Dick Pountain/Idealog 249/09 April 2015 21:04
Recently the medical profession has discovered that stimulating our brains with difficult puzzles and problems - mental exercise in other words - has a beneficial effect on health.Such exercises can't, as some have suggested, actually cure dementia but there's evidence it may delay its onset. Just a few years ago one of the big electronic vendors advertised its hand-held games console by showing ecstatic grey-beards using it to play Connect Four on the sofa with their grandsprogs. As a senior citizen myself I must feign interest in such matters, but in truth I've never really worried that I'm not getting enough mental exercise, because the sheer cack-handedness that prevails in the IT business supplies all the exercise I can use, for free, every single month.
Take for example the impact of new security measures on the attempt to keep a working website. Plagued by hacks, leaks, LulzSec, Heartbleed, NSA surveillance, every online vendor is tightening security, but they're not all that good at notifying you how. I've had a personal website since 1998, and more recently I've also been running three blogs while maintaining an archive of the works of a dear friend who died a couple of years ago. I've never believed in spending too much money on these ventures, so I hosted my very first attempt at a website on Geocities, and built it using a free copy of NetObjects Fusion from a PC Pro cover disk. Mine was thus one of the 38,000,000 sites orphaned when Yahoo closed Geocities in 2009, so I moved to Google Sites and built a new one from scratch using Google's online tools. Around this time I also shelled out money to buy my own domain name dickpountain.co.uk from the US-based registrar Freeparking.
My low budget set-up has worked perfectly satisfactorily, without hiccup, for the last six years, that is until January of this year when I suddenly found that www.dickpountain.co.uk no longer accessed my site. To be more exact, it said it had accessed it but no pages actually appeared. I checked that the site was working via its direct Google Sites address of https://sites.google.com/site/dickpountainspages/ and it was, so perhaps redirection from my domain had stopped working properly? To check that, I went to log into my account at Freeparking's UK site, only to find that entering my credentials merely evoked the message "A secure connection cannot be established because this site uses an unsupported protocol. Error code: ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH?"
Locked out of my account I couldn't reach Freeparking support, so I mailed RWC columnist Paul Ockenden who immediately asked whether I was using Chrome. Yes I was. Did I know that nowadays it disables SSL3 by default? No I didn't, thank you Paul. With SSL3 enabled I managed to get into my account, only to find nothing had changed: it was still set to redirect dickpountain.co.uk to that Google address. About then I received another email from Paul saying a source view on http://www.dickpountain.co.uk/ shows the frameset there but not visible: Google was suddenly refusing to display pages in an external frameset, problem not with Freeparking.
An evening plodding through the forums revealed that Google too has upped security, and now you have to verify ownership of your site (even one that's been running for six years already). Their help page explaining verification offers four different methods: add a meta tag to your home page to prove you have access to the source files; add the Google Analytics code you use to track your site; upload an HTML file to your server; or verify via your domain name provider by adding a new DNS record. None of the first three worked because my site was built in Google's own tools, which strip out any added meta tags and won't allow uploading raw HTML. I needed to make a trek into into the belly of the beast, into Mordor, into... DNS. Now DNS scares me the way the phone company scared Lenny Bruce ("mess with it and you'll wind up using two dixie cups and a string"). Log into Freeparking site, go to ominously-named "Original DNS Manager Interface (advanced users)" and edit a CNAME record to point, as instructed by Google Help to ghs.google.com. Nothing happens. Try again, five times, before it finally sticks. Half an hour later www.dickpountain.co.uk works again!
You might expect me to be annoyed by such a nerve-wracking and unnecessary experience, but you must be kidding, I was jubilant. I still have it! The buggers didn't grind me down! It's like climbing Everest while checkmating Kasparov! Macho computing, bring it on, mental whoops and high-fives. It did wear off after a couple of days, but I still smirk a little every time I log onto my site now...
Wednesday, 16 September 2015
Wednesday, 12 August 2015
SYNCING FEELING
Dick Pountain/Idealog 248 /05 March 2015 15:29
Astute readers may have noticed that I'm deeply interested in (a nicer way of saying obsessed by) note-taking. This is no coincidence, because all my main occupations - editing the Real World section, writing this column, writing and reviewing books - involve reading the work of others and gathering together important points. Anything that reduces the amount of re-typing required is a bit like the difference between weeding a field of beans using a tea-spoon and using a tractor. Just few years ago my desk groaned under thick hard-back books that bristled like porcupines with small yellow Post-It notes to mark those pages I needed quotes from, or had pencilled margin notes on.
Making notes on a tablet that could sync with my laptop removed the need for those yellow flags, but still left me the job of re-typing the quotes into my own text. (Over the years I'd tried several of those pen-like or roller-like handheld scanners, but none was effective enough to be worth the hassle). No, the logical final step is for the source material I'm reading to be online too, but it's taken until now to arrive there. For the very first time I'm reviewing a book in its Kindle rather than paper edition, which means I can search its full text for relevant phrases and cut-and-paste all the resulting notes and quotes. In theory that is, because it turns out not be quite so simple.
Amazon's Kindle reader software certainly enables you to place bookmarks, highlight passages and make notes, but none of these functions is without its quirks, and the way they work varies between versions. I like to use an actual hardware Kindle when outdoors because it's light, readable in sunlight and has great battery life. Indoors I prefer to read and note-take on my Android tablet, but I write the actual review on my Windows laptop, and all these platforms run different versions of the reader.
First quirk is that the granularity of Kindle bookmarks is too broad, working only to whole page boundaries. When I view Notes & Marks the short extract presented is only the top few lines of that *page*, though my interest might lie further down. Highlights are more useful because then the extract is from the start of the highlighted area, not the whole page. I can attach a note to any single word on a page, but in Notes & Marks only its text appears, so I end up with a cryptic list like "yes", "no", "good", "really?" with no idea what each refers to until I click it and go to that page, which becomes dizzying after a while. The best compromise is to highlight a sentence or paragraph and then attach a note to its first word.
Next quirk: notes, highlights and bookmarks should sync automatically between Kindle, tablet and desktop readers, but notes made on my tablet weren't showing up on the laptop. This matters because I can only cut and paste highlighted quotes from the laptop version, as Kindle and tablet versions have no copy function. Solving this required a stiff yomp through the forums, where sure enough I found an answer - you have to manually sync by hitting that little curly-arrows icon. Still didn't work. More forums and the real answer. You have to hit *not* the sync icon inside the book in question, but the one on the home screen with all books closed. Doh! But it does work.
The last quirk is that you can't run multiple instances of Kindle reader on the same device. It so happens I have another book on my Kindle that's relevant to this review and I'd like to quote from it: have to go out into the library, open other book, find quote, cut-and-paste (but on laptop version only). It would be nice to keep two books open in two instances of Kindle reader on same machine. I really shouldn't grouse too much though, because merely being able to search, make notes and cut-and-paste them has hugely reduced the amount of tedious re-typing involved in the reviewing process, and I also need to remember that Amazon is obliged by copyright and fair-usage to restrict some of these functions (a copyright notice gets placed on every quote I paste, which I delete).
Nevertheless I do believe that Amazon is missing a trick here, and that just making a few fairly minor tweaks would establish a really effective collaborative network for students and researchers to share notes and quotes, which wouldn't need to carry advertising since the product has already been paid for. That would of course grant Amazon the sort of dominance that the US courts have already refused to Google, but let's not go there...
Astute readers may have noticed that I'm deeply interested in (a nicer way of saying obsessed by) note-taking. This is no coincidence, because all my main occupations - editing the Real World section, writing this column, writing and reviewing books - involve reading the work of others and gathering together important points. Anything that reduces the amount of re-typing required is a bit like the difference between weeding a field of beans using a tea-spoon and using a tractor. Just few years ago my desk groaned under thick hard-back books that bristled like porcupines with small yellow Post-It notes to mark those pages I needed quotes from, or had pencilled margin notes on.
Making notes on a tablet that could sync with my laptop removed the need for those yellow flags, but still left me the job of re-typing the quotes into my own text. (Over the years I'd tried several of those pen-like or roller-like handheld scanners, but none was effective enough to be worth the hassle). No, the logical final step is for the source material I'm reading to be online too, but it's taken until now to arrive there. For the very first time I'm reviewing a book in its Kindle rather than paper edition, which means I can search its full text for relevant phrases and cut-and-paste all the resulting notes and quotes. In theory that is, because it turns out not be quite so simple.
Amazon's Kindle reader software certainly enables you to place bookmarks, highlight passages and make notes, but none of these functions is without its quirks, and the way they work varies between versions. I like to use an actual hardware Kindle when outdoors because it's light, readable in sunlight and has great battery life. Indoors I prefer to read and note-take on my Android tablet, but I write the actual review on my Windows laptop, and all these platforms run different versions of the reader.
First quirk is that the granularity of Kindle bookmarks is too broad, working only to whole page boundaries. When I view Notes & Marks the short extract presented is only the top few lines of that *page*, though my interest might lie further down. Highlights are more useful because then the extract is from the start of the highlighted area, not the whole page. I can attach a note to any single word on a page, but in Notes & Marks only its text appears, so I end up with a cryptic list like "yes", "no", "good", "really?" with no idea what each refers to until I click it and go to that page, which becomes dizzying after a while. The best compromise is to highlight a sentence or paragraph and then attach a note to its first word.
Next quirk: notes, highlights and bookmarks should sync automatically between Kindle, tablet and desktop readers, but notes made on my tablet weren't showing up on the laptop. This matters because I can only cut and paste highlighted quotes from the laptop version, as Kindle and tablet versions have no copy function. Solving this required a stiff yomp through the forums, where sure enough I found an answer - you have to manually sync by hitting that little curly-arrows icon. Still didn't work. More forums and the real answer. You have to hit *not* the sync icon inside the book in question, but the one on the home screen with all books closed. Doh! But it does work.
The last quirk is that you can't run multiple instances of Kindle reader on the same device. It so happens I have another book on my Kindle that's relevant to this review and I'd like to quote from it: have to go out into the library, open other book, find quote, cut-and-paste (but on laptop version only). It would be nice to keep two books open in two instances of Kindle reader on same machine. I really shouldn't grouse too much though, because merely being able to search, make notes and cut-and-paste them has hugely reduced the amount of tedious re-typing involved in the reviewing process, and I also need to remember that Amazon is obliged by copyright and fair-usage to restrict some of these functions (a copyright notice gets placed on every quote I paste, which I delete).
Nevertheless I do believe that Amazon is missing a trick here, and that just making a few fairly minor tweaks would establish a really effective collaborative network for students and researchers to share notes and quotes, which wouldn't need to carry advertising since the product has already been paid for. That would of course grant Amazon the sort of dominance that the US courts have already refused to Google, but let's not go there...
SLEEPY HOLO?
Dick Pountain/ /08 February 2015 12:20/ Idealog237
With the TV news full of crashing airliners, beheadings and artillery bombardments it's hardly surprising that a lot of people wish to escape into a virtual reality that's under their own control, which is becoming ever more possible thanks to recent technology. As Paul Ockenden explained in a recent column, the miniaturised components required for smartphones are precisely those whose lack has been holding back virtual reality for the last couple of decades: displays, graphics processors, high-bandwidth comms and batteries. The embarassing withdrawal of Google's Glass project (no-one wanted to be a glasshole) suggests that gaming remains the principal application for this technology and Microsoft's HoloLens goggles, announced at the Windows 10 launch, merely confirm that Redmond is thinking the same way.
The HoloLens employs unprecedented amounts of mobile GPU power to mix 3D holographic images into your normal field of view, creating an augmented, rather than virtual, reality effect: you see what's really there combined seamlessly with whatever someone wants to insert. It's an exciting development with many implications for future UI design, but it might create some unprecedented problems too, and that's because we already live in a naturally augmented reality. You might think that everything you're seeing right this second is what's "really" there, but in fact much of the peripheral stuff outside your central zone of attention is a semi-static reconstruction of what was there a few seconds ago: like yesterday's TV sets, your eyes lack sufficient bandwidth to live stream HD across their whole field of view. That's because poor old Evolution had no access to silicon, gallium arsenide or metallic conductors and had to make do with warm salty water.
But that's the least of it, because *everything* you see is actually a reconstruction and none of it is directly "live". Your visual cortex reads data from the rods and cones of your retinas, filters this data for light, shade, edges and other features and uses these to identify separate objects. The objects it finds get inserted into a constantly-updated model of the world stored in your brain, and that model is what you're seeing as "really" there, not the raw sense data. Everything is already a reconstruction, which is why we're occasionally prone to see things that aren't there, to hallucinations and optical illusions. (If you're interested, all this stuff is brilliantly explained in Chris Frith's "Making Up The Mind", Blackwell 2007 ).
There's even more. These objects that get accepted into the world model aren't neutral, but like all your memories get a tag indicating your emotional state, in the strict biochemical sense of hormone and neurotransmitter levels, when they were added. This world map in your brain is value-ridden, full of nicer and nastier places and things. You maintain a similar brain model of your own body and its functions, and the US neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes the mystery of consciousness will one day be solved in the way these twin mappings get superimposed and differentially analysed in the brain. (We're still a long, long way from such a solution and the hard road toward it might conceivably just stop, or worse still become a Möbius strip that circles for ever).
Neuroscientists aren't the only people who understand this stuff. Painters, sculptors and movie makers, at least the good ones, know very perfectly well how visual representations and emotions are connected: some spaces like dungeons are just creepy, some faces are admirable, others irritating. A horror movie - let's say Sleepy Hollow, to validate the weak pun in my column title - is already a primitive form of augmented reality. Most of what appears on the screen depicts real stuff like trees, sky, people, furniture, buildings and only a few parts are unnatural CGI creations, but since all are only two-dimensional the brain has no trouble distinguishing them from "real" objects. That will longer be the case with the new holographic 3D augmented reality systems.
The cruder kinds of early VR system I used to write about years ago - those ones where you staggered around in circles wearing a coal-scuttle on your head - suffered noticeable problems with motion-sickness, because the entirely artificial and laggardly background scenery violated the physics of people's inner world models and upset their inner-ear balance. It seems likely that augmented reality systems of the calibre of HoloLens may escape such problems, being utterly physically convincing because their backdrop is reality itself. But what completely unknown disorders might AR provoke? Could AR objects stray out of the perceptual model into memory and become permanent residents of the psyche, like ghosts that people will in effect be haunted by? Will we see epidemics of PLSD (Post-Ludic Stress Disorder)? And as for AR porn, the potential for embarassing encounters doesn't bear thinking about...
With the TV news full of crashing airliners, beheadings and artillery bombardments it's hardly surprising that a lot of people wish to escape into a virtual reality that's under their own control, which is becoming ever more possible thanks to recent technology. As Paul Ockenden explained in a recent column, the miniaturised components required for smartphones are precisely those whose lack has been holding back virtual reality for the last couple of decades: displays, graphics processors, high-bandwidth comms and batteries. The embarassing withdrawal of Google's Glass project (no-one wanted to be a glasshole) suggests that gaming remains the principal application for this technology and Microsoft's HoloLens goggles, announced at the Windows 10 launch, merely confirm that Redmond is thinking the same way.
The HoloLens employs unprecedented amounts of mobile GPU power to mix 3D holographic images into your normal field of view, creating an augmented, rather than virtual, reality effect: you see what's really there combined seamlessly with whatever someone wants to insert. It's an exciting development with many implications for future UI design, but it might create some unprecedented problems too, and that's because we already live in a naturally augmented reality. You might think that everything you're seeing right this second is what's "really" there, but in fact much of the peripheral stuff outside your central zone of attention is a semi-static reconstruction of what was there a few seconds ago: like yesterday's TV sets, your eyes lack sufficient bandwidth to live stream HD across their whole field of view. That's because poor old Evolution had no access to silicon, gallium arsenide or metallic conductors and had to make do with warm salty water.
But that's the least of it, because *everything* you see is actually a reconstruction and none of it is directly "live". Your visual cortex reads data from the rods and cones of your retinas, filters this data for light, shade, edges and other features and uses these to identify separate objects. The objects it finds get inserted into a constantly-updated model of the world stored in your brain, and that model is what you're seeing as "really" there, not the raw sense data. Everything is already a reconstruction, which is why we're occasionally prone to see things that aren't there, to hallucinations and optical illusions. (If you're interested, all this stuff is brilliantly explained in Chris Frith's "Making Up The Mind", Blackwell 2007 ).
There's even more. These objects that get accepted into the world model aren't neutral, but like all your memories get a tag indicating your emotional state, in the strict biochemical sense of hormone and neurotransmitter levels, when they were added. This world map in your brain is value-ridden, full of nicer and nastier places and things. You maintain a similar brain model of your own body and its functions, and the US neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes the mystery of consciousness will one day be solved in the way these twin mappings get superimposed and differentially analysed in the brain. (We're still a long, long way from such a solution and the hard road toward it might conceivably just stop, or worse still become a Möbius strip that circles for ever).
Neuroscientists aren't the only people who understand this stuff. Painters, sculptors and movie makers, at least the good ones, know very perfectly well how visual representations and emotions are connected: some spaces like dungeons are just creepy, some faces are admirable, others irritating. A horror movie - let's say Sleepy Hollow, to validate the weak pun in my column title - is already a primitive form of augmented reality. Most of what appears on the screen depicts real stuff like trees, sky, people, furniture, buildings and only a few parts are unnatural CGI creations, but since all are only two-dimensional the brain has no trouble distinguishing them from "real" objects. That will longer be the case with the new holographic 3D augmented reality systems.
The cruder kinds of early VR system I used to write about years ago - those ones where you staggered around in circles wearing a coal-scuttle on your head - suffered noticeable problems with motion-sickness, because the entirely artificial and laggardly background scenery violated the physics of people's inner world models and upset their inner-ear balance. It seems likely that augmented reality systems of the calibre of HoloLens may escape such problems, being utterly physically convincing because their backdrop is reality itself. But what completely unknown disorders might AR provoke? Could AR objects stray out of the perceptual model into memory and become permanent residents of the psyche, like ghosts that people will in effect be haunted by? Will we see epidemics of PLSD (Post-Ludic Stress Disorder)? And as for AR porn, the potential for embarassing encounters doesn't bear thinking about...
Wednesday, 1 July 2015
TRIX WITH PIX
Dick Pountain/Idealog 246/06 January 2015 14:05
My major digital pastime has for several years now been photography rather than programming: reading my profile reminds me I joined Flickr eight years ago and have now posted 1500+ pictures there (www.flickr.com/photos/dick_pountain/). The digital imaging market has been through a technical revolution during those years, and now faces what tech gurus love to call "disruption" thanks to the mobile phone. A whole generation now prefers their mobile to a proper camera, and phones' performance has improved extraordinarily by incorporating sensors and image processors from real camera manufacturers like Sony. Camera makers are striking back with gorgeous-looking retro designs that recall the golden age of the Leica, fitted with huge sensors, fixed "prime" lens and astounding image quality - and premium £1000+ prices aimed at separating "real photographers" from selfie-snappers.
As for me I've resisted both these trends. I started out posting mostly travel pics, street photos and landscapes, over-sharpening and saturation-boosting them to match the approved Flickr aesthetic, but in recent years I've become more and more interested in post-processing photos to make them more like paintings (abstract or otherwise). There are plenty of software tools available nowadays to spice up photos - some like Google's Nik Collection of plug-in filters for Photoshop and Light Room are very good indeed - but I'm less interested in buffing up my pics than in dismantling and reconstructing them completely. And my chosen tool is therefore, er, Photoshop Elements version 5. This ancient version lacks all the smart cut-out and similar features of later versions, and many abilities of full Photoshop, but it has all I want which is basically layers, blend modes and a handful of filters.
My modus operandi is as eccentric as my choice of platform. I perform long sequences of operations on each picture, duplicating and saving layers, tinting, filtering and blending them in different modes, but rather than write down this sequence so I can repeat it I deliberately do *not* do that. I merely watch the continually changing image until I like it well enough to stop. I can never repeat exactly that effect again, which I've convinced myself makes it "art" rather than mere processing, just as an oil painting can never be exactly repeated. Doing this so many times has given me a fairly deep grasp of how pictures are made up, about manipulating different levels of detail and tonality. One of my favourite filters is High Pass, which can separate out different levels of detail so that you can enhance or remove just that level. Another favourite trick is mixing some percentage of an outrageously processed image back into the original to temper the effect and make it more subtle.
In view of all my coal-face experience of the internal makeup of digital pictures, I was interested to hear about a joint project by GCHQ and the National Crime Agency (NCA), announced in December 2014 by PM Cameron, to deploy new recognition algorithms for identifying online pictures of child abuse, to aid in their prosecution. The press release said these algorithms are "hash based": that is, they process the bitstream of a digital picture to reduce it to a single number that becomes a "fingerprint" of that picture. Such fingerprinting is essential for evidence to be acceptable legally: it's necessary to prove that a picture confiscated from some offender is the same as one obtained from someone else, and obviously filenames are of no use as they're only loosely attached properties that can be easily changed.
The US website Federal Evidence Review suggests an algorithm called SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm version 1) is in use for this purpose, but it appears to me that algorithm is designed for use on texts, gun serial numbers and other alphanumeric data sets, and I can hardly believe it would generate useable hashes from bitmapped images whose contrast, saturation, sharpness and so on may have been altered - either deliberately during enhancement, or merely by accident through repeated sloppy copying of JPEGs. Pictures that are perceptually similar might have bitstreams quite different enough to change the hash.
I'd guess that content analysis, not merely hashing the bits, will be needed to prove the identity of two versions of any bitmapped image. Face recognition is well advanced nowadays (recent compact cameras can even distinguish smiles) and so is dissection of bitmaps into separate objects in Photoshop. It would remain challenging to create a unique hash from the collection of persons, furniture and stuff isolated from each picture, and oddly enough it's in fine art rather than criminology that the required expertise is most advanced. Iconclass is a hierarchical notation developed by Dutch painting scholars for cataloguing unique configurations of picture elements, and what's needed is something similar for far less salubrious subject matter.
My major digital pastime has for several years now been photography rather than programming: reading my profile reminds me I joined Flickr eight years ago and have now posted 1500+ pictures there (www.flickr.com/photos/dick_pountain/). The digital imaging market has been through a technical revolution during those years, and now faces what tech gurus love to call "disruption" thanks to the mobile phone. A whole generation now prefers their mobile to a proper camera, and phones' performance has improved extraordinarily by incorporating sensors and image processors from real camera manufacturers like Sony. Camera makers are striking back with gorgeous-looking retro designs that recall the golden age of the Leica, fitted with huge sensors, fixed "prime" lens and astounding image quality - and premium £1000+ prices aimed at separating "real photographers" from selfie-snappers.
As for me I've resisted both these trends. I started out posting mostly travel pics, street photos and landscapes, over-sharpening and saturation-boosting them to match the approved Flickr aesthetic, but in recent years I've become more and more interested in post-processing photos to make them more like paintings (abstract or otherwise). There are plenty of software tools available nowadays to spice up photos - some like Google's Nik Collection of plug-in filters for Photoshop and Light Room are very good indeed - but I'm less interested in buffing up my pics than in dismantling and reconstructing them completely. And my chosen tool is therefore, er, Photoshop Elements version 5. This ancient version lacks all the smart cut-out and similar features of later versions, and many abilities of full Photoshop, but it has all I want which is basically layers, blend modes and a handful of filters.
My modus operandi is as eccentric as my choice of platform. I perform long sequences of operations on each picture, duplicating and saving layers, tinting, filtering and blending them in different modes, but rather than write down this sequence so I can repeat it I deliberately do *not* do that. I merely watch the continually changing image until I like it well enough to stop. I can never repeat exactly that effect again, which I've convinced myself makes it "art" rather than mere processing, just as an oil painting can never be exactly repeated. Doing this so many times has given me a fairly deep grasp of how pictures are made up, about manipulating different levels of detail and tonality. One of my favourite filters is High Pass, which can separate out different levels of detail so that you can enhance or remove just that level. Another favourite trick is mixing some percentage of an outrageously processed image back into the original to temper the effect and make it more subtle.
In view of all my coal-face experience of the internal makeup of digital pictures, I was interested to hear about a joint project by GCHQ and the National Crime Agency (NCA), announced in December 2014 by PM Cameron, to deploy new recognition algorithms for identifying online pictures of child abuse, to aid in their prosecution. The press release said these algorithms are "hash based": that is, they process the bitstream of a digital picture to reduce it to a single number that becomes a "fingerprint" of that picture. Such fingerprinting is essential for evidence to be acceptable legally: it's necessary to prove that a picture confiscated from some offender is the same as one obtained from someone else, and obviously filenames are of no use as they're only loosely attached properties that can be easily changed.
The US website Federal Evidence Review suggests an algorithm called SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm version 1) is in use for this purpose, but it appears to me that algorithm is designed for use on texts, gun serial numbers and other alphanumeric data sets, and I can hardly believe it would generate useable hashes from bitmapped images whose contrast, saturation, sharpness and so on may have been altered - either deliberately during enhancement, or merely by accident through repeated sloppy copying of JPEGs. Pictures that are perceptually similar might have bitstreams quite different enough to change the hash.
I'd guess that content analysis, not merely hashing the bits, will be needed to prove the identity of two versions of any bitmapped image. Face recognition is well advanced nowadays (recent compact cameras can even distinguish smiles) and so is dissection of bitmaps into separate objects in Photoshop. It would remain challenging to create a unique hash from the collection of persons, furniture and stuff isolated from each picture, and oddly enough it's in fine art rather than criminology that the required expertise is most advanced. Iconclass is a hierarchical notation developed by Dutch painting scholars for cataloguing unique configurations of picture elements, and what's needed is something similar for far less salubrious subject matter.
THE EMOTION GAME
Dick Pountain/Idealog 245/05 December 2014 11:02
In Viewpoints last month Nicole Kobie fairly skewered ("Good at PCs? It doesn't mean you're bad with people") Hollywood's sloppy assumption that Alan Turing must have been autistic because he was a mathematical genius who didn't like girls. I almost didn't go to see "The Imitation Game" for a different reason - the sensational trailer that seemed to be trying to recruit Turing into the James Bond franchise - but I forced myself and was pleasantly surprised that although it took some liberties with the facts, it did grippingly convey the significance of Bletchley Park to the war effort. The movie's major "economy with the truth" lay in excluding GPO engineer Tommy Flowers, who actually built the kit and wrestled with those wiring looms that Turing was portrayed as doing alone. (It also lumped together two generations of hardware, the "Bombes" and Colossus, and barely even attempted to explain Turing's seminal paper on computable numbers, but those I excuse as they'd have hugely slowed the pace).
The film doesn't mention Asperger Syndrome - just as well since it was unknown in Turing's lifetime, and we now have to call it autistic spectrum disorder anyway - but as Nicole pointed out Cumberbatch's depiction of Turing was clearly based on modern notions about the stunting of emotional expression and social interaction that comprise that disorder. The plot depends heavily upon Turing overcoming the dislike his coldness provokes in the other team members, assisted of course by the token emotionally-literate woman played by Keira Knightley, and the tragic ending shows Turing being chemically castrated by injections of female hormone. And that combination of emotions with hormones set me off to read between the lines of The Imitation Game's script to a deeper meaning which the writer may or may not have intended.
The film is named after a test of machine intelligence that Turing invented, in which the machine must try to imitate human conversation sufficiently well to fool another human being, on the assumption that language is the highest attribute of human reason. However recent research in Affective Neuroscience has revealed the astonishing extent to which reason and emotion are totally entangled in the human mind. The weakness of the whole AI project, of which Turing was a pioneer, lies in failing to recognise this, in its continuing attachment to 18th-century notions of rationalism. Those parts of our brain that manipulate language and symbols are far from being in ultimate control, and are more like our mind's display than its CPU. I am, therefore I think, some of the time. US neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp has uncovered a collection of separate emotional operating systems in the brain's limbic system, each employing a different set of neurotransmitters and hormones. These monitor and modulate all our sensory inputs and behaviour, the most familiar examples being sexual arousal (testosterone and others), fight/flight (adrenaline) and maternal bonding (oxytocin), but there are at least four more and counting. What's more it's now clear that motivation itself is under the control of the dopamine reward system: we can't do *anything* without it, and its failure leads to Parkinsonism and worse. Now add to this the findings of Antonio Damasio, who claims all our memories get tagged with the emotional state that prevailed at the time they were recorded, and that our reasoning abilities employ these tags as weightings when making all decisions.
These lines of study suggest two things: firstly all rationalist AI is doomed to fail because the meaning of human discourse is permeated through and through with emotion (if you think about it, that's why we had to invent computer languages, to exclude such content); and secondly AI-based robots will never become wholly convincing until they mimic not only our symbolic reasoning system but also our hormonally-based emotional systems. Sci-fi authors have known this for ever hence their invention of biological androids like those in Bladerunner, with real bodies that mean they have something at stake - avoiding death, finding dinner and a mate (a bit like the IT Crowd). Steven Hawking's recent grim warnings about AI dooming our species should be tempered by these considerations: however "smart" machines get at calculating, manipulating and moving, their actual *goals* still have to be set by humans, and it's those humans we need to worry about.
So as well as a great deal of pleasure from its serious treatment of Turing, the two big lessons I took away from The Imitation Game were these: machines will never be truly intelligent until they can feel as well as think (which would depend as much on advances in biology as solid-state physics and software engineering); and it would be nice if they were to start planning an "Imitation Game 2: The Tommy Flowers Story".
In Viewpoints last month Nicole Kobie fairly skewered ("Good at PCs? It doesn't mean you're bad with people") Hollywood's sloppy assumption that Alan Turing must have been autistic because he was a mathematical genius who didn't like girls. I almost didn't go to see "The Imitation Game" for a different reason - the sensational trailer that seemed to be trying to recruit Turing into the James Bond franchise - but I forced myself and was pleasantly surprised that although it took some liberties with the facts, it did grippingly convey the significance of Bletchley Park to the war effort. The movie's major "economy with the truth" lay in excluding GPO engineer Tommy Flowers, who actually built the kit and wrestled with those wiring looms that Turing was portrayed as doing alone. (It also lumped together two generations of hardware, the "Bombes" and Colossus, and barely even attempted to explain Turing's seminal paper on computable numbers, but those I excuse as they'd have hugely slowed the pace).
The film doesn't mention Asperger Syndrome - just as well since it was unknown in Turing's lifetime, and we now have to call it autistic spectrum disorder anyway - but as Nicole pointed out Cumberbatch's depiction of Turing was clearly based on modern notions about the stunting of emotional expression and social interaction that comprise that disorder. The plot depends heavily upon Turing overcoming the dislike his coldness provokes in the other team members, assisted of course by the token emotionally-literate woman played by Keira Knightley, and the tragic ending shows Turing being chemically castrated by injections of female hormone. And that combination of emotions with hormones set me off to read between the lines of The Imitation Game's script to a deeper meaning which the writer may or may not have intended.
The film is named after a test of machine intelligence that Turing invented, in which the machine must try to imitate human conversation sufficiently well to fool another human being, on the assumption that language is the highest attribute of human reason. However recent research in Affective Neuroscience has revealed the astonishing extent to which reason and emotion are totally entangled in the human mind. The weakness of the whole AI project, of which Turing was a pioneer, lies in failing to recognise this, in its continuing attachment to 18th-century notions of rationalism. Those parts of our brain that manipulate language and symbols are far from being in ultimate control, and are more like our mind's display than its CPU. I am, therefore I think, some of the time. US neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp has uncovered a collection of separate emotional operating systems in the brain's limbic system, each employing a different set of neurotransmitters and hormones. These monitor and modulate all our sensory inputs and behaviour, the most familiar examples being sexual arousal (testosterone and others), fight/flight (adrenaline) and maternal bonding (oxytocin), but there are at least four more and counting. What's more it's now clear that motivation itself is under the control of the dopamine reward system: we can't do *anything* without it, and its failure leads to Parkinsonism and worse. Now add to this the findings of Antonio Damasio, who claims all our memories get tagged with the emotional state that prevailed at the time they were recorded, and that our reasoning abilities employ these tags as weightings when making all decisions.
These lines of study suggest two things: firstly all rationalist AI is doomed to fail because the meaning of human discourse is permeated through and through with emotion (if you think about it, that's why we had to invent computer languages, to exclude such content); and secondly AI-based robots will never become wholly convincing until they mimic not only our symbolic reasoning system but also our hormonally-based emotional systems. Sci-fi authors have known this for ever hence their invention of biological androids like those in Bladerunner, with real bodies that mean they have something at stake - avoiding death, finding dinner and a mate (a bit like the IT Crowd). Steven Hawking's recent grim warnings about AI dooming our species should be tempered by these considerations: however "smart" machines get at calculating, manipulating and moving, their actual *goals* still have to be set by humans, and it's those humans we need to worry about.
So as well as a great deal of pleasure from its serious treatment of Turing, the two big lessons I took away from The Imitation Game were these: machines will never be truly intelligent until they can feel as well as think (which would depend as much on advances in biology as solid-state physics and software engineering); and it would be nice if they were to start planning an "Imitation Game 2: The Tommy Flowers Story".
Wednesday, 8 April 2015
TELE-ABSENCE
Dick Pountain/Idealog 244/06 November 2014 10:04
Hello. My name is Dick Pountain and I'm a Flickrholic. Instead of interacting normally with other human beings, I spend too many hours slumped at the computer, Photoshopping photographs I took earlier to make them look like mad paintings (www.flickr.com/photos/dick_pountain). Then I fritter away my remaining time probing the complete works of Bill Frissell, Brandt Bauer Frick and Bartok on that notorious online service Spotify (a villainous outfit which steals food from the mouths of Taylor Swift and Chris Martin). For a while I was a Multiple-Service Abuser, enslaved also to the hideous FaceBook, but that addiction cured itself once the user experience deteriorated to a point where it turned into Aversion Therapy. Yes folks, it's official, the internet is bad for all of us. In South Korea you can get sent on a cure. Here the Guardian runs stories every other day about how it's driving all our young folk into mental illness: cyber-bullying, trolling, sexting, and ultra-hard-core violent porn. We all live in terror of having our identities stolen, our bank accounts drained, or our local sewage works switched into reverse gear by shadowy global hacker gangs.
I'm going to exit heavy-sarcasm mode now, because though all these threats do get magnified grotesquely by our circulation-mad media, there's more than a pinch of truth to them, and mocking does little to help. An anti-digital backlash is stirring from many different directions. In a recent interview Christopher Nolan - director of sci-fi blockbuster Interstellar - expressed his growing dissatisfaction with digital video. Obsessive about picture quality, he feels he can't guarantee it with digital output (the exact opposite of orthodox opinion): “This is why I prefer film to digital [..] It’s a physical object that you create, that you agree upon. The print that I have approved when I take it from here to New York and I put it on a different projector in New York, if it looks too blue, I know the projector has a problem with its mirror or its ball or whatever. Those kind of controls aren’t really possible in the digital realm.” Or consider Elon Musk, almost a God among technophiles, who's recently taken to warning about the danger that AI might spawn unstoppable destructive forces (he compared it to "summoning the demon"), and this from a man who invests in AI.
What all these problems have in common is that they occur at the borderline between physical reality and its digital representation. My Flickr addiction is pretty harmless because it's just pictures (pace Chris Nolan's critique), while Musk's fears become real when AI systems act upon the real world, say by guiding a drone or a driverless car, or controlling some vast industrial plant. And the problem has two complementary aspects. Firstly, people continue to confuse the properties of digital representations with the things they depict. I can repaint my neighbour's Volkswagen in 5 minutes in Photoshop, but on his real car it would take several hours, a lot of mess, and he'd thump me for doing it without permission. Secondly too much absorption in digital representations steals people's attention away from the real world. As I wander around Camden Town nowadays I'm struck by the universal body-language of the lowered head peering into a smartphone - while walking, while sitting, while eating, even while talking to someone else.
If you want a name for this problem then "tele-absence" (the downside of telepresence) might do, and it's problematic because evolution, both physical and cultural, has equipped us to depend on the physical presence of other people in order to behave morally. The controller of a remote drone strike sleeps sounder at night than he would if he'd killed those same people face-to-face with an M4 carbine: the internet troll who threatens a celebrity with rape and murder wouldn't say it to her face. And "face" is the operative word here, as the Chinese have understood for several thousands of years (and Mark Zuckerberg rediscovered more recently).
Maintaining "face" is crucial to our sense of self, and "loss of face" something we make great efforts to avoid. But we can't make face entirely by ourselves: it's largely bestowed onto us by other people, according to the conscious and unconscious rules of our particular society. Tele-absence robs us of most of the cues that great theorist of social interaction, Erving Goffman, listed as "a multitude of words, gestures, acts and minor events". We've barely begun to understand the ways that's changing our behaviour, which is why criminalising trolling or abolishing online anonymity are unlikely to succeed. Safety lies in hanging out online with people of similar interests (Flickr for me), but at the cost of reinforcing an already scary tendency toward social fragmentation.
[Dick Pountain sometimes wishes his shaving mirror supported Photoshop's Pinch filter]
Hello. My name is Dick Pountain and I'm a Flickrholic. Instead of interacting normally with other human beings, I spend too many hours slumped at the computer, Photoshopping photographs I took earlier to make them look like mad paintings (www.flickr.com/photos/dick_pountain). Then I fritter away my remaining time probing the complete works of Bill Frissell, Brandt Bauer Frick and Bartok on that notorious online service Spotify (a villainous outfit which steals food from the mouths of Taylor Swift and Chris Martin). For a while I was a Multiple-Service Abuser, enslaved also to the hideous FaceBook, but that addiction cured itself once the user experience deteriorated to a point where it turned into Aversion Therapy. Yes folks, it's official, the internet is bad for all of us. In South Korea you can get sent on a cure. Here the Guardian runs stories every other day about how it's driving all our young folk into mental illness: cyber-bullying, trolling, sexting, and ultra-hard-core violent porn. We all live in terror of having our identities stolen, our bank accounts drained, or our local sewage works switched into reverse gear by shadowy global hacker gangs.
I'm going to exit heavy-sarcasm mode now, because though all these threats do get magnified grotesquely by our circulation-mad media, there's more than a pinch of truth to them, and mocking does little to help. An anti-digital backlash is stirring from many different directions. In a recent interview Christopher Nolan - director of sci-fi blockbuster Interstellar - expressed his growing dissatisfaction with digital video. Obsessive about picture quality, he feels he can't guarantee it with digital output (the exact opposite of orthodox opinion): “This is why I prefer film to digital [..] It’s a physical object that you create, that you agree upon. The print that I have approved when I take it from here to New York and I put it on a different projector in New York, if it looks too blue, I know the projector has a problem with its mirror or its ball or whatever. Those kind of controls aren’t really possible in the digital realm.” Or consider Elon Musk, almost a God among technophiles, who's recently taken to warning about the danger that AI might spawn unstoppable destructive forces (he compared it to "summoning the demon"), and this from a man who invests in AI.
What all these problems have in common is that they occur at the borderline between physical reality and its digital representation. My Flickr addiction is pretty harmless because it's just pictures (pace Chris Nolan's critique), while Musk's fears become real when AI systems act upon the real world, say by guiding a drone or a driverless car, or controlling some vast industrial plant. And the problem has two complementary aspects. Firstly, people continue to confuse the properties of digital representations with the things they depict. I can repaint my neighbour's Volkswagen in 5 minutes in Photoshop, but on his real car it would take several hours, a lot of mess, and he'd thump me for doing it without permission. Secondly too much absorption in digital representations steals people's attention away from the real world. As I wander around Camden Town nowadays I'm struck by the universal body-language of the lowered head peering into a smartphone - while walking, while sitting, while eating, even while talking to someone else.
If you want a name for this problem then "tele-absence" (the downside of telepresence) might do, and it's problematic because evolution, both physical and cultural, has equipped us to depend on the physical presence of other people in order to behave morally. The controller of a remote drone strike sleeps sounder at night than he would if he'd killed those same people face-to-face with an M4 carbine: the internet troll who threatens a celebrity with rape and murder wouldn't say it to her face. And "face" is the operative word here, as the Chinese have understood for several thousands of years (and Mark Zuckerberg rediscovered more recently).
Maintaining "face" is crucial to our sense of self, and "loss of face" something we make great efforts to avoid. But we can't make face entirely by ourselves: it's largely bestowed onto us by other people, according to the conscious and unconscious rules of our particular society. Tele-absence robs us of most of the cues that great theorist of social interaction, Erving Goffman, listed as "a multitude of words, gestures, acts and minor events". We've barely begun to understand the ways that's changing our behaviour, which is why criminalising trolling or abolishing online anonymity are unlikely to succeed. Safety lies in hanging out online with people of similar interests (Flickr for me), but at the cost of reinforcing an already scary tendency toward social fragmentation.
[Dick Pountain sometimes wishes his shaving mirror supported Photoshop's Pinch filter]
YOUR INPUT IS ALWAYS WELCOME
Dick Pountain/Idealog 243/10 October 2014 15:42
Last month I wrote here about my recent infatuation with voice input in Google Keep, and now this month Jon Honeyball's column discovers a web source for vintage and superior keyboards. For consumers of media content output may be the more interesting topic (my display is higher-res than yours, my sound is higher-fi than yours) but we at the coalface who have to produce content have a far deeper interest in input methods.
It was ever thus. During my first flirtations with the underground press in the 1970s I used to write my copy longhand with a Bic ballpoint pen and hand it straight to Caroline, our stoical typesetter. Upon elevation (?) to the IT biz on PCW I was firmly told by our late, lamented chief Felix Dennis that he wasn't having any editors who wrote longhand, and so he'd signed me up for a Sight & Sound course. That was perhaps the most surreal week of my life, huddled in a darkened room at a manual Imperial typewriter with blanked-out yellow keys (pressing Shift was like lifting a house-brick with your little finger) touch-typing endless streams of nonsense words. I emerged capable of 35 words per minute, then graduated immediately to a CP/M computer running Wordstar and thus bypassed the typewriter era altogether.
In those days computer keyboards were modelled on mainframe terminals, with deep shiny plastic keys with inlaid characters on their caps, satisfying travel, resistance and click. They had few special keys besides Esc (which CP/M didn't recognise anyway). After that keyboards slithered down two separate hills: in 1982 Clive Sinclair launched the Spectrum with its ghastly squashy keys, probably made by Wrigleys, which became the archetype for all cheap keyboards to the present day; then in 1985 IBM launched the PC XT whose keys and layout largely persist on Windows computers today, Ctrl, Alt, function and Arrow keys and the rest. Jon remembers the IBM AT keyboard fondly as something of a cast-iron bruiser, but I had one that made it look quite flimsy, the Keytronic 5151 (http://blog.modernmechanix.com/your-system-deserves-the-best/). This brute, the size of an ironing board and weight of a small anvil, corrected certain dubious choices IBM had made by providing full-width shift keys, separate numeric and cursor keypads, and function keys along the top where they belong. I loved it, typed several books on it, and kept it until the PS/2 protocol made it redundant in the early 1990s.
It was around then that I suffered my one and only bout of RSI, brought on largely by the newfangled mouse in Windows 3. I fixed it using a properly adjustable typist's chair, wrist rests, and a remarkable German keyboard I found while covering the 1993 CeBIT show, Marquart's Mini-Ergo (see http://deskthority.net/wiki/Marquardt_Mini-Ergo). It was the first commercial split-keypad design, with twin spacebars and a curious lozenge shape reminiscent of a stealth bomber or a stingray. Marvellous to type on, and I carried on using it until I gave up desktop PCs and bought my first ThinkPad (a definite step backwards input-wise). Since then it's been all downhill, at increasing speed. My various successive laptops have had shallower and shallower chiclet-style keys (for added slimness), with less and less feel and travel. My latest Lenovo Yoga compounds the offence by making the function keys require a Fn shift. And on every laptop I've had since that first ThinkPad, the key labels for Right Arrow and A have soon worn off, being merely painted on.
What to do? On-screen tablet keyboards, however large they may become, have little appeal, even though I've gotten pretty quick nowadays at Google's gesture/swipe typing. And I most definitely *won't* be going back to writing in longhand. I may have been one of the earliest Palm Pilot adopters, and I may indeed run Grafitti Pro on both my Android phone and tablet, but writing with a finger is tiring and those pens with squashy sponge tips are pretty horrible. But another, possibly eccentric, solution just occurred to me. It was while ambling through the seething online casbah that is Amazon's Cabling and Adapters section that I discovered, for £1.99 an AT-to-PS2 adapter, followed by a small black box that's a PS2-to-Bluetooth converter (for another £19). It struck me that these two gizmos put together should enable me to use either my Keytronic or Marquart keyboards with all my current devices, phone, tablet and Yoga PC. How amusing it would look to deploy the Yoga in its "tent" configuration as a monitor. Best of all, this arrangement might provide me with plenty to do on cold, dark winter evenings, trying to get a bloody £ sign in place of the #, just like the good old days...
Last month I wrote here about my recent infatuation with voice input in Google Keep, and now this month Jon Honeyball's column discovers a web source for vintage and superior keyboards. For consumers of media content output may be the more interesting topic (my display is higher-res than yours, my sound is higher-fi than yours) but we at the coalface who have to produce content have a far deeper interest in input methods.
It was ever thus. During my first flirtations with the underground press in the 1970s I used to write my copy longhand with a Bic ballpoint pen and hand it straight to Caroline, our stoical typesetter. Upon elevation (?) to the IT biz on PCW I was firmly told by our late, lamented chief Felix Dennis that he wasn't having any editors who wrote longhand, and so he'd signed me up for a Sight & Sound course. That was perhaps the most surreal week of my life, huddled in a darkened room at a manual Imperial typewriter with blanked-out yellow keys (pressing Shift was like lifting a house-brick with your little finger) touch-typing endless streams of nonsense words. I emerged capable of 35 words per minute, then graduated immediately to a CP/M computer running Wordstar and thus bypassed the typewriter era altogether.
In those days computer keyboards were modelled on mainframe terminals, with deep shiny plastic keys with inlaid characters on their caps, satisfying travel, resistance and click. They had few special keys besides Esc (which CP/M didn't recognise anyway). After that keyboards slithered down two separate hills: in 1982 Clive Sinclair launched the Spectrum with its ghastly squashy keys, probably made by Wrigleys, which became the archetype for all cheap keyboards to the present day; then in 1985 IBM launched the PC XT whose keys and layout largely persist on Windows computers today, Ctrl, Alt, function and Arrow keys and the rest. Jon remembers the IBM AT keyboard fondly as something of a cast-iron bruiser, but I had one that made it look quite flimsy, the Keytronic 5151 (http://blog.modernmechanix.com/your-system-deserves-the-best/). This brute, the size of an ironing board and weight of a small anvil, corrected certain dubious choices IBM had made by providing full-width shift keys, separate numeric and cursor keypads, and function keys along the top where they belong. I loved it, typed several books on it, and kept it until the PS/2 protocol made it redundant in the early 1990s.
It was around then that I suffered my one and only bout of RSI, brought on largely by the newfangled mouse in Windows 3. I fixed it using a properly adjustable typist's chair, wrist rests, and a remarkable German keyboard I found while covering the 1993 CeBIT show, Marquart's Mini-Ergo (see http://deskthority.net/wiki/Marquardt_Mini-Ergo). It was the first commercial split-keypad design, with twin spacebars and a curious lozenge shape reminiscent of a stealth bomber or a stingray. Marvellous to type on, and I carried on using it until I gave up desktop PCs and bought my first ThinkPad (a definite step backwards input-wise). Since then it's been all downhill, at increasing speed. My various successive laptops have had shallower and shallower chiclet-style keys (for added slimness), with less and less feel and travel. My latest Lenovo Yoga compounds the offence by making the function keys require a Fn shift. And on every laptop I've had since that first ThinkPad, the key labels for Right Arrow and A have soon worn off, being merely painted on.
What to do? On-screen tablet keyboards, however large they may become, have little appeal, even though I've gotten pretty quick nowadays at Google's gesture/swipe typing. And I most definitely *won't* be going back to writing in longhand. I may have been one of the earliest Palm Pilot adopters, and I may indeed run Grafitti Pro on both my Android phone and tablet, but writing with a finger is tiring and those pens with squashy sponge tips are pretty horrible. But another, possibly eccentric, solution just occurred to me. It was while ambling through the seething online casbah that is Amazon's Cabling and Adapters section that I discovered, for £1.99 an AT-to-PS2 adapter, followed by a small black box that's a PS2-to-Bluetooth converter (for another £19). It struck me that these two gizmos put together should enable me to use either my Keytronic or Marquart keyboards with all my current devices, phone, tablet and Yoga PC. How amusing it would look to deploy the Yoga in its "tent" configuration as a monitor. Best of all, this arrangement might provide me with plenty to do on cold, dark winter evenings, trying to get a bloody £ sign in place of the #, just like the good old days...
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