|
Digital Document Quarterly Perspectives on
Trustworthy Information |
Volume 6, Number 4, 4Q2007 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
HMG Consulting |
©
2007, H.M. Gladney ISSN: 1547-8610 |
Digital Preservation
The abstract of a new paper, Economics and Engineering for Preserving Digital Content, reads:
Progress towards practical long-term preservation seems stalled. We preservationists cannot afford unique technology, but must exploit marketplace offerings. Macro economic facts suggest shifting most preservation work from repository institutions to their users.
Prior publications describe conceptual solutions for all known challenges of preserving a single object, but do not deal with software development or collection scaling. Much of the software needed is available. It has, however, not yet been selected, adapted, integrated, or deployed for digital preservation. Tools for daily work can embed packaging for preservation without much burdening their users.
We describe a practical strategy for detailed design and implementation. Document handling is complicated by human sensitivity to communication nuances. Our engineering section therefore suggests how project managers can master the many pertinent details.
A Discussion about Digital Trustworthiness
Literature of the digital preservation community continues to pose questions already answered in computer science and software engineering literature. An example is an Oct. 17 posting by Helen Tibbo (HT) to the MOIMS Repository Audit and Certification blog. Since my answer to included questions seems to have been rejected by the blog manager, without reply to my inquiry why this occurred, DDQ excerpts HT’s posting and follows this with my reply:
… First, what is the goal of [the TRAC] standard? … Indeed, what is the purpose of audit and certification? Is it not to give contributors and users of repository materials confidence that what is deposited will remain essentially as it is over time, that any changes are documented, and that the materials will remain available, accessible, and understandable? …
Even the highest level of certification will not ensure digital longevity and authenticity, anymore than best practices in analog repositories will ensure that no objects go missing or that none are defaced in some way. None of this is providing certainty; only risk projections that provide confidence. …
My greater concern is in identifying the elements of any list such as TRAC that are the most likely to indicate either a repository that is likely to fail or one that is likely to succeed. Back to the restaurant analogy: I am more concerned when hot food is not kept hot and cold food is not kept cold than things like food being stored on the floor or even roaches. One is much more likely to become sick from food that was left at room temperature than if a bug crawled on it. What are those food temperature equivalents for the preservation likelihood of digital objects? …
This HT posting ends with questions and concerns that DDQ addresses below. Essential background includes that:
(1) it is too early to expect consensus about social norms and tools for evidence about digital documents. This topic first attracted attention in R&D literature about a decade ago. In contrast, society has used documents on paper as evidence for more than a century.
(2) How every specifically identified technical requirement for digital document trustworthiness has been addressed.[1]
(3) The meaning and attributes of any document depend on an unbounded set of other documents. Because of unboundedness, no unequivocal assertion of context or trustworthiness of any document is possible.
(4) One cannot address the issues properly without some specification of the authenticity risks at hand. The likelihood of deliberate falsification of academic and cultural literature is small (except by totalitarian governments), as is the potential damage to readers. In contrast, it is often tempting to falsify legal and financial documents to damage unsuspecting victims.
HT asks: "Isn't part of the issue for us that it is much harder for contributors/users to make the trustworthiness decisions in the digital realm than in the analog?"
DDQ responds: There is little reason to believe that digital documents present unusually difficult problems. In the paper world, trustworthiness decisions depend on conformance to socially-accepted practices that evolved over several centuries, with considerable trial and error. An equivalent process for digital documents has hardly begun, and has certainly not progressed to choosing, implementing, and accepting widely understood standard practices. Thus there is, today, next to no reduction to practice upon which users can rely.
HT asks: "So it is not "proof" of authenticity that we can ask for but rather the track record of behaviors that provide us confidence that the repository will continue to follow good practice in the future."
DDQ responds: One must start with a clear notion of what is meant by 'proof'. A possible meaning is that provided by criminal judgment criteria along the lines of "beyond reasonable doubt". And this certainly depends on, among other things, HT's "track record of behaviors".
HT comments: "My greater concern is in identifying the elements of any list such as TRAC that are the most likely to indicate either a repository that is likely to fail or one that is likely to succeed."
HMG comments: It is very difficult to define procedures (other than certain document-oriented procedures that can be executed in contributor/user machines) to ensure the authenticity of every holding of a repository. Even if such procedures were known, it would be very difficult to ensure that a repository conformed to them with no more than small discrepancies. Nor can interim audits demonstrate that failures have not occurred. Moreover, it would be burdensome for end users to judge which procedures/audits a document had been protected by, and whether or not these procedures met their own risk minimization objectives. Finally, it is unlikely that many end users would have the expertise or patience to make the implied investigations.
Security Problems from Insider Errors
An RSA Security survey found that many grievous security problems originate in employee carelessness or ignorance. Anyone who wonders why I am skeptical about “trusted digital repositories” might consider the likelihood that no mishap threatens archive contents held for a century or longer!
Canadian Digital Preservation Strategy
In 2005, Library and Archives Canada (LAC) initiated a dialog about a Canadian Digital Information Strategy (CDIS). Its consultations culminated in a 2006 National Summit. A broad consensus emerged, leading to CDIS development. A chapter devoted to digital preservation is summarized with:
· Conduct a national appraisal of digital information priorities for long-term retention and preservation, and accelerate capture accordingly.
·
Develop a distributed network of Trusted Digital
Repositories with responsibility to capture, manage, preserve and provide
access to
· Foster Canadian R&D that advances the goals of better managing, sustaining and providing access to digital information, and contribute research outcomes to the global effort.
· Develop new workplace skills capacity for digital information management and preservation.
· Raise the public and political profile of digital preservation issues.
This conforms to what other nations’ archivists are writing, including accepting all the flawed notions implied by “Trusted Digital Repositories.” It illustrates a weakness of most committee reports: reduction to bland consensus that exhibits no original thinking whatsoever. It also fails to identify any specific action commitments. Once again, I am disappointed with words from the archival community!
Epistemology
Semantics
G.E. Moore's deliberations about the "meaning" of goodness led to the conclusion that "the good" is an idea that must be understood on its own terms. The meaning of this expression cannot be captured by a redefinitional formula of the format "The good is that which . . . (is happiness promoting, conducive to the greatest good for the greatest number, or the like)." For a definitional clarification of is predestined to futility. The philosophical quest (going back to Socrates) for the definition of this and similar terms is totally misguided. To be sure, this check is not a complete defeat for the clarificatory project. For we must distinguish between definitions and explanations. Explaining what "the human good" comprises as a viable project—friendship, enjoyment, etc.—is one sort of thing. But defining what "the human good" as such means is something quite different—and indeed something that is infeasible. Rescher[2]
Academic literature and the I/T trade press are replete with articles suggesting that the Semantic Web will remedy readers’ confusions with what authors mean.[3] Hyperbole should be balanced by sobriety about the limitations of communication, starting with what we might mean by “semantics”.
We find explanations such as the following excerpt from Wikipedia:
[T]here is no capability within the HTML itself to unambiguously assert that, say, item number X586172 is an Acme Gizmo with a retail price of €199, or that it is a consumer product. Rather, HTML can only say that the span of text "X586172" is something that should be positioned near "Acme Gizmo" and "€199", etc. … There is also no way to express that these pieces of information are bound together in describing a discrete item, …
The semantic web addresses this
shortcoming, using the descriptive technologies Resource Description Framework
(RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL), and the
data-centric, customizable Extensible Markup Language (XML). …
machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to
the content, i.e. to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about that
content. This way the machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, …
The quotation from Rescher reminds us that an attempt at precise definition would be futile. (The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes 13 distinct explanations.) Without expecting that any reader will accept it entirely, my thinking usually starts with the notion that semantics is a set of relationships between language strings (words, phrases, sentences, …) and the object or situation each represents—not a relationship between two language strings, i.e., not a definition![4]
What the Wikipedia entry teaches us is that the Semantic Web mechanisms can add two ingredients to HTML and XML objects: thesaurus entries and graphs communicating structure. What can these convey, and what is necessarily still missing? They can narrow a reader’s possible suppositions about what an author might have intended. However, neither conveys certainty about what is being communicated.
Thesaurus entries can help a reader reject widely incorrect supposed meanings. But the poor reader still cannot know with certainty that his understanding is closer to an author’s intention than what he understood from the author’s own words.
One might hope that a reader could compare an author’s graph expressing structure to his own notion to verify supposed meaning. Unfortunately, its help is limited in much the same way as thesaurus entries. One can readily detect that a wildly incorrect ontology does not correspond to a published ontology. However, comparing two ontologies to demonstrate that they are equivalent is NP-complete, i.e., computationally infeasible.
The structures alluded to above are what today’s authors usually mean by “ontologies”. (A century ago, “ontologies” had a quite different meaning!) Martin Hepp’s recent article[5] identifies basic inadequacies of current engineering for ontology exploitation.
Startling Facts
Erma Bombeck’s Writers Workshop shares
the following startling estimates, and other related facts:
1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
80 percent of
70 percent of
57 percent of new books are not read to completion.
70 percent of books published do not earn back their advance.
70 percent of the books published do not make a profit.
News
Carnegie Mellon University's digital library collection has exceeded 1.5M books.
A spate of e-mails suggests that many universities have ceased thesis deposits at UMI Microfilm, or are considering doing so.
Hormel has lost a spam lawusuit!
Standardization of PDF 1.7 has been approved as ISO 32000.
Investigators at UCSC are developing a tool to measure the trustworthiness of any
Wikipedia page.
A
new ACM periodical, Transactions
on Knowledge Discovery from Data,
is seeking research papers on information discovery and
analysis.
This
year’s desktop Linux
survey attracted twice as many respondents as last
year’s. More than 50% favor Ubuntu
distributions. See also eWeek’s technical
review.
Newspapers and governments
began altering photographic images long before digital photography made this
kind of fraud easy. A website, Top 15 Manipulated
Photographs, illustrates this.
IBM’s “Many Eyes” project is
an experiment on the power of human visual intelligence
to find patterns. You can explore it
online.
Hard drives are often taken for granted, but
they're the main repository for all our digital data. Western Digital tries to get the hard drive a
little more respect in its Editor's Day event. Work towards higher density data storage continues vigorously.
Notwithstanding two decades in which we saw 2x improvements roughly
every 15 months, another 20x still seems feasible.
What is WiMAX? Will We Ever Have It?
Worldwide
Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is a technology standard for
radio transmission of large amounts of digital data. Compared to today's WiFi radio links, it will
increase signal range from a few hundred yards to about 20 miles and deliver
data more than 10 times more quickly. It
is also an economical alternative to coaxial cable and telephone lines for
bringing broadband Internet access to homes and businesses. WiMAX backers plan to build it into TVs,
notebook PCs, and smart phones.
Few technologies
have been as widely hyped and as broadly anticipated as WiMAX. But for several years it has been expected
“next year.” A Sept. 3 BusinessWeek
review describes the
technology and its practical prospects.
Many Web blogs, such as one at
Techrepublic, also comment. However, BusinessWeek also reports that WiMAX plans have
been dropped by Sprint and Clearwire.
E-mail from the
Grave? “Immortal Computing”?
Microsoft researchers are pursuing a patent for storing information indefinitely for future generations. A patent filing suggests the use of nonmoving parts to avoid damage over time, alternative means of energy, as well as independent interfaces for information retrieval, so the means of access could evolve even though the means by which the information is stored could not. Those storing information could decide to whom to grant access, using DNA or biometrics to confirm identity. These artifacts would be "self revealing," meaning that no other information besides the artifact itself would be needed for access.
The Espresso Book Machine can produce a 300-page paperback on demand, complete with color cover, in just 3 minutes. The $50,000 machine could transform libraries into mini bookstores, making hard-to-find titles as accessible as cappuccinos. It can offer digital reprints of out-of-print or self-published books at a fraction of the price charged by publishers.
According to press releases, machines have been installed at several prominent research libraries.
Reading
Recommendations
The conventional story of Church persecution of Copernicus and other scientists is a myth. Mano Singham tells an interesting and possibly more accurate story.[6]
Smashing Magazine might interest DDQ readers.
DDQ 6(3) recommended three books
as outstanding accounts of the best in science.
Like these, Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and
the Struggle for the Soul of Science will appeal to lay readers. Its sketch of how epistemology used the basics
of physics to create a theory of knowledge is typified by the passage:
Until this time, a theory
was a set of rules that accounted for some set of facts. Between theory and experiment there existed a
direct, exact two-way correspondence.
But that was no longer quite the case.
Theory now contained elements that the physicists were sure existed in
reality, but which they couldn't get at experimentally. For the theorist, atoms had definite
existence, and had definite, positions and speeds. For the experimenter, atoms existed only
inferentially, and could be described only statistically.[7] A gap had opened up between what a theory
said was the full and correct picture of the physical world and what an experiment
could in practice reveal of that world.
This refers to interrelated shocks forced on scientists and philosophers
between 1890 and 1930: the breakdown of intuitive common sense as a guide to
the structure of the world, in-principle limits to what could be observed and
measured, and mathematical descriptions replacing physical models. For many scholars, the resolution was a
no-man’s land between logic and physics, that Lindley summarizes with:
“Philosophy,” Paul Dirac once observed, “is just a way of talking about discoveries which have already been made." … physicists do not take kindly to philosophers telling them what theories mean, still less to those who dare to tell them how to conduct their business. … questions of interpretation and philosophy simply do not arise for the great silent majority of physicists who apply quantum mechanics to their endeavors. In the late nineteenth century, especially among scientists educated in the German tradition, there was a feeling that as theoretical physics advanced. it ought to evolve a philosophy along with it. Nowadays most physicists are reared in the Anglo-Saxon style, steer clear of Plato and Kant, and are belligerently uninterested in what philosophers make of their theories.
Ernst Cassirer, The
Logical Structure of the Humanities and An
Essay on Man
Among prominent twentieth
century philosophers, Ernst Cassirer and Bertrand Russell present students with
special problems. Each was so erudite
and so prolific that one cannot read him completely without this displacing
attention to other worthwhile authors.
For instance, Cassirer wrote both The Logic of the Cultural Sciences and
the fourth volume of the Problem of Knowledge in a period of 5 months
(circa 1940). A mitigation of this
problem is provided by the following choices.
The Logic of the Cultural Sciences presents Cassirer's most developed and systematic articulation of how it
is possible to achieve objective and universal validity in both the domain of
the natural and mathematical sciences and the domain of practical, cultural,
moral, and aesthetic phenomenon. Stanford Encycl. of Phil.
In founding his philosophy of culture,
Cassirer relies upon the comprehension of the various areas of cultural life
in the fields that study them—mythology, history of religion, linguistics,
aesthetics, literary criticism, art history, history and historiography,
anthropology, and so on—the Kulturwissenschaften (literally:
"cultural sciences"), as these fields can be called in German. In [this] work, whose German title is Zur
Logik der Kulturwissenschaften, Cassirer turns his attention from the
subjects that these fields study to the form or logic of the fields
themselves. In his early work on Substance
and Function (1910), Cassirer had presented a theory of concept formation
in the natural sciences which he carried through into his later works. In the present work, Cassirer turns to a theory
of concept formation for the cultural sciences.
The contrast and relation between these two types of concept formation
is specifically the subject matter of the third and pivotal study of this
work. Cassirer's philosophy of culture
comes full circle from extending the problem of knowledge to those areas of
thought that are distinctively human, in which the human self specifically confronts
its own nature, to a philosophical reflection on those fields on which the
philosophy of culture must rely to construct its account. Translator's
preface to The Logic of the Cultural Sciences.
Cassirer identifies his Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture as synopsizing his work especially for American audiences. Considered together with The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, it provides a good and readable introduction to Cassirer, who is famous for bridging scientific and Continental philosophy.[8] The book seems appropriate for upper division undergraduate students. Its theme is suggested by the excerpts:
Reason is a very inadequate term with which to comprehend the forms of man's cultural life in all their richness and variety. But all these forms are symbolic forms. Hence, instead of defining man as an animal rationale, we should define him as an animal symbolicum. By so doing we can designate his specific difference, and we can understand the new way open to man—the way to civilization. [p.26]
The difference between propositional language and emotional language is the real landmark between the human and the animal world. All the theories and observations concerning animal language are wide of the mark if they fail to recognize this fundamental difference. In all the literature of the subject there does not seem to be a single conclusive proof' of the fact that any animal ever made the decisive step from subjective to objective, from affective to propositional language. [p.30]
Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy is a good source for identifying the problems whose solution concerned 20th century philosophers. Like Cassirer, Russell provides eminently readable text.
Amos
Elon, The Pity of It All, and Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong?
As most readers surely
know, the European political and cultural liberalization of 1848 to 1933 is
inextricably associated with Jewish emancipation. Jewish emancipation, in turn, is a critical
ingredient of 20th century epistemology (e.g., in the case of Cassirer).
Elon's The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.
It is not the houses. It is the spaces
between the houses.
It is not the streets that exist.
It is the streets that no longer exist.
It is not the memories which haunt you.
It is not what you have written down.
It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.
What you must go on forgetting all your life.
And with any luck oblivion should
discover ritual.
You will find out that you are not alone in the enterprise.
Yesterday the very furniture seemed to reproach you.
Today you take your place at the Widow's Shuttle. JAMES FENTON, A German Requiem
Contrast between Jewish and Muslim contributions can be obtained by concurrently reading Bernard Lewis’ more focused and shorter historical account, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. I believe this book should be on everybody’s short list of social history.
Practical Matters
OpenOffice
2.3 has been released. A wiki summarizes
new
and improved features.
Linux users will be interested in KDE 4, the next release series of the K Desktop Environment software, which debuts in January 2008. In addition to efficiency and performance improvements, the new version will contain a new multimedia API, called Phonon, a device integration framework called Solid, and a new style guide and default icon set called Oxygen. It will also include a new desktop called Plasma, which supports desktop widgets.
Readers who enjoy PC
games and assembling their own computers might enjoy PC Magazine’s Get
the Most PC for Your Money.
Readers might be puzzled by the relationship between CPU models and performance (the distinction between an Intel Celeron and a more expensive Pentium-4 machine, or their AMD Sempron and Turion counterparts). A Legion Hardware review summarizes performance comparisons with an explanation of what is important.
Would you be willing to sacrifice a smidgen of hard drive
performance for a little more reliability? Consider enterprise class hard drives built on desktop drive
designs.
ComputerWorld
reports year-to-year
price declines for notebook hard disk drives
from about 86¢ to about 53¢ per
Gb. The prices of all kinds of magnetic
disk drives continue to fall. Best
prices in
|
3.5” SATA
HDD for desktop computers |
20¢ per Gb |
|
High speed
3.5” HDD (4 ms. seek time) |
$1.3 per Gb |
|
2.5” HDD for
notebook computers |
50¢ per Gb |
|
2.5”
portable USB attached HDD |
60¢ per Gb |
|
Network-attached HDD array with automatic backup software |
20¢ per Gb |
LinuxWorld reports that an open-source version of the erstwhile popular Eudora e-mail client will appear in 2008.
OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX) is a new Web service for open source management intended to help enterprises find, download, use, and support hundreds of enterprise-ready open source packages. Try it out.
When
my laptop computer died three years ago, I did not replace it. Recognizing that a PC would be available at
most travel destinations, I instead carried only a 60Gb USB-attachable HDD
whose content I synchronized with my working directories before and after each
trip. For 2007 travel, I abandoned even
that in favor of a 2Gb Lexar flash drive, whose
included PowerToGo software makes it easy to carry heavily used
applications together with copies of work in progress.
The picture to the left, showing the device and its keychain attachment, emphasizes a feature that DDQ readers might overlook. Unlike most available flash drives, the keychain attachment is part of the protective cover rather than part of the drive housing. This is convenient because it prevents loss of the protective cover.
Needing more capacity, I just purchased a new Lexar 4Gb drive for $20.
Carrying a tiny drive is likely to become common as capacities increase. A research project has shown the feasibility of a terabyte thumb drive!
An attractive alternative is the flash memory geometry for digital cameras, such as SD or CF modules. A couple of these are conveniently carried in a wallet.
The
Virtual computers seem all the
rage in the last year. Offerings that
might interest readers include Parallels Workstation for Windows
and Innotek VirtualBox.[9]
Parallels
Workstation empowers any user to create several secure virtual machines on a
single PC. These can run nearly any OS,
including Windows 3.1--XP/2003, Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, eComStation, Sun Solaris,
and MS-DOS. Free to try; $50 to buy.
innotek
VirtualBox is a virtualization product family. Although enterprise customers must pay for
VirtualBox, it is free to home users under the GNU General Public License
(GPL). It runs on Windows, Linux and
Macintosh hosts and supports a large number of guest operating
systems including but not limited to Windows (NT
4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and
OpenBSD. See an introduction.
CAPTCHA for Digitizing Old Books
A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a program for protecting websites against robot access by generating and grading tests that only humans can pass.
A
Carnegie
Mellon project digitizing old books and manuscripts uses OCR
software to convert scanned images to encoded files that can be searched by
computers. However OCR software is
unable to interpret many words because of low quality images. The only reliable way to decode them is for a
human to examine them individually—a large laborious task. The project distributes images of troublesome
words as CAPTCHAs. Web visitors’ decipherings.are managed by a voting program;
if enough visitors provide the same interpretation, this is used to improve the
text.
Addressing Your Private Web Page
You might think that providing a private Web page necessitates renting a static IP address. If this was ever true, it is not true today. Services such as No-IP exploit the fact that the providers of high-speed Internet connections (DSL and cable) commonly change their subscribers numeric addresses only infrequently. This makes efficient a client program mapping from a registered domain name to its current IP address, redirecting DNS servers appropriately.
Domain-name registration costs about $10 p.a.
Opting Out of
In December, Consumer Reports recommended the World
Privacy Forum website listing 10 "opt outs" to help consumers remove their contact
information from marketing lists.
CR identified the following options particularly:
·
To stop most telemarketing calls, try the National Do Not Call Registry.
·
To stop "pre-approved" credit-card offers.
· To stop catalog and nonprofit mailings, the Direct Marketing Association Mail Preference
Service.
SJMN
reports on opting
out of catalog lists. Catalog Choice
is a project of three environmental organizations: the National Wildlife
Federation in
Removing
your name from lists sold by data brokers, who compile lists culled from public
records, credit transactions, and warranty cards can be tedious. Try the brokers list compiled by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
[1]
H.M. Gladney, Trustworthy 100-Year Digital Objects: Evidence After Every Witness is Dead,
ACM Trans. Office Information Systems 22(3), 406-436, July 2004.
[2] N. Rescher, The Rise And Fall Of Analytic Philosophy in Minding Matter and Other Essays in Philosophical Inquiry, Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, pp.23-38.
[3] See, for instance, the Semantic Report.
[4] See, for instance, the definition of semantics in the Free Online Dictionary.
[5] Martin Hepp, Possible Ontologies: How Reality Constrains the Development of Relevant Ontologies, IEEE Internet Computing 11(1), 90-96, 2007.
[6] Mano Singham, The Copernican Myths, Physics Today pp.48-52, December 2007.
[7] Since the time that Lindley writes about, it has become possible to view images of single atoms with a transmission electron microscope.
[8]
Michael
Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap,
Cassirer, and Heidegger,
[9] Warning: I have not tested either package, but do plan to try VirtualBox for running Windows applications on my Linux platform.
