Tom Morris

The media seems to have reinvented itself not as a source of information, but escapism, a one-way conversation with your own internal idiot. In this world an octopus called Paul, who can predict the results of the World Cup, is a story, even if he cannot, actually, predict the results of the World Cup, because he is an octopus, and is probably above such things. Add squirrels on waterskis, obese rabbits, dogs that can use cash-points and – who knows? – semi-politicised fish, and you have a genre of the media that is probably bigger, and is certainly more profitable, than the section that cares about feminism.

Capital letters: not just a good idea but a Good Idea

Travel warning. If you are in London, be sure to not spend any time in either York Way or White City if you happen to have any form of computing device on you. It may be damaged beyond the point of repair. Not just computing devices, really, anything that has the ability to produce written English: computers, pens, typewriters, sophisticated neural implants that can turn your thoughts into text files.

Why the warning? Because if you go anywhere near the journalists at the BBC or the Guardian, the shift key may stop working. That has to be the explanation.

The BBC have been long known to omit capital letters from abbreviations and acronyms to the point of unreadability. “WPCs” (woman police constables) becomes “Wpcs” even though, unlike “NATO” (sorry, “Nato”), you can’t pronounce Double You Pee Cee as a word.

I had that eery and slightly sickening feeling that someone was going a bit too easy on the shift key recently with multiple pieces from The Guardian referring to the Stop Online Piracy Act as “Sopa” (not to be confused with “soma”, the stupefying drug of choice for denizens of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) and the PROTECT IP Act as “Pipa”. The fact that PROTECT IP is itself a ghastly initialism of the sort that seemingly started with the ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’ (or USA PATRIOT Act) adds to the idiocy of this trend.

Today I saw on one of the news sites the Director of Public Prosecutions referred to as the “director of public prosecutions” as if that were not an office but simply a description. The Attorney General often becomes the “attorney general”, the Chancellor of the Exchequer becomes the “chancellor” and so on. I have so far not yet seen the newspapers sink to “Usa” or “Uk” but given this idiotic trend, it can’t be long.

I really have no idea what is behind it. Some utterly bizarre desire to seem more hip and down with the Twitering Facebookers on their smartphones? Yes, well, those same people will probably think you rather ridiculous if you refer to an iPad as an “ipad” or indeed an “Ipad” or omit the CamelCase from BlackBerry.

The other explanation seems to be some kind of idea that it is less deferential, stemming from a bizarre idea that using capital letters is an exercise of power. Perhaps it all goes back to some half-baked deconstructionist nonsense: the word “capital” in the phrase “capital letters” is somehow linked to the root of the word “capitalism” and if we just stop using capital letters, we can avoid propping up capitalism, and then the revolution will finally come.

Some kind of power-based analysis seems to fit danah boyd, and maybe k.d. lang too. bell hooks says it was “to distinguish [herself] from her grandmother”.

One thing I find very annoying about my fellow atheists is when they decide to do the same thing to ‘God’. ‘God’ is a proper name, like ‘Dave’ or ‘Susan’. It is also a description, ‘god’. Hence the title of Reza Aslan’s book, No god but God is derived from the expression that there are no gods that exist other than ‘God’ (for Aslan’s purposes, that would be the Islamic god). But some of my atheist brothers and sisters seem to think that giving the word ‘God’ a capital g grants respect or implicitly endorses the actual existence of the ‘God’ character. They don’t seem to apply to same logic to Gandalf, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Zeus, Thor etc. Nobody suggests that I’m either presuming Gandalf’s existence or granting special powers to the word ‘Gandalf’ by printing the first letter as a capital, so why should ‘God’ be any different? Why give one fictional character exemption from the same rule the others follow?

We’ve had similar debates about capital letters at Wikipedia. A recent one I came across is this Manual of Style rule (and, again, note that internally we are perfectly happy to talk about “AfD”, “MOS”, “ANI” etc.) about capital letters for religious doctrines:

Doctrinal topics or canonical religious ideas that may be traditionally capitalized within a faith are given in lower case in Wikipedia, such as virgin birth (as a common noun), original sin, transubstantiation.

In itself, uncontroversial. But there’s a limit. And that limit should simply be “what do the best secondary sources say?” The point of Wikipedia is that it follows secondary sources. And if we’ve got non-fringe contemporary, academic theological sources consistently using a theological term differently from Wikipedia, that seems like a pretty good path to follow. Again, as an atheist, I don’t really see a problem. While “the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven” may be a bit of a mouthful, following traditional rules on case hardly commits me to accepting the metaphysical presumptions that underlie it. Nor does writing “the assumption of the blessed virgin mary into heaven” strike some sort of blow for freethought. It just makes it look like my shift key is broken.

The rule on religious doctrines is a bit of a strange one, because mostly Wikipedia’s Manual of Style on capital letters is actually pretty sensible.

Unlike the BBC (“Bbc”?) and Guardian. What on earth ought we do to get them to shift their position on capital letters?

The new Gmail sucks →

Crooked Timber is right: new Gmail sucks and Google is becoming crappier. I have been trying Duck Duck Go for search… we really need an open source Google Apps suite that you can chuck on Amazon cloud, pay for, and not be manhandled by Google in their not-even-in-the-slightest-bit-evil way.

adactio:

(via Design won’t save the world)

Gamification” treats people like children — children who need to be manipulated, who need to be tricked into doing what’s good for them.

Creative Commons 4.0 proposal: fair use baseline

Creative Commons has launched the Creative Commons 4.0 process, where they hope to produce a fourth version of the Creative Commons licenses. I have a proposal that I think could make Creative Commons even more useful than they already are, namely using CC licenses to enforce a minimum baseline of fair use. It’s very simple: we simply make it so that every CC license includes extra clauses that not only specify that the Creative Commons license does not infringe on fair use (the licenses already include such a clause) but they also guarantee a minimum baseline of fair use.

Fair use differs by country, but the nice thing is that the CC license could encode in the license those fair use rights while also allowing them to be enforced by statute.

In the United States, there is a broad class of fair use exceptions are described by 17 U.S.C. § 107 as follows:

the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright

Those are examples given, but the U.S. law works by defining four criteria of fair use, and then saying that a work is fair use if it meets those four criteria, leaving it open in the future for people for reusers to make a case to the courts if challenged that they are pursuing a new form of fair use.

The United Kingdom doesn’t have fair use in the same way. Instead it has a variety of “fair dealing” exceptions. There is a common law fair dealing defence, and a number of statutory fair dealing defences. Unlike the U.S., there is no general class of exceptions, just a specific list of exceptions, often with a stack of secondary legislation specifying exactly how that fair dealing could take place.

According to Wikipedia, there is also fair use in other countries, specifically Canada (which has a fair dealing style limited exceptions rule), Israel (which is broadly U.S. style), Poland and South Korea. Fair dealing is, of course, used in Commonwealth countries like Australia and New Zealand.

Now, before I get on to the substantive proposal, I’ll say something hopefully uncontentious: fair use is good, fair use is consistent with Creative Commons values and it is something we should try and promote. Of course, in an ideal world, people would simply use public domain/CC Zero or CC BY or BY-SA or something, which would essentially provide a much stronger version of fair use/fair dealing for most purposes. So, broadly, fair use is good, and the copyleftish, free culture movement who thinks things like Creative Commons and Wikimedia and free software and so on are pretty cool are generally in favour of more of it. This seems uncontentious, and hopefully my proposal will seem equally uncontentious.

Given that we like fair use, CC 4.0 could promote fair use by guaranteeing fair use internationally. Just as the main terms of the CC license are applicable internationally, instead of simply specifying that the CC license doesn’t interfere with or supersede one’s common law or statutory fair use or fair dealing rights (because, you know, how could it?), the CC licenses could guarantee some uncontentious and shared subset of fair use/fair dealing rights as part of the license. This means that even in countries where fair use is not guaranteed by the laws of that territory, one can still engage in those fair use rights even if they are not guaranteed by the main terms of the license (namely, share-alike, no-derivs, non-commercial).

So, you have a reuser in the fictional country of Examplia. He finds a particularly intriguing scientific article online under the CC BY-NC license and wants to write a blog post in response that quotes some small chunks for the purposes of criticism or review but has a small amount of advertising on his blog (the question of non-commercial licensing rears its ugly head).

If he were in the United Kingdom, fair dealing would protect his right to copy material for the purposes of review under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, § 30(1). But Examplia does not have such an exception built in to their copyright laws. Thankfully, he is doing it with a CC 4.0 license that includes my magical fair use baseline requirement, which guarantees fair use rights very similar to those granted by the UK and USA to reusers internationally, and so he is able to go ahead.

Guaranteeing international fair use rights even when the law doesn’t seems like a no brainer in principle. But, of course, I am not a lawyer, and there may be legal reasons why it is a bad idea. (Sadly, there usually is.) There is also the question of what exactly would be covered. This is, of course, ripe for debate. I think the existing UK and US laws guide us, and sticking fairly conservatively to the sort of things they allow means that people will find this proposal as uncontentious as I think it is. I’d suggest the following:

• non-commercial study (this is guaranteed by all the CC licenses already except perhaps no-derivs licenses)
• quotation for the purpose of news reporting
• criticism and review
• parody of the work, and perhaps use of the work to parody or satire other things
• format shifting
• time shifting
• educational use within government-operated or accredited schools, colleges and universities

All of these except the last one are pretty well-covered already by the existing fair use and fair dealing laws, so I should justify my inclusion of the last entry. This is because of the very common use case of someone finding a useful paper in a scientific journal and wanting to distribute it to students in class. This is about as fundamentally straight forward a case of fair use/fair dealing in terms of intuitive understanding as I can think of, but buts up against the non-commercial clauses of some CC licenses because technically a student pays tuition fees to be at university, and the lecturer is paid to give the class, so distribution of educational materials in that situation is technically a commercial use of those materials. Although the requirement that the schools be government-operated or accredited is rather problematic, that’s simply because that is a convenient way of getting most of the real schools and universities while excluding diploma mills, the shadier side of for-profit colleges (all those language colleges you see down Oxford Street in London!) and so on. Of course, this is just a very rough proposal, so it would be up to people who actually know about law to figure out how to implement this.

If any of these are legally problematic, we simply leave them out. Providing a baseline of fair use rights internationally is simply a very simple response to the way that the copyright extremists are doing the same thing with DRM and all the other crap that they’ve been pushing through WIPO and ACTA etc. Creative Commons saying through the licenses that wherever the reuse occurs, something like fair use is a fundamental requirement of an equitable and fair copyright system might be a small way to rebalance that debate.

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Why we should teach programming in schools

Finally, an issue lots of my fellow techies have been droning on about for years has reached public consciousness: the lamentable state of ICT lessons in schools and the lack of any programming or computer science stuff for learners before university age.

John Naughton in the Guardian last week:

What’s missing from both sides of this campaign is any appreciation of the real significance of introducing children to programming. Messrs Livingstone and Hope take an instrumental view of the matter, which is understandable given their industrial backgrounds. They are concerned that UK universities are not producing graduates with the skills that their industry needs now. […] But in a way they’re making the same mistake as those who saw ICT as a way of preparing kids for the world of work by training them to use Microsoft Office […] What governments don’t seem to understand is that software is the nearest thing to magic that we’ve yet invented. It’s pure “thought stuff” – which means that it enables ingenious or gifted people to create wonderful things out of thin air. All you need to change the world is imagination, programming ability and access to a cheap PC.

So, here we’ve got two justifications: Livingstone and Hope have a business justification. Naughton thinks we should teach proper computing in schools because it potentially enables kids to produce wonderful things that might change the world. I have a funny feeling the former might be more convincing for the Tories, and I’ve got no objection to fitting the message to the target audience.

But I’ve got a better reason than both, I think. The reason I think programming ought to be taught in schools is simple: it is real, practical, applied logic. There are people on philosophy courses who really struggle with the logic, and battle through logic textbooks, eventually mastering it. But if you write code, everything you learn in logic gets felt deep in your bones. The process of taking some kind of hand-wavy specification and turning it into a working machine, where the cogs and gears and pipes of that machine are pure logic? The government seem to want vocationally useful training that still has academic quality: unlike “leisure and tourism studies” or an A-level from McDonald’s, computer science gives you that.

Teaching people to code might lead them to create something cool, and it might mean that software companies can hire lots of talented programmers in the future. But the primary reason we should teach programming, in my opinion, is simply because it is a bloody good way of instilling logic into one’s mental toolkit, along with that nice, vague “problem solving” that is so often considered a “soft skill” or “key skill” or whatnot. There is a valuable moral lesson too: when you want to solve problems, you have to break them down and solve each step as logically as straight-forwardly as possible. That kind of attitude might help contribute to making society less dominated by utter bullshit.

Structuring a solution to a programming problem is essentially a pragmatic form of conceptual analysis. Writing decent, non-bloated code? Ockham’s Razor. Plenty of logic. Unit testing? Well, when did you last read an analytic philosophy paper that didn’t include a whole stack of intuition-prodding examples with which to compare proposed theories? If all the philosophers haven’t been forced to drink hemlock in order to save money in the higher education budget, and they find that they are particularly pedantic, they could even go study philosophy…

Bell Pottinger behind the scenes

This post has been removed at the request of fellow Wikipedia administrators who are concerned about revealing deleted information. Personally, I disagree with this, and think that when it comes to a major scandal like Bell Pottinger, the public have a right to know as much as possible, so long as it doesn’t breach confidentiality. Until there is community consensus on the appropriateness of such publication, I have removed this post.

Turning off notification sounds for muted threads in Gmail on Android?

At the weekend I bought a new phone, a Samsung Galaxy S2. It’s very nice, blah blah. I’ll write up a long post about Android sometime soon.

But I’ve got a bit of a tech support question.

I’ve got the Gmail app that comes with the phone, and I have it set to give me notifications when I get new e-mail. I know this will probably drive me completely apeshit very quickly, so I might turn it off. But it is actually mostly useful.

The only thing is it seems to not be very smart about what it notifies me over. It seems to notify me over every new message in the inbox, even muted threads. I reported a bug with Firefox a while back, and someone just got around to submitting a patch for it this evening, and there have been a few developers commenting on the patch and changing Bugzilla statuses and so on. Which is fine, but it gets annoying. This seems like the ideal case for muting at thread.

I don’t need a notification every time it happens, but it’s still inbox material as the first message to come through for months since reporting it is interesting and I don’t want to write a rule to send it to the same label as all the crappy notifications I get about people following me on Twitter.

Only the Android Gmail app doesn’t seem to have a way to let me change this. I could have it only notify me on Priority Inbox messages, which might do the job as then muted threads are highly unlikely to make it in. But I’m not sure I want that. Any advice?

Code noodling contest: functionalize this

Learning moment for me. I’ve been learning functional programming for a while, but was faced with an interesting little challenge today. I’ll spare you the problem domain, which is rather boring, and simply give you what’s needed…

A function that takes a positive (that is n>=1) integer, calculate the number of times this number is divisible by 16, and how many times the remainder is divisible by 8, and how many times the remainder of that is divisible by 4, and how many times the remainder of that is divisible by 2. Return each of these values in a key-value structure similar to Ruby’s Hash.

My mind immediately leapt to “oh, this is a perfect fit for some kind of functional technique! Who needs variables?” And then I sat down and tried to write something and my brain very quickly turned to jelly, and I gave in and wrote a very quick imperative version.¹ Which looks like this:

Which is fine and will do the job. But, here’s the challenge to any of my FP-loving readers. Feel free to code-golf the hell out of this. Lisp/Clojure, Scala, Haskell, OCaml, Ruby, Python, JavaScript: whatever your poison, show me how much I suck for using variables. The prize? I might nick your solution and quietly put it into production. And you get over 9000 nerdpoints. And the warm feeling of satiating my curiosity. I don’t care if you don’t output necessarily the same data structures, but you do have to output the right values given the same input.²

Police officers told a member of the public they were prohibited from bringing “political materials” into the Houses of Parliament

A 61-year-old Halifax County man died Tuesday, a day after police shocked him with a stun gun while he was riding his bike, family members said.

I was on the train recently and saw something that to anyone competent at using a computer is a bit like the sound of nails on a chalkboard.

Across the aisle from me was a man with a MacBook Pro. He had open Numbers, Apple’s spreadsheet software.

He had a list of figures in the spreadsheet. He wanted to do some arithmetic on the same column in each row and have the resulting value fill the column directly to the right of it.

He had found a method for doing this.

For each value in the spreadsheet, he looked at it, stored the value in his brain, hit the button on his keyboard (F4) to open the Dashboard (OS X’s gallery of helpful widgets), manually clicked the number into the calculator Dashboard widget using the trackpad, stored the resulting value in his brain, hit F4 to close the Dashboard, then typed said value into the spreadsheet.

I’ve seen people pull out a calculator to crank numbers while sitting in front of a computer, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone doing anything quite so elaborately strange with a computer for quite some time.

I sat there wanting to say “you know, you could just write an expression in the first row, then use fill down, that way if one of the values changes, the calculated value will also change”. But I didn’t.

Someone once said that Excel was the world’s most widely used functional programming language. I’m so glad to see that both functional programming and cargo-cult programming have reached mainstream acceptance.

Bad code: it’s everywhere.

Sounding the death Knol

Business Insider in 2008:

Google Launches Wikipedia Killer “Knol”

Google in 2011:

Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.

Business Insider, hyperbole much?

Why WebFonts matter

I want to share a font that changed my life.

This is a paragraph from this page on Malayalam Wikipedia. The article is about Simone de Beauvoir. (You could tell, right?)

I listen in on the web design community. It’s often very interesting, but can be a little bit narrow. When WebFonts first came out, the discussions were about type foundries and putting DRM on type and how WebFonts would never work because of the lack of copy protection.

And, yes, typography designers will now have to work out what their business models are. They may follow the music industry and try to sue everyone into oblivion. Because that has worked real well.

But that doesn’t matter. The Web as universal archive is so much more important than whether or not existing industries can continue making money. Napster may have pissed off the music industry, but it helped build an enormous library of human creativity.

Designers look at the web and see that it needs civilizing, it needs design. It needs beauty. It’s been designed–if you dare use that word–by philistine programmers who spend fourteen hours a day staring at white text against a black background in some godforsaken text editor like Emacs or Vim. They never went to art school and they prefer reading Perl manuals to reading Keats. They probably use Android, not iOS.

They are right (although I did briefly go to art school). The web is ugly. And WebFonts might not help. The type foundries may or may not jump on to WebFonts. The DRM schemes may or may not happen. And it doesn’t matter.

The reason WebFonts is vitally important is because of the key role of typography. Typography is to make things readable. And they currently aren’t for hundreds of millions of people around the world because there are many, many languages that don’t have fonts. There are 35.9 million people who speak Malyalam. Up until recently, they couldn’t use the web in their own language. At the end of the fiscal year 2010, Apple had sold 73.5 million iPhones.

Malayalam fonts and input methods means Malayalam now has a blogging community, it now has a vibrant Wikipedia and Wikisource. The Malayalam Wikipedia community have been distributing Wikipedia and Wikisource on CD to schools in India: WebFonts means that the CD they distribute need only contain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which means that it can work on any computer that has a web browser on it.

What’s more important to the world: that smartphone users in the West have a “beautiful user experience” with pretty typography, or that the “rest of the world” as we so frequently call them can actually read and write on the Web? How you answer that question will tell you how important WebFonts will be for you. For me, everyone being able to have the chance to participate in the World Wide Web is far more important than making sure the privileged few have a more magical user experience.

WebFonts are important because language requires type, and access to one’s own language is about as profound a social justice issue as you can find. As the early Wittgenstein said, the limits of my language are the limits of my world. If you can’t type or read your language online, your world is not part of the World Wide Web. That needs fixing.