You Can't Say That on the Internet

Evgeny Morozov, The New York Times, November 16, 2012

A BASTION of openness and counterculture, Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A. But its hyper-tolerant facade often masks deeply conservative, outdated norms that digital culture discreetly imposes on billions of technology users worldwide.

What is the vehicle for this new prudishness? Dour, one-dimensional algorithms, the mathematical constructs that automatically determine the limits of what is culturally acceptable.

Consider just a few recent kerfuffles. In early September, The New Yorker found its Facebook page blocked for violating the site’s nudity and sex standards. Its offense: a cartoon of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve’s bared nipples failed Facebook’s decency test.

That’s right — a venerable publication that still spells “re-elect” as “reëlect” is less puritan than a Californian start-up that wants to “make the world more open.”

And fighting obscenity can be good for business. Impermium, a Silicon Valley company that helps Web sites deal with unwanted reader comments, has begun marketing technology that identifies “all kinds of harmful content — such as violence, racism, flagrant profanity, and hate speech — and allows site owners to act on it in real-time, before it reaches readers.” Impermium will police the readers — but who will police Impermium?

Apple, too, has strayed from its iconoclastic roots. When Naomi Wolf’s latest book, “Vagina: A New Biography,” went on sale in its iBooks store, Apple turned “Vagina” into “V****a.” After numerous complaints, Apple restored the title, but who knows how many other books are still affected?

True, these books are still on sale. Unlike the good old United States Post Office, which once confiscated “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and other books it deemed too lewd, Silicon Valley does not engage in direct censorship. What it does, though, is present ideas and terms that have gained public acceptance as something to be ashamed of. Silicon Valley doesn’t just reflect social norms — it actively shapes them in ways that are, for the most part, imperceptible.

The proliferation of the Autocomplete function on popular Web sites is a case in point. Nominally, all it does is complete your search query — on YouTube, on Google, on Amazon — before you’ve finished typing, using an algorithm to predict what you’re most likely typing. A nifty feature — but it, too, reinforces primness.

How so? Consider George Carlin’s classic comedy routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” See how many of those words would autocomplete on your favorite Web site. In my case, YouTube would autocomplete none. Amazon almost none (it also hates “penis” and “vagina”). Of Carlin’s seven words, Google would autocomplete only “piss.”

Until recently, even the word “bisexual” wouldn’t autocomplete at Google; it’s only this past August that Google, after many complaints, began to autocomplete some, but not all, queries for that term. In 2010, the hacker magazine 2600 published a long blacklist of similar words. While I didn’t verify all 400 of them on Google, a few that I did try — like “swastika” and “Lolita” — failed to autocomplete. Is Nabokov not trending in Mountain View? Alas, these algorithms are not particularly bright: unable to distinguish between Nabokov’s novel and child pornography, they assume you want the latter.

Why won’t tech companies let us freely use terms that already enjoy wide circulation and legitimacy? Do they fashion themselves as our new guardians? Are they too greedy to correct their algorithms’ mistakes?
Thanks to Silicon Valley, our public life is undergoing a transformation. Accompanying this digital metamorphosis is the emergence of new, algorithmic gatekeepers, who, unlike the gatekeepers of the previous era — journalists, publishers, editors — don’t flaunt their cultural authority. They may even be unaware of it themselves, eager to deploy algorithms for fun and profit.

Many of these gatekeepers remain invisible — until something goes wrong. Thus, in early September, the online livestream from the Hugo Awards, the Oscars of the science fiction world, was interrupted with a cryptic copyright warning, right before the popular author Neil Gaiman was to deliver an acceptance speech.
Apparently, Ustream — the site streaming the ceremony — was using the services of another company to determine whether its streamed videos violated any copyrights. The partner company draws on a very large video archive to see, in real time, if what’s being streamed matches anything in its collection. Somehow, the celebratory video that preceded Mr. Gaiman’s speech tripped a copyright match, and the feed was cut off, even though the organizers had all the requisite permissions (and, under the doctrine of fair use, probably didn’t need them anyway).

The limitations of algorithmic gatekeeping are on full display here. How do you teach the idea of “fair use” to an algorithm? Context matters, and there’s no rule book here; that’s why we have courts. From the perspective of sticky, amorphous human culture, semi-automation — pairing up humans with algorithms — beats full automation. Sometimes, gaps are productive. But will profit-driven Silicon Valley ever acknowledge this insight?

Our reputations are increasingly at the mercy of algorithms, too. No one knows this better than Bettina Wulff, the former German first lady who has sued Google for autocompleting searches for her name with words like “escort” and “prostitute.” Ms. Wulff insists that Google’s algorithms spread false rumors about her; Google says that the suggested terms are just an “algorithmically generated result of objective factors, including the popularity of the entered search terms.”

Google’s defense would sound tenable if its own algorithms weren’t so easy to trick. In 2010, the marketing expert Brent Payne paid an army of assistants to search for “Brent Payne manipulated this.” Soon anyone typing “Brent P” into Google would see that phrase in their autocomplete suggestions. After Mr. Payne publicized his experiment, Google removed that particular suggestion, but how many similar cases have gone undetected? What is “objective” about such algorithmic “truths”?

Quaint prudishness, excessive enforcement of copyright, unneeded damage to our reputations: algorithmic gatekeeping is exacting a high toll on our public life. Instead of treating algorithms as a natural, objective reflection of reality, we must take them apart and closely examine each line of code.

Can we do it without hurting Silicon Valley’s business model? The world of finance, facing a similar problem, offers a clue. After several disasters caused by algorithmic trading earlier this year, authorities in Hong Kong and Australia drafted proposals to establish regular independent audits of the design, development and modifications of computer systems used in such trades. Why couldn’t auditors do the same to Google?
Silicon Valley wouldn’t have to disclose its proprietary algorithms, only share them with the auditors. A drastic measure? Perhaps. But it’s one that is proportional to the growing clout technology companies have in reshaping not only our economy but also our culture.

Obviously, Silicon Valley won’t develop or embrace similar norms overnight. However, instead of accepting this new reality as a fait accompli, we must ensure that, in pursuing greater profits, our new algorithmic gatekeepers are forced to accept the idea that their culture-defining function comes with great responsibility.
The author of the forthcoming book “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.”

Mechanical Turk and the Limits of Big Data

Walter Frick, MIT Technology Review, November 1, 2012


The Internet is transforming how researchers perform experiments across the social sciences.

It’s telling that the most interesting presenter during MIT Technology Review’s EmTech session on big data last week was not really about big data at all. It was about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the experiments it makes possible.

Like many other researchers, sociologist and Microsoft researcher Duncan Watts performs experiments using Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace that allows users to pay others to complete tasks. Used largely to fill in gaps in applications where human intelligence is required, social scientists are increasingly turning to the platform to test their hypotheses.

The point Watts made at EmTech was that, from his perspective, the data revolution has less to do with the amount of data available and more to do with the newly lowered cost of running online experiments.

Compare that to Facebook data scientists Eytan Bakshy and Andrew Fiore, who presented right before Watts. Facebook, of course, generates a massive amount of data, and the two spoke of the experiments they perform to inform the design of its products.

But what might have looked like two competing visions for the future of data and hypothesis testing are really two sides of the big data coin. That’s because data on its own isn’t enough. Even the kind of experiment Bakshy and Fiore discussed—essentially an elaborate A/B test—has its limits.

This is a point political forecaster and author Nate Silver discusses in his recent book The Signal and the Noise. After discussing economic forecasters who simply gather as much data as possible and then make inferences without respect for theory, he writes:

This kind of statement is becoming more common in the age of Big Data. Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics, where the data is so noisy. Statistical inferences are much stronger when backed up by theory or at least some deeper thinking about their root causes.

Bakshy and Fiore no doubt understand this, as they cited plenty of theory in their presentation. But Silver’s point is an important one. Data on its own won’t spit out answers; theory needs to progress as well. That’s where Watts’s work comes in. 

The Internet is transforming how researchers think of the “lab” and enabling new kinds of experiments across the social sciences. Those experiments will be critical in helping us collectively make sense of the huge amounts of data we’re now generating. And those huge data sets will help inform the direction of Watts’s and others’ experiments.

The value of big data isn’t simply in the answers it provides, but rather in the questions it suggests that we ask.

New Talk by Clay Shirky -

Clay Shirky’s Ted Talk “How the Internet will (one day) transform government”

The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new, oftentimes divergent, ideas using hosting services like GitHub -- so why can’t governments? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how democracies can take a lesson from the Internet, to be not just transparent but also to draw on the knowledge of all their citizens.

Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible -- with deep social and political implications

Sal Khan's 'Academy' sparks a tech revolution in education

Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY, May 30, 2012

  

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Most people don't wake up in the morning thinking about how to best explain the financial collapse of the Thai baht in the 1990s. But most people aren't Sal Khan. 

"When I started, you wouldn't have imagined that some crazy dude in a closet making videos would help lead this charge," says Salman Khan. "But my mission is to have every precocious 13-year-old in the world have access to every bit of information they could ever want."

"When I started, you wouldn't have imagined that some crazy dude in a closet making videos would help lead this charge," says Salman Khan. "But my mission is to have every precocious 13-year-old in the world have access to every bit of information they could ever want." 

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It's not much past 9 a.m., and Khan, 36, founder of the online educational non-profit Khan Academy, gets set to record his 3,081st video lecture in a small office with a view of air conditioning ducts.

"In 1997, you see, there was a devaluation of the Thai currency," Khan says into a beefy microphone as he makes crude sketches on his monitor. 

If you want gleaming high-tech, go down the road to Google's campus. If you're looking for a revolution, this is the right address.

Ever since quitting his job as a successful hedge-fund analyst two years ago to dedicate himself full time to this labor of love, Khan has managed to win fans worldwide and goad skeptical educators.

His simply narrated, faceless home videos on everything from algebra to French history have been viewed half a billion times. Last year, a number of schools began "flipping" their classrooms, having students study Khan videos by night and do homework with teachers by day.

In the process, Khan has fueled the debate over tech's growing influence on education while garnering the support of powerful friends.

"At 3,000 lessons online, Sal's personal ability as a teacher is remarkable," says Bill Gates, whose mention of Khan Academy at a conference in Aspen, Colo., in 2010 put the website on the map. "Bringing this kind of creativity and new assessment tools for teachers could make a profoundly positive difference in education."

Gates' enthusiasm is shared by Silicon Valley philanthropist and Academy backer Ann Doerr, wife of renowned tech investor John Doerr. "Sal imparts a sense of dignity; he assumes each (viewer) is intelligent," says Doerr, who adds that providing free access to knowledge that "allows students to become empowered, drive their own education and test their mettle just seems right."

Khan is taking that praise and sprinting with it.

Where he once was an army of one, the staff has been ramped up to 32, including the recent high-profile addition of Google's first hired employee, programming ace Craig Silverstein. The staff's immediate mission is to further broaden the site's content and improve assessment and feedback features so the Khan Academy experience becomes more interactive.

"We have 6 million visitors a month, so we think that students helping each other is the future," Khan says. "That community can become as popular as the videos themselves. It'll be like having free private tutors in the cloud."

Next up: Camp Khan

Khan's plans are no less ambitious on the ground. This summer, he'll launch the first Khan Academy Discovery Lab in Palo Alto, Calif., a small, project-based summer camp "that's like a lab for us, so we can learn more about how kids learn," he says. If it's a hit, the labs will expand nationwide next year.

And after, perhaps a bricks-and-mortar Khan Academy. "I wouldn't want to be the headmaster of such a place per se, because I want to work on stuff that scales," he says. "But it's a cool idea. A place where teachers make what an engineer would make, where the ideas we have can be on display."

Those ideas have caused friction in the education community. Though critiques vary, most hinge on the inference that classroom-based teachers aren't as important as we thought.

"If a teacher is just lecturing like a computer might, maybe that teacher should be replaced. But the truth is, most teachers don't just drone on, they educate," says Frank Noschese, a physics teacher at John Jay High in Cross River, N.Y., whose personal website dedicates a tab to Khan Academy criticism.

"Some teachers are getting pressure from their administrators to flip their classrooms, but it might not be the right thing for them," Noschese says. "When I first learned about the site, I eagerly e-mailed it around, saying it could be a useful tool. But now all of sudden it's supposed to be reforming education?"

That bandwagon phenomenon is at the root of the grumbling, says Kevin Bushweller, executive editor of Education Week Digital Directions.

"Khan's timing is perfect, because students and parents are living in the age of YouTube, where video watching is routine," he says. "Certainly schools need to evaluate what's best for their kids and curriculum. That said, technology is here, and doing the same old thing just won't work."

Suney Park agrees. The sixth-grade math teacher at Eastside College Prep in nearby East Palo Alto recently flipped her classroom using Khan Academy videos, and now feels liberated. "I had my doubts, but now I feel like the conductor of an orchestra, and if I have to tell the violins to go on with their stuff while I help the brass catch up, I can do it," Park says. "I couldn't go back to the regular way of teaching."

Voice behind the videos

Love it or hate it, Khan Academy is part of a looming tech-education iceberg, says Victor Hu, head of education technology and services for Goldman Sachs. He says that from 2002 to 2006, venture capital firms put $300 million into about 50 tech-ed deals; since 2007, $2 billion has gone into 230 deals.

"Technology is doing to education what it's done to countless other industries: disrupting it," Hu says. "Where education once was static, bound to a textbook, now it's moving to a global, interdisciplinary model."

But even Hu is impressed by Khan's rapid and improbable success. "To go from making videos for your cousins to promoting a new model for education in a few short years is amazing," he says. "But it's also the best thing that can happen to this space. It needs more smart people who care."

By any yardstick, Khan is both. Raised by a single mother in suburban New Orleans, Khan attended a local public school, where "we had smart kids, and we had metal detectors."

He was one of the smart ones, eventually not only captaining the math team but also taking graduate-level mathematics courses at the University of New Orleans. Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered him a scholarship, and four years later, he graduated with two bachelor's degrees and one master's in computer science and math.

"Being a bit crazy intellectually is normal here, and that characterizes Sal," says Anant Agarwal, an early Khan mentor at MIT who now is president of edX, a newly formed non-profit online-education partnership between MIT and Harvard.

"Sal and I have our debates, but we agree that adding a tech dimension to education will have a huge impact worldwide," says Agarwal, whose edX project is echoed by news that Stanford, Princeton, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania have partnered with Coursera.org to offer classes online.

"What makes Sal's videos particularly engaging is just his personality," Agarwal says. "It's his voice. You feel like he's there next to you, explaining things."

But Khan's almost laid-back delivery belies a fierce drive.

"Besides having a great sense of humor, Sal is also very intense and dedicated," says Shantanu Sinha, who met Khan in high school, roomed with him at MIT and now is Khan Academy's president and COO.

Sinha recalls walking miles in the snow with Khan so the two could tutor gifted children nearby. "He became that focused with his videos," he says. "Heck, he was that focused when he went looking for a wife."

Khan found one, rheumatologist Umaima Marvi, during his time at Harvard Business School, which he attended after an ill-fated foray into the dot-com space at the turn of the millennium. The couple have two children, a 3-year-old boy and a 10-month-old girl.

If Khan is pushing his academy for anyone, it would seem to be for that next generation. He got off a hedge-fund track that was promising high-seven-figure payoffs so he could pilot this startup, one he is particularly thrilled offers no lure of stock options and instant riches.

"I saw firsthand what that did to people (during the dot-com years), and it was ugly," he says. "Sometimes people in Silicon Valley are a bit confused, 'Oh, you're not for profit?' But the core ethos of the valley isn't to buy a Bentley. It's to innovate, do well, and then help the next generation innovate. So we're just part of that."

Khan says he has had no problems luring top talent, and Silverstein's decision to come on board last fall is a case in point. "At first I just thought I'd donate some money, but then I thought it'd be better to donate my time," says Silverstein, whose job is to help other new engineers make the site's user experience more intuitive, something he pioneered at Google.

"Search was a bit like where we're at with Khan Academy. There was a lot out there, and it was just a matter of helping people find what they needed fast," he says. "Who knows where this will go? But helping people learn things is a nice challenge to have."

An argument with oomph

Back in his small office, Khan is holding forth — OK, call it lecturing — on why a college degree may not mean what it used to.

It's full of reasoned examples ("College must give you a job? Well, no, a computer science degree from Berkeley will give you a job, but you go some random place, it's not clear what will happen to you") and makes a simple point (create globally recognized tests that define mastery, which ignores whether the student had come upon that knowledge at Oxford or by sitting in his basement watching videos).

Yet what's most fun is watching Khan make his argument. As with his faceless videos, he is engaging for some indefinable yet undeniable reason. But what if Khan stops making those videos? Will folks keep watching?

"We're letting others in now," says Khan, noting that Stanford will soon put medical classes on his website. "But hopefully they realize from what I've done that it can't be a professor at a whiteboard with PowerPoint. It has to be bite-size and conversational, and no faces."

Khan swivels in his desk chair, then grins broadly.

"When I started, you wouldn't have imagined that some crazy dude in a closet making videos would help lead this charge. But my mission is to have every precocious 13-year-old in the world have access to every bit of information they could ever want."

In other words, his target is the 13-year-old version of Salman Amin "Sal" Khan.

From Student to Teacher

Key steps on Sal Khan’s road from proud math geek to passionate online educator:

·       At Grace King High School in Metairie, La., (other famous alums: Ellen DeGeneres and Donna Brazile), Khan — valedictorian in 1994 — takes advanced-placement math classes. School rules compel all AP students to join the math club, where Khan finds he enjoys mentoring younger students.

·       After graduating from MIT in 1998, Khan uses his computer science degrees to join the start-up meVC as its chief technology officer. He’s on the road to riches when the bubble bursts. He attends Harvard Business School, where he falls in love with Umaima Marvi and the study of capital markets.

·       Rejected by most hedge funds for lack of experience, Khan finds a mentor in Daniel Wohl, who brings him on board Wohl Capital Management in Boston, which soon moves to Palo Alto, Calif. In 2004, Khan help his 13-old-cousin, Nadia, with math problems by making videos in his free time.

·       In 2008, Wohl closes out his fund. He encourages Khan to start his own hedge fund, but the market collapse looms. In 2009, Khan ends his hedge fund work and uses a small donation from philanthropist Ann Doerr to create Khan Academy. A year later, Bill Gates cites Khan’s videos at a conference, and donations flow.

In late 2010, a few Bay Area schools agree to “flip” their curriculums, using Khan videos as homework. Khan accelerates the growth of his non-profit, hiring engineers, management consultants and former teachers. But his biggest coup comes in late 2011 when he lands Craig Silverstein, the man who created Google’s tech architecture as its first employee.

Internet accounts for 4.7% of U.S. economy

Annalyn Censky @CNNMoney March 19, 2012

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The Internet contributes more to the American economy than the entire federal government, according to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group.

The Internet accounted for $684 billion, or 4.7% of all U.S. economic activity in 2010, Boston Consulting Group found. By way of comparison, the federal government, contributed $625 billion, or 4.3%, to the nation's output.

If it was considered its own separate industry, the Internet would also be larger than America's education, construction or agricultural sectors.

In the retail sphere alone, e-commerce accounted for 5% of U.S. sales in 2010.

"All businesses are increasingly digital and need to think about how to take advantage of these opportunities," said Dominic Field, a BCG partner and co-author of the report. "And for policymakers, we would hope they recognize the importance of Internet growth and making sure their countries are taking advantage of these opportunities."

As a share of gross domestic product, only three countries have larger Internet economies: the United Kingdom, South Korea and China. The U.S. is tied with Japan.

Boston Consulting Group predicts the Internet will grow about 10% a year through 2016 in the Group of 20 nations. It will grow nearly twice as fast in emerging markets as in developed economies, with Argentina and India accounting for the fastest growth, the study said.

"The U.S. is relatively mature as an Internet economy, whereas some of the developing economies are further behind -- so their growth rates are higher," Field said.

Granted, measuring the full impact of the Internet can be a fuzzy matter. In the Boston Consulting Group study, the researchers included the impact of e-commerce, what consumers pay to access the Internet and money spent by businesses and the government on building Internet infrastructure.

The study also looked at some other slightly silly metrics to measure how consumers value the Internet. It found for example, that 77% of Americans would be willing to give up chocolate for an entire year, rather than go without the Internet. Only 21% though would give up sex, and an even smaller 7% would go without a shower.

Americans perceive the Internet to be worth about $3,000 a year, even though on average, they spend only $472 each year on devices, applications, services and access.