Spinning the Semantic Web.

Last week I attended the International Semantic Web (SW) Conference, ISWC 2009. The semantic web project is one that has interested me for a long time because it would be a large scale knowledge representation implementation and because it involves standardizing languages and approaches for doing so. But the semantic web has been taking its sweet time in catching on. Interestingly, I attended a few sessions of the ISWC in 2002 or 2003 and Tim Berners Lee claimed that we were just on the cusp of having it catch on and that it was picking up speed just the way the web originally did. I think that now, in 2009, some momentum is finally beginning to gather. dbpedia is a SW version of, essentially, Wikipedia and there is a way to query it using the SW query language, SPARQL, and the NY Times is "semantic webifying" itself, but the SW has not caught on at nearly the same speed as the web did and I think it is useful to ask why. Some of my thoughts:

a) There has been a tendency to make the semantic web a much harder problem than it needed to be. Last week's conference was full of discussions of generating the inferential closure of hundred of millions of triples (assertions), sophisticated model theory discussions and SPARQL extensions. A new OWL 2.0 spec was released that included n-ary quanitifiers. Those are important questions and issues for knowledge representation, but they're not, I would claim, the things to be focusing on when attempting to get the SW implemented on a wide scale. (A good but abstruse example: Last week I found myself in a discussion over a claim that a many-sorted first order logic implementation of uncertainty representation was preferable over a pure second-order because completeness and compactness were important features of a web reasoning language. Well, completeness and compactness are important features of a logic in the very purest sense of the word 'logic', i.e., in the sense of keeping logic contentless, but not really necessary for a knowledge representation language in such a heavily applied environment. Many argue that SOL is an appropriate foundation for arithmetic and set theory, surely the internet is not quite as pure as those domains.) RSS implemented simple RDF at one point, but even that proved too complex for full implementation, so why are people worried about packing inference into SPARQL and getting n-ary quantifiers into OWL? Any traction the SW is seeing is in FOAF and linked data, it hasn't been for want of n-ary quantifiers that the SW has been mostly unrealized. Linked data focuses on the relatively simple task of linking data and far less on sophisticated ontologies and knowledge representation issues. This gets to the heart of the reason why the SW has been slow to catch on. The utility of the web was obvious to people who didn't have computer science degrees; the SW, not so much.

b) Querying the semantic web is difficult. The standard query language for the SW is SPARQL, but from my experience, even relatively intelligent web searchers, doctors and the like, are barely capable of using quotes or boolean operators correctly, why do we think they'll be able to run complex SQL queries requiring complicated URL UIDs? SPARQL is useful for sophisticated users deeply familiar with the knowledge representation language and ontology that has been implemented, it would likely be much harder to use it for discovery, a key task in much web usage. And yet those involved in "spinning" the SW seem unwilling to give this problem much consideration.

c) The development has been very top down. See (a). The players in the SW are well known and the group is relatively small. We're getting standards passed down for problems that don't yet exist instead of going to the grass roots and trying to solve problems as they arise. Even the venue was evidence of this. The conference was ridiculously expensive and took place at some remote Marriott, completely inaccessible by public transit. Hardly screams "grass roots" or "user input". Tellingly, I heard lots of talk of the need to go out and "spread the word" and "encourage people to use it' or join "meet ups", etc. Or questions about how I get "people to take more interest in the semantic web". People will get interested when we show them it's useful, let's worry more about that and less about methods of popularization reminiscent of an evangelical church.

d) I'm still of the impression that the SW's original sin was to insist that the URL become the means of designating reference. I think it leads to ontological confusion. We use such strings both to point to pages about X and to refer to X itself, not completely unlike using some string to denote me and the apartment in which I happen to be living at some point in time. It's handy and solves what could have been a complicated UID problem but I wonder if it makes the proposed solution seem harder than it needs to be. There has been discussion of this issue amongst those doing the implementing and I wonder if the ontological fuzziness here ends up making the SW fuzzier than it needed to have been.

Anyway, I think the SW will catch on and is catching on, but I think it could have been happening much more quickly if people had mainly concerned themselves with making it useful and workable and less with exploiting it as a funding tool for interesting but ancillary AI problems.

Noble gesture?

A story about a kid who stops at the 2-yard line rather than score another touchdown against some down on their luck school is being widely advertised on Yahoo. The breathless writing makes it clear that we're supposed to regard this kid, and the team, as some modern day hero[es]. It was a "noble gesture" even, according to the title! Near the story was a pointer to a different, but similarly themed, story about a kid with Down Syndrome who is brought into a football game late, when the game is out of reach, and given the ball and allowed, by the opposing team, to run it in for a TD.

Whenever I hear about these alleged "noble" gestures, or teams catching hell for scoring too many pts in a game, I always think there are lots of things more disrespectful than running up the score against someone or not letting a kid with Down Syndrome inaccurately believe that he's able to score a touchdown. At least in those cases one respects his/her opponent to take them seriously. More disrespectful, IMO, is being the kind of patronizing person who holds his/her opponent in such low regard that he'd condescendingly stop at the two yard line rather than bother to score. Or another example, perhaps, being the kind of person who would make a fool out of someone by creating a farce in which he's led to believe he's scored a legitimate TD when in fact he hasn't and everyone around him knows it.

Market based health care dilemma

Here's a dilemma I've been thinking about after yet another health care discussion (YAHCD) and some recent commentary from David Frum

As is well known, the US doesn't match up well with other nations in comparisons regarding some fairly basic health indicators, e.g., life expectancy, infant mortality, etc. See the report linked in this post. When faced with this fact, defenders of the current US health care system have been known to argue along these lines: "There are a lot of contributors to these factors in addition to medical care. Things like diet, lifestyle, environment, etc. all play a factor." Many then go on to argue that Americans have worse diets and more sedentary lifestyles than much of the world. So, suppose we accept that. Doesn't this fact actually undermine an important arguments against socialized medicine, i.e., the moral hazard argument? If people aren't forced to pay the costs of their health care, they lose an incentive to be healthy and avoid the need to access expensive health care. But, in fact, nobody pays more for their health care than Americans do and yet this moral hazard has no positive effect on their willingness to remain healthy and avoid the need for health care.

Holder's investigation

Some people, the president and the 08 Republican nominee for president included, keep asserting that with respect to allegations of torture during the Bush administration, we should "look forward, not back". And Holder's announcement that he intended to investigate regardless generated concerns that such an investigation could hurt morale and effectiveness of the CIA.

It's hard for me to understand how these constitute effective arguments. The first suggestion is just utterly silly. First, it seems that it could be applied to any criminal investigation, all crimes have occurred in the past and yet we go back to investigate them. But it's much more dangerous in this particular case, the question of whether or not the US endorsed and/or participated in torture and whether or not the country is willing to take a stand and indicate whether or not that was permissible goes to the very heart of what the country's principles are. How can the country "move forward" while those questions remain unaddressed?

As to the CIA morale argument, well, of course, criminal investigations hurt morale at any organizations, but surely if this is a legitimate argument, then we've effectively given the CIA carte blanche. Prosecution for any criminal wrongdoing will require investigation. Any investigation will hurt morale at the CIA, so if the general principle is "Never hurt morale at the CIA", it follows that we can never prosecute any criminal wrongdoing at the CIA, so the CIA is free to do whatever they'd like.

Cash For Clunkers seems a little Clunky to me

I don't doubt at all that Cash For Clunkers has a stimulative effect on the economy. I'm far more sceptical about claims that it has a positive environmental impact.

Consider the environmental impact of producing a new car, let's call that amount EIP. Suppose that we can expect a car to last Y years, then the environmental impact of producing (EIP) a car is EIP/Y for each year it's on the road. If I have an old car that I might have driven for, say, three more years but which I retire early, then I have to replace my old car but the EIP of my old car has already been paid. It's paid if it lasts for a week or a century (the longer a car lasts, the less its EIP/year). So the total EIP is a fixed amount and we might even say that, in effect, the EIP/year goes up if I take the car off the road early.

Now consider the new car that I buy3 years earlier than I would have. That is a brand new cost of 3*(EIP/Y), a cost we wouldn't have had to pay had we kept my old car on the road for three more years. Now, further suppose that I drive 12000 miles/year and my new car gets 22 mpg while my old one got 17. With my new car, I'd have to buy 1636 gallons of fuel vs. 2117 with my old car. Let's call the environmental impact of burning a gallon of gas, EIGG. Is it obvious that 3*(EIP/Y) < 481*EIGG? If it's not, we incur an environmental loss from the C for C program here. (And what if the buyer uses the program to gain a 2 mpg improvement?)

The Future of Journalism???

Some time ago I wrote out some thoughts on what might be done to save the newspaper, essentially a coming together of newspapers in sort of a cable TV model, i.e., where one pays for access to any and all of the sources, and where revenue is split according to proportion of page clicks. Since then I've realized that I'm not alone in making this suggestion. For instance, David Simon has been arguing for the newspapers to do essentially the same thing and lobbying to get an antitrust exemption exactly for these purposes. Personally, I like the idea because it retains newspapers in something like the function, if not the same form, we have now, i.e., a relatively independent group beholden to no one doing the kind of job that we once envisioned newspapers doing.

On the other side, we have, well, a lot of people. A lot of people oppose efforts at walling off content, and, relatedly, of obligating news aggregators to cough up fees. I've been following King Kauffman, who used to write a brilliant sports column for Salon, and Katherine Mieszkowski's blog: The Future of Journalism. They've been fairly critical of the David Simons and even the Ian Shapiras (who recently complained that Gawker was stealing his content). But, I'd think and sometimes even comment, what in the world do we propose in their stead? Are bloggers ever going to provide the kind of painstaking journalism which Simon has described? Will amateur bloggers ever break a Watergate? Well, I was assured, you're assuming they'd be amateurs, maybe they'll be paid, this is America, we're full of ingenuity, we'll find a way to monetize. Don't worry.

Ah, yes, well, apparently they've found it. According to a tweet from Kauffman and an article in their blog, the "future of journalism" may very well be what is described in this article: "From a Texas Small Town and a Bedding Company, the Future of Journalism, Marketing, or Both". The article discusses a corporate sponsored blog, in which some former journalist is now paid by Carpenter Company to write about Stephenville, TX. Yup, that's the future of journalism, that's why we can all laugh at David Simon and say's he's just being paranoid and standing in the way of progress. We've found a way to monetize. We can now safety let the newspapers die. Good riddance ya bums and don't let the door hit you on the way out But what about independence of the press? Oh, don't worry, the article assures us, "Dan's free to chronicle small town life as he sees fit. So he roams Stephenville, capturing residents' hopes and dreams and idiosyncrasies and taking literal and figurative snapshots" Yeah, sure he's free. And I'm sure the town can look forward to his hard-edged articles on, for example, how questionable corporate practices at the town's largest employer affects the residents of Stephenville. Mieskowski bizarrely dismisses this kind of potential conflict as Hollywood fantasy, "But this is real life." Um, yeah, you got me there.

You thought GE telling Olbermann to shutup was bad? You ain't seen nothing yet.

Papa Bear on life expectancy

In this clip Bill O'Reilly claims that the reason life expectancy is higher in Canada is because the US has 10 times as many people resulting in ten times as many deaths and crimes, etc. I try to be charitable, I've misspoken lots of time, momentarily misunderstood a metric or a stat when presented with it in the heat of discussion, and as such, probably made a stupid remark or asked a dumb question. But this is uttered by a "talking head", a man whose job it is to analyze, discuss and elaborate on the issues of the day. He's ostensibly doing an analysis of health care systems and it's a prepared bit, not an off the cuff reaction to someone calling in. Life expectancy, for better or worse, is a very simple metric frequently used in comparing health systems. There cannot be any excuse for coming on the air and pretending to speak intelligently on an issue while failing to grasp such a simple idea. Try as one might to be charitable, it's hard to conclude anything other than the man is a complete moron, a blowhard who cares nothing for truth, only winning arguments. Yet tens of millions of people listen to him and form opinion based on what he's saying, a man so fucking stupid and/or pig-headed that he doesn't even understand, or bother to try to understand how to interpret life expectancy metrics. This is the man playing a key role in helping Americans form opinions in the health care debate. Sometimes I think my head will explode.