Re: question of nurture as well as nature

[Kurt Cagle <cagle@olywa.net>]

Paul,

 

Last year I talked with a company up the peninsula here in Washington that had created an interesting mechanism for searching databases by essentially inverting structure trees and looking for relationships building from that, applications that they had developed with it was a very interesting mechanism for observing word relationships in data articles, often highlighting associations that weren't at all immediately obvious. The application that they showed me was fascinating because it basically made it possible to scan through a large amount of textual data such as International news stories and pull together from this terrorist associations that hadn't been evident from the articles themselves.

 

I would, however, also bring in my usual note of caution on this, as obscene as it was. It is tempting, after such an invasive attack, to become extremely focused upon the security aspects of a technology without realizing that most systems that are designed for security become restrictive for unintented audiences. Assume, as an example, that someone like Bin Laden orchestrated this (my personal guess, but just that ... a guess). Would profiles about potential terrorist suspects have prevented this? My guess is probably not - there are already far more sophisticated systems in place that are proprietary, and you can see how successful they were. On the other hand, will it suddenly make it far easier to use such a tool to incriminate innocent Palestinians, Afghanis, Iraqus, Iranians, or Syrians (or Americans of that descent)? You betcha.

 

-- Kurt

----- Original Message -----

From: Paul Stephen Prueitt

To: Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga ; Humanmarkup-Comment

Cc: Intrusion Group Dialog

Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 1:07 PM

Subject: question of nurture as well as nature

Ranjeeth

 

It is difficult to know how to say things - because the cause of terrorism, like to cause of most crime, is a question of nurture as well as nature.

 

I am working on new kinds of mapping techniques to reveal the boundaries of organizations and to thus provide tools where by the behavior of groups and individuals can become more well understood - and even a predictive element develop.

 

I  wonder if the notion of human mark-up might lead into some degree of choreographing of deviant behavior.   I know that there is work on this, but not open work that involves academics.  Within a wider participation in developing a foundation for future work, there will be little progress (In My Opinion).

 

I can share the primary methodology that I am inventing.  It is based on a shallow link analysis followed by a scatter gather (used in text mining) and then a stratified categorization processes that reflects work done in the Soviet Union (applied semiotics).  Pair wise metrics on relationship are convolved into a global topology not unlike genetic algorithms or a reinforcement learning neural network. 

 

The specifics of choreographing deviant behavior is beginning to appear in the human markup concepts.  These concepts are not well organized for view by someone from the outside of the history that you have, for example.  I understand that the process is formative and that not all problems are solved.  Moreover, the primary driver of this work in interactive games and entertainment.

 

I will share two papers that I have published about gestures and state transitions - and perhaps some part of the group can develop a means to bring into the discussion those whom can fund the research and rapid development of a new generation of informational transparency to world wide communication in the internet.

 

http://www.bcngroup.org/admin/CIL/guide/events.htm

http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/forms.htm

 

Selective attention with rapid informational transparency is what is required, if the democracies are to keep to the principles of freedom in the face of this type of dedicated terrorism. 

 

Much of the selective attention can be automated and the results guarded so that privacy issues are accommodated. 

 

One should note that the types of information technologies that align to social and individual behavior has many very positive advantages, when used in training, learning, emotion or medical diagnostics... etc.