Brains and digital computers go about computation in very different ways—so different, in fact, that it’s less than clear to me that “computation” (in the Turing machine sense) is what brains are really doing. This probably accounts for why trivial brain tasks like detecting speech, understanding natural language, and recognizing faces are at present next to impossible to do well in software, as anyone who has tried to use their mobile phone’s voice activated dialing can attest.

Researchers at Stanford are onto this:

Now Kwabena Boahen, a neuroengineer at Stanford University, is planning the most ambitious neuromorphic project to date: creating a silicon model of the cortex. The first-generation design will be composed of a circuit board with 16 chips, each containing a 256-by-256 array of silicon neurons. Groups of neurons can be set to have different electrical properties, mimicking different types of cells in the cortex. Engineers can also program specific connections between the cells to model the architecture in different parts of the cortex.

Substance dualists should be happy about this kind of research for two reasons. First, if it works, it is likely to yield new tools of heretofore unheard-of levels of aweXomeness. For instance, right now Google image search offers up pictures of trees based on the close association of a web image with text that talks about generally arboreal things. With massively scalable brain-like image recognition, maybe we’ll be able to do web-scale searches for pictures of, say, tire swings with foreboding skies in the background. But then physicalists get jazzed about this kind of thing too.

The real payoff for substance dualists is in the utterly faithful simulation of the human brain. That this will be done someday is a certainty. And theories of quantum consciousness notwithstanding, the brain is a machine—an elaborate configuration of matter scrupulously obeying the laws of physics. If substance dualism is true, then the silicon brain should be qualitatively different from the human one. It might be able to associate visual images with one another, find subtle patterns in search spaces, and carry on a spoken conversation with a person, but we would predict that its soulless-ness will in some way be obvious. Kind of like when Dr. Kurnow asked SAL in 2010 how she felt about being powered down: the question made no sense to her. Enfleshed souls tend to be a bit touchier about that one.

I have long thought it a key aspect of the Classical school that we always have our apologetic money on the table. Hence if the brain is the organ of the mind, then as technology allows, let’s build a replica brain and have a talk with it. If it’s indistinguishable from a person, I lose a line of evidence. If, the better and better we get at making silicon brains, the more and more obvious it is that these things are not human, then we need to have a nice, long talk about just how silly it is for me to believe that I have an immaterial component that is essential to my identity.

The metaphysics of the human person notwithstanding, it just wouldn’t fun if they didn’t create some nice, new bioethical dilemmas while they were at it:

Engineers ultimately hope to use the information generated by the silicon cortex in a variety of ways–to build better neural prosthesis, for example. “The real-time aspect of this technology allows us in principle to interface the silicon cortex with the real cortex or brain,” says Gert Cauwenberghs, a neuroengineer at the University of California, San Diego. “There is the promise, at least in the future, to build a prosthesis to replace some lost motor function or sensory function.”

And I’m sure it will stop there. William Gibson, call your office.

h/t Slashdot

To the barricades! InfoWorld is calling for action to recruit and retain more women in information technology jobs. The piece is not as bad as it might have been, but it contains some assumptions that are as odd as they are unexamined. To begin with, data:

It may not be surprising that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women filled only 26.7 percent of computer and mathematical positions in 2006. What’s troubling is that this percentage has been declining for some time. And the descent has been nearly universal across all IT job categories. For example, women accounted for 16.6 percent of all network and computer systems administrator positions in 2006, down from 23.4 percent in 2000. At the management level, the imbalance persists. Among computer and IS managers, for example, 27.2 percent were women in 2006. By contrast, women held 66 percent of all social and community service management jobs last year.

An optimist might at least observe that women seem to be better-represented in management ranks than among network and system administrators. However, the data are very spotty, and there are many peer categories to sysadmins that might dilute the outlook. Still, what is “troubling” about the numbers? Whence the assumption that the sexes ought to be equally represented in a given occupation? Can anyone adduce evidence of real oppression keeping women out of IT? I don’t deny that glass ceilings used to exist in full force and are surely present residually in the world today, but the burden is on the author to show that they are to blame in this case, or explain why anyone should care what little girls want to do when they grow up. The article’s strengths notwithstanding, these burdens are not borne.

An obvious explanation for any gender imbalance in any profession is that younger women make career sacrifices in order to raise children. Pinnacle Entertainment CIO Carol Pride comments:

In order to get to the top of the food chain, you have to own something big and ugly — an ERP implementation, for example, or a slot machine implementation at a casino….Often, the first big-and-ugly project coincides with the time one is trying to raise young children. Women often realize, rationally, that children are more important than companies, but if you don’t do the big and ugly, then it ends up hindering you later.

I’d hate to think I’m giving Carol an uncharitable reading, but I hear her saying that women need to be ready to sacrifice their children in favor of their careers. To dispel some of the gender-political confusion that might cloud our judgment, let’s reverse the roles and see how well the statement plays. Now, nobody knocks dads for being away from the children for 40 or 50 hours a week; it’s not just culturally normative, but necessary to keep food on the table. But suppose we were talking about men who have young families and still want to pursue very competitive careers in which 70 or 80 hours a week are needed to get anywhere. Suppose some executive was mentoring these young men, and he told them that sure, their kids might miss them and their wives might wilt under the stress of running the family substantially alone, and they might know what they’re doing is somehow wrong, but if they wuss out now, it will “hinder them later.”

I mean, with hypothetical mentors like this, who needs no-fault divorce laws?

Clearly I am locked into patriarchal, male-as-breadwinner thinking. This article, written for respectable company, can’t be expected to deal with troglodytes like me, can it? Apparently not:

According to a recent joint study by Catalyst, the Families and Work Institute, and the Center for Work and Family at Boston College, 74 percent of women executives have a spouse/partner who is employed full-time. By contrast, 75 percent of male executives have a spouse/partner who stays home full-time — strong evidence that, despite progress in attitudes toward domestic workloads, women still predominantly bear the brunt of striking a balance between career and home.

The paternalism of that paragraph is jarring. The point is well-taken that most women executives are the “second income” in the household, and most male executives are the only income. But to turn this into “strong evidence” that women are bearing the “brunt” of anything requires us to assume that all women want and ought to pursue a career path that leads to executive management. Could the data not as easily tell us that women from wealthy households frequently make the decision to be homemakers? It’s not like these wealthy families couldn’t break loose a few bucks for a maid and an au pair. If these numbers suggest anything, it is that the women most able to decide how to structure their lives, decide in large numbers to stay home and raise families. They need not be scolded for making what is in the final analysis a much freer choice than most are able to make.

And as for a bad attitude toward housework, my wife would need to comment here to acquit me finally of that charge. However, I am confident that in the end I will be found innocent.

Eventually the article drops complaints about strict gender inequities and instead attempts to give an account of why it matters. Here we find a mixed bag of silliness and sobriety:

“Because most companies are based on a male model and have been for many decades, the men don’t get the kinds of business contribution women can give,” [Women in Technology International Carolyn] Leighton says. “They often [institute diversity metrics] just to meet requirement codes.”

But, Leighton adds, the current nature of IT actually calls for what are considered stereotypical female characteristics. No longer an island within the company, IT is integral to other departments and requires employees who communicate well. “Now IT goes across all departments globally,” she says. “And women by nature are collaborative consensus builders.”

It’s too bad Leighton didn’t elaborate on what a “male model” might be. I mean, I saw a picture of my company’s president from when he was in high school, and he honestly looked a lot like Fabio—no, for real, he did—but I’m pretty sure that’s not what she meant.

Given that, imagine my honest relief that strict gender equivalence is not being assumed here. One might construct a species of feminism around the proposition that the classes “male” and “female” are functionally identical as they relate to the institutions of commerce and family, but the author avoids that path. If we’re talking about corporations based on a “male model” which might be improved by the presence of naturally collaborative and consensus-building women, then we are obviously all comfortable with the fact that men and women differ in important ways which might actually matter in the real world. Continuing along these lines is IBM V.P. of SOA and WebSphere strategy Sandy Carter, who says that “Women are good at accepting change and creating change, which is important in the marketplace,” and “The skills that [women] have — being able to juggle things, multitasking — reflect the [business] environment we’re in now.”

And these are valid points. It seems fairly uncontroversial that collaboration, consensus-building, and “multitasking” are typically more natural for women than men. (Take me, for example. The “consensus” I like best is when everybody agrees that my way is the right one.) But let us not overstate our case: saying that women are more natural consensus-builders is a little bit like saying men are more natural sysadmins because they have the upper-body strength needed to lift the occasional server into the rack. No one will deny that men do, in fact, have this physical advantage, but it’s not like women are all so weak that asking them to heft a 1U box 40″ off the ground is going to make them wilt like delicate garden flowers in the sun. The difference is real and important, but somehow each sex learns to develop some aptitudes that come naturally for the other—even outside of a diverse environment like a 50/50 workplace or a family.

Ultimately we can agree that no man or woman should be hindered from making free vocational choices within the scope of the knowledge professions. Far from this modest goal, though, the InfoWorld piece agitates for strictly proportional representation of women in IT. Even if all the resulting collaboration and consensus and multitasking would make IT departments hum, it seems unlikely that it’s actually good for women to set this goal, or even to care much how many of them choose technology professions at all. Let it be enough to present free choices to women and allow them to structure their lives as they see fit.

It will come as no surprise to my readers that I have a place in my heart for the career choice of homemaker and homeschooler, and I am not shy about extolling the benefits of that path. Nor, more to the point, is my wife. But I would only want a woman to make a free and informed choice of this lifestyle—never a coerced or a manipulated one. If many women choose otherwise, I will not assume they are either enslaved or unfeminine or unconcerned about their families. The reciprocal charity would be most welcomed.

I know a woman who left IT a couple of years ago. (This is of course anecdotal, but not much more so than the comments of the of ten prominent women in IT interviewed in the InfoWorld piece.) She was a Java developer, and is now a homeschooler and stay-at-home mother of three. She was a single mother of one for most of her career, and while her problem wasn’t precisely one of balancing work and motherhood, she has admitted that her heart was just never really in her work. Her desire was simply more for her son than for Enterprise Java. Maybe she could have championed a massive ERP implementation (if massive ERP implementations were not already passé by the time her career would have allowed her the risk), but she never wanted to. Now she stays at home with an infant and a special-needs preschooler and an eleven-year-old. She tells me she loves it. If we want to carp about women leaving IT, why not tell her story too?

P.S. Certain other women technologists might take the trouble to weigh in on this. Am I completely off base here?

Chris Anderson bows the knee to homeschooled Christian kids in “I, for one, welcome our new Christian homeschooled Lego robotics overlords:”

This is a bit off topic, but my fondness for Lego robotics cannot be suppressed. Check out this video of a team of Christian home-schooled 9-14 year olds winning the New Hampshire FIRST Lego League Nano-Quest Challenge in a single autonomous outing. There are so many impressive things going one here that it’s hard to highlight just one, but the fact that the robot changes its own tools is unbelievable.

Ah, that video brings me back to the awkward days of eighth grade Olympics of the Mind (now called something that sounds dumb due to the objections of the International Olympic Committee) and our “Treasure Hunters” problem. It involved no robots, but it did require us to write a program that would automatically plot a path through a large 8×8 grid for two human actors to pick up three treasures each while avoiding three randomly-place hazards. And not walking on the same square twice. Way too hard for 13-year-olds using the programming tools of the day, but good memories were made my Dad, who provided copious programming help.

Seventh grade OM is where I met the girl who would later become my wife. There was no programming that year, although I did manage to get some electronics involved by making some little LED flashers for one of the space circus animals we constructed out of papier maché, chicken wire, wood, and canvas. But I digress.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Chris Anderson and Mindstorms. If you’re not familiar with Chris (he’s the editor-in-chief of Wired) and his recent book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, you’d be well served to read his brief introduction to the idea under the heading The Long Tail, In a Nutshell. It’s a compelling economic model that, while not without its critics, seems to do a good job explaining certain distribution models that have arisen in the Internet age.

As for Mindstorms, I’m more and more convinced that I need to part with $250 and get this product into my house. Programmable robots with sensors, for the kids? As I’m fond of saying (not entirely without irony): it’s a wonderful time to be alive.

Here’s a fun mashup of Google Maps: GeoGreeting. You type in a message, and the program matches each letter with an appropriate image of a building or other man-made structure somewhere in the Maps data. Propose marriage! Send endearing Christmas greeting to loved ones! Declare your 2008 presidential favorite! The possibilities are endless. (Well, not technically. There’s a 40-character limit, and you only get 53 characters at present, so the possibilities actually number 53⁴⁰. But you go ahead and tell me that’s not good enough for you, you prima donna.)

h/t O’Reilly Radar

Josephy Cooney has written about avoiding the unfortunate “Developer UI” condition painfully known to software developers and users alike. His post focuses more on development process and the ad-hoc methods that can allow hastily conceived developer utilities to become a permanent part of shipping products. He gives some guidelines to help programmers avoid creating overly cumbersome user interface elements for their own strictly utilitarian purposes, lest these things grow malformed legs and end up half-ambulating around the application forever.

My own struggles with Developer UI are a bit different: I find that managing a group of only developers—myself included for our purposes here—makes user interface design difficult. We never have a problem exposing cobbled-together utility code and having people fall in love with it, but we do have fairly typical problems doing good interaction design, being too small of a shop to have a specialist UI designer on the payroll.

The problem is that good developers are trained to take the bewildering array of particulars in their problem domain and abstract them and systematize them into something simple and elegant. (Another good, if indirect, reason for developers to be realists: universals are your stock in trade.) This, combined with the typical developer bias towards utility over beauty, can create some pretty cumbersome human interfaces. My typical first pass will result in a UI that is beautifully abstracted to expose the deepest conceptual core components of the system in such a way as to be completely inaccessible to any normal person who has not thought about the product for as long as I have. Which is to say pretty much everybody else in the world is going to think it’s trash.

The trick is to design user interfaces to work in a way that most people will expect, rather than the way a developer would calculate. The application model—the view of the world exposed by the program, plus its relevant data—ought to coincide with the user model, or the view of the world and its relevant data that is natively and unreflectively assumed by the user. Hence deep knowledge of the application’s internal model is a huge barrier to effective UI design; it is a vast body of facts and mental habits which must nearly be forgotten in order to get oneself into the user’s mind and make a good guess about the model residing there. This involves some disciplines which, while not in any way antithetical to software development, are not really rewarded in the field either: things like the ability to see things through eyes that are very different from your own or the ability to step back, blur your vision, and get a good view of the big picture.

It’s like being a camera that can switch effortlessly between a macro lens and a fisheye lens. Anyone who can do this well has a shot at creating outstanding software which is both easy and pleasurable to use—which should be the among the highest aspirations of people in this profession. If you can only manage one of those lenses, you’re either stuck in a cube writing code or in a marketing department being enthusiastic for the rest of your career. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld said, but it’s nice to aim higher.

h/t Style Gala

Cringely has an interesting piece on Linux-based 802.11g rotuers. Wow, my non-technical readership says. That sounds aw3><50m3! Well, take my word for it. Or take Robert’s:

One of the cheapest Linux computers you can buy brand new (not at a garage sale) is the Linksys WRT54G, an 802.11g wireless access point and router that includes a four-port 10/100 Ethernet switch and can be bought for as little as $69.99 according to Froogle….But since the operating system is Linux and since Linksys has respected the Linux GPL by publishing all the source code for anyone to download for free, the WRT54G is a lot more than just a wireless router. It is a disruptive technology.

…

The result is a box you connect to power, to a DSL or cable modem and MAYBE to your PC (if all you want to be is a service provider the PC isn’t needed) and it automatically attaches itself to an OSPF mesh network that is self-configuring. In practical terms, this mesh network, which allows distant clients to reach edge nodes by hopping through other clients en route, is limited to a maximum of three hops as the WiFi radios switch madly back and forth between sending and repeating modes. If you need to go further, switch to higher-gain antennas or gang two WRT54Gs together. Either way, according to Ewing, his tests in Sweden indicate that if 16 percent of the nodes are edge nodes (wireless routers with DSL or cable modem Internet connections), they can provide comparable broadband service to the other 84 percent who aren’t otherwise connected to the Net.

…

A well-funded VoIP company like Vonage could today start WISP-based deployment one city at a time. With newspaper ads and direct mail, they could recruit what would be essentially micro-franchisees, each of which would get at cost a pre-configured router (or my preference — a pair of routers) and a DSL or cable broadband account. Since each node costs the VoIP provider exactly nothing, the problem of flaky franchisees is eliminated by over-building the network and conscientious franchisees make more money as a result. For $50 down and $30 per month the franchisee makes $93.75 per month (provided they keep the connection up and running). Want more revenue? Put routers in all your stores or delivery trucks or in the homes of your friends in exchange for giving them free Internet and/or phone service. Your take per router drops to $78.75 but your gross profit margins are still more than 70 percent.

Or imagine a school or a church distributing routers among parents or parishioners as a fund-raiser. Let’s see how long SBC or Verizon lasts against the Baptists. Now THAT’s disruptive.

I have been convinced since 1997 that exciting things would only happen in the last mile when the economics of wireless technology finally displaced the regional telcos’ billions of dollars of buried copper. DSL and cable modems worked out a lot better than I ever expected them to, but we still haven’t seen the kind of broadband love we might one day see. The kind of guerilla scenario suggested here might just be crazy enough to work. If it does, then exciting things will be afoot.

Hat tip to Todd, who does not blog.

I remember sitting at a computer in 1995 or 1996, being frustrated with the miserably irrelevant search results I was getting from Yahoo! or Altavista or some such. I remember saying that a billion dollars would go to the first man who made web search actually work.

How about three billion?

SAN FRANCISCO–Google Inc. co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin each own nearly 16 percent of the Internet search engine leader that they launched nearly six years ago–stakes expected be worth at least $3 billion apiece after the company’s initial public offering of stock.

Page owns 15.7 percent of Google’s outstanding shares and Brin holds a 15.6 percent stake, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents filed Friday.

Nothing quite like a cup of coffee, an English muffin, some whole grain cereal, and this:

John Kerry and John Edwards, who are not speaking under oath and who know that economic illiteracy has never been a disqualification for high office, have led the scrum against the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, who said the arguments for free trade apply to trade in services as well as manufactured goods. But the prize for the pithiest nonsense went to [House Speaker Dennis] Hastert: “An economy suffers when jobs disappear.”

So the economy suffered when automobiles caused the disappearance of the jobs of most blacksmiths, buggy makers, operators of livery stables, etc.? The economy did not seem to be suffering in 1999, when 33 million jobs were wiped out - by an economic dynamism that created 35.7 million jobs. How many of the 4,500 U.S jobs that IBM is planning to create this year will be made possible by sending 3,000 jobs overseas?

Hastert’s ideal economy, where jobs do not disappear, existed almost everywhere for almost everyone through almost all of human history. In, say, 12th-century France, the ox behind which a man plowed a field changed, but otherwise the plowman was doing what generations of his ancestors had done and what generations of his descendants would do. Those were the good old days, before economic growth.

As I’ve said before, I am potentially putting my money where my mouth is on this. This isn’t some abstraction like “the textile industry” that conjures up Dickensian images of ten-year-olds scurring under huge looms to pick pennies’ worth of lint off the floor, that couldn’t possibly be connected to my life. It’s, like, my job.

Read it all.

UPDATE: a friend IMed me this morning to tell me, among other things, that I was less than clear in this post. I was assuming knowledge on the part of the reader of my previous endorsements of the general idea of offshoring of U.S. tech jobs. There is an ironic constrast here with the fact that I happen to hold a U.S. tech job myself (when I’m not blogging). My brief comments in the original post were probably overly hasty and insufficiently clear.

My friend went on to tell me that he is seeing other essentially conservative IT professionals getting angry at Bush over this issue, possibly to the point of not voting for him in November. Now I tend to put this in the same bin as the rest of the conservative bellyaching over Bush–yeah, fine, there are things to complain about, but come on: are you really going to put Kerry in the Whitehouse because of it? Well, on this issue, maybe they will. These guys are afraid for their jobs, and the Democrat is much more likely to give them the protection they seek.

But let’s look at the real options here. Suppose for a moment that falling communication costs and rising education levels in third-world countries open up authentically lower-cost labor markets to compete with American IT professionals. We can:

1. Elect politicians who will use the force of law to prevent American industry from following cheaper labor resources.
2. Unionize and try to use the power of collective bargaining to achieve the same end as (1).
3. Let stewards of capital make free decisions about how to trade goods and services, recognizing that some technological developments (e.g., communication) may be disruptive to the present order from time to time to the point that I, personally, might even have to make a career change.

Call me Austrian, but I think you see where I’m going. Options (1) and (2) cannot succeed in the long term, despite whatever short-term gain I might personally realize under protectionist regimes. If the laws or labor unions (which operate under the protection of the laws) of the United States deny businesses the ability to operate efficiently, the businesses will be at a competitive disadvantage globally. At best, this means Americans shareholders earn smaller dividends. At worst, it means technological innovation ceases to be a defining American idiom. Entrepreneurial smart people will set up their whole shops elsewhere, instead of just sending some of their coding there.

And besides that, do you really want to have a job just because the guys with the guns are forcing your boss to keep you on the payroll? Wouldn’t you rather be carving out your own little sphere of value in an entropic creation? You can sign me up for the latter.

Note that this assumes that offshoring is actually going to produce cost savings in the long haul. Personally, I believe the jury is still out on this, but I am willing to accept the practice as an economic, social, and moral good if the jury comes back and says it does. There is a fertile debate to be had among IT professionals about the details of running cross-cultural, trans-global development teams, and I wouldn’t mind talking about that if anyone is interested. If you have relevant experience, or just want to cuss me out, the comments are open.

Just because we can do a thing, does it follow that we should do a thing?

I didn’t think so either.

The Dischoshaman has seven very good suggestions for improving the influence of the evangelical (or “non-liturgical” as he says) voice in the art world. We are not too stupid to do this; we only occasionally seem that way.