November 2006

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Rise of soft news: on feeling more and knowing less

November 29, 2006 in Media | Permalink

Meaning of the phrase “hard news” and its tendentious complement “soft news” has changed dramatically over the past few decades. News is treacherously hard to define in an age when issues like L’affaire Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are regularly covered in “hard news” programs and when “turkey contests” are adjudicated within a news program right after news about homicides. (Fox News, 10/26/06, Morning News Programming)

Soft news items have increasingly proliferated hard news programming in the past few decades. Aside from content, news programming has also been transformed stylistically since the advent of cable, and now features production ploys (and values) that are reminiscent of entertainment, for example use of sound and graphics in major news programs. It is disconcerting that shows like Bill O Reilly’s eponymous O’Reilly factor, which use confrontation and group identity rituals to entertain their audiences and feature topics like “war of Christmas”, have become the staple of hard news. It is also important to note that soft news is not limited to television but pervades other forms of media. Pew researchers found in 2004 that 17% of the public regularly listens to talk radio. While the true numbers for definable soft news items may be contested, the content and style of hard news has unarguably shifted towards soft news.

Let’s train our attention towards understanding the reasons behind the rise of soft news. The rise of soft news has generally been understood as a result of twin economic pressures to lower production costs for news, and increase audience (for basically the same information). The latter half of the argument is predicated on the assumption, which appears to be true, that majority of the audience members in US like to be entertained by news. The popularity of entertainment news, a sub-section of soft news, can also be understood as a function of economy. In particular, information about celebrities has become increasingly important for social intercourse with friends, family and colleagues at work. Given the salience of entertainment news in social intercourse, it is but natural that people will pay more attention to entertainment information. In a related point, one can also look at rise in entertainment news as a reflection of the fundamental shift in economy, from an economy where significant value addition happened in production to where significant value addition happens during marketing. Given that celebrities are often pioneer new fashion trends and early adopters of lifestyle gadgets, the focus on celebrities can be seen as a ploy to sell more things. Other researchers have argued that the popularity of soft news stems from the dry, pompous, elitist model of hard news that resorted to intellectualizing rather than present stories with human interest.

Given the proliferation of soft news, it is important to understand if/how it affects its consumers. As I argued above, rise in consumption of soft news may lead to a rise in consumerism. Consumption of soft news can also have significant political effects. To understand those effects fully, we must carefully analyze how soft news differs from hard news.

One significant way in which soft news differs from hard news is that “soft news coverage of political issues is far less diverse than that of hard news,” according to Matthew Baum, professor of political science at UCLA. Soft news coverage is generally dominated by topics like crime, in particular violent crime, with frequency that overstates the true frequency and salience. The preponderance of crime stories leads to two related misconceptions – firstly that the problem is larger than it actually is and secondly that the problem is more important than it actually is.

Researchers have argued that using stored heuristic cues, people can form opinions that reflect their ‘true opinion’ or opinions formed with full information. Assuming that this form of reasoning is the dominant form of reasoning, it is important to make sure that rich heuristic cues, based on sound information, are created which can then be used later to form internally consistent opinions. It seems natural that hard news programming, which provides more facts, will help produce richer, more differentiated, heuristic cues. Heuristic cues triggered by hard news have been shown to have a shorter shelf life than ones produced by soft news. By enhancing the shelf life of heuristic cues, soft news is at one level increasing the shelf life of information but it is doing so by compromising the richness (context, variegated meaning) of information. In short heuristic cues produced by soft news leave people ‘feeling’ they know more than they actually do.

Another major way in which soft news differs from hard news is that “the soft news media almost never employ thematic (context along with news) frames”, according to Prof. Baum. and instead relies on episodic (event based) framing. Shanto Iyengar, professor of communication at Stanford University, argues that episodic framing doesn’t let people trace the arc of responsibility behind the episodes and hence doesn’t give people information about where/whom to attribute accountability. This is a severe limitation for soft news for it hampers the key use of information accrual by a citizen in a democracy – to demand accountability. Combining the above two points, one may argue that not only are soft news consumers thinking (or shall I say feeling) about issues in a ‘wrong way’ but they are focusing their attention on ‘wrong’ issues. As a side note, thematic coverage can be problematic in its own way by providing stereotypic understanding of an issue. In addition, partisan and simplistic thematic coverage can lead to misplaced attribution. Thematic coverage of an issue provides a blanket narrative of an issue that can discourage people from digging deeper into the issues or accept alternate theories that may explain the issue.

On the flip side, one can argue that soft news can in fact be used to inculcate better citizenry. For example, Researchers have shown that people who saw progressive drama where women were forced to confront the issue of abortion affected their ability of how they reasoned about the issue and even their stances on public policy. Soft news has the ability of narrating stories of a variety of groups that we will perhaps never meet in real life and hence it does the important function of sensitizing people to other cultures, sub groups and ideas. Admittedly it doesn’t do it well but when it does, it is likely that it makes people more empathetic.

In all, news needs to do two things to be efficacious – it needs to provide information and it needs to make that information relevant to people.

Rational Ignorance: Celebrities or Politics

November 29, 2006 in Media, Politics | Permalink

It is a commonly held belief that people are too busy to be informed about policy issues. The argument certainly seems reasonable given the oft-repeated assertion that people are leading increasingly hectic lives with little time for leisure, except that it doesn’t stand well to scrutiny. Americans, as I corroborate below, have ample leisure time and ample access to informational sources.

An average American child between the ages of 8 and 18 spends about 44.5 hours per week, or six and a half hours daily, consuming media, according to a 2005 Kaiser Family Foundation report. More than half of this time is spent in watching television programs, movies and other videos. The figures are comparable for American adults, who watch more than four hours of television each day or twenty eight hours each week on average, according to a Nielsen study. Even if we assume that Americans do other tasks, say cook or clean, simultaneously for part of the twenty eight hours, it is reasonable to conclude that Americans do have fair amount of leisure time which they spend primarily watching television.

Given that people have ample leisure time and access to information, why do people choose not to be informed about politics. Some researchers have argued that people don’t care about politics because they are rationally disinterested – they don’t feel that they can make a change hence they don’t care to be informed about it. Inarguably fan support is at best peripheral to whether a sports team will either win or lose, then why do people often times posses close to perfect information on the teams (or sport) they follow, and argue passionately over the matters related to sports?

Americans are not information averse; they are surprisingly well informed about things they care to know about like celebrity gossip and football. They also spend fair amount of time and energy collecting, regurgitating and discussing this information. While talking about sports people show a surprising amount of talent for remembering and accurately interpreting statistics. So why is it that Americans are willing to spend time and energy in collecting entertainment and sports while showing little interest in foreign or even domestic policy?

Admittedly policy issues are generally more complex than celebrity news and perhaps people’s interest in entertainment news is driven by the fact that consuming entertainment news is less cognitively demanding. The explanation seems inadequate given people (perhaps mainly men) do keep track of elaborate sports statistics and present well articulated positions on why a certain team is better than the other. One can perhaps argue that given the general lack of morally divisive issues, people feel more comfortable discussing entertainment news than say abortion. But then certainly there are policy issues that are bereft of morally divisive issues. It seems though that most political information is presented in identity packets rather than ideational packets as in choices are explained and understood as liberal or conservative choices. Choices marked with identity dissuade analysis and reflection, as research has shown, and combined with the chronic lack of factual information on relevant policy topics on American television, there isn’t much hope that people will get to critically think about the problem.

Movie Review: Independent Intervention

November 21, 2006 in Films | Permalink

General Tommy Franks described the media as the “fourth front” in his (Iraq) war plan, according to Danny Schechter, an award winning journalist and documentary filmmaker.
What he meant by that was that winning the “media war” is an important part of winning the war in Iraq. Three years down the line with US stuck in an ever-worsening situation, we all know what happens when governments win the media war and succumb to their hubris.

Independent Intervention, a documentary by Norwegian filmmaker Tonje Hessen Schei, is superficially an exploration of how the Iraq war was fought on the “fourth front” in US media. On a deeper level, it is a well crafted expose’ of the effects of media conglomeration on the style, topicality and quality of news.

Schei begins her documentary with a series of heartrending images from Iraq, images that were never shown on mainstream American media. This initial sequence provides the preface to her documentary- the Iraq war shown on the television screens of Americans was a very different from the one being fought in Iraq. Schei, stuck by the jingoistic, bleached (of the horrors of war), video game like coverage of Iraq war in US mainstream media, explores the reasons behind how and why mainstream American media became a willing partner in government’s propaganda machine helping it wage the war for the hearts and minds of American public. Using footage from the war and interviews with people luminaries like Dr. Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman and others, Schei persuasively argues that a majority of what went wrong during media’s coverage of Iraq war can be traced to corporate media ownership.

The documentary does a stupendous job in tracing media’s coverage of Iraq war starting with the pre-war buildup by effectively using some well known statistics, for example about how during the two week period around which Colin Powell gave his speech at UN and during a time when more than half of the people opposed war, and– out of the 393 people who were interviewed on the four major nightly network newscasts – NBC, ABC, CBS and PBS only a meager 3% held antiwar views while a stunning 71% were pro war.

Independent Intervention is simply scintillating when it weaves snippets from local morning news shows to convey a point. It is jarring to see archival news footage of anti-war protests highlighting mundane inconveniences caused by protestors – “simply creating chaos during rush hour” or “protestors shut down the financial district in San Francisco” and sneeringly ignore to give time to explaining why protestors were against the war.

Independent Intervention explores how merger of showbiz and “newsbiz” has had a damning impact on the way news is covered. In their effort to attract consumers, news shows have ramped up their production values to match those in entertainment. The ever shrinking sound bite has limited what can be conveyed intelligibly to the audience and hence all that is complicated is left at the curb. So while reporting on the Iraq war, the ethnic complexities are left out.

Schei though is never is able to purposefully include some information in the documentary. For example, we are informed that five corporations – Vivendi, Disney, Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom -own eighty percent of media but yet are left in the dark about how and why it affects media coverage in the way it does. Perhaps the critique is implicit but it is limited to corporate control (economics fudging the news) and not to effects of agglomeration.

Media is an important institution for democracy – a tool through which we understand the world and the world understands us (Goodman). We need to keep the media free and independent for we need good unbiased and uncensored information for a functioning democracy. And lastly and perhaps most importantly, media should never be confused as a tool of war.

Overall, Independent Intervention can be seen as part of the genre of documentaries inspired by Michael Moore – a genre of unabashedly political documentaries with an agenda, but its wider message – that of need for independent media – would be of interest to both liberals and conservatives.

The DVD of the film is available at http://www.independentintervention.com

Careerism, bureaucratization, racism, and self-promotion mar aid efforts

November 18, 2006 in General | Permalink

A khaki clad western aid worker is helping unload a truck in a sun baked dusty barren place surrounded by black (or brown) faces. It could be any of the countless news clips shown by news organizations about the equally countless number of crisis that continue to rain down upon obscure parts of the world. The clips are ubiquitous and they all look the same and yet nobody notices the egregious role of the western aid worker. If you are still floundering as to exactly what I am getting at then think again about why the western aid worker, who has ostensibly flown around from wherever s/he was living earlier, doing the readily “outsource-able” job of loading or unloading aid from a truck? It is oddities like these that have long dotted the world of aid organizations.

The mission: confounded by the missionary

The modern “aid” industry can trace its antecedents back to Christian missionaries, whose mission was to “civilize the savages” in the colonies and beyond. Hence, it is not particularly surprising that the fundamentalist supremacist mentality of bible thumping colonial front men pervades the NGO aid industry. If one looks closer, one will find that in fact the modern “aid workers” have much in common with the foot soldiers of prior era in their conviction that they are there to help by offering their supreme knowledge to these poor naked subhuman creatures. NGO aid workers, a majority of whom are social misfits, careerists, uneducated ideologues, and bible thumpers, are particularly unsuited in the job of providing “aid”. Their ‘work’, mostly directed towards helping prove their self worth to themselves, translates into being the people who unload the aid trucks. The fact that most have nothing better to offer than physical labor, of course plays a part in their decision to unload trucks and erect tents.

Planners versus “the Searchers”

Dr. William Easterly, an NYU economics professor and a former research economist at the World Bank, in his book “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good”, argues that the aid efforts led by west have failed primarily because their utopian aid plans are based on the assumption that they know what is best for everyone. While implementing these gargantuan plans, they have sometimes ignored even the basics conditions on the ground. For example, he observes that “The West spent $2.3 trillion in foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get 12 cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $4 bed nets to poor families. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get $3 to each new mother to prevent five million child deaths.” He argues that the west needs to get away from the model of “Planners”, imposing top-down solutions, and rather adopt the “Searchers” model, that tries to adapt innovations that come from native cultures.

Careerism and Bureaucratization

Rise of careerism and increased bureaucratization in the NGO industry are partly responsibly for the failure of development assistance to the third world, according to Dr. Thomas Dichter, an anthropologist at University of Chicago and author of “Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World Has Failed”

Increased bureaucratization has led to demand for “trained professionals” to fill the teeming ranks. Paying heed to the rising demand, “entire college programs have sprung up, such as Wayne State University’s Nonprofit Sector Studies Program (NPSS). The NPSS mission sates, “The nation’s fastest growing sector needs administrators, policy makers, program managers, and advocates who will guide them into the future”" writes Michael Donnely for Peace Corps Online. One may expect that the rising compensation packages at non-profit organizations would attract better talent, instead it has largely meant that the organizations are paying more for the same work or/and are led by ever more ambitious dimwits who want to push for ever larger projects at the expense of some little ones that do work.

The NGO-Ivy league Nexus

In the past two decades, an internship at an NGO has become a right of passage for countless Ivy League undergraduates, primarily in social sciences and humanities but increasingly in fields like biology, interested in pursuing further graduate school education. Experience with a foreign NGO has become the best way for the ambitious ivy educated dolts to pad up résumé’s and impress law or medical admissions committee of their sociotropic ideals. There is little that these self-absorbed individuals bring to third world countries in terms of talent or ability to help but every year thousands of such students are farmed out to NGOs across the world and there they leech money and time from NGOs to get training to hang their mosquito nets and make their calls to mom and dad and make safari trips and learn the language.

NGO workers – what’s so special? Why do they get paid more?

“Government employees have complained their co-workers employed by some non-governmental organizations are getting high salaries that cause socio-economic imbalance in the society. The high-paid workers of NGOs have clouded the status and standard of life of the low-paid government employees. Prestigious social status and high income of the NGOs workers have created envies in the poverty-stricken government employees.” South Asian Media Net “Venting her spleen, Torpikai, a government employee, told Pajhwok Afghan News on Sunday despite 18 years experience she was paid 2,000 afghanis (40$) but her younger and inexperienced neighbour with same qualification was getting double than her salary.” And wages are only part of the issue, real bills pour in from conferences at five star hotels, and extravagant perks enjoyed by foreign aid employees like use of SUVs, PDAs, and stays in five-star hotels. The sad fact is that majority of the “aid” is actually funneled back to pay for the perks and salary of the western aid workers.

Lack of accountability

The logic that underpins all NGO wastefulness is lack of accountability, both in tallying funds and actual accomplishments. Washington Post a couple of years reported that employees in non-profits often times take loans from the NGO funds at no or ridiculously low interest rates. Other egregious ethical violations are also rampant within NGOs. For example, Oxfam, an NGO and a 25% stakeholder of Cafedirect, campaigned vigorously against CafeDirect’s competitors, accusing them of exploiting coffee growers by paying them a small fraction of their earnings.

I would like to end with an excerpt from a New York Times article that passingly compares aid strategies between the west and china.
“The industrial nations conducted a sort of moral crusade, with advocacy organizations exposing Africa’s dreadful sores and crying shame on the leaders of wealthy nations and those leaders then heroically pledging, at the G8 meeting in July, to raise their development assistance by billions and to open their markets to Africa. Once everyone had gone home, the aid increase turned out to be largely ephemeral and trade reform merely wishful. China, by contrast, offers a pragmatic relationship between equals: the “strategic partnership” promised in China’s African policy is premised on “mutual benefit, reciprocity and common prosperity.” And the benefits are very tangible.”

Google News: what, why and where to?

November 16, 2006 in Science and Technology | Permalink

Google News in its short lifespan has already become the sixth most visited news site, according to Alexa Web Traffic Rankings. While its popularity can rightly be attributed to the phenomenally successful Google web search business, which funnels queries on news topics to its eponymous news site, the service itself deserves further attention.

Inside Google News

Google News is basically a news aggregation service that scours around ten thousand news sources, categorizes the articles and ranks them. What sets Google News apart from traditional news sites is that it is not monetized, as in that it doesn’t feature ads or have deals with publishers, and that it is run by a small group of about ten software engineers, rather than journalists. Google News’s popularity has attracted kudos and brickbats in equal measure. Some have criticized the service as a massive infringement of their copyrights while others have showered appreciation at its wondrous abilities that allow people to compare and contrast facts from multiple news stories quickly.

Criticisms and critiques and some suggestions

The primary criticism that has been lobbed against Google News is that it highlights “popular” stories and sources, thereby exacerbating the already large gap between popular news stories (and viewpoints) and the less popular ones. I am not particularly convinced that the above criticism is necessarily legitimate given that Google News merely mimics the information (news) and economic topography of the “real” world (which encompasses the economic underpinnings of the virtual world as in better funded sites tend to be more popular or firms more successful in real world may have better produced sites and hence may in turn attract more traffic). It does however bring into question whether Google can do better than merely mimic the topography of the world. There are of course multiple problems associated with any such venture, especially for Google, whose search algorithm is built around measuring popularity and authority of sites. The prime problem is that news is not immune to being anything more than a popularity contest shepherded by rating (euphemism for financial interests) driven news media. A look at New York Times homepage, primarily tailored to lifestyle articles, gives one an idea of the depth of the rapacity. So if Google were to venture out and produce a list of stories that were sorted by relevance to say policy, not that any such thing can be done, there is a good chance that an average user will find the news articles irrelevant. Of course, a user-determined topical selection of stories would probably be very useful for users. While numerous social scientists have issued a caveat against adopting the latter approach arguing that it may lead to further “atomization” and decline in sociotropism, I believe that their appeals are disingenuous given that specialized interest in narrowly defined topics and interests in global news can flower together.

Another criticism that has been lobbed against Google News is that it is not particularly transparent in the way it functions. Given the often abstruse and economically constrained processes that determine the content of newspapers, I don’t particularly see why Google News process is comparatively less transparent. I believe the objection primarily stems from people’s discomfort with automated processes determining the order and selection of news items. Automated processes don’t imply that they haven’t been based on adaptive systems based on criterion commonly used by editors across news rooms. More importantly, Google News works off the editorial decisions made by organizations across board, for they include details like placement and section of the article within the news site as a pointer for the relative importance of the news article. At this point we may also want to deal with the question of accountability, as pertaining to veracity of news items. Given that Google News provides a variety of news sources, it automatically provides users with a way to check for inconsistencies within and between articles. In addition, Google News relies on the fact that in this day and age, some blogger will post an erratum to a “Google News source” site, of which there are over ten thousand, and that in turn may be featured within Google News.

Let me move on to the issue of diversity of stories on a particular issue. Firstly, it is important to clarify what one means by diversity and what kind of diversity would users find most useful. Diversity can mean – diversity of locality (of publishers or date lines), view point – for or against an issue, depth – a quick summary or a large tome, media type – video or text or audio, or it can be diversity of news type (reporting versus analysis). Of course Google can circumvent all of these concerns by setting up parallel mechanisms for all the measures it deems important. For example a map/google news “mashup” can prove to be useful in highlighting where news is currently coming from. Going back to the topic of ensuring diversity – conceptual diversity is possibly the hardest to implement. There can be a multitude of angles for a story – not just for and against binary positions and facets can quickly become unruly, indefensible and unusable. For example if it splits news stories based on news sources (like liberal or conservative – people will argue over whether right categorizations were chosen or even about the labeling, for example social conservatives and fiscal conservatives) or organizations cited (for example there is a good chance that an article using statistics from Heritage foundation leans in a conservative direction but that is hardly a rule). Still I feel that these measures can prove to be helpful in at least mining for a diversity of articles on the same topic. One of the challenges of categorization is to come up with “natural” categories as in coming up with categorization that is “intuitive” for people. Given the conceptual diversity and the related abstruseness, Google may though want to preclude offering them as clickable categories to users thought it may want to use the categorization technique to display “diverse” stories. Similarly, more complex statistical measures can also prove to be useful in sub categorization, for example providing a statistical reference to the most common phrases or keywords or even Amazon like statistics on the relative hardness of reading. Google News may also just want to list the organizations cited in the news article and leave the decision of categorization to users.

To come up with ideas about how to improve Google News, one must understand what makes Google News useful? I see two important ways in which Google News is useful to its users – its ability to mine through gargantuan number of news sources and come up with a list of news stories on the same “topic” (or event), and the ability to search for a particular topic quickly. One can envision that both the user looking for a diversity of news sources or looking for quick information on a particular topic, could both be interested in other related information on the topic. More substantively, Google News may want to collate information from its web, video and image search, along with links to key organizations mentioned in the websites and put then right next to the link to the story. For example, BBC offers a related link to India’s country profile next to a story on India. Another way Google News can add value for its users is by leveraging the statistics it compiles of when and where news stories were published, stories published in the last 24 hrs or 48 hrs etc. I would love to see a feature called the “state of news” that shows statistical trends on news items getting coverage, patterns of coverage etc. (this endeavor would be similar to Google Trends)

Money: for thats what makes Spot run

Google News’ current “philanthropic” (people may argue otherwise viewing it as a publicity stunt) model is fundamentally flawed for it may restrict the money it needs to innovate and grow. Hence, it is important that it explores possible monetization opportunities. There are two possible ways to monetize Google News – developing a portal (like Yahoo) and developing tools or services that it can charge for. While Google is already forging ahead with its portal model, it has yet to make appreciable progress in offering widely incorporable tools for its Google News service. There is a strong probability that news organizations would be interested in buying a product that displays “related news items” next to news articles. This is something that Technorati already for does for blogs but there is ample room for both, additional players, and for improving the quality of the content. It would be interesting to see a product that helps display Google News results along with Google image, blog and video search results.

Conclusion

Google News is an important addition to the news landscape. Its continued success will depend on how well it is able to cater to the current and emerging needs of its user base.

Chastizing Shoddy Scholarship: A response to Sherry Turkle

November 16, 2006 in General | Permalink

Chaste, who has contributed earlier to the site, critiques an article by the reigning doyenne of Science, Technology and Society, Dr. Sherry Turkle.

Her article can be accessed here -
http://web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/whitherpsychoanalysis.html

Chaste’s response -

My main issue is that it is a sloppily done article. A thorough piece generally bases itself on a careful theoretical apparatus or produces such solid evidence that most of its claims are very difficult to argue against. This author simply strings together a bunch of speculations, at least 70+% of which have at least equally convincing arguments against them. I simply do not see the point of such pieces, for they are little better than chat-like aggregation of ideas. And her efforts at an MIT-based incestuous self-aggrandizement do little for the credibility of her analysis.

Here are just a few examples to show how very thorough she is in her sloppiness. She talks about the possibility of exploring alternative personas in cyberspace, and how this represents a very different possibility of self-exploration than anything that went before. But isn’t she led to such conclusions by assuming as given that the “virtual reality” of cyberspace is more analogous to “reality” than to fantasy as “virtual” would suggest? Thus, couldn’t a man in his fantasy life in decades and centuries past explore alternative personas based on the films he watched from day to day or the gossip stories he read in newspapers or heard from neighbors? Or take her example of the effect of HCI affection in the shaping of emotions. None of her examples go beyond children aged 10: a time at which they have barely outgrown belief in the tooth-fairy. Unless she can give substantial evidence of emotions in adult lives, why should we distinguish HCI from the countless other things that children set store by? And when she does venture into adult HCI, her ineptness is only laughable. She talks of a man who chooses a female persona as a convenient outlet for his assertiveness. First, the man’s responses are reactive rather than exploration-oriented; second, his choice of a female persona appears to be dictated by little more than convenience. Only in an age of post-modernist sloppiness can the choice of a convenient medium be confused with meaningful self-exploration. And I do not need to tell you that avatars are not aspects or sub-personalities of Hindu gods, but are their incarnations: the latter is a discrete entity at a point in time throughout all space.

And now to the couple of things in this essay that actually sparked my interest. First of course is the definition of what it is to be human, and why I find it rather absurd that humans would ever accord machines a similar status. At one time, I had toyed with the idea that what gives human beings their uniqueness is an arbitrariness induced by biochemical arbitrariness in their responses to various stimuli. But frankly all that is pointless palaver. No one has ever seriously taken any definition of humanity based on objective ideas like intelligence. All those crappy definitions of race were largely based in politics and economics, and what support they got from neutral academics was largely based on those academics being at their wits end to produce a logical rebuttal. What people perceive as most worthy about themselves is inevitably what has always driven their definition of what is human. Thus, there were very few serious Christians who ever subscribed to the racial hierarchies of 19th century race science, precisely because they saw in non-white people the same capacity for Christian redemption that they most valued in themselves. What people regard as valuable can of course change. But let me glance at some of the odds stacked against machine creations. I will stat by assuming a sophisticated persona that is not programmed with a limited set of instructions but is constantly changing itself based on selective crawling of web data. As such it would be a store-house of information and insights on any topic including the manners of various subgroups of our times that a human could only dream of. Given current IP laws, digitally generated personas cannot be owned by the owner of the persona generator. Besides, such persona generators are unlikely to be monopolies. Hence the personas will lack that most important value in human eyes, namely, market value. They will be infinitely reproducible. It is also impossible to conceive of personas as serious stake holders which could accrue value for themselves through participation in the market and in social spaces. Who would allow a persona a serious stake in anything when that demand for a stake could simply be disposed of with a mouse-click? It is difficult to see why personas should be much more effective than the characters in Shakespeare or in Emily Bronte. Claiming this would be succumbing to the seduction by the latest medium: no different from claims by conservatives about the effect of media violence based on an assumed confusion between reality and screen by the audience.

The other point that interested me pertains to the possible psycho-pharmacological uses of such personas. I think she is trying to make the point seem more important than it is by using some trendy term like “psycho-pharmacological.” The fact that she talks about them primarily in relation to children and the elderly points out the less glamorous spin on it, namely, that they are more effective toys at killing time and keeping unproductive people occupied at low cost. She could have pointed out (which she does not) that intelligent personas could be used as effective and cheap socializing tools both for children and for entrants into a new culture. But doubtless that sounds less sexy.

Understanding voter disinterest

November 15, 2006 in Politics | Permalink

Voter indifference in US is commonly understood as an effect of things associated with mass media, for example negative advertisements or availability of entertainment that had pushed news programming to a distinct second. While the above view may very well be true, it is unlikely that is either the sole or even the major cause of the dwindling number of voters.

To understand voter disinterest fully, one must try to see it in a “personal” context that takes into account the rationale behind why a person chooses to engage in a democratic process. By doing so, one may understand the downturn in voter interest as an artifact of the spatial (nation or culture specific) and temporal (historical) locality. More specifically, US voter’s indifference towards politics can be seen as a side-effect of living in an era where economic and social conditions are relatively (and in absolute terms when measured as life expectancy etc.) good. Given that an average American voter tends to view government’s role in resolving social and economic issues as rather limited, it is not altogether surprising that a US voter may conclude that s/he have little to gain from voting. The contention is corroborated by the fact that the voter group that does rely upon the government – older adult voters, who need Medicaid and Social security benefits, votes most often in the elections.

The lack of growth in citizen’s level of political knowledge (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996), in spite of the increase in amount of information available, can similarly be explained by lack of motivation in voters. Research done by Dr. Robert Luskin identifying interest and intelligence as key variables affecting the level of political sophistication also ties into the above analysis. Luskin states, “Education, too, may be motivational in part. In educated society, the blankest ignorance of politics may be a solecism. We learn about the things we care about.” Education, by making a person more aware of the actual role of government and the services it offers, as opposed to the widely perceived peripheral role of government, can make people more motivated to vote.

Rational self interest or disinterest cannot fully explain voter disinterest in US. There is an argument to be made, that aside from the differences that emanate from different school systems and the perceived differences in importance of government’s role in alleviating social or economic problems, nearly all the other differences can be traced to differences between media environments. One key difference in US media markets and media markets in other countries is the lack of a comparatively large public broadcaster. NPR and PBS fare poorly in terms of budget, viewership and production values when compared to their counterparts in say Britain (BBC) or Canada (CBC) or other developed countries. One may impute from the above that the presence of a large public broadcaster in a media market has an important salutary impact on the way politics is covered.

The effect of a large public broadcaster can be understood in terms of the kind of programming shown by public broadcasters – primarily thematic coverage of news. Thematic coverage of news as opposed to incident oriented coverage of news, the most prominent model on network news, allows citizens to trace the arc of accountability to the government or other social and economic factors, according to Dr. Shanto Iyengar, a professor at Stanford University. This in turn may make a person more motivated to vote

In all, voter disinterest can be more fully understood by analyzing factors influencing voter’s perception of his/her self interest and government’s role in helping achieve their interests, whether it be security or employment.

Comments Please! The Future Of Blog Comments?

November 11, 2006 in Science and Technology | Permalink

Often times the comments sections of blogging sites suffer from a multiplicity of problems – they are overrun by spam or by repeated entries of same or similar point, continue endlessly, and are generally overcrowded with grammatical and spelling mistakes. Comments sections that were once seen as an unmitigated good are now seen as something irrelevant at best, and a substantial distraction at worst. Here, I discuss a few ways we can reengineer commenting systems to mitigate some of the problems in the extant models, and possibly add value to them.

Comments are generally displayed in a chronological or reverse chronological order, which implies that, firstly, the comments are not arranged in any particular order of relevance and, secondly, that users just need to repost their comments to position them in the most favorable spot – the top or the bottom of the comment heap.

One way to “fix” this problem is by having a user based rating system for comments. A variety of sites have implemented this feature to varying levels of success. The downside of using a rating system is that people don’t have to explain their vote for, or against, the comment. This occasionally leads to rating “spam”. The BBC circumvents this problem on its news forums by allowing users to browse comments either in a chronological order or in the order of reader’s recommendations.

Another way we can make comments more useful is by creating message board like commenting systems that separate comments under mini-sections or “topics”. One can envision topics like “factual problems in XYZ” or “readers suggested additional resources and links” that users can file their comments under. This kind of a system can help in two ways – by collating wisdom (analysis and information) around specific topical issues raised within the article, and by making it easier for users to navigate to the topic, or informational blurb, of their choice. This system can also be alternatively implemented by allowing users to tag portions of the article in place – much like a bibliographic system that adds a hyperlink to relevant portions of the story in comments.

The above two ways deal with ordering the comments, but do nothing to address the problem of small irrelevant repetitive comments. These are often posted by the same user under one or multiple aliases. One way to address this issue would be to set a minimum word limit for comments. This will encourage users to put in a more considered response. Obviously there is a danger of angering the user, leading to him/her adding a longer, more pointless comment or just giving up. On average, I believe that it will lead to an improvement in the quality of the comments. We may also want to consider developing algorithms that disallow repeated postings of same comments by a user.

The best way to realize the value of comments is to ask somebody – preferably the author of the article – to write a follow-up article that incorporates relevant comments. Ideally, the author will use this opportunity to acknowledge factual errors, and analyze points raised in the comments. Hopefully this follow-up piece will be able to solicit more comments, and the process would repeat again, helping to take discussion and analysis forward.

Another way to go about incorporating comments is to use a wiki-like system of comments to create a “counter article” or critique for each article. In fact, it would be wonderful to see a communally edited opinion piece that grows in stature as multiple views get presented, qualified, and edited. Wikipedia does implement something like this in the realm of information but to bring it to the realm of opinions would be interesting.

One key limitation of most current commenting systems on news and blog sites is that they only allow users to post textual responses. As blog and news publishing increasingly leverages multimedia capabilities of the web, commenting systems would need to be developed that allow users to post their response in any media. This will once again present a challenge in categorizing and analyzing relevant comments but I am sure novel methods, aside from tagging and rating, will eventually be developed to help with the same.

The few ideas that I have mentioned above are meant to be seen as a beginning to the discussion on this topic and yes, comments would be really appreciated!

Making comments more useful

November 10, 2006 in Science and Technology | Permalink

Often times comments sections of blogging sites suffer from a multiplicity of problems – they are overrun by spam or by repeated entries of same or similar point; continue endlessly and generally overcrowded with grammatical and spelling mistakes. Comments sections that were once seen as an unmitigated good are now seen as something irrelevant at best and a substantial distraction at worst. Here below I discuss a few ways we can reengineer commenting systems so to mitigate some of the problems in the extant models, and possibly add value to them.

Comments are generally displayed in a chronological or reverse chronological order, which implies that firstly the comments are not arranged in any particular order of relevance and secondly that users just need to repost their comments to position them in the most favorable spot – the top or the bottom of the comment heap. One way to “fix” this problem is by using a user based rating system for comments. A variety of sites have implemented this feature to varying levels of success. The downside of using a rating system is that people don’t have to explain their vote ( Phillip Winn) for or against the comment leading occasionally to rating “spam”. BBC circumvents this problem on its news forums by allowing users to browse comments either in a chronological order or in the order of reader’s recommendations.

Another way we can make comments more useful is by creating message board like commenting systems that separate comments under mini-sections or “topics”. One can envision topics like “factual problems in XYZ” or “readers suggested additional resources and links” that users can file their comments under. This kind of a system can help in two ways – by collating wisdom (analysis and information) around specific topical issues raised within the article and by making it easier for users to navigate to the topic or informational blurb of their choice. This system can also be alternatively implemented by allowing users to tag portions of the article in place – much like a bibliographic system that hyperlinks relevant portions of the story to comments.

The above two ways deal with ordering the comments but do nothing to address the problem of small irrelevant repetitive comments, often times posted by the same user under one or multiple aliases. One way to address this issue would be to set minimum word limit for comments. This will prod users to put in a more considered response. Obviously there is a danger of angering the user leading to him/her adding a longer more pointless comment or just giving up but on an average I believe that it will lead to an improvement in the quality of the comments. We may also want to consider coding in algorithms that disallow repeated postings of same comments by a user.

The best way to realize the value of comments is to ask somebody – preferably the author of the article- to write a follow-up article that incorporates relevant comments. Ideally the author will use this opportunity to acknowledge factual errors, and analyze points raised in the comments. Hopefully then this follow up piece will be able to solicit more comments and the process repeated again helping take discussion and analysis forward.

Another way to go about incorporating comments is to use a wiki-like system of comments to create a “counter article” or critique for each article. In fact it would be wonderful to see a communally edited opinion piece that grows in stature as multiple views get presented, qualified, and edited. Wikipedia does implement something like this in the realm of information but to bring it to the realm of opinions would be interesting.

One key limitation of most current commenting systems on news and blog sites is that they only allow users to post textual responses. As blog and news publishing increasingly leverages multimedia capabilities of the web, commenting systems would need to be developed that allow users to post their response in any media. This will once again present a challenge in categorizing and analyzing relevant comments but I am sure novel methods, aside from tagging and rating, will eventually be developed to help with the same.

The few ideas that I have mentioned above are meant to be seen as a beginning to the discussion on this topic and yes, comments would be really appreciated.

Advice on studying in US: why, why not, and how

November 8, 2006 in General | Permalink

Number of foreign students studying in US increased for the first time in four years buoyed by a 32% increase in number of Indians joining graduate programs. Graduate education in US has become increasingly popular for Indians meanwhile undergraduate population of Indian students in US is still far behind (about a sixth of the graduate population) and for good reason. Here below I try to come up with a guide of issues that an incoming undergraduate applicant may want to think about before coming to US.

Why not?

Finances: Undergraduate education in US is extremely expensive, especially at top-tier private schools, and given the income disparity (in dollar terms) between India and US. In addition, the chances that an international student will get hired right away after graduation with a top-notch salary are slim given visa issues. A prospective undergraduate applicant may also want to factor in the pressure that s/he is likely to come under (or feel) if his/her parents are taking a large loan to finance their education. There is also a good chance that the undergraduate will probably have to work 20 hours per week (or more illegally) to supplement his or her income, which in turn will cut into the study time.

Age and associated factors: Add to the above the fact the relative immaturity and youth that make it harder to adjust to a completely new culture. It is not merely adjusting to a new culture but adapting to it to such a degree, and with enough rapidity, so as not distract you from studies for a significant time.

Why?

Going to a liberal arts college in US allows one a lot of choice in sampling different courses. This kind of choice is relatively absent in colleges in Asia or even Europe. Then there are top-tier facilities, labs, faculty etc. which may make the expense seem worth while. In addition, doing an undergraduate degree will almost certainly improve your chances of doing graduate school here.

If you have considered the above arguments and still want to apply for getting an undergraduate degree in US, then here is the drill –

Decided? Then Prepare

The preparation should ideally start at least about a year and a half before you want to join the school. An international student needs to give TOEFL (Test for English as a foreign language), SAT and generally SAT 2s in at least one or more subjects – especially if you are applying to top universities. English of course would be the main challenge. Given that SAT now has a writing section; it is of paramount important that students develop good writing skills. You may want to engage a tutor to understand “expository” writing techniques. A preparation program can be really helpful especially because you will get to meet people who are in the same boat. Preparation center staff can also provide you helpful pointers on admission essays etc.

Schools: It is foolhardy to limit your choices to Harvard or MIT or two other top universities that you may have heard of in India. There are a lot of top-tier universities in US including Princeton, Stanford, Darmouth, Yale, UC Berkeley, Cornell, Georgetown etc. It is imperative that you apply to at least 8 -10 universities. There may also be an argument for applying to mid ranked private schools like Boston University or NYU for typically they have the dollars to fund top international students. One type of university you don’t want to apply to is – large state universities that never fund international students at undergraduate level and typically won’t do much for your career prospects.

Funding: A lot of top universities engage in what is called “need blind admission”. Chances are that once you are admitted into Harvard or Yale and don’t have the money to pay for their tuition, they will pony up the rest. On the other hand, chances are that your family will still need to contribute a good 10-15 grand an year. It is also a mistake to imagine that all the “aid” from universities will be in the form of grants, a majority of the aid is in the form of subsidized loans.

Application: The art of getting into a US university is self-aggradizement and careful positioning. It is expected that your application will include records of volunteer activity, membership to various clubs and other “leadership” experience. The other important thing in application is how you place yourself academically – here’s what I mean – say, if you are great in Chemistry – give a SAT II exam for Chemistry and get a 750 plus score on it and then write how much you want to get a Chemistry degree in your “Statement of Purpose”. Given the way universities in US work, one can change fields on the first day of the school so you can still do engineering or English literature.

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