Off the grid

Strizki runs the 3,000-square-foot house with electricity generated by a 1,000-square-foot roof full of photovoltaic cells on a nearby building, an electrolyzer that uses the solar power to generate hydrogen from water, and a number of hydrogen tanks that store the gas until it is needed by the fuel cell.In the summer, the solar panels generate 60 percent more electricity than the super-insulated house needs. The excess is stored in the form of hydrogen which is used in the winter -- when the solar panels can't meet all the domestic demand -- to make electricity in the fuel cell. Strizki also uses the hydrogen to power his fuel-cell driven car, which, like the domestic power plant, is pollution-free.

Solar power eliminates utility bills in U.S. home - Yahoo! News

technorati tags:solar, hydrogen, grid

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Client-side editing

Remove excessive exclamation points with Greasemonkey:

With this script installed, trim down any instance of multiple exclamation points down to a single point!!!

technorati tags:editing

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The distribution of surveillance: Not just for authority figures anymore

On Wednesday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in his State of the City Address that the city plans to install new technology so that 911 call centers can receive digital images and videos sent from cell phones and computers."If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition you'll be able to transmit images to 911 or online to NYC.gov," he said.

New York to use cell phone photographers to help fight crime | CNET News.com

technorati tags:surveillance

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Wrike: Distributed project management software

Wrike is a web-based project management service that competes with Basecamp and others in this area. The big news here is that it allows you to assign tasks by tagging, meaning that the same task can show up in different projects. Also, you can email Wrike along with the people to whom you want to assign a task, and Wrike will set up a task and make those people responsible.

technorati tags:projectmanagement

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"I don't think America likes to watch people be ridiculed"

... said Rosie O'Donnell on 'The View', blasting American Idol -- which debuted to record ratings.

technorati tags:contradiction

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"Standards evangelism must remain our top priority in the coming year."

WebAIM reviews 2006 and lays out a strategy for 2007.

technorati tags:accessibility

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"anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic"

In today's OpinionJournal, Charles Murray argues that too many people are going to college:

There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college--enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.

I think that it does make sense to boost vocational training as an alternative to four-year colleges, but tying the argument to IQ is not a good idea, since standardized tests such as IQ tests are not a good predictor of college success. Murray also expresses a lot of faith in "advances in technology [that] are making the brick-and-mortar facility increasingly irrelevant" such as lectures on DVD.

technorati tags:college, vocational, iq

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"Just find an entrenched business. Then eat their lunch as they watch, paralyzed."

Michael Arrington tells entrepreneurs how to take market share away from the big players.

technorati tags:web2.0, startups

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Reading :: Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity

Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity
By Jeffrey Walker

Jeff Walker, who is one of my colleagues here at UT, is well known in the field of classical rhetoric. I can see why. This book lucidly and concisely makes the case that rhetoric and poetics emerged together, or to put it differently, that rhetoric encompasses poetics and that a solely pragmatic understanding of rhetoric doesn't fit how rhetoric was developed or used in antiquity. Separating rhetoric from poetics, he says, is sort of like separating business and technical writing from the rest of English, then referring to the entire field of English as "business writing" (pp.33-34). That is to say, a pragmatic subfield has been allowed to stand as the entire field, and the result has been no little confusion.

Part of that confusion is that rhetoric has been thought to have "declined" during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, even though rhetoric clearly developed in the legal arena during that period. This confusion stems from the fact that scholars have assumed rhetoric thrives only in a democracy. But, Walker says, this gets the causal relationship backwards: it's not that rhetoric is made possible by democracy, but democracy is made possible by rhetoric (p.134).

Another part of the confusion is that "the idea that poetry in general and lyric poetry in particular 'makes arguments' has typically been foreign, even counterintuitive, for Western literary-criticial thought for most of the twentieth century" (p.168) -- something that seems completely bizarre to me, but I'll have to take Jeff's word for it. Jeff does a stellar job of demonstrating that lyric poets did in fact make arguments grounded in their sociocultural environments. Along the way, he explores the notion of the enthymeme, demonstrating that the enthymeme is not a truncated syllogism (in the Toulmin mode), but rather an antistrophos (differing sister) (pp.170-171). Walker comes down hard on modern efforts to teach enthymemes here, and I'm not quite willing to agree that the conventional way of understanding enthymemes "have had little impact on the actual teaching of practical argumentation in modern times" (p.170) -- I've had success using these sorts of enthymemes as heuristics to help students shape arguments, and so have others, judging from the wide use of Toulmin logic in the composition classroom -- but I agree with the larger point that such heuristics aren't in themselves sufficient for teaching argumentation.

In any case, I learned a lot from this book, and I wish I had read it before my recent reading of Aristotle. I've said it before, but I'll say it again: what a pleasure it is being on such a well-rounded and accomplished faculty.

Seven accessibility mistakes

456 Berea Street presents seven accessibility mistakes you don't want to make.

technorati tags:accessibility

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Austin's ice and snow; distributed expertise

So the city of Austin has been shut down since Monday (MLK Day) due to icy conditions. How icy? Oh, not terribly:

This light dusting of snow -- the first I've seen in my five years in Austin -- doesn't look like a big deal, does it? Certainly it's nothing compared to what I saw in my five years in Iowa, where this level of snow and ice would be trivial. But everyone's staying indoors: schools and businesses are closed.

That's not because Texans lack fortitude. Before moving to Iowa, I would have simply agreed that Texans don't know how to drive in icy conditions, since we don't get them that often. That's true, but it's much less of a factor than you may think. The big difference between, say, Austin and Ames is that Ames has had to invest in the infrastructure for dealing with these driving conditions: snowplows, de-icers, etc. When we lived in Iowa, the moment flakes started hitting the ground, a road crew was out there. Due in large part to them, I found myself quickly becoming an "Iowa driver," which is to say that the winter driving expertise I had always attributed to Northern drivers had to do more with this infrastructure than with the individual driver.

But for Austin, where we go years without even a light dusting like this one, it doesn't make sense to invest in that sort of infrastructure. The price we pay is that every once in a while the city gets shut down.

To make it worse, since the temperature is so close to the freezing point, the ice keeps melting, refreezing, melting, and refreezing. It just gets slicker and slicker. In Iowa, it just dropped way below freezing in October and didn't come back up until April.

To give you an idea of how big this shift is, we were walking around in shorts last week and the plants thought it was spring:

technorati tags:austin, ice

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In search of how societies work

Here's the abstract from what looks like a really interesting working paper. The author, David Ronfeldt, coedited a collection on netwar recently.

RAND | Working Papers | IN SEARCH OF HOW SOCIETIES WORK: Tribes — The First and Forever Form

The latest in a string of efforts to develop a theoretical framework about social evolution, based on how people develop their societies by using four forms of organization — tribes, hierarchical institutions, markets, and networks — this installment focuses on the tribal form. The tribal form was the first to emerge and mature, beginning thousands of years ago. Its main dynamic is kinship, which gives people a distinct sense of identity and belonging-the basic elements of culture, as manifested still today in matters ranging from nationalism to fan clubs. This report provides a lead-off chapter that sketches the entire framework, plus a “rethinking” chapter that shows why David Ronfeldt thinks that social evolution revolves around four forms of organization. A chapter then traces the evolution of tribes and clans, and the final chapter describes modern manifestations of the tribal form. An appendix reprints three op-ed pieces that sprang from Ronfeldt’s efforts to understand the tribal form and its continuing relevance. Ronfeldt maintains that societies advance by learning to use and combine all four forms, in a preferred progression. What ultimately matters is how the forms are added and how well they function together. They are not substitutes for each other; they are complements. Historically, a society’s advance — its progress — depends on its ability to use all four forms and combine them into a coherent, well-balanced, well-functioning whole. Essentially monoform tribal/clan societies and biform chiefdoms and clan-states, some dressed in the trappings of nation-states and capitalist economies, remain a ruling reality in vast areas of the world. It therefore behooves analysts and strategists who mostly think about states and markets to gain a better grip on roles the tribal form plays in both national development and national security.

technorati tags:netwar, tribes, organization

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"Mr. Gates is leading in the wrong direction"

A TCS Daily column lays out the case for a smaller, leaner, more Rumsfeldian military suitable for fighting netwar:

Mr. Gates is leading in the wrong direction. Rather than reinforcing failure, what the U.S. government should be learning from Iraq is a new way to fight its wars. Instead of using massed legacy American forces, the U.S. should move to a model that employs highly-trained U.S. teams either working in a distributed fashion to identify enemy targets, or as advisors to local allies and proxies.

Rumsfeld and Powell may have both left the administration, but their argument continues.

technorati tags:netwar

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Communicative Practices in Workplaces and the Professions

Mark Zachry and Charie Thralls' edited collection Communicative Practices in Workplaces and the Professions is coming out soon. The Introduction is online. This is going to be a really solid and interesting book, and I'm not just saying that because I have a chapter.

technorati tags:rhetoric, professional-writing

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Workshop on HCI and Information Design

Mike Albers is hosting what looks to be a really interesting Workshop on HCI and Information Design to Communicate Complex Information. The superlative Barbara Mirel is keynoting.

technorati tags:information-design

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Five more GTD systems

On What's the Next Action, a follow-up post called 5 GTD systems I should be using someday...maybe.

technorati tags:gtd

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Reading :: Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency
By David H. Petraeus and James F. Amos

Published in December 2006, the US Armed Forces Counterinsurgency Manual is meant to provide an updated field manual for counterinsurgency operations. Coauthored by Major General David Petraeus, who is about to take over as commander in Iraq, the manual was clearly written with recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq in mind. As the authors say in the Foreword:

A counterinsurgency campaign is, as described in this manual, a mix of offensive, defensive, and stability operations conducted along multiple lines of operations. It requires Soldiers and Marines to employ a mix of familiar combat tasks and skills more often associated with nonmilitary agencies.

And, strikingly: "Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as soldiers." Clearly this manual, which is publicly available and surely politically vetted, reflects the huge changes that have taken place since then-Gov. Bush declared in the 2000 campaign that the armed forces should not be nation-builders. Now, according to the manual, the armed forces must do many things that they have not traditionally done, including controlling the messages and narratives that circulate in and about the occupied territory. And that's what really interests me about the manual: in counterinsurgency (COIN), rhetoric is a central concern -- although not under that name -- and rhetorical concerns are integrated thoroughly into all aspects of the manual.

Of course, a field manual that is released onto the Internet for anyone to read is obviously going to be part of that effort as well. So of course the manual stresses persuasion, message, and narrative in terms of honesty and truth, not in terms of propaganda. This is probably a sanitized version. Nevertheless, it's still a legitimate, widely used document, and therefore useful for understanding counterinsurgency in general and current events in Iraq in particular.

So let's look at the rhetorical aspects of the manual. (If you want a military strategist's take on it, Ralph Peters' review was recommended to me.) We'll start by defining counterinsurgency:

Joint doctrine defines an insurgency as an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict (JP 1-02). Stated another way, an insurgency is an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of an established government, occupying power, or other political authority while increasing insurgent control. Counterinsurgency is military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency (JP 1- 02).

Notice that insurgency and counterinsurgency are both related to establishing and weakening legitimacy, and this is done in a variety of ways, including violence but also charity, public works, and information control. In fact,

The information environment is a critical dimension of such internal wars, and insurgents attempt to shape it to their advantage. One way they do this is by carrying out activities, such as suicide attacks, that may have little military value but create fear and uncertainty within the populace and government institutions. These actions are executed to attract high-profile media coverage or local publicity and inflate perceptions of insurgent capabilities. Resulting stories often include insurgent fabrications designed to undermine the government’s legitimacy. (p.1-3)

And, grimly, the authors continue:

Insurgents have an additional advantage in shaping the information environment. Counterinsurgents seeking to preserve legitimacy must stick to the truth and make sure that words are backed up by deeds; insurgents, on the other hand, can make exorbitant promises and point out government shortcomings, many caused or aggravated by the insurgency. Ironically, as insurgents achieve more success and begin to control larger portions of the populace, many of these asymmetries diminish. That may produce new vulnerabilities that adaptive counterinsurgents can exploit. (p.1-3)

So the authors detail a variety of ways that either side can use to mobilize popular support, including persuasion, coercion, reaction to abuses, foreign support, and apolitical motivations (p.1-8). Each of these is methodically explored in the manual. For instance, the authors go to some length on how insurgencies are typically oriented around ideologies expressed through a narrative, "an organizational scheme expressed in story form" (p.1-14), and discuss how to destabilize these narratives while constructing other narratives to serve the counterinsurgency. Cultural and social aspects are discussed as well (and the manual has an entire appendix on social network analysis).

Intelligence is of course important to counterinsurgency, so the authors look at a variety of intelligence sources, including "open source intelligence [, which] is information of potential intelligence value that is available to the general public" (p.3-2), as well as standards such as signals intelligence.

In Chapter 4, the authors talk about designing counterinsurgency campaigns and operations. I was interested to see that they actually include a case study of iterative design (p.4-7), with a methodology that bears some resemblance to those we use in interface design, but for a very different purpose.

But back to rhetoric. In Chapter 5, the authors provide a lengthy discussion of how to conduct information operations, including advice such as "choose words carefully"; "publicize insurgent violence and the use of terror to discredit the insurgency"; "admit mistakes ... quickly"; and "highlight successes of the host-nation government and counterinsurgents promptly" (p.5-9). These guidelines are each accompanied by a paragraph of description elaborating on how they interact with other aspects of the counterinsurgency operation. That is, they're not just good rules of thumb, they're integrated into a larger operational design. And they must be broadly disseminated because, as Chapter 7 argues, leadership has to be distributed at lower levels than is typically the case in order for counterinsurgency forces to react swiftly. (For more on this separation of command and control, see my review of Alberts and Hayes' Power to the Edge.) In counterinsurgency, that is, every unit is a rhetor and every action is evidence that builds the case for the government's legitimacy and the insurgency's illegitimacy. Counterinsurgency is a legal and political argument made to the populace.

Reading :: The Age of Spiritual Machines

The Age of Spiritual Machines
By Ray Kurzweil

In one part of his popular futurist book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil contemplates spiritual experiences, which are currently the provenance of human beings but which, he says, will eventually occur in the intelligent machines we will create. "Spritual experiences are not all of the same sort," he points out, "but appear to encompass a broad range of mental phenomena. The ecstatic dancing of a Baptist revival appears to be a different phenomenon than the quiet transcendence of a Buddhist monk" (p.151).

A dancing Baptist? Apparently Kurzweil is not that familiar with Baptists!

I bring up this point not to be an ankle-biter, but to illustrate what I think is a recurring problem with the book. Although Kurzweil is intelligent and widely read, I don't think he spends much time with the details. In person, I imagine him to be the kind of guy who excitedly finishes your sentences, and doesn't notice that he's finishing them in ways that you never would. The details, of which there are many, serve to propel the overall narrative rather than to constrain it.

And what's the narrative? We get a sense in the first chapters, in which Kurzweil postulates teleological laws of the universe. He notes that major milestones in the development of the universe seem to be spreading out: it took trillionths of a second after the Big Bang for gravity and subparticles to emerge, about a minute for atomic nuclei to form, and 300,000 years for those nuclei to capture electrons, etc. On the other hand, evolution's rate increases exponentially, with evolutionary milestones happening at shorter and shorter intervals. On these two curves, he maps Moore's Law, the exponential increase in computing power, as well as the fast pace of milestones reached by a developing human fetus. From all of this, he extrapolates a universal law that guarantees and compels technoevolutionary change, the Law of Accelerating Returns:

Moore's Law came along in 1958 just when it was needed and will have done its sixty years of service by 2018, a rather long period of time for a paradigm nowadays. Unlike Moore's Law, however, the Law of Accelerating Returns is not a temporary methodology. It is a basic attribute of the nature of time and chaos -- a sublaw of the Law of Time and Chaos -- and describes a wide range of apparently divergent phenomena and trends. In accordance with the Law of Accelerating Returns, another computational technology will pick up where Moore's Law will have left off, without missing a beat. (p.33)

Got that? Kurzweil has selected arbitrary milestones out of a much larger set of possible milestones, noted an apparent pattern, named that pattern a Law, and used it to make confident predictions about technological development. This is the same sort of reasoning that underpins numerology and some conspiracy theories. Like numerologists and conspiracy theorists, Kurzweil is very intelligent and very good at finding patterns, but not so good at recognizing when those patterns emerge from overly selective filtering of data points.

Treating the Law of Accelerating Returns as a proven law or destiny, Kurzweil then goes on to demonstrate that this Law will inevitably lead to intelligent machines -- machines that are each more intelligent than all human brains combined by 2060 -- and to argue that this change is the natural result of human evolution.

Kurzweil also makes the assumption that cognition goes on entirely inside the skull, an assumption that drives his predictions about machine intelligence, since in that case all one has to do is to reproduce the computational power of the brain. To be fair, many cognitivists rely on this same assumption. But sociocognitivist and postcognitivist perspectives (such as distributed and situated cognition) present some sharp critiques of this assumption.

The result is entertaining science fiction, but not convincing futurism.

Discarded GTD systems

What's the Next Action talks about 5 GTD systems I stopped using and why.

technorati tags:gtd

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The Ford Airstream, straight out of the blister pack

Via Slashdot, AutoblogGreen describes the Ford Airstream concept. I think I saw this once in a Hot Wheels 10-pack:

Anyway. The Airstream is actually developed in conjunction with Airstream, the company that makes the shiny mobile home trailers. This particular vehicle is a gas/hydrogen hybrid with the hydrogen parts made by Ballard. The drivetrain appears to be the "skateboard" configuration they've been developing.

technorati tags:hydrogen, ford, airstream, hybrid

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The death of privacy, continued

This weekend saw a flurry of stories about how easy it is for us to take and share video of each other, with the predictable result of destabilizing carefully constructed public images. Here are two out of many.

• First up is this story linked from Slashdot about shaming your neighbors with video and photos.
  

• Next, Instapundit links to a story by Patrick Hynes, John McCain's blog guy, about video clips and responses in politics. 
  

Now that we have cheap video cameras on us all the time (e.g., the ones built into our phones), and an infrastructure that can distribute them easily and cheaply (e.g., YouTube and Flickr), it's trivial to execute these sorts of gotchas.

technorati tags:privacy

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Netwar and Google Earth

Slashdot reports:

"British news reports say insurgents are using Google Earth to pinpoint vulnerable targets within bases in Iraq. Could Google be doing more to prevent this? Should they be doing more? They certainly could explain more."

technorati tags:netwar, google-earth

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