Human-Nets-Request%rutgers@brl-bmd.UUCP (07/24/83)
HUMAN-NETS Digest Saturday, 23 Jul 1983 Volume 6 : Issue 36
Today's Topics:
Computers and the Law - Property Rights to Stored Data,
Computers and People - Electronic Doctoring &
Personal Information Systems (3 msgs)
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Date: 21 July 1983 23:10 edt
From: Dehn.DEHN at MIT-MULTICS
Subject: computer files as property
I wonder how far the Massachusetts law goes... Imagine people, in
their wills, leaving subdirectories to their grandchildren!
-jwd3
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Date: 22 Jul 1983 0217-PDT
From: Henry W. Miller <Miller at SRI-NIC>
Subject: Computerized Medicine
Whoa, let's give some more credit where credit is due: my
girlfriend is nurse at a local hospital, in the critical care nursery.
Some of the horror stories she tells!!! Doctors really muffing it,
misdiagnoising, etc. Sometimes she comes home in tears.
She, and the other old hands can look at a baby and tell you
what is wrong. Some doctors can't. In this respect, experience wins
out. (She figures she has taken care of 50,000 babies in the past 11
years...) Nurses are in touch with their patients much more than
doctors are, and seem to care more. (On the otherhand, remind me to
tell you about the time Battleship Bertha drew blood from me...)
But, computerized diagnosis is valuable. Consider SUMEX for
example. You can draw upon the past experiences of thousands of
M.D.'s
On the third hand, remember how Dr. McCoy hated machines?
(Come to think of it, so did Samuel T. Cogley, Atty. at Law...)
-HWM
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Date: 23 Jul 1983 1014-EDT
From: Larry Seiler <Seiler@MIT-XX>
Subject: Personal information systems - who can't afford them?
If only (say) half the population were able to afford personal
information systems, that would cause serious social problems.
However, it doesn't have to be that way. Telephones, for example, are
priced artificially low in terms of cost to have one, the difference
being made up in higher charges on calls. Installation charges are
also (in many cases) artificially low. So by making a lot of phone
calls, I am subsidizing people who would not be able to own phones if
charges were based directly on costs. And that is a good thing. Or
to take another example, consider video games. The hardware units are
being sold for pennies above the manufacturing costs (or maybe even
below the manufacturing costs). All the profit comes from users fees,
ie game cartridges.
So anyone can offord to own a video game, although richer people will
be able to afford to use them more. Hopefully, the same will apply to
personal information systems.
Larry
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Date: 22 July 1983 01:38 EDT
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM @ MIT-MC>
Subject: Fear & loathing ... - too-easy access, lazy?
[Gee, here comes the perpetual optimist regarding info systems, Mr.
Robert Maas, again...] [long msg, 2-line capsule summary at end]
Date: 18 Jul 83 14:41:56 EDT
From: Ron <FISCHER@RUTGERS.ARPA>
I am trying to consider the consequences of widespread use of
personal information systems. Imagine a large segment of the
world population owning the rough equivalent of Alan Kaye's (sp?)
Dynabook,
Actually I'd want the newer stuff, with Hypertext (Xanadu) innards and
windows with mouse or trackball interface. If I mouse <verb> a word of
something I'm reading, a menu appears, including the definition(s) of
that word and where it was used recently and where it in that context
came from if not original in the current text.
Imagine them interconnected by the infamous "Worldnet" concept so
often lauded here.
My basic concern was: with such ready access to information would
our desire to ask questions be stifled? Knowing that an answer is
only a keypress away might keep one from making that movement, the
same way that having reference texts on a shelf lulls one into a
false sense of "defacto understanding."
Perhaps idle searching or unneeded info will be stifled, but reference
to the info in the course of reading and answering network mail,
especially discussion groups such as HUMAN-NETS or ARMS-DISCUSSION
etc., will increase and increase the effectiveness of
communication/discussion. For example, for a long time I had a
dictionary and encyclopedias in the home, but hardly ever consulted
them because they weren't available when I was writing a letter in
another room or doing homework in another room or chatting with
somebody in another city. Now that I do most of my discussion via
electronic mail at this terminal, right next to my dictionary and
thesaurus, I consult those reference books often in the course of
discussions. Electronic mail allows me to stop in the midst of typing
or reading for perhaps ten minutes while I look something up, and then
get back to the typing or reading without disturbing the other person.
This is much nicer than live talking where saying "please excuse me
while I look up that word you just used" would totally kill the
conversation. Secondly the references are accessible all the time, so
I get in the habit of using them. If my Dynabook were around
everywhere I went instead of just at home, and if it had not just a
dictionary and thesaurus but the full Library of World <Congress;
expanded> accessible online, I'd be able to look up facts and data,
check to see whether some new info is actually accessible in the main
library and if not then file it myself in my private library
(currently I have to file it in all cases, because I have no way to
first check the main library; so my personal files get constipated
with duplicated info).
In summary, in my opinion, Dynabook/Hypertext/WorldNet will NOT suffer
from the laziness you suggest for people actively involved in network
discussion groups. As for people who are just sitting around
unproductively drinking beer and playing electronic games all day,
uninterested in trying to improve the world or their own mind, I have
no idea what difference if any will be effected by D/H/WN.
At another end of the spectrum: might academia fall into the trap
of rearguing each other's theses indefinately, with a significant
percentage no longer doing original or empirical work? Redundancy
is a healthy thing in research. By asking the same question again
new viewpoints may be discovered. By challenging existing ideas,
directly or indirectly, we come upon new truths.
I had trouble understanding this the first time, you seemed to
contradict yourself, but finally I think I got it, so I'll try to
paraphrase it before answering. <<Instead of redoing the same
experiment, without being aware of the original, and thus accidently
succeeding where the original experimentor failed; people will look up
the original, see it failed, and not even bother to repeat it
themselves.>> Well, the first effect will be that indeed. Instead of
duplicating old experiments, people will do new ones. I think this is
good. Repeating an old experiment has only a slim chance of giving a
different result, if the original experiment was competant and well
documented and the new one is done exactly like the original. New
experiments on the other hand have a high change of turning up new
results. Thus it's in general better to do a new experiment than to
redo an old one. Thus it's better to be able to ask "has this been
tried before, if so give me the report so I can study it" before
actually doing an experiment. -- Of course done to extreme we'll
blindly believe a 500-year-old experiment that was a total fraud. When
any experiment is really important it should be repeated by
independent means to make sure neither fraud nor personal bias nor
random undocumented features of the experiment were causing the
experiment to give misleading results. For example there was a
Consumer's United experiment a few years ago showing that three brands
of breakfast cereal were sufficient (with just water) for keeping rats
alive. That experiment ought to be verified by somebody else. -- But
even in these cases I think it's better for the new experimentor to
read the original experimental conditions (but not the results;
hypertext will help immensely here) and exactly duplicate the
experiment AS DOCUMENTED, and report the new results; rather than to
be unaware of the original and do something sort of like it for the
fifth or tenth time (four or nine others similarily were unaware of
the original experiment), and report it in some obscure journal that
nobody else reads or in some popular magazine that everybody reads. In
short I really thought we ought to do experiments in total information
rather than in total ignorance, and I think we're intelligent and wise
enough to repeat experiments where useful and avoid unnecessary
duplication. Also I think it's beneficial to have all the results of
similar or identical experiments accessible together for comparison
and analysis. That way we don't see one result by accident and be
unaware of the others that refute it, and thus get a misleading idea
of how such experiments have turned out.
Further: might we become conceptually "xenophobic?" I.e. afraid
of things that our little boxes could not explain?
If we have electronic mail and private filing systems, as well as info
referral systems, then when we ask a question our "little box" can't
answer our next step is to ask an "expert". That expert will either
explain how our question is ill-formed (why did IBM buy Apple?; you
dummy, it didn't) or unknown (will the Universe collapse or go on
expanding forever; nobody knows yet, it depends on how much "missing
mass" there is between the galaxies, this is the most crucial question
in cosmology currently) or disputed (does Vitamin C prevent the common
cold; well, there's evidence pro and con, here are some of the results
...) or known (are there currently active volcanos anywhere except on
Earth; yes, images of Jupiter's moon Io taken by Voyager 1 spacecraft
showed many continuously active volcanos on Io). -- Once the person
can find out the status of the question, the person can decide whether
to do original research to resolve the question or give money to a
fund to allow somebody more expert to resolve it (if the question is
on the verge of possibility) or drop it or write science fiction
stories (if the question is far beyond current knowledge) or learn
something new and apply it (if known) etc. Of course some people will
be lazy and never do original research, but I'm optimistic about
worldwide info systems increasing rather than decreasing the amount of
productive (non-duplicative; well-documented and accessible) original
research.
I worry that easy access to incomplete systems of information may
cause a television-like stupor to descend upon us, ultimately
decreasing our involvment and interaction with knowledge.
Mostly the people with the stupor are watching fiction, not
educational, TV. If everyone watched general-science programs like
Nova (too bad it's the only one on), and more technical programs like
Life On Earth, Project Universe, Oceanus, Time/Life specials, they
wouldn't be in a stupor, especially if questions that arise while
watching could be "looked up" in the WorldNet encyclopedia easily and
still-unresolved questions could be sent to an expert to answer within
48 hours. (I wonder how many people are "turned off" because there's a
crucial question that arises during TV program and there's nobody
around to ask and writing a letter to the writer in care of the TV
network hardly ever gets a good reply in a reasonable time.)
In summary, I see almost all good from WorldNet, if done properly with
full electronic mail etc.
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Date: 22 July 1983 13:00 EDT
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM @ MIT-MC>
Subject: Fear and loathing in Iowa
Regarding worldnet and TV giving Iowans the fear of street mugging
that occurred in Chicago. With WorldNet it'd be easy for the user to
ask "Yeah, that's in Chicago, but what about here in Iowa", get a
negative answer, and sleep peacefully tonite. They might even call up
a map showing density of muggings, and see there isn't mugging
anywhere nearby at all, only in the big cities. With TV, you get the
fear report but you can't easily ask "yeah, but what about here in
Iowa", so all you have is the vague fear "if it can happen in Chicago,
maybe it's here too" with no way to refute that fear.
Of course it will take some training before most people inquire about
what they read, asking the right questions, but if it's trivial to ask
questions and get answers then more and more will do it until nearly
everyone does it. When 50% are inquiring, then the 50% who aren't will
express their fears to random others and half the time they'll get a
reply "why don't you ask the computer?" followed by a demo of how to
do it, and those lagging 50% will start converting too.
When info retrieval is truly easy and cheap, all it'll take is one
expert user as a seed to start exponential growth in user population.
When 99% have converted to inquiring minds, inquiring themselves
instead of merely watching TV or reading National Enquirer (I couldn't
resist that poke, after plagarizing their slogan), the 1% who still
live in fear can easily find friends or acquaintenances to do the
inquiries for them and alleviate their unwarranted fears.
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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