“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride”
- William James
- The Mammals, “Industrial Park”
I learned, or maybe I just re-learned it for the hundredth time, that what scares people beyond anything else is never being heard. Is having to realize that you spent 20, 40, 80 years on this earth, and no one once listened. And really, the problem isn’t that people don’t have things to say. It’s that we all have so much to say, that we forget to sometimes just shut up and listen. Some stories from the track
I asked an older gentleman how I should have played my exacta bet. For those who don’t know, the exacta is playing first and second in a given race. I had bet that the win would go to Rags to Riches. As a hedge, I bet that the exacta would be Curlin-Rags to Riches. The older gentleman explained that if I had boxed my bet, I would have paid the same money, but won much more. Lesson learned. Or so I thought. This gentleman had 7 teeth on his upper gum. I asked him how often he came to the track, and he said everyday. He told me a tale of three of his “personal” friends who came and lost $5,000 every week betting on horses. But it wasn’t a story about betting, but apathy. Imagine how much $15,000 a week could help this man. He just sits there and watches a nicer house, better food, higher quality medicine get thrown away because these guys have the money. “It doesn’t matter how bad it gets out there,” he says, “In here they do whatever they want.”
Or another gentleman from the Ukraine who tried to explain to me that if I bet 8-5-3 on every race, that I’d come out a millionaire. I didn’t ask him if he was in fact a millionaire, but I knew he wasn’t. I asked him his strategy. He gave me the history of every jockey in the 9th race at Hollywood Park today. “I used to bet on him, and he’d win every time. Not anymore. Now he can’t even place.” His thick accent took getting used to, but it was easy to see that he just wanted someone to understand why he lost. He lost because he couldn’t rig the game as well as the winners do. But he always had 8-5-3, and I sat and watched with him as that trifecta won him $52 for a $2 bet on his last race of the day.
These guys, and many more like them, come to the track everyday and know more about horse racing than I might learn in a lifetime. And all they want to do is share. They think that if someone remembers their ideas or their strategies they become immortal. And maybe they’re right, maybe that’s the closest we’ll ever get. All I know is that I’m going to start watching for 8-5-3 winning combinations, and hope that old Ukrainian becomes a millionaire.
Oh yeah, and my horse won the Belmont Stakes making me a cool $10.60 for a $2 bet. Very nice.
Laugh if you want, but it’s true. I’m doing water aerobics to help stay in shape this summer. I just don’t think anyone understands how hard it is unless they try it. Especially when you are as conducive to floating as I am, which essentially means you sink. The real secret to water aerobics is pushing yourself. Some of the more “experienced” (read, older) classmates of mine have shoes and gloves that don’t let the water through cracks between your fingers and toes. That is by no means an insignificant amount of force that you’re adding to your exercise. Water is a beast when it wants to resist. If it can carve the Grand Canyon, then it can definitely carve me up. That’s the theory at least.
The nice thing about people who do water aerobics is that they’re all chill. Maybe it’s because anything else is too much work. There’s no intense yelling, screaming, etc. that is usually associated with aerobics. Or maybe I’m just afraid that I’d get my ass kicked if I did standard aerobics. Either way, I’m very happy with my decision to hop in the pool.
Some crucial points though:
That’s really it for my gym musings. I think having a gym one-mile down the road from work is great. I’ve made work the hub of my life, and the place where my bed is happens to just be thirty minutes down the road. I was pretty sure that it was going to work that way anyway, but things are working out so far. What more could I ask for?
My “Summer of Zimbra” has reached day 2. It actually progressed through a full T-14 days of cross country road travel, but I haven’t really gotten my head completely around that yet. I also haven’t quite figured out what it means to be a college graduate. I know there are all sorts of positives, but all I really want is for the feeling to sink in. That takes a lot longer than I thought it would.
I think working for a smaller company rocks. I did it my first summer, and I’m doing it my last summer. You can constantly learn. I think that’s what makes this experience great. On the flip side, it’s grown enough to where I don’t think I’m going to learn everything. The new trend in online is going offline, and I think that that’s an area I won’t get to touch. It would be cool to learn what that entails as it’s being developed, but that might end up being self initiated. A big win for me is that my project is very customer facing. Upped responsibility, which will hopefully equate to upped reward. So far, so good.
Cary Academy Junior Varsity Girl’s Soccer (2-8-1, 0-2-0)
Cardinal Gibbons versus Cary Academy
Thursday, May 3
Final Score:
Cardinal Gibbons: 4
Cary Academy: 0
Summary:
Without heart, a passion for the game, respect for your opponent, and desire, it’s very difficult to be successful in life. This fact also holds true on the soccer field. An uninspired first half of play saw the Chargers give up four goals in the first twenty minutes of Thursday’s match against Cardinal Gibbons, a deficit from which the Chargers could not recover. Two Charger starters were benched due to poor performance at practice, and the inability to effectively move the ball forward made the task of being competitive even more difficult. Wanting to win their final match of the season, the Chargers went into halftime having dug themselves into a big hole.
The second half saw a much stronger effort by the Chargers, but a staunch Crusader defense, who did not concede a goal all season, refused to break. Keeping the Crusaders off the scoreboard in the second half was the outstanding goalkeeping of Kelly Andrejko. Passion recovered, technical failings prevented the Chargers from mounting a consistent enough attack to truly threaten the Crusader goal, and at the end of 70 minutes the final score read 0-4. A moral victory, but a defeat on the pitch.
The Chargers ended their season with a record of 2-8-1, with the Golden Boot award, which is given to the player with the most goals, being earned by Sarah Berger. Katja Kleine and Jordan Bowles acted as captains for the team, and did an exemplary job. From February through the last match, 14 girls became a soccer team and consistently represented their school with dignity and pride.
Dinner, Friday, April 20
“I thought he was supposed to be for the poor people, but does he ever socialize with any poor people? He doesn’t speak to me.”
-Monty Johnson (neighbor of presidential candidate John Edwards) Source
The role of this digital hammer is as the lead actor for progress in human relationships. Is it possible that the Internet can make us more human? I think that if we learn how to use the new wealth of information provided to us, then we will be better able to construct the relationships that bind us. This is best exemplified in the move towards a semantic web. This technology tries to take advantage of relationships between words instead of nodes to construct the web. To connect at such an abstract level returns to humanity the intimacy of communication. The web becomes a tool of how things are defined, and not how they are connected. This definition will be a truly democratic process. Notice the importance of participation. How words are connoted and defined is a level of communication that the Internet currently lacks. Returning the importance of communication to digital relationships is progress.
Progress will be realized when we can use the information that exists on the Internet to create a better world around us. This opportunity exists because there is a desire to improve the general condition of the way that communication and relationships are built. When relationships are a matter of understanding and not social standing, then we can say that the Internet has helped humanity progress. Another marker of social progress will be a breaking down of barriers that produce such situations as “haves” vs. “have-nots.” Is this possible? Yes, because once the overhead cost of infrastructure is paid, then the cost of business for being on the Internet reduces to zero. Amortizing this cost in the name of a more evenly distributed world income is a desire we should all aspire towards. Understanding has been the fundamental problem in many of the discords that have plagued humanity. A semantics based web that helps us better understand ourselves is another form of progress. There is a danger that it will kill the uniqueness of language, but this uniqueness, when it becomes ambiguity, is a root cause of discord amongst cultures. I’m not asking for individual cultures to lose their language, I’m asking for cultures to learn to understand each other through improved communication.
Is there a solution to the problem of ethics and data mining on the Internet? Yes. First and foremost we must build a system of trust between vendor and consumer. If we can’t build an Internet where trust is an integral part of the communities that are forming, then we cannot build a better Internet. Without a better Internet, our information is a treasure chest for wrong doers, and not a foundation for an improved world. This improved world must truly be global. To increase participation, we must ask that government open up its uses of gathered information to act as a model for corporate entities, which are also storing information. Ethically progressing towards an open information model will be an even more important issue in the years to come, and it is a challenge that we must embrace and answer globally. The consequences of remaining silent might devastate humanity and steal from us our identity.
Bibliography
Arrington, M. (2006). TechCrunch >> Blog Archive >> FTC may regulate PayPerPost. Retrieved Dec. 14, 2006, from http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/13/ftc-may-regulate-payperpost/
Barbour, I. (1993). Ethics in an age of Technology: The Gifford Lectures Volume 2. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers.
Dibbell, J. “A rape in cyberspace.” How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society. (Reprinted from The Village Voice, 1993, December 23)
Epstein, R. G. (2006). An ethics and security course for students in computer science and information technology. Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 535-537.
Friedman, B. & Thomas, J. C. (2001). Is ignorance bliss?: Informed consent online. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 215-216.
Fule, P. & Roddick, J. (2004). Detecting privacy and ethical sensitivity in data mining results. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 56, 159-166.
Jordan, L. J. “Senator challenge FBI chief over domestic spying program.” (Reprinted from The Boston Globe, 2006, December 7)
Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press.
Sassower, R. (2004). Confronting Disaster: An existential approach to Technoscience. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.
Tavani, H. T. (1999). Privacy online. ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society, 29(4), 11-19.
Tips for Protecting Privacy Online. (2006, August 18). Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. [Radio News Program]. Retrieved December 14, 2006 from Lexis-Nexis.
Vascellaro, J. E. “Online retailers are watching you.” (Reprinted from Wall Street Journal, 2006, November 28)
Woodbury, M. (2000). The bout of the century?: Information Ethics vs. E-Commerce. Ubiquity, 1(18).
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Lunch, Thursday, April 5
A myth of the Internet must also be broken down so that progress can be made. The Internet does not provide unbound freedom from one’s physical self. One exists on the Internet similarly to the notion of existence in reality. There is an expectation to act responsibly. One cannot escape their duties in reality simply because they are virtual. Greater freedom is a farce of Internet propaganda. While it seems to be tougher, those who want to find and trace one’s trail on the Internet will do so. Freedom must be explained and defined for the information on the Internet to be more properly used.
The first paradigm shift that the Internet must go through is a movement away from an English-centric entity, into a global medium of communication, exchange, and growth. It is possible for the Internet to help us break down walls that have stood for generations. It is not possible for us to do this if we don’t allow the Internet to permeate into parts of the world where basic survival is still an issue. The Internet can help bridge gaps, but this must be done in a culturally sensitive way. We will learn a lot about ourselves as human beings as we help the Internet grow, and watch to see if humanity can grow with it.
This first paradigm shift is an example of how we’ve developed a “normal sociology” analogous to Kuhn’s “normal science.” The rich are supposed to get access to new technology. Once it has been refined to help the rich, then it can be mass-produced and everyone else can have access to it. This kind of sociology must be broken down if the Internet is going to help foster humanity. Part of the problem with how information is used is its de-humanizing affect. The rich will continue to maintain the status quo by stripping everyone else of their identity. This is an acceptable solution to those who have the ability to walk in and out of situations without the potential consequences harming them. As an example, someone who has the ability to spend responsibly can buy products on the Internet, and is willing to become a credit card number. Someone else who is given a chance to spend freely on the Internet but is unable to do so responsibly will find a new way to get into extreme credit card debt. Also because they are disassociated from judgment from a scornful face, they don’t feel as if they have to answer to someone on the other end when they’re spending over their affordable limit.
The revolutionary science here is a set of products that are released for everyone immediately for the good of everyone. This doesn’t seem to be asking too much, but if we look at how products are released and the groups that they are targeted towards, it’s simple to see that this is in fact quite the revolutionary business strategy. How can this be done? It’s a matter of empowering the lower classes as a buying block. There must be a willingness to redistribute income and opportunity. While this is a problem much larger than the Internet itself, the cost of business for Internet-based applications allows them to lead the way in enacting this change. The breaking down of class walls is an important goal for humanity in general, and this “sociological revolution” may come from a digital hammer.
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