I wish I had this comic in my pocket last summer. I spent some weeks at the University of Washington CS department working with Steve Tanimoto. (I mention Steve because he was an amazing host.)

I didn’t know many people in Seattle and so when a student at UW invited me to go hiking along with her husband and cousins, I was happy to make some new friends and take in some of the area’s extreme natural beauty. The hike was fun and everyone was pleasant. After we went to their favorite Taiwanese restaurant. They were all Taiwanese so we got the no-English menu with the scary dishes, which made me happy.

I was happy eating with my new friends until one said she didn’t like California. That’s where I grew up so I asked why. She asked if I had seen Idiocracy. “No, but my parents liked it and I like Mike Judge, especially King of the Hill.” “It’s so funny.” Something to the effect of how, because stupid people have more babies, eventually everyone will be stupid. I asked what that had to do with California. She explained that CA is filling up “Joses”. I hoped this was merely dark humor and pushed back. She persisted, though a year later I don’t remember many more details except that my attempts to disabuse her only made everyone uncomfortable. As their guest, I decided to drop it, but I couldn’t stop hearing the TMBG song, Your Racist Friend, echoing in my head.

What’s the best course of action there? Racism is not just offensive but dangerous. I didn’t want to react harshly because I didn’t want her to conveniently retract what she was saying. Better that racism be discussed openly so it can be examined and rationally disassembled. Right?

Later in the meal I offered her more water from the pitcher and she mentioned that she wouldn’t drink tap, only bottled water. Even water filters wouldn’t do. I explained that most bottled water is simply filtered in a factory but that made no dent. I figured at that point I was better off not trying.

UPDATE: Here’s some good advice. When you do respond, never claim the person is racist. That’s an argument you can’t win and they can dismiss. Explain how the thing they said was racist. That’s external to them. Jay Smooth says it smoother of course:

There’s a video on YouTube about thinking skeptically, the Baloney Detection Kit. It’s sponsored by the Richard Dawkins Foundation.

Many of the comments are about whether science is an alternate religion, but there’s also a theme of denying climate change. What I find notable, though not surprising, is that deniers are using the Spam button to censor the messages of people asserting climate change.

It’s worth bearing in mind the way that tools to protect collective norms (e.g. defeating spam, terrorism) can be used as tools against someone an individual simply disagrees with.

Wondermark » Archive » #471; In which Bill ends up paying Full Price.

I sympathize with this comic. The last time I sent in a rebate, it was declined. It went like this:

- We couldn’t process your claim because it lacked the original receipt.
- No, I sent the original.
- You’ll have to send the original paperwork.
- How can I? I already sent the original.
- Do you have proof?
- Well, I photocopied everything before I put it in the envelope.
- Okay, send us that and we’ll process it.
- Do you realize how insane that is?
- It may sound crazy to you sir, but you’re not here and I assure you it makes perfect sense.

Vick Timlee wants you to join Yaari!

Is Vick your friend?

Yes, Vick is my friend! No, Vick isn’t my friend.

Please respond or Vick may think you said no

Thanks,The Yaari Team

So, that’s a lie. Vick didn’t send me anything. He’s not waiting vulnerably for my attestation of our “friend”-ship.

What has happened is that he created an account on Yaari.com and they spammed everyone in his Gmail contacts. Further, they claimed that Vick sent these messages himself.

A nice blog post goes into this practice in more detail. The short of it is, stay away from Yaari.

I wonder when digital identity will become so pervasive as to transform our idea of the self à la psychology, the ego à la Buddhism and the soul à la Abrahamic religions.

Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.

“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you. I had a student who posted that she was downloading some Pearl Jam, and someone wrote on her wall, ‘Oh, right, ha-ha — I know you, and you’re not into that.’ ” She laughed. “You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”

Increasingly, who you are is what you’ve done.  Not just your idea of it, or anyone else’s idea, or the idea of a group, but the ever-growing corpus of data about the life you’re living.  Not only is there always more data about you but there are increasingly powerful and handy tools to analyze it.  This week Google added face recognition (not just detection, recognition) to Picasa Web.  There was a similar face detection web site in early 2006, but now it’s just another easy-to-use feature in a popular image management application.

I’m giving up hope that technology or policy will do anything to abate this torrent of data about us rushing out into the public eye.  Getting off the grid is not an option for most people, especially me.  I expect that it’s mostly culture that will adapt.  Knowing everything about everyone is how things were for thousands of years before the industrial age.  I appreciated the observation in the article that anonymity may just be a phase of the 20th century, like the automobile.  In tribes, everyone sees and hears everything, first or secondhand.  Some might say that it’s the same online today, except now there’s nowhere to escape too because the eyes are global.  From what I know of Native American tribes, you didn’t have anywhere to escape to either.  If you left your tribe, no other tribe would accept you.  Or at least others would always be suspicious of you.  Maybe in the future we’ll have identity asylums.  E.g. for people who’ve experienced psychological trauma or damage to their frontal cortex.  (e.g. by a tamping rod)

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t be vigilant about privacy.  Just that relationships will adapt.  It’s the political order that I’m really worried about.

I do delete stuff that I know I’ll never read again, like “bagels in the copy room” or automated reminders from RTM.

I think of the Inbox as another label and for me “in:inbox” means that it requires action. When the action is complete, I archive it. A reply in the conversation brings it back into the inbox to act on. I also have status labels “Waiting On” and “Some Day” to qualify the inbox messages.

I use the Quick Links feature in the Lab experiments settings tab to make new views on the inbox, like, “Research to process”. That’s “in:inbox label:Research”.

The Better Gmail extension for Firefox has a really great macro, f-Focus, which takes whatever your current view is and narrows it down to messages that are (in:inbox OR is:unread) AND !is:muted. i.e. ({in:inbox is:unread} !is:muted). I used to love that, but I use Mailplane now for Gmail on my Mac and it’s not extensible.

Since writing that e-mail this morning, Google released a beta of their new Chrome browser for Windows. I gotta say, it’s nice. The best part is it has a simple “Create application shortcuts…” function for any website that basically turns it into a desktop app. Mozilla has something similar with Prism but compared to Chrome it’s bloated and slow. I’ll probably stick with Fluid on my Mac, and I look forward Safari 4.0, which is supposed to have something similar. Hopefully Google will have ported Gears to work in Safari by then. Shouldn’t be hard since Chrome also uses WebKit.

While I was in Seattle I got a jury summons by mail here in Pittsburgh.  It’s my first summons in Pittsburgh.  I’ve been summoned before in other towns, but each time I’ve called the night before, my number didn’t come up.

Well this time it did. 

I got up all early and bused down to the City County Building.  That’s for civil trials.  The courthouse next door is for criminal trials.

It was a pleasant experience.  A nice lady named Angel guided us around and through the process.  Judge James was very charismatic and friendly.  I looked forward to participating.

But they needed a commitment of up to a few weeks.  And I have a journal article due in two weeks, not to mention 3 courses.  So they put me in the “have time conflicts” box and eventually brought me up to reschedule.  The lady had the calendars printed out for each area school.  I told her CMU and she referred to the row highlighting the end of the semester.  “October 13?”  “Did you say October?”  “Yes, that’s the end of your semester?”  “No, I think that’s the end of the minis.  Does it say ‘mini’?”  “Yeah…”  “Those are half-semester courses.  The semester ends in December.”  “I wish they’d all get their academic terminology in common.”

Then she said I could go.  “Could I have done this online?”  “Yes, sure.  Or by phone.”  So… if you have a commitment, call instead and save yourself the trip.  I would have called but I misunderstood the stated “one day / one trial” policy on the mailing.  I thought that meant I was in some pool for one-day trials and I figured today would be as good a day as any.

If I had known, I would have just gone online to postpone.  In the end though, it was an interesting experience.  I love seeing the full cross-section of the city.  Licensed voters and drivers, at least.  (The judge said they’re getting other sources of names too and intend to get everyone in.)  You don’t get to see full cross-sections much in Pittsburgh.  That’s something I still miss about the BART in the Bay Area, you’d see both crack heads and people on their way to the opera.  I got to rub elbows with a slice of Pittsburgh I don’t normally get to.  Though there was a CMU prof there I recognized.  I wonder if one CMU student and one CMU faculty there today do in fact reflect the local demographics?

But I am posting about something relevant to my summer traveling: the nuisance of changing timezones on your devices as you cross them. For me I had to change my Mac system timezone and my Google Calendar timezone. I even had to change it on my Blackberry, which was particularly annoying because it knows from the network what timezone it’s in, but that’s separate from the issue here. My Blackberry also has GPS and it’s able to tell Fire Eagle where it is. If Fire Eagle could just let other systems know what timezone that location is, they could update with my new timezone.

So I set out last night to try making that work. The challenges to surmount:

• Fire Eagle doesn’t output timezone info
• my Blackberry doesn’t update Fireeagle
• I don’t know how to write Mac (Cocoa) applications

Fortunately, these walls aren’t high.

I wrote to the Fire Eagle dev list and one of Yahoo’s developers, Seth Fitzsimmons, said he would update the system to output timezone info. Sweet.

I found the J2ME updater app by Simon King and got it to run on my Blackberry. Just downloaded the JAR to my Mac, went to Media on Blackberry and chose Receive by Bluetooth and sent it from the Mac. Then I could navigate to the file and install it. After setting up the OAuth (a little clunky) it’s running and updating Fire Eagle. (more details) And if you’re interested in making it better, it’s an open-source project, fireeagle-updater-midlet on Github. Sweet.

So now my location is updated automatically in Fire Eagle and soon applications can look up my timezone. So what software will read it and update my Mac’s timezone? I don’t know Cocoa or Objective-C to write a Mac native app. Fortunately, the timezone can be updated with a simple Mac system command. A different but equally simple command works on Linux. I do know Java and could write a cross-platform app that runs the appropriate command depending on the OS it’s running in.

I’ll wait until Fire Eagle is actually outputting the timezone info, but I wanted to document the above. Also, is anyone interested in collaborating on this application? I’d like to make it plugin oriented so different devices can be updated, e.g. Google Calendar.

Mail went missing recently in my apartment building and today I received my credit card statement with a balance transfer check charge for $2000 and another for $2500. I called Citibank to challenge the charges and they said no problem. No, I won’t be responsible for the charges, but I will have to:

• cut up my existing credit card
• wait for my new card in the mail
• fill out an enclose affidavit identifying which charges weren’t mine
• send it back
• contact everyone who charges my credit card automatically (phone company, etc.) to give them the new credit card information
• and in my particular case, wait 3 weeks for any of this to happen since I am relocated for the summer and they will only send to my permanent address

All in all, this isn’t horrible. But it could all have been avoided if Citibank didn’t send me those balance transfer checks. I never requested them. Every time I received them in my mail I would be frustrated that I now had the burden of disposing of them safely. I wish I had taken the time to tell them to never send them again. Now I have.

You might want to do the same. And if you feel strongly about it, contact the FTC and ask that credit card companies not be allowed to increase your risk of theft by sending you balance transfer checks without your consent.

UPDATE: When I called my company weeks later to confirm I would not be receiving checks, the agent said I had only been removed from the “promotions” mailing list. So I requested again to not receive checks. She said I would not anymore. I’ll see. Incidentally, they also call them “convenience checks”. They are indeed very convenient for thieves. I got another one in the mail today and it says in large bold lettering on the envelope: “Part check. Part credit card. Very convenient.” How more obviously exploitable could it be?

I’m in Seattle now and for the next six weeks. I’m working at University of Washington with Prof. Tanimoto, a great guy. Here’s my new address for you to send gifts and attestations of the void created by my physical absence from your life.

Turadg Aleahmad
608 21st Ave E
Seattle, WA 98112

I write this from Victrola café. They got some good coffee. The vibe is like a less hipster hyper version of Ritual Roasters in SF’s Mission District.

It hasn’t rained yet today, despite the forecast, so I hope it stays clear through the fireworks. Well, clear as in no water falling from the sky. It’s quite overcast. Apparently, that’s something Seattleans get used to, mostly by mainlining caffeine.

The CS department has its own espresso machine. Not one of those press-the-button rigs like in Wean, but a real professional barista style machine. And everyone knows how to operate it. I hope I don’t return to Pittsburgh a caffeine addict, but I fear that experimenting with shots and foaming will be too seductive to forgo.

Ciao for now.

my mosque photo

Originally uploaded by TfUnQ

My photo of a mosque in Esfahan made it into somebody’s blog post. Yay for Creative Commons.

Note, I don’t think Ahmadinejad is right about what the world needs.

UPDATE: I asked Ally how she found that web page and then I tried to find it myself. I did, along with this SFist page using one of my photos of Boogaloo’s. Fun!

Ally and I spent 10 days surrounding Mother’s Day in California. We flew into LAX and stayed with my sister. I got reacquainted with LA’s car culture. We ate sushi. Ally was surprised that the temperature was cool, contrary to the LA portrayed in the liberal media. We hit the LACMA and thoroughly enjoyed the Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement exhibit. Time on Ventura Beach. Mother’s Day festivities. It was so good to see my family. Renewal. Oh, and we ate at California Pizza Kitchen. How can it get more California than that?

We rode with Micah up the coast to San Francisco. I got reacquainted with BART. I love the intersection and flow of people. (I had a video link for BART too, but it turns out that it’s on Atlanta’s MARTA, which has the same car design.) The weather in Berkeley was gorgeous, even by Berkeley standards.

We seriously lucked out, as the gorgeousness maintained through our spontaneous camping trip on Angel Island. “spontaneous” as in the product of a serendipitious exchange in which Robert and his rad friends invited us to join them. “rad” both as in “radical politics” and “super fun to camp with”.

Well, I’m not going to try to recount the whole time there. I don’t have links for everything. And I’m not sure how comfortable my friends are with me shouting out to them in a blog. (Oh, though I know Ann Larie is down. We caught up over sushi and the conversation was just getting rolling when we had to part.) Suffice it to say that I was deeply glad to see the people I managed to and wish I had time to visit more. I’ll be back in California in not too long for my next dose. Natural beauty, mass transit, multiculturalism, the intense odor of garlic driving through Gilroy, etc.

I’ve been using FeedBurner’s Link Splicer to add into the feed a daily grab of my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia. I’ve been keeping those a while, and using the feed to share them with people who want to see the things I like to share.

Since Google Reader added sharing, and now notes, I find that I’m not using Ma.gnolia hardly at all anymore. For real bookmarks that endure, I’m using Foxmarks (which replaces Google Browser Sync because it works in Firefox 3). For timely sharing, that I used to use Ma.gnolia+Feedburner for, I’m using Google Reader.

If you want to see what I’m reading that I think is worth sharing, check out my Google Reader shared page. Better yet, load up Google Reader and add me as a Friend so my shared items will integrate into your other newsreading. While you’re at it, you can add the feed you’re reading, my personal about-me blog feed.

Cheers,
Turadg

I found comment #303 particularly interesting,

Tae, let that be a lesson: Blogs are not inert things that can be studied dispassionately! Sometimes they can bite back — jump right up at you through the screen.

And the meaning of sentences cannot be dissected by computer analysis.

I wonder if this will happen more as people gain awareness that they’re being analyzed.

[by way of Matthew Hurst]

Press Release from Friday
CMU noted it Friday and now has it in releases
On the blog of the CS department head
And just now I saw a write-up on Yahoo’s Messenger blog 

I am pleased to be a co-recipient of the Smiley Award.  Because of the history of the Smiley and the goal of the award to highlight "projects that are both useful and fun" I think it’s nicely fitting that the first recipients are from the Art School and the School of Computer Science. Of course, it is primarily an art project and thus Jennifer’s baby.

When Jennifer told me that One Cold Hand was winning the Smiley Award I was really happy, and glad to have been asked to help.  Back in November it just seemed like a cute idea and I thought it would be fun to handle the technical side of things.  Since then, it’s been a long interesting ride.

I remember our giddiness when it hit the New York Times, as an Associated Press article and the hockey stick we saw on Google Analytics.  And the subsequent waning of interest.  And then the occasional peaks as it hit the home page of a big news site in Hungary, or Italy, or Brazil.  I don’t remember them all. 

All along I was happy to see Jenn get her due recognition in the interviews with BBC radio, Pittsburgh television, NPR, CNN, etc.  It was her baby.  To extend a metaphor, I was the ob/gyn who helped bring it into the world.  People take pictures of the baby with the mom, not the ob/gyn.  She’s the one who nurtured it to greatness.

When I suggested she submit One Cold Hand for the Smiley Award, we thought it would be the project that won or lost.  Really, the project has required a battalion of volunteers collecting gloves from boxes and interning with Jenn in her studio.  Not to mention the countless people taking the time to pick up a glove and carry it to a box, based on a simple and statistically improbable hope that it be reunited with its mate.

So now that this Smiley Award press is bouncing around the internet, I wanted to publically (as if anyone reads this blog) thank Jenn and all the volunteers for the great experience I’ve had with the project.

Thanks.

Remember that white people are not poor people. White people are those with the privileges of computers and free time that they can spend it on a web site mocking them and providing ad revenue to the person generating generalizations of them.

Remember also that people “of color” (white people do not have a color—really they are so empty as to be translucent) do not exhibit the attributes above. Black people do not like coffee, Apple products, to study abroad, bicycles, or recycling. Black, yellow, red, brown, and purple people who do like any of the aforementioned things are not acting their color or being true to their cultures.

If you see a non-white person at Whole Foods, they are probably trying to be white.

p.s. white people also love the socially pacifying power of conspicuous irony

On bad scientific reporting and bad quantitative methods.

When I read about the MySpace private photos leak, I thought this could be the I Lusitania was waiting for. But the press has been pretty quiet, by what I’ve seen. Why aren’t people up in arms? Why aren’t they suing MySpace? Does MySpace have any liability at all?

These pictures are on hard drives around the world in a big BitTorrent cloud. They will never go away. Accessible face recognition is here. Riya has been doing it for years and startup Polar Rose is rolling out a web service next quarter. Someone with enough time to make a point could easily run all these photos through face recognition and start putting together some pieces. They could make a wiki or ESP Game app where volunteers name the people in the photos. In fact, since the photos are linked to MySpace account IDs, there’s a whole lot that can be found out with some simple data mining. Those users can delete their accounts, but those pictures will live on in the torrent, undeletable.

Boing Boing recently had a headline, “Database leaks are as immortal and toxic as nuclear spills — let’s start acting like it”. I think now that Chernobyl is a better, albeit slightly ragged, metaphor. When will the public confidence in our privacy infrastructure melt down? It looks like it may be happening in England with those DVDs of private records lost repeatedly in the post. (And the article quoted in BB was from The Guardian.)

The power of IT to destroy privacy been advancing rapidly. Yet over last 7 years while we should have been working to preserve it, we’ve been convinced not to, in order to be safe. Don’t believe it. Security is not at odds with privacy. Security requires privacy.

I go to my mailbox, and there is a note. The driver left their name, car make and year, their insurance company name and 800 number, and their own policy number. There are good people in the world.

And today Jack’s Towing came to tow it to Progressive’s repair facility. I don’t know if I got to speak with the Jack, but what a jolly Pittsburghy guy. And while I was standing next to the tow truck, hearing Jack’s story about a power tripping officer at the impound, a car pulled up with the window down.

“Is that your car?” “yeah, it got hit” “I saw her hit it! She was gonna write a note and I told her to call 911. What if that note fell off?” “Wow thanks! yeah, someone put it in my mailbox for me” “yeah I told her to call someone. what if it had fallen off!”

So I salut the good people of Pittsburgh.