Category: Uncategorized

Web Diarists, Collaborative Filtering, and Scale-Free Networks

Even though it disparages Josh Marshall, we have to thank No Data Source for the new Hugh Hewitt piece on the Big Four web logs. There was a time when web-based journalism was supposed to somehow revolutionize the delivery of news. The combination of low overhead and accessibility that web sites provide was supposed to wrest control of news from corporations and put it in the hands of the people. Now, presumably, anyone can publish their own broadsheet. It's unavoidable that readership is going to gravitate towards a small group of news providers -- no one person can read everything. The decision of which news sources to read is influenced in large part by their visiblity and referrals from friends -- it's a textbook scale-free network, where things that are popular tend to stay popular, and the ignored stay ignored. The result is Hewitt's Big Four: Instapundit, Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan and the Volokh Conspiracy. Together, these four news outlets exert an enormous amount of influence over the day's agenda, reducing most publishers (like ourselves) to echoes and rehashings of thier posts. This is natural, of course -- reputation and habit are an essential part of the intellectual economy. It's also functionally identical to the "corporate media" problem: the agenda's controlled by a handful. It's useful to look at how computer scientists deal with this "collaborative filtering" problem. After a time, ranking items by strict popularity becomes less useful. The homogenization of search results are going to prevent valuable but unknown items from being found. The simplest solution is to insert unpopular items, at random. This doesn't interfere too much with the accuracy of the results, but does give a fighting chance to the underdogs. For you, the news consumer, this means occasionally trying something new. Just visit WebLogs or another blog aggregate service, and see if you can't find a new favorite. Unfortunately, scale-free networks tend to discourage this behavior. You need a large number of people accidentally picking up the same underdog at the same time in order to gather enough momentum to bring it to the top. Epidemiology studies scale-free networks, too. Viruses get passed around by a core group, and infect populations in clusters. So, it seems, truth is a virus.

Blix: “Bastards” Get Him Down

Now that he's retiring after three years as the Chief Weapons Inspector, Hans Blix seems to have found a new voice. He gave an interview with the Guardian in which he called out the "bastards" in the Bush Administration who interfered with the inspection process. They leaned on him for more damning language in the reports, gave him bad intelligence, and were dismissive of the UN in general. "There are people in this [US] administration who say they don't care if the UN sinks under the East river, and other crude things," he said. They believe it is "alien power, even if it does hold considerable influence within it. Such [negative] feelings don't exist in Europe where people say that the UN is a lot of talk at dinners and fluffy stuff." He also says that despite of the bad apples, his relationship with the United States was good.

Not So Much with the Looting

This story has been collecting steam for a few weeks, and WaPo finally put it all in one place. The looted Iraqi National Museum of Antiquities isn't missing 170,000 artifacts, which would be their entire collection. It's not missing the 3,000 artifacts estimated by this Saturday's initial report from the State Department and the Customs Service. It's actually missing only 33. Still bad, but not the "rape of civilization" as one archeologist described it. The confusion apparently came from some hyperbole from the museum's respected director, Donny George. He has since apologized for the alarmist remarks.

Demzilla

The DNC is currently trying to roll out Demzilla, a piece of software that will collect state and interest group voter lists into a single 150 million-member database that can be used for fundraising efforts. The project, run by QRS New Media and based on software from Plus Three, Alterian and Market Zone, is failing, according to Roll Call, for all of the usual reasons: overengineering, bad or incomplete data, and a lamentable lack of involvement from the intended users during development. The result is that some searches now take weeks to complete. This is, of course, absurd, and Demzilla is basically unusable at this stage -- just when the DNC needs it for the 2004 elections. We could write a book about software development disasters like this, but it would be boring -- these are all rookie mistakes. The real story, though, is not that the DNC can't deploy a by-the-book piece of software. That's only embarrassing. What should really concern Democrats is that the National Committee could not muster support for the Demzilla project from groups that are ostensibly their closest allies. The DNC claims that 40 state committees will participate, but the reception has been lukewarm to hostile. This could be explained, in part, by the interest groups' and state committees' reluctance to share their voter lists with the national committee. The DNC is asking for their bread and butter, so this is probably the case. Surely they could have been made to see the benefits of a single, unified collection of this information? Couldn't the DNC have used a trusted third party to broker the information? Was their no middle ground? Did the DNC really sink millions of dollars into this project and expect the states to participate under duress? Exactly how well-managed is the DNC?

OnePeople 2004 Federal Budget Wrapup, Part I

The United States' Federal Budget is where politics, theory and rhetoric collide with harsh reality. In its 2,866 pages is encoded an immensely complex set of priorities, commitments and compromises which together will keep the United States operating for an entire year. The 2004 budget is especially interesting (relatively) because it was designed by a strongly ideological White House who has the unusual advantage of controlling Congress. This means that the approved budget is a much less about the compromises and more about the priorities of the Republican party. For that reason, this year's budget is immensely instructive. OnePeople obviously has nothing better to do, so we're going to walk you through this year's budget, highlighting areas of interest that you could easily have skimmed over in your favorite periodicals. Since we're almost as lazy as you are, we haven't actually read the budget -- we're relying on a number of different sources, which we'll refer you to when the opportunity presents itself. We'll begin the series with some high-level analysis, turning our perceptive gaze towards the summary prose that precedes the tables and line-items of the budget proper. As it does each year, the Administration uses this prose to explain, justify and illustrate its own fiscal policy. It makes for an awfully big target.