Tails Beta Testing

I had recently been looking for a good bug tracker, in the run up to working on a couple code projects, a freelance e-commerce project, and a couple other miscellaneous projects. And while I've used trac and bugzilla before, and heard good things about collaboa, I'm really not all that terribly interested in bugtrackers, and as a result have very little interest in actually administering one. I'm lazy, and would much rather be looking up information on other things (like cocoa, which I've recently become interested in), rather than digging through bugtracker manuals.

Turns out, just through my random wanderings through the interweb, a casual acquaintance of mine from a message board I frequent fortuitously happened to be in the final stages prior to a beta launch of a bugtracker his company was building. So, as a result, I managed to get into the initial beta test of Tails, which purports (and seems to live up to) effortless bug tracking.

First things first. Tails is a hosted app. This is good for someone like me, who's not interested in having to deal with all the administrivia of setting up a bug tracker, and probably bad for people who are total (read: needless) control freaks, or extremely paranoid with their data. But, hosted applications aren't a new development, and given that Dan, the guy working on the app, is a good guy, I don't have any serious qualms with using Tails (more on privacy later). The picts below come from Dan's flickr account, and it might be handy to check out the notes that go with each image there.

Tails, being a bug tracker, does all the things that you'd want it to do, you can create projects, file bugs, request features, assign bugs to particular project members, etc., etc., etc. So now that we know it actually is a bug tracker, what's neat about it? Well, in terms of cool things for a linguistics/categorization geek, like me, it allows you to tag features/bugs/projects/the like. Now, before you cram any lead pipes down my throat for uttering a web 2.0 buzzword, remember that this is a good use of keyword searching. Since I (or you) control who's got access to a project, and who's tagging bugs, you don't get the collective cognitive dissonance that site-wide flickr searches produce, because you don't have people who are trying to whore their bug reports to as many people as possible.

Now, on privacy. Your tails projects can be set to either public or private. So, in private mode, really you've got full control over who can see your private information (however much you'd like to put up into tails), and of course in public mode, anyone on the site can see your stuff. That said, there is no public index of projects at this stage, and i'm not sure one is to come. So, Tails still serves as a personal bugtracker, and nobody else will find it (or stumble across other people's random projects) unless you want them to, even if you keep your projects set to public. In either mode, you can invite guests to your project to come, tool around, report bugs, request features, again, all the normal bug tracking things. Guests also don't count as users, in terms of the level of account you have. And accounts come in 4 flavors; Free, Basic, Pro, Unlimited. (seen below)

What screen shots don't illustrate is the usability of the site. Why is that? Because it's got a lot of dynamic interaction. Most text and options related to your project is easily editable via a JS/ajax interface. Click, an overlay will popup (see below) and you're ready to go (and what's better, all editable items give you indications that they are editable). This is the thing that's really great about the site. It's hosted, but it's also lovely to simply use.

So, what's the final verdict? For me? Definitely. It serves all the purposes that I have for it, as a small/lone developer, and hands me some functionality that I wouldn't otherwise have. Finally I don't have to worry about maintaining it, and because it is a commercial project (thankfully that also has free accounts), I'm not terribly concerned about suddenly being left holding the bag, having to support my own bug tracker.

Casual Commentary: Palestine, Posturing, and Politics

My view of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict can be summed up very succinctly with one catch phrase:

"Two wrongs do not make a right."

The arguments on both sides of the division come down to two things, a sense of entitlement, as to what each side is owed, and a sense that each side is in dire and immediate danger from their opponents in the other nation. The irony is that these two sets of feelings cycle and reinforce each other. The sense of entitlement each side has, and the commentaries to that effect are used by the other side to justify why they must continue their struggle, which only serves to fuel their opponent's paranoia that they are an immediate and unending threat.

Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition:

A spokeswoman for Mr. Schwarzenegger, Margita Thompson, said after the vote that the governor believed that the issue of same-sex marriage should be settled by the courts, not legislators, but she did not indicate whether that meant he would veto the legislation. The bill did not pass with enough votes to override a veto. (from the new york times)

“Activist judges . . . have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives. On an issue of such great consequence, the people's voice must be heard. If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process.”- George W. Bush, January 20, 2004 (from town hall)

Yes, republicans. The big tent party. The big contradiction party.

Synthesis: Science Education as the New Wedge

Even prior to the first Bush Administration, it was clear to me that the Born-Again NeoCon Republican party takes actions solely for their political gain. As early as the republican primaries demonstrated the lengths to which NeoRepublicans would go to discredit those who oppose them, as demonstrated by push polling directed at John McCain. Late 1999 began with the Bush campaign attempting to placate some environmental concerns... pretenses which were quickly abandoned once the election was over. The next several years were not representative of what the Bush Admin was destined to be, due to a horrific assault on New York City. But behind the mask of patriotism and rallying around the president, the Republican Party was still functioning in the same cynical fashion.

Nothing demonstrated their modus operandi more clearly than the 2004 presidential campaign. Of course, the standard Roveian tactic - spreading lies and rumors about one's opponent - was still in play, but, although these tactics sent the Democrats reeling, they were not what the press (nor i) attributed the small but significant margin by which Bush won (discussion of disenfranchising voters aside). What put Bush over the top were issues of religious faith. What did that mean in 2004? Bans on homosexual marriage. Most notably in locals such as my home state of Ohio, the state which delivered Bush a second term. Why is this a cynical tactic? Well, nationally, for all the rhetoric Republicans spew, commentators conservative and liberal alike note the significant absence of any substantive legislative gains for the Religious Right. Abortion is still legal, and nobody is jumping for a federal homosexual marriage ban (seems Bush spent all his political capital on getting electrocuted by the 3rd rail of politics, Social Security).

So what's that got to do with today? Well, having played the homosexuality card in 2004, Republicans need a new social rallying cry for the 2006 midterm elections. So, the question is, what are conservatives ramping up the noise machine for today?

Science bloggers know. Comments this August from the President himself have started a steadily growing resurgence of anti-science controversy aimed at evolutionary theory. The press has picked up on the comments, which have set crank tanks such as the Discovery Institute into full gear, repeating specious and untrue claims to whoever will publish them, whether it's the NYTimes, or sports commentators. This news is disturbing enough for scientifically minded Americans, but doesn't give one a view of what is afoot. Having legitimized "teaching the controversy" over evolution in the presses, states like Florida appear to be prepping to install controversy into their school systems, and have taken their first step with their choice of k-12 Chancellor.

This issue is going to be just as hard, if not harder to fight than issues of homosexual unions, as explained by an article published today in the NYTimes (in a fit of irony) on Jon D. Miller, a political scientist at Northwestern. His conclusions are summed up very succinctly by this paragraph:

While scientific literacy has doubled over the past two decades, only 20 to 25 percent of Americans are "scientifically savvy and alert," he said in an interview. Most of the rest "don't have a clue." At a time when science permeates debates on everything from global warming to stem cell research, he said, people's inability to understand basic scientific concepts undermines their ability to take part in the democratic process.

And, if i'm right, and the current racket is a precursor to the din of the 2006 election, it won't just be Democrats who'll be hung out to dry, but scientists, and America's very future. By turning evolution into a political football, conservative politicians are denying America's children the education they need to keep America as the pillar of intellectual thought that it is today.

Impossibly Complex Distictions for a Sports Commentator

There is a huuuuuge and unescapable irony in that journalists rant about bloggers not having credibility to comment on pressworth issues, yet columnists like this one seem to think that they're capable of doing justice to questions about evolutionary theory (linked via Atrios). An excerpt:

First, let's get rid of the idea that ID (intelligent design) is a form of sly creationism. It isn't. ID is unfairly confused with the movement to teach creationism in public schools. The most serious ID proponents are complexity theorists, legitimate scientists among them, who believe that strict Darwinism and especially neo-Darwinism (the notion that all of our qualities are the product of random mutation) is inadequate to explain the high level of organization at work in the world. Creationists are attracted to ID, and one of its founding fathers, University of California law professor Phillip Johnson, is a devout Presbyterian.

::Howl of Intellectual Pain::

• Complexity Theory is not what Intelligent Design Creationists are doing. Computational Complexity Theory is about classifying problems based on how difficult they are to solve. IDCers aren't interested in solving problems (which is what classifying problems requires), they're only interested in creating problems .
• Most (i'd venture nearly all) supporters of Intelligent Design are in fact Creationists. More importantly, these people support ID because they are creationists, and justify their support on theological grounds.
• Please note, "ID proponents ... legitimate scientists among them, who believe that strict Darwinism and especially neo-Darwinism ... is inadequate to explain the high level of organization at work in the world." No mention of actual proof of the assertations they make, just that "legitimate scientists" believe it. Legitimate according to who one might ask?

On Nomenclature:

Proponents of evolutionary theory are not Darwinists, they are Evolutionaries. By comparison, believers in General Relativity are not Einstienians, they are cosmologists.

Useful Analogies: Guns & Drunk Driving

Guns don't kill people, people kill people.

Well, clearly then, the NRA must be against drunk driving statues right?

After all,

Cars don't kill people, drunk drivers kill people.

Fact or Flak: Reality behind the Ebonics Debacle

Language is a complicated issue. It's complicated because every human uses language. And because they use language, they believe themselves to all be experts on language. This is not the case. So please, abandon your preconceptions. For those of you unable to abandon your preconceptions, i will use short sentences and small words.

There are children. These children speak a dialect of english. This dialect of english is not the Standard American English (SAE) that is tested for by the SAT, ACT, GRE, or No Child Left Behind. If you were feeling generous, the current way of teaching children SAE might be called "sink or swim." These children only see SAE on television. They grow up in one of the many different cultures that make up the "American Melting Pot". They are brought to school, and expected to behave in a manner they are not familiar with, with minimal instruction.

One school board, decided that this was silly. Wouldn't it make more sense to first understand how their children really speak, and then explain how SAE works by connecting how they actually speak to how SAE works?

In fact, this is a proven methodology! Children of recent immigrants are taught with a good deal of success when you introduce English to them via their own language, rather than in spite of it. So this school board decided, "hey, this could work for us too, why don't we see whether we can qualify for the same funding as children who are learning english as a second language?"

Unfortunately, America did not understand. They though that by acknowledging that children of a particular subculture did not speak Standard American English (although, y'know, really, a lot of people don't. Guess what, you still understand them), that they were being asked to legitimize a dialect of English which is unpopular. They criticized this school board, so much, that all funding opportunities disappeared.

Ironically, thanks to the ignorance of others, children are still told to sink or swim. Through no fault of their own, because the way they speak is considered "ignorant" and "improper", they are not taught SAE effectively.

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On Issues of Culture:

People often decry African American Vernacular English (the linguistic name for "ebonics") as simply being "improper" Standard American English. They often believe that people speak AAVE due to a lack of education. This is a misconception. Children essentially language sponges. From before they're born, up until puberty, childhood brains just soak up language. They soak up whatever language is around them. That's why british children speak with a british accent, and children from Georgia speak with a drawl and a twang. Likewise children who are born to parents who speak AAVE soak up AAVE. They do not speak AAVE because they have improperly soaked up Standard American English. They speak AAVE because that is what they know.

Next. AAVE is not an illegitimate way of speaking. AAVE is a dialect of English. It is like other dialects of english, for example British English, Appalachian, Bostonian or Brooklyn English. It is a way of communicating. Manners of communication are often associated with certain ways of behaving. The way you speak to your boss or the way you would speak to the president is different from the way you speak to your close friends, or to your significant other. In fact this is so universally the case, that people stereotype it. For instance, academics are often accused of being pedantic, or arrogant. That's because they occasionally speak in a way that is difficult to understand for people who are not familiar with the subject at hand. It is only arrogant if they refuse to explain the unclear points, or dismiss those who don't understand, because they are uninitiated.

Likewise, people who demand, and expect children who speak AAVE to suddenly flip a switch and begin speaking SAE are in a similar situation. They are dismissing AAVE speakers out of hand, without giving them a chance to become acclimated to SAE.

Currently Plugged Into: The Cyberiad

An excerpt from: The First Sally (A) or Trurl's Electronic Bard of the Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel (yes, this is a -translation-, i can only imagine what the original was like).

---

"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling you understand, in the cybernetic spirit."

"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your sense?" Trurl began, but stopped for his electronic bard was already declaiming:

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gental gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but know such a^2 cosine(2*phi)!

This concluded the poetic competition, since Klapaucius suddenly had to leave, saying he would return shortly with more topics for the machine; but he never did, afraid that in so doing, he might give Trurl more cause to boast.

What i really want out of the Sheehan conflict

Unless you've been living in under a rock or deep space, you've heard about Cindy Sheehan and the controversy that's exploded around her.

Bush continues to decline to meet with her, citing the fact that he's aware of what she has to say. And he's right. Iraq policy isn't going to change. The US didn't go into Iraq with a plan, and it's going to be difficult to spin one out of the situtation that's developed now (unless we'd like to just hand Iraq to Iran).

So why should Bush meet with Sheehan?

Simple. To prove he's not an unrelenting bastard. A simple acknowledgement of the fact that things aren't going perfectly. To prove that he can communicate with Americans in a way that does not solely involve propagandistic motives.

Recent developments in the History of Science, a breif recap.

It is my opinion that the cultural beating evolution has taken at the hand of in the past 30 years is symptomatic of a larger anti-scientific and anti-technological trend that has evolved out of disparate corners of American society.

First some historical perspective. Back around the turn of the previous century, there was a movement called Logical Positivism. During the high times of Modernism, philosophers and scientists pursued goals like the formalization of all mathematics. The problem, as demonstrated by Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems in the case of the Principia Mathematica, was that the Positivists were reaching for things that were in principle impossible. Regardless of the philosophical turmoil brewing the demands of WWII and post-war reconstruction made science and technology as the driving force in human civilization.

The problem was that Positivism's demise left a gaping void, with nothing to fill it (hard to accomplish the impossible). Postmodernist philosophy instead lead to attempts to reenvision reality, and included in that science and philosophy. Of these, the most influential was probably Thomas Kuhn's theory in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Disregarding other theories for the moment, Kuhn's basic insight was that scientific progress did not work solely via altruistic scientists who steadfastly developed theories by following where facts lead. Obviously, a serious furor developed. Scientists did not appreciate the accusation that scientific truth was merely a social construct, true only because we believed it to be so.

Disregarding Kuhn however is impossible. Kuhn was right in part. Science was and is a human endeavor. Humans aren't perfect, and as the adage "there are three kinds of lies -- lies, damned lies, and statistics" points out, research can be twisted for all sorts of purposes. Nor are the goals of research programs necessarily determined by scientists, as DARPA is well aware (Yes, of course a missile defense shield is possible!). Anyway, with the departure of the modernist dream, Kuhn drove the nails into its coffin by removing scientists from the seat of impartiality and neutral pursuit of Truth (note capital T).

That brings us up to modern day philosophically. What i've written thus far sounds pretty bleak, but science has made due. But remember, modern day scientists, don't claim to be perfect. However, a lack of perfection doesn't mean that scientists can't be, and don't strive to be, impartial. Because of this point Scientists don't tend to buy Kuhn. Most scientists fall into the philosophical tradition of Karl Popper, who's solution to the problems of verificationism was something called Falsificationism (where you test theories by trying to make them break).

So what's this got to do with anything? Kuhn opened the door to a new kind of relativism, relativism over the fundamental facts of science. Operations such as the Discovery Institute, and other efforts to undermine science, such as global warming deniers function by exploiting this belief that scientific conclusions are determined merely by what people believe.

Unfortunately the position of science today is more dire than just what i've described above. The present day first world is closely associated with all things technological. As such, technology and science bear the wrath of individuals in our society who are dissatisfied with society. Whether they are anti-evolution literal biblical creationists, anti-authoritarian hippies and/or libertarians, anti-urban sprawl ruralites, anti-pollution environmentalists, or those opposed to processed food, many view the failures of society as the result of forms of technological domination.

As a result, science is facing not only acute attacks by groups with particular agendas, but also a general malaise of distrust from the general public.

Later i'll post some on perspectives of science, and what i think needs to be done to rehabilitate the science of cool.

Categories i plan on using

Hello, to the non-existant audience who may be reading this (or for future readers).

I intend on using a couple recurring categories to track things that i find interesting or irritating, the list currently includes but is not limited to:

• We do not live in a free society. (And other complaints about authoritarianism)
  
• Fact or Flak? (Don't believe everything you see on TV)
  
• Remember kids, details are important! (because reality doesn't work in soundbite sized chunks)
• Currently plugged into... (media showcase!)
• For future reference. (Recordings for posterity)