Distributed Mind

NOLA.com has a rather detailed report about some of the outrageous and incredible - too incredble, in many cases - incidents of violence that were reported to have occured at the Superdome and the Convention Center in New Orleans.

I have been interested in this story since the beginning, or at least pretty close to it. One reason I find the apparent exaggerations interesting is because I am very much concerned about how we can get accurate information. This is unfortunately another case where accurate information was hard to get - or maybe is now.

Basically, this is the situation as it stands: Despite the original reports of murder and rape (and the combination of the two) being common in both locations, there is no empirical evidence now, according to official sources as reported in this case by Times-Picayune writers, of any murders beyond possibly one. The article addresses the problem of establishing the prevalence of rape, but as for the murders, at least in the assesment of these authors, there is no support for several of the most widely repeated stories. There is also apparently disagreement between some of the actors in the events as to what happened, which may be in part due to another effect, which is that some of those same actors, notably Mayor Nagin and police chief Compass, seem to have said different things at different times. I will not at the moment speculate as to the source of those inconsistencies, though it is not hard to imagine reasons, some less generous than others. We also know that the state of empirical evidence, as reported by the authors, conflicts with quotes reported by journalists of evacuees and others (the article gives several examples, so I will skip citing examples here). Whether the innacuracy is due to the journalists or their subjects becomes the question; I would be surprised if it was due entirely to the journalists, but that is merely a guess, not a fact. Of course, in this case we are relying on journalists to report on mistakes made by journalists - which is not to throw all journalists together, but as an aggregate media television, newspaper, and Internet news does not have some sort of consistent and authoratative take on the whole matter, so if we were not inclined to accept the new reports as more readily substantiated, we would not have any reason to trust one journalist over another (though we might have reason to be more inclined to accept more recent reporting by a journalist than older reporting by the same journalist, at least in a case such as this).

Some questions this raises for me:

• So how do we get accurate information? Good question. If we were to go just on this particular example, I would hold little hope we could ever get good information.
• If the first media perspective on events (that a lot of unspeakably bad things were happening) is to be believed false, how do we know this new one (that such events did not happen or were exaggerated qualitatively and quantitatively) is any better? In this case we are fortunate to apparently have empirical evidence. But support for a particular viewpoint, that those unspeakably bad things were rare or maybe even did not occur, might cause us to ignore evidence to the contrary. It is easiest, of course, to just look for evidence that supports whatever hypothesis we believe, or even, for that matter, it is easy to look for information to contradict the hypothesis we believe. The hard part is developing a more accurate hypothesis that fits the actual data.
• Why was the media so keen to report what seemed to be unlikely stories? And worse, why were so many people keen to believe them? Or, rather, what does the fact that many people were willing to believe them tell us about ourselves as a society? Or, even, why did some of us doubt the stories in the first place? (For the record, I was skeptical - but afraid I would turn out to be wrong. Apparently I was not wrong, and perhaps I should have been even more radical in my skepticism.)
• How often does this sort of exaggeration affect the news we see? What about more careful investigating? The latter is, my impression is, a fairly well understood problem, but I do not know whether I should trust my impressions. A research problem for another night.

All of this time, I have been talking about the storied of violence. But what about the stories of people dying of dehydration, etc.? Again, a low number. Not many more than 14 for the two sites put together. The Convention Center had 4. How many people died because of slow action on the part of the government for evacuating people from these places? We don't know the exact number, but we may have just found an upper limit. We would do well to examine more the effects elsehwere in the city and the effectiveness of rescues from flooded areas. (In the interest of full disclosure, I believed there should be more, say maybe tens of people, to have died from natural causes. My ideological bias should be clear.)

(I saw the NOLA.com article thanks to a post on a blog titled "Adam Smith Lives!" by a Sandra Peart. She has links to more stuff on this, saving me the work of looking for it, or in this case, reading it. What a scary title! I must add.)

Remember Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen who was deported from the US to Syria while on a layover on the way back to Canda and who was allegedly tortured for several months afterward? Jeanne of Body and Soul pointed to an article printed in the Globe and Mail with some amazing quotes by our new ambassador to Canda, DAvid WIlkins.

First, on whether there are any regrets:

Mr. Wilkins, who took up his post in Ottawa about two months ago, seemed puzzled when asked whether he or his government had any regrets about the affair.

"You talking about regrets by the United States?" he said.

"The United States made that decision (to deport Mr. Arar) based on the facts it had, in the best interests of the people of the United States, and we stand behind it."

The ambassador went on to describe the action as an example of the hard-nosed approach that has governed U.S. anti-terrorist policy since the 9-11 attacks four years ago.

"The thing is that tough decisions have to be made every day now in this new environment we're in," he said.

"When you make decisions at the border or inside your country you don't get second chances. You've got to be right all the time in terror, because if you make the wrong choice an act of terrorism occurs."

Remember, regardless of how our officials try to position these events, we are talking about a Canadian (who admittedly was a dual citizen) suspected of somehow being related to terrorism being "deported" (while on a layover!) not to Canada but to Syria where certainly he would be treated harshly and possibly tortured. And they think that this is alright, and would do it again in a second. We know that inocent-until-proven-guily is not believed to apply to foreigners by our federal government, but if ever we doubted how far that could take us, this gives us a hint.

Also from the article:

David Wilkins is also warning that other Canadians with dual citizenship could face a similar fate if they fall under suspicion.

"The United States is committed in its war against terror," Mr. Wilkins said.

"We're committed to making sure that our borders are secure and our country is safe. Will there be other deportations in the future? I'd be surprised if there's not."

Why would anyone want to come to this country, ever? I wouldn't. Of course, in this whol incident, Canada has hardly proven itself a bastion of civil liberties. And I know the Europeans aren't any better. It's almost enough to make me an anarchistic.

Earlier today, in the space of 5 minutes, I experienced three times windows opening immediately over the mouse cursor as I was about to press the button. Once, I clicked on the wrong window, twice I came very close. This is a very danger problem. I have lost data before because of this same problem. This is in fact similar to the problem of new windows stealing keyboard focus. And that frequently results in passwords being entered in windows they should not be entered in.

I am not sure what the solution preferred by usability experts is, if there is one. The obvious approach would be to open new windows in the background, but usually users want new windows in front. Perhaps what is needed is some guess as to whether a window is being used (e.g. key press or mouse click within the last so many milliseconds); if it is, the system will open the new window behind it if it would block the old window. Also, it could be useful for programs who do not usually need to be on top to open in the background, though which is preferred can be hard to determine for some types of programs (e.g. IM clients).

Well, we have managed to be completely silent on all the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina. I can't speak for Justin, but for my part, that was because: (1) I didn't really have much that I felt confident enough in saying, both because I did not feel I had enough information and because I did not have any insights I considered to be worth sharing at the moment and (2) other people have managed to say what was worth saying sooner and better elsewhere. But, the time has come to share some points I think are somewhat, though of varying degrees, important.

Just a few passing thoughts, of varying importance:

• I still don't trust the television news media (well, I keep a decent level of skepticism when reading the newspaper, too, but not nearly to the same extent). And there are several good reasons for that. First, while people were happy they were questioning the government, it was frequently not a useful questioning. One of my favorite contradictions from the first week after the hurricane was the frequent repetition of Mayor Nagin's quote about too many press conferences followed inevitably by yet another interview with Michael Brown. Second, there was much sensationalistic manipulation, as usual, as evinced by the incessant repetition of three-day old rescue footage, for example. Jack Shafer of Slate wrote a nice critique of the media's handling of events in the midst of the crisis that says most of what I would want to say on the topic (though he is a little too harsh in spots; for example, CNN did use maps, though perhaps not as much as they should have). There are actually other things I can think of, such as the failure to set context: (was this response really atypical, or is it always this bad?), failure to even attempt to reconcile conflicting accounts of the levels of violence, possible perpetuation of racist stereotypes, and so on, but I will leave it at that for now.
• Hurricane Katrina could be, for better and for worse, liberals' September 11th. It should be - and was - a reminder of the problems of poverty and government's neglect of it (at the local or federal level), a reminder of the necessity of good government policy and planning (especially in this case at the local level, but again, not confined to it), and a vindication of some of their criticisms of the Bush administration, which can and will be used to bring some balance to the current federal approach to terrorism and emergency planning. The reverse is that the left may lose persepctive and use this disaster merely to sink Bush rather than consider some other critical lessons to be learned or to consider the greater context. More on the lessons to be learned below. And the "greater context" is that natural disasters, like terrorism, are not the only killers in this world and that Katrina's death toll is dwarfed by the number of deaths every year to, for example, traffic accidents, or disease, and so on - and that is not even to consider the international level. If the left can approach the issues this has raised in a rational, balanced, and fair manner (even if they feel that's not what they would get in the same position) [, this could be a pivotal, useful moment]. I am too cynical to believe that they will, however.
• Finally, and most importantly, Katrina has reminded us that we must, absolutely must, plan ahead for disasters, whether natural, epidemiological, military, or, yes, even terroristic, though not all are of the same importance. I like to think in terms of "expected impact": the "expected impact" of a disaster is the probability of the event multiplied by the damage that would be caused by that event. Obviously, one could use differenct metrics to measure the impact, such as death toll, economic cost, or some more refined formula. This disaster demonstrated clearly what improper focus on one type of disaster can do, but it also demonstrated the need for thorough local planning. Believe me, the federal government does not care as much about your city as you do. Nor will they usually be able to appreciate the complexities of your city's situation, though in the rare case they do, listen to them.

Alright, that's all I've got.