Archive for August, 2004

Somebody in the physical world told be about Carnegie Mellons ESP Game. (I know it was a physical person because I found the url on a piece of paper on my desk — I’m not sure who though, if it was you, speak up in the comments below.) It’s fun itself, and also relevant to a new meme that’s been floating about lately: “bottom-up social classification”.

In the same week as I was tipped to the ESP Game, I attended a brownbag lunch at work discussing meta data, primarily as it applies to photos. Of note was the “community classification” offered by the photo service Flickr. Obviously, classification and meta data are crucial as the amount of information continues to skyrocket.

How to do it is much more difficult than identifying the need.

This “bottom-up social classification” idea has been generating a bunch of conversation lately, nicely summarized by Gene. This concept has been coined a folksonomy by Thomas.

You can read more about Folksonomy in thoughtful posts by Victor, Jess, Stewart and Alex.

So, the ESP Game is pretty similar, which is why I’ve combined these posts. The ESP Game is a Java-based game that facilitates two people viewing a single image at the same time. You can read about how to play, but basically two people are looking at the same image. They both type labels describing the picture. When they’ve both identified the same label, a match is declared and both players earn points. The points are the reward to the humans — the high-quality, double-human-confirmed keyword/label associated with an image is the reward to the system that CMU is building.

(Previously identified labels for a specific picture are then taboo words, and aren’t allowed to be used in the game. This ensures that additional — generally more precise — labels are continually identified and captured.)

They’ve already collected 3.726 million human-confirmed labels. I’ll let them describe the value of this:

Labeling an image means associating word descriptions to it, as shown below. Computer programs can’t yet determine the contents of arbitrary images, but the ESP game provides a novel method of labeling them: players get to have fun as they help us determine their contents. If the ESP game is played as much as other popular online games, we estimate that all the images on the Web can be labeled in a matter of weeks!

Having proper labels associated to each image on the Internet would allow for very accurate image search, would improve the accessibility of the Web (by providing word descriptions of all images to visually impaired individuals), and would help users block inappropriate (e.g., pornographic) images from their computers.

Help out and have fun.

I don’t remember if I’ve talked about George Lakoff of this blog before or not, but it’s certainly better late than never. I guess thinking the same the, NewsCenter posted another conversation with him yesterday, “Linguistics professor George Lakoff dissects the “war on terror” and other conservative catchphrases. (They interviewed him in October 2003 also.)

I highly recommend that you read both of those posts. Becoming familiar with his work is without doubt one of the most influential things that happened in my life of the past year. It’s really fantastic work, “Framing”, “‘nurturant parent’ model versus the conservative ’strict father’ model” [articulated in Lakoff’s “Moral Politics,” and briefly discussed here].

Here are some of the better quotes from yesterday’s article:

…I wrote a chapter on what unites progressives — a moral system, certain political principles, and what I call policy directions as opposed to policies. A policy direction is something like “Let’s have a sustainable environment” and “Working people shouldn’t be living in poverty” and “Everybody should have health care.” The problem is that the Democrats have wanted to talk about programs rather than policy directions, and programs call up distinctions, which tend to separate people. For example, Kerry should be talking about health care for everyone, and just put a white paper with the details of the program on his website. The values, principles, and general directions are what people care about and what brings them together. It’s pointless to argue about the policy-wonk details, because they’re going to change anyway.

In another chapter I tell progressives how to talk to conservatives. This is not rocket science: you should show respect, know your values, always reframe, and say what you believe. The important thing is not to accept their framing of the issues, nor just negate their framing — that just reinforces it. Simply confronting them with facts won’t help. Frames trump facts. The facts alone will not set you free. You have to reframe the issues before the facts can become meaningful and powerful.

The New Deal, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act — these too are all products of progressive, liberal values. They represent advances of the nurturant parent model versus the conservative “strict father” model. These movements are also seen as stemming from traditional American values, part of our shared heritage. So, when you start looking at what this country is rightfully proud of, it’s the extension of progressive values. And it’s time to say that loud and clear.

The important thing is not to accept their framing of the issues, nor just negate their framing — that just reinforces it. Simply confronting them with facts won’t help. Frames trump facts. The facts alone will not set you free. You have to reframe the issues before the facts can become meaningful and powerful.

Conservatives have branded liberals, and the liberals let them get away with it: the “liberal elite,” the “latte liberals,” the “limousine liberals.” The funny thing is that conservatives are the elite. The whole idea of conservative doctrine is that some people are better than others, that some people deserve more. To conservatives, if you’re poor it’s because you deserve it, you’re not disciplined enough to get ahead. Conservative doctrine requires that there be an elite: the people who thrive in the free market have more money, and they should. Progressives say, “No, that’s not fair. Maybe some should have more money, but no one should live in poverty. Everybody who works deserves to have a reasonable standard of living for their work.” These are ideas that are progressive or liberal ideas, and progressives aren’t getting them out there enough.

What progressives are promoting is not elite at all. Progressives ought to be talking about the conservative elite. They shouldn’t be complaining about “tax cuts for the rich,” they should be complaining about “tax cuts for the conservative elite,” because that’s who’s getting them.

You’ve said that progressives should never use the phrase “war on terror” — why?

There are two reasons for that. Let’s start with “terror.” Terror is a general state, and it’s internal to a person. Terror is not the person we’re fighting, the “terrorist.” The word terror activates your fear, and fear activates the strict father model, which is what conservatives want. The “war on terror” is not about stopping you from being afraid, it’s about making you afraid.

Next, “war.” How many terrorists are there — hundreds? Sure. Thousands? Maybe. Tens of thousands? Probably not. The point is, terrorists are actual people, and relatively small numbers of individuals, considering the size of our country and other countries. It’s not a nation-state problem. War is a nation-state problem.

Really, it’s all great stuff. Check it out.

Talking Points Memo (a must-read) has this to say about the great new Kerry TV ad:

He’s a coward because he has other people smear good men without taking any responsibility, without owning up to it or standing behind it. And when someone takes it to him and puts him on the spot to defend his actions — as McCain does in this spot — he’s literally speechless. Like I say, a coward.

Watch the ad. Read TPM. It’s clear that Bush is the idiot son of an asshole.

Slashdot carries news that AOL has just released Netscape 7.2 based on Mozilla 1.7. Your can get it at Netscape Browser Central.

One way I’ve always configured my browsers it to have visible a horizontal links/favorites/bookmarks bar. This was the “Links” folder in IE, and is a default config in Mac’s Safari too. Of course I don’t use IE anymore, instead using Firefox from the good people at the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.

Within my visible bookmarks, I keep a folder called Start. A well-known great feature of Firefox (and other non-IE browsers such as Opera, Safari, and the Mozilla Application Suite, is Tabbed Browsing, which lets you browser multiple web pages, each help as a tab within a single browser window.

By default, the bottom item in a folder of bookmarks is a common “Open in Tabs”. So, each morning I click on “Open in Tabs” in my Start folder, and watch my 20ish daily-read web sites open. I read each tab, closing it when I’m finished reading. When all the tabs are closed, I’m ready to start my normal work day (or hop in the shower, or go back to coding, or stir the pasta — you get the idea.)

Yes, I know many people may point out that this is exactly why then use a RSS Aggregator, aka a News Reader. I use one of those too, but find this in-browser experience a pleasant, fast, and rich way to start the day.

Anyways, I tell you all this by way of citation. This morning, while reading my Start Folder, I found an interesting link sitting at #23 on Daypop’s Top 40 Links. The link: A Web Standards Checklist from the people at Max Design.

Their checklist is a nice place to start, when you’re thinking about modern web development. It reminds about some basic measures of quality, such as “Does the site have any broken links?”, but it also includes more modern concerns, such as “Are all decorative images in the CSS, or do they appear in the (X)HTML?”. In total, they ask questions in six sections:

1. Quality of code
2. Degree of separation between content and presentation
3. Accessibility for users
4. Accessibility for devices
5. Basic usability
6. Site management

I’ve been working to develop similar guidance and measurement at work, and will post my work here when it nears completion. In the meaning, cheers to Max Design for creating and sharing this great one.

cheers, nate

Articles documenting the increased interest in browsers other than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer seem to be published more and more frequently these days. The latest, In Search of a Browser That Banishes Clutter, is by none other than the New York Times (registration required).

Ms. Sandlin is so devoted to her browser that she has taped a note to her monitor warning guests not to click on the desktop shortcut to Internet Explorer. “Do not touch the blue ‘E!’ ” the note says.

“I didn’t want to fool with it anymore,” said Ms. Sandlin, 51, an administrative assistant at Halifax Community College in Weldon, N.C. “I spent more time clicking pop-ups than I did surfing the Web.”

[F]or the first time since Microsoft’s browser beat out Netscape to gain dominance, its market share is eroding as users like Ms. Sandlin shift to other browsers.

[Internet Explore]… has been almost an impenetrable sort of fortress and this is the first sign of any kind of crack.”

“I would just about go to sleep, or play three or four games of solitaire,” Ms. Mills said of waiting for pages to load. Now, “I can’t even go over and check the printer, it’s so fast.”