Clay Shirky expresses some very powerful ideas about the demise of newspapers and traditional publishing [Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable at Clay Shirky]:

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

[Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 9:22 pm]

The main thesis of the article is that the business models underlying print-based news are completely unsustainable, and newspapers are being kept alive solely by institutional inertia.

Shirky notes that the new content production models visible at the moment involve unremunerated writing and publishing produced by loose collections of enthusiastic amateurs:

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

[Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 9:22 pm]

The new model of journalism seems to have some worrying characteristics. Investigative journalism in the Woodward and Bernstein mould may be an idealistic model, but it was possible because of resources which might only be available to large institutions: teams of lawyers, a newspaper’s own political weight, institutional access to data etc. Investigations into the activities of large transnational bodies need to be supported by the tactical resources enabling them to withstand legal, financial and paramilitary defense mechanisms. It seems hopelessly romantic to imagine that networks of enthusiastic amateurs could achieve what the ideal models of investigative journalism seem to achieve. The new models look capable of producing vast amounts of shallow scrutiny, but they risk disabling the kinds of journalism that gave journalism what good name it has.

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The Scotsman have reported on the development of miniaturised, ’speckled computing’ techniques being developed by team based in Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Strathclyde universities¹. Dr Damal Arvind, director of the team, will deliver a talk about these new computational systems at Edinburgh International Science Festival on Friday 13th April.

Arvind said: “This is the new class of computing: devices which can sense and process the data they receive. They also have a radio so they can network and there’s a battery in there as well, so they are entirely self-powered.

“You can do lots of interesting things with this technology. We are seeing this kind of technology in the Nintendo Wii and this is a very, very primitive form of what we will be demonstrating on Friday.” [The Scotsman]

On a related note, I am reminded of the 5 micron RFID chips produced by Hitachi² which are many times smaller than the 0.4mm x 0.4mm mu-chips that can already be found embedded in tickets etc.

¹[From The Scotsman via Medgadget and Engadget]

²[Fuji Sankei (in Japanese) Via Pink Tentacle]

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2006 saw the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) cutting back its funding of fundamental science in favour of product-based research of tactical and strategic significance for the US. University researchers have found themselves starved of funding for basic science and having to conform to war-footing security procedures for smaller scale projects. The focus on deliverables has led to funding being directed towards corporate and covert research programmes. The cumulative effect of IP legislation in the US has further eroded the openness of traditional academic methods.

According to David Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery, DARPA funding has decreased [for universities] while National Science Foundation funding has been rising, although NSF funding tends to focus on very much smaller scale projects than was conventional for DARPA. It should be noted that the funding numbers referred to by Patterson are ‘excluding classified projects or those where the university functioned as a subcontractor’ ( IEEE Spectrum Online ). The New York Times reported on April 2nd that:

This week, in responding to a query from the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Darpa officials acknowledged for the first time a shift in focus. They revealed that within a relatively steady budget for computer science research that rose slightly from $546 million in 2001 to $583 million last year, the portion going to university researchers has fallen from $214 million to $123 million. [New York Times]

The Computing Research Association, an association of computer science academics from US universities, produced a report for the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee subcomittee on cybersecurity R&D criticising government policy for the near-sightedness of DARPA’s venture-capital firm approach to easily measurable progress in research; for the increased use of classification to hide research from the academic community; and for the pernicious influence of IP law in preventing open discourse about research.

According to the CRA report, under the stewardship of its director, Anthony Tether, DARPA has been transformed into an organization resembling a ‘high-tech venture capital firm’ focused on projects whose development schedules can be mapped onto 12/18 monthly milestones. Since there can be no guarantees in the development schedules of fundamental science these constraints place the emphasis of funding squarely on those projects having only to overcome implementation problems.

The CRA report also criticises the increased use of classification to render the results of research beyond the scrutiny and peer-review of the academic community. Clearly, research with a focus on deliverables of tactical and strategic importance is going result in classified research. However, where there is a redistribution of resources in favour of such projects there will be a dwindling amount of academic material available to contribute to the broader research community. Starving the academic community of cutting edge developments is hardly a recipe for expanding the pool of researchers and theories out of which future projects will emerge.

The growing proportion of DARPA funding for tactically relevant research brings with it inevitable security concerns. One consequence of this is the increase in classification of research and the associated extension of the state security apparatus to include the assessment of membership qualification for research programmes. The New York Times article reports that academics have discovered DARPA funding can entail tough constraints on the membership of research programmes. One academic, Dr. Kleinrock (UCLA) ‘said that he decided that he was not interested in the project when he learned that the agency was insisting that he employ only graduate assistants with American citizenship’ (New York Times). Needless to say, severing US research from the pool of international talent wanting to study in the US deprives science (and US science) of a tremendously powerful resource.

The third of the CRA’s concerns was with the consequences of US intellectual property law for the dissemination of academic research:

[T]he “anti-circumvention provisions” of the DMCA interfere with many legal, non-infringing uses of digital computing and prevent scientists and technologists from circumventing access technologies to recognize shortcomings in security systems, to defend patents and copyrights, to discover and fix dangerous bugs in code, to analyze and stop malicious code (e.g., viruses), and to conduct forms of desired educational activities. In some instances, the threat of legal action under the DMCA has deterred scientists from publishing scholarly work or even publicly discussing their research, both fundamental tenets of scientific discourse.[CRA Report]

Whether your politics are left- or right-leaning, the issue at this point in history is whether anyone can afford to cut fundamental science in favour of covert military research when the operational constraints on covert research remove the mechanisms science has established to sustain the quality of its work. The place of the university at the heart of science is not metaphysically guaranteed role. Even if research increases the intensity of its migration into corporatate institutions the same principles of openness, peer-review and criticism are still its best guarentors of quality. The danger of the drift in emphasis towards deliverables and security in an age of almost permanent national emergency is that will see increasing political interference in matters of science and we will have removed the protections against a new breed of corporate Lysenkoism.

Ref:

Computing Research Association (2006) Testimony Of The Computing Research Association For The Pitac Cyber Security Subcommittee Town Hall Meeting On Cyber Security Research And Development. (Report) [Online] Internet: http://www.cra.org/ (Accessed 26 Dec 2006)

Kumagai, Jean (2006) “U.S. Defense Dollars for Computer Science Plunge”. IEEE Spectrum. 43 (2) [Online] Internet: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb06/2814 (Accessed: 26 Dec 2006 )

Markoff, John (2006) “Pentagon Redirects its Research Dollars”. The New York Times. 2 April 2006 [Online] Internet: http://www.nytimes.com/ (Accessed: 26 Dec 2006 )

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Wired have reported on a autonomous agent system, produced by Naveen Kuppuswamy of the KAIST robot labs, that can move between a number of hardware substrates including robots and PCs.The agent learns via genetic algorithms and has been constructed to be trained for loyalty and recognisable emotions. (More ….)

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The (American) National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) makes yearly evaluations of machine translation technologies. The evaluations are based on Arabic - English and Mandarin-English translations. This year’s results are commented upon by MIT’s Technology Review. The results aren’t spectacular but there is concrete progress with Google and IBM jostling for top spot.

It would be great to see the real time translators used in Second Life where Yossarian Seattle has already provided the tools. There’s a good article on Yossarian’s translator at New World Notes and a video of it in action on YouTube.

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