Legatissimo.info

The Parties to this Protocol,

In pursuit of the objective of settling the matter of responsible parties as expressed in Article I,

Acknowledging that someone must go get the pizza we ordered,

Being guided, by Article II of the Convention,

Considering the strict punishments for accord violations discussed in Article III,

Have agreed as follows:

Article I

1. Each party enumerated in Annex I, in order to settle matters of responsibility in the delegation of actions manifest as public goods, shall:

(a) Implement and/or endorse the procedural basis for actor-selection as outlined in Article II, hereinafter referred to as "the Procedure", to the best of his or her ability not limited by personal characteristics of:

(i) Laziness
(ii) Unwillingness

(b) Treat the assignment of actions of public good by the Procedure to be binding, so long as its use is not:

(i) Excessively malicious;
(ii) Unreasonably financially burdensome;
(iii) Discrepant with the Procedure outlined in Article III.

2. The assignment of responsibilities relating to actions designated as public goods by use of the Procedure may include, but are not limited to:

(a) Fetching:

(i) Food orders;
(ii) Forgotten items;
(iii) Items located in remote locations;

(b) Making:

(i) Consumables;
(ii) Other items;

(c) Discussing socially undesirable topics, such as:

(i) The presence of body odor with the culpable party.

(d) Other:

(i) Paying for things
(ii) Performing tasks

Article II

1. Initiation of the The Procedure is a combination of a verbal statement and a hand gesture. To be considered an official activation of The Nose Goes Accord (hereinafter 'The Accord'), this combined action must be carried out pursuant with Article II § 2.a. To have one's response counted in an official activation of The Accord, it must be conducted as outlined by Article II 2.b. The matter has been settled when the conditions of Article II 2.c have been met.

2. The implementation of an Accord procedure.

(a) The Activation. The Activation is the initial call made by an Accord signer, as listed in Annex I, through use of the activation phrase, with its accompanying hand gesture. The Accord can only be activated when the initiator is a signed member, and when all present potential actors are signatories in word or deed. The process of Activation requires the following two actions to be performed in any order:

(i) Speaking of a phrase similar in construct to "not it," with a level of granular detail substantial enough to identify the disputed action, and audible enough so that it is identifiable by all reasonable parties. If identification of the disputed action can be determined without the use of speech, this phrase is not necessary.
(ii) The touching of one's nose with either index finger in a subtle or non-subtle fashion.

(b) The Response. The Activation is met with the Response of all parties deemed to be within reasonable playing distance. The Response is the action of an individual touching his or her nose with his or her index finger. As with the Activation, the action of the Response can be subtle or non-subtle.

(c) The Resolution. Resolution occurs when all but one present potential actors have performed the response, as outlined in Article II § 2 c. The remaining individual, who has not completed the Response (hereinafter 'It') is assigned responsibility for the action in dispute.

Article III

1. Enforcement of this Accord is left up to the total group will of the the Activating parties. Punishment for failure of explicitly signed members could take the form of revocation of their activation privileges, or simple social ostracism.

2. Disputes disputes will be resolved by one of two procedures. Matters involving questions of procedural application—eg determination of the last responding party—will be determined as outlined in Article III § a. Matters involving the interpretation of the Accord text will be determined as discussed in Article III § b. While procedural questions default to Article III § a, if sufficient disagreement on the matter warrant, it can be escalated to the procedure outlined in Article III § b.

(a) In determining matters of procedure, those individuals participating in the specific Accord Activation and free of explicit personal interest in the dispute shall act as arbitrators, determining who is It.

(b) In determining matters of Accord interpretation, the individual leading the charge of dispute is responsible for conducing a poll of the undersigned enumerated in Annex I. Should the poll not be carried out, the motion shall be considered to have failed. Should the poll determine that a majority of undersigners find in favor of the motion, the motion is passed. If the poll results end in a tie, the motion fails, and all decisions of the Accord in regard to the specific dispute are null and void.

Annex I

Heck yeah. I've already got my bibliography and cover page in there, too. Of course I did that when I didn't feel like writing. All said and done, each copy of this is going to set me back 61 pieces of paper. I did drop two pages from my outline. Actually, I dropped two from the introduction and two from the conclusion, but I just had so much to say about "technologies to watch" that I made up for my poor bookending of the subject matter.

Anyway, it's 2 AM and I've got a huge day tomorrow. I've decided to go to Psych--I think that it would be in poor form to skip the last day of class. The obvious downside of that decision is that I have to physically get out of bed to go to class. Hopefully I'll manage.

Then I'm going to whip up a little presentation before Computers in the Fine Arts about my project. I think I know how it's going to start:

Since the dawn of buckets, human kind have been miffed by one unending question, "What can be done with this bucket?" And while the languages have changed and the dialects shifted, the sentiment has not. However, through the collaborative, decentralized nature of the Internet, and the revolutionary values of "make culture" and the hyper-neo-progressive-retroactive-blogosphere-podcasting-revolution, we--the collective we: you, me, everyone throughout history, and everyone yet to be born--may finally have a single repository in which we may aggregate our wisdom.

No longer do traditional bucket uses die with the elder of a family. No longer do more exotic uses practiced by Amazonian tribes fall from the global consciousness when their native village is politely relocated. No longer do the buket-related innovations in less-connected Tibet redouble already produced bucket research in Central America. With a click of this mouse, I bequeath to the world, not a fountain of knowledge, rather, a ground-spring of truth, in its most pure, unaltered form. Hallelujah! Glory be. Today, we witness the end of the dark ages. Come with me, fellow students in FA 193 section 12, Computers in the Fine Arts. Under the tutelage of Professor Jeffery Stephanic, let us bask in the beautiful light of the future.

Then from there, I think I'll show them all the links and stuff that I put on the site.

Band's over for the semester, so I don't have that to worry about. But I have roped Maura into copy editing my paper. I'm paying her by the hour to do it, though. So it is very much in my economic interest to minimize mistakes before she has the ability to capitalize on my bad grammar. (This could be interpreted as a play on the fact that "capitalize" also refers to moving to an alternate letter form. However, this coincidence is purely accidental.)

With any luck, that should be done before midnight. And then? Then, I'm going to snuggle into bed and have anxiety nightmares about my thesis somehow getting destroyed.

Signing off in LJ style:

Music Bust a Bucket (Dan Reed Network)

Mood Tired and a little proud

For all the traffic it gets, it should go without saying that Gullible.info has its fair share of detractors (learn more). In my experience, the most vitriolic of these people are typically people who believed it at one point and then came to their senses. These folks write emails that have subject lines that read "fake facts....I'm disappointed!" and contain lines like "Good bye and good ridance." Their words are often hurtful, they usually suggest I do things to myself that are physically impossible, and they are just so smarmy and self-righteous. (And there's only room for one of us.)

But there are also people who don't like the site and have understood its concept from the beginning. These are the people who actually present valid arguments and challenge me to defend the site I created and the justification of its purpose. I stumbled across one such argument the other day, and I'd like to try and stick up for myself. I'm also trackbacking this link to the original blog. I'd love to hear the author's opinions on my thoughts.

Here's the starting point for this discussion, which can also be found in its original format here.

The Fascinating World of Incorrect Trivia

There's a site out there -- gullible.info -- that contains of the most bizarre and interesting collection of trivial factoids I've ever seen. Since its inception over a year ago, over 200 individual items have been posted, in every area of human (and non-human) endeavor. The amount of potential fodder for cocktail parties is astonishing, and puts the (monthly!) Atlantic List to shame. Check these, for example, from August 8.

• More Tony Awards have been given to musicals about trains than any other topic.
• Novelists, on average, invent nine words over the course of their careers that have never been used before. One in 300 of these words are ever used again.
• Six percent of the source code to Microsoft Windows XP is unchanged since Windows 1.0. 43 percent is unchanged since Windows 95.
• There are at least 4 pirate ships still actively pillaging transoceanic shipments.
• In seven out of the last 20 years, at least one major calendar manufacturer has printed the wrong date for Easter.

Remarkable. The guy who runs it must have a crack research staff.

Or maybe he's just making everything up.

"The site's creator, Kyle Stoneman, said that not everyone who visits the site realizes the giant grain of salt with which they are to take the information. "I would be inclined to say there's a good percentage of people who don't put any effort into questioning the source," said Stoneman, 19, a student at George Washington University. "I'm legitimately frightened by the fact that people will believe what they read on the site."

"Stoneman, a political communications major, said he started Gullible.info last fall as a social experiment, parodying people's willingness to accept bits of information without question. "It's parodying not only the whole genre of trivia, but also how quickly we believe things," he said. One illustration of that, he said, is that readers frequently write in with corrections. "Some people can get very defensive," he said.

Well, duh, if you disguise the fact that you're putting up fraudulent material, of course people are going to believe it. There's no disclaimer of any sort on the site, just some coy allusions to the fact that it might be a joke. I'd think the five people who have cited gullible.info in their theses (which is frightening, I'll admit), might justifiably feel they were defrauded. I know I would.

If this is an "experiment," then it's in bad faith.

Interesting points. And in the interest of full disclosure, I'd like to readily admit that these are questions that I've wrestled with myself, and I do sometimes mull over the ethics of the site. However, as you may know, the site is still online, and will be for some time, which means that ultimately I always reach the conclusion that the world is at least marginally better with Gullible.info than it would be without it. Why is that.

Let me flesh out the arguments I put out in the NYT piece about Gullible.info that he references. Essentially, my motivation behind Gullible.info is threefold.

1. It is a creative endeavor for me. When I was updating the site daily, it forced me to be creative and think about new and unique ways.

2. It is a learning experience for visitors. It demonstrates why we need to be teaching people how to asses the reliability of sources in an information-rich environment.

3. It is a social experiment. Not an experiment in any scientific or academic sense of the word, more like a kid mixing all the chemicals in his chemistry set together just to see what happens (side note: I did this as a child).

I think the second argument is most at play in this discussion, and it is what I will be using to address this person's points. I'll explain.

The Internet (among other technological developments) has provided our society with a great wealth of resources and information. The democratization of the information dissemination process has shifted our world from an information-scarce environment to an information-abundent environment. Consumers of information can now just as easily be suppliers as well. Okay, that's a lot of pseudo-academic nonsense. What does it mean in practical terms?

There is a lot of knowledge out there, and our access to that knowledge is unprecedentedly vast. But with increased access comes a new set of challenges. In an information-scarce environment, the challenge to overcome is locating information. Additionally, because of the high cost of distributing information, for the most part, what is found as a result of the laborious process is true.

The opposite problem exists in an information-abundent society. Finding information is not a challenge, but authenticating it is. Anyone can put anything on the Internet. This is a critical point, and it begs restating: Anyone can put anything on the Internet. I can put up stupid fake trivia, and a more sinister person can put fabricated information saying the Holocaust never happened.

Now, in our history, it is absolutely crucial that we teach students and anyone who will have to interact with information on the Internet, that assessing the value of an information source is exponentially more important than finding that information in the first place.

I have no disclaimers that say what I have is fake. That is a true assessment of Gullible.info. But neither do hate sites. Neither do many other agenda driven sites. But to argue that I disguise Gullible.info's true nature is absurd. I gave a full, and quite thorough, interview to one of the most widely read newspapers in the country about the nature of the site -- which is a far cry from disguising the fact that it's all "fraudulent" material.

You cannot blindly trust everything you read on the Internet. Do not do it. You will be lied to. If I'm the only person who has ever lied to you on the Internet, mercy, you are a lucky person. I have no real agenda with these lies, and if you believe them there aren't many negative ramifications. But there could be much worse problems that arise if one doesn't learn early that they need to verify their facts and/or their sources. Many people do contact me and ask me for my sources, an admirable thing to do. And I usually respond with a link to the New York Times article. It's a teachable moment.

But should someone who believed what I have to say feel defrauded? Yes. Of course they should feel defrauded. But they should feel defrauded by the education system, which hasn't given them proper tools to asses information, first, and defrauded by me second. Gullible.info isn't the disease, it's just the symptom.

I typically write back to people who have found out the awful truth about Gullible.info and have gotten mad at me. And while their initial letter usually starts off with an insult, the last one they send often ends something like this:

...the main reason got so mad is that I had told a lot of my buddies about some of the facts I found on this site, and now I have to embarrassingly own up to it or lead them astray...

But that's not the point. I understand your idea and I respect your motives, and I've gotten a bit of a laugh out of this whole thing. I just wish I hadn't fallen for it, and I know now not to believe everything from the internet.

If you want to reply, go ahead, and I may even reply back. I wish you good luck with your studies, as deceiving as they may be. I appologize for my overreaction.

Take this for what it is: A reasonable person, learning a reasonable lesson in a low-stakes situation.