This is the first in a new series of VERY short posts (Bit sized not bi/yte sized, and mostly extracted from my Twitter feeds!) that are fun and informative:
Here is a lovely little example of end-to-end channel testing. Apparently there are some naughty apps on your smartphone that will monitor your speech and use it for setting up your web search meta data (that's SO bad from a digital ethics perspective.)
If you talk about pet lizards and pink VWs with your friend Marge, and then suddenly start seeing both VW and reptile store ads in your news feeds: you're not paranoid (Well - you could ALSO be paranoid, but that is beside the point being made here).
Your smartphone apps might well be parsing your speech (which is BAD). Honestly: this is a SERIOUS digital ethics issue and shows just how far we have already fallen.
The idea here is simple, statistical, and straight from the Mathematical Theory of Communication. The more unlikely a message is overall (to occur), coupled with the more unlikely it is that it matches a previously produced message from a known, prior source: the less likely it is a random occurrence.
This is very powerful, and extremely useful.
If you make up a nonsense phrase like "Unicorn phantabula scudders" in a private message, and it comes back to you several days later via the internet/Web: this is definitely NOT random. Why, because BOTH the syntax and the semantic content (meaning) are very unlikely given the set of known codes, alphabets, and 'dictionaries' of English (even 'Phantabula scudders' is very unlikely).
This is also heuristically and intuitively sensible. Can you imagine two people PURELY ACCIDENTALLY coming up with the exact same line from Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky'? (Not if you are not stupid.)
The more complex - and the more 'nonsensy' - your phrase, the more sure you can be it is not a random occurrence for it to come back to you.
Of course, people are unlikely to parse and use a nonsense phrase (because it is less likely to be useful without any conventional discernable meaning). (Algorithms will probably throw it out for the same reasons, but might get 'fooled'). However, this procedure also works for weird English (or natural language) sentences and assertions.
It particularly works for phrases that encode meaning that constitutes what science fiction theorist Darko Suvin would have called a 'novum' (Suvin's own neologism). A novum is a science fiction ideation or invention. A good example is Ursula K LeGuin's "ansible", which was a device in her novel "Rocannon's World" for sending messages through time and space 'magically'.
Importantly, however, the ansible is a less certain example. Why? Because many science fiction authors are interested in the trope of sending messages (or objects) through time, and in time travel, astral projection, and other science fiction and fantasy themes like these. Thus although the name 'ansible' is very unlikely even in the science fiction genre and corpus, ansible-like devices and meaning are quite common. The syntax is very unlikely, but the semantic content is fairly likely.
In lieu of a reference list, here is a copy of the Bibliography from my 2009-10 Master of Philosophy thesis Informationist Science Fiction Theory and Informationist Science Fiction.
B i b l i o g r a p h y
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