Transcendental Generalization

You may wonder why the US Secret Service has responsibilities as diverse as investigating fraud and protecting the President. At a recent conference, Tim Viertel of the US Secret Service shed some additional light on the history of the organization recorded here.

In 1865, President Lincoln authorized the formation of the Secret Service under the Department of Treasury to combat a huge counterfeit currency problem that had arisen following the Civil War. Lincoln was assassinated the day after this authorization.

In 1902, after the assassination of two more presidents, and with no other governmental police available, Congress expanded the responsibilities of the Secret Service to Presidential protection.

The Secret Service implicated a senator and two congressmen in the western land fraud of 1907. Congress decided the Secret Service had gotten too powerful, and created the FBI under the Department of Justice.

This is a pretty cool big ad.

Here is a presentation on developments in digital identity. It is excellent in both content and style. For those who are stuck in the rut of wordy PowerPoint presentations, this will be refreshing. Edward R. Tufte would be pleased.

The style of this presentation is based on this one at the same conference but from a prior year.

I found this article fascinating. Scientists have trained wasps to detect explosives and corpses, in situations where emergency management personnel would otherwise use dogs.

Scientists from the University of Georgia and USDA Agricultural Research Service are training a strain of the insects to detect everything from concealed explosives, drugs and human remains to — hopefully — diseases like cancer. The results will be published in the journal Biotechnology Progress in the next few months, and is already available online.

From this Discovery Channel article:

The gait-recognition tool, under development at the Technology Research Center of Finland in Oulu, uses sensors to measure and monitor a person’s stride. If the steps are unfamiliar, it switches to a security mode.

On and off, I’ve been following the controversy over the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA operative. It was never clear to me who got involved when and why. The New York Times has presented an excellent interactive graphic that answers these questions as well as links to additional details.

Last night, C-SPAN broadcast a lively debate on whether intelligent design should be taught in schools, sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Click here for a description of the event. C-SPAN archived the video in three parts.

A telling exchange occurred between Kenneth Miller and Paul Nelson over the flagellum, a tail bacteria use to propel themselves through fluid. Proponents of intelligent design have argued that since the parts of the flagellum have no function that could possibly confer evolutionary advantage, the whole flagellum could not possibly have evolved from parts.

Miller showed that even with 80% of its parts removed, the remaining parts have quite a useful function. Hence, it is eminently possible that the parts evolved for a variety of purposes and were then combined for an entirely new purpose.

Nelson’s response was that the flagellum’s function is to propel the bacterium through its medium, and the parts have no ability to propel. He implied that, therefore, the flagellum could not have evolved from parts.

Nelson’s argument against evolution reminded me of Searle’s argument against artificial intelligence. Both are deeply flawed and reminiscent of the idea of the homunculus. This is the childish notion that our intelligence comes from a smaller, whole person inside each of us–the homunculus–who controls the larger body. The notion leads to the question: where does the intelligence of the homunculus come from? Of course, examination of the interiors of bodies reveals that they possess complex organs, but no homunculus. So, the notion is dismissed and we are led to more useful threads of inquiry regarding how bodily behaviors might be controlled by the organs inside them.

Similarly, Nelson suggests that we look for propellant ability in the deconstruction of the flagellum. Not finding this ability in the flagellum’s parts, he concludes that the flagellum must be the product of design.

Nelson displays ignorance, in this exchange, of the well-understood idea of emergent properties. Propellant ability arises out of a specific combination of more fundamental parts, which individually have no propellant ability but are useful and functional nonetheless.

Here is a debate I would love to see: Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of MIT’s Media Lab, columnist for Wired, and author of Being Digital, representing “bits,” information in electronic form, vs. Edward R. Tufte, professor at Yale and author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, representing “atoms,” information in physical form.

Maps would be one point of discussion in this hypothetical debate. Tufte would present a graphic such as the following, from Yahoo! maps:

He would compare it to the same area displayed in a paper map:

Tufte would argue that the highly-refined printing process allowed a much greater density of information to be packed clearly and usefully on the paper map. The Yahoo! map includes less information, because it must be displayed on computer screens of low resolution (compared to what is possible with paper), and is therefore less useful. He would argue that the paper map is more useful in the field compared to any computer display, due to its light weight, thin form factor, the fact that you can fold it up or unfold it into a large area, and the fact that you can annotate it with pen or pencil.

Negroponte would counter that the digital map is more likely to include up-to-date information, and since no physical map could pack in all information that might possibly be useful to the viewer, the digital map would let the viewer choose dynamically the most relevant information for display, as in the case of this Google Earth representation of the same area:

Who’s right? As usual, it depends, but don’t dismiss those paper maps right away.

An interesting front-page article in the 12 October Wall Street Journal describes how all Germans must register their names with the government. Law prevents names that include hyphens or confuse the sex of the named person.

…the rules are meant to prevent German children from being the victims of ridicule or confusion…

And why no hyphens? …the concern is hyphenation multiplication. If a double-named boy grew up to marry and have children with a double-named woman, those children could have four names, and their children could have eight, and their children could have 16. The bureaucracy shudders.

Lest we think that Germans are overzealous on this matter, recall that the person with the longest name was a German named
Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvim John Kenneth Loyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor Willian Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorffvoralternwarengewissenhaftschaferswesenchafewarenwholgepflegeundsorgfaltigkeitbeschutzenvon-
angereifenduchihrraubgiriigfeindewelchevorralternzwolftausendjahresvorandieerscheinenbanderersteerdeemmeshedrraumschiffgebrauchlichtalsseinursprungvon-
kraftgestartseinlangefahrthinzwischensternartigraumaufdersuchenachdiesternwelshegehabtbewohnbarplanetenkreisedrehensichundwohinderneurassevan-
verstandigmenshlichkeittkonntevortpflanzenundsicherfreunanlebenslamdlichfreudeundruhemitnichteinfurchtvorangreifenvon-
andererintlligentgeschopfsvonhinzwischensternartigraum Senior

Would you want to be responsible for printing his passport, birth certificate and driver’s license?

An inspiring article on NPR’s Morning Edition described how a small-time community orchestra has been energized by the prospect of doing the debut performance of a famous composer’s latest work. It also contained critical insights for business leaders wanting to get the best out of employees and teams:

• Find people with internal motivation–who are willing to work even if they are not rewarded with fame or fortune.
• Present a team of such people with an objective they all recognize as important and beyond the reach of any one of them individually.
• Convince them that there is a chance, however remote, of this particular set of people collaborating to achieve this objective. Small modifications to the objective may be required.
• Have a plan which includes the participation of every member of the team.
• Have contingency plans, because you cannot anticipate every outcome.
• Ensure the cooperation of every participant, according to their abilities and desires, in achieving the goal.
• Invest, personally, in the group’s execution.
• Practice, practice, practice.

I don’t think this is easy in business. Indeed, in music and even in sports, there are standard structures for collaboration, traditions passed from generation to generation, and even specialized languages to support getting the best out of teams. In business, especially entrepreneurial, high-technology business, such support seems to be lacking or undergoing constant change.