Impedance Mismatch over HTTP

I read a very interesting article in the Washington Post about why people you are friends with and those you know tend to think the same as you. Shankar Vedantam comments on how homophily, an idea that people seem to be drawn to others like themselves could be fueling partisanship and how technology might be exacerbating it.

While the instinct for homophily in politics and other areas seems hard-wired, technology may be fueling our nature. Cable television and the Internet have allowed enormous numbers of people in distant areas to form virtual groups that are very similar to what you see in the office cafeteria. Smith-Lovin's research, for example, shows that homophily is on the rise in the United States on nearly every dimension of social identity. Ever larger numbers of people seem to be sealing themselves off in worlds where everyone thinks the way they do. No Walter Cronkite figure unites audiences today, the sociologist noted. We can now choose cable stations, magazines and blogs that see the world exactly as we do.

Well, this is the flip side of freedom of thought, free-will and freedom of expression. With capitalism and democracy comes choice and choice leads to contest. As I read it, I could not help but revisit an essay in one of my favorite books, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler wherein he describes the effects of overchoice and how people try to align themselves with an ideology in a life style. Here are a few excerpts: Toffler on why it is difficult to describe your life style:

Most of us, in fact, do not think of our lives in terms of life style, and we often have difficulty in talking about it objectively. We have even more trouble when we try to articulate the structure of values implicit in our style. The task is doubly hard because many of us do not adopt a single integrated lifestyle, but a composite of elements drawn from several different models.

On overchoice and why people are grow passionate about their life style:

Why does the life style have this power to preserve itself? What is the source of our commitment to it? A life style is a vehicle through which we express ourselves. It is a way of telling the world which particular subcult or subcults we belong to. Yet this hardly accounts for its enormous importance to us. The real reason why life styles are so significant -and increasingly so as the society diversifies-is that, above all else, the choice of a life style model to emulate is a crucial strategy in our private war against the crowding pressures of overchoice.

On how a chosen life style affects behavior:

Aunt Ethel gives us a wedding present. We are embarrassed by it, for it is in a style alien to our own. It irritates and upsets us, even though we know that "Aunt Ethel doesn't know any better." We banish it hastily to the top shelf of the closet. Aunt Ethel's toaster or table-wear is not important, in and of itself. But it is a message from a different subcultural world, and unless we are weak in commitment to our own style, unless we happen to be in transition between styles, it represents a potent threat. The psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term "cognitive dissonance" to mean the tendency of a person to reject or deny information that challenges his perceptions. We don't want to hear things that may upset our carefully worked out structure of beliefs. Similarly, Aunt Ethel's gift represents an element of "stylistic dissonance." It threatens to undermine our carefully worked out style of life.

Based on the above, perhaps the very act of blogging is to create an identity and a way to navigate the plethora of choices, safeguard a life style and a point of view; yet another reason as to why people blog. Shankar raises the interesting question of how our friends end up having similar points of view even though we don't make friends by filtering people based on a set of questions involving politics and social issues.

While beliefs matter, there are two other powerful but subtle factors at work, said sociologist Mario Luis Small of the University of Chicago: One is demography, and the other is shared experiences.

Considering the choices we have and the ability to seek out and associate with people who think like us via the Internet, there seems to be a lesser need to listen to other points of view. Combine that with the zealousness with which people defend their life styles, could we be leading towards an extremely fragmented society without unifying factors? We already have podcasts, blogs and news that can be subscribed to. Networks already shun news that is deemed traumatic: a walk into the office cafeteria at lunch shows the entire set of alphabet soup channels indulging in light banter and news that is easy on the eye and light to digest. In this age of overchoice, fragmentation, ratings and feel-good culture, existence and reality probably resides increasingly in the mind more than what we make of the surroundings around us.

We have all seen the metamorphosis of personal computers from bulky and ugly looking rectangular boxes to Disney themed bright things. The same parallel applies to cell phones: these days, one of the biggest revenue streams for cell phone makers is neither its features nor the plethora of things you can do with it other than receiving a call, it is about how the phone looks; yes, the next time you chance upon seeing the gold-plated, diamond-studded, mother’s-day-pink Oprahfied versions of anything, it is a sign that the product has matured and that it is time for consumers to drive the evolution of newer versions of the product. Technology plays second fiddle until some disrupter comes along and brings technology to the forefront again.

I think I have just witnessed the accessorization of search. The site msdewey.com has a perky desi (Janina Gavankar) at your service to help you find what you are looking for. I think this is an interesting idea along the lines of avatars and Yahoo environments for online messaging. If what I understand is true, then we should be able to accessorize our search by tying it to a virtual character with mannerisms and change search engines at will behind the scenes. Probably, the intelligence behind the avatar will decide which search engine to search and if it should combine multiple search engines to generate a result. Could this be a swappable human wrapper over the boring search? If Google won us with its simplicity, then these search engines will have a chance with their human interfaces. Once upon a time, back in 2000, the search war was supposed to be over, and so was the browser war. In late 2006, we have a new leader and a very promising challenger in corresponding spaces. Who would have thought that we could be searching the Internet this way in 2000? Even Jude Law and Haley Osmond did not have a human interface as they searched for information when they entered Rogue City in the movie Artificial Intelligence. Interfaces for human interaction as a subject was largely overlooked in the last decade but with greater speeds and faster processors, this area is in store for substantial growth. The logical extension to Ms Dewey would be voice recognition.

Back in 2002, Sprint was probably the early adopter of the voice recognition systems (Claire) and in fact, I demand discounts for having been their guinea pig as they tested their voice recognition systems on us poor customers who have had to bear the brunt of answering questions only to wait until “Claire” exhausted all the answers she did not understand and decided that she had to transfer us to a live operator. Fastfoward to 2006, If you call AT&T’s DSL customer and trouble shooting service, the voice recognition system is so good and pleasant that it is scary; almost science fiction like. The fact that you are not talking to a human at the other end and yet answering details about a modem is very surrealistic. Along that vein, one could ask Ms Dewey a question orally as opposed to typing it; before you know it, it could very well lead to customer service applications over the web. Interestingly enough, a visual avatar of a pleasing customer service representative is much more calming than a pleasing voice recognition system over the phone. I would really be interested in knowing the thought process behind the selection of the character, ethnicity, and diction at msdewey.com. At the end of the day, here is the irony: it does not matter that the interface is virtual, what matters is that it is human.

Today being Monday, with the lingering weekend inertia in place, tech news hits a bit hard. As I was driving to work today morning, I heard an NPR story about an experiment at a school in Philadelphia. Microsoft's project manager Mary Cullinane says that they are trying to answer the question, "what if?" It is not surprising to find Microsoft at the center of this exercise.

"'What if a company like Microsoft and an organization like the School District of Philadelphia came together to build a school of the future? What would it look like?'" ~ Mary Cullinane

OK, that is a little bit scary but hey, who am I to complain?

It is a commendable experiment except that some of the quotes aired today make me wonder if everyone on the project is in sync with the goal of the project.

Grover says assignments such as blogging aren't about bells and whistles. They're about finding new ways to teach fundamentals. One question that comes up often: How does she know students in class aren't on their laptops goofing around?

Grover is ready for that one. She says, "My question to you is, how did your teachers make sure that, when you were sitting in the classroom, you weren't goofing around, even though you didn't have a laptop? I think the issues remain the same. In this case, the laptop, sure, it's an invitation to do other things. It's up to us to make sure that the work is meaningful, and that it'll challenge them."

I am not so sure, I am not a luddite by any means but when I solved a problem in Physics or proved a theorem in Geometry, there was a feedback loop between what my eyes saw and what my brain thought. What I scribbled or drew on paper largely influenced what I would think next or how I would solve a problem. Also, there are certain patterns and styles in Mathematics or Physics your mind can recognize over time and think two deducible steps ahead of what you write on paper. All this needs correlation between the hand, eye, and the brain; of course, not everyone out there is of the calibre of Stephen Hawking. Unless an electronic device which recognizes handwritten text is in the horizon with the portability and ubiquity of paper, it would be practically impossible to make a seat of learning paperless.

With laptops and such, that correlation is completely gone as everything turns into an assignment which is due at a certain date. This lack of spontaneous thought is detrimental to a child's ability to improvise. Also, the number of variables involved in problem solving increase with the introduction of laptops. Also, teachers would have to teach with material which is very inadequate for a teacher-student dialogue since it is created ahead of time. As far as I know, it is very easy to get distracted and even lulled to sleep during Powerpoint presentations. I don't know, I have seen people use tablet PCs, fancy foldable keyboards with PDAs; I have personally used laptops, PDAs myself to capture and analyse information.

IMHO, nothing beats the paper and a pen. Ingmar Bergman, the legendary playwright and screenwriter always wrote by hand on a specific type of paper even in the age of electronic typewriter. To me, writing by hand captures more than thought. It captures the progress of a thought process more efficiently than spell-checked and sanitized text.

It would be interesting if we had a device attached to the PC that would allow free form hand drawing just as one would do with a pen on paper and then create a JPEG out of it and give the option to paste it in the document where she pleases.

Just a few days ago, I read about a site that had an interesting concept: take one photo a day and upload it to your site and watch the progression. The idea is not new but the fact that there is a critical mass of people out there willing to put snapshots of lives into a mass database chronicling life in general as still images marks the beginning of uncharted territory. Youtube probably is a true pioneer in this trend. We now have consumers who are not only consuming content but are demanding the freedom to create content and businesses out there need to pay attention.

The second story that I read today takes this a step further: I read about technology that can record every waking moment of our lives and save it for recall at a later point in life. That should be enough to set off alarm bells ringing all over the place.

"As a research project, the idea is being obsessed with recording everything I can," said Bell, the head researcher in a project called MyLifeBits for nearly five years at Microsoft.

"The quest is to essentially build a surrogate memory. Something that's as good as my own memory, that I can use it as a supplement, and will remember everything that I should have remembered, that came to my ears, eyes, whatever," Bell said of his experiment. 

"The interim objective is to make this kind of system available, to gradually put these kind of capabilities in all of our PCs."

On a related note, Sunil Vemuri, a Ph.D from MIT is working on a device that can aid memory by searching a database of textual content generated by voice/language recognition algorithms that convert the recording in the device to searchable text. Looks like this company is being groomed for a Google acquisition from the ground up. Surely, times are a changin'

Resources:

• School of the future
• Microsoft's version
• Mary's blog
• MyLifeBits

Over the weekend, my site went dead. I logged in and frantically checked the .htaccess, permissions, and index.php wondering if something had gone awry during my jEdit* session. It turns out that my hosting provider had disabled my site without bothering to inform me about it. It took me about 6 emails to extract the reason out of them.

Now for the juicy details: little did I know that there was no connection pooling in Wordpress’ implementation. It basically creates, opens and closes connections in that order for every call. The word out there is that creation of connections with MySql is not as expensive as it is made out to be but it still doesn’t sound right to me. It is bad as it is, it must have really held on to the connections for a very long time when I accidentally set the number of posts per RSS to 200. Apparently, Wordpress can use persistent connections but one has to turn it on. I will have to check for it in the Wordpress code.

Notes:
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*jEdit is a Java based pluggable light-weight editor. The FTP plug-in offers the ability to open remote files and edit them right in your editor along with other code which is local. Pretty neat for an open-source tool.