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On kids and social networking

June 29, 2010 by

Sunday’s New York Times has an article about cyber-bullying that’s currently #1 on their “most popular” list, so this is clearly a topic that many find close and interesting.

The NYT article focuses on schools’ central role in policing their students social behavior. While I’m all in favor of students being taught, particularly by older peer students, the importance of self-moderating their communications, schools face a fundamental quandary:

Nonetheless, administrators who decide they should help their cornered students often face daunting pragmatic and legal constraints.

“I have parents who thank me for getting involved,” said Mike Rafferty, the middle school principal in Old Saybrook, Conn., “and parents who say, ‘It didn’t happen on school property, stay out of my life.’ ”

…

Judges are flummoxed, too, as they wrestle with new questions about protections on student speech and school searches. Can a student be suspended for posting a video on YouTube that cruelly demeans another student? Can a principal search a cellphone, much like a locker or a backpack?

It’s unclear. These issues have begun their slow climb through state and federal courts, but so far, rulings have been contradictory, and much is still to be determined.

Here’s one example that really bothers me:

A few families have successfully sued schools for failing to protect their children from bullies. But when the Beverly Vista School in Beverly Hills, Calif., disciplined Evan S. Cohen’s eighth-grade daughter for cyberbullying, he took on the school district.

After school one day in May 2008, Mr. Cohen’s daughter, known in court papers as J. C., videotaped friends at a cafe, egging them on as they laughed and made mean-spirited, sexual comments about another eighth-grade girl, C. C., calling her “ugly,” “spoiled,” a “brat” and a “slut.”

J. C. posted the video on YouTube. The next day, the school suspended her for two days.

“What incensed me,” said Mr. Cohen, a music industry lawyer in Los Angeles, “was that these people were going to suspend my daughter for something that happened outside of school.” On behalf of his daughter, he sued.

If schools don’t have the authority to discipline J. C., as the court apparently ruled, and her father is more interested in defending her than disciplining her for clearly inappropriate behavior, then can we find some other solution?

Of course, there’s nothing new about bullying among the early-teenage set. I will refrain from dredging such stories from my own pre-Internet pre-SMS childhood, but there’s no question that these kids are at an important stage of their lives, where they’re still learning important and essential concepts, like how to relate to their peers and the importance (or lack thereof) of their peers’ approval, much less understanding where to draw boundaries between their public self and their private feelings. It’s certainly important for us, the responsible adults of the world, to recognize that nothing we can say or do will change the fundamentally social awkwardness of this age. There will never be an ironclad solution that eliminates kids bullying, taunting, or otherwise hurting one other.

Given all that, the rise of electronic communications (whether SMS text messaging, Facebook, email, or whatever else) changes the game in one very important way. It increases the velocity of communications. Every kid now has a megaphone for reaching their peers, whether directly through a Facebook posting that can reach hundreds of friends at once or indirectly through the viral spread of embarrassing gossip from friend to friend, and that speed can cause salacious information to get around well before any traditional mechanisms (parental, school administrative, or otherwise) can clamp down and assert some measure of sanity. For possibly the ultimate example of this, see a possibly fictitious yet nonetheless illustrative girl’s written hookup list posted by her brother as a form of revenge against her ratting out his hidden stash of beer. Needless to say, in one fell swoop, this girl’s life got turned upside down with no obvious way to repair the social damage.

Alright, we invented this social networking mess. Can we fix it?

The only mechanism I feel is completely inappropriate is this:

But Deb Socia, the principal at Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Dorchester, Mass., takes a no-nonsense approach. The school gives each student a laptop to work on. But the students’ expectation of privacy is greatly diminished.

“I regularly scan every computer in the building,” Ms. Socia said. “They know I’m watching. They’re using the cameras on their laptops to check their hair and I send them a message and say: ‘You look great! Now go back to work.’ It’s a powerful way to teach kids: ‘I’m paying attention, you need to do what’s right.’ ”

Not only do I object to the Big Brother aspect of this (do schools still have 1984 on their reading lists?), but turning every laptop into a surveillance device is a hugely tempting target for a variety of bad actors. Kids need and deserve some measure of privacy, at least to the extent that schools already give kids a measure of privacy against arbitrary and unjustified search and seizure.

Surveillance is widely considered to be more acceptable when it’s being done by parents, who might insist they have their kids’ passwords in order to monitor them. Of course, kids of this age will reasonably want or need to have privacy from their parents as well (e.g., we don’t want to create conditions where victims of child abuse can be easily locked down by their family).

We could try to invent technical means to slow down the velocity of kids’ communications, which could mean adding delays as a function of the fanout of a message, or even giving viewers of any given message a kill switch over it, that could reach back and nuke earlier, forwarded copies to other parties. Of course, such mechanisms could be easily abused. Furthermore, if Facebook were to voluntarily create such a mechanism, kids might well migrate to other services that lack the mechanism. If we legislate that children of a certain age must have technically-imposed communication limits across the board (e.g., limited numbers of SMS messages per day), then we could easily get into a world where a kid who hits a daily quota cannot communicate in an unexpectedly urgent situation (e.g., when stuck at an alcoholic party and needing a sober ride home).

Absent any reasonable technical solution, the proper answer is probably to restrict our kids’ access to social media until we think they’re mature enough to handle it, to make sure that we, the parents, educate them about the proper etiquette, and that we take responsibility for disciplining our kids when they misbehave.

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Did a denial-of-service attack cause the stock-market "flash crash?"

June 25, 2010 by

On May 6, 2010, the stock market experienced a “flash crash”; the Dow plunged 998 points (most of which was in just a few minutes) before (mostly) recovering. Nobody was quite sure what caused it. An interesting theory from Nanex.com, based on extensive analysis of the actual electronic stock-quote traffic in the markets that day and other days, is that the flash crash was caused (perhaps inadvertently) by a kind of denial-of-service attack by a market participant. They write,

While analyzing HFT (High Frequency Trading) quote counts, we were shocked to find cases where one exchange was sending an extremely high number of quotes for one stock in a single second: as high as 5,000 quotes in 1 second! During May 6, there were hundreds of times that a single stock had over 1,000 quotes from one exchange in a single second. Even more disturbing, there doesn’t seem to be any economic justification for this.

They call this practice “quote stuffing”, and they present detailed graphs and statistics to back up their claim.

The consequence of “quote stuffing” is that prices on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), which bore the brunt of this bogus quote traffic, lagged behind prices on other exchanges. Thus, when the market started dropping, quotes on the NYSE were higher than on other exchanges, which caused a huge amount of inter-exchange arbitrage, perhaps exacerbating the crash.

Why would someone want to do quote stuffing? The authors write,

After thoughtful analysis, we can only think of one [reason]. Competition between HFT systems today has reached the point where microseconds matter. Any edge one has to process information faster than a competitor makes all the difference in this game. If you could generate a large number of quotes that your competitors have to process, but you can ignore since you generated them, you gain valuable processing time. This is an extremely disturbing development, because as more HFT systems start doing this, it is only a matter of time before quote-stuffing shuts down the entire market from congestion.

The authors propose a “50ms quote expiration rule” that they claim would eliminate quote-stuffing.

I am not an expert on finance, so I cannot completely evaluate whether this article makes sense. Perhaps it is in the category of “interesting if true, and interesting anyway”.

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How Not to Fix Soccer

June 22, 2010 by

With the World Cup comes the quadrennial ritual in which Americans try to redesign and improve the rules of soccer. As usual, it’s a bad idea to redesign something you don’t understand—and indeed, most of the proposed changes would be harmful. What has surprised me, though, is how rarely anyone explains the rationale behind soccer’s rules. Once you understand the rationale, the rules will make a lot more sense.

So here’s the logic underlying soccer’s rules: the game is supposed to scale down, so that an ordinary youth or recreation-league game can be played under the exact same rules used by the pros. This means that the rules must be designed so that the game can be run by a single referee, without any special equipment such as a scoreboard.

Most of the popular American team sports don’t scale down in this way. American football, basketball, and hockey — the most common inspirations for “reformed” soccer rules — all require multiple referees and special equipment. To scale these sports down, you have to change the rules. For example, playground basketball has no shot clock, no counting of fouls, and nonstandard rules for awarding free throws and handling restarts—it’s fun but it’s not the same game the Lakers play. Baseball is the one popular American spectator sport that does scale down.

The scaling principle accounts for soccer’s seemingly odd timekeeping. The clock isn’t stopped and started, because we can’t assume a separate timekeeping official and we don’t want to burden the referee’s attention with a lot of clock management. The time is not displayed to the players, because we can’t assume the availability of a scoreboard. And because the players don’t know the exact remaining time, the referee gives the players some leeway to finish an attack even if the nominal finishing time has been reached. Most of the scalable sports lack a clock — think of baseball and volleyball — but soccer manages to reconcile a clock with scalability. Americans often want to “fix” this by switching to a scheme that requires a scoreboard and timekeeper.

The scaling principle also explains the system of yellow and red cards. A hockey-style penalty box system requires special timing and (realistically) a special referee to manage the penalty box and timer. Basketball-style foul handling allows penalties to mount up as more fouls are committed by the same player or team, which is good, but it requires elaborate bookkeeping to keep track of fouls committed by each player and team fouls per half. We don’t want to make the soccer referee keep such detailed records, so we simply ask him to record yellow and red cards, which are rare. He uses his judgment to decide when repeated fouls merit a yellow card. This may seem arbitrary in particular cases but it does seem fair on average. (There’s a longer essay that could be written applying the theory of efficient liability regimes to the design of sports penalties.)

It’s no accident, I think, that scalable sports such as soccer and baseball/softball are played by many Americans who typically watch non-scalable sports. There’s something satisfying about playing the same game that the pros play. So, my fellow Americans, if you’re going to fix soccer, please keep the game simple enough that the rest of us can still play it.

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Rebooting the CS Publication Process

June 16, 2010 by

The job of an academic is to conduct research, and that means publishing manuscripts for the world to read. Computer science is somewhat unusual, among the other disciplines in science and engineering, in that our primary research output goes to highly competitive conferences rather than journals. Acceptance rates at the “top” conferences are often 15% or lower, and the process of accepting those papers and rejecting the rest is famously problematic, particularly for the papers on the bubble.

Consequently, a number of computer scientists have been writing about making changes to the way we do what we do. Some changes may be fairly modest, like increasing acceptance rates by fiat, and eliminating printed paper proceedings to save costs. Other changes would be more invasive and require more coordination.

If we wanted to make a concerted effort to really overhaul the process, what would we do? If we can legitimately concern ourselves with “clean slate” redesign of the Internet as an academic discipline, why not look at our own processes in the same light? I raised this during the rump session of the last HotOS Workshop and it seemed to really get the room talking. The discipline of computer science is clearly ready to have this discussion.

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on and off to flesh out how a clean-slate publishing process might work, taking advantage of our ability to build sophisticated tools to manage the process, and including a story for how we might get from here to there. I’ve written this up as a manuscript and I’d like to invite our blog readers, academic or otherwise, to read it over and offer their feedback. At some point, I’ll probably compress this down to fit the tight word limit of a CACM article, but first things first.

Have a look. Post your feedback here on Freedom to Tinker or send me an email and I’ll followup, no doubt with a newer draft of my manuscript.

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Developing Texts Like We Develop Software

May 11, 2010 by

Recently I was asked to speak at a conference for university librarians, about how the future of academic publication looks to me as a computer scientist. It’s an interesting question. What do computer scientists have to teach humanists about how to write? Surely not our elegant prose style.

There is something distinctive about how computer scientists write: we tend to use software development tools to “develop” our texts. This seems natural to us. A software program, after all, is just a big text, and the software developers are the authors of the text. If a tool is good for developing the large, complex, finicky text that is a program, why not use it for more traditional texts as well?

Like software developers, computer scientist writers tend to use version control systems. These are software tools that track and manage different versions of a text. What makes them valuable is not just the ability to “roll back” to old versions — you can get that (albeit awkwardly) by keeping multiple copies of a file. The big win with version control tools is the level of control they give you. Who wrote this line? What did Joe write last Tuesday? Notify me every time section 4 changes. Undo the changes Fred made last Wednesday, but leave all subsequent changes in place. And so on. Version control systems are a much more powerful relative of the “track changes” and “review” features of standard word processors.

Another big advantage of advanced version control is that it enables parallel development, a style of operation in which multiple people can work on the text, separately, at the same time. Of course, it’s easy to work in parallel. What’s hard is to merge the parallel changes into a coherent final product — which is a huge pain in the neck with traditional editing tools, but is easy and natural with a good version control system. Parallel development lets you turn out a high-quality product faster — it’s a necessity when you have hundred or thousands of programmers working on the same product — and it vastly reduces the amount of human effort spent on coordination. You still need coordination, of course, but you can focus it where it matters, on the conceptual clarity of the document, without getting distracted by version-wrangling.

Interestingly, version control and parallel development turn out to be useful even for single-author works. Version control lets you undo your mistakes, and to reconstruct the history of a problematic section. Parallel development is useful if you want to try an experiment — what happens if I swap sections 3 and 4? — and try out this new approach for a while yet retain the ability to accept or reject the experiment as a whole. These tools are so useful that experienced computer scientists tend to use them to write almost anything longer than a blog post.

While version control and parallel development have become standard in computer science writing, there are other software development practices that are only starting to cross the line into CS writing: issue tracking and the release early and often strategy.

Issue tracking systems are used to keep track of problems, bugs, and other issues that need to be addressed in a text. As with version control, you can do this manually, or rely on a simple to-do list, but specialized tools are more powerful and give you better control and better visibility into the past. As with software, issues can range from small problems (our terminology for X is confusing) to larger challenges (it would be nice if our dataset were bigger).

“Release early and often” is a strategy for rapidly improving a text by making it available to users (or readers), getting feedback, and rapidly turning out a new version that addresses the feedback. Users’ critiques become issues in the issue tracking system; authors modify the text to address the most urgent issues; and a new version is released as soon as the text stabilizes. The result is rapid improvement, aligned with the true desires of users. This approach requires the right attitude from users, who need to be willing to tolerate problems, in exchange for a promise that their critiques will be addressed promptly.

What does all of this mean for writers who are not computer scientists? I won’t be so bold as to say that the future of writing will be just exactly like software development. But I do think that the tools and techniques of software development, which are already widely used by computer scientist writers, will diffuse into more common usage. It will be hard to retrofit them into today’s large, well-established editing software, but as writing tools move into the cloud, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them take on more of the attributes of today’s software development tools.

One consequence of using these tools is that you end up with a fairly complete record of how the text developed over time, and why. Imagine having a record like that for the great works of the past. We could know what the writer did every hour, every day while writing. We could know which issues and problems the author perceived in earlier versions of the text, and how these were addressed. We could know which issues the author saw as still unfixed in the final published text. This kind of visibility will be available into our future writing — assuming we produce works that are worthy of study.

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