datacloud

Dead Peasants

Already suffering from the raids that netted more than 300 "illegal aliens" across 60 stores, Wal-Mart's images is taking another (well-deserved) hit.

“I never dreamed they could profit from my husband’s death,” Jane Sims told the Houston Chronicle after Wal-Mart collected $64,000 on her spouse, who worked 11 years at a Texas distribution center until his 1998 fatal heart attack. Sims is part of a lawsuit charging that Wal-Mart took out some 350,000 similar policies, then wrote off premium costs as a tax-deductible business expense.

This perhaps explains why Wal-Mart seems to hire so many senior citizens and retirees. [A longer article is in the INDYpendent. Or Google's set of stories.] [via Kelly]

Dreaming

There's something odd and fascinating about this: RapidEyeMovement, a website that hosts dream journals (and allows other visitors to add their interpretations).

In this dream My husband and I are computer repair and sales people. We get a phone call from a customer who bought a computer from us but is having problems with it. SO i agree to meet him and help sort the problem out....

I'm not a fan of dream interpretations--bizarre imagery is interesting for its own sake, though.

Minor DMCA Exceptions

Regulators at the Library of Congress and the US Copyright Office added four new exceptions to the over-reaching Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Added were allowances to break copyright protections in order to

• provide read-aloud or handicapped access to ebooks when necessary
• transfer computer programs or video games from obsolete to current file formats or hardware
• computer programs that are protected by obsolete or broken hardware dongles
• lists of sites blocked by commercial Internet filtering software (but not lists for battling spam)

While this is a sign of progress, it's extremely limited. DMCA still prevents people from removing restrictive protections on media that they've already purchased, in order to play the media on a different device, even if the use doesn't actually break standard copyright law.

[via a c|net story, among other places]

The Politics of robots.txt

When standard web crawlers are indexing sites, they begin by checking for the existence of a robots.txt file [definition]. The file specifies which directories a well-behaved crawler should or should not include in its index. So, for example, irrelevant files or things that are semi-private can, in theory, not show up in search engines. In practice, they still tend to show up for a variety of reasons, including crawlers that ignore robots.txt and via links from other pages. Still, robots.txt files do have an effect and hiding pages and directories with rules in that file tends to make the pages not show up as frequently in search engines.

At some point last summer, the White House changed the robots.txt files in White House websites to include most of the directories with "Iraq" in them to the robots.txt file, meaning that search engines would no longer list pages from White House websites if the pages contained the word "Iraq". As the DNC's blog ("Kicking Ass") describes it,

Why would the White House do this? Those pages are still public, and the White House search engine itself does index those pages, so users can still get to them.

It's easy enough to understand the reasoning if you look at past White House actions. Earlier this year, the White House revised pages on its website claiming that "combat" was over in Iraq, changing them to say "major combat."

One of the reasons some alert readers noticed the change — and were able to prove it — was that Google had archived the pages before the change occurred. Now that all of the White House pages about Iraq are no longer archived by Google, such historical revisionism will be harder to catch.

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog offers a more detailed and wide-ranging analysis, including extensive links, comparisons, and ongoing discussion (including what Dan Gilmor describes as the Occam's Razor" explanation).

[via Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Dan Gillmor on Guerilla Marketing

Dan Gillmor dismisses -- and then regrets his dismissal -- of guerilla marketing. Commenting on the press release for an Oki Data color printer campaign that featured unitard-clad dancers with Oki logos on their chests singing "songs about Oki printers" and dancing in high-trafficked areas in San Francisco (that's a scenario my fingers have never typed before), Gillmor quips,

I was laughing out loud when I forwarded this along to Mercury News Business Editor Vindu Goel. He wrote back, "Costumed people dancing in the streets of a city that just had the Exotic Erotic Ball and is going to have a peace protest this weekend -- and Oki actually thinks it'll get noticed?" (He also observed that San Francisco isn't exactly the hotbed of technology, though there are undoubtedly some "hot beds" (note spelling in press release) in the city.)

But by the end of the article, he realizes his complicity (Palmolive? You're soaking in it):

Still, I'll bet that the local TV stations will cover this stunt.

Question: Does this posting count as coverage, too?

Bingo. That's the gift of postmodernist culture. There's no such thing as bad press, because mindshare influences brand recognition.

Study on the Effects of Spam on End Users

Surprising PEW research study on spam, including survey results such as

7% of email users report that they have ordered a product or service that was offered in an unsolicited email, although not all of this is pure “spam.”

33% of email users have clicked on a link in unsolicited email to get more information....

32% consider unsolicited commercial email to be spam, even if it came from a sender with whom they’ve “already done business.”

[via Slashdot]

After Steampunk

Vintage Technology hosts an archive of examples of "home electrical goods from the twentieth century". It's an eclectic mix (given the span of the twentieth century as it relates to 2003), so there are 1940s radios and 1980s calculators (some of which I'm pretty sure I owed). I still have my HP-11C around here somewhere....

American Idol for Russian prisoners. Prize: freedom

From Boing-Boing. Not sure how to even comment on this, since the story seems capable of consuming any satire or critical comment I might throw at it.

In a grotesque, totally po-mo spin on reality talent shows like "American Idol," Russian prison officials organized a contest in which prisoners sing their way out of jail. Six convicts pleased judges enough to awin pardons.

Vladimir Volzhsky sang his own song, White Nights of the Perm Prison Camp. He has already released two albums.

The prisoners sang to 1,100 guests, most of whom were prison and police officials.

Technically, the six to be freed will be released because their parole is due, not just because of the competition. The 17 losers received a television and a small cash prize.

Link to story. Anyone who provides BoingBoing with links to MP3s of winning (or, heck, losing) tunes wins a reduced life sentence. UPDATE: An anonymous BoingBoing reader points us to MP3 files from prison singer Vladimir Volzhsky. Link to Russian page,

Link to English.

[via Boing Boing]

Posted by johndan at 09:41 AM | TrackBack

#9

A little moment of revolution from Tim Bray:

After dinner Friday the kid wanted to do a jigsaw puzzle and I thought that we might as well have a musical backdrop for our quality time. I felt in a rock & roll mode and my hand fell on the White Album. Eventually Revolution #9 came along, and all these decades later, you know, it holds up pretty well. Anyhow, the kid with furrowed brow was trying to figure out which way a piece of Thomas the Tank Engine would fit, and I was making helpful suggestions when I noticed that in his little munchkin voice he was intoning “Number nine... Number nine... Number nine...” Now that’s Quality Time.

Coincidentally, yesterday afternoon I could hear my daughter attempting to work her way through a new song on her guitar upstairs, in her room above my office. I was struggling to place the song, which sounded familiar. She came downstairs and asked me to help her figure out some slide notation in the tab, and realized she was learning Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" (which I have to point out is a song that I think of as from my generation, but actually came out when I was about ten).

[via ongoing]

Maps and Interfaces

A brief piece in Anti-Mega discusses parallels between interface design and mapmaking, including references to MacEachren's How Maps Work and Mullet and Sano's Designing Visual Interfaces:

Cartography seems to have some parallels with HCI, and its modern twist, interaction design. Both disciplines are interested in how information is disseminated, passed, parsed and used, and this book takes a cognitive approach to understanding. It doesn't stop at when the information is understood, but is interested in how that information will be used, for what purpose, and under what conditions (and then taking that learning and changing the design accordingly).

The problem of usefulness has plagued computing as a human activity for its entire history. Users are frequently constructed as inefficient components of an otherwise smoothly running program. Delays and unused gestures are seen as waste, something to be overcome. The system only runs well when the users understands instantaneously, without thought. The interface, like the map, is seen as a necessary embarrassment, an admission that there's dirt within the system, impurity.

But what if maps are not representations but contexts for stories to play out? Not so much in the sense of Brenda Laurel's notion of "computers as theater", but in postmodernist, "happening" sort of way.

Dreaming

There's something odd and fascinating about this: RapidEyeMovement, a website that hosts dream journals (and allows other visitors to add their interpretations).

In this dream My husband and I are computer repair and sales people. We get a phone call from a customer who bought a computer from us but is having problems with it. SO i agree to meet him and help sort the problem out....

I'm not a fan of dream interpretations--bizarre imagery is interesting for its own sake, though.

Computing

Mitch Kapor, of early killer app Lotus 123 and EFF fame (among other things), is leading development of an alternative to traditional approaches to organizing information in computers [MIT Technology Review article]. Based on "contexts", Kapor and Co.'s Open Source app "Chandler" attempts to structure information and documents based on purpose and use rather than in hierarchical (and separate) locations. The "Co.", Kapor's "Open Source Application Foundation," includes Andy Hertzfeld, the programmer who built most of the original Mac OS. Chandler is based around email functionalist, which Kapor sees as the central information application for most users.

The “to-do” screen, for example, could be a context, with e-mail mixed in with related task items. So if you’re planning a party, Chandler might put a calendar with key dates on it (when to pick up a cake, say), the invitation form, RSVPs, a task list, and even a budget on-screen at once. When a guest’s e-mail request for veggie hors d’oeuvres arrives, arranging for them would automatically be added to your to-do list. Contexts will mean Chandler can reorganize the screen every time the user shifts between projects, as if she were replacing her desk with a new one. That’s a far cry from today’s software, which forces people to dig through applications and file folders to find things, and to print them out if they want to see everything in one place. And while Chandler will offer preset contexts, Kapor expects other open-source programmers to build them, too. If someone develops a better way to run spreadsheet analyses, a user can simply pull out existing contexts and replace them. (Try that with Outlook.)

Sounds great on paper--I'm hoping it works as well.

Some Demographics

Now Reading: William T. Vollman, Argall: A book of North American Landscapes, V.3.and Ellen Lupton (Ed.) Skin.
Now Listening: Drive-By Truckers: Decoration Day and Afrikaa BamaataWhat's the Name of this Nation? Zulu!
Now Watching: Led Zeppelin, How the West Was Won (DVD).

Videoconferencing on the City Scale

Citizens and visitors to London and Austria will be able to interact with each other via a pair very large videoconferencing units being installed in public spaces in both cities. Wired mag reports:

An Austrian firm is developing a giant video-conferencing system that will be deployed in public spaces in London and Vienna next year, allowing people in the two cities to meet and talk eye-to-eye. Standing in front of the 10-foot-high, cylindrical TV screen is like looking directly into the heart of a foreign city, its inventors say.

Shrinkwrap Agreements on Tools

From Boing-Boing, via a bunch of other places (including Ed's Gripelog), news of an End User License Agreement ("Shrinkwrap Agreement") being applied to a woodworking tool. Such controversial agreements, commonly used in the software industry, are often used to take away traditional consumer rights without the consumer even realizing it. They're called "shrinkwrap" because the terms of the agreement include the fact that by breaking the shrinkwrap, you're agreeing to the agreement. (Often, they're also part of software install processes--those "Yes, I Agree" buttons you click without reading the contract offered.)

In the TemplateMaster case, purchasers are prevented from letting anyone aside from the purchaser use the tool.

"...the purpose of the TemplateMaster is to clone itself. Therefore we are verifying your honesty that only you will use the tool and you will not be passing it around to others to use for free. It is exactly the same as the 'shrink wrap' agreement that comes with almost all computer software. Please help us fight 'tool piracy'." [full agreement at Stots online]

Note that the agreement articulates "honesty" in a very bizarre and interesting way:

• "the purpose of the TemplateMaster is to clone itself" I don't know much about the TemplateMaster, but this would appear to be, at the very least, only a partial truth. Why would anyone buy a tool that had as its primary function the ability to clone itself? What good is that? Entertainment? Watch this, Frank! It's going to duplicate again!"
• "we are verifying your honesty" Actually, what we're really doing is binding you to a legal contract, because we don't trust you to just apply your honest, best judgment.
• "you will not be passing it to others to use for free" So now I'm not allowed to let others use something when I'm not using it. Imagine the consequences of this applied on a larger scale--I can't loan people print books. I can't offer someone a place at my dinner table for a meal, because the table manufacturer only allows me and my family to be seated. I can't give someone a ride in my car or, worse yet, loan them my car. I'm not allowed to teach students how to design pages for Internet Explorer because not every student in my class has licensed the right to that knowledge.... These seem a little far-fetched, but that's because the TemplateMaster case is far-fetched.
• "help us fight 'tool piracy'" ! .... I'm not sure what else to say about that term, but "!". Since when is using one tool to make another considered "piracy"? Only since Stots had the bright idea to hook its wagon to the music/movie/software piracy horse.

The way things used to work was that people used tools to make, among other things, new tools. It's not like they grew new tools on trees. So when my wife and I hired a local carpenter last year to build a porch on our house, he started by building a whole range of jigs and frames and sawhorses to use in the construction. And what did he use to build them? Tools, including other jigs and frames and sawhorses.

Now I'm worried that I'm going to be sued as the construction equivalent of his ISP or something.

Airports, Redux

Although it's probably relatively unrelated to my schizophrenic experience two weeks ago of leaving one Ottawa airport on Saturday and landing in a completely different one the following Wednesday, there are apparently some serious map issues in the new Ottawa Airport:

Officials at the Ottawa Airport have flown into damage control after a visitor noticed that large display maps in the new terminal have redrawn the United States, putting Atlanta in Alabama and Washington, D.C., next to North Carolina.

Oddly, in my experiences, Canadians seem to know the US much better than the US knows Canada. That's either due to the fact that many Canadians I deal with are in the midst of the Green Card process, or because the airport hired a particularly lame company to do the maps. Or both. [via The Map Room]

Gehry Concert Hall

Following up/expanding on the previous post about usabilty/usefulness: SFGate (among others) reports on Frank Gerhy's newest work, the Disney Concert Hall in LA:

But savor what actually exists: a sensuous spectacle to be relished and explored. Someone who never buys a ticket can discover hidden terraces 70 feet in the air, or lean against the thin steel panels that frame the travertine stairway that sweeps upward from the corner of Grand Avenue and First Street. Disney Hall offers triumphant proof that architecture can thrive as an interactive part of the larger culture around it -- not merely an object of contemplation.

From a completely utilitarian standpoint--a rudimentary usability position--the work of Gehry and other contemporary architects is massively stupid. But from a usefulness perspective, one that values the ability of situations and technologies to challenge people, to help them learn things about themselves and the world around them--this makes a lot of sense.

The key question, of course, is this: How does one apply the things learned in deconstructive and postmodernist architecture to other fields?

After Usability

Even as the computer industry--and society--have increased attention paid to "< href="http://usability.gov/">usability in software and hardware design (and product design, communication, and other circles), important work has begun to coalesce around the notion of usefulness. As an article in the Guardian reports,

As Pentagram's Robert Brunner argued last week at the HITS (Humans/Interaction/Technology/Strategy conference in Chicago: "It doesn't matter if something is usable. What matters is that it is useful. Even better if it is desirable." To break the deadlock in user-interface and product design, we need radical innovations. We could start by going beyond the text- and list-based interface of Google, and should be debating what could be learned from Grokker's information visualisation-driven product.

I've long thought that the most interesting and useful computer experiences emerged from breakdowns. This is true of education in general: one doesn't learn important things if they're transparent. One learns when theories and concepts collide, and when realities smack them upside the head. The most unusable technologies are frequently the most useful. Usability models, though, tend to conceive of breakdown--even visibility--as a bad thing, to be avoided. Sure, we can't survive if everything breaks down completely. But if things aren't stress facturing, if the system doesn't crash occasionally, you're not pushing hard enough.

Interview with Google News Creator

I get the majority of my news from three sources: National Public Radio, Weblogs, and Google News.

The Online Journalism Review (OJR) has an in-depth interview with Krishna Bharat, the creator of Google News. (Here's a photo of the Google News team with the Webby Award they won.)

Bharat says, in the interview,

There are no press releases on the browsable pages or news pages. We have a higher editorial responsibility on those because we're telling you where you should look. On the news pages, we do not intend to use press releases. We would never do anything to compromise the objectivity of the product. We don't even show advertising … we do this because we think it's useful. Making a press release available as part of the search results gives the full facts that were available to the reporter when they wrote it.

I want this to be a force for a democracy. I want us to be an honest broker, and I want newspapers featured on our site to get traffic from us. … There's never been a more controversial time on the planet. I think it's great to be a news source at this point because there's so much hunger for news. You see a lot more diversity in the news coverage on our site than on others. I think the diversity is a mirror to the diversity of opinion there is worldwide. One of the things that makes us objective is we show all points of view. Even if you disagree with one, we give you both -- the majority and the minority point of view. The ones you don't agree with are education. It's nice to know what the other side is thinking. You'll see left-leaning ones as much as much as you see right-leaning ones. Frankly, the software doesn't know the difference between left and right, which is good.

[via Google Weblog]

Posted by johndan at 03:41 PM | TrackBack

A Weak Defense of Textbooks

Although the big scandal this week in the textbook industry is the news (not actually all that new, but previously unreported) that textbooks sold in the US are more expensive than the same textbook sold in other countries. First, lets look at the textbook industry itself. Like any other industry, it exists, at least in large part, to make a profit. I've authored or co-authored several tradebooks and textbooks, and I did that work--hundreds of hours on most of those projects--to make a profit. In our culture, that's not necessarily evil: if an organization wants to do good work, and to continue to do good work, there's not an easy way around the fact that bills have to be paid, employees have to be paid, etc. I won't go into the complexities of arguing for or against a socialist system of work, except to say that I don't see it coming real soon to a community near me except in little pockets and pools. So making a profit itself isn't necessarily evil, unless you buy into that whole "contamination" theory of money. I'm a leftist, but i don't buy into that (pun not intended). Second, producing textbooks isn't cheap. Although academics are a group that, in general, gives freely of its time, I also think that they sometimes deserve to be paid for their effort. Textbook authoring, for example, are not highly valued by my own University. It shows up on my annual reports, but it's never going to net me a lot either in status or pay. So I expect to be paid for the hundreds of hours I mentioned above. Additionally, although a handful of textbooks take off and make millions, many more actually lose money, sometimes big chunks of money. And the author's work is not the only cost of producing a textbook--in addition to expected things like marketing, printing, and shipping, textbooks require effort on the part of graphic designers, editors, proofreaders, and (in some cases) programmers, usability experts, information architects, media specialists, and website designers. One textbook I co-authored clearly cost, in advance royalties and wages, something in the low to medium six-figure range. I think this book will eventually turn a profit, but it's an iffy thing. So the money for any specific textbook typically also includes a substantial R&D cost to cover a range of successfully and failed projects. (I make a similar argument to myself every time I buy an Apple product rather than a knock-off--I'm paying for R&D.) Third, the prices of goods, at least in our culture(s), are at least partially determined by market demand. I know this doesn't hold water in every case, and there are certainly companies like Enron that have jiggered with markets and regulations in order to artificially drive prices up or down. And markets aren't perfect--in fact, that's the point. In a completely transnational, global economy, goods would flow freely to whomever wanted to pay for them, without issues like differential income levels in some countries, or tariffs, or trade embargos. But, instead, capitalism relies at least partially on the idea of differential growth: Some areas have higher wages than others; some areas will pay more for products than others. Textbooks are part of that pattern. So the market price for a textbook in Mexico is different than the market price for the same book in New York is different than the market price for the same book in Peru. The educational system in the US is so highly stuctured that it will currently bear a higher market price for books. Will that last? I don't know--I'm guess it will. (What will likely happen is that the market will begin to focus on online information space purchases rather than print texts--software will probably replace static text. But that may actually be used as a justification to drive up prices.) All of this is relatively self-serving. As I said above, I do profit from this market. Are these all just rationalizations? I don't think so. Could the textbook industry sell books more cheaply? Perhaps, but not dramatically so while maintaining an active R&D program. Is life fair? Only sometimes, and sometimes only a little. I'm currently finishing up book projects including an edited collection (with Stuart Selber) called Central Works for Oxford (see tentative cover sketch below) and two others.

Posted by johndan at 09:24 AM | TrackBack