The Dean Campaign has about 3,500 people on the ground in Iowa, and the Gephardt people about 1,000. But in terms of body mass, it’s more even then the ratio suggests. Most of the Dean Supporters are young people, male and female, with an average stature of Dennis Kucinich. Most of Gephardt’s people are labor guys, mostly Teamsters, I understand, with the average stature of an NFL lineman.

Consider the political import of that difference: the total mass of Dean vs. Gephardt canvassers is probably equivalent!

I’m amazed that the media has not picked up on this vital statistic as yet another example of Dean’s diminished lead. After all, their job is to bring out the important, subtle issues that we mortals might not perceive. And they do this as consummate professionals, subject only to preemption by more important issues, like Michael Jackson walking from a limo to a court room.

But the Dean canvassers outweigh the Teamsters in another metric: they include a lot of bloggers, and they’re documenting the canvassing experience so heavily that there’s a site set up to point to their posts. BloggerStorm (referring to Joe Trippi’s “Perfect Storm” Iowa campaign) offers some pretty good insights that are more biased, but more nuanced than the press, of course. Even the Deaniacs are suffering from ad fatigue (from Seth-Tech):

Campaign Overload

You know there are too many campaign commercials on TV here in Iowa when I start complaining. As someone with an interest in political science, and 18 hours of coursework to back it up, I’d consider my tolerance to be higher than the average Iowan, but last night was relentless. I’d say that at least 50% of the ads were political last night, all Dean, Kerry, Gephardt, and Edwards. At least it will all be over soon…

Speaking of media fatigue, the Michael Jackson event seems to be enough to cause Doc to flee Santa Barbara for Burlington’s -40 wind chill.

The Doc is In

I’m picking up the SearlsDude at the Burlington Airport at 11:35 tonight. He says that he hasn’t been in really cold weather in 2 or 3 decades. I’ve been disingenuous about a critical fact I should not have withheld: There are no jetways here. He gets to walk from the plane to the terminal in whatever golf jacket he’s wearing.

I’ve been urging Doc to visit Dean HQ since the weather was clement. He’ll interview Harish Ro, Tony Lyon, Tom Limoncelli and Jascha Franklin-Hodge to learn about the campaign’s abundant use of Linux and open source, and probably act as Team Cluetrain’s Inspector General to see if we’re as clued as we seem to be.

It’ll also be fun to hang with him up here in the midst of this ferment of smart young people.

1:02:23 PM    

The general goals of the yet-to-be-realized Assertion Processor are being embraced in many corners of the blogosphere. I had discussed this idea with Ben Hammersley on December 9th. That led to several posts between Ben and me on the subject, and some good comments helping us along.

Blaser: 12/15; 12/17; 12/19; 1/06

Hammersley: 12/19; 12/28

Our most recent posts respond to Danny Ayers’ important contribution – his QuestionGarland concept.

The idea behind the Assertion Processor is to extend an article’s RSS feed with a few new data tags to suggest the character of an article’s content, not just where the content appears in it. In other words, what are the phrases that get our attention?

Adopt a Campaign Journalist

On January 10, Jay Rosen reported on a distributed suggestion he saw developing in late December:

Adopt a Campaign Journalist in 2004: The Drift of a Suggestion

Over the holidays, an idea gained some Net traction: webloggers “adopting” a campaign reporter. That means you monitor and collect all the reporter’s work, and then… And then what? Follow the turns as the suggestion is taken up and debated.

Saturday Night, Jan. 10: Link flow and blog authority have been combining in the atmosphere. In sequence:

Dec. 23. At the Daily Kos, Vet 4 Dean reacts to discussion at Blog For America, the Dean campaign’s main gig:

Earlier today on DFA, there was a good bit of discussion of the latest piece of “journalism” committed by Ms. Jodi Wilgoren in the NY Times. Well, I decided it was time to lose my blogging virginity and created The Wilgoren Watch.

Dec. 23. And he does. The Wilgoren Watch: “Dedicated to deconstructing the New York Times coverage of Howard Dean’s campaign for the White House.” (The inaugural post.)

Dec. 28. At Steve Gilliard’s News Blog, Gilliard says he has had enough: Time to Take the Gloves Off:

The media in America lives in a dual world, one where they want to hold people accountable, yet flip out when people do the same to them…

I think it would be a really, really good idea to track reporters, word for word, broadcast for broadcast, and print the results online. Not just for any one campaign or cause, but to track people’s reporting the way we track other services….

Keeping score of who’s right and wrong, how many times they repeat cannards like Al Gore invented the Internet and make obvious errors. Not accusations of ideology, but actual data and facts.

Dec. 30. Reacting to Gilliard’s idea, Atrios gives it a second. Hardball: “We should have an ‘adopt a journalist’ program. As Steve suggests, people should choose a journalist, follow everything they write, archive all their work, and critique and contextualize it where appropriate.”

It’s a terrific chronicle of the birth of a new weapon in the war on hierarchy – Read Jay’s catalogue at PressThink or at Blogging of the President. Both have a good review of the reactions. Most are intrigued, but also concerned about the establishment of “truth squads.” Even Jay takes the idea with a grain of salt:

Why I Love the Adopt-a-Reporter Scheme. Why I Dread It.

A weblog devoted to watching the work of a journalist is democracy in action. It is bound to be educational, for the watcher and perhaps for the journalist who is watched. But there are reasons to worry.

All the ideas, examples and disputes are here: Adopt a Campaign Journalist in 2004. It has more than thirty links. I stayed out of that post because I wanted to know what others think. So… no illustrations in this one. Use the links and fill in any details you need.

Why I Love It.

It’s practical. People can do it, and they don’t need permission or oversight. Tracking a reporter’s work is a good thing for a very simple reason. It’s participation in the presidential campaign, and in politics. It’s doing something useful with your own civic time. It’s what Thomas Jefferson, the botanist, did– observe nature, and record what you find. Except that culture is our nature now and media a surrounding sea. So we observe this, and try to sense its motion…

…Why I Dread It.

I have this question, seriously intended: What makes media hate any better, any more “okay,” than other forms of politicized hating? Nothing in my field of vision. Check yours.

Don’t tell me it doesn’t exist–floating hatred for The Media, (which has no address) addressed to individuals who in someone’s eyes represent “the” media–because I can find occasional evidence for it in comments here at PressThink. You can find it at a million Web pages in public view. Bipartisan evidence, too. Is the contempt deserved? A lot of intelligent people think so, and they act on that belief. They write of it. They sometimes commune around it. Is there contempt for an intelligent lay public by the press? There is, but right now I am not discussing it.

Processing my Assertion

The Assertion Processor is conceived as a general-purpose tool to catalogue any set of assertions, wh
ether a single article, a series on the same topic by different writers, or, as in this example, all articles by the same writer. What we continue to lack is a good enough agreement on the interesting tags that elicit what there is about a story that gets our attention.

In my last post on the Assertion Processor, I more-or-less jokingly suggested a few data tags to get at the attention-getting.

• <moneyPaid>
• <payor>
• <payee>
• <scapegoat>
• <wretchedExcess>
• <cynicalGreed>
• <whiningVictim>
• <statuteViolated>
• <wrongedSpouse>
• <fiduciaryViolation>
• <rampantConflictOfInterest>

My amateur opinion is that every writer projects her bias on her audience by the whats and hows she details. I asked Jay to help us out on the concept:

We are drawn to the media based on its power to push our buttons. There is a characteristic to outrage as there is to beauty and grace. Just because they’re hard to describe is no excuse to abandon the quest.

These are the elements that journalists strive for even as they attempt to push their master narrative of omniscience and objectivity–the dominant myths of the press, as Jay Rosen is so masterfully teaching us.

Jay, could you put an oar in here? I’m sure there’s some small set of tags that captures the traditional six Perry White questions included in Danny Ayers’ QuestionGarland but also feeds out the crucial elements of cynicism, greed, Pollyanna optimism and self-victimization that marks our delusional responses to life’s challenges.

And Jay responded in the comments:

I would love to help you out, Britt. But I am afraid you reached the limit of my processor– i.e., brain. I do not quite understand what you are up to here, or what you are really asking. It seems to be what kind of narrative structures indicate a sexy, readable, outrageous story likely to get reactions.

If that is the case, I think there are too many. Sure, we could probably lay down some predictable ones, (conflict-of-interest) but for anything worth knowing the unpredictable ones would be as valuable. But then some items in your list are not story elements, as far as I can tell, but critics’ reactions and categorizations (“Smith is being made the scapegoat for…”)

Who, what, when, where, why and how (“the 5 w’s and an H,” as journalism textbooks put it) are “elements” in a simple news story, yes. But what people often care about is another element: what it all means. This too is an element in the more sophisticated news accounts: who did (or said) what, when was it done, where did it happen, why did it happen and how did it happen are supplemented with: “what does this mean for the outcome of the New Hampshire primary?”

If I knew what I was asking, Jay, I’d be more useful. I don’t know journalism, but I know what gets my attention. Everything that makes a story meaningful is an attribute in the 5 <w>’s and the <how>. The RSS feeds that our blog software generates automatically already tell us who the author is, headline, etc., but there’s a legitimate need for the qualitative tags as an option, and without the requirement for an overly determined standardized namespace to define all tags.

I’m going to be thinking of 3- 6 attributes for each of the w’s and the how tags. Perhaps there’s just a few straightforward characteristics of each that we’ll recognize when we see them, but which are not obvious yet.

1:33:33 AM    

I’ve always loved space travel. I devoured science fiction as my default genre through high school. In my early teens I borrowed books from the branch library that catered to Robert Heinlein when he was my age. My favorite first book had been the 1949 Conquest of Space, realistic paintings by Chesley Bonestell of Willy Ley’s conception of the space travel everyone knew would be routine by the third millennium. Three buddies of mine in USAF Pilot Training became astronauts and later gave me an insider’s tour of Johnson Space Center. One of them, Roy D. Bridges, Major Gen., (Rtd.) saved my life with a radio call, and, last I heard, was the Director of Kennedy Space Center.

Further, I’m enough of a trekkie to know that Gene Roddenberry’s widow, Majel Barrett, is the voice of the computer on the Next Generation series and played Deanna Troi’s mother, the fabulously outrageous Lwaxana Troi (a daughter of Betazed’s Fifth House, holder of the sacred Chalice of Rixx and heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed) and was nearly cast in the Captain Kirk role in the original series.

Yep, I’m in the cross hairs of the old fart population of space exploration fanatics.

But I don’t see how going to Mars relates to developing our Global Brain. Global Brain is the book by my favorite sociobiologist, Howard Bloom, describing how we are wiring ourselves together to form a superorganism linking us as tightly as bees in their hive. Bloom thinks every life form is a superorganism comprised of simpler life forms that link up so avidly they take on the appearance of unity. In our case, it’s useful to remember that all our biological energy is generated by the mitochondria at the core of every cell, which is literally a separate, symbiotic life form. Our mitochondria are with us but not of us.

Howard Bloom says we’re connecting so fast that major projects will need a broad cultural buy-in rather than by presidential decree. Imagine how different the federal budget would look if it were designed the way they develop budgets in Vermont.

Last week, armed with that question, I read a skeptic who declared that there’s no market for Mars exploration, except for the military-industrial complex. How does he know that? If people hankered for Mars, he said, there’d be settlers queuing up to live in the Gobi Desert, which is a million times more hospitable than Mars and a billion times cheaper to get to. Besides, there are far more interesting challenges waiting for us here on earth, like getting democracy right and building The Economy, Rev. 3.0, which I call Xpertweb.

Harmonizing with the Enemy

On Saturday, Tamara and I visited with Franz Hartl, Dan Droller and Kevin Collinsworth at Music For America’s east coast headquarters. Franz is the spiritual head of MFA, and dropped in on our mini-summit last July to say hi to Zephyr and Zack. Franz loves the idea of the Great Centrist Party, but wants to call it the Great Consensus. He says that the labels Democratic, Republican, liberal and conservative have lost their meaning and that we need a new way of describing the animating force behind American politics.

As Franz and Dan’s interview by Chris Lydon reveals, MFA will sponsor a series of concerts across the country to inspire a new generation of political activists. This initiative, combined with the energy that the Dean youngsters have introduced into the race, is a tsunami sweeping over American politics.

I’m in Burlington for my monthly stint at the capacious corner office in the volunteer bull pen, and I’ll witness this force again, firsthand. Most of the volunteers and staff have never been involved in politics and often have never voted. I certainly have never been involved in politics and swore I never would be.

What does Tom Harkin Know that We Don’t?

Tom Harkin is the senior senator from Iowa and one of the most beloved politicians in Iowa’s history (I’m surprised I can even type “beloved politician”). Last week he joined Al Gore and Bill Bradley to campaign for the Gov in Iowa. Why would he do this when pundits are saying that the race is getting closer? Does this mean Harkin’s casting caution to the winds and throwing in with Dr. Dean to rescue him from the teapot tempest inspired by his 1999 observation that only committed professionals will spend several hours at an Iowa caucus?

Actually, no. I’ll bet Tom Harkin likes Howard Dean as much as anyone else, but he’s not likely to turn his back on Gephardt or Kerry unless he’s quite confident about Dean’s victory in Iowa. But where is he getting his confidence? The difference is that he’s an Iowan and the pundits aren’t. The polls are tilted to the old politics and not to the new, as Franz Hartl explained yesterday.

Franz pointed out that pollsters mostly poll people who voted in the last caucus, discounting the likelihood that a newcomer will show up next Tuesday night. But Franz reminded me of an important point. As we heard again on Meet the Press this morning, Iowa expects twice the turnout as the 2000 caucus. And what kind of people are those new 60,000 voters? People who now have a reason to caucus and did not before.

MidWiving the Revolution

As we left Music For America, Tamara and I thanked our new friends for sharing their time and enthusiasm. And Franz gave us one of the nicest compliments I’ve heard: “It’s great to get better acquainted: You guys midwived the revolution!”

10:30:33 PM    

Teach In with Teachout

With any luck, the O’Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In will have Zephyr Teachout virtually onstage. I’ve been helping with the planning and it appears that we may have Jim Moore and the legendary Zephyr join us through iChat AV. The logistics precluded anyone from the Dean campaign attending in person, though Joe Trippi was genuinely enthusiastic when Doc asked him to keynote last month.

You may recall that the invitation happened when I was carrying Doc around Dean HQ embedded in my PowerBook via iSight.

Let’s see. The campaign will be in the middle of its entire raison d’etre, and Joe or a designated thriver is supposed to fly from Burlington to San Diego for an hour session? Well, telepresence probably should have been our original plan, and we’ve got a great agenda now, so I’m optimistic about the conference.

The O’Reilly folks have been using me as a placeholder until some things got resolved in our conference call today. If you look fast before they revise the schedule, you’ll see my service as the body double for the real Dean team, now to be present virtually, since we all knew that I, the virtual Dean teammate, could really be there (sort of a reverse bait-and-switch):

---

Sessions

These sessions will be part of the Digital Democracy Teach-In. Please check back often as we will be adding sessions and panels in the days to come. For more details about specific speakers, see the Speakers page.

Internet Campaign Magic
Britt Blaser, President, Blaser and Company
Time: 8:30am – 9:15am
Location: California Ballroom C

Howard Dean has rocked the political establishment by raising more than $40 million over the internet, mostly in small donations, by harnessing the power of weblogs, meetup.com, and email. Pundits now say that the 2004 presidential election will be shaped by the internet as surely as the 1960 election was shaped by television. In this session, key technologists involved with the presidential campaigns will explain how to build a grassroots campaign — what some people call “Open Source democracy” — using the net to empower local activists.

---

Y’all C’mon Down, Y’Hear?

Admission is just $100, the weather will be great, and it coincides with the Emerging Technology Conference, which was moved to accommodate our teach-in, as Tim O’Reilly writes today:

Wes Boyd of MoveOn.org is keynoting, but we’ve also got key people from the Dean and Clark campaigns, a bunch of noted bloggers, Scott Heiferman from meetup.com (which has become a critical political organizing tool), and other online activists. We’ve also got a panel on the critical issue of transparency and trust when using electronic voting machines.

We actually moved eTech to this earlier date (from its usual April time slot) because we wanted to have the Teach-In early enough in the campaign season to help make a difference in getting people involved.

Whatever your politics, the increased use of the internet for everything from fundraising to activism is extremely interesting. I’m looking to hear more about success stories in this space, and especially about tools that can be adapted and used by others, not only for campaigning, but for making government more responsive after the fact.

We’re Peddling the Electoral Cycle – Buy in Now!

Tim’s last point is crucial. The fuel for American governance (sort of its Krebs cycle…:) is the electoral cycle. This seems to be the only time when politicians look at what good they might do. Then they spend their time in office to weasel out of their insights into governance, or pandering, depending onyour viewpoint.

That’s why we democracy-lovers need to get involved in politics now, not after government goes back to business as usual. Perhaps that won’t be true of a Dean administration, since no one tells the Dr. what to think, which he does on his feet, and has the self-confidence to develop his diagnoses in public. He honors us by treating the public as co-producers of democracy.

As some wag said the other day, “To Washington insiders, a gaffe is what they call it when they think you should have lied.”

Dirty Politics

I don’t speak for the O’Reilly folks, but I have a closely-guarded secret few people know about Governor Howard Dean. He intends to do precisely what he’s describing, since he’s on to the one dirty trick politicians can’t deal with:

Candor.

11:36:39 PM    

A compilation of governance tools that
might deserve a programmer’s attention

The Revolution will be Engineered

1. Assertion Processor – RSS feeds of facts that matter
2. Constituents’ Issues Assessment and blog archives of comments
3. Explicit vertical and horizontal linkages among like-minded individuals
4. A citizen-based Administration elected by a citizen-based campaign
5. Citizen-based (not faith-based) programs for training, jobs & mutual support
6. Peer-to-peer vigilance through our personal sensors and shared video archive
   1. of terrorism
   2. polling place coercion
   3. brutality by armed and unarmed bureaucrats

1. Assertion Processor for the Great Centrist Party - Part D

Danny Ayer to the Rescue – The W6 Vocabulary & the QuestionGarland

Ben Hammersley connected the dots between my Assertion Processor plea and Danny Ayers’ brilliant QuestionGarland solution. First, Danny Ayers’ concept:

Think of something. Call it an idea. Draw a circle, and label it with the name of that idea. From that circle draw 6 radial arrows. Label them who, what, where, when, how, why. At the end of those lines write an appropriate label : i.e. for who write the name of a person or group. Etc etc. That’s the Question Garland.

…I reckon if this vocab is used somewhere like a weblog, then you’re halfway to the ‘Assertion Processing’ Ben and Britt have been talking about. E.g. (quoting Britt) “Yesterday he pointed out an important truth: no one’s going to be elected by hating Bush.” In the first part of the sentence there’s a link to a statement – woo-hoo! a URI:

http://doc.weblogs.com/2003/12/14#powerFromThePeople.

In the second part there’s a proper noun, ‘Bush’. So if we already had Dubya in our person table, we could automatically extract the simple statement:

#powerFromThePeople w6:who #Bush

It doesn’t capture the human nuance, what’s actually being asserted, but the basic ‘related’ is there.

Aha! who, what, where, when, how, why! The prime directive(s) of journalism. When Ben and I first discussed the Assertion Processor at the Intermezzo Café in Philly, we too felt that the whowhatwherewhenhowwhy architecture was a guide to the answer, but we were thinking less specifically than Danny, and therefore less usefully, IMHO.

Commenting on Danny’s structure, Ben remarked:

Continuing on with the Assertion Processor idea, I think Danny’s contribution may have cracked it for me with his introduction of the W6 vocabulary.

To recap: Britt wants a system to aggregate assertions about political figures, in order to create a database to, well, in the old phrase, fact-check their asses. I posited the way to do this would in in RDF, naturally, and that there are really three different levels of information we can retrieve from a news story:

1. Data about the story itself, as a separate object. Its author, its date of publication and so on.

This is usually supplied, or could be without fuss, automatically at the point of creation.

2. The Who, Where and When of the story. These are either proper nouns (George Bush, Washington, Republican Party), or are roughly parsable dates (September 11, 03/04/76, Last Tuesday)

These could be retrieved automatically with, among other things, fancy regular expressions. Shouldn’t be too hard, anyway.

3. The Why, What and How of the stories.

Tricky. Why, and How, I would suggest, are too complicated a set of potential actions, with too many ways to express them in natural language, to make their collation worthwhile or efficient. In other words, let’s leave them out and let the reader do some work.

And here we are, back at the beginning again. The complications of our shared frailty causes us to seek truth when there is none (except among the prematurely convinced, but that’s another rant). I agree with Ben that there is no truth to be discerned here, but the utility is lost if we don’t encourage articles to assert the truth or biases they think they’re exposing.

I can’t imagine some grand namespace in the sky that reveals the “truth” to us by showering us with the inconsistencies of our enemies. The point here is that there are no external enemies. As Pogo said so long ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

It’s an assertion processor! There is no way to mediate in the questionable processes by which biased authors, editors and reviewers populate assertion feeds to sell their biases to the rest of us. Just as there’s still no consensus on Sir TBL‘s dream of a semantic web to deliver us from ignorance (I know I got that wrong, but you get the drift).

Who predicted Google? How about this new Vivisimo‘s results for Assertion Processor, which discovers the themes embedded in results themselves and organizes the results according to that discovered “namespace”? See how it discovers that I’ve been blathering on about assertion processors, leavened by Ben Hammersley’s treatment whereby he applies actual knowledge and perspective to the problem, which has never slowed me down! (Be sure to click Vivisimo’s [preview] link in each result for an instant glimpse of the found page).

The Proof is in the Put-In

So I’m less focused on the establishment of an orderly system than I am on the set of tags to encourage liars to streamline their biases: None of us is to be trusted, my precioussss.

My hopeful cynicism suggests that we embrace and extend Danny Ayers’ QuestionGarland (who, what, where, when, how, why) with some additional tags to let the expositors sell us more efficiently on the outrageousness of
their assertions. What is there about some otherwise lifeless lump of ASCII text that causes it to be worth the author’s effort? Without some animating force, it’s not worth our time either. Those elements of outrage must include the kinds of data that excites people at a cocktail party or sells books: sex and money and intrigue:

• <moneyPaid>
• <payor>
• <payee>
• <scapegoat>
• <wretchedExcess>
• <cynicalGreed>
• <whiningVictim>
• <statuteViolated>
• <wrongedSpouse>
• <fiduciaryViolation>
• <rampantConflictOfInterest>

I’m kidding around a little but not a lot. We are drawn to the media based on its power to push our buttons. There is a characteristic to outrage as there is to beauty and grace. Just because they’re hard to describe is no excuse to abandon the quest.

These are the elements that journalists strive for even as they attempt to push their master narrative of omniscience and objectivity–the dominant myths of the press, as Jay Rosen is so masterfully teaching us.

Jay, could you put an oar in here? I’m sure there’s some small set of tags that captures the traditional six Perry White questions included in Danny Ayers’ QuestionGarland but also feeds out the crucial elements of cynicism, greed, Pollyanna optimism and self-victimization that marks our delusional responses to life’s challenges.

12:02:58 AM    

You can’t lie when you’re sitting around the camp fire. If you’re sharing a camp fire with someone, it’s because you’ve spent a day outdoors together, doing some task, so you already know too much about each other to package yourself.

I think most blogs are a little like that. As amateur efforts, most are done after work with our guard down, not as part of our personal marketing effort. We report what we’ve seen out on the trail, and our frequent listeners know how to filter out our particular biases without resenting them, much as one might discern words despite an accent. Camp fire conversation and blogs have the ring of authenticity to them. They may deserve criticism, but rarely cynicism.

I expect to blog again next week, but I wanted to get that off my chest.

10:43:30 PM    

Tamara and I hosted a Dean House Party last night and hung out with some terrific people. Janet Purdy told a great story, so I sent it along to the Dean Blog, courtesy of Joe Rospars:

House Party Reports

The conference call with Governor Dean, Al Gore, Tipper Gore and over 1,400 house parties across the country just ended — see the blog post below for the play-by-play and reactions. Reports are coming in from house parties across the country. See Halley’s blog for a report on hers in Boston; Britt Blaser sends the following report from New York.

I’m at a house party with Emery Davis, leader of the Orchestra to presidents from Roosevelt through Kennedy and Clinton: a man with standards.

Emery Davis, with Janet Purdy and Suzanne Frye, at a New Year for America house party

Emery is with us courtesy of Janet Purdy and Suzanne Frye, who have two great stories of their own.

Janet says: “I have a friend who is 84 and a former captain of the polo team at Yale. He told me, ‘I’ve voted Republican all my life. In 2004, I’m voting Democrat.'”

And Suzanne attended Columbia Pre-Med with Howard Dean.

A warm ‘Hello’ from our house party to all the others out there reading the blog. Keep contributing to push the bat!

Britt Blaser
New York for Dean

Musical Knights

Emery Davis is the noted leader of the Emery Davis Orchestra, a high society tradition since his father founded the Meyer Davis Orchestra in 1912. It took me until this morning to realize that Meyer and Emery are the same name after the remix. Emery is an elegant, charming gentleman who epitomizes that highest of compliments, “gentle man.”

After a few minutes of delightful conversation, I understood Emery Davis’ plan for me. I’m to devote the next year of my life to make sure he has a gig in January, ’05:

   Meyer Davis played his first Inaugural Ball for President Harding, in 1921. He played all of the parties for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. When asked “what was Roosevelt’s favorite tune,” Meyer, wishing to be non political said, “Home on the Range.” When the President saw him at the next party he said” Meyer, I could Kill you! I hate that song!” The President was kidding!

    Emery played his first Inaugural Ball for President Kennedy at the Washington Armory. He has played the Inaugurals of Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, at the White House for President Ford and the last two Inaugurals for President Clinton, playing the first one at the Arkansas Ball.

…Which explains the photo of him in front of the White House at emerydavisorchestras.com. It seems that George W prefers cowboy music, and besides, the Emery Davis Orchestra has never played for the Bushes and does not, I inferred, intend to in the future. So Howard Dean is Emery’s best hope for an Inaugural Ball engagement, as well as a better country.

Well, Emery, I accept your challenge! I will do everything in my power to ensure that you are leading the celebration, and Tamara and Suzanne and Janet and our other guests and I intend to do our part by dancing the night away.

Josh Koenig and Franz Hartl of MusicForAmerica represented the young end of the musical spectrum. I’d met Franz once before, when he stopped in the weekend Zephyr and Josh were here in July. He has a stunning statistic: more people download music than voted in 2000. I’m pleased that Franz is enthusiastic about my sense that the only sure way to take our country back is to instantiate a new political party, which I’ve given the working title of “The Great Centrist Party.” Josh and Franz and I will flesh this out next week before Josh returns to California.

Old Year

2003 was an amazing year for me, and most of the amazement is the result of the connections that blogging has brought about. Thank you for your attention to these rantings. In a year, we’ll have a new President and the beginning of an upgraded Economic OS.

That’s a promise.

12:00:01 AM    

Dean Science

David Isenberg is the champion of stupidity. Not in people, but in networks. He has pushed the key attribute of our blessedly stupid network–the Internet–so we’d understand that its brilliance rests on being the dim bulb of networks. Here’s what he wrote in 1997, when he worked for AT&T. When he left and they realized what he was saying, they made him take it down, but David Weinberger hosts it for our benefit:

“JUST DELIVER THE BITS, STUPID

A new network “philosophy and architecture,” is replacing the vision of an Intelligent Network. The vision is one in which the public communications network would be engineered for “always-on” use, not intermittence and scarcity. It would be engineered for intelligence at the end-user’s device, not in the network. And the network would be engineered simply to “Deliver the Bits, Stupid,” not for fancy network routing or “smart” number translation.

Fundamentally, it would be a Stupid Network.

In the Stupid Network, the data would tell the network where it needs to go. (In contrast, in a circuit network, the network tells the data where to go.) In a Stupid Network, the data on it would be the boss.

Instead of fancy “intelligent” network routing translation, in a Stupid Network, intelligent end-user devices would be connected to one or more high speed access networks – always listening for relevant information, for data addressed to their owner. Sometimes a “communication” might be a few bits, perhaps a short, pager-type message. Other times, it might be longer, like email. In the event of the need for two-way voice communication, an initial message might state the identity of the “caller,” and/or inquire of the whereabouts of the owner. The intelligent end-user device could apply its knowledge of where its “owner” was, and who the caller was. Then, if it were programmed to do so, it could launch a message to its owner, telling of the call, the caller’s identity, location, and any other information. It could also forward as much information as practical.

End user devices would be free to behave flexibly because, in the Stupid Network the data is boss, bits are essentially free, and there is no assumption that the data is of a single data rate or data type.

David is a scientist, biology Ph.D, specifically, who knows that scientists’ special way of thinking means that they must be more open to new ideas than the rest of us and more critical of unproven assumptions. Scientists also get it, like Plato’s mistrust of the shadows on the cave wall, that our picture of reality is always under development, like a book that’s still being written.

A while back, Dr. Isenberg decided to put his weight behind the Howard Dean campaign. If we value the characteristics of the Internet, we’ll join him. I believe he’s telling us that it’s pretty crazy for any Netizen to not be enthusiastically behind Dr. Dean, who happens to be the only Presidential candidate in memory with scientific training, let alone one who depends explicitly on the Internet for his elective hopes.

David is inviting scientists to join him and Bob Kopp, originator of the Scientists for Dean site. Here’s his invitation on their Deanspace-based site:

Looking for Well-Known Scientists
Submitted by David Isenberg on Thu, 12/18/2003 – 12:46.
Bob Kopp and I are looking for a few well-known scientists who we can work with to write a letter to other scientists inviting them to join scientistsfordean.org. We intend to send this letter to scientists who already support Howard Dean, as well as to scientists who might not know yet that they’re for Dean.

We’d like to bring the community of scientists together who are turned off by the Bush Administration’s anti-evidence, anti-hypothesis-testing attitude and the evidence-free policies that result.

Do you know a Nobel Prize winner, or somebody who is widely acknowledged as a leader in their scientific discipline, who would lend their efforts to our work? If so, please let us know!
David S. Isenberg, Ph.D. Biology, 1977
isen@isen.com
1-888-isen-com

The plan is to attract the thought leaders from the scientific community to save science from the attacks it’s been undergoing since ideology has replaced even the pretense that we govern our society based on principles.

There’s much to be said for enlightened self-interest, which the Republicans worship and Democrats often mistrust. I think that we all should support Dean because he will protect our interests, not out of some abstract ideology. That’s what the scientists are doing, supporting science through Dean. Just as Dean the scientist would.

This brings up some thoughts from 14 months ago, inspired by a couple of other biologists, Howard Bloom and Richard Dawkings. In that post, I argued that bloggers willingly expose themselves to peer review, an essentially scientific process. I think these are themes that David Isenberg and Bob Kopp would support.

High Wire with a Neural Net

Howard Bloom’s Global Brain suggests that the blogging community is a self-organizing superorganism thinking like a neural network, promoting its central meme. The blogging meme would be something like,

The world is full of experts who will teach me most of what I need to know if I read their posts regularly. I will also get to know them better than if we worked in the same office for years. They give me insight, candor, depth and humanity available nowhere else.

But there’s something even more important going on. Bloggers (I think) are exposing their personal thinking to others’ debugging in the way that programmers do, and to an extent that only open source programmers do. That’s a big deal. Consider the thoughtful, respectful dialogue around Doc’s Blogo Culpa over just a hint of conflict of interest. Look around your office or PTA or condo board and see if regular folks in meatspace routinely expose strong opinions for which they expect, even demand, debugging. I’m not seeing it out there. Are you?

Who We Are and Aren’t

People who blog expect suggestions that range from helpful to inflammatory. We do it because our collective purpose is so important and because we believe in the scientific method. There have always been disciplined thinkers but it’s never been a widespread pursuit. Managers and leaders and parents and priests are rarely interested in a partnership seeking the best way to reach a goal. I guess you’d call it collective debugging. It’s the defining characteristic of the part of western society most worth preserving.

There’s a large and growing group of people who suppress collective debugging:

Fundamentalists

Fundamentalists are proud of their resistance to thoughtful discussion. Collaborative debugging vs. Fundamentalism is the war we’re engaged in, not America vs. Terrorism, Palestinians vs. Israelis, North Koreans vs. South or Islam vs. Everybody Else. The sooner we understand the core nature of the deeper conflict, we can start some real life-saving.

On September 15, 2001, the distinguished British scientist, Richard Dawkins wrote:

  Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. “Mindless” may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.

   It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

But fundamentalism lies even deeper than religion. It describes any group that relies on a single creed with no allowance for discussion of “foreign” values. The Crips gang is fundamentalist, but not religious, like the cult around the Jonestown massacre. Examples of secular fundamentalism are everywhere – supporters of the O.J. acquittal, the Ku Klux Klan, most forms of patriotism, liberalism and conservatism. The problem is that science and the scientific method have reached a critical mass and a global presence. (Of course we’re not very good at disciplined thinking. The point is that we think we should be, and we try to recognize it when it shows up).

The common thread of fundamentalism is lazy, uncritical thinking. If you defer all choices to a received text, even if current, you’re abdicating Choice – the greatest gift God gave us.

The religious right’s support for a war to “defend our way of life” is an irony you’d never put in a novel. Our way of life – democracy itself – is about being able to live your life as you want while not harming others, a bear hug of diversity.

It Takes Real Faith

Just because Copernicus won the sun-centered universe debate does not mean that society bought into his methods. Patriarchy has ruled our lives forever and has a few good generations left in it. The key to patriarchy is absolute alpha male dominance of the household dialogue monologue. TV drives a stake through patriarchy and that’s why autocratic rulers are nuking up as fast as they can. They can’t stand a world with television. And the Internet? Fuggedaboutit!

The point of accepting Copernicus’ and other scientists’ views is the greatest act of faith possible. Real Faith is when you understand just enough of another’s guesses and investigative methods to trust what they report back to the rest of us. Real faith lies in trusting your annual report to 50 million lines of code built by people you’ll never meet under conditions you’d never endure, using circuits that would not work without quantum physics. Or boarding an airliner with no clue as to what Bernoulli’s theorem is about, trusting the chain of conclusions he started.

Real faith is not the simplistic regurgitation of an inspiring ancient text for parables to inform our daily actions. Such texts are seductive for their simple-mindedness but not very useful for taking responsibility for your actions in a world that must include diverse views. If we condone killing those who think most differently, do we then support killing those who think a little less differently? That sounds pacifist, but it’s not.

People of Real Faith, Infiltrating From Within

There are fundamentalists everywhere. They haven’t infiltrated our democracy to tear it down from within, they’ve always been in control because they are the natives here.

We are the infiltrators with our notions of healthy diversity and a method to arrive at a truth that hasn’t been written down yet. All the hallowed texts were penned by followers of rabid iconoclasts and we are their protegés, fighting the same fight against the same kind of people: patriarchal lazy thinkers with little faith in others’ ideas and observations. They’re pissed because we’re driving a conceptual wedge between patriarchy and the young disciples they want to automate. As it has always been done.

That’s our meme and we’re sticking to it.

1:19:21 AM    

A compilation of governance tools that
might deserve a programmer’s attention

The Revolution will be Engineered

1. Assertion Processor – RSS feeds of facts that matter
2. Constituents’ Issues Assessment and blog archives of comments
3. Explicit vertical and horizontal linkages among like-minded individuals
4. A citizen-based Administration elected by a citizen-based campaign
5. Citizen-based (not faith-based) programs for training, jobs & mutual support
6. Peer-to-peer vigilance through our personal sensors and shared video archive
   1. of terrorism
   2. polling place coercion
   3. brutality by armed and unarmed bureaucrats

1. Assertion Processor for the Great Centrist Party - Part C

The Assertions of Processing Assertions

Is the Internet a great place or what? About the time I went to bed, Ben Hammersley dug into The Processes of the Assertion Processor:

Caution, this is tremendously rough thinking. Early. Before breakfast. No coffee. Onward! I’m continuing on with thoughts about Britt’s Assertion Processor idea. This is about to get a bit tricky, so bail now if you want to.

I’m having problems with this. Once you get into anything other than the very basic, the amount of marking up is actually very considerable, as any news story worth its salt will have hundreds of different assertions. Remember, the basic building block of a fact is Subject Predicate Object…

…The more assertions, triples, whatever you call them, you throw into the pot, the more connections we can find between things.

[There are people on the planet who would be dismayed that Hammersley, the most obvious expert for this problem–a working tech journalist who wrote an RSS book, is a champion of the RDF flavor of RSS. This red herring gives us a chance to expend our collective energies on internecine warfare, like Democrats, rather than to meet the challenge at hand, like…hmm.]

Ben has coded up some RSS 1.0 examples for us, based on the Seymour Hersh article I used as an example. You qualified folks should review them at his site and pick up a mug while you’re at it. We non-techies must be content with a more general view.

Putting the Hammer Down

Ben seems to be designing a comprehensive system while I had in mind a format for bread crumbs. This distinction is not evidence of a fundamental argument about the nature of knowledge aggregation! Ben and I are having fun working on this project and I’m enormously grateful for his knowledge and point of view.

By bread crumbs, of course, I’m thinking of how Hansel & Gretel found their way home. I want RSS bread crumbs to help our country find its way home. Each author or editor or reviewer tags an article, not completely, but with the elements that make it interesting and that validate its point. Like blogs, no assertion is to be trusted on its own merits, but rather by how it’s been honored by the Linkosphere. This troubles governments and big time journalism, but is the only reasonable basis for fact-based governance.

It doesn’t seem necessary to build a centralized repository tying every mention of <actor>Richard Perle</actor> in the Hersh article to all other instances of <actor>Richard Perle</actor>. I’ll leave that up to whoever hosts the Richard Perle Assertion Aggregator. Inquiring minds want to be able to find the articles in our news readers and we’ll also be hoping that someone assembles the most authoritative ones among them into a timeline.

My ignorance of the mechanics allows me to imagine that properly tagged assertions would allow a script to generate a timeline like this example, which I found at the Project for the New American Century.  Without attribution, these assertions are uncompelling, especially if you’re new to the Iran Contra scandal (and the ethical mindset that made it a scandal). As Dr. Dean says, “We can do better than this.” I want RSS feeds, not collected and served from a central database, but available for post-processing so that better timelines than this can be generated automagically. I don’t want actual magic–just a sufficiently advanced technology.

Imagine that the following contains links to the supporting information:

IRAN CONTRA SCANDAL
“October Surprise” allegation	10/80			Reagan-Bush campaign makes secret pact with Iran to delay release of the Embassy hostages until after the November election, in return for future covert arms sales.
Reagan takes oath of office.	1/20/81			Hostages held in the American Embassy in Iran released. Reagan takes oath of office.
An Israeli official suggests a deal with Iran to then-national security adviser Robert McFarlane	7/85			…saying the transfer of arms could lead to release of Americans being held hostage in Lebanon. McFarlane brings the message to President Reagan.
	8/30/85			The first planeload of U.S.-made weapons is sent from Israel to Tehran.
	9/14/85			The first American Hostage is released.
Reagan secretly signs a presidential ‘finding,’ or authorization…	12/5/85			…describing the operation with Iran as an arms-for-host ages deal.
Etc., etc., etc.

Now is that too much to ask? Does anyone else like this idea? Buehler? Buehler?

12:07:02 PM    

A compilation of governance tools that
might deserve a programmer’s attention

The Revolution will be Engineered

1. Assertion Processor – RSS feeds of facts that matter
2. Constituents’ Issues Assessment and blog archives of comments
3. Explicit vertical and horizontal linkages among like-minded individuals
4. A citizen-based Administration elected by a citizen-based campaign
5. Citizen-based (not faith-based) programs for training, jobs & mutual support
6. Peer-to-peer vigilance through our personal sensors and shared video archive
   1. of terrorism
   2. polling place coercion
   3. brutality by armed and unarmed bureaucrats

1. Assertion Processor for the Great Centrist Party - Part B

Last time, I said I hoped to discuss the Assertion Processor with a journalist who could “spell RSS.” That was disingenuous since I’d already discussed it with Ben Hammersley, war correspondent, Guardian columnist, author of the O’Reilly RSS book, Content Syndication with RSS and savior of greyhounds. Not a bad place to start.

A week ago yesterday, I walked into the Intermezzo Café in Philly to see this tall, impeccably dressed Brit saying, “Yes, do bring me another quadruple shot.” Thus was I warned…

After an entertaining iChat AV video session with Doc, courtesy of Intermezzo’s wonderful free WiFi, we got down to business. (Ben and Doc had met in the real Soho (London) a couple years ago when Doc was seeking a WiFi connection. His warwalking led him to the hotspot that Ben had erected over the Petite Délice café). My question: how hard would it be to build an Assertion Processor? Ben’s answer was then about what it is in his blog post today:

It’s not really a technical issue at all. You could very easily create a markup to annotate news stories, and a database to hold the stuff and produce the links is prime RDF territory. Actually building the system, therefore, isn’t an issue (given cash). The problems that strike me are all social: how do you get people to enter stories into the thing? How do you prevent malicious insertion? What do you think?

Well, since he asked… I’m not sure it’s so much a database model as an aggregation model. And that means it shouldn’t take much cash to build the system, since you wouldn’t actually be building a system. I’m imagining a profusion of feeds that may then be arbitrarily aggregated with all the lovely chaos by which we aggregate blog feeds today. If we don’t set up a central database, we don’t have to worry about malicious insertions (ah the images Ben conjures . . . . . . Stop! This is a serious dialogue. Don’t get caught up in Hammersley’s irresponsible, ribald world view and its surrounding accretion disk! Must. Not. Yield.)

On Ben’s site, Eric Sigler commented (treating malicious insertions more seriously than I):

How do you prevent malicious insertion? You don’t. You provide a way to track who made the assertions, and then a way to squelch out people who make assertions you don’t like. But then that could allow people to squelch out others who make assertions they don’t agree with, and that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.

Back to the Future

Where were we? Oh yes. Isolated RSS feeds aggregated in any way that any aggregator chooses to. Mine or someone else’s. Chaos reigning. The central function is the tagging of the elements that pique your interest when you read an article and then pump your fist like a Jets fan, saying YESSS! Or conversely, the same elements that cause an opponent of the assertions to throw down the paper in disgust.

(Aside: a few months ago, chugging around the Central Park Reservoir track at my usual serene pace, I passed another middle-aged guy with earphones, even more out of shape than I. As I passed, this fellow human erupted, “Fucking Liberal Bastard!” Well. He certainly told him.)

All Assertions All the Time

They’re just assertions! This entire quest is based on the assumption that we have a right to make any assertions we want to make. We can tag the parts of our assertions with flags like <actor>, <company>, <document>, <documentdate>, etc.

We all now accept that our statements in the marketplace of ideas are subject to the scrutiny of the rest of us. And their votes. Our votes. Google has defined our future, unevenly distributed though it may be. Whether by Google or Slashdot or Scoop or Drupal, any assertion will be endorsed or rejected by our hive-mind. Some assertions will gain stature and others will be labeled as loony. Whether those judgments are “right” or not is hardly the tag-designers’ concern. What matters is that we have a means to expose the fist-pumping/infuriating elements and aggregate them in useful ways so that all of us can endorse or dismiss them according to our biases.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll get so involved in the fist-pumpers and belief-violaters that we’ll recognize them for what they are–passing nuages–and consequentially start a dialogue that matters. We might even learn something from each other…

11:14:47 PM