Alexy

Lawrence Lessig Killed Coke for Me

On May 27th, Lawrence Lessig gave a talk at Dartmouth about rebooting our democracy. He started by making a case how the US government subsidizes obese kids, by subsidizing corn and erecting tariffs against pure cane sugar; then the price of corn becomes negative and high fructose corn syrup is stuffed into 40% of the products. BTW my doc said pure cane sugar will make you obese still.

But what happened was unexpected — I’m disgusted by the high fructose corn syrup ingredient in sodas and even Yoplait yogurt! Hence I’m buying Jones soda, my favorite anyways, and am pondering other yogurts — while more expensive and not as tasty. When I lived in cities, there was a Trader Joe nearby with that good imported yogurt (was it Dutch? Or Italian?…) in individual glass cans.

Oh, and Lessig’s right. Expect in Russia they’d unravel his scheme in an hour by simply coopting the convention one by one. Wait, the lobbyists can do it here, too!

Jim Hendler’s Social Machines

Jim Hendler of RPI has visited with our group last week and gave a talk at the Jones seminar. Jim is a cool guy deeply immersed in semantic web and more so in the human one. He brandished the first iPad I’ve seen, neatly tucked into a magenta rubber case and a zipped larger case. Now there’s somebody who understands how to care for gadgets properly.

Jim’s talk was about Social Machines — web mobs which self-organize to accomplish a task, such as solve a hit-and-run accident or identify lovers of a man in a photo posted by a suspicious wife under false pretenses. Well, the latter happens less now due to the mobs starting with a “real” media link. Jim called those machines HFS — Human Flesh Search engines, after a hilarious reverse translation of “social search” or some such phrase from Chinese.

I have a number of objections to the effectiveness of the web mobs as a future of social computing. They are hysterical and ad hoc. The goals they can achieve are basically forms of lynching. Sensible people, when forming a mob, can be foolish and lemming-like. To feed the hungry via the web means fund-raising and buying more Land Rovers for NGOs — which is easier achieved by getting donations from big corporations. It remains to be seen how such social machines can be useful beyond mainland China’s mobs finding perps, or the Wired magazine’s readers chasing a writer who tried to hide his identity by leaking it piecemeally.

A more current and meaningful form of a social machine is before us — that is, if we look at Twitter or Facebook as a social computer. It computes a function of its activity, which may be the social capital or indeed the future of the participants. If we formulate that as a question for studying the social machines, we can discover new knowledge — today.

The multidisciplinary nature of Jim Hendler’s Web Science, similar to Sandy Pentland’s Social Computing, has a danger of producing exhortations to “scientists from various disciplines” to “work together.” Now it’s not going to happen unless you and I start doing it — and I’ve already started, by the way.

Ask not what the multidisciplinary scientists can do for you. Ask what you can do to lead the multidisciplinary scientists by example!

But those are some regular scepticisms going through ones mind at a “multidisciplinary” talk. Overall, Jim’s very effective in mobilizing people and tickling one’s curiosity, so it’s great we had such an opportunity. Until Dartmouth moves to Seattle, we’ll be working hard on getting the best speakers like Jim!

What Does Twitter Compute?

When discussing social network processes with Sergey Bratus, we’ve come to a formulation and a question. The latter is worth a few PhDs.

A Twitter is a social computer. It’s a computing network. What does it compute?

My thesis is, a form of social capital. A kind of a social future; it molds perceptions, forms groups, elevates ideas, inflates and crushes hopes, etc. How can we formulate a theory of social computation?

The Khrabrov Update, May 2010

Greetings friends — it’s been a while since we’ve been in touch with some of you, so the time has come to tell a few stories of what we’ve been up to.

In 2007, I left Amazon to catch up on a project of pretty high importance: my family. I wanted to live in Moscow with Olga, my then future — and now current — wife. First, I did what I wanted for a while — got a digital SLR, Pentax K10D, and went to the Santa Fe Photo Institute, where I took a course in digital archive management with Peter Krogh, the author of “The DAM book” by O’Reilly. The key results of that are that

• I shoot solely in RAW
• I use Adobe Lightroom
• It takes forever for me to publish the pictures

So, in May 2007 I put everything into a giant, two-room storage I had on the Seattle’s waterfront, and flew back to Moscow. The day after arriving and reconnecting with Olga, I moved in with her in the beautiful Southern Butovo, a new satellite area of Moscow. Many downtown Moscovites look down on Butovo, especially the Southern one, but they are ignorant — it’s an amazing city of the future. It was built as a whole, with apartment buildings, supermarkets, a MacDonald’s, public spaces, landscaped lakes, churches, and light metro — the one going above ground. Everything is new, freshly painted, and colorful, — lots of pure white. Everybody is mostly young, professional, taking that metro downtown and back, as from an American suburb. The MacDonald’s even has a café with good espresso; although it could get crowded with seasonal workers, treating themselves to a weekend meal in their holiday clothes after a hard day. Initially I was finishing up a research project I had going with Dartmouth, and was programming on my white MacBook in the subway, the Mac cafe, or in the kitchen of our apartment, overlooking the metro with its romantically lit-up trains crossing the night with rhythmic rumble every few minutes. Then I got an amazing consulting job, merging computational linguistics with business, which brought me to St. Petersburg for a few weeks, and a conference in Copenhagen in the Fall. We traveled, vacationed in Turkey as many Russians do — a perfect stay, — and I finally visited Lake Baikal with Olga, and lived on the Olkhon island for a week.

A historical aside is warranted here. I first met Olga in 2004, during a previous attempt to spend more time in Russia. I was determined then to get deep into the country and visit Baikal, which I never did before. I got a previous semi-pro digital camera, then an Olympus 8080, and about ten batteries for it. I also got some flash cards, and since those were expensive, also a portable CD burner, to save my photos in the taiga surrounding Baikal — so the burner got its own ten batteries, fully charged before the planned Siberian adventure.

On the Aeroflot plane, which I’d chosen out of patriotic nostalgia and contrary to those who look down on it, I picked a free Kommersant newspaper, which then contained a glossy Weekend section. Among various events, it listed a Pavel Kashin concert in the club “B2”. I went there with my poetry friends from Moscow, and we reserved some good seats near the stage. When people started to dance, I noticed my future wife on the floor, and was pulled to her very strongly. It turned out she was from Irkutsk, and even used to work as a guide on the Baikal, using her linguistic education in English.

So we enjoyed Moscow immensely and then I took her to the Baltic sea, and we didn’t visit Baikal that year. Instead of the Baikal, I met a girl from Baikal. Now it was time to close the arc.

After Copenhagen, I went to Firenze, where my dad was celebrated as the founder at the XXXth conference on electric rocket propulsion. He prepared a long talk in English, and I wanted to help with any questions. We were treated royally by the organizers; my mom came too, so we had a family reunion. Back in Moscow, we planned the next steps — Olga had a long-planned trip to Buenos Aires to advance her tango, and I thought of stopping in back in the US to sell off my storage, join Olga in Argentina, and then move to St. Petersburg.

At that point, we learned that Olga was pregnant. Suddenly the idea of the big megapolis of Moscow started to fade, and the small university town of Hanover, the home of the Dartmouth College, loomed large in my mind. The concept of pursuing the vibrancy and unpredictability of Russia once again looked pale in contrast to the academic exuberance and everyday stability of the US. I had become an American, after all. After two months in Argentina, full of tango, unimaginable steaks and wines, and travels, I went to Key West and Olga returned to Moscow. I drove across the keys in a convertible and contemplated my life, what I can do, and what I should do next, and worked hard to execute on it. A lot of variables, countries, and plans had to align.

In a month, Olga joined me in Seattle. Our son Edward was born April 16th, 2008. Edward is very kind, beautiful, and social. He likes to take things apart and has a lot of persistence.

In July, we moved to Dartmouth, where I accepted a position of computer scientist with my very first US advisor. This was the place where I had spent my first night in the US, back on September 11, 1993, in a room in a house shared with other graduate students. Now we had a family townhouse where, it seems to me, Einstein’s wife used to live. The basement was so huge that all my storage fit there, instead of being thrown into the Puget Sound off the Alaskan Way.

On May 10, 2010, we had our wedding at Dartmouth.

Our daughter Eva (pronounced Yeva in Russian) was born on January 8, 2010. She is our little princess, and is cooing almost like she’s it talking by now.

That was mostly a family update. I’ll save research, creative, entrepreneurial, etc., news for later. Hopefully this closes some gaps in my story, in case you were wondering what’s up! I’ll try to post updates more regularly. Let’s keep in touch by a variety of means, and see more of each other in our wonderfully connected world!

Testing MarsEdit=>Tumblr/Markdown Setup

Well, it’s time to write.