On newspapers and trust

On December 17, a regional Massachusetts paper called The Standard-Times reported that agents from the Department of Homeland Security visited a student's house after he checked a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's Little Red Book out of a library. Today, we learn in the Boston Globe that this story was actually false. Now, clearly, this is an example of the incredible dangers inherent in the technology of newspapers, which permit reporters to publish things that are false! It's true that the error was eventually corrected, but the story was out there for a whole week, and it's far from clear that people who read the original article will see the follow-up reporting.

And look --- the Standard-Times posted a corrected article, but the old article's still available in the newspaper archives, where any schoolchild could come across it! Why don't these irresponsible editors send the archived article down the memory hole, for the children?

Emboldened by the unencumbered freedom of the printing press, reporters are out there spreading scandalous untruths about our national security apparatus. It's clear that the system of reporters and editors digging up facts and reporting them, without the oversight of a national Ministry of Information, cannot be allowed to continue. Or rather, I am personally all in favor of newspapers, but unless newspapers voluntarily submit themselves to scrutiny by a private-sector Ministry of Information, which consults with the government to ensure accuracy and fairness, then in the next election, who knows, maybe some reporter will report something inaccurate about a politician, and the political pressure to regulate newspapers will become overwhelming. And people like John Seigenthaler will have to step in to defend them.

Melanie Wyne makes no sense

Melanie Wyne's recent editorial on open source for CNet is a cornucopia of hackish distortions, falsehoods, and ridiculous non sequiturs.

The backstory: Massachusetts recently proposed that all government executive agencies should standardize on the OpenDocument format for office files, plus PDF for document interchange. The OpenDocument format's been independently implemented in at least two office suites, and it's backed by OASIS, a consortium of people and companies (including IBM, Sun, Adobe, Corel, and many others) that are trying to do for office formats what the W3C did for the web: make it so that everybody in the world can view every document reasonably well, regardless of what software you use. The W3C's efforts are at least partly responsible for the fact that you can choose to use whatever software you want --- Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, or whatever --- to browse the web, and expect that most pages will basically work. This will be especially true if the website developer follows W3C guidelines, and writes clean standards-compliant code.

The State of Massachusetts would like this to be true for all government-related office documents too, not just web pages. It would be really nice if, in five years, citizens of the State of Massachusetts could open any electronic documents they get from the State of Massachusetts using the software of their choice, and if government contractors could submit electronic documents to the State of Massachusetts that were created using the software of their choice. Therefore, they are electing to have all executive agencies switch over to OpenDocument. It's important to realize, here, that any company is absolutely free to build office software that reads and writes OpenDocument file formats, without asking permission, and to license that software however they choose. And because the specification's publicly available, there's actually some faint chance that this might actually happen, with less of the random brokenness that happens today when you open a PowerPoint presentation in OpenOffice.org Impress.

Now, according to Wyne, for Massacusetts to contemplate standardizing on OASIS formats is cause for "IP owners" to "worry". Wyne can't back up this statement with anything more than a vague haze of innuendo and guilt-by-association. Her argument is essentially:

1. Open source software developers participated in the design of OpenDocument.
2. Some open source software developers have allegedly goofy ideas (like the principle that a nation ought to set its own IP laws, a principle that I suspect most members of the U.S. Congress would agree with).
3. Therefore, OpenDocument is a step down a slippery slope towards rampant government confiscation of intellectual property, and the end of innovation.

This argument's pretty self-evidently ridiculous, so ridiculous that it's hard to debunk, simply because it's hard to pull apart the logic of an argument that simply has no logic. However, here's a shot. There are roughly three kinds of intellectual property: copyright, patents, and trademarks. To illustrate the absurdity of Wyne's claim that standardizing on an office format amounts to intellectual property confiscation, consider the following three hypothetical conversations between Melanie Wyne and the State of Massachusetts:

State of Massachusetts: Thank you for calling, how may I help you?

Melanie Wyne: Hi, I'm opening a restaurant and I'd like to submit a liquor license application online.

State of Massachusetts: OK, you can submit it in OpenDocument or PDF format at the following website---

Melanie Wyne: HEY! STOP INFRINGING ON MY COPYRIGHT!

State of Massachusetts: Uh, excuse me?

Melanie Wyne: You're infringing on my copyright!

State of Massachusetts: In what work?

Melanie Wyne: Uh... All of it!

State of Massachusetts: Okay. If you'll hold just a second, I'll transfer you to State Services for the Mentally Ill...

A couple of minutes later...

Melanie Wyne: Oh, hello, I was wondering where I can get a pamphlet on coping with mental illness.

State of Massachusetts: OK, you can visit our website, or we can mail it to you if you provide a postal address, or we can email it to you in OpenDocument or PDF format---

Melanie Wyne: HOLD IT! You're a clever bastard, but you won't infringe on my patent that easily!

State of Massachusetts: (silence)

Melanie Wyne: I hold a patent on batshit insanity, and if you email me a document in OpenDocument or PDF format, then I will lose my rights to that patent!

State of Massachusetts: Riiiiggghhht. OK, so, I've traced your phone number to an address and I'm going to initiate an intervention here. Some nice men and women in white coats are going to knock on your door shortly. Do not be alarmed. They are there to help.

A few weeks later...

State of Massachusetts: Ms. Wyne, you've been making super progress! Look at how little of your applesauce you spilled this morning. You barely even need that bib!

Melanie Wyne: Agagooga! Me like applesauce!

State of Massachusetts: That's right, Ms. Wyne, you do! You like applesauce. Now, we'd like to talk about enrolling you in an outpatient program... (Pulls out Tablet PC running Windows and OpenOffice.org document detailing plan).

Melanie Wyne: WAWAWAWAWAWA!! You infringing my trademark!

State of Massachusetts: ...

Melanie Wyne: Put it away! Put it away! Aaaaah! My precious trademark!

State of Massachusetts: (Puts tablet away) Now Ms. Wyne, you know --- you know, that really doesn't make any sense. You're going to have a lot of trouble integrating into broader society if you throw a nonsensical hissyfit every time you see anything related to open source software. If you keep doing this, then we'll have to stop giving you the applesauce.

Melanie Wyne: HA! I KNEW you wanted to infringe my property rights! Communists!

But, of course, Wyne's motivation for slamming OpenDocument need not make any sense. Wyne works for the "Initiative for Software Choice", a partly Microsoft-funded group whose Orwellian name belies their mission to advocate for competitive advantage for proprietary software. Wyne's dinner depends on her ability to shill for pro-Microsoft (and anti-open source) positions regardless of principle; in a very real way, Microsoft ideology is wired up to Melanie Wyne's limbic system. I have to say, though, that Microsoft's not getting a very good deal for its money. It's possible to shill for somebody while still making some semblance of sense. You'd think that with all their billions, Microsoft would be able to buy a higher grade of hack.

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p.s. The Open Data Format Initiative has interesting notes comparing the "Initiative for Software Choice" with its opposite, the Sincere Choice project led by Bruce Perens.

p.p.s. For what it's worth, I got the Wyne article link via Symbolic Order, whose blog came up in referers but whose analysis of the situation is (alas) no better than Wyne's.

Gelernter's shameful editorial on public schools

Yglesias points to David Gelernter's shameful editorial on abolishing public education. This editorial's shameful in at least two ways.

First, he opens by citing statistics on how badly our public schools are doing --- "12% of graduating seniors were 'proficient'", and "[g]lobal rankings place our seniors 19th among 21 surveyed countries" --- but neglects to consider a glaringly obvious fact: all the countries that do better rely on public education systems. I can't access Pamela Winnick's Weekly Standard article, which Gelernter cites, but the US Dept. of Education's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study results for 2003 may be revealing. Students in Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea aren't going to charter schools.* But you shouldn't need recent statistics to realize this; a basic familiarity with history suffices to recognize that public education is one of the cornerstones of the modern nation-state, and common to all advanced industrialized economies. If some nations are doing better than America, then one should study their public education systems for features that could be adopted in our own, not scrap the entire system.

Second, and equally shamefully, the editorial pulls a huge rhetorical bait and switch. Gelernter opens the editorial complaining about the quality of public school education, but promptly switches to a claim that schools no longer "speak for the broad middle ground of American life" --- which, if you translate from bland, homiletic conserva-speak into the sole example that Gelernter gives, means that public schools teach tolerance towards gays.

Let's leave aside Gelernter's regrettable intolerance, and consider the bait-and-switch. If, as Gelernter claims, "public schools have a right to exist insofar as they express a shared public view of education", then educational quality does not matter. A public school that produces excellent educational outcomes but fails to "express a shared public view of education" still has no right, by Gelernter's argument, to exist. So complaining about the quality of public schools is just misdirection. But Gelernter's editorial would strike the average reader as far less convincing if he just stated this outright, so he must first engage in some rhetorical prestidigitation about educational quality.

So, then, what of Gelernter's argument? Well, basically, I think the language and logic of "rights" that Gelernter uses is pretty unhelpful when considering whether public schools should exist. "Rights" can be a useful framework for thinking about entities that, like human beings, are ends-in-themselves, to be protected from certain harms or guaranteed certain goods simply by virtue of what they are. But things like schools, armies, or corporations are not ends-in-themselves; they're instrumental, existing for some external purpose, and the proper way of justifying their existence is to consider their effectiveness at their mission relative to their costs.

Therefore, public schools should exist insofar as they produce better educational outcomes, on average and in the long run, than if they did not exist. All available evidence, across all known space and time (i.e., between nations, and through history), suggests that some form of universal education greatly benefits everybody, and that public education can provide universal education. Call this the public education theory, which merits that name because it has been thoroughly validated. Some have also suggested a hypothesis --- call this the private school choice hypothesis --- that private schools with vouchers or some other parental-choice mechanism would also lead to adequate universal education, and possibly some improvements over public schools. This hypothesis hasn't been evaluated, but it's probably worth experimenting with.

For what it's worth, in my opinion K-12 education in America is clearly a huge mess, but its problems stem from two fundamental facts that have nothing to do with the fact that it's government-run. First, unlike private schools, public schools attempt to educate everybody, including the students who don't care and the students whose parents don't care --- and in America, those two categories include a lot of students. Second, unlike private schools, public schools largely lack the funds to attract first-class people into the teaching profession. Any privatized school system that had to educate everybody, using the amount of money that K-12 education currently receives, would suffer from similar problems. These are, of course, only hypotheses, which is why it's probably worth experimenting with some form of school choice on a small scale.

p.s. One other, lesser quibble with Gelernter's piece: Gelernter cites the "1910" Encyclopedia Brittanica's claim that "The great mass of the American people are in entire agreement as to the principles which should control public education", and expects us to believe it. First of all, this is the kind of vague and sweeping generalization that anyone with an ounce of critical sense should regard skeptically. Furthermore, as any Wikipedian knows, 11th ed. of Brittanica, like every edition of Brittanica including the present one, was full of errors. Moreover, in the absence of modern polling techniques (Gallup's scientific polling revolution didn't happen until mid-century), how exactly was the author even to know what the "great mass of the American people" were in "entire agreement" about? Lastly, does Gelernter really believe that in 1911, when there were still living Civil War veterans and women were still struggling for suffrage, that there were no deeply divisive social issues? Or does he simply believe that no public school taught about these issues in a fashion that was offensive to somebody?

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* Actually, IMO, based on stories I hear from my family, the "success" of students in East Asian countries can be attributed to cultural factors that would be incredibly hard to replicate here. And I put "success" in scare quotes because I actually don't think that the educational system of South Korea, for example, ultimately shapes minds properly.

NYT and WaPo drop ball on Grokster

The Grokster case makes for infuriating/exciting times in the land of intellectual property. Both NYTimes and WaPo have come down on the wrong side of the case, and in both cases the editorial was so poorly reasoned that I have difficulty understanding what's going on.

The NYTimes and WaPo editorials both amount to the same argument: that Grokster is different from previous "infringement-enabling" technologies like the printing press, the photocopier, and the VCR because Grokster is designed to facilitate "theft". This statement is plainly false: Grokster is a content-neutral technology, just like the Web, just like the VCR, just like the photocopier and the printing press. Grokster carries whatever bits its users put on the network. The only evidence that Grokster was designed to facilitate "theft" is that some substantial fraction of existing traffic does, in fact, consist of copyright infringement. But look at the history of the VCR, the photocopier, and the printing press, and you can see that infringement was always a major (if not predominant) use early in the technology's history. But gradually, some combination of laws and social norms brought the usage back into balance again. The Grokster case is about preemptively banning certain technologies before they are even brought into market, before that balance can be found.

I literally cannot understand --- I cannot understand, it does not compute --- how any disinterested and thoughtful person could honestly make the arguments that NYTimes and WaPo are making.

So, if reason's not the driving force here, I can only conclude that social-network-based groupthink plays a role. The editors of the NYTimes and WaPo move in social circles where they work with, play golf with, have dinner with, etc., people in influential positions in the big media conglomerates. Bill Keller, and other top editors at major newspapers, do not socialize with Richard Stallman or Lawrence Lessig; they socialize with people who write, promote, or distribute books, magazines, movies, television shows, and music. And so by social osmosis, they absorb the mindset and values of these people, and not the mindset of people who actually, you know, understand the technology and the law.

It's a sad and cynical conclusion to draw, and I would love to be proven wrong, but it's the only one I can draw when these editorials contain such ridiculous tripe.

John Tierney: Credulous stenographer for right-wing think tanks

Today's Times Magazine has a really infuriating article on the "social, moral, and environmental case for driving more", penned by John Tierney, which approvingly cites ideologues such as:

• The Independent Institute scholar Randal O'Toole,
• Heritage Foundation visiting fellow Wendell Cox,
• Manhattan Institute scholar Peter Huber, and
• Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Sam Kazman.

all without ever mentioning that all these policy institutes are right-wing think tanks. The slant of these organizations may be well-known in public policy circles, but general readers will be utterly in the dark. For example, how many readers will know that (from Disinfopedia):

Robert D. Tollison, Richard E. Wagner and Thomas Gale Moore are members of the Board of Advisors at [The Independent Institute], Gary Anderson, Robert Ekelund, Dwight R. Lee, Mark Thornton and S. Fred Singer are Research Fellows at TII and Richard Vedder is Senior Fellow at TII. Most of them have a long history of working for the Tobacco Institute (TI) and/or Philip Morris and all nine were also members of the 'Academic Advisory Board' for the pro-tobacco junk science report 'Science, Economics, and Environmental Policy: A Critical Examination' published by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) on August 11, 1994. AdTI received money from both TI and Philip Morris. (See: AdTI-Funding)

This doesn't necessarily mean that Randall O'Toole is a fraud, but how far would you trust someone employed by a think tank that's run by, and employs, scholars who take money from the tobacco industry to publish junk science about the environmental effects of tobacco? How far would you trust an organization that takes money from Microsoft while Microsoft is under antitrust investigation, then publishes a book about antitrust regulation, and then lies about how much money Microsoft gave them?

Enough about the "Independent" Institute. As for CEI and AdTI, I'm a computer scientist, and I can say that basically everything I've ever read coming out of the Competitive Enterprise Institute or the Alexis de Toqueville Institution about computing technology issues has been bullshit (for example, the AdTI's recent hacktackular critique of open source software).

And Heritage? Don't make me laugh.

Throughout the article, Tierney frames the debate as one between (1) woolly-headed feel-good liberals who love cities because of their elitism and desire to control everybody else's lifestyle, and (2) serious scholars who've done the "number-crunching" and debunked the "myths" and favor automobiles. Tierney never mentions that all the people he quotes in category (2) are employed by self-consciously ideological, structurally dishonest institutions.

BTW this is the same John Tierney who wrote, regarding the fake, Republican spin-driven NASA bunny suit pseudo-fiasco, "If there was anything Senator John Kerry's strategists were hoping to avoid this week, it was the image of a Massachusetts liberal in funny headgear." I'm not sure whether Tierney's a right-winger himself, or he's just a totally gullible moron who lets himself get spun by right-wing operatives because he doesn't know any better. Either way, to borrow Jon Stewart's phrase, he's a douchebag.

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Holy shit, I just turned to the Week in Review, only to find another John Tierney byline heading up an equally ridiculous article that pounds repeatedly on the "John Kerry is a flip-flopper" line while masquerading as news analysis. Shallow horse-race campaign coverage ahoy! America would objectively be a better place if somebody briskly paddled the Week in Review editor's ass with a cricket bat every time (s)he ran an article on the tactical maneuverings of a political campaign instead of the substance of the issues.

Swift Boat Vets for White Supremacy

I'm pretty fucking sick of all this Swift Boat Vet b.s. that's infesting all the blogs I read. It's been thoroughly debunked and basically I wish it would just stop. Nevertheless, I will add one post noting that Regnery Publishing, publisher of the the SBV book, is bankrolled by white supremacists who, among other things, want to organize a whites-only online dating website (MSNBC/Newsweek article).

But not all of their activities are quite as silly. Regnery sponsors The Occidental Quarterly, a white supremacist journal whose editorial staff includes such charming characters as Samuel Francis (whose column was dropped from the Washington Times after he made racist remarks before a meeting of American Renaissance, which is roughly to anthropology what the Journal of the ICR is to evolutionary biology).

Of course, as has been well-documented, Bush has not dissociated himself with this group, its ads, or its publisher. Far from it. (J. B. DeLong piles on.) But we should expect no less from a candidate who spoke at Bob Jones University on the campaign trail in 2000. It's a common Republican talking point that _______ (fill in name of Democratic politician here) will do anything to get elected. But this is a classic case of projection: it is, in fact, Bush who will stoop to any level, ally himself with any faction no matter how grotesque or unsavory, in order to get elected.

Bonus link: Nick Confessore on other exploits of Regnery Publishing.

Two evidences that Microsoft is out of control

1: Microsoft files defamation suit against Brazilian government official for criticizing Microsoft business practices.

2: Microsoft employs the Alexis de Toqueville Institute, an intellectually bankrupt right-wing think tank.

Scientists and Republicans

There seems to be a widespread belief that academics and researchers in the hard sciences and engineering are, on average, more conservative than academics in the humanities. This may be true, if only because humanities academics tend to be pretty far to the left. However, the oft-repeated suggestion that hard scientists tend to tilt conservative because they work in fields with more objectively verifiable facts and standards is both false and a non sequitur. Scientists may be more conservative than humanities academics, but they're still pretty liberal. As Nicholas Thompson reports in a recent Washington Monthly, Republicans have been gradually alienating scientists for four decades:

The split between the GOP and the scientific community began during the administration of Richard Nixon. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, protests against the Vietnam War captured the sympathy of the liberal academic community, including many scientists, whose opposition to the war turned them against Nixon. The president characteristically lashed back and, in 1973, abolished the entire White House science advisory team by executive order, fuming that they were all Democrats.

...

By the mid 1990s, the GOP had firmly adopted a new paradigm for dismissing scientists as liberals. Gingrich believed, as Nixon did, that most scientists weren't going to support him politically. "Scientists tend to have an agenda, and it tends to be a liberal political agenda," explains Gingrich's close associate former Rep. Robert Walker (R-Pa.), the former chairman of the House Science Committee. In 1995, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), then-chairman of the House committee dealing with global warming, called climate change a "liberal claptrap." In interviews with The Washington Post in 2001, Texas Republican Tom DeLay dismissed evolution as unproven, said that we shouldn't need an EPA because "God charges us to be good stewards of the Earth," and denigrated scientific Nobel Prize winners as "liberal and extremist."

No party that panders to creationists while scoffing at Nobel Prize winners can honestly claim to be the party of science and hard-headed, objective thinking. Even top Republican strategists believe that, as a voting bloc, scientists are so liberal as to be a lost cause.

Now, people with business degrees, on the other hand...

(Via TAPPED.)

p.s. While I'm at it, I may as well point out Tim Lambert's examination of junkscience.com (via Crooked Timber), a site that purports to debunk junk science by, among other things, running guest commentary by prominent creationist lawyer Philip Johnson. The proprietor of junkscience.com, Steve Milloy, is an "adjunct scholar" at the Cato Institute, a well-funded and highly influential conservative/libertarian think tank. On the Cato interview linked above, Milloy states proudly:

Explanations of human evolution are not likely to move beyond the stage of hypothesis or conjecture. There is no scientific way - i.e., no experiment or other means of reliable study - for explaining how humans developed. Without a valid scientific method for proving a hypothesis, no indisputable explanation can exist.

The process of evolution can be scientifically demonstrated in some lower life forms, but this is a far cry from explaining how humans developed.

That said, some sort of evolutionary process seems most likely in my opinion. But there will probably always be enough uncertainty in any explanation of human evolution to give critics plenty of room for doubt.

That loud hacking sound you just heard was the sound of someone coughing up whatever shreds of intellectual integrity he had left in order to pander to the right. It's a sound that's all too familiar to scientists who hang around with conservatives.

p.p.s. UPDATE: NY Times reports:

More than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, issued a statement yesterday asserting that the Bush administration had systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad.