Archimedes’ Hot Tub

I tend to tune out at conference Q&A time, but there was a terrific little give-and-take about IBM’s Watson today at EmTech MIT, hosted by MIT Technology Review.

The session had been really quite good, a forthright discussion between Jason Pontin, TR’s editor-in-chief and publisher, and Mike Rhodin, who runs IBM’s Watson group. Then the audience got to ask a few questions. One of the people who spoke turned out to be Michael Bueche, who works in USAA’s innovation group. USAA, a financial services company for military personnel and their families, announced in July it would pilot Watson Engagement Advisor to help soldiers transitioning to civilian life.

Bueche said there had been some challenges in adopting Watson. One issue is that when you ask Watson a question, “You can’t necessarily clarify the question further,” Bueche said. “Watson tends to start from scratch every question,” he said. Bueche said that USAA also has had to work to figure out how to balance privacy issues around personal data. “When they ask questions you need to know things about the person to make the recommendation. Putting that type of information into Watson you get into issues of privacy and things like that.”Bueche also said that curating data to make it useful for Watson took “a lot of time,” and that Watson was designed to work with larger amounts of data than USAA was using for the pilot. He also recommended companies plan on extensive training time to get Watson up and running.

Rhodin took Bueche’s comments in stride, and said that IBM was working on them. He said IBM was working to change redefine the system so that the corpus, the data Watson uses to answer questions, is generally available information, and personal information “comes in as part of the question, not the corpus.”

For the issue of clarifying questions, Rhodin said that it is broader than just programming Watson to allow for follow-up questions. “We’re trying to teach Watson when to not answer the question,” Rhodin said. He said that some questions were ambiguous, which means Watson cannot give a correct answer to them. “We are starting down that journey,” Rhodin said, noting that in May, IBM bought a company called Cognea, which had used artificial intelligence techniques to help computers engage in dialogue with people. IBM is working to integrate Cognea with Watson.
Rhodin also acknowledged that Watson is designed to work with very large amounts of data.

Rhodin also said that IBM was also finding that corporate customers don’t necessarily come with questions. “Many times people hand us problems. Those have to be broken in to many questions,” he said. He mentioned that IBM was working with the Cleveland Clinic to develop a reasoning engine.

Rhodin said from the stage he looked forward to seeing Mr. Bueche at USAA on Thursday, before moving on to the next question.

This kind of open discussion about an ongoing technology project doesn’t happen often at conferences; Rhodin handled it well enough that I wondered if the discussion had been staged. I’d love to be at that meeting this Thursday.

There’s a meme going around Facebook on the 10 books that have influenced a person. Influence is a mushy word. There are books I liked immensely, the Narnia stories, Watership Down, War and Peace. But have they influenced me?
I chose  books that caused me to take specific actions.
The Bible (especially Genesis and Exodus, Proverbs and Matthew), which challenges me to strive to be better than I am, especially towards others.
Johnny Got his Gun (Dalton Trumbo), which caused me to decide I did not want to go into the military.
The Republic (Plato), for the story of the cave, where I too often trap myself.
The Sound and the Fury (wm. Faulkner), because it convinced me to pursue non-fiction writing instead of fiction.
On Writing Well (Wm. Zinsser), which continues to help me deal with the day-in, day-out process of being a non-fiction writer.
House (Tracy Kidder). I figured if he could make this mundane story compelling reading, I could tell great stories about anything. Maybe some day….
The Last Lion (William Manchester), because it’s powerful to read about people who do great things despite their frailties.
North of Boston (Robert Frost), which helped me find the joy and truth in poetry.
Oranges (John McPhee), for inspiring me to rethink how I approached journalism.
Why Things Bite Back (Edward Tenner), which caused me to stop smugly accepting that technological progress is always a good thing.

Since I posted my list, I’ve seen other people’s lists and said “oh yeah, that book!” Or, ‘that makes me think of this book…’ Those have included Guns, Germs and Steel, Tom Sawyer, Democracy in America, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Peloponnesian Wars, Jim Fixx’s Book of Running, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Lippmann’s Public Opinion, The Jungle, Babbitt, The Wealth of Nations, King Lear, Great Expectations, Don Quixote, Sons and Lovers. Complexity, Major Barbara, Darwin’s Century.

Ah, the making of lists has no end.
I hadn’t realized the dearth of female authors on this list until a friend commented on it. So my ten favorite books by female authors, all of which I loved. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book I talk about frequently and could have made my most influential list:
Pride and Prejudice (Austen), The Age of Innocence (Wharton), My Antonia (Cather), A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan), The Harry Potter series, To Kill a Mockingbird (lee), Song of Solomon (Morrison),  The History of the Standard Oil Company (Tarbell), Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Didion), American Salvage (Bonnie Jo Campbell).
I also made a list of the 10 books I haven’t read that have influenced me, through reviews or zeitgeist…books like Tipping Point, To the Finland Station, Being and Nothingness, the preface to Man and Superman, Calvin’s Institutes, Nichomachean Ethics, Thus Spake Zarathrustra, Godel Escher Bach, Ulysses, Brave New World.

Here’s a post about the 20 most cited books on Facebook so far.

Timing on these books is interesting: college is the dominant influence, followed by my Nieman year at Harvard, almost 30 years later. A few were left over from adolescence, more from the year I had a Templeton-Cambridge fellowship. My early career, especially the week I spent at the Poynter Institute, also saw me reading things that had a big influence.

I’ve been thinking about forgiveness a lot recently. I interviewed Amy-Jill Levine, a New Testament scholar at Vanderbilt (Jesus, the consummate storyteller), and was so interested in what she’s learned teaching the Bible at a maximum security prison that I went to see her when I was in Nashville this past week. She told me some stories I’m not sure what to do with, stories of men who’ve committed heinous crimes nonetheless experiencing forgiveness, or becoming peacemakers in prison. How would I treat these people? How would society?
There’s a short story by David Brin where criminals cannot see the world around them, thanks to a kind of Google glass. Everyone wears them; criminals see other people as blurs, and can know nothing about them. Meanwhile, the rest of the society can look at them through their glasses and know that they are criminals, and shun them. But this futuristic Scarlet Letter is removed when their punishment ends, wiped from their records.

We don’t really do that in our society. Criminals often receive in effect two sentences; they serve their time, and then they continue to be punished, even treated as pariahs. They are often unable to vote, it’s very hard for people with a criminal record to get a job, and that’s not even the people who commit the kinds of crimes that get them put on lists, with notices sent to the neighborhood.
Journalists do something similar with people who aren’t criminals. In a way, it’s our job to ask people about the worst moments in their lives, repeatedly. A scandal, a public mistake, these become the moment that defines a person. I once heard a PR person warn an executive about the press and its tendency to ask “Do you still beat your wife?” questions. These have no good answer, even if you say you’ve never beaten your wife. We journalists are like secular Puritans. It isn’t true that we are only our self at our worst. But perhaps we need constant reminding to be better.
Friday night at the Excellence in Journalism conference I went to see A Fragile Trust, the documentary about Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who was a serial fabricator and plagiarizer.