On this episode of Spark: Hackers in Space, Unoriginal Genius, and The Polyglot Web. Click below to listen to the whole show, or download the MP3 (runs 54:00).
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The Polyglot Web
Luis von Ahn is a computer science professor at Carnergie Mellon, and his latest project is a website called Duolingo. Its lofty goal is to translate the entire web into every major language, using nothing but volunteer translators. We find out how Luis plans to make this happen. (Runs 12:29)
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Unoriginal Genius
Marjorie Perloff is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California. In her book Unoriginal Genius, she argues that something is happening in poetry. Thanks to the internet and accessibility of information, originality is taking a back seat to new work that is created using other people’s words. (Runs 10:07)
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Hacker Space Race
Now that the U.S has severely cut back its space program, independent groups and private companies are taking up the challenge. Right now there’s a bit of an amateur space-race going on between groups of hackers and other space enthusiasts and Spark contributor Cinnamon Nippard gets into the thick of it. (Runs 6:23)
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Where My (Computer Science) Ladies At?
Ten years ago this December, Jane Margolis published her influential book on women and computing, Unlocking the Clubhouse. Now a decade later, we find out from Jane Margolis and Canadian-born computer scientist Maria Klawe why gender balance in computer science matters. (Runs 19:25)
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Just listened to your interview about volunteering to help translate the www. Sign me up, what a grand idea.
I have played with learning Spanish for years. I would love to do this for a number of reasons…….one being, it wound stop me playing games and help bring the love of reading books to others.
Did you catch the url? I can't find it on here…
Hi Carlie, the link is right under the story, but here it is again http://duolingo.com/
I find your program interesting. But one thing I often notice about our present time is that people repeatedly have the hubris to think that they have discovered or invented something for the first time, without realizing that history is long and there is often nothing new under the sun. Your conversation with Marjorie Perloff is a good example. In her discussion of poets' citing of earlier poets, she got back as far as the twentieth century: T.S. Eliot. One would expect an emerita professor (particularly one who got the latin feminine "emerita" correct) to know about the tradition of the *cento* in which, for a thousand years or more, writers took lines verbatim from classical authors such as Virgil and strung them together to make a poem on a toothache or some other topic. Likewise, there were classical and medieval poets who wrote their poems in the shape of objects. Digital culture just makes it happen faster with less work — and perhaps with less creativity as well.
agreed, What's the URL? They always say "go to the web site for a link" then it's either not there, hidden or occasionally so obvious it's hard to find
Hi Philip, the link is the second one under the story, but here it is again for you http://duolingo.com/ All the links that pertain to particular stories you hear will be found each week under that story heading/player.
WOMEN IN COMPUTING
Well, Nora, your second show about the lack of women in Computing has induced me to comment. Through your first radio program, I learned that the proportion of women enrolling into Comp. Sci. has diminished since the early & mid-1980s when I attended University.
I was shocked & concerned by this info. because I saw many women in my Calc & Lin. Math, Statistics, Comp.,EE, Physics, … and other "rigorous" courses. And throughout my decades-old career, I worked with "exemplary & full-competent senior systems designers & 'coders' who are women."
I too would have liked my own pre-teen daughters, and teenage son to consider Computing as possible career pursuits. However, three years ago (when the World swirled the bowl), I was Re-Organized out:
*************
It relates in at least three ways:
#1 I learned during the infancy of Computing Science, and programmed with First-Principles, from scratch in C, Oracle, C++, CORBA and so forth; initially using flowcharting, workflows, time-lines, pseudo-coding, and various other "traditional or legacy" techniques. In time, I adopted Rapid Application Development (RAD) techniques and Integrated Development Environments (IDE) such as Eclipse, in Java.
>>>> Today, women in computing have the benefit of UML (for instance) so that they can use 'their form of cognition' to design, prove the correctness of, and implement complex systems via AGENT-TO-AGENT interactions, rather than 'cold&rigorous masculine' algorithmic, formulaic and pseudo-coding techniques. UML FOR EXAMPLE IS A BOON FOR MAKING APPLICATIONS & SYSTEMS DESIGNS A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY ACTIVITY, RATHER THAN THE EXCLUSIVE DOMAIN OF MALE BIT-HEADS.
#2 Decades of dedication in a job that I loved, and spent many extra unpaid hours, so as to successfully shore-up and deliver on time projects that EVERYONE KNOWS fail at least 1/3 of the time, are delayed, cancelled or delivered with a grossly lacking feature set (does not met its design), DUE TO SCOPE CREEP, LOGISTICAL PROBLEMS, INADEQUATE INITIAL ANALYSIS and OTHER SUCH FACTORS…. I worked extra hard personally because "my project team" didn't finalize their work ahead of me, and/or requirements changes mid-implementation, or unstated requirements suddenly emerged during testing, … and so on. I BURNT MY PERSONAL EFFORTS & RESILIENCE TO DELIVER SUCCESSFULLY… BUT WAS ULTIMATELY TUFTED TO THE CURB.
>>>>>> Women should not have such careers of Martyrdom!!! My daughters or son ought not to face that crush!!!
#3 Speaking frankly, without "FORMAL, UNIVERSITY-PROVIDED STUDY IN COMPUTING", several staffs that I worked with were on the opposite side of the spectrum than my 9-1-1 colleague. Specifically, WITHOUT CALCULUS AND ALGORITHMS COURSEWORK,… etc.
several "Computing Related & IT" Staff LACKED CREATIVITY, INNOVATION, lacked the ability to Understand Analogies or Analogues and Metaphor, lacked the ability to extrapolate, lacked the ability to conceptualize, model/abstract and encapsulate. More so, such "staff" lacked common computing-related VOCABULARY, TERMS, TECHNIQUES, TEMPLATES / FACTORY SOLUTIONS. The problem & solution had to be stated in terms-and-ways-that-they-understood,… and how dense such staff seems at times. I became a diplomat, facilitator and translator of technical-topics, techniques and architectures into simple-language. Why? …I'll explain….
Why? Because many of the staff had no historical depth of computing techniques, no abstraction skills, no shared vocabulary even among each other… meetings became long semantic debates among themselves that I sat back and watched for the most part until I felt it had gone on too long or too astray, then I facilitated a common vision and reminded everyone of the sought goal or recapped the business/process/client problem or requirement. Politeness was my constant companion. WHY? BECAUSE EACH PERSON HAD REACHED HER LEVEL OF SUCCESS "BY BEING OUTSPOKEN & EXTROVERTED, RIGID, PRECISE AND PROCEDURAL", NOT BECAUSE SHE HAD INTROSPECTION or CREATIVITY.
>>>>> That's the reason why Computing Science is not for everyone. Certainly not for all women any more than it is for all men. People: a large portion of every population, regardless of gender( or sex) CAN'T THINK IS THE RIGOROUS TERMS NECESSARY TO CORE ASPECTS OF COMPUTING.
>>>>>> To work with such staff diminishes worklife quality. My daughters & son ought not to choose a career in futility !!!
That's why I loved the first ten years of my Computing Career, tried my best for five more years to wrest scraps of interesting work from the "senior staff who were 15 years my elders, yet too young to retire", next tried to transition elsewhere while ensuring ongoing salary, and finally was shown to the curb. I haven't yet recovered, and work more-or-less as a cab driver.
>>>>> I won't recommend a Computing Career to any women, let alone any other man.
Interesting, the piece on the hacker space race. I don't remember either of the groups discussing how they were funding their activities. It may have taken the U.S. eight years or so to reach the moon (though I don't know where they came up that claim that there was only fifteen minutes of practice space flight), but the U.S. used the Apollo program as a Cold War cudgel against the Soviet Union and threw plenty of money at it. These private groups may know what they want to do, but if they can't get the money, whatever "deadline" they've set is rather meaningless.
I listened to the WWW translation project with great interest. Unfortunately, Facebook's approach to their own translation project was not mentioned by your guest. They translated all their core content into numerous languages using the same described method less the learning opportunity. They obviously counted on 150 million participants vs. the expected 1.2 billion for this project.
See https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internationa…
In their own words: "Facebook is currently available in over 70 languages, thanks to a framework that allows our user community to translate the text on Facebook. By integrating with Facebook, you can take advantage of our Translations framework immediately, so you can enjoy the benefits that translation can bring to your Platform application or website."
Nora's conversation with Marjorie Perloff about unoriginal genius reminded me about the Book World in the novels by Jasper Fforde. In it there is a recognized limited number of plots for fiction (16 if I remember correctly) and characters from unread books sell off plot devices such as A Head in A Bag. The most prized, priceless possession is One Original Idea.
Ha, I love that. I hadn't heard of it before. Sometimes it truly does feel like every story's been told!
duolingo sounds great, and I'm eagerly waiting for my invite to be sent (it's currently in private beta.)
It makes me think of another site I recently came across, universalsubtitles.org, which has similarly noble aims and a related purpose. Basically the aim is for volunteers to caption and translate videos, opening them up to deaf and hard of hearing users as well as opening them up to speakers of different languages.
It's a pretty nifty piece of software and has already been used to caption most of the khanacademy catalogue of videos (in English) by the looks of it.
What I find interesting is you could also see it as having a kind of learning benefit for the user, like with duolingo. In order to caption a video you have to really make sure you're paying attention (and also watch it at least 3 times through…) so hopefully you can grasp the topic better. It could be like the super-advanced level for duolingo — if you can transcribe the spoken word from a language other than your own then I'm pretty sure you've nailed that language. Maybe they should team up. On top of that you could maybe even use it as simply a way of trying to improve your typing speed
Having said that, on my first go it took me about an hour to caption (and sync and review) about 10 minutes of video, so I'm not sure how much material you could get through by yourself!
I wrote this comment regarding the "unoriginal genius" idea on my own blog and on google+ and thought I would share it here. (Not sure anyone still reads these, I'm a podcast listener who is a few episodes behind…)
http://www.ekran.org/ben/wp/2012/the-ownership-of…
When you write poetry you’re using words you did not invent (though you could) to convey some idea. Likely you also use phrases and sentence structures you did not invent. Further, you may be be using allegory and referring to stories and ideas you also did not invent. So where is the line between repetition and contribution? IP and copyright clearly make the point that a particular arrangement of form may be unique and attributable to one person (or corporation).
Things get sticky when we go beyond specific words on a page or particular arrangements of physical materials. For example, software is covered by copyright; the specific arrangement of syntax and words in a digital file can be considered the same as the arrangement of words on a page. So why are there such things as software patents? They exist because (largely) corporations seek to control not only the implementation (the code) but the very process, the algorithm itself.
If you take an idea from someone else’s writing and restate it in completely different words, that is not infringement. In the world of code, a particular software process could be reimplemented so that it does not infringe on the original, but yet to the user of the program the process may be indistinguishable. What is the problem with this? Well, the algorithm is quite similar to an idea. It can be realized in many different forms without loosing its identity. I don’t think it makes any sense to attribute ownership to an idea because there is no obvious objective way of measuring how that idea is related to other ideas in order to determine its (degree of) originality.
The conceptual content of an algorithm, or a poem, is both a function of the uniqueness of the reader (associating each symbolic representation to experiences and practises in their life) and the commonality of the culture. The same relation applies to the creator of the poem or algorithm. So we return to the question, where is the line between the cultural norm and the unique and individual contribution?
I think that a part of the answer is a consideration of scope. If we look very tightly at a supposed contribution then it may seem very unique and interesting compared to the background. If we broaden the scope (look at ideas in other contexts and in a broader time-frame), then perhaps what was seen as unique and original suddenly blends into the background and its uniqueness is reduced, or even obliterated.
I would go so far to say that individual ownership (of any idea) is flawed because no human creation happens in isolation. The argument of ownership can only apply to a physical form that is implemented by a creative individual: “I made this, its mine”. That ownership only applies to the physical object, and not the content.
All creative endeavour is social and cultural, and as such owes most of its existence to culture itself. Even if you could make a particular individual unique contribution in isolation, it would have no value because it would exist outside of the context of culture. No one could even understand it because it would not depend on cultural norms for communication and purpose.
So how can one “own” an idea that cannot be excised from culture? It seems that our non-communal notions of owning physical things has crossed over to apply to ideas, but I don’t think the relation holds at all. You could even argue that you can’t own a physical “thing” because you did not pay for all aspects of its creation; somewhere in the process someone, or something, looses out (a worker not paid a living wage, an animal’s suffering, the environment), and you owe something by “owning” that object.
The worst thing about all this effort for uniqueness and originality funnelled into IP vaults, is that it deprives culture of those elements. If we lack a background of ideas and practises then that can only hurt future innovation, creativity, and originality. Ideas, including abstract processes, are cultural and social notions, and without a commons, they have no meaning and no value.