Authoritarian Followers

Dr. Bob Altemeyer, a retired professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba, devoted forty years to studying authoritarianism, and literally wrote the book on it in 2006 (highly recommended, and conveniently free). Much shorter, and directly addressing recent years, his 2016 post Donald Trump and Authoritarian Followers deserves a fresh look¹. (Those who’ve read it can skip this post; Bob’s the expert, I’m just saying his work is important, go and see and judge for yourselves.) The portion of that 2016 post I most want to point-out is the enumeration, in Trump’s context, of authoritarian followers’ pschological traits. Those traits strike this writer as essential pieces missing from the mental puzzles many people are struggling to assemble as they try to understand Trump’s coup attempt of January 6th, his insurrectionists, the enablers of both within the Republican party and right-wing echo chambers, where those people came from, and where they’ll go.

Bob Altemeyer:

We know a lot about authoritarian followers, but unfortunately most of what we know indicates it will be almost impossible to change their minds, especially in a few months. Here are some things established by experiments. See if you recognize any of these behaviors in Trump supporters. Compared with most people:

They are highly ethnocentric, highly inclined to see the world as their in-group versus everyone else. Because they are so committed to their in-group, they are very zealous in its cause. They will trust their leaders no matter what they say, and distrust whomever the leader says to distrust.

They are highly fearful of a dangerous world. Their parents taught them, more than parents usually do, that the world is dangerous. They may also be genetically predisposed to experience stronger fear than people skilled at “keeping their heads while others are losing theirs.”

They are highly self-righteous. They believe they are the “good people” and this unlocks a lot of hostile impulses against those they consider bad.

They are aggressive. Given the chance to attack someone with the approval of an authority, they will lower the boom.

They are highly prejudiced against racial and ethnic minorities, non-heterosexuals, and women in general.

They will support their authorities, and even help them, persecute almost any identifiable group in the country.

Their beliefs are a mass of contradictions. They have highly compartmentalized minds, in which opposite beliefs live independent lives in separate boxes. As a result, their thinking is full of double-standards.

They reason poorly. If they like the conclusion of an argument, they don’t pay much attention to whether the evidence is valid or the argument is consistent. They especially have trouble realizing a conclusion is invalid.

They are highly dogmatic. Because they have mainly gotten their beliefs from the authorities in their lives, rather than think things out for themselves, they have no real defense when facts or events indicate they are wrong. So they just dig in their heels and refuse to change.

They are very dependent on social reinforcement of their beliefs. They think they are right because almost everyone they know and listen to tells them they are. That happens because they screen out sources that will suggest that they are wrong.

Because they severely limit their exposure to different people and ideas, they vastly overestimate the extent to which other people agree with them. And thinking they are “the moral majority” supports their attacks on the “evil minorities” they see in the country.

They believe strongly in group cohesiveness, and being loyal. They are highly energized when surrounded by a crowd of fellow-believers because it makes them feel powerful and supports their belief that “all the good people” agree with them.

They are easily duped by manipulators who pretend to espouse their causes when all the con-artists really want is personal gain.

They are largely blind to themselves. They have little self-understanding and insight into why they think and do what they do. They are heavily into denial.

I hasten to add that studies find examples of all these things in lots of others, not just authoritarian followers. But not as consistently, and not nearly as much.

Thank you, Bob.

Returning to two issues from the opening paragraph — where Trump's base came from, and where they’ll go post-Trump: Trump’s base isn’t his at all; authoritarian followers have always been a part of our society. Trump merely borrowed the current batch, and put them to work. Even if Trump were to magically vanish tomorrow, they’re not going anywhere, and won’t be changing their minds about much of anything. They’ll be waiting for the next leader who tells them they’re right and good, their desires will be fulfilled, and those they hate will be punished. No matter how many partisan divides are healed, people with their psychological traits will continue to appear in the population, find each other, form self-reinforcing groups, seek leaders to follow, and, tragically, break their children as badly as they themselves were broken.

That’s all bad, but it’s also nothing new.

The good news? A healthy society is likely to reduce the toxicity of authoritarian followers from one generation to the next¹, while a dysfunctional society will increase it. So, this writer’s master plan for America remains unchanged (and short on details): A United States government devoted to maximizing the quality of life of every American, at no harm to the rest of the world. Also, short-term, let’s finally take terrorism by white people seriously, and find some more checks and balances to protect the nation from authoritarians in its government, so we all arrive at the long-term in one piece.

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1. See also Bob Altemeyer’s 2018 post Why Do Trump’s Supporters Stand by Him, No Matter What?. It ends on a hopeful note, but should be read in context.

Maintaining In-House Technical Skills

From Project Apollo: The Tough Decisions by Robert C. Seamans, Jr., pg. 84:

When conducting advanced technical efforts, it’s imperative to maintain in-house technical skills of a high order. But high-grade technical personnel cannot be stockpiled. They must be given real rabbits to chase or they will lose their cutting edge and eventually seek other employment.

The “Glass Teletype”

From TOG on Interface by Bruce “TOG” Tognazzini, pg. 131:

Early computers used printers as their sole output. When programmers at various large traditional computer companies were first given monitors, they immediately duplicated the printer interface on their green, glowing screens, giving rise to the term “glass Teletype.” With this lavish investment of more than 20 minutes of design time behind them, they saw no need to update the interface for the next thirty years.

The Intuitive Person vs. Western Education

From TOG on Interface by Bruce “TOG” Tognazzini, pg. 103:

Western education is heavily biased toward intellect over intuition: Intuition is endowed with a perverse habit of delivering results most slowly when the need for speed is greatest. [....] Telling a bunch of kids to “think about it for a couple of hours, a day, a week—whatever it takes—then get back to me” just doesn't fit into our lock-step educational process. Betty Edwards (1989): “The right brain—the dreamer, the artificer, the artist—is lost in our school system and goes largely untaught. We might find a few art classes, a few shop classes, something called ‘creative writing,’ and perhaps courses in music; but it’s unlikely that we would find courses in imagination, in visualization, in perceptual or spatial skills, in creativity as a separate subject, in intuition, in inventiveness.”

While I admit to having no idea what classes in “imagination” or “creativity as a separate subject” would amount to, and therefore no idea what benefits might be expected from them, this quote otherwise summarizes one aspect of my dismal school experiences better than any other statement I’ve come across, especially the notion of intuitive people going “untaught.” Am I an autodidact by nature, or necessity?

When I signed-up to take shop classes in Junior High, I was hauled before some school authority and lectured that people on the “college track” couldn’t take shop classes. I couldn’t, and still can’t, imagine why any college in its right mind would care about anything that happens in Junior High, or hold it as anything other than a virtue that you know how things work and how to build them, but the view in my Junior High was definitely that people on the “college track”—a track I’d never imagined existed, because it’d never occurred to me that the school was excluding anyone from it—didn’t need to, and shouldn’t, know how to produce anything. Needless to say, I signed-up for the shop classes anyway, and only wish they’d been better and more numerous. There’re still a lot of questions I’d like to ask my shop teachers; none at all that I want to ask of my other pre-college teachers.

As an aside, as far as I can tell, white kids from upper-income families were automatically on the “college track,” and everyone else was apparently disposable. Was that a hold-over from the traditional, strictly stratified southern social structure, with a dose of probable racism thrown in for good measure? This happened in Houston, Texas at a time when school officials still quivered in fear (or anger, depending on their viewpoint) at the prospect of forced-bussing, and, yeah, I think it was all those things.

Also, the general insight that intuition operates least effectively when speed is most demanded, rings true well beyond my school experiences. (Put another way, telling people who are meant to be operating in a creative capacity: “Create! Create now! Faster, faster, faster!” …is not a formula for success, yet organizations that depend on creativity do it all the time, apparently oblivious to how creativity works, or doesn’t.)

As to the issues of pedagogy as I experienced them at all levels of the educational system (well, up to and including undergraduate college, anyway) and what I call the doctrine of “disposable people,” I have a great many thoughts and criticisms, but that’s for another time. (However, if anyone can recommend a good book summarizing modern thinking on pedagogical techniques, please let me know; a comment to the blog will be fine, or you can email me at any of my well-known email addresses.)

Goldilocks

From TOG on Interface by Bruce “TOG” Tognazzini, pg. 91:

For those not well-versed in English folk story tradition, “The Three Bears” is the story of a young juvenile delinquent who breaks into a neighbor’s house, vandalizes it, and manages to kill herself while trying to escape. Good parents read it to their children, instead of letting them watch all that violence on television.

The Cost of Imperial America

From War Is A Lie by David Swanson, pp. 284-285:

We are [...] proud, however, of shoveling huge piles of cash through the government and into the military industrial complex. And that is the most glaring difference between us and Europe. But this reflects more of a difference between our governments than between our peoples. Americans, in polls and surveys, would prefer to move much of our money from the military to human needs. The problem is primarily that our views are not represented in our government, as this anecdote from Europe’s Promise suggests:

“A few years ago, an American acquaintance of mine who lives in Sweden told me that he and his Swedish wife were in New York City and, quite by chance, ended up sharing a limousine to the theatre district with then-U.S. Senator Jon Breaux from Louisana and his wife. Breaux, a conservative, anti-tax Democrat, asked my acquaintances about Sweden and swaggeringly commented about ‘all those taxes the Swedes pay,’ to which this American replied, ‘The problem with Americans and their taxes is that we get nothing for them.’ He then went on to tell Breaux about the comprehensive level of services and benefits that Swedes receive in return for their taxes. ‘If Americans knew what Swedes receive for their taxes, we would probably riot,’ he told the senator. The rest of the ride to the theater district was unsurprisingly quiet.”

Now, if you consider debt meaningless and are not troubled by borrowing trillions of dollars, then cutting the military and enlarging education and other useful programs are two separate topics. You could be persuaded on one but not the other. However, the argument used in Washington, D.C., against greater spending on human needs usually focuses on the supposed lack of money and the need for a balanced budget. Given this political dynamic, whether or not you think a balanced budget is helpful in itself, wars and domestic issues are inseparable. The money is coming from the same pot, and we have to choose whether to spend it here or there.

Though I have some problems with Swanson’s book, he raises more than a few important issues, including the one above.

So, what is the price of Imperial America? Military expenditures, as of 2007, were $503.4 billion, the highest in the world by a margin so large that they equalled the combined expenditures of the next thirteen biggest military spenders, which were, respectively, China, France, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Brazil, South Korea, India, Turkey, and Australia. And, if those are nations we’re meant to be competing with, it’s worth recognizing that at least nine of those are either allies or nations we get along with just fine. And, in my judgement, China, the world’s no. 2 military spender at $114.7 billion per year, is more of an economic threat to the United States than a military one at present, given both the rapid growth of their economy in size and sophistication, and our increasing financial debt to them.

(During the Cold War, I used to think that a phrase like “American Imperialism” was merely rote propaganda. However, to this day no nation on earth has military bases in more countries than America—how many even still have military bases in other nations?—and that’s a sound working definition of “imperial,” so now I take the phrase, and the issue, quite seriously. And, if the bizarreness of this situation isn’t immediately apparent, perhaps due to being inured to it because it was the status quo before most of us were born, imagine for a moment how it would strike you if there were German, Japanese, Cuban, French—take your pick—military bases within the United States. Taking that hypothetical one step further, if you then heard that much of the populace of country X wanted to close their U.S. bases and reserve their national wealth for enriching the lives of their citizens, would you regard them as traitors, cowards, fools, or as people with sensible priorities?)

So, if we were to abandon the course of empire, a course that history demonstrates is fantastically expensive (in purely monetary terms, as well as human ones), and also assured to fail ultimately, our budget problems are readily solved, and our government can concentrate on using budget dollars to enrich the lives of our citizens with first-rate services (many of which would have the great benefit to our economy of taking large and variable financial burdens, like health care and retirement, off of the shoulders of employers, at least those that still attempt to supply such benefits), rather than on attempting to stage-manage planet earth at gun point. In the meantime, we can have as big a budget problem as the empire we desire. (…and as many enemies as its maintenance, through military presence, military action, and secret skullduggery, provokes.)

Further, as the Reagan administration chose to demonstrate with its policy (earlier advocated by the Heritage Foundation, if memory serves) of driving-up military expenditures in an attempt to create a budget crisis that would force Democrats to cut the social programs reviled by the administration and its backers, the budget crisis which pits military expenditures against social expenditures is a manufactured one, given birth and nourished over the decades by a specific desire to gut the nation’s public education system, social programs, its protective regulatory infrastructure, and the like.

We do not have to play along in this carefully orchestrated game. Discard its premise—that America must be an empire—and the constraints imposed by the game on our thinking about the scope and proper applications of our nation’s wealth, its international and domestic policy, even how we relate to the rest of the world and whether that can conform with our stated ideals of liberty and inalienable personal rights – all those constraints fall away, and we find ourselves freed to consider futures for America and we, its people, that have been withheld from us for generations. Renounce the confining darkness from our past, and we can have a long, bright future – and at very affordable rates.

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This is not an especially nuanced presentation, which I regret, but the facts of government services and military expenditures substantially speak for themselves, so, in all the places where nuance is missing here, its modifications to this message would, I believe, be minor and would not substantively affect the overall conclusion.

The Syntax of Photography

From The Keepers of Light by William Crawford, pp. 6–7:

[....] Are there "syntactical" rules of structure for the way we turn objects into photographs, rules that compel the infinite possibilities to fall along a finite line, just as there are rules for the way we turn concepts into statements? How you answer this question tends to determine how you approach the study of the history of photography.

My answer is that there is a photographic syntactical structure for the "language" of photography and that it comes, not from the photographer, but from the chemical, optical, and mechanical relationships that make photography possible. My argument is that the photographer can only do what the technology available at the time permits him to do. All sorts of artistic conventions and personal yearnings may influence a photographer—but only as far as the technology allows. At bottom, photography is a running battle between vision and technology. Genius is constantly frustrated—and tempered—by the machine.

Contemporary sensibility puts so much emphasis on photography as a "creative" activity that we can forget that what photographers really do—whether creative or not—is contend with a medium that forces them to look, to respond, and to record the world in a technologically structured and restricted way. I think that this point is essential to an understanding of photography. You simply cannot look at photographs as if they were ends without means. Each is the culmination of a process in which the photographer makes his decisions and discoveries within a technological framework. The camera not only allows him to take pictures; in a general sense it also tells him what pictures to take and how to go about it. It does this by restricting the field of view. The technology itself has blind spots and often stumbles through the dark. It is ornery and obstinate and sees only what it will. As a result, human experiences and natural wonders that the technology is not yet able to see go unrecorded—and even unnoticed. Each time the technology enlarges its sight, our eyes grow wider with surprise.

Having struggled over the years with stereo photography, including long baseline (up to 150 feet) stereo of moving objects, high dynamic range photography, and, most challenging of all, panoramic high dynamic range photography—each a photographic technique able to capture visions (or versions) of reality human eyes cannot see, while significantly challenging photographers attempting to impose them on the medium of current technology—the passage above rings especially true, suggesting available photographic technology will always fall short of some photographers’ yearnings, while limiting recordable “human experiences and natural wonders.” I admit, however, the “running battle” between available technology’s limits and inspiration’s realization, is an aspect of photography I find engaging (given sufficient energy and resources), and one which sweetens the successes, despite, or due to, their rarity.

Consultants

What’s great about hiring consultants is supposed to be that your organization has no committment to them. What isn’t much mentioned is that, by the same token, consultants have no committment to your organization.

The Measurement of Misfortunes Revisited

A few days after posting Mark Twain and the Measurement of Misfortunes, I realized something obvious that I’d overlooked for years: The bad habit of seeking an external yardstick by which to measure, compare and disregard human pain and suffering—well examined by Twain in that quoted material—is the basis for a reductio ad absurdum.

The reduction is straightforward: If the pain or suffering of any person can be denied significance because someone else (call them person two) is suffering, or has suffered, more as measured by some external metric, then it follows that if anyone can be found who has suffered more than person two, then person two’s suffering is also of no significance. Repeat this process with that external metric long enough and, given a sufficiently broad knowledge of human misfortune, in principle one person (whether actual or archetypal) can always be plausibly identified as having suffered worse than any other human being. Thus, through this process, and by the logic of the external metric (whatever it happens to be), the pain or suffering of only one person in the entire world matters, and the experiences of the remainder of humanity have no significance.

It’s an obvious absurdity, but a convenient one for anyone disinclined to empathy: by defining a metric—any metric—to judge the relative importance of anyone’s pain or suffering, their empathy can be reserved for just one person in the entire world, who they’ll probably never meet. Thus the wielders of such metrics may, in practice, forever absolve themselves of the exercise of empathy.

(Admittedly, few people employ any idea with absolute consistency, so I’ve constructed a scenario that is, by and large, artificial in its purity, but I believe my critique of this mode of thought is correct – the fact that its adherents will tend to apply it inconsistently is good [the less it is applied, the better], but that in no way diminishes the error inherent in such thinking.)

Any behavior, mental or otherwise, tends to serve some purpose for the person employing it. In this case, that raises the disturbing question: what purposes might be served by, or benefits derived from, an individual’s elimination of empathy? I leave that to the contemplation of the reader.

Mark Twain and the Measurement of Misfortunes

Ever since reading Mark Twain’s autobiography years ago, I have, with some regularity, found myself presented with situations that brought the following passage to mind. Another such situation arose recently, and caused me to search out the passage, as my memory had stored the lesson well enough, but had come up lacking in the matter of retaining the story sufficiently to pass it along properly when it needed passing along. With the passage located, allow me to share it with anyone who can find good use for it, which, roughly speaking, I think is every human being who can still draw breath.

From The Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider, pp. 251-253:

[...] Susy aged seven. Several times her mother said to her, “There, there, Susy, you musn’t cry over little things.”

This furnished Susy a text for thought. She had been breaking her heart over what had seemed vast disasters—a broken toy; a picnic canceled by thunder and lightning and rain; the mouse that was growing tame and friendly in the nursery caught and killed by the cat—and now came this strange revelation. For some unaccountable reason these were not vast calamities. Why? How is the size of calamities measured? What is the rule? There must be some way to tell the great ones from the small ones; what is the law of these proportions? She examined the problem earnestly and long. She gave it her best thought from time to time for two or three days—but it baffled her—defeated her. And at last she gave up and went to her mother for help.

“Mamma, what is ‘little things’?”

It seemed a simple question—at first. And yet before the answer could be put into words, unsuspected and unforseen difficulties began to appear. They increased; they multiplied; they brought about another defeat. The effort to explain came to a standstill. Then Susy tried to help her mother out—with an instance, an example, an illustration. The mother was getting ready to go downtown, and one of her errands was to buy a long-promised toy watch for Susy.

“If you forgot the watch, mamma, would that be a little thing?”

She was not concerned about the watch, for she knew it would not be forgotten. What she was hoping for was that the answer would unriddle the riddle and bring rest and peace to her perplexed little mind.

The hope was disappointed, of course—for the reason that the size of a misfortune is not determinable by an outsider’s measurement of it but only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected by it. The king’s lost crown is a vast matter to the king but of no consequence to the child. The lost toy is a great matter to the child but in the king’s eyes it is not a thing to break the heart about. A verdict was reached but it was based upon the above model and Susy was granted leave to measure her disasters thereafter with her own tape-line.

Perspective that extends one’s understanding beyond one’s own experiences seems to me to be a key component of wisdom. However, denying anyone’s pain legitimacy because it doesn’t measure-up to some external yardstick, is an exercise in intellectual negligence and emotional denial, because it fails at the most basic task of understanding in such situations: realizing that the pain is fully real and deeply felt to the person experiencing it, and that attempting to deny the legitimacy of their experience of that pain—as a whole, or by degree—will not help them deal with it, and to the extent that it encourages the sufferer to deny or repress their pain, rather than process it and come to grips with it, the application of that external yardstick is, I believe, a destructive folly.

So, full points to Susy, aged seven, for raising a profound issue. And my thanks, again, to Mark Twain for so openly and ably sharing his experiences in his autobiography.

Finally, to the people I’ve known, some gifted with great intelligence, who have admonished suffering people that their problems are trivial compared to those of person X or Y, a reminder that intelligence does not automatically supply wisdom, and that a genius may, therefore, also be a damn fool.

Human Face Recognition, a Presentation by Dr. Shalini Gupta

The Austin Forum, on the evening of January 4, 2011, hosted an interesting presentation by Dr. Shalini Gupta entitled “Digital Human Face Recognition,” which I attended because I find digital face recognition a fascinating technical challenge, an increasingly important social issue, and because I have an interest in a lesser, related problem: automatic face isolation (without regard to identity).

Regrettably, it does not appear to be the practice of the Forum to record video of these presentations, so you'll have to settle for her slides (PDF, 25.4 MB), and various points that seemed important at the time and therefore stuck in my head. Her results were significant, interesting, and some of them were even germane to my face isolation interests.

• Ironically, for me at least, Dr. Gupta’s presentation did not cover one of the first problems any real-world face recognition system has to solve, and the one in which I was most immediately interested: face isolation.
• Much of Gupta’s extremely successful “3D AnthroFace” work was performed against the “Texas 3D Face Recognition Database,” which pre-isolated the faces, consistently positioned them within every image, and used significantly higher resolution images than those I have experimented with. Also, since the photos in the recognition database are stereo and/or 3D, they provide significantly more data than 2D images. Their single deficiency, relative to photos I've worked with, is their apparent lack of color. The choice of monochromatic imagery was presumably rooted in a desire to ensure that their algorithm would work in the absence of color information, thus making it compatible with output from monochromatic cameras, like most security cameras.
• The “Eigenfaces” algorithm, published by Turk and Pentland in 1991, made face recognition truly practical for the first time by allowing a face to be characterized by as few as five numbers, quantifying key differences between the metrics of the observed face, and a prototypical “Eigenface.” Gupta sites it as having achieved a 21% verification rate with a false acceptance rate (FAR) error of 1 in 1,000, although it is not clear what size of database was involved in the test that produced that figure. Presumably, 20 years ago, the database would have been quite limited. Nonetheless, Eigenfaces has apparently been the basis for all subsequent face recognition work, and has been dramatically advanced over the years. It has also become the basis for many other types of automated visual recognition systems; as Gupta put it, there are now Eigenbolts and Eigenscrews, etc. For a great many classes of objects that require visual recognition Eigen images can be produced which allow the Eigenfaces algorithm (and its improved descendants) to be applied essentially unchanged.
• In the most recent standard industry test of face recognition (“Multi Biometric Evaluation” in 2009/10), which used a database of 3.6 million people and required the fully automated analysis of 8.7 million photos and videos shot in a variety of conditions, ranging from studio shots only marginally more complex than those in the “Texas 3D Face Recognition Database” (though not 3D), to real world video of moving subjects in widely varying photographic conditions, “3D AnthroFace” was not only better than any other technology, but had a recognition rate equal to, or better than, that of humans. However, the means by which the humans were tested was not specified, so it’s hard to know what to make of that claim. (It seems unlikely that any human was asked to review photos of 3.6 million people, and then search for them in 8.7 million photos and videos.)
• With regard to human face recognition capabilities, Gupta pointed-out that in a study of prison inmates exonerated by DNA tests, 84% had been incorrectly visually identified by human witnesses. So, at least under the conditions in which crimes are committed, investigated and prosecuted, human face recognition can be so poor as to be actively misleading. This isn’t news to many of us, but given its real-world importance, it probably can’t be repeated too often.
• Face recognition systems depend, as you’d expect, on a database of the faces they’re meant to recognize. The error rates (composed of the false rejection rate, FRR, and the false acceptance rate, FAR) of all extant, and predicted, face recognition systems increase with the number of faces in the database. This problem is regarded as intrinsic to the task, but it is widely believed that the growth in error rates can be reduced by using separate databases for storing the characteristics of faces that can be differentiated by readily identifiable gross characteristics. Race and, I believe, sex were mentioned as candidates for such characteristics. In such a system, the first step in face recognition would be to make that gross identification, and then to select the appropriate database based on it. After that, the existing face recognition approaches would be used within the selected database with significantly reduced error rates. Of course, the error rates continue to scale with database size, so the use of multiple databases only delays the point at which error rates become unacceptable, as face databases (presumably) will only grow in size for most any purpose for the foreseeable future.
• Despite the huge strides made in digital human face recognition, it is still bedeviled by a number of quite ordinary issues including unconstrained observing environments, human aging, the poses of subjects, variations in illumination, varied facial expressions, and the poor quality of images available from video systems. The latter issue was of particular interest to me, because many of the photos I have dealt with are comparable to images that might be obtained from video in their poor resolution and quality, suggesting that even the best face recognition systems would have had difficulty with some of the same images that have been a challenge to me.
• Dr. Gupta repeatedly refused to comment on the social implications of face recognition technology, stating that she was concerned only with the technology; what people did with it was not up to her. One wonders what the uniformed police officers, and anyone else in the audience who might have been considering operating a real-world face recognition system, took away from the presentation. While the results of Gupta’s work were truly impressive, as demonstrated in the Multi Biometric Evaluation of 2009/10, the real-world capabilities of all face recognition systems were called into question by her closing acknowledgement that a host of common issues posed major problems (see item above). Her discussion of the problem of error rates increasing as face databases grow only raised more questions. The industry’s anticipated method of mitigating the latter issue, as previously discussed, is to make an initial gross categorization of faces based on a characteristic like race, and then to search within category-specific databases. While this is a sensible technical strategy (if such gross categorization can be performed quickly and reliably), will its eventual developers and users realize that their technology is engaging in automatic racial profiling? Will they also realize that it is doing so because the more one relies on facial recognition technology, the less reliable it becomes? Either issue is significant independently, but, when considered together, they mean that being a member of one of the races that compose the largest of the category-specific databases brings a higher chance of being falsely identified (bad if the database is looking for criminals), and falsely rejected (bad if the database is supposed to grant someone access to their bank account, or confirm to border officials that they are who their passport says they are).

That’s everything I can think of to report. I hope some of it was of interest, and that I’ve done justice to Dr. Gupta’s impressive work.

How Should the Troops Die?

Alan Grayson, Democratic congressman from Florida’s 8th district, who urged his colleagues to vote against war funding in order to shut down those wars and bring the troops home, was accused by one of his opponents, Kurt Kelly, of putting “our soldiers, and our men and women in the military in harm’s way, and maybe he wants them to die.” Naturally, the accusation was made on Fox News. Here’s the key passage of Grayson’s response, from an August 17, 2010 email, which echos my own longtime thinking on this matter:

Yes, Kurt, I do want them to die: of old age, at home in bed, surrounded by their loved ones, after enjoying many Thanksgiving turkeys between now and then. And you want them to die: in a scorching desert, 8000 miles from home, alone, screaming for help, with a leg blown off and their guts hanging out of their stomachs, bleeding to death.

And how can anyone but a U.S. President be accused of placing U.S. military personnel in “harm’s way”? Ever since Presidents began illegally bypassing Congress to start wars, or otherwise involve troops in combat, they’ve been ultimately responsible for any occasion on which the troops were in “harm’s way.”

Grayson was defeated for re-election in 2010, doubtless clearing the way for a politician whose idea of “supporting the troops” is keeping them on battlefields in routine danger of death, mutilation, and mental and physical injuries that will last them a (possibly quite short) lifetime. “Support” like that is something our troops would live longer, better lives without.

Jay Lake Provides One Moment of Shining Clarity

A moment of shining clarity, thanks to Jay Lake.

Government Secrecy, Andrew Jackson Style

Here’s a dose of perspective on government secrecy for this July 4th. I don’t mean to suggest that today our government can be as open as it was in Andrew Jackson’s (or Lincoln’s) time, but the following provides some perspective on how much the openness of our American government has decreased over the course of the past 150 years. To be sure, we’ve added some improvements, like the Freedom of Information Act, but, as we saw during the Bush administration, the various organs of our government have, or can take, far too much leeway in their interpretations of their obligations under that act. And, more generally speaking, because an informed electorate is critical to the success of a democracy, the less an electorate knows about the activities of its government, the less durable their democracy becomes.

From Secrecy by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, pp. 82-83:

Openness in deliberation and not least in diplomacy came to be seen as something of a democratic virtue, even an aspect of [American] national character. In 1860, one of Andrew Jackson’s early biographers reported an anecdote that cast the general as the very embodiment of this virtue. When Jackson was told that one Augustus, a servant with the run of the White House, might be smuggling presidential papers to the general’s opponents, Jackson responded:

“They are welcome, sir, to anything they can get out of my papers. They will find there, among other things, false grammar and bad spelling; but they are welcome to it all, grammar and spelling included. Let them make the most of it. Our government, sir, is founded upon the intelligence of the people; it has no other basis; upon their capacity to arrive at right conclusions in regard to measures and in regard to men; and I am not afraid of their failing to do so from any use that can be made of any thing that can be got out of my papers.”

Apocryphal or not, the anecdote bespeaks what appears to have been a widely shared sentiment. Then with the onset of the Civil War we observe the surely unprecedented notion of openness as an instrument of foreign policy. On December 3,1861, at the beginning of the second session of the Thirty-Seventh Congress, Abraham Lincoln accompanied his State of the Union message with 410 pages, all promptly printed, of dispatches to American ministers abroad. The dispatches dealt with the Confederate states’ efforts to obtain recognition from foreign powers, notably Spain, France, and Great Britain. It was a fateful enterprise in which assertive openness was considered the most effective policy, and there is reason to judge that this proved to be the case. Openness communicated our threats as well as our entreaties, and it did so, in the case of Britain, not only to Whitehall but also to an increasingly literate and volatile public. The United States was dealing with insurrection at home; did Her Majesty’s Government, did the British people consider that this same misfortune might befall England, or Ireland?

Airports

It can hardly be a coincindence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "as beautiful as an airport."

Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect that in their designs.

They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current location of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.

— The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams, pp. 13-14.

(And that was before the advent of the TSA.)

Network Neutrality

The following is the slightly corrected text of a comment I submitted to whichever part of the government was studying network neutrality, and requesting comments from the public, back in mid-January. I submitted this comment as a private citizen, but, of historical necessity, it references my employer. Let me be perfectly clear about this: I in no way speak for, or represent, my employer. Neither do I decide, or have input into, any of its policies. My employer doesn’t know, or care, about about my opinions. I’m speaking for myself only. Believe me.

I reproduce the comment here in the hope that some reader’s perspective on network neutrality might be informed by it.

I’ve been using the Internet since 1987, before the web was invented, and long before most people had even heard the word “email”, let alone “Internet.” In 1993 I created The University of Texas at Austin’s first home page on what is estimated to have been one of the first 200 web servers in existence. I was ordered by my employer to take it down, because the web was not the future they had selected. I ignored the order. The future they had selected had already come and was rapidly fading into irrelevance, but their policies blinded them to that fact.

If the visionless decision makers who told me to take down those web pages had had control over the network, and the type of traffic it carried, they could have stopped me. And if 199 other visionless decision makers, or just a handful of top-level Internet infrastructure providers, had possessed similar power and the will to use it, the web could have ended there and then. Today’s world and economy would be a very different place than it is, and not a better one.

Do not let anyone acquire that power today. The future network technologies that could be choked-off are, by definition, beyond imagining by all but the few people who will be imagining them now and in the years to come. The importance of any one of them might be as world changing as was the World-Wide Web. Nobody should be in a position to hold a kill switch on any of them, or be able to confine them to low-bandwidth ghettos in which they may stagnate and die. The Internet Service Providers arguing against pure network neutrality, whether they admit it, or even realize it, are arguing that they should have such kill switches, or the ability to lock technologies into ghettos to whither and die. Nobody is gifted with the insight and vision necessary to pass judgement on every new network-based technology that will ever come along, so nobody should have that power, in whole or even in part.

Well, that’s my perspective on the issue, anyway. And, needless to say, the “visionless” quality of the decision makers referenced here turned out to be a temporary condition. They, too, embraced the World-Wide Web long before most people had ever heard of it.

The Moon – Been There, Done That

Our Moon, Third Quarter, February 5, 2010.
©2010 Chris W. Johnson

While I’ve had my back turned in recent weeks, the Obama administration announced the scrapping of NASA’s Constellation program to return astronauts to the moon, explore asteroids, service distant space telescopes, and lay the groundwork for human exploration of Mars. I’ve since read several articles about this, and still have no idea what the new plans for our human spaceflight program are. It’s not even clear to me that the Constellation goals have been abandoned, but Constellation, itself, is history. Whether that program was the right way to accomplish those goals, I don’t know. (Although, development of the Ares V heavy lift booster strikes me as a good idea, regardless; having a tool like that available creates a lot of opportunities.) It does, at least, seem clear that Constellation was inadequately funded to accomplish its original goals in a timely manner, if at all. While some of this bothers me not a bit—I think human exploration of Mars is a bad idea for the foreseeable future (contaminating a planet with humans, and whatever other Earth biota they bring with them, is a not an aid, but a hindrance, to searching it for its own unique lifeforms)—I’d have liked … really, really liked … to see us go back to the moon.

The oldest, and seemingly most common objection to human lunar exploration dates back to the Apollo era and is that it costs too much, and we need that money elsewhere. The most common reply to such concerns is that NASA is a tiny fragment of the federal budget (currently less than 1%, if memory serves), so, even with some budget increase to support a crewed lunar program, if you’re looking for money for other projects, there are a lot of agencies whose budgets can be raided to far greater effect. A less common, but at least equally important response, is that the only things “lost” to space exploration are the hunks of metal, plastic, etc. that we fling into space (or into the ocean, along the way). We loose no money to it - all of the money stays on Earth, where it supplies good paying jobs and tax revenue. (My own job has nothing whatsoever to do with the space program, I hasten to add. Money-wise, I have no stake in this, other than being an American taxpayer.)

Yet another objection has more weight to it, in my opinion: That human space exploration is expensive, dangerous, and, beyond low Earth orbit, exceedingly rare, and not currently possible; therefore, we can do exploration cheaper, safer, and more often if we do it robotically. I agree with that argument. But the political reality is that we will have human spaceflight – the money associated with it flows into too many congressional districts for abandoning it to be politically tenable. And even I don’t want to see it abandoned – I just want to see it go someplace for a change, and not cannibalize the robotic exploration programs as it does so.

But there’s yet another objection that I’ve been hearing more and more in recent years, which is: “been there, done that.” That one takes my breath away. It’s like the tourist who visits the Grand Canyon, stops at a few scenic overlooks, maybe takes a donkey ride, and then crosses it off his list of places to see. Been there, done that. That there might be something more in those ≅2,000 square miles than was apparent during his hit-and-run visit never occurs to him. (And those who would never visit at all, because “it’s just another hole in the ground,” make even our hit-and-run visitor a master of insight by comparison. Their lunar equivalents might choose a phrase like “just rocks, dust, and more rocks,” but the failure is the same.)

The moon doesn’t offer us the life and color that a natural wonder like the Grand Canyon does, but it is a natural wonder nonetheless, covered with mountains, valleys, plains, extinct volcanoes, and even caves, that no human eye has beheld, except, perhaps, in glimpses from orbit. So, yes, we’ve been there, like the hit-and-run tourist. But have we “done” it? The notion is absurd. And if we go back without including in every crew an Ansel Adams-grade photographer, complete with the digital equivalent of a large-format, bellows camera, to climb those mountains, walk those canyons, and capture those sights for us, we’ll have cheated ourselves. Think of the moon as the greatest, remotest (inter)national park that Earth has, and one that only 12 explorers have even set foot in, and then imagine that we’ve seen everything worth seeing, and know everything worth knowing. I can’t.

Mark Twain on Death

Years ago, an author I respect, Joe Straczynski, in one of his postings on the Internet, stated his opinion that Mark Twain's autobiography was the greatest work in the English language. With a recommendation like that, I promptly bought and read the book. I'm not a writer, have never been an English major, and there are still quite a few books in English that I haven't read, so I cannot say whether or not I agree with Joe. I can say that I found it an excellent book.

Mark Twain was no stranger to the death of loved ones, and he did us the courtesy of writing eloquently about his experiences. His recountings give the inexperienced some understanding of what is to come, and provide the experienced with some company in their pain. And with his credentials in such matters established, he saw fit to share, from the safety of his own grave (for he had insisted that certain portions of his autobiography not be published until he was dead, or dead for some particular number of years) his own view of death. Though it flies painfully in the face of many established beliefs (a pain Twain regrets), it has stuck with me, and I pass it along for the benefit of any kindred souls.

From chapter 49 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain, as edited by Charles Neider, pages 326 to 327:

[...] I have long ago lost my belief in immortality—also my interest in it. I can say now what I could not say while alive—things which it would shock people to hear; things which I could not say when alive because I should be aware of that shock and would certainly spare myself the personal pain of inflicting it. When we believe in immortality we have a reason for it. Not a reason founded upon information, or even plausibilities, for we haven't any. Our reason for choosing to believe in this dream is that we desire immortality, for some reason or other, I don't know what. But I have no such desire. I have sampled life and it is sufficient. Another one would be another experiment. It would proceed from the same source as this one. I should have no large expectations concerning it, and if I may be excused from assisting in the experiment I shall properly be grateful. Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

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[Update of March 9, 2009] I agree with Alison in Austria's critique of the quote above. Nothing can be experienced of nothingness, so it is a blatant failure of logic when, at the end, Twain claims experiences of the nothingness prior to his birth – the same nothingness that he asserts will follow his death.

Personally, when I read that quote, I assume that the failure wasn't lost on Twain; that in his mind he did equate death with annihilation, and the result of annihilation with nothingness, but that he decided that it was simpler, and/or more effective from a literary standpoint, to express his perspective by ignoring the logical failure of attributing qualities to nothingness. I further assume that he trusted the readers who accepted the death-is-annihilation view to see through his sophistry, while trusting everyone else to be sufficiently offended to move on to the next paragraph without further ado.

Of course, that's a lot of assuming, and I could be wrong. I'll just add that I don't associate Twain with clumsy thinking, while I am aware (because he tells us so in his autobiography) that he was not above toying with the facts in his stories when he thought the stories would benefit. In this case, he may have been toying with the logic of the piece in order to make it easier for his readers to wrap their minds around a concept (absolute nonexistence) that might be unfamiliar to them, and/or antithetical to their beliefs. If so, it was a dubious tactic, because it conflated incompatible concepts (nonexistence and existence), and that leaves us to guess about what he really thought.

Granting all of those problems, I must admit that I still enjoy that passage every time I think of it.

Wow

Barack Obama will be President of the United States of America. An eight year nightmare is ending, and what an ending. It'll take a while to fully sink in for me.... We have a staggering mess to cleanup, but now the process can begin. At long last. Wow.

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And just to anticipate a question: No, I don't trust electronic voting machines one iota more now than I did before the candidate I supported won, and neither should you.

The Ghost of LabMan Past

At some point, I'll finish writing-up a retrospective of the 20 years of academic and administrative computing that I've been a part of here at The University of Texas at Austin, but, for the moment, I just want to throw out a few screen shots of one the earlier software development efforts (1988) of the long-disbanded Microcomputer Support Group (MSG) of the not-quite-so-long-gone U.T. Austin Computation Center. It was a Macintosh application called LabRegister which was used by our proctors to manage our microcomputer lab (and later, labs). It evolved from, and replaced, a HyperCard stack developed by one of the lab proctors, Kee Kimbrell (now a big-shot somewhere). After many more stages of evolution, it became "LabMan", which the The University sells to this day. (And which a number of us around here want to see open-sourced.)

(I was able to run LabRegister again for the first time in ages by using the "minivmac" Macintosh emulator. The screenshots are all, therefore, modern, and show it running under System 7, which didn't exist in 1988 when we used this LabRegister application. But it's close enough, and the original Macintosh 512 X 342 screen size is correct. Note that while the original Mac screen seems unbelievably tiny these days, it still had more pixels than, say, the iPhone currently does.)

My friend and colleague William Green offers the following background: "The primary function initially was allocating machines to users and tracking their usage. There were long waits to get computer access back then. People were required to sign up on paper forms, and those were entered later by hand to generate usage statistics. The Hypercard and later application automated the sign-up and allocation process. The statistics helped to justify lab upgrades and expansions. It changed over time from a manual process by proctors entering data, to users entering data and fully automated. Eventually it did a lot more than track usage, and was actually used to manage the computers themselves."

The "about box". At the time, the man in charge of the MSG, G. Morgan Watkins, insisted that no individual be given credit for any software produced. This "about box" was a fiercely contested compromise that acknowledged Kee Kimbrell's original work, but not my authorship of this particular program. Instead, the entire core staff of the group was credited with authorship, even though some of them weren't even computer programmers.

To Morgan's credit in this context, he insisted that the computers in our labs be networked. Believe it or not, that was a contested issue, with folks outside of the MSG insisting that the Computation Center's serial communications system, MICOM, was all that the lab computers could possibly need.

The main screen, representing our original microcomputer lab in Taylor Hall room 103, circa 1988, which sat roughly where the 24th street entrance to the ACES building currently sits. The icons represent the newly released Macintosh SE and Macintosh II models, although I believe the actual lab was probably still a mix of Mac Pluses, Mac 512Ks, and IBM PCs.

The dialog box for marking machines as down, so the proctors wouldn't assign users to them.

The dialog box showing the status of a machine, in this case one whose ROMs had died.

To understand that there was some significance to the existence of the MSG, the microlab, and this piece of software, it's important to be aware that those of us who argued (and quite passionately) that microcomputers had a useful place to fill in campus computing, and one that made some of the other systems irrelevant, were the young turks that nobody took seriously. We were absolutely right, of course, but in those days it was a constant a fight. These days, of course, most of what were once mainframe tasks are now executed on microcomputer hardware, even if it is stuck in a rack in a machine room somewhere.

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Chris Cooley Remembers

[My additions and deletions are in brackets. --CWJ]

I remember also proctors having to carry around a clipboard to scribble consulting info, then enter them using the "TSR" [terminate and stay resident] style application on IBM PCs. That was even after the move to FAC [Flawn Academic Center] 29. And that "materials" field in LabRegister for things such as diskettes containing applications for the second floppy drive, MacWrite documentation, etc.

I don't recall how the DOS waiting list was accessed by the proctors to get the next user. Was it only a data entry program?

Oh, and the joy of users not in possession of their UT EID for us to confiscate while they used the lab. Especially after having waited a while.

Otherwise I'm drawing a blank on "all the important stuff" as William termed it. I'm thinking that we've pretty much described how it was before the move to FAC 2nd floor and the advent of LabMan. That's when station assignments, integrated printing, IF accounts, station logons generating usage stats, the "spend" command, PRS, etc, came about. (Oops, I think I might have reminded Chris about LaserWriter 8 driver hacking.) [Hacking the LaserWriter driver's binary to remove the AppleTalk communications stack and substitute our own print-intercepting code is not forgotten. It was a neat hack, but I never want to do anything like it again.]

On LabMan, we're waiting for [....] a letter that simply informs OTC [Office of Technology Commercialization] that ITS [Information Technology Services] will be making it free & open source. I'd like to immediately change the pricing. Distribution of the source will have to wait, as we add licensing & disclaimers, remove the registration number code, evaluate security implications to existing labs by exposing the client-server communications details, etc.

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Larry Liberty Remembers

[My additions are in brackets. --CWJ]

I did the TSR [terminate and stay resident] consult recording application (a quality Turbo Pascal program).

For the DOS waitlist, I believe there was the sign-up box (by the door) and another one behind the proctor desk. They were on PC LAN (remember those the huge white coax cables?). Through a shared file, users could add themselves to the list and the proctors could "pop" them off the list. The sign-up and assignment times were recorded so that the waiting time for a station could be determined.

And there was laser printing in FAC 29 [Flawn Academic Center, room 29]. Chris lead the way with LabUser [UserInfo]. (or something like that, I liked the "abuser" part of the name [officially, that stood for "Apple Bus User", since "Apple Bus" was Apple's original name for its AppleTalk networking system]). And I had a Novell Netware based print server solution for PC laser printing. That was followed by a Windows 3.1 integrated printing package. Both required having Unix accounts. William pushed through the whole IF accounts concept (give the users a way to spend money, please!) and IF accounts were already around during the FAC 29 days.

PRS came on-line shortly before the SMF [Student Microcomputer Facility] opened (because the Unix boxes couldn't handle that many IF accounts and IF accounts were required now for lab station logon). So we were required to move laser printing to the VMS machines (PRS), which could handle all the accounts.

It's good to hear LabMan might be open source (it should have been that way from the start).