bosons has led to the continued failure of the Large Hadron Collider, the bankruptcy of the Superconducting SuperCollider project, and any other projects that might conceivably have produced a Higgs.  They use a quirky choice of mathematics and grammar; but the authors are no cranks.   They are Holger-Bech Nielsen, one of the early creators of string theory, and Masao Ninomiya, one of the editors of International Journal of Modern Physics A — certainly respected in the right context, though given a certain distance today.

Fascinating, and an excellent candidate for Not Even Wrong.   Of course readers of this blog recall that after another couple of setbacks, the LHC will discover Higgs particles on December 21, 2012 .

“I never need porn again, as I can just watch that video over and over and over” – Mattchew, from the comments

The Longest Now crystal ball says Matt will need something else to watch soon, once such designs become bog-standard.  And we won’t be calling them ‘touchscreens’ soon… because why would you use a non-responsive display?

A fun quote:

So, a key question is, “Is each annual 100 million–strong cohort emerging from completion of basic education adequately equipped for its lifelong participation in the relevant society, polity, and economy?” The answer is, “No one has the slightest idea.” Really. Not the slightest idea[...]

I wonder how RAND chooses the areas it tackles for long-term global planning.  How does one go about finding ‘documents like this’ (e.g., long-term plans for educational purpose) in a meaningful way?  Tony Pryor, call your office.

Here is a series, part of the Educational Technology Debate, on ebooks and affordable access to [preexisting] content, featuring Dick Rowe (Olé!)and Angus Scrimgeour. People still avoid talking about building new materials from scratch – the sort of work that a skillful teacher engages in every week – which is when another leap forward will begin. But they are keen on finding ways to let interactivity and creativity improve and annotate books and class materials.

Do we need a three-legged stool? Will it balance?*  What else is missing?

* I can see a whole new series of YouTube videos based on this hook… including everything from architecture to ontologies.

I have this bug, for databases and for books.  But I haven’t indulged it much — I have contributed sporadically to Wikisource, mainly tiny works in English and Nahuatl, but nothing significant.  The largest work I’ve gotten copyright release for, the Whole Earth Catalog, I haven’t managed to digitize.  So I am still an apprentice, and can not speak definitively about what it means to be a wikisourceror.  But I want to share a story about someone I met who clearly has this spirit, and has gotten his students to work together on wiki-style projects to make their classroom work available to the rest of the world.

Greg Crane is a Classicist.  He oversees a major digital classics project at Tufts, and works as scribe and researcher, poring over, transcribing, translating, cross-referencing, annotating and discussing Greek, Latin, and Arabic texts from antiquity.  Two months ago he organized a “Wikipedia portal workshop” with Maura Marx of the Open Knowledge Commons to discuss how to make the digital scans of public domain works, available through the Million Book Project, more useful to Wikipedia.  Mathias was invited to present, and I joined the discussion.

Greg makes some strong points about public collaboration on source materials being a natural extension of academic research — but one that hasn’t been realized through cramped private work areas and a narrow view of who should be able to participate in such work.  Despite this, undergraduate and graduate classics students have been doing detailed work for a long time, many of them wishing they could work on a ‘real’ project that would be reused, not just an assignment.  [The same could be said about most fields, I reckon.]

Combining this broad collection of apprentice scholars with broad tasks that seem difficult for any small group to accomplish is rewarding for everyone involved.  This isn’t “using people’s shirk-y time” for a productive end – it means providing a learning environment in which the work you do to practice your art is available and vaulable to others who might chip in.

I transcribed the day-long workshop.  Some good ideas and quotes came out of it – worth a browse, though it’s long.

Some of the ideas surfaced on the wikisource and openlibrary mailing lists in a recent thread (1, 2).

And Greg and Maura visited the Wikimedia offices earlier this week (I happened to be there later that day); I’ll be interested to see what comes of those conversations as well.

I recommend you start with Apocamon or Dicebox, or even Delta  Thrives when it’s put up, for a quick immersion in color and art.  But my favorites are  the Jain’s Death and the full Spiders series (only the third episode of which is currently online).

• Some things don’t date. Scatman John,  Unicorn v. Narwhal, flyguy
• Some are amazing anyway. Superparamagnetic music videos and Things that GROW among them
• And some need resurrection. like Patrick Farley’s amazing comics website of art and animation (and spiders)

Update: thanks to Avi for pointing out that Farley is rebooting his site at electricsheepcomix.com .

I am looking for other good descriptions of what it means to identify with similar global collaborative projects; not only in the world of free software and knowledge but also education, health, language, art, science, peace…  and would appreciate links to any gems.

Meanwhile, my friend Kat Walsh has not yet stood for re-election to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, though I hope she will!

Update: she did, and she was reelected for another term!  Congratulations

She is among the last of a certain breed of board members who have been strong advocates for community involvement in key decisions, and we could use more.  The current Wikimedia Foundation is strongly in support of openness even without nagging from the Board – for instance in framing the upcoming year-long strategic planning as a process to facilitate and crystalize plans from the many communities – but without active community trustees we might no longer be so lucky a few years from now.

My official statement, and throwback to an earlier era, after the jump.

Here is what I said in my brief statement, the blurb every candidate offers which is translated into dozens of languages before the election begins

Wikimedia should be a model for open, scalable organizations.

As a Board member, I would be a strong community voice, communicating regularly about the Board’s work, holding open meetings and soliciting public input. I support developing expertise within the community.

I would also

• fight for better support for translation and multilingual communication across Wikimedia, particularly for planning discussions
• represent the technical and practical needs of smaller projects
• encourage careful use of funds and goodwill, planning for long-term availability of the projects (with an endowment and core services)
• encourage delegating outreach & community development to chapters

About me: I am an editor, translator, steward, and public advocate for Wikipedia. I started the Meta translators network and the Wikimedia Quarto newsletter (in 5 languages) in 2004, and was secretary of the Special Projects Committee. I founded the Boston meetup group and helped run the first two Wikimanias, hosting Wikimania2006 in Boston.

Outside Wikimedia, for 3 years I have been director of content at One Laptop per Child, working on local partnerships for free content and offline distribution.

I greatly enjoyed Aaron Swartz’s regular blogging in 2006 about important ideas, and mean to follow his example for the coming weeks.

And Tim and the new Web Ecology Project (’researching the Internet so you don’t have to’) has their first whitepaper up on the subject — I look forward to more.

I just ran across a fabulous moonshot website via SJv’s photostream, however, that deserves immediate blogging.  In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, it is a multimedia site broadcasting a real-time reenactment of the launch, flight and landing.  Even the name of the site is a pleasure : we choose the moon.  They are currently in Stage 6, with almost 2 days to go before moon-landing.

Take a look!  It’s a fantastic site to share with teachers and children as well, since links to the primary sources are all neatly integrated with artist’s renderings of the elements involved.

How it might work:

• you write to wikisj@gmail .  It posts to the sjmail wiki : subject becomes title [or dab], metadata gets put in a wiki-template (or sem wiki form) .
• a mwiki extension adds a “reply” button at the top of main article namespace pages.  this appends the reply in its own section on the article page, and emails the result to the original sender and cc list [you get normal options of reply, reply-all, &c].
• the response email that senders receive looks like a normal email, with a footer saying “sent by user:hill  at <site url> via sjmail”
• senders who care can log into the sjmail site to set their preferences — they can opt to get aggregate updates rather than every email response, or just abbreviations of the response with a link to the full page.
• repliers can use the system to send a private email as well : it would note a reply was sent with timestamp somehow in the thread flow of the page but not show or store the contents.  Of course if you know the email address of the original correspondent (which wouldn’t be directly visible on the site, only stored internally), you can write them out of band.  But that’s true too if you see an email printed out or read it over my shoulder.
• wikilinks [between messages, to wp, &c] used in the reply gets converted to URLs when sent via email.

Thoughts?  Naturally this idea came from the success and scalability of user talk: pages, which are nothing but a simplified public messaging system where anyone can come and modify, wikify, or reply to my message to you.

If you’ve done gmail-to-site hacking and are interested in the project, let me know.

I’d like to see this expand to be a useful service, with individual namespaces for any number of people.  I can see the resulting body of correspondence being an interesting store of public knowledge; perhaps individual user namespaces matched to target email address ‘recipients’, RC by user, and a shared common namespace not unlike everything2 in feel — everything one might want to say about “getting around Boston” might be linked from [[getting around Boston]] in someone’s reply.

What do you think?  I’m also looking for better ideas for a name!

Publicly authored works, with public drafts showing the stages of development (appropriate for anything but creative art, where the illusion is part of the package, don’t you think?), would never be able to imply original research and fact-checking the way Chris Anderson can.

We disagreed about whether the truth of the importance of the matter was obvious.  As someone who still has no idea what the real fundamentals are, I don’t find this obvious.  Some clever scientists doubt the brinks.  Some dedicate their lives to explaining that this is the defining crisis of our times.  It offends me deeply as a scientist that the opinions of scientists fall strongly along political lines.  What the hell is wrong with our scientific community?

Jeremy and I noted that some very smart people are convinced that human contributions to climate change will change and effectively destroy life on Earth within short order.  They put their careers on the line with projections of environmental and economic catastrophe with low error bars within 30 years, and work to convince everyone, in science, art, media, policy, business, and planning, that this is the essential crisis of our time.  Others put their careers on the line insisting that there is no such crisis and everyone should stop wasting effort even investigating it.

Or do these zealots put their careers on the line?  It’s acceptable as a scientist to tilt at windmills, even drawing many others along with you, and then to end up having been wrong.  There are certainly scientists who are make a good living holding forth a minority theory, and I can’t think of any active mechanism to censure someone for mere ‘innocent’ deception and misguided analysis if they don’t stoop to plagiarism or data forgery.

I reckon our society hasn’t moved passed the stage where playground challenges and antics are acceptable discourse, and where shouting “Fire!” on the global stage evokes more than a raised eyebrow.  Scientific disciplines should be the first to change this.

It would be nice to live in a world in which this sort of ruckus signals real consensus and indicates a focused field-wide annealing of research and analysis which, neutrally and from specific perspectives, steadily refines our understanding of the fundamentals and possibilities involved.   Instead this seems to play out like almost any zeal-on-zeal controversy : people caught in their own emotional cycles, and professional and social circles, come up with bold ideas, become attached to them, get into edit wars and public fights, and come to represent caricatures of their own analyses on teevee.   There’s not much scientific purity and valor that makes it through that awkward human noise.

Some of this can be blamed on laziness on the part of fields themselves.   We have strong ethical or guild codes within academic disciplines, but in ways they could be stronger.  In mathematics, there is a compulsion to take unsolved problems very seriously.  If someone has a wild idea that they insist revolutionizes all of math, you can go to any card-carrying mathematician and get their take on a neutral assessment – or a pointer to someone who can offer the same.  It is hard to find yourself in the middle of a turf war, with Italians dismissing the French topologists’ wacky methods, or a group of set theorists attacking the credentials of a Quinian or hinting she is funded by the NSA (? who are the big corporate baddies in good math-conspiracy fiction?) to suit their ulterior motives.

The same is often true of physics and engineering – it’s hard to get people to put dogma ahead of making sure a result is strong, resiliant, and doesn’t fail.  But somehow I don’t see people taking environmental, energy, or medical scientific studies as seriously – there is a willingness to be sidetracked by entrepreneurial business ideas, political and economic overtones, and a desire for personal recognition.  There is less open research and more done behind closed doors or with conflicted funders.

Maybe this is inherent to the topics involved and the difficulty we now have in immediately testing hypotheses, but I think not.  We should be tackling climate analysis the way we tackle searching for supernovas and Higgs bosons : with coordinated global research efforts funded by dozens of interested groups, gathering billions and trillions of data points, and funding hundreds of the world’s best scientists to work together on what is recognized as a project of extraordinary public importance.

I love it — and I want it for every organization I care about.  Mad props to Vivek Kundra – whose quote about “having up to 30 days” to get used to the new system is priceless.

A bit of background.  The word disambiguation was not popular before the 50s.  It is used in quotes in a 1954 federal court case, expressly referencing the earlier work of the one philosopher and author who consciously used it for a specific purpose: Jeremy Bentham.  But who introduced it into the jargon of linguistics?  And to the original point, who introduced it to Wikipedia?

The word’s recent history touches on Rush, Nirvana, Invictus, Larry, and Magnus… and started with a page on Naming conventions/Disambiguating.  Details after the jump.

The dominance of today’s Internet makes the latter question easier in ways and harder in others.  We can track revisions of most Wikipedia pages, but the use of this term predates the creation of the new software to preserve all revisions,  in August 2001 — so some guesswork is required even there.   Certainly the Wikipedia usage was guided by the linguistic usage before it:  “word sense disambiguation” and disambiguation in semantic analysis were all the rage across linguistics in the 1990s, as the term had moved out of computational linguistics into the field’s mainstream.

Early uses of the term in the 50s are in the context of ‘disambiguation programs’ and ‘automatic word disambiguation’.   Then by 1960 comes Dwight Bolinger, using it boldly and provatively.  “understanding presupposes disambiguation.  Disambiguation presupposes the processes that make it possible”.    This was picked up by literary critics in France, and by other linguists such as Anthony oettinger writing about automatic translation.

Sometime around March 20, 2001, the issue of disambiguating Wikipedia articles comes up.  User:Invictus (NB: no userpages back then) creates the article [[RushBand]], following the earlier model of [[NirvanaBand]].   And who should respond with a philosophical note on the right way to disambiguate than Larry Sanger, starting the page Naming_conventions/Disambiguating .    Within eight months, Magnus Manske has written new code allowing the use of parentheses in article titles, and the use of the term ‘disambiguation’ to describe appending a parenthetical clarifier at the end of an article name, and pages listing similar titles, has taken off.

I have to say, I do like it better than the alternative name suggested for those lists : ‘jump pages’.  So a tip of the dab-hat to Larry, may this be only one of your lasting contributions to encyclopediana.

For following along with me for so long, here’s a special bonus : the original quotation from Bentham’s papers laying out the place of Disambiguation in the heirarchy of Exposition.  This is from George Bentham’s 1827 Outline of a New System of Logic, in which he reviews his uncle’s papers and a recent set of writings on logic by one Dr. Whately.

He diagrams the elder Bentham’s 12 modes of exposition (physical designation, translation, etymologization, definition, individuation, paraphrasis, archetypation, description, parallelism including antithesis, enumeration, exemplification, and illustration), and says:

If exposition be considered with respect to its immediate object, it may be divided into Onomatopoea, or the giving a new name to an idea, and into Exposition of existing words.

In following the same principle of division, exposition of existing words may be subdivided into the following operations:  —
1. Substitution of a new sense to the one in which a word has already been used, an operation resembling onomatopoea, but attended with much more practical inconvenience, excepting where the use of the word in its old sense be at once disadvantageous, and of rare occurrence.
2. Elucidation—where the object is to give clearness to an obscure term.
3. Disambiguation—where it is to fix the sense of an ambiguous term. This operation has been termed distinction by some Logicians, and erroneously reckoned as a species of division.
4. Ampliation—where it is to extend the sense of a term.
5. Restriction—where it is to restrict the sense of a term.

Extra special nostalgia bonus: note the link-preserving awesomeness buried in the first post to wikipedia-l : that link still works, through a dozen TLD, domain, software and naming changes.