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Remote Tech, Computer Takeover, and some Tech Tips - Ep 156
247 Plays4 years ago
Paul and Chris start the show talking about tech challenges when in remote areas. How do you get internet? What about charging your devices? In segment two we review the previous episode regarding convolutional neural networks and using programs like that to identify artifacts. Segment three has some great tech tips and some talk about the new iPad Pro 12.9 M1.
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
Episode Introduction and Main Topics
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 156. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we discuss remote tech challenges, computers taking our jobs, and we finish with some tech tips. Let's get to it.
00:00:34
Speaker
All right. Welcome to the show, everybody.
Paul's Career Transition
00:00:36
Speaker
Paul, how's it going? It is. It's going. We are recording right now on June 3rd. And that means that I have less than a month left before I leave the job I've had for 21 years. And that means that I'm doing all sorts of cleanup and fixes and brain dumps to everybody. We hired my replacement and I have to
00:00:57
Speaker
meet him face to face and start training him in and I'm documenting and then on top of everything, I've mentioned many times that I spent part of my time in New York City and part of my time up an hour north in the country in Brewster. For various personal reasons, I've been going back and forth and that takes a lot of extra time. It's been a whirlwind couple of weeks here. Yeah, it's going. I'm not sure where I am. Speaking of going, are you still going or have you finally stopped someplace?
00:01:27
Speaker
That's a matter of interpretation because are you still going if you're never home? So, you know, I thought if you live in an RV, you're always home. Exactly. So am I ever going? I'm always not going, but I'm always going at the same time. Okay. So are you like going in a velocity sense anyway? I hope you're not recording this while you're driving. That is the next evolution. If I can get my wife to drive and I can podcast from the back, that's the next step here. She's going to love that.
Chris's Archaeology Project in Nevada
00:01:53
Speaker
We just got here on Sunday, Memorial Day actually, or the day before Memorial Day, to RV Park north of Elko, Nevada, where we're going to be our base of operations for the next two and a half months while we conduct an archaeological survey for a client up here. So it's a big environmental assessment, big partnership with two other companies, and it's going to be a fun, fun time. My wife and I are starting the project.
00:02:15
Speaker
this weekend. We've got another crew member showing up next week. And then in July, we get this guy. He goes by Dr. Fieldtech. I don't know what he's doing. Somebody's been trying to make that happen. I don't know that he goes by that.
00:02:31
Speaker
That's just what I've heard, you know, around, on the street. So I'm excited, Paul, because you're going to be come out, you're working with us. It's going to be your first job after working this other job for 21 years. Your first, your first job after this 21 year, you know, job. And I'm glad that it's in archeology. Was your last job before this one also in archeology or were you in like, what would you do right before you got this job?
00:02:55
Speaker
Just before this one, yeah, it would have been. I was working at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Masca, which is a department that no longer exists. It was a materials applied science center for archaeology.
00:03:10
Speaker
It's since been replaced by, I'm forgetting the acronym now, but another tech department within the museum. They decided to restructure. Anyhow, when Masco went down, it was a big brouhaha. There were thousands of different archaeologists all over the world signing that the
00:03:27
Speaker
you know, an open letter that the museum shouldn't close it. I got interviewed a couple of times actually by the Daily Pennsylvanian about,
Paul's Archaeological Career Reflections
00:03:34
Speaker
you know, my thoughts on it, which is, you know, I was a minor player. I wasn't an important part of MASCA, but I was at the time, yeah, so mid 90s till 2000. I was
00:03:50
Speaker
mostly the guy, the computer guy in the corner where we had our computer lab. It was me and it was Bill Fitz who took over after me as the main computer guy and a roving cast of different students and some other people that were coming through there. Every now and then we had the illustrator would work out of our office because it was big enough space that she could put up her drawing table in it.
00:04:19
Speaker
Yeah. So I think that was my last job, but I didn't, you know, it paid pennies. Uh, and I was a grad student at the time and every so often the director of the department, Stuart Fleming, would send me off to various projects. Typically in the middle East, actually all the ones I did were in the middle East to be surveyor. Cause we had survey software that we developed. Bill and I developed at Maska.
00:04:45
Speaker
and they would send me off to be site surveyor for various projects. I've mentioned before that I was at Petra a lot, and that's how I got to Petra. Actually, the surveying is how I initially got to Yemen, which ended up being my dissertation came out of that project, even though that was not a project associated really, other than renting the equipment and renting
00:05:07
Speaker
me and my services. I wonder how much Stuart pocketed from that because I got plane tickets and I got fed and that was good enough, I guess. Yeah, so this is the first time going back and it's a long time since I've been paid to do fieldwork. It's been over 20 years since I've been paid to do fieldwork.
00:05:30
Speaker
Well, given that information, that's why I think your salary of $6.50 per hour is more than generous. Yeah, that's almost double what I got before. Actually, I think that's exactly half of what I got before.
00:05:47
Speaker
I'm a firm believer in you can't discount other experience and you know not only have you kept a toe in you know it's just stuff you've done it at your school and you know obviously this podcast and things like that but you know you got to just kind of look at a person sometime because archaeological fieldwork is not that hard but you need people that can
00:06:07
Speaker
be intuitive. You need people that can look at something and make a decision and know when to ask questions, know when to make decisions on their own and just do that thing. To me, those are the most important skills and that's not something you have a problem with.
Intuition and Decision-Making in Fieldwork
00:06:23
Speaker
Archaeology and just like CRM in the area, even though you've never worked in this area before, you can learn that. You know what artifacts look like. I'm not worried.
00:06:31
Speaker
I think people focus on the wrong things when they try to hire sometimes. They focus like, we need regional experience. You need to have seen artifacts and features in this area before. I'm like, really? Is that really the most important thing you're looking for here? Not like somebody who will work well with your other people and, you know.
00:06:46
Speaker
Not a douchebag. Hey, did you happen to read the ongoing thread on the members only Slack? Because one of the members, I don't know if I should be saying his name, but one of our members was mentioning that he is going into CRM and another member suggested a number of things to do.
00:07:09
Speaker
It wasn't so much about the technical skills. It was so much about just the how you comport yourself in the field. Ask questions. If you've run out of things to do, ask for something else to do. In my experience, you're right. The archeology, the fieldwork of archeology isn't particularly difficult.
00:07:26
Speaker
The
Challenges in Archaeological Fieldwork
00:07:27
Speaker
tough part, the part that always grinds anybody down is physical stuff and just being uncomfortable and being in a work situation that is uncomfortable physically for an extended period of time. And that's the stuff that always seems to make people crack either with internal fighting or with...
00:07:48
Speaker
risky and or abusive behavior and so on. It's the stuff that you can't really teach. You can certainly make people aware of, but there are personalities that gravitate to fieldwork and can thrive in it and there are personalities that become toxic in it and leave. They might be good scholars, good workers in other environments, but that business about being in the field
00:08:14
Speaker
That's its own skill. And that's one that again, it's harder than the actual the archaeology of it. So I'm dying to get back in here because I know the that you've worked with the other field tech on a number of different projects in the past. And I'm really looking forward to meeting him. I've obviously I've met you and Rachel before, and I'm looking forward to working with you guys. And I'm looking forward to living in a tent for a month or so.
00:08:42
Speaker
because it's been a long time since I've had to do that and I used to enjoy that. Unfortunately, doing basically a desk job, IT for the last 20 years, I at my age don't have the same kind of physical ailments as a lot of people who've been doing field archeology since their 20s or 30s. My knees are good, my back is good. I don't have any of the kind of nagging, recurrent stress injuries.
00:09:14
Speaker
So it's going to be a fun challenge, but it's, it's, it's, you know, wow, it's out of left field.
00:09:21
Speaker
Well, I will say at least we're easing you into a month of camping that you haven't done in a while because there's, you know, this is an RV park, so there's power, there's water, there's wifi, there's showers, there's laundry. I was asking you so I couldn't know what kind of equipment I had to get. And he said, Oh yeah, there's ice there. I said, Oh, well that's going to make living in the desert out of a cooler so much easier than if there's no ice.
00:09:46
Speaker
Oh, you're having dirt for dinner again. Yes. It's the only thing that didn't spoil. Well, and then, and then of course, the other good thing, we always offer it up because we were in our 36 foot RV here. So, you know, we have air conditioning if it gets too oppressive and you want to hang out in here in the evening or something like that. And it's nice. But then again, we're in the high desert too. You're not on the East coast anymore, buddy. This we're, we're hitting mid to high eighties this week right now. Cause we're in a little bit of a heat wave for the end of May, early June.
00:10:13
Speaker
But still overnight, like I woke up this morning, I get up at 440 every morning and I look at my watch and I look at the temperature and it was 39 degrees.
00:10:23
Speaker
See, that's the part I'm worried about is the night cold temperatures. I think I'm actually not living out of a tent. I think I'm going to live out of two tents, the big six person tent that we had when we used to go car camping as a family. That's where my stuff will live and a tiny little bivouac one person tent that will be where I sleep so I can keep it warm with my old body heat. That's true. We'll see because I know if I slept in that six person tent, I would freeze.
00:10:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's just too big. You can't heat that space. So, um, yeah, I mean, if you got a good sleeping bag and, and good clothes to wear, like sleeping clothes, stuff like that, I mean, you'll be fine. We've slept in, we've slept in that many times and, uh, it's definitely doable. Now that's also the temperatures now, but then we hit July, the overnight lows will probably be in the low fifties, which is much more comfortable. So yeah, that's good sleeping weather.
00:11:12
Speaker
Well, speaking of being out here, we were going to mention some of the challenges. Like one of the other companies that I'm working with, the one of the PIs there, he's coming out here, but he's debating on staying here at the RV park or staying in Elko because on the days off, you know, he's like, I'm running a company and I'm like, yeah, I'm running like three of them right now and I'm working for another one and I'm doing zoom calls all day and I'm still living at the RV park. So it's definitely possible if you plan for it. Right. Now I'm trying to use the camp wifi here as much as I can.
00:11:42
Speaker
Since very few people are here and the other people that are here are actually way down at the other end of the RV park where they can't even reach the Wi-Fi, we're pretty much the only ones on it. And we have a booster on our roof that will, you know, they don't work very well, but really what they're supposed to do is receive that signal and then boost it and boost my output back to it for better upload speeds. It does do a decent job. When we're connected to that, it does work a little bit better than we're just connected to the Wi-Fi. But still,
00:12:10
Speaker
You got to kind of roll with the punches, and I jockey back and forth between Teams calls and Zoom calls, depending on the client and who I'm talking to. But both of them have the ability to call in on a phone line, and our phone service works great. So I just call in with the phone, and then I have no broken audio unless something weird happens with the phone call, which does happen.
00:12:31
Speaker
But most of the time I have no broken audio and then I'm just dealing with a slightly laggy screen because 99% of the time we're screen sharing too because mostly what I do is training people and doing software implementation. So I'm either looking at their screen or they're looking at my screen, but there's always a screen share involved like nearly 100% of the time.
00:12:48
Speaker
That's all doable. And you know, I hear, I hear so many objections to the aspects of digital in the field. And one of my favorite ones I heard lately was on the huge thread on archaeo field text on Facebook about somebody put up a poll about not are you using tablets, but it was worded. Like, why do you hate tablets so much or something like that? And it was like, Oh, because of the battery. And it was just this whole tablet hate rant. And there was like 150 comments and
00:13:14
Speaker
One of the people said, you know what, my company wants us to use tablets, but you know, we're already on a remote camping project and we're having a hard enough time keeping the, the trembles and the computers and the cameras and all that stuff charged. Now we got to charge up tablets.
00:13:29
Speaker
And again, I'm thinking you're not even addressing the problem the right way. Somebody commented on that one and said, you know, if you use the right software, it can replace half that stuff you just mentioned. So there's that. And then also you just got to think about it, right? First off, you don't need to use tablets. People can use their own personal cell phones and it'll work just fine. And they're, they're definitely charging those up at night, however they're doing it. So use the gear you have and look at the right software. And then I said too, I'm at same thread. I was like,
00:13:56
Speaker
You know what? You got to use the right tool for the right job. If I end up with a project, I am 100% digital, right? But if I end up on a project where a client is paying me to do some work and there's literally no cell service, the app I'm using is simply not going to work. Maybe it's 120 degrees out. I got a job in Death Valley and I was an idiot and took it. Tablets simply won't work when it's 120 degrees. I don't care what you do unless you've got an air-cooled freezer case to walk your tablet around in. It's simply not going to work and you're just going to have to use paper.
00:14:26
Speaker
Conversely, if you're working in minus 40 degree temperatures, you shouldn't be first off, but second, if you are, your tablets also not going to work then. But there's times of the day when it will work and they take up such little space that
00:14:42
Speaker
You know, if maybe if you're working in Death Valley and it's 125 during the day, again, go home, but also start at five o'clock in the morning when it's 80, you know what I mean? Or 70 or something like that. Get as much work as you can done during that timeframe and be productive. And then if you have to switch to paper, go ahead, but also maybe split your day up and work the last half of the day in the evening when it's only 90 and your tablets will work, you know?
00:15:07
Speaker
So you have to use the right tools for the right situation. And sometimes that's multiple tools during a situation. Now, in 10 years of being mostly digital, I've stopped carrying paper. But I know that if I had to use paper for some reason, and first off, I should know that coming into the project. But if I had to use paper for some reason, largely weather related,
00:15:27
Speaker
It's easy enough for me to get the PDFs and run into town and print out some. I have a printer here. I can just print out some copies and we can do that and then transcribe later. But write tool for the right job. I'm not opposed to paper. I'm just like, if you don't need to use it, don't. And if you can use something else that's better for your database, then do that.
00:15:46
Speaker
Yeah, I've got a couple comments. I don't disagree with what you're saying, but a couple things that jumped out to me about that complaint that you saw of, you know, I've got to charge this, I got to charge that, I got to charge the other thing. If those things are being required by the company that hired them,
00:16:00
Speaker
Isn't it the responsibility of that company to make sure that they can do that? Shouldn't the company be getting them a generator or power banks or something to be able to facilitate that? Because that seems really reckless on the part of the company to hire people, send them out with things that need to be charged up nightly.
00:16:19
Speaker
and not provide them the proper means to do that and leave it on them to take care. I realize that the actual field techs are going to have to schedule that into their routine. Make sure I plug everything in at night.
00:16:34
Speaker
how they do that shouldn't be their decision. That shouldn't be them planning and figuring it all out from the get-go. It shouldn't be their purchases, certainly. If it's being required by the company, I would assume that the company, in order to do their own damn job, would want to make sure that that's taken care of. You spend $1,000 on a good-sized generator
00:16:58
Speaker
That's probably better than having lost data and you lose a day's work or something. That's probably more expensive to lose that work than anyhow. You're totally right.
Tech Support in Fieldwork
00:17:12
Speaker
When they say you've got to take a truck to get places, they don't say bring your own truck or go buy one. They give you a truck.
00:17:19
Speaker
Right. And then the other thing that I was going to comment on, the charging has been a perennial problem. I was talking about being in Petra. That was in the mid-90s. And it was such a problem. The power in Jordan is 220 volt, but we're an American project. And so all our equipment, all the computers, the total station, the
00:17:40
Speaker
It's all 110. Everything was 110. We had these great big brick step-down transformers that people for some reason kept on plugging in in the wrong direction and just kept on frying things. Even those little like wall wart, maybe you don't remember these from
00:17:59
Speaker
But there were these, up until maybe 2000, you'd get these wall war transformers for travel to Europe and you'd plug them into the wall and it was 220 in and 110 out. They'd do those and they'd plug those directly into the power strip and plug the power strip into the wall burning out the power strip. So I ended up drawing this great big poster
00:18:22
Speaker
I still have it on my computer. How to plug things in. Wall plug, the transformer, the power strip, and then your equipment. Because I got so fed up with everything. I would come out to the project, toward the end of the project usually, to do some finishing mapping for them and some photography for them.
00:18:46
Speaker
And I get fed up with having to bring an extra suitcase full of chargers because of everything that everybody burnt out during the course of the year.
00:18:53
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and it's gotten so much easier too, right? Because almost every truck that's been made in the past like five years has an, uh, an AC outlet somewhere in the truck, whether it's in the bed or, or in the like, uh, you know, armrest or something like that, but not hard to find these days. So that and USB five volt becoming a standard interface for just about everything really helps too.
00:19:18
Speaker
Yeah, totally, totally. So, all right, well, let's take a break and switch gears a little bit and we'll come back on the other side and kind of talk about the last episode that we did back in a minute. Cool. Chris Webster here for the Archaeology Podcast Network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archaeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zencaster.
Zencastr Features and Discount Code
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Speaker
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00:19:49
Speaker
Zencaster allows us to record high quality audio with no stress on the guest. Just send them a link to click on and that's it. Zencaster does the rest. They even do automatic transcriptions. Check out the link in the show notes for 30% off your first three months or go to zencastr.com and use the code ARCHEOTECH. That's A-R-C-H-A-E-O-T-E-C-H.
00:20:11
Speaker
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Speaker
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Interview on Neural Networks for Pottery
00:20:52
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeotech Podcast, episode 156. And last week, I interviewed Leszek Pavlovich, and he is one of the lead researchers from Northern Arizona University regarding an article that's been going around all over the place about the, essentially the convolution, is it convolutional neural network that they developed? They didn't invent that idea, but they invented the network for this particular application.
00:21:20
Speaker
And what they're doing, basically, if you want to hear more about it, go listen to the interview because it was really great. It was awesome interviewing him. I didn't mention this on the show because I didn't want to geek out too much, but he was on Jeopardy. And I thought that was pretty cool. That's how I got to know him, actually, is a friend worked with him and said, hey, you like Jeopardy. This guy was on Jeopardy. A friend of him on Facebook. And this is the first time we've actually spoken. So kind of kind of geeked out on that a little bit. But anyway, the guy is super smart. I just listened to the interview. He's done some crazy things.
00:21:50
Speaker
What they did here is they created a computer program that they basically teach how to recognize a certain type of pottery in the Southwest that they're working with. And it does pretty good. It recognizes, it learns from its own mistakes and recomputes its model and does better the next time.
00:22:08
Speaker
I'm bringing this up because A, I wanted to get Paul's reactions on this. Cause you've had a chance to hear the interview and read the article, but also you've heard some, some chatter about this on, uh, on Twitter that I wanted to talk about as well. So first, what did you think about the interview with Leszek? Oh, I thought it was really good. I, um, I enjoyed it. I'm glad that I saw that was a phys.org maybe article initially that I sent to you and that fortuitously you happen to know the guy.
00:22:36
Speaker
Yeah. I have a particular take on expert systems and so on and that my dad who was a physician worked for years doing an expert system because that was a terminology at the time for monitoring diabetes patients. And the idea was that
00:22:54
Speaker
you know, they could help physicians, you know, family doctors anywhere in the world, someplace out in the middle of nowhere, somebody that didn't have access to an endocrinologist to be able to ask the questions that an endocrinologist would want to do of a patient with diabetes in order to help monitor them. And it was this incredible collaboration between a programming company, a pharmaceutical company, and the Mayo Clinic where my dad was. And it was always a feedback loop.
00:23:20
Speaker
It was always going between what you can do with the computer to improve the questions and what the doctors can ask to improve the computer models. And so it was back and forth. And so the conversation reminded me of that. And also, you're right, he's smart, but he also didn't just bog us down in the interview with
00:23:43
Speaker
wacky terminology, which it could have gone. Sometimes when you talk to specialists in certain domains, they have troubles talking to other people outside of that domain. I didn't get that sense. I did understand fairly clearly what we wanted to do. I know it's different. The CNN, this convolutional neural network is very different than the expert system stuff that my dad was working on.
00:24:04
Speaker
But it's not dissimilar in that it's a feedback between models and people. What it does differently, in my understanding, is that the models can be used by the models to make better models.
00:24:24
Speaker
And then the other thing that should not be lost is that he's also an archeologist. He worked as a field archeologist for years. So it's not dropping somebody from Google to go tell you how to do something that only has comp sci experience, but it was dropping somebody that has deep comp sci experience who also happens to have deep archeology experience.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah, totally. And so I'm glad that that was mentioned in the interview because like you mentioned, I saw some some chatter on Twitter. I mean, at this point, you've probably seen comment of this. I think it was in New York Times. It's been in a whole bunch of other articles, this thing about teaching computers how to identify pottery.
AI in Archaeology: Reactions and Ethics
00:25:06
Speaker
And what I like about it as just as a general idea is that not that the computers are the be all end all, but one of the things you want to do as a scientist is have reproducibility.
00:25:18
Speaker
If you're going from a list of descriptions of a wear type, of a decorative motif on pottery, of whatever it is that you're using to do your typology, it's not
00:25:34
Speaker
reproducible in any kind of mathematical sense, in any kind of statistical sense. I mean, you and I might have the same training on a certain kind of pottery and look at something and decide it's a little different. But we would have to have the conversation to say, well, no, this is a slightly different color. No, these hashes are finer line than those hashes are, you know, something's like that. And
00:25:55
Speaker
major part of my dissertation was actually doing pottery typology in Yemen for part of Yemen. It never has had one before. I kind of steeped in this. The Twitter chatter, somebody posted, hey, did you see this? A lot of people that I really like and respect, a few of them I've met in person, others I've just interacted with online, but they're people, they're online friends. Most of them were just like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, fuck that, nope, hell no.
00:26:27
Speaker
And it made me really anxious. I'm a little prone to anxiety because that whole leaving a job I've had for 20 years. My reaction to things like that might be a little amplified right now.
00:26:47
Speaker
What was most striking to me though was I didn't chime in because I hadn't yet read the original paper and I hadn't yet listened to the interview. So I didn't know the details of it. But I knew enough to know that their nose were really knee jerk reactions.
00:27:07
Speaker
Sure. Right. They might not be Luddites themselves. So one said, oh, by the time I've scanned and photographed and uploaded to the computer, I could have just done this myself. It's like, well, that's not the point. And you're not photographing the diagnostic shirts. What the? Hmm.
00:27:23
Speaker
Okay, maybe that's the difference between CRM and the kind of archaeology I did. I don't know. I will learn next month. But it did seem a little shocking to me, some of the objections. And one of the people who was engaged actually did read the original paper and also knew enough about the programming that they went to the open source code for the learning models.
00:27:45
Speaker
and said, it's there. If there's something wrong, you can actually look at it and assess it. And people were still saying, yeah, but what about if you have it rotated the wrong way? And the response was, well, that's actually taken into account in the program is rotation.
00:28:05
Speaker
Well, it was just this after this after this to still get back to the point of no, no way I don't ever want to deal with this. Again, it made me anxious, but it also reminded me of another conversation I had 25 years ago when I was the site surveyor on that project that ended up spinning off my dissertation in Yemen where an elderly scholar
00:28:30
Speaker
was staying at our house for a few days. And he saw me working on the computer at night and gave me a 20-minute lecture about what computers cannot do.
00:28:40
Speaker
that I couldn't get a word in edgewise while I was doing some of the things he said would never be able to be done by a computer. That's right. So there's no here nor there. And actually, it's a good discussion. I mean, the nos, even though it made me uncomfortable, that is actually what we should do, right? We should be saying no. And then, well, no, actually. And, well, maybe yes.
00:29:06
Speaker
Or no, and hell no, because you find some deep flaws with it. We see this, oh, a lot of things that basically get criticized as digital phrenology. Trying to find out by a photograph of somebody's face who's the more likely criminal. No, don't do that.
00:29:30
Speaker
The stakes seem a little lower to me, like this is pottery type A or pottery type B, and then have somebody say, well, no, they're actually the same type because I've got pots that have both of them. But it's a conversation there, and that's the important part of it.
00:29:45
Speaker
It is. And I think, I think you're totally right. A good spin on this is to take a look at the nose and then if you can't shoot every single one of those down, well, then there, then you've got some holes to plug,
Historical Tech Skepticism
00:29:56
Speaker
right? And that's valid. So, you know, absolutely go do that. Yeah. And just when you said that, that guy 25 years ago that says, here's, you know, here's what computers can't do. That just made me think it just, it's a similar type of ignorant comment about somebody who didn't actually research something. I was,
00:30:13
Speaker
I don't know. I was being an uber geek when I was in the Navy and I was, we were out on the ship and I was reading, I was reading On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Cause I'd never read it before. And I'm sitting in my shop in the avionics shop. And one of the guys comes up and I've been reading it for days and nobody ever said anything. And he comes up and he just looked straight at me and said, pointed at me and said, I don't believe in anything that book has to say. And I was like, Oh yeah, what was the part you disagreed with? And I was like, have you actually read this book?
Advancing Tools with CNNs and Ethics
00:30:40
Speaker
He's like, well, no, but evolution. And I was like, yeah, okay, but there's like 400 pages here and they don't all talk about evolution. So, you know, let's, let's do your research before you start making some, uh, some sweeping generalizations there. But you know, another thing as well, like you were mentioning talking about this one, you know, this one CNN that they made to do this one thing for pottery and
00:31:05
Speaker
a lot of the objections have been to, okay, well, you know, we're doing this. And like you just said too, it's not like we're doing like, you know, digital phrenology by looking at faces and saying which one's going to be a criminal. However, with enough data,
00:31:17
Speaker
You know what I mean? With enough data and enough data points that you truly understand, it's like they always say, if you knew where the position of every atom was in the universe right now, you could predict the future and the past because you know how they're going to interact. That's just math.
00:31:36
Speaker
I wondered, and I kind of mentioned this in the podcast, but I think Lesha kind of blew over it, or maybe I cut out or something like that, but he didn't really talk about it. But I was like, okay, so this is one CNN that does one thing. You've got another one that does another thing, and you've got another one that does another thing. And he said none of them are approaching AI, because if you talk to a true AI scientist, they're like, this is so far, and we don't even know how to really get to AI right now, like true AI. Like it's just so far out. But I'm like, yeah, but what if you take all these individual really smart components and put them together?
00:32:05
Speaker
and get them working with like, what if you had a CNN that its inputs were other CNNs? I mean, could you start really just kind of mapping all this kind of stuff together? That's what I was wondering and really make like an Uber tool for doing different things that hopefully doesn't take over the world or my way off base. I don't know anything about this. Yeah, I don't know that we're as I don't know that we're as close to that as
00:32:33
Speaker
It's much easier to say than to build, obviously. And Les had definitely seemed to be pushing away from that. It's like, don't even go that way. That's not what we're really interested in doing anymore with AI. And I forgot what he said. It's like classic AI or something. I can't remember what the term was. To differentiate this kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
00:32:58
Speaker
And then the part that we really have to remember, always, always, always, always to avoid getting to like a minority report kind of situation is that, and we've talked about this before, you know, ethics and digital archeology is why is not just digital separated from archeology, but why is ethics like an extra, you know, special sauce that you throw
Ethics in Digital Archaeology
00:33:20
Speaker
on your archeology? If it's not in there from baked into it, you're doing it wrong. So we have to always keep an eye on
00:33:27
Speaker
what the implications are, what we're doing with the data that we have, how it impacts actual human beings. There's a lot more nuance there that we have to be very careful with. We have to tiptoe through. We have to not do things just because we can, but also try to anticipate what the effects are going to be. So my inclination, again, and no surprise here, is to step back from that and make
00:33:56
Speaker
very good, very domain specific kind of, for lack of a better term, AIs, and not even try to put together the bigger ones because I think that we'd have to have a lot of experience with the smaller ones to get a sense of where the cracks are going to be, where things are going to get abused. And again, and to stop doing the digital phrenology stuff because that's just every time. I mean, every few weeks there's a new one you see on the news feeds and
00:34:23
Speaker
And every time I see them, I'm like, why? Who thought this is a good idea? Yeah, agreed. The only people who are very secure in their knowledge that they might never accidentally get tagged by one. Yeah, yeah, indeed, indeed. Well, I think we're going to solve the issue again. It's just math. And I'm excited for what that kind of technology can do for really for our jobs, because there are so many
00:34:50
Speaker
so many tedious things and anybody that says that they would never have something doing this kind of analysis for them or they would never use a tablet or a smartphone in the field to record archaeology and they don't care about making things. One of the other comments on that huge thread in Facebook was, I don't care if it makes things easier for those in the office, I'm not doing it. And there were a few of us business owners that were like, great, don't send me a resume.
00:35:15
Speaker
because I don't want it. And you know, it's not about necessarily making things easier for somebody or being cheap on a project. It's about being able to do more good archeology and not have to worry about the minutia of it. Like we're just real quick here. We're on this project that I was thinking about this just the other day. Like this project that we're going to be on for the next couple of months, it's just a fun walk in the high desert and the mountains in some really beautiful areas. But for those of us on the business side of it,
00:35:43
Speaker
like the Forest Service is ruining it. Like they are making so many different things that we have to do for this environmental assessment and so many little, you know, just hoops that we got to jump through and all these little things. And I'm just like, guys, I mean, I understand the legalities of it, but come on, we're recording archeological sites here. We know how to write those up. We'll give you a report of what's there. Leave us alone.
00:36:05
Speaker
They're just overcomplicating it. I don't know how I got off on that tangent, but don't overcomplicate things.
Enhancing Archaeology with Technology
00:36:10
Speaker
We just want to do more archaeology. We want to do it better, more boots on the ground kind of stuff, and be more accurate. The only way we're going to do that is, to be honest, unless we all become supercomputers ourselves, which we are to a degree, but it's going to take some help.
00:36:25
Speaker
Tie it back to that article and to the interview. I would love to have, since I said I developed a typology for my region in Yemen from scratch. I had a few examples from other people's work, but nobody had a comprehensive one like I did. I would love to run that back through to see what kind of groupings, what hit and what didn't. That's the kind of reproducibility that I would love to see. Check, was I wrong? Some model off.
00:36:55
Speaker
Maybe we can refine what I did. Maybe we can refine what the model, but where those disjunctures happen is actually a learning experience or an opportunity for one. And, uh, and that's, that's cool that the human learning part alongside the machine learning. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, let's take our final break and come back and wrap this up on the other side back in a minute.
00:37:18
Speaker
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00:37:38
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to the architect podcast episode 156. Today, Chris and I are talking about this that and the other thing. So this third final segment of today's podcast, I'm just gonna, you know, throw out a few random things. And the first one I wanted to do is, Chris, you were talking about the booster that you've got on your RV for the for Wi Fi. So I just wanted to
00:37:59
Speaker
Give a little tech tip for our listeners. Most of our listeners are pretty tech savvy. They probably understand this already, but just in case somebody doesn't know the difference, I think this is useful. With home Wi-Fi, a lot of companies sell boosters or repeaters.
00:38:13
Speaker
Basically, you take a device and you put it halfway between your router, where the internet comes into your house and the back office where you're trying to work that never had good reception. You put that repeater there and it takes the first signal and bounces it back out and takes your return signal and bounces back to the router itself.
00:38:37
Speaker
The problem with those things is that each one that you put in has the speed of the network. And the way that Wi-Fi works, it doesn't talk device A to device V. Everything is a bit of a broadcast. So that repeater is yelling, and then anything that thinks it's supposed to respond responds, and then it takes that and feeds it back. So there's a whole other technology out there that you have probably seen, and you probably don't know what the difference is. It's called mesh networks.
00:39:05
Speaker
And there are different ones, Euro, Google Wi-Fi, TP-Link, their Deco series. I'm sure there are a dozen other ones at this point. But this is important to us because this has been the solution for absolutely everybody's Wi-Fi problems over the last year, the year of COVID, while everybody's doing their
00:39:25
Speaker
their remote learning and remote teaching at my school has been to get them one of these mesh networks instead of a repeater, instead of a stronger main Wi-Fi router. I mean, I'm presuming that they've got a good pipe into the house.
00:39:40
Speaker
If you have bad internet access, none of that internal stuff is going to help you. But so many people would be, oh, it's great if I work in a living room right next to where the internet comes in and I've got the main WiFi router. But when I work in the bedroom or I work in the back room that I have access to because nobody else is back there and it's nice and quiet, it's a terrible reception. So basically what these things do is they have two networks.
00:40:06
Speaker
They've got one that is the Wi-Fi that you see and that you connect all your devices to, but they have another one that's a back channel that talks between them. And so what that has is it's got greater resiliency against interference, because it's smart. I mean, it's something inherent with radio. It has greater resiliency to interruptions, but also you don't slow down your network speed.
00:40:33
Speaker
for each one of these that you put in. I've been using them in my own house and apartment. I've been using the TP-Link ones that are a few years old now, and they've been fantastic in places that I haven't been able to get good reception with all the different repeaters and extenders and high-powered antennas and all the crap I tried over the years. As soon as I put these things in, boom, suddenly all our network problems were gone in the house and in the apartment.
00:41:00
Speaker
Nice. Nice. And so I just want to recommend to any of our listeners, if you're trying to do stuff with a repeater in your house, spend the extra money, throw away the repeater, throw away your regular router, and go with one of these mesh networks because you're going to be so much happier. It's going to be faster. It's going to be more saturated around your house. And if you find some spot that doesn't have good signal, instead of putting get another repeater in and having your network speed yet again,
00:41:29
Speaker
You put it in and it just repeats the network and talks to the other ones happily on the back channel and you've extended the coverage. So that simple little tech tip that I wanted to get out there, because when you mentioned booster, you don't have that option in an RV. You've got a totally different situation. But if people are thinking of that for their home networks, there's a right answer and a wrong answer.
00:41:52
Speaker
Yeah, mainly it's only like a tertiary feature that it's a Wi-Fi booster, the one that we have in our RV. The antenna that we have up there is actually a cell receiver. We can put SIM cards inside of this router and then it picks up relatively faint cell signals and tries to amplify those as well and include shipping it back to the cell tower. So it just happens to do Wi-Fi at the same time. Yeah.
00:42:14
Speaker
But yeah, I can't speak highly enough for those things you were talking about, too. We had Eero, actually, for a couple of years in our townhouse. The townhouses, like a lot of townhouses, it's kind of like long and narrow. It was two floors, long and narrow. And the internet came into one room on the top floor, on the second floor. And it's like the rest of the house was completely out. It's like we couldn't do anything. And the Eero I got, I think I got it at Costco. And it came with its own router and then two nodes for the mesh network.
00:42:43
Speaker
we put one in the master bedroom, which was at the other end of the house for where the internet came into the router upstairs. And then we put one in kind of down in the middle downstairs that was down in the like kitchen dining room area. And that was enough to cover basically the whole house. And we had high speed internet basically anywhere. And we had a lot of devices that are constantly tugging on that internet too. I mean, from the washer dryer to the stove, to the
00:43:07
Speaker
all the iPads and the Nest front door, the lights, everything is just like tugging on the wifi and you don't realize how much that stuff is kind of pulling a little bit, even if it's not very often, it adds up. So having the ability to spread that out a little bit and have that high-speed internet all over the place was pretty nice.
00:43:26
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to make just one other quick comment. If you're looking at buying one of these, you'll see some of them will have, they usually come in three packs. Some of them, the three devices will look identical. So like the TPE link demo deco M5s that I've got there.
00:43:41
Speaker
three identical devices. Whichever one is plugged into the cable modem, that's the electromagnetic terminology. I was going to say master. That's the main one and the other ones are the remotes. It doesn't matter which one is the main one. Some of these systems, there is like a bigger box that is the main and the other ones are remotes. There's no real big distinction between don't let that sway your buying decision, but just be aware that
00:44:09
Speaker
If you're looking at thinking you're comparing apples to apples when you're doing your Amazon search and you're wondering why they look different, it's just because it's a slightly different design decision on the part of the company that makes them. For all intents and purposes, it's not a functional distinction that's going to change how you use it.
00:44:28
Speaker
and speaking of apples though that's one of the reasons i think i went with the euro i know i'm going to transition to that but i'm using it as a different segue right now that's one of the reasons i went with the euro because it's just a it's a sleek like smooth round cornered white thing because the router
00:44:44
Speaker
the Wi-Fi router that it came with, it just sits up in another room and that's fine. Not a lot of people see that, but we had one of those nodes downstairs plugged into a pretty visible plug outlet, but it looked nice. It wasn't something that was like this crazy monstrosity, had a power cord and I had to mount it or put it somewhere. I don't know if any of them look like that, but I'm just saying this one looked presentable.
00:45:08
Speaker
if you will, right? And I don't know, to some people that's important that it actually looks good. I don't like wires hanging around. I don't like antennas all over the place. This just really fit. So it had a real Apple aesthetic, which is why I was saying that with a kind of like a smooth white finish to it. So, and speaking of Apple, as we transition again, officially,
00:45:26
Speaker
So on this new project, we get prepayment, which really helps. They pay 50% ahead of time. So it allows us to upgrade some gear, do some other things. And one of the things I've been looking to upgrade, because I use it almost daily, is my 2015
00:45:43
Speaker
iPad Pro 12.9 inch and that's the first generation of the iPad Pro when they came out. So I've had this thing for six years. The only real downside to it is it's having a hard time reading the Apple pencil and sometimes some finger inputs on like a lower third of the screen on the right side. I don't know what's happened. Some of the sensors in there have just gone bad and I've never really had the time to take it in and get it fixed. I'm sure I could just get the screen replaced and it'll be fine.
00:46:09
Speaker
That being said, it's got some of the older technology. It's got a big bezel around it. And with the new iPad Pros coming out with the M1 chip, and this starting to be the harmony of Apple bringing all their devices into the same chipset, which opens them up for the same operating system, which opens them up for, hey, running the same programs, no longer having mobile versus desktop programs. That's where I'm hoping all this goes. So I ordered my new iPad.
00:46:37
Speaker
I ordered it probably two weeks ago. It's Apple saying it's not going to be here till the end of June. So we'll see. But I'm looking forward to getting that. But it's with that new M1 chip and the speeds and the almost edge to edge screen on it. I got the new pencil too, because the second generation pencil goes with it. And oh, and I also got the new keyboard set up. The keyboard case that goes with it, what do they call it? The magic keyboard case that. Right, right, right. That actually came already. That thing's pretty slick. That's pretty neat. I can't even try it out with my current iPad because it just doesn't fit. It's completely different setup.
00:47:07
Speaker
But I'm definitely looking forward to that because I've been saying for years when I bought this iPad, I was saying that I would never buy a laptop again. And then three years later, I bought another laptop.
00:47:17
Speaker
Because it's just not ready yet. I'm a little disappointed at the pace that these things are going because really it's business decisions. It's not technological decisions. They've got the same chips now. They've had the ability to change the operating system, but they have to increment these things because they're a big massive ship to move. And I understand that people are going to be resistant if they move too fast. So they have to ease people into it.
00:47:38
Speaker
which again, frustrating for those of us that are ready, that are ready to move into something brand new and figure it out and just go, but I'm excited by where the possibilities are going with this because just the ability to run regular programs, I think on mobile devices is gonna be a game changer for our entire society. You know, cause mobile apps suffer some problems and they're a big drain on resources for app development companies too, because unless you're solely a mobile app developer,
00:48:06
Speaker
you probably got a desktop component and now you've got to retool everything for the mobile app environment. It's a real drain on resources and I think that moving in this direction is going to be better for everybody. It's going to be interesting to see what happens. I do so much on the command line that that's the one thing that would keep me from going full tablet because I want the command line.
00:48:32
Speaker
It's funny, just this brief aside, this doesn't even really matter, but the M1 chips, so we have 465 new computers for students for next year. Oh yeah, that's for the high school. We also have another 500 for other grades, 600. Imaging those, so we always used to wipe a new computer and put a custom image that we built out with all our software and everything.
00:49:00
Speaker
imaging those has been a real bear because these M1s, some of the tools that Apple used to have, the command line tools for dealing with a brand new computer don't exist. And they've been only releasing them. We just got to the point last week of actually being able to image them properly. And one of the tools that we use
00:49:23
Speaker
to get through some of those initial startup screens. Usually the hack that the programmer did is beautiful. It turns on the voice commands and then speaks text, the voice command here in order to continue through a few of the setup screens.
00:49:41
Speaker
Oh my God. That's awesome. So they turn on, you know, they've got, they started imaging this week. They've done about 300 of these 465 and when they start them up, you hear these computers talking to themselves.
00:49:59
Speaker
We're getting to the tail end. I want to give our listeners another tech tip, something that I've been wanting to talk about for a bit here. Since we're talking about Apple, that's my segue because this pertains specifically to QGIS on macOS.
00:50:13
Speaker
I've mentioned many times that I've got this programming side project that I've been doing with Total Stations. When I finally got it working, I did a bit of a topo map of my backyard. I went to go create a contour map of the topo points that I took.
00:50:30
Speaker
in QGIS and it's pretty simple. It's an extension, a plugin for QGIS for contours. And I go to run it on the Mac and it says it can't do it. And the specified reason that it couldn't do it is because Python, which QGIS uses for a lot of its own internal programming, didn't have certain mathematical plugins itself, modules. I think it was pandas.
00:50:58
Speaker
Matplotlib was definitely part of it. It doesn't matter which ones in particular, but it said it couldn't do it. So I took an old laptop that I had and I installed Ubuntu Linux on it and installed QGIS on that and took my data points and I did the contour plan there.
00:51:14
Speaker
which was the hard way to do it, you know, build out a whole new machine in order to run QGIS properly. And then a couple of weeks ago, I went back and I looked at it and I looked at the download page for QGIS to see if they had a newer version that maybe fixed this problem. And I realized something that I missed the first time through is that they have two downloads for the Mac. One is their official download that has bundled in it, like,
00:51:41
Speaker
executables within the bundle of the application itself, they have a version of Python 2, which is now deprecated. But there's another link that allows you to use the Python 3 version that you have installed on your computer, and I much, much, much prefer Python 3 anyhow.
00:52:00
Speaker
And I downloaded that, and lo and behold, suddenly the contour plan worked. And so I was really happy. No more errors. I can install stuff on my system like I normally would, and I can use the Python version that I prefer. So if you're on a Mac and you're trying to get QGIS running, what I strongly recommend is rather than use the official distribution of it, you look down on the same thing. And there's another link that they have to somebody else's distribution.
00:52:30
Speaker
Look scary as hell. This guy's actually been around for a long time, but I don't think he's actually updated the look of his website. I'm saying his, I don't even know the person's gender. They haven't even updated the look of their website in 15 years.
00:52:49
Speaker
The first time you click the link, it raises every last alarm bell because it's King Chaos, K-Y-N-G-C-H-A-O-S. You go to this crappy looking site that makes you think, oh, this is just malware central. Anyhow, what they had done is they bundled up
00:53:10
Speaker
the QGIS without its internal dependencies, and they also have links to a few external Unix libraries, Godel, and the link to the official Python installer version 3.9, whatever it is today, 3.9.4, I think.
00:53:26
Speaker
Yeah. And that one worked like a charm. So if you're trying to do this on a Mac and you're trying to get QGIS, look for that link on QGIS's download page. I mean, they vetted this. They approve it. It's just not the way they bundled it.
00:53:42
Speaker
But it's not an all-in-one. And I strongly, again, just like I strongly recommend mesh networks, I strongly recommend you go get King Chaos and then send them some love because they've been doing this for a long, long time. And I'm pretty sure it was King Chaos's grass builds back in the day that I used for my dissertation.
00:54:02
Speaker
Nice. Yeah. I literally just opened QGIS yesterday for this project. So I use it all the time. It's great. Yeah. So if you're running into problems with it, if you try to run a plugin or a certain command and it doesn't work, you might want to look at this alternate bundle of it. Yeah. An interesting thing is I've updated to Big Sur since I used it last and I didn't even think about it. I just opened it. I opened it last time I opened QGIS because I honestly don't have to use it that often. And last time I opened it was back in September.
00:54:31
Speaker
or probably a little bit later than that when I was wrapping this project up. And that was it. So I haven't installed any updates. It's a few versions back. There's already been quite a few since then. And I noticed that when I opened it up, but my project opened fine and I was able to do it fine. So that's the nice thing about this kind of stuff that unless you're looking for some other software or you're bringing it to, you're like bringing it to a different machine or maybe there's an operating system requirement for an upgrade,
00:54:58
Speaker
There's not really that much reason to upgrade and it'll just keep on working as long as it's not conflicting with anything, which is nice. Yeah. So yeah, as long as the dependency still work, I haven't tried it on my M one Mac from work. So I had to do that just for YUX, but Python runs great on it. And I have no doubt that, uh, the QGIS will, but I haven't tested it yet.
00:55:20
Speaker
By the way, one last thing, when you mentioned building a whole set up just to get QJS on there and, you know, get your data set to work and you're like, not the most efficient way. It made me think of something I'd heard last year and I went and found the link for it and I'll drop it here for you Paul. Everybody else can Google it, but the guy that got the video game doom to work on it. I know you've probably seen it, but that's very, um,
00:55:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's just good stuff. Doom pregnancy test. I know. There's not a more appropriate game you could play on a pregnancy test, I think.
00:56:04
Speaker
Uh, there's a joke in there somewhere and I'm just missing it at the moment. I'll think of it and I'll send it to you on Slack. Yeah, we should probably just avoid it. I should make it and then send it on Twitter so I can get really, uh, roundly criticized for it. There you go. There you go.
00:56:23
Speaker
Not better yet. I'll just make it and think it and not tell anybody. That's right. All right. Well, thanks for sticking around for this sort of potpourri episode. Next time around, we are interviewing Chris Nicholson of the
00:56:38
Speaker
The Digital Archaeological Repository. Is that what TDAR stands for? I believe so. Yeah, it's run out of Arizona. My camera, if it's Arizona State or University of Arizona, we'll find out all those details. What is TDAR? What can you use it for? What do they use it for? You know, what are the benefits of it? So Chris Nicholson is, I think he's the current manager of TDAR, running that whole thing. And I've been having some chats with him
00:57:02
Speaker
over the last month or so, and he is going to come on the show. That's why Paul and I are having a potpourri episode this time, because he had to bump his interview from now to next time. So we had to scramble a little bit. But yeah, it's going to be a fun interview. So tune in for that one on the next episode. So anyway, thanks a lot, everybody. And we'll see you next time. Thanks, Chris. Wash your hands. That's right. We can't stop that. Nope. Not yet. We're not out of it yet. It looks like there's light at the end of the tunnel, but we're not out of it yet. That's right.
00:57:37
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:58:03
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:58:26
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to arkpodnet.com slash members for more info.