DISsertation

I have talked here before about a database-driven world. The idea is that the internet is largely driven by databases, and our lives are increasingly dependent on it. The invisible layer is even more powerful as it is invisible. I wrote that blog post as an attempt to understand the phenomenon. Then I wrote a paper about it.

The paper was kindly reviewed and commented on by several colleagues and friends. Then I even sent it out for publication. Long story short, I haven't heard back from the editor yet - probably never will. Maybe because they didn't like it, maybe because it was too weird (mixing translation theory, rhetorical criticism, and databases), or maybe for some other unknown reason. Whatever it may have been, a year later parts of the argument are obsolete. MySQL is still the default standard, but the big sites with billions of records are switching to new standards, the No SQL stuff.

So I have decided to release that paper to the world here - under the Creative Commons License. The main premise still holds, and it is more use here than sitting on my hard drive.

Epistemology and rhetoric of database-­‐driven translation - PDF file

Not every book is based on good science rather than anecdotes on conjecture. When it is scientific, it is rarely well written. When well written, it is not always provocative and novel. And the rarest of all gifts, few provocative academic books pass the test of who-the-fuck-cares-besides-your-tenure-committee.

Paul Hawken's Blessed unrest is unique in that it is all of the above - factual, precise, fresh, meaningful, and timely. The main argument is delivered with precision, elegance and poise. The greatest social movement that is the focus of the book is the one with no name and no unifying ideology. It is a bottom-up movement that includes a variety of people, causes, and geographies - social rights, working rights, social equality, transparency, preservation, sustainability. My favorite element of the argument is that Hawken convincingly shows that social movements of the past and the environmental movements of today are two sides of the same coin. The less privileged strata of society are usually the people who suffer the most from pollution, deforestation, erosion and other forms of environmental degradation. The same ideology of exploitation is applied to people and nature.

The answer can be summarized in one word - sustainability (a word that, according to Hawken, Exxon Mobil at some moment explicitly prohibited in its printed materials, while sponsoring "skeptics for hire" to deny climate change). Growth that is couched in terms of greater creativity not in terms of ever-increasing consumerism requiring more and more natural resources. Change that is bottom-up rather than top-down. Local solutions to global problems.

The movement is not a rigid structure with a centre of command - it is a distributed global ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of organizations. The book ends with a meticulously organized taxonomy of these organizations that takes about a hundred pages. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg itself is online - a dynamic community with its own discussions boards, groups, and other tools expected of a modern social media network site. It is the finest and the most prominent example of an ever-growing endeavor that helps us move "from a world created by privilege to a world created by community".

Project goal: build a digital signage system for the college that meets the following requirements:

- the content is modular and is easily re-arranged or re-styled
- existing content from the college CMS / web site can be displayed
- external content can be displayed (RSS, XML, etc)
- system can be controlled remotely by multiple users with different levels of access
- only open standards are used (ruling out Flash, PowerPoint), leaving the content open and accessible
- content is stored locally rather than by a third party
- system is running on open source code rather than expensive commercial software

Hardware
- Apple Xserve
- Apple mac mini (any model will do)
- mac mini mount
- an LCD panel with 1080p resolution - 40" TV in our case
- LCD mount
- an HDMI cable
- a Mini Display Port / HDMI adapter

Software
- Mac OS X Server / Apache / PHP / MySQL enabled
- Drupal 6.16 with various additional modules (details below)
- Apple Remote Desktop for remotely administering server and player machines
- Mac OS X on the player machines
- Plainview
- a custom written Apple Script

Problem 1: Web site styling must be different from signage styling

Install ThemeKey module that allows different themes to be applied to different areas of the site. Load two themes of your choice - one for the site, one for the signage. Under Blocks, disable all navigations and menus (=all interactive items that require the user input) in the signage theme. If it produces orphan elements, kill those elements in code by editing template.php file in your theme's folder. Keep a backup of the file in case you cut too much and break everything.

Problem 2: Need to have control over what content is displayed in signage

Install the CCK module. Create a new content type and give it a memorable name - like Signage slide. Make sure it has an image field for the actual slide and and a text field for the story to go with it. Set the image to resize to the size you want so that it doesn't mess up your layout. In our case, everything is sampled to 800x600 pixels.

Problem 3: Need to have scrolling effects without locking the content in a proprietary format

Install Views module. Install Views Slideshow module. Create a slideshow using your Signage Slides. Decide where and how you want to display titles, stories and thumbnails. Set the times for the transition duration and time each slide is displayed. Once you have created multiple slides, you don't want to show all of them. Set the display properties to a reasonable number of slides and thumbnails (9 in our case because that's how many fit under the 800 pixel wide image in one row) and arrange them in descending order by creation date so only the newest ones are shown.

Problem 4: Need to have external content (e.g. news items from a newspaper)

Find the newspaper RSS address. Add it using the Aggregator module that is part of the default Drupal 6 package (Core optional). Create a separate view for the feed using Views, styling and titling it the way you want (display it as a list, table, etc).

Problem 5: Need to have weather information

Install Weather of Yahoo Weather Forecast Module. Customize it to your location. You now have a weather block that you can put on any page

Problem 6: Need to have a clock with date and time

Install the Clock module. Make sure you get the Libraries API and the jquerytimers.js script and put them in appropriate places. Set the clock to display the time the way you want - which means you might have to create a new custom date and time format (Administer > Site Configuration > Date and time > Formats tab). Set the clock to update continuously using Javascript.

Problem 7: Need to assemble various pieces of content and display them on one page.

Install Panels. Create a new page in panels. Give it a memorable name (like Signage) and a memorable path (like yoursite.net/signage). Choose the layout for your page - number of columns, fluid / fixed layout, and so on. Add content to the page - signage slideshow in one column, RSS in another, clock and weather in the third one in our case. They can always be re-arranged / re-sized / re-styled later as your system evolves. Your signage page is ready - you can test in a browser from anywhere (huge advantage for troubleshooting).

Problem 8: Need to feed the content to my signage displays.

Create a barebones Mac OS X installation - no iLife, no fonts, no multiple language support, no extra software. Install a free app called Plainview that allows to run web content in kiosk mode. Clone the installation to all your player machines, as many as you choose to have. Open Plainview and set it to display your page on application startup (yoursite.net/signage, or whatever path you decide to have).

Problem 9: Need to make sure signage works even after a power failure and that it pulls new content from the server automatically as it is added.

You need your system to load Plainview on startup and to show nothing else (no dock, address bar, etc). You also need to able to reload the page periodically to retrieve new content, especially if you are using RSS / weather forecasts and other time sensitive materials. Both tasks can be achieved by a simple AppleScript:

on idle
-- the applescript only calls attention to itself when the idle period is up

tell application "Plainview"
--confirms your kiosk app is the front application
activate
end tell

tell application "System Events"
tell process "Plainview"
keystroke "r" using {command down}
end tell
end tell
--sets the idle period in seconds. i.e. plainview will refresh every 1800 seconds (= every 30 minutes)
return 1800

end idle

Cut and paste the above code into an AppleScript editor (part of the default Mac OS X install, to be found in Applications > Utilities). Hit Compile. Save the script as an Application (look for that option in the File Format menu). Give your script a memorable name (like Refresh). Add your Refresh app to your startup items (System Preferences > Accounts - click on your user account, open Login Items tab, hit the plus button below, navigate to your Refresh app).

Problem 10: Need to administer the player machines remotely.

Install Apple Remote Desktop on the machine from which you will control everything. ARD is expensive but it quickly pays for itself because it saves so much time. Connect your player machines using Ethernet cables rather than wireless. Hard code the IP addresses (DHCP with manual address option). Install ARD clients on player machines, enable remote access. Connect to player machines using ARD from your control machine.

Problem 11: Need to save energy.

On your player machines go to System Preferences > Energy Saver. Hit the Schedule button and set your boxes to run 9 to 5 on week days only - or whatever schedule you need. While you are at it, disable display sleep and screen savers so your signage display is not disrupted.

Problem 12: Need to allow several people to add various types of signage content, controlling access and the level of privileges.

You can assign access to the Signage Slide content type in Drupal administration. (Administer > User Management > Permissions). For finer gradations, install Content Access module or if that is still not enough, ACL.

Problem 13: Need to display an urgent message

Create a node with a memorable path (such as yoursite/urgent). Restrict access to it to people who are allowed to send urgent messages - i.e. main administrator and the big bosses. Keep it empty by default. Using the Panels module functionality, edit your signage page (see Problem 7) and add the urgent message node to one of your columns. When the bad things happen, the big boss logs in, edits the empty urgent message to include the actual message (CLASSES CANCELLED TODAY or whatever else it might be), saves the modules. On the next refresh (in our case within 30 minutes), the message is displayed on your signage screens.

Problem 14: I have other needs but you didn't write about them. Can't figure out how to get things to work

Post your question as a comment here.

Last Friday I drove for 15 hours, travelling 870 miles and consuming approximately 32 gallons of gasoline. My truck (Ford Ranger with the 2.3 liter engine) is the most fuel efficient and the least polluting of all trucks currently sold in the US. It produces 279 grams of CO2 per mile travelled (which compares poorly to the cleanest car, the 2010 Toyota Prius, at 127 gm/mile, but favorably to the 476 gm/mile of the Nissan Titan or the 479 gm/mile of the the Porsche Cayenne). So my ride produced 242 kilograms of CO2. If I had the inclination to drive like that every day, I would have produced 88 metric tons of CO2 a year, four times the average of US per capita emissions, and forty times the average the global per capita emissions. In other words, even if I drove like that only once every forty days, that driving alone would produce enough CO2 to match the global per capita average.

The reality is even worse. The carbon impact of my drive includes the emissions that were needed to extract, refine, and transport the fuel as well as the emissions needed to extract, refine, and transport the raw materials for the manufacture the vehicle itself. I am also indirectly responsible for the pollution needed to sustain the infrastructure that makes driving possible - maintaining the roads, filling stations, and road police. I am responsible for the destruction of habitats needed to build the roads, noise and light pollution that they create, and the disruptions in the migration patterns of wildlife. These hidden costs are immense. They are not reflected in the MPG or CO2 emissions numbers. All these factors are connected and interdependent, sometimes linked together into positive feedback loops (where a growth in consumption in one area leads to a spiral of increased pollution and consumption in other areas).

If my contribution as an individual is so huge, what is it like to have a society of driving loving individuals? What sort of environmental impact can they produce? This is one of the questions that Jared Diamond attempts to answer in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The book looks at the problem from a variety of disciplinary angles, and describes a broad range of societal settings - Norse Greenland, oil mining in New Guinea, Anasazi and Pueblo people, modern Los Angeles, and the vanished civilization of the Easter Island, to name just a few.

It is a great read that I am not going to summarize or evaluate here. It is also a very thought provoking read, and I am going to focus on the ideas that it triggered.

1. Many of our problems can be explained by the tragedy of the commons. When a resource is shared with various parties exploiting it, they tend to each attempt to extract as much as possible. As a result, resources that could be used in a sustainable manner with quota management are overexploited, depleted, and destroyed.

2. Reducing the environmental impact often necessitates a change of values that the cultures hold dear. For example, the US would have to give up the myth of the untamed Wild West, and the exhilarating freedom of driving on a whim (among other things) to reduce its footprint.

3. World population problem is not the only problem; it is the growing proportion of the population striving for and achieving First World lifestyles, thereby driving the global per capita impact up.

4. As a corollary to both 2 and 3, one of the worst values that we have that contributes to our growing impact is defining achievement as increased consumption.

5. Recycling is wonderful, but not even remotely as wonderful as non-consumption. Recycling only solves a tiny fraction of the carbon cycle - the consumer part, not the manufacturing part, which is many times more than the consumer part.

6. The current governmental pre-occupation with global warming and green house emissions - as well as endless debates whether global warming is happening distracts us from problems that are most certainly happening - soil erosion, depletion of fisheries, deforestation, increasing consumption, toxic waste and toxic manufacture transfer to the Third World, and so on.

7. Those still doubting the gravity of these problems should be reminded of the Pascal's wager. The risk of doubting them and being wrong is the risk of destroying the Earth; this is a chance no one should want to take.

There is a cluster in rhetorical criticism called apologia, or corporate apologia, that deals with image restoration in response to a crisis caused by a corporate screwup - such as an oil spill, or exposure to toxic chemicals (asbestos, lead, arsenic - take your pick).

One of the interesting conclusions of apologia research is that it takes different people to do the cleanup and to talk about doing the cleanup, while giving the audience the illusion of a unified front. It is very hard to for the same person to do both. It is unlike trying to be a photographer at your own wedding, or as Erving Goffman would put it, playing tennis with yourself. You cannot be part of the action and outside of the action at the same time. You cannot be a participant and an onlooker (unless you are in shavasana getting an extracorporeal glimpse of your own restive body, but that is beside the point). You cannot be part of the reality and of metareality (just like the map can never be the territory, but that is beside the point, too).

Yet that is increasingly the expectation if you are an active user of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. If you want to be popular, you have to do interesting things and then be able to describe them in an interesting way. You are supposed to run both manufacturing and public relations, all by yourself. It is probably a good thing. I hope it gives us a better grasp of how these two activities relate to each other, and how to manage both successfully. It can't hurt to have such a grasp in today's workplace.

There are many ways to learn about a new city or a country. You could look at its GDP data, or the exchange rate, or the atmospheric pressure and dew point, or any other point estimates and indicators. You could read a Lonely Planet guide about it. Or you could go spend a week there. If somebody asked you about it later and all you had was the GDP data, you could simply tell them what the number was. They would have the same information as you then. But you can't share your travels with them the same way. Your impressions are complex, multifaceted, irreducible to stories and pictures.

Complex phenomena are all around us - snowflakes, tornadoes, ant colonies, stock markets. Studying them requires a new approach. Converting them to point estimates - size of the flake, speed of the wind inside the tornado, number of ants, Dow Jones - doesn't give them justice. The simplifications are too crude, too much data is lost. One solution to that is to have multiple point estimates. We can map the snow flake configuration with 1 micron accuracy - and if that is not enough, even greater detail.

But it is never going to be enough. The map can never be the territory. The measurements are imprecise; initial imprecision translates into greater and greater errors as we model the reality over time using point estimates. Eventually we have to admit that some of these problems - even the seemingly simple ones - are transcomputational - we cannot know what the weather will be two weeks from now, what the stock market will do in a month, or what would be the in-thing at the Milan fashion show next year.

Stuart Kauffman tackles the issue in his new book, Reinventing the sacred. Kauffman is one of the most respected scholars in the study of complex systems. This is his fourth book, and it builds on the first three. His earliest book, Origins of order, published in 1993, is a rigorous academic account of order-for-free, bottom-up emergence of high level order from the actions of lower level agents - such as the water molecules forming a snowflake. It was followed by At home in the universe, a brilliant translation of the first book into language comprehensible to the non-academic audiences. In 2000, Kauffman published Investigations - although it would be more accurate to call it Musings or Ramblings. It reads like a notebook - powerful raw ideas in need of better argumentation and cleaner style.

Reinventing the sacred resembles all three. It has some hardcore theory that many will hard to follow (such as the discussion of quantum decoherence). It has some excellent explanations of what these concepts mean in layman terms. And it has oodles of speculation and conjecture.

But there is also a new element - one that has to do with religion, ethics, philosophy, and the emergence of a global society and culture. Emergent order is the quality of the universe. Life emerges naturally. Human consciousness emerges naturally. Culture, language, society, economies all follow similar paths - unpredictable, irreducible, forever changing, forever creating. There is no need to invent a creator God to explain it all. But there is something that can be revered - the endless creativity of the universe itself. Worshipping this creativity is the suggested foundation for a new global culture, global ethic, global religion.

It is a beautiful idea, but one that is not easy to argue. The argument annoys the hard scientists (and anyone who wants to defend reductionism), philosophers (and anyone who finds Kauffman's foray into epistemology amateurish), complexity scientists (why can't Kauffman talk about biology and leave the rest out), and last but not least, the believers in a Creator God.

The task is enormous, and it is also enormously important. Kauffman's book isn't flawless - but on a subject as daunting and broad as world ethics, no argument can be. The book suffers from occasional repetitiveness and uneven style. It oscillates between barely understandable discussions of quantum physics and bar-style down-to-earth real life examples delivered with excessive nonchalance and camaraderie. But most of the time the book stays right in the middle, and despite redundancies and style issues, it delivers a strong argument - an argument that is not only thought-provoking, but timely and important as well. I have thoroughly enjoyed it - how can you dislike a book where a scientist who understands biology, mathematics, and quantum physics devotes several pages to praising rhetoric?

But this is a reductionist narrative about the book. The book is a lot more complex than my ramblings about it. You should read it yourself, or at the very least, listen to Stuart Kauffman talk about it himself. You can also read some of his most recent thoughts on this NPR blog.

In the 1990s, all books in intercultural communication started with "we have never seen so much international travel / globalization". In the 2000s, all computer mediated communication books went on about never-before-seen ways to interact online. And in the first week of the 2010s (that The Economist suggests we call "teens", "decadents" or "debtcade") I managed to screw up in an entirely new, novel, never-before-possible way.

I have been talking about the software stack; and how depending on your geekiness you either live at the very top of it or you can actually penetrate its murky depths. The stack situation, in the great scheme of things, is a consequence of the division of labor and specialization. Even the geekiest nerds don't know every element of the stack. Generally, any modern household, vehicle, appliance, is a stack where the user knows only the top layer. It used to be that a peasant could fix the tools of his trade himself. There was nothing mysterious about a sickle. A John Deere tractor is a different story.

So armed with a minimal knowledge of server technology, I spent the last week of the "oughts" setting up a Mac OS X server - all the way from network connections and DNS records to remote administration, databases, and active PHP applications. And then I managed to lock myself out of one of my accounts; and decided to re-install everything.

It was all going well in the beginning - faster than before, because now I knew what I was doing. But it all went to hell in a hand basket when it was time to set up the database server. You start the MySQL daemon with a click of a mouse; but then you have to use a third party program like Navicat to create users and databases. The first time I was doing the server setup, I looked it up online, found an answer that worked, and was creating databases in five minutes. But the second time was different. I still didn't know how to set up the database server; but I knew more about the whole process - enough to be doing the Google search for instructions with different terms, enough to not be able to find the solution that had worked before. So knowing more about the process was actually counterproductive.