Posts Tagged ‘digital’
“We won’t really understand the brain until we can make models of it which are analog rather than digital, which nobody seems to be trying very much”*…
… As Max Levy and Michael Moyer argue, perhaps that should change, if only because our climate future might depend on it…
Computing today is almost entirely digital. The vast informational catacombs of the internet, the algorithms that power AI, the screen you’re reading this on — all are powered by electronic circuits manipulating binary digits — 0 and 1, off and on. We live, it has been said, in the digital age.
But it’s not obvious why a system that operates using discrete chunks of information would be good at modeling our continuous, analog world. And indeed, for millennia humans have used analog computing devices to understand and predict the ebbs and flows of nature…
[Levy and Moyer survey the history from analog computing, starting with the ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism…]
… Analog computing reached its apotheosis in the differential analyzer, first built by Vannevar Bush at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1931. The analyzer used a complicated series of gears and shafts driven by electric motors. It could calculate a huge variety of differential equations — the kind of equation used to model physical phenomena. But to modify an equation, the machine had to be laboriously reconfigured by hand.
When modern digital computing began in the late 1930s, it was clunky, expensive and inferior. But digital computation had benefits. Digital computers were easier to program and often more accurate than analog machines. And with the rise of the transistor and the subsequent advances fueled by Moore’s law, digital processing soon took over.
But as our digital world has exploded, its costs have as well. Every switch of a digital bit takes a smidgen of energy. And new artificial intelligence systems require huge amounts of computing power. To take just one example, news reports have revealed that Microsoft and OpenAI are planning a $100 billion data center that would suck about 5 gigawatts of power. That’s roughly the output of five nuclear reactors.
Analog computing offers an alternative. The neural networks that power AI systems make predictions by repeatedly blasting through a sequence of multiplication and addition operations.
In an analog computer that uses electrical signals — not gears and pulleys — a current could pass through a circuit that uses carefully chosen resistors to model those operations, at a significant power savings.
The advantages of digital computing are real, but so are the drawbacks. Perhaps, by reaching back to computing’s past, researchers will be able to steer a sustainable path toward our computational future…
You don’t need 0s and 1s to perform computations, and in some cases it’s better for the climate to avoid them: “What Is Analog Computing?” from @laxmevy and @mmoyr in @QuantaMagazine.
* Freeman Dyson
###
As we celebrate the continuous, we might send elastic birthday greetings to Peter Hodgson; he was born on this date in 1912. An advertising and marketing consultant, Hodgson introduced Silly Putty to the world. As The New York Times recounted in his obituary,
The stuff had been developed by General Electric scientists in the company’s New Haven laboratories several years earlier in a search for a viable synthetic rubber. It was obviously not satisfactory, and it found its way instead onto the local cocktail party circuit.
That’s where Mr. Hodgson, who was at the time writing a catalogue of toys for a local store, saw it, and an idea was born.
“Everybody kept saying there was no earthly use for the stuff” he later recalled. “But I watched them as they fooled with it. I couldn’t help noticing how people with busy schedules wasted as much as 15 minutes at a shot just fondling and stretching it”.
“I decided to take a chance and sell some. We put an ad in the catalogue on the adult page, along with such goodies as a spaghetti-making machine. We packaged the goop in a clear compact case and tagged it at $1.00”.
Having borrowed $147 for the venture, Mr. Hodgson ordered a batch from General Electric, hired a Yale student to separate the gob into one ounce dabs and began filling orders. At the same time he hurried to get some trademarks.
Silly Putty was an instant success, and Mr. Hodgson quickly geared up to take advantage of it…
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a Library”*…
Digitization promised to democratize learning, and despite countervailing forces the trend is toward more open access. But is an ‘Alexandria in the cloud’ really an open sesame? The redoubtable Robert Darnton reviews the equally-estimable Peter Baldwin‘s important new book, Athena Unbound- Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All…
In 1991 the World Wide Web seemed to provide a path to a dazzling future: everyone in the world would be able to communicate, at a minimal cost, with everyone else through the Internet. In 2004 Google promised to make that future even brighter. By digitizing library holdings, Google would create a modern Library of Alexandria: everyone would have free access to all the books in existence. Digitization promised to open up the world of learning to the excluded and the underprivileged, particularly in developing countries. But it touched off an equal and opposite reaction in the form of closed access, paywalls, and monopolies. The world of learning has become a battleground between the opposed forces of democratization and commercialization…
Darnton, who shares Baldwin’s goals of preservation and open access, unpacks the history of digital sharing/lending and of the forces massed to oppose it, and reviews the risks that attach, concluding in the end on a less optimistic (or at least, more complicated) note than Baldwin– a “dialogue” that’s enormously informative.
“The Dream of a Universal Library” (possible paywall; archived link here), from @RobertDarnton.
* Jorge Luis Borges
###
As we accelerate access, we might send exquisitely-curated birthday greetings to Belle da Costa Greene; she was born on this date in 1879. A librarian, she managed and developed the personal library of J. P. Morgan. After Morgan’s death in 1913, Greene continued as librarian for his son, Jack Morgan, and in 1924 was named the first director of the Pierpont Morgan Library.
Her life was a sad comment on access of another sort. Born to Black parents (her father, Richard Theodore Greener, was the first black student and first black graduate of Harvard [class of 1870], who ultimately served as dean of the Howard University School of Law), Greene passed for white. After she took the job with Morgan, she likely never spoke to her father again and listed him as deceased on passport applications throughout the 1910s, despite his being alive until 1922.
“‘Big’ government? Who wants that? I just want effective government. That means America’s government needs to be big in some places, small in others and non-existent in others.”*…
The Red would like to see less; the Blue, more– still, for all of their contention, the right and left in the U.S. agree that government isn’t doing the job that it could/should.
Indeed, the quantitation question obscures a qualitative issue: as our lives (and our businesses) have become more digital, governments have fallen behind in taking effective advantage of technology. Jen Pahlka, founder of Code for America, has devoted most of her life to precisely that problem. Now, she’s sharing the lessons she’s learned in a new book. Your correspondent has read and deeply appreciated it; but don’t take his word…
Beginning with “I’m Just a Bill,” an animated musical introduction to the American legislation system from Schoolhouse Rock!, Pahlka, the deputy chief technology officer during the Obama administration, delivers an eye-opening and accessible examination of why online interactions with government in America work—or, often, do not. The author provides numerous examples of failures, including a form for Veterans Affairs health insurance that only really worked on certain computers with certain versions of software; the development of healthcare.gov, where “the full set of rules governing the program they were supposed to administer wasn’t finalized until the site was due to launch”; or an “application for food stamps that requires answering 212 separate questions.” Through these and many other illustrative cases, Pahlka effectively shows that “when systems or organizations don’t work the way you think they should, it is generally not because the people in them are stupid or evil. It is because they are operating according to structures and incentives that aren’t obvious from the outside.” Indeed, by tracing the requirements of any technology developed by or for the government, it becomes increasingly apparent that simply adding new laws or throwing money at the problems fails to alleviate the confusion or waste. Throughout this empowering book, the author makes compelling, clear arguments, revealing inefficiency, bureaucracy, and incompetence, whether it stems from legislators, administrators, or IT professionals. “The good news is that software and the US government have something very important in common: they are made by and for people,” writes Pahlka. “In the end, we get to decide how they work.” Anyone dealing with the implementation of technology in government should pay attention to the author’s suggestions…
Starred review, Kirkus Reviews
An important– and eminently readable– exploration of the fraught intersection of technological innovation and government bureaucracy, and a guide to navigating it: Recoding America: why government is failing in the digital age and how we can do better, from @pahlkadot.
* Van Jones
###
As we get smart, we might spare a thought for Auguste Lumière; he died on this date in 1954. The son of a French portrait painter who added photography to his repertoire, Auguste joined with his brother Louis to pioneer a pre-digital technology that changed the world: cinema.
Their father returned in 1894 from a trip to the U.S. where he’d been enchanted by Edison’s kinetoscope. The brothers (who’d already pioneered new darkroom techniques for still photography) were excited… until they understood that Edison’s display could only be seen by a single viewer at a time. They envisioned something different: a projected image that could be shared by an audience, in the same way that audiences share a play. With his brother’s help, Lumière designed the Cinematograph, a self-contained camera and projector that used a clawed-gear to advance sprocketed film. It was the first apparatus for making and showing films to audiences in a way that would be recognizable today as “going to the movies,” thus the Lumière brothers are often credited as inventors of the motion picture. In any case, the principle at work in the Cinematograph was the principle used in movie cameras and projectors for more than a century afterwards.
“If you want to understand today you have to search yesterday”*…
The redoubtable Brewster Kahle on the dangerous ephemerality of civil discourse in our digital times…
Many have now seen how, when someone deletes their Twitter account, their profile, their tweets, even their direct messages, disappear. According to the MIT Technology Review, around a million people have left so far, and all of this information has left the platform along with them. The mass exodus from Twitter and the accompanying loss of information, while concerning in its own right, shows something fundamental about the construction of our digital information ecosystem: Information that was once readily available to you—that even seemed to belong to you—can disappear in a moment.
Losing access to information of private importance is surely concerning, but the situation is more worrying when we consider the role that digital networks play in our world today. Governments make official pronouncements online. Politicians campaign online. Writers and artists find audiences for their work and a place for their voice. Protest movements find traction and fellow travelers. And, of course, Twitter was a primary publishing platform of a certain U.S. president.
If Twitter were to fail entirely, all of this information could disappear from their site in an instant. This is an important part of our history. Shouldn’t we be trying to preserve it?
I’ve been working on these kinds of questions, and building solutions to some of them, for a long time. That’s part of why, over 25 years ago, I founded the Internet Archive. You may have heard of our “Wayback Machine,” a free service anyone can use to view archived web pages from the mid-1990’s to the present. This archive of the web has been built in collaboration with over a thousand libraries around the world, and it holds hundreds of billions of archived webpages today–including those presidential tweets (and many others). In addition, we’ve been preserving all kinds of important cultural artifacts in digital form: books, television news, government records, early sound and film collections, and much more.
The scale and scope of the Internet Archive can give it the appearance of something unique, but we are simply doing the work that libraries and archives have always done: Preserving and providing access to knowledge and cultural heritage…
While we have had many successes, it has not been easy… companies close, and change hands, and their commercial interests can cut against preservation and other important public benefits. Traditionally, libraries and archives filled this gap. But in the digital world, law and technology make their job increasingly difficult. For example, while a library could always simply buy a physical book on the open market in order to preserve it on their shelves, many publishers and platforms try to stop libraries from preserving information digitally. They may even use technical and legal measures to prevent libraries from doing so. While we strongly believe that fair use law enables libraries to perform traditional functions like preservation and lending in the digital environment, many publishers disagree, going so far as to sue libraries to stop them from doing so.
We should not accept this state of affairs. Free societies need access to history, unaltered by changing corporate or political interests. This is the role that libraries have played and need to keep playing…
A important plea, eminently worth reading in full: “Our Digital History Is at Risk,” from @brewster_kahle @internetarchive.
* Pearl S. Buck
###
As we prioritize preservation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that MGM released the first in what would be a long series of Tom and Jerry cartoons (though neither character was named in this inaugural outing, and one of the animators referred to them as Jasper and Jinx… Tom and Jerry were their monikers from the second cartoon, on). The basic premise was the one that would become familiar to audiences: “cat stalks and chases mouse in a frenzy of mayhem and slapstick violence.” Though studio executives were unimpressed, audiences loved the film, and it was nominated for an Academy Award.
Find Tom and Jerry at The Internet Archive.
“The Net is the new underlying infrastructure for civilization itself”*…
Most governments have traditionally argued that there are certain critical societal assets that should be built, managed, and controlled by public entities — think streets, airports, fire fighting, parks, policing, tunnels, an army. (And in just about every rich country except this one, access to and/or the provision of health care.) The choice to have, say, a city-owned park reflects two key facts: first, a civic judgment that having green outdoor spaces is important to the city; and second, that free parks open to all are unlikely to be produced by private companies driven by a motive for profit.
When it comes to the Internet we all live on, huge swaths of it are owned, controlled, and operated by private companies — companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Twitter. In many cases, those companies’ public impacts aren’t in any significant conflict with their private motivations for profit. But in some cases… they are. Is there room for a public infrastructure that can offer an alternative to (or reduce the harm done by) those tech giants?
A diagnosis of the issue with a set of proposed remedies: “Public infrastructure isn’t just bridges and water mains: Here’s an argument for extending the concept to digital spaces.”
This article is based on a piece by Ethan Zuckerman, written for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, in which he lays out what he calls the case for digital public infrastructure. (He also published a summary of it here.)
Pair with this consideration of another piece of our political/social/economic “infrastructure,” corporate law, and its effects– contract, property, collateral, trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law, an “empire of law”: “How ‘Big Law’ Makes Big Money.”
* Doc Searles
###
As we contemplate the commons, we might recall that it was on this date in 1865 that the U.S. government dismantled a monstrous piece of “infrastructure” when Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and submitted it to the states for ratification.
The amendment abolished slavery with the declaration: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Thomas Nast’s engraving, “Emancipation,” 1865
You must be logged in to post a comment.