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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Friday, September 10, 2004
   
   

Centuries of Meditations

I find that Thomas Traherne's remarkable work is available here:

See also A Decade of Centuries.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/10/04 11:38:43 PM
Categorized as Literary & Religious.


   
   

Hurricane Ivan

Alas, it is appropriate again to keep in our prayers everybody in the path of the new hurricane, especially emergency personnel who put their own safety, health, and lives on the line in the service of the community. If you will, please remember especially my relatives & friends in central Florida.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/10/04 10:19:11 PM
Categorized as Religious.


   
   

Re: More on CBSgate

And, show me ten. No: show me even five.

With an update from a computer scientist, courtesy Hugh Hewitt.

A reader writes:

I missed all the fun last night re the suspect "TANG" documents, so I must thank you for the news. I just can't fathom the rinky-dink depth of both the mendacity and stupidity of this attempt. Machiavelli must be spinning in his grave! What further evidence does one need of the almost complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Democratic Party?

I caught some alleged defense of the authenticity of the forged documents along the lines of, "Sure, there were typewriters in 1972-3 that could superscript ordinals!"

Okay. I'll bite. There must be, then, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of documents from that era with superscripted ordinals. And porportionally spaced type. With kerning.

Show me ten, and I'll believe it. Heck, show me even five, and I'll believe it.

P.S. I think the coolest reference yet to this fiasco — though I don't know whom to credit — is to put the blame squarely on Dan Rather. :-)

P.P.S. Hugh Hewitt has posted three e-mails from Robert "Corky" Cartwright, Professor of Computer Science, Rice University. I'm presenting only the text of the e-mails, not Hewitt's own remarks.

+ + + + +

Hi Hugh,

I am a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University who has followed the evolution of word processing technology over the past 30 years. A cursory glance at the "Killian documents" shows that they are forgeries, the product of a modern word processing system. Even the most powerful word processing systems available in the early 70's were not designed to produce propotionally spaced documents. Moreover, no mechanical typewriter, even with variable letter widths like the IBM Executive typewriter, could produce precise propotional spacing comparable to a modern word processor. Precise proportional type-setting is a very demanding computational problem. Since modern PC's are more powerful than supercomputers from the 70's, we take this form of computation for granted.

Let me take a moment to recount the state-of-the-art in word-processing in the 1970's. I used a state-of-the-art word processing system to write my undergraduate thesis at Harvard in the spring of 1971. I was one of a handful of Harvard students who were given access to a PDP-10 time-sharing system to conduct my thesis research. I used the same machine to prepare my thesis using a word processing program called "runoff". The output device for "runoff" on the Harvard PDP-10 was a flexowriter, a typewriter-like device driven by punched paper tape. I had to write in the superscripts and subscripts by hand because the flexowriter could not perform fractional line spacing much less proportional font spacing. The runoff program did not support any output devices with proportional spacing. Neither did any other word processing of that era to my knowledge. In the late 1970's, researchers at Bell Laboratories developed a new version of runoff, called troff, to support proportional typesetting on a photo-typesetter; troff is still available today on standard Unix distributions.

So in 1971, even the most powerful available computer systems were not equipped to produce documents like the Killian documents. In Fall 1971, I entered graduate school in Computer Science at Stanford. I soon gravitated to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which had the most powerful time-sharing system (a PDP-10) on campus. In either 1972 or 1973, Xerox gave the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory a prototype xerographic printer called a "Xerox Graphics Printer (XGP)". Two similar prototypes were given to the MIT Computer Science Department and the Carnegie-Mellon Computer Science Department. The programming staff at the Stanford AI Laboratory was thrilled with the gift because it was the first opportunity that computer science research community had to develop software to support printer quality type-setting. The three Computer Science Departments cooperated in developing the word processing programs to support the XGP. I wrote my first published research paper and my doctoral disseration using the XGP in Spring 1976. It would take another decade before comparable word processing systems were available to most computer science researchers on minicomputers running Unix. It would take nearly another decade before they were widely used on personal computers.

+ + + + +

Hi Markos,

You are tilting at windmills with the IBM Selectric Composer theory.

Go to [URL] which is a user's manual showing some sample typed text using this typewriter.

The typed text in the "Killian memos" is kerned (check out letter combinations like "fo" and "fe"), but the Composer text is clearly not. Kerning is a computationally complex task beyond the capacity of any mechanical typewriter — even one as expensive and elaborate as the IBM Selectric Composer. Moreover, the proportional spacing in the sample text is rather crude (look at the typesetting of "11" for example) which is the best that a mechanical typewriter — even one as complex as the Composer — can do.

Consult someone who understands the typography behind modern word processing. The "Killian memos" are word processed documents.

+ + + + +

Hi Hugh,

I have seen reports that Dan Rather has upped the ante on the authenticity of the Killian documents by insisting that they are authentic. How foolish!

In the testimony that I have seen by forensic experts questioning the authenticity of the documents, they have qualified their opinions by stating that no typewriter familiar to them could have produced the documents. Perhaps they are merely being cautious to safeguard their reputations. But I wonder if these typewriter experts appreciate the computational complexity of modern "print-quality" word processing. No mechanical typewriter could implement the complex sequence of rules governing the formatting of text in a word processor like Microsoft Word.

The Killian memos could not have been typed on an IBM Executive typewriter with "proportional spacing" or any other typewriter using similar technology. According to product descriptions on the web, the IBM Executive typewriter supports only four different character widths. In contrast, modern proportional spacing involves a far more sophisticated type-setting algorithm. Every type font in Word (or any other modern word processing system) has a custom width for every character. Moreover, the spacing between individual pairs of characters is modified by a process called "kerning" that compensates for the fact that letters have varying shapes that affect our perception of proper spacing. To achieve an aesthetically pleasing result, the type-setting process must take into account the relationship between adjacent character shapes. For example, the letter "T" followed by the letter "o" looks badly spaced if the "o" is not tucked under the overhang provided by the top of the "T". On the other hand, no such adjustment is appropriate if the letter "T" is followed by the letter "H". In the Killian documents, you can clearly see the effects of kerning in pairs of letters such as "fo" and "fe".

I am amazed that Dan Rather and his associates at CBS are blind to the overwhelming evidence that these documents are blatant forgeries.

+ + + + +

I used RUNOFF back in the early 1980s on PDP-11s.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/10/04 10:04:11 PM
Categorized as Media.


   
   

In the Big Lights With Susanna Cornett

Well, sort of.

Over at cut on the bias the other day:

Well, maybe not, but it's cool nonetheless! Following back a link from my referrer logs, I came upon this discussion of framing theory put together for a Management 360 class at Cal State Northridge. It's quite excellent, and if the concept interests you I recommend reading it all. It goes beyond media framing, showing its applicability in several other contexts. This I thought was good:
The media power is not so much about telling people what to think (framing), but rather to tell people what to think about (priming) (McCombs and Shaw 1972).
I don't agree with that totally, but substantially. For proof, think about the SwiftBoat Veterans issue. The big annoyance in the blogosphere was that the mainstream media wouldn't cover it. All manner of alternative media, including the blogosphere, were, but the bigtime media weren't. Then they did, and it's been repeatedly cited as an issue that's seriously hurt Kerry. The media covered it in a way that generally favored Kerry, but the citizenry didn't hear it the way the media told it. I think media framing (the "what to think" aspect) is more apparent and successful when it's something the average citizen has less accessibility to, less capability to find competing information....

Susanna very kindly wrote to me and pointed out that the page she quotes cites The Blog from the Core as a source. :-)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/10/04 09:49:12 PM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.


   
   

More on CBSgate

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCCLXXIII

I must confess, Faithful Reader, I was stunned by yesterday's developments. Yes, I, Mr. Cynic, couldn't believe that CBS would be so stupid as to either (1) get duped by forgeries and/or (2) try to dupe the public with forgeries. I must now confess that I'm surprised that mainstream media is starting to cover the story as a story about forged documents.

From the front page of today's Washington Post:

Documents unearthed by CBS News that raise doubts about whether President Bush fulfilled his obligations to the Texas Air National Guard include several features suggesting that they were generated by a computer or word processor rather than a Vietnam War-era typewriter, experts said yesterday.
Experts consulted by a range of news organizations pointed out typographical and formatting questions about four documents as they considered the possibility that they were forged. The widow of the National Guard officer whose signature is on the bottom of the documents also disputed their authenticity....

And from an Associated "Boo" Press story, yesterday:

The authenticity of newly unearthed memos stating that George W. Bush failed to meet standards of the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War was questioned Thursday by the son of the late officer who reportedly wrote the memos.
"I am upset because I think it is a mixture of truth and fiction here," said Gary Killian, son of Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who died in 1984.
Another officer who served with Killian and a document expert also said Thursday the documents appear to be forgeries....

Power Line — also taken by surprise that mainstream media is covering the forged-documents angle, not just the phony Bush-lied angle — notes the denouement:

.... Tomorrow morning, dinosaur media across the country will be headlining the 60 Minutes "scoop" as a blow to the Bush campaign. Before their newspapers are even printed, not only is the story obsolete, but CBS is in full retreat. As Stephen Hayes reported earlier today, Power Line "led the charge" against the 60 Minutes hoax today. But the credit really goes to the incredible power of the internet. We knew nothing; all of our information came from our readers. Many thousands of smart, well-informed people who only a few years ago would have had no recourse but perhaps to write a letter to their local newspaper, now can communicate and share their expertise in real time, through sites like this one. The power of the medium is incredible, as we've seen over the last fourteen hours....

Frankly, I think that MM is starting to cover this as a forged-documents story because they realize how very damaging this attempted fraud on the American public could be to both the Kerry campaign and to themselves. (Pardon the redundancy.) So, they want to get it out in the open and out of the way as soon as they can. My friend Paul writes:

Well, they might have gotten away with it 30-40 years ago, but that stuff doesn't work anymore. They're trying to use the same old playbook they've always used to manipulate public opinion. (I believe that would fall under "Core's Law of Old Media", would it not?)

Why, yes, Paul, I think it would. :-)

And Margaret writes: "George Soros's cash is working overtime!"

P.S. Two good articles today: CBS's Big Blunder? and What the Bush Guard Papers Really Say.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/10/04 07:50:44 AM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & Media.


   

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