Maastricht, looking over the river Maas

Travel...

I’m in the Netherlands for the IETF meeting, so blogging will be spotty until Friday, 6 August.

On learning your search preferences

New Scientist reports on experiments that give search engines metadata about the person searching, with the hope of increasing the relevance of search results. It seems that some of it’s promising, though some relies a lot on, say, all young white males being roughly alike, at least in terms of what they’re likely to search for:

Demographic data can help, say Ingmar Weber and Carlos Castillo at Yahoo Research Barcelona, Spain. For example, they say that when US women type in the search term wagner, they are most likely to be thinking of the 19th-century German composer. US men, on the other hand, may well be thinking about the makers of spray painters.

By giving a search engine some basic demographic information, such as age, gender and educational background, it is possible to boost the engine’s chances of identifying user intent correctly, say Weber and Castillo. That personal information can be gleaned when people sign up to the other services, such as email, that search engines provide.

The wagner example is perfectly anti-Barry: I can absolutely guarantee that I would never be looking for spray painters, and would almost certainly, in a search for wagner, be interested in the composer. I know I’m not a typical guy in these regards, but, still... I know lots us U.S. men who would also never imagine searching for anything related to spray paint.

Generalizations are tricky things, and if one generalizes and the result is sometimes improving results, but never (or rarely) making things worse, we can cope. This sort of thing, though, strikes me as using too broad a brush (or, well, too broad a spray, I suppose) in painting a picture of a search. It seems likely to make things much worse, too often.

Happily, search engines such as Google have a lot more information, and, in particular, a lot more information specific to the individual. They know what you’ve searched for over time, they know what you’ve clicked on, they know, for those who also use their other services, what’s in your email, where you took your photos, and so on. When I search Google for wagner, I get, in order, the Wikipedia entry for the composer, the home page for Wagner College on Staten Island, and, in third place, the home page of the leader in consumer paint sprayers. (That’s followed by more stuff about Richard Wagner, and then the web site of Wagner Vineyards in New York’s Finger Lakes region.)

Personalization is more likely to help my search results than just trying to generalize on arbitrary demographic data.

The other experimental technique that I have serious questions about is mouse tracking:

However, the mouse serves analysts’ needs almost as well, say Qi Guo and Eugene Agichtein at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Recent studies suggest a surprisingly high number of us — 70 per cent — use the mouse cursor to help our eyes follow text on screen. Tracking the cursor offers a cheap way to check how people read a search results page — vital information for companies keen to target their adverts at people who are likely to respond.

70% of us point the mouse at what we’re looking at? Really?

I’m skeptical.

I’m certainly different in that regard, as well. I tend to go the opposite way, moving the cursor out of my way so it doesn’t threaten to obscure what I’m reading. And with scroll wheels on mouse devices, I don’t even need to use the mouse cursor to grab the scroll bar. I’d have to do some data recording to be sure, but my guess is that for me, the mouse position has a negative correlation with where my interest is.

Yet, in their study — which I haven’t read; I’m only considering the news article — they found that [t]he volunteers’ mouse movements revealed their intent with 96 per cent accuracy. Wow! I should go check out their methodology.

Of course, nothing is going to be perfect. Even looking at what people actually click isn’t going to tell you for sure whether you found what they were looking for; accidental clicks and browses of interesting-looking search failures are common also. We’re just aiming to make an improvement, not to get it right all the time.

That’s where I think personalized learning will win every time.

Books, using all the senses

In 1999, the radio show This American Life broadcast an episode called The Book that Changed Your Life. The episode was re-aired a while ago, and I recently got to listening to the podcast of it — I save them on my BlackBerry, and I have a bunch yet to hear.

One of the segments is about a guy called Roger, a construction worker who decided to collect — at great expense — journals of and books about the explorers Lewis and Clark. In case you listen to the audio stream, the segment starts about 26 minutes into it. About 31 minutes in, Roger has this to say:

When you get something, 18th, 19th century... you open up the book, and you look at the discoloration of the pages, and the smell, and that’s when you really feel the true energy of history. Not what you would read, but you’ve got more senses than just your eyes. You can smell, you can feel, you can touch.

Indeed: this is what I miss when I read things electronically, and it’s why I still like books, and will always like books.

Books are more than the words that are in them. Roger talks about more than eyes, but it’s eyes as well, seeing the book as a book, looking at the cover and the pages. There’s the slightly musty smell of an old library, with aging, worn paper. You feel the pages as you turn them, and hear the shuffling and crinkling of the pages, not as a digital sound effect, but as something real, there in front of you. For taste, well, unless you’re 18 months old and everything goes in your mouth, we’ll have to add a cup of tea to sip while you read. I guess we could do that with digital, as well as with paper.

I hope we never lose the books. There are advantages to digital versions, when you want to search, or when you need to keep a lot of verbal material in a small footprint. But nothing can replace sitting in a comfortable chair in a well lit corner of a dimly lit room... and seeing, feeling, smelling, and hearing a real book.

Contradancing, on NPR

I’ve talked about contradancing  in these pages  a few times before. Recently, NPR had a good item about it, where they talk with well known caller David Millstone (picture on the right), and we hear some legendary contra bands such as Wild Asparagus.

It’s a well done piece; give a listen.

Listening for space aliens

New Scientist reports on a study that addresses whether we’re using the right frequencies to listen for extraterrestrial communications:

A new study suggests that cost-effective galactic radio transmissions would be at higher frequencies than SETI projects traditionally monitor, and ET’s attempts to make contact would be only few and far between.

If ET was building cost-effective beacons, would our searches have detected them? The answer turns out to be no, says James Benford, president of the company Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, California.

Aliens wishing to communicate would probably broadcast at frequencies between 1 and 10 gigahertz, where there is less astronomical background noise than in other wavebands. Most SETI projects tune in to the cosmic water hole waveband between 1.42 and 1.72 gigahertz. The reasoning goes that alien astronomers might expect earthly scientists to be looking there anyway as this is the frequency of radiation emitted by interstellar hydrogen and hydroxyl clouds.

But this fails to consider the cost to aliens. Societies are always constrained by their resources, Benford points out. Why did cathedrals take centuries to build? Partly because they had only so many artisans, but also their capital was limited.

Benford’s analysis of the economics of extraterrestrial beacons with his brother Gregory at the University of California, Irvine, and son Dominic at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland suggests that aliens would choose to transmit at nearer to 10 gigahertz, as this makes it easier and cheaper to create a powerful beam.

Short pulses rather than a continuous signal would also enable frugal aliens to use small and cheap transmitters. Small transmitters can beam out powerful radiation using high voltages — but only if they broadcast brief pulses that don’t give the electric fields time to discharge.

It’s interesting to look at how we might listen better. But is that enough?

Back at the end of 2007, I wrote in these pages about a presentation by and conversations with Jill Tarter, who heads research at the SETI Institute. Over lunch during Dr Tarter’s visit, she said that they only listen for transmissions from elsewhere in the universe. SETI researchers don’t send their own transmissions, attempting to actively communicate, because there would then be too many questions to deal with, Earth-based logistics and politics. What do we transmit, and who (which country, what officials) gets to control that? There was a great deal of work put into what to send on the Pioneer and Voyager probes, and criticism remains about the choices that were made. This, a constant set of messages actively sent, would be more difficult.

But, I asked Dr Tarter, if we’re not able to get around the socio-political issues and actively transmit, why should we assume that other intelligent societies can? What if there are millions of SETI researchers throughout the universe, all listening... and no one is sending anything to be listened to?

That’s an excellent point, she replied, adding that we just have to hope that someone, somewhere has gotten past those issues.

Managed cardio care

My doctor — general practitioner — recently did a routine referral, sending me to a cardiologist for a stress test, because, well, I’ve reached the advanced age of 53 and haven’t had one, and I have a family history of heart problems. Results first, lest anyone be alarmed: everything is fine, and they have a baseline for future testing if it’s needed.

Specifically, I had a stress echocardiogram. A sonographer attached about a dozen electrocardiogram leads to my chest to monitor my heart, then took very cool pictures of my heart at rest, using ultrasound imaging. The focus, here, was on the blood flow to the heart muscle. The cardiologist came in, and they put me on a treadmill, monitoring all the while. Every three minutes, the treadmill sped up and increased its steepness. They’re looking for me to get to my target heart rate and stay there or above for bit.

The target heart rate is a strange thing, by the way, as it’s rather arbitrary. You figure your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 220, as though 220 were a magic number, and magic things happened to you at each birthday. Anyway, that puts my maximum at 167. The target rate is then 85% of that, 142 for me.

After 10 minutes or so on the treadmill, they turned it off and had me lie back on the table as quickly as I could, so the sonographer could repeat the ultrasound pictures with my heart working hard. They can then compare the before and after pictures to see if there are problems with the blood flow under stress. As I said above, there weren’t.

As you might imagine, given that I’m occupying a sonographer for some 45 minutes and a cardiologist for 15 or 20 minutes, and using an exam room, an ultrasound imager, a treadmill, a heart monitor, and so on... it’s not an inexpensive test. I got my insurance information, the explanation of benefits, the other day.

The cardiologist billed $1750 for the whole procedure. But here’s the interesting part: the insurance company discounted that by about $1240. That’s the amount that the doctor agrees to eat, as a cost of participating in this insurance plan, and that brings the amount that he actually gets for the procedure to about $510.

Let’s go over that again: he bills $1750, but accepts just $510, by agreement with the insurance company.

And that brings up a question: Who pays retail? That is, who, if anyone, actually winds up paying $1750 for that procedure?

If everyone with insurance pays a discounted fee, then it would have to be the uninsured people who pay the full one. But that doesn’t make sense: the uninsured are generally the ones least able to afford the full fee. And I’m told that doctors will routinely negotiate discounted fees for people without insurance.

What I get from this is that the full fee is actually an inflated one that’s designed to draw a higher discounted amount from the insurance company. Something like, Ask for $1500, hope for $1000, be happy with $500. Most of us have seen that sort of thing in other contexts.

But what does it say about managed care? Is it really keeping costs down, or are doctors just compensating by pushing their asking price up, requiring more pre- and post-procedure consultations — bringing in hundreds of dollars for spending ten minutes with the patient to explain the procedure, something that could be done with a leaflet the vast majority of the time — and using other techniques to keep the money coming in, in the face of more scrutiny by the insurance companies?

It seems to me that, in the end, the consumer isn’t winning here.

Another reason I don’t “like” Facebook

My anti-spam colleague from Microsoft, Terry Zink, posts about a Facebook-related scam that’s being sent around. You see that one of your Facebook friends likes an odd-looking web page. You click on the link, and you find that it is, indeed, a questionable site, and one that’s probably going to try to load malware onto your computer. Maybe you proceed, and get infected; maybe you’re smart enough to leave without damage.

And, of course, Facebook isn’t responsible for what your friends like.

Ah, but there’s the trick. Probably, your friend didn’t click anything to say she liked it at all. Probably, she did what you, a smart Facebook user, did: she left as soon as she saw that it was garbage. But this is when it becomes a Facebook problem:

Of course, the fact that I now clicked on the link now has it showing up in my Facebook Friends’ newsfeed. Apparently, I now like the xxx link. I know this because a friend pinged me this morning alerting me to the fact that this occurs. So, if you click on this link, my friends, you will automatically like this link and it will show up in your Friends’ newsfeed.

That Facebook allows this to happen — allows a web site to be set up to auto-like itself when a logged-on Facebook user visits it — is a Facebook problem, and is another example of why I dislike Facebook.^[1]

Of course, many users use the like feature so promiscuously as to make it useless. For them, auto-liking doesn’t matter, because their Facebook friends can’t (and don’t care to) put any stock in what they like. But for other users, things like this can be a real drawback — at best, making others think you’re a moron, and at worst, drawing others into the scam, and luring them into malware infections.

That’s why I prefer telling people what I like and why, in my own style, and dislike binary like flags.

---

^[1] And I use like, here, in the traditional English sense, as well as the Facebook sense.

You’re my best friend...

In a New York Times article last month, we heard about concerns from parents and educators about what happens when best friends turn into exclusive subgroups, prompting children to block other children from their inner circles.

Still, school officials admit they watch close friendships carefully for adverse effects. When two children discover a special bond between them, we honor that bond, provided that neither child overtly or covertly excludes or rejects others, said Jan Mooney, a psychologist at the Town School, a nursery through eighth grade private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. However, the bottom line is that if we find a best friend pairing to be destructive to either child, or to others in the classroom, we will not hesitate to separate children and to work with the children and their parents to ensure healthier relationships in the future.

I’m at a loss.

I understand the problem of bullying, an age-old malady that’s become all the worse as our standards have changed and as technology has created new ways to bully.

I understand the problem of in groups, another age-old malady that’s become all the worse as our standards have changed and as technology has created new ways to exclude.

But let’s be realistic. Humans have two primary characteristics that are at play here. One: we’re tribal by nature, which is one of the reasons that racism is so hard to eradicate. That makes us want to stay in small to moderate group sizes, to form bonds within those groups, and to make it relatively difficult for others to come in. We have country clubs, German-American clubs, Knights of Columbus, and church social groups. We have class reunions, where we attempt to maintain or revitalize bonds from twenty, thirty, and fifty years ago.

Two: we naturally form especially close bonds with just a few other people, sometimes one. Why are buddy films so popular? Because we can relate to the buddy, partner, sidekick, special-trusted-friend relationship at a very basic level. It’s not just that we want to have a relationship like that; it’s that we want a relationship like that deep inside, as part of what makes us human.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everyone is like that all the time. As I think back to my childhood, I know that there were times when I had a best friend, or perhaps two... and times when I didn’t. It isn’t a need that has to be filled all the time.

But it’s a need that humans drift to, some more strongly than others. I don’t think we serve children well when we try to get in the way of that. And they are getting in the way of that when they try to separate best friends because that group of friends is not including some other child.

Also, of course, we expect our children, as they move into adulthood, to develop one special relationship that will turn into marriage. We expect them to establish this relationship for life, and to remain faithful to it. Will it help them learn to form such bonds if we disallow the best friend connection?

It’s terrible for the excluded child, of course, if he or she can’t find a group to be a part of. Perhaps the kid is considered weird, fat, or ugly. Maybe the kid’s shy, and no one’s willing to make the effort. Or maybe it’s just the luck of the draw, and the other kids have just left this one out for reasons we can’t figure. Adults at school are right to try to help.

But separating true friends, with the idea that they’ll then be forced to include the outsider, is not the right answer. Apart from the intrusion on the child’s life and the heartbreak of having a best friend pulled away... apart from the uncertainty involved whenever you try to force people to like each other... there’s the risk of psychological consequences it may take many years to see.

Standards Manager

Starting today, I have a full-time position as Standards Manager with Huawei Technologies. In a sense, it’s a very small change: I’ve been consulting for Huawei for the past year, doing Internet standards work. So this will be a formalization of that relationship, an expansion of scope, and a full-time job with the usual benefits.

I’ve enjoyed working with my Huawei colleagues over the past year, and so I’m pleased to make the situation more permanent, and I’m looking forward to the coming years with Huawei.

For those who don’t know, Huawei is the number 2 telecommunications company worldwide, behind Ericsson. Its U.S. presence is currently relatively small, but that’s changing.

Much adieu about nothing

Here’s a phrase I’ve seen written a number of times recently: without [any] further adieu.

No.

It’s ado, meaning trouble, bother, fuss. Without any more fuss, I will bring out our guest of honour. There you go. It’s based on do, as in a [big] to-do.

Adieu is, of course, French for goodbye, from à dieu, to god. The phrase in question simply makes no sense at all with that in there. Pas du tout.

Now, with no further ado: adieu.

Seattle vs New York, the return trip

There’s another way in which Seattle differs from New York, and it strongly favours the former city: its airport is better, and for several reasons.

1. Sea-Tac is much less crowded than Newark, JFK, and LaGuardia Airports. When I got to Sea-Tac at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday to come home, I went from the curb to my gate in about three minutes, zipping straight through security — there was no one in the security queue to slow me down.
2. Sea-Tac has much better restaurants than any of the New York City airports. I stopped for a bit of fish at Anthony’s, expecting a meal that was overpriced and no better than adequate. But the food was great, and not airport-expensive at all. For what I would have paid for a hot dog at Newark, I got a very good bread-bowl of clam chowder and an excellent Caesar salad.
3. Sea-Tac has free Wi-Fi, and it’s fast and works well. The New York City area airports all charge for the use of their wireless network. Feh!
4. Sea-Tac has a view of Mount Ranier.

Seattle wins on all counts here.

Getting intimate with the iPhone

Unless you’ve been on Mars since the release of the iPhone 4, you surely know that they’ve had problems with the phone’s signal. The difficulty has been blamed on user error (Dude, you’re holding it wrong!), the AT&T network, a software error (they claimed that the signal was lost because it was actually weaker than what they were displaying in the first place), and the antenna design, but it’s clear that the first three are smoke screens. Apple plans to have a press event this morning to work the Steve Jobs magic spin on it, a move that’s sure to induce euphoria in the believers.

Customers have been complaining since the phones went on sale, but it was Consumer Reports that finally forced them into this press conference, by saying that they can’t recommend the iPhone 4, confirming quite clearly that the problem is caused by a design flaw in the phone’s antenna.

In Wednesday’s Gadgetwise blog in the New York Times, Jenna Wortham wonders whether what Consumer Reports says matters, in the case of the iPhone. Smart-phones and household appliances are not the same sorts of things, and, Ms Wortham says, our love of our phones transcends the Consumer Reports rating system:

[...] does anyone react to Consumer Reports any more?

The short answer is, They do. Each month, more than eight million subscribers flip through the magazine’s pages for advice on the greenest air-conditioners or cars with the best fuel efficiency.

But the longer answer is a bit more complicated, in part because our relationship with technology, and in particular, our smartphones, has become a lot more complex over the last few years.

There’s a reason that the latest Kenmore refrigerator has never been a trending topic on Twitter or dipped in and out of your Facebook news feed with persistent regularity. Would you bemoan a partners’ unhealthy addiction to a KitchenAid mixer? Or fiercely defend — and brag — to friends about your choice in microwave ovens?

Distilling it down, Ms Wortham puts it this way:

Our smartphones have become much more than personal appliances — they are intimate fixtures in our daily lives, often the first items we reach for in the morning and the last things we carefully lay to rest at night, before ourselves.

But wait! Sure, I like having my BlackBerry, and I’d not like to be without it. And yes, I’m certainly more fond of it than I am of my refrigerator, or my clothes washer. But let’s not belittle the Kitchen Aid and the Cuisinart too hastily! And a state-of-the-art Jenn-Air or Aga would absolutely have an intimate place in my heart.

The BlackBerry wins on portability, of course. Still, if I could get my email and browse the web while stirring the risotto... well....

Two iPhone users got married recently. The ceremony was lovely, but the reception was bad. Everyone said they held it in the wrong place.

Happy birthday, Linda

Linda Ronstadt turns 64 today — she was born on this day in 1946 in Tucson.

She began as a country/pop crossover singer, but has, over her career, dipped into many streams, doing big band standards (with the late Nelson Riddle), Latin standards, soul-pop (with Aaron Neville), punk (covering Elvis Costello and others), Gilbert and Sullivan, mariachi and tejano, and other styles. The variety in her music has been something that’s kept me interested over the many years of her career.

Ronstadt’s sung many songs of two of my favourite songwriters, Karla Bonoff and Warren Zevon. She’s collaborated with pretty much everyone in the music business. In her personal life, she’s noted for her relationship with former California governor (and now attorney general) Jerry Brown, and her engagement to movie producer and director George Lucas... but she’s never married. She’s adopted two children, a boy and a girl, both teenagers now. She’s an activist for such causes as gay rights and environmental issues, and is an advocate for immigrants and for the arts.

Happy birthday, Linda, and thanks for entertaining me since I was your son’s age.

Voting while under the influence

One indication of why our political system is as screwed up as it is comes from researcher Neil Malhotra of Stanford University:

Malhotra and his team looked at how political candidates fared in 62 US county elections between 1964 and 2008, and compared that with the local college American football team’s results. They found that in years when the team won in the two weeks prior to election day, the incumbent or their party received 1.6 per cent more of the votes than in years when the team lost (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1007420107).

It’s not that football has a direct effect on its own, of course — that’d be, um, stupid. What matters, according to Mr Malhotra, it that we’re voting with our guts, our moods, and not with our brains:

A bad mood draws us to change, and a good mood to the status quo, regardless of what causes that mood, says Malhotra.

It’s not news that when we vote, many of us choose for the wrong reasons. Instead of choosing based on the candidate’s intelligence, platform, and suitability for the job we’re entrusting her to, many vote according to religious, sociological, or ethnic biases. We’ve known this.

But now it’s clear that something as trivial as whether the local college has a winning team right now can be the deciding factor.

Remember: friends don’t let friends vote while they’re high on football.

Seattle vs New York

I flew out to Seattle yesterday, for the Collaboration, Electronic messaging, Anti-Abuse and Spam Conference, which has started this morning (Michael O’Reirdan, the chair of MAAWG, has this morning’s keynote talk).

As the plane approached Sea-Tac Airport, we did so from the north, passing Seattle on our right. A young boy at the window in the row in front of me, travelling with his grandparents, looked out his window and exclaimed, New York City!

No, said his grandmother, That’s another city. That’s Seattle.

The boy recognized that she must be right: This city doesn’t have as much... as tall buildings.

Indeed not. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

Are you as smart as your phone?

And here’s a surprise: most people don’t make full use of their smart-phones:

As smartphones increasingly penetrate the market, with nearly a quarter of mobile users owning one, data consumption is becoming more stratified: the heaviest users most frequently use their phones’ advanced features while many people hardly touch them, according to a Nielsen report.

I expect that’s at least partly because most people don’t know how to make full use of them, just like most folks don’t know how to use all the features on their digital cameras, their DVRs, their high-definition televisions, and many other bits of electronic technological marvel.

I take full advantage of my BlackBerry, but for me the item of conundrum is the camera. It has so many features, and so many that I seldom would want to use anyway, that I can’t get my head around them all and remember how to use them. Nor, in fact, do I usually even remember that they’re there, so I could remember to use them in the first place.

Probably the most useful feature that I need more practice using is the manual focus. I once saw a leaf dancing in the air on the breeze, and took several shots of it. Of course, the camera focused on the background, and I completely missed getting an image of the leaf — which would have looked great if it were crisp against a blurred background, instead of the other way ’round.

So, yes, we’ve gotten to where we’re often not as smart as our tools. Now... where did I put my programmable digital hammer?

España

Thanks for the hyphen!

Never was there a better example than this headline of why hyphens are important in compound modifiers:

Patent Holder Sues Six Smart-Phone Companies

They have correctly used a hyphen in the compound modifier "smart-phone". And why is this significant?

Well, because otherwise we’d have to accept that there’s such a thing as a phone company that’s smart, that’s why.

As Barry goes, so goes the World Cup

I think I must be one powerful guy.

Really, I mean, look: I just spent some time in Barcelona, right? Spain.

And I’m about to go to the Netherlands.

Well, the World Cup final is this Sunday, and who’s playing in it? Yes, indeed: Spain and the Netherlands.

We know this can’t be a coincidence; the odds are too much against it, something like 1,759,438 to 1. Or thereabouts. Whatever. It’s not possible that it just, you know, happened that way.

No, sir-ee, this is better than Paul the psychic octopus, and no mistake! I have me some strong juju working. Y’all better keep that in mind.

People like to have paid sick leave. Imagine.

Here’s another unsurprising result of a poll, reported a couple of weeks ago in the New York Times:

Most Americans Support Paid Sick Leave, Poll Finds

[...]

The survey of 1,461 randomly selected people found that 86 percent of respondents favored legislation that would guarantee up to seven paid sick days a year, while 14 percent opposed such legislation.

According to the survey, which was released on Monday, 69 percent of respondents said paid sick days were very important for workers, with 78 percent of women compared with 61 percent of men saying paid sick days were very important. Sixty-four percent of respondents who described themselves as strong Republicans said paid sick days were very important as a labor standard, compared with 85 percent of those who identified themselves strong Democrats.

Americans overwhelmingly view paid sick days as a basic labor right, said Tom W. Smith, a senior fellow at the National Opinion Research Center and director of the study, Paid Sick Days: Attitudes and Experiences.

The other unsurprising thing is what people do if they don’t have paid sick leave: they go to work sick. That is, they’re more likely to go to work sick than people who do get paid sick leave, but there is a surprise here after all: the margin isn’t what one might think. Only 55% of those who have to eat the day themselves say they’ve gone to work with a contagious illness — that means that 45% always stayed home, despite not being paid for the day — and 37% of those who have paid sick leave went to work sick anyway.

I have to conclude that our work culture encourages going to work sick, even when you might infect others. People might fear staying home for a number of reasons. Perhaps they worry that their employer will think they’re faking it, goldbricking. Maybe they’re concerned about work piling up, meetings missed, authority undermined, and so on. Some workplaces give awards for no absenteeism, without thinking of the effect that has on legitimate absences — and the consequences of having contagiously ill employees at work.

Of course, lack of paid sick leave makes that worse, giving us more workers infecting others, more sending their kids to school sick (and having them infect teachers and other kids), more using hospital emergency departments because they can’t make appointments with their regular doctors during working hours. All of this costs money — a lot of it — but it’s less obvious than the direct cost of giving the paid leave in the first place.

We need not to look to the false economies, not try to save money on the obvious things and wind up spending it on more illness and more health-care costs.

Competition in mobile phone service

We’ve had a long-standing problem in the U.S., wherein several incompatible mobile networks developed in parallel. The direct result of that was that phones designed for use on AT&T’s network, which used a technology called TDMA, would not work on Sprint’s CDMA network. Neither would work with Nextel’s iDEN network, nor would any of those work with GSM, which T-Mobile used.^[1]

The technology issue has eased, with the merging of companies and the development and deployment of 3G networks, and with the ability to pack more radios into a single phone and still have reasonable cost and battery life. It’s possible, now, to have a phone that will function with any U.S. provider.

The providers, though, generally block that, through a locking process, an indirect result of the original situation. When you set yourself up with a Verizon or Sprint or AT&T or T-Mobile phone in the U.S., that phone is generally digitally locked, using cryptographic keys, to the provider you got it from. The carriers use this as a mechanism to keep customers: if you leave, you can’t take your phone with you. Along with the service contract termination fees, the cost of changing phones — in terms of the money you have to spend, but also in terms of loss of features and favourite applications, and the hassle of getting used to using a new phone — deters users from switching.

None of this applies to Europe, which settled on the GSM technology early on. The European Union doesn’t allow locking, and providers have to keep their customers and differentiate their service in other ways. The nice thing, then, is that your European phone will work anywhere in Europe, on any provider. And mobile towers don’t need to be set up with different technologies, supporting different frequencies, and so on.

But there’s still a barrier, one which exists in both the U.S. and Europe: roaming charges. Those are per-minute fees that your provider charges when you use another provider’s network. In the U.S., you pay those fees if you have, say, T-Mobile service, and you go to an area that’s served by AT&T but not by T-Mobile. Use your phone there, on the AT&T network, and you pay a high charge for every minute you use, even though you thought you were making one of your unlimited weekends calls, or were well within the minutes per month that are included in your plan.

In Europe, the roaming charges generally hit when you go from one country to another, even when you stay on the same provider, because the companies are legally separate. And because going from one EU country to another is often rather like going from one U.S. state to another, the charges can sneak up, if one isn’t careful. Imagine being in New York, and having to pay 40 cents a minute to make a call when you go into New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania.

In an attempt to mitigate this to some extent, at least, the EU has regulations that put limits on how much the companies are allowed to charge for roaming. The caps are still pretty high — 43 cents per minute, in euros (about 54 cents U.S.), for outgoing calls, for example — but at least they’re something. And, of course, the companies don’t need to charge the full legal maximum.

Well, the European Commission, the EU’s legislative body, has just released a report on the rates the companies are actually charging. Surprise! It turns out that they are charging close to the legal limit:

Three years since the rules came in, most operators propose retail prices that hover around the maximum legal caps, the Union’s commissioner for telecommunications, Neelie Kroes, said in a statement. More competition on the E.U. roaming market would provide better choice and even better rates to consumers.

When you tell a company how much it may charge, it will often wind up charging as much as it may. And the problem is that most customers won’t choose their provider based on the roaming charges. Customers who frequently make calls from countries other than their home one will, but the great majority select on other factors. And even those who frequently travel have workarounds they can put in place, such as using pre-paid local service while they’re in the other country.

More competition isn’t sufficient to fix this, unless Ms Kroes has some plan for assuring that the competition addresses the roaming issue, specifically.

We’re quite spoiled in the U.S., in this regard. Many of us are used to service plans that cover our usage with no extra fees. We’re used to travelling over an enormous area without worrying about charges. On the other hand, our providers’ abuses come in terms of locked phones, multi-year service contracts, and insane early-termination fees. If you move into an area that’s poorly served by your old provider, with a year left on your contract, it may cost you hundreds of dollars extra to switch to a service that works well in your new area.

It just goes to show you: it’s always something.

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^[1] This is a bit of an oversimplification: iDEN and GSM use TDMA underneath, but in ways incompatible with each other and with AT&T’s use of it. The network details are beyond the scope of this post, and their mutual incompatibility is the salient point here.

The World Cup is in the quarterfinals, and the U.S. is not

Perhaps you’ve heard that the U.S. was eliminated from the World Cup competition, with their loss to Ghana the Saturday before last. Sad for the U.S. team, indeed. But is it sad for all the American World Cup viewers? Should it be?

Most significantly, should they stop paying attention now?

On Friday’s Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, our local public radio station, they had a segment with this as a teaser:

Had they beaten Ghana, the USA would be playing this afternoon. So, why should you still care what’s happening in the world cup? Mike Pesca, NPR sports correspondent, and Franklin Foer, editor at The New Republic, soccer fanatic, and author of How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, join us to discuss soccer in the USA.

I didn’t listen to the segment, and don’t especially care to. I just find the idea that one might lose interest in a sports competition just because your team is out of the running... to be odd. And, yet, it seems a widespread attitude, which affects sports coverage, including our coverage of the Olympics — events in which the U.S. is not a significant force are often very lightly covered, with coverage focusing on those events the U.S. is expected to win medals in.

I don’t get it. If you like soccer, then

1. you ought to be interested in watching the World Cup whether the U.S. is in the competition or not, and
2. you ought to prefer to watch the best matches, which involves eliminating the weaker teams.

And, of course, if you don’t like soccer, then why would you want to watch it just because the U.S. is competing?

Maybe it’s because I don’t watch sports on television — though, honestly, if I’m going to watch something, I’d rather it be soccer than anything else — but I just don’t get the parochial my team or nothing attitude.

My favourite thing to do with pasta

I rarely use bottled pasta sauce, and will most often go for something simple on my pasta. In the summer, a favourite is fresh raw tomatoes, coarsely chopped basil, garlic, and olive oil. If I have a lot of basil handy, I’ll make a basil pesto. Or I’ll just do the straightforward aglio e olio — lots of fresh garlic and oil — especially if I’m adding some vegetables to the pasta.

I was recently planning to do an aglio e olio preparation along with some eggplant and red pepper, and I thought I’d roast the pepper first. Well, come to that, why don’t I roast the eggplant, as well, eh? And that’s the genesis of this easy, very tasty, and very healthy roasted-vegetable pasta sauce that also happens to make a great vegetarian/vegan meal.

This is a nice, clingy sauce that works well with pasta of any form factor. Still, I particularly recommend it with fettuccine or tagliatelle. I love how the sauce goes with the wide, flat noodles.

Roasted-vegetable pasta sauce

Vegetables:

• One medium-sized eggplant
• One sweet red bell pepper
• One medium-sized, nicely ripe tomato
• One small-ish onion, or half a larger one
• Two or three chunky garlic cloves

Cut the stem end off the eggplant, then halve it (the fruit, not the stem) lengthwise. Brush the cut sides with olive oil and put the halves cut-side down in a shallow, oven-proof pan. Stem and seed the pepper and cut it lengthwise into three pieces. Add them to the pan, on top of or around the eggplant. Similarly add the tomato, halved, the onion, quartered, and the garlic cloves, peeled and lightly squashed with the side of a knife. Drizzle a little olive oil over everything, salt it lightly, and stick it in that 450-degree oven you’ve been preheating because you read ahead.

Roast the vegetables for about 45 minutes, by which point they should be soft and taking on some colour (and flavour). Take them out of the oven and start the pasta water. Get out your food processor.

Put the contents of the pan into the bowl of the food processor, and run it until it’s all puréed nicely. It doesn’t have to be totally smooth, of course: small chunks are fine, or however you think you’ll like it. Sprinkle in a little crushed red pepper if you want some zing, add in some chopped basil if you like, then test the salt and adjust it, pulsing once or twice to make sure everything’s mixed in.

That’s all you have to do. There’s not much oil in here (depending, of course, on how much you roasted the vegetables with), but there’s a lot of veg and a lot of flavour. When the pasta’s ready, just plate it, put some sauce on, and sprinkle it with your favourite grated cheese (or not, as you like).

Buon appetito!

Carnivals!

Every two weeks, I’ve been posting, generally on Sundays, a short item and pointers to the blog carnivals that I’ve followed. One by one, though, many of the carnivals have disappeared, from lack of sponsorship, lack of submissions, or just general lack of interest. The Carnival of the Liberals found that it couldn’t maintain critical mass once the Evil Emperor was deposed. The Skeptics’ Circle quietly went away, for reasons of which I’m not sure. Three versions of education carnivals vanished. Two mathematics carnivals now share time, and the Carnival of the Godless seems to be chronically late these days, though it does always appear eventually.

I just don’t see the sense in highlighting them any more, the three that remain, with only two showing up each bi-week. So this will likely be the last of the Carnivals! posts, unless things pick up. Keep up with them yourselves, if you like, by finding them at blogcarnival.com: Godless, Mathematics, and Math Teachers at Play.

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Carnival of Mathematics #67.
• Carnival of the Godless #145 (without further what?).

When the music’s over, turn out the lights

39 years ago today, Jim Morrison died in Paris. He was the third top rock musician to die at the same age — 27 — in less than a year (Jimi Hendrix died in London the previous September, and Janis Joplin died in Los Angeles a few weeks after that). Morrison would probably have thought there was something mystic about 27, and would have written a poem about it.

Not to touch the earth
Not to see the sun
Nothing left to do, but run, run, run
Let’s run
Let’s run
House upon the hill
Moon is lying still
Shadows of the trees
Witnessing the wild breeze
C’mon baby run with me
Let’s run

Part beat poet, part musician, part performer, part exhibitionist, part introvert, and all, as he saw it, misunderstood, Jim Morrison was probably the most eccentric, enigmatic, and charismatic rock-music figures of the late 1960s.

Well, your fingers weave quick minarets
Speak in secret alphabets
I light another cigarette
Learn to forget

His death was as enigmatic as his life: there was no autopsy, and the cause of his death has never been known for sure, leading to endless speculation.

I was doing time in the universal mind
I was feeling fine
I was turning keys, I was setting people free
I was doing all right

Jim Morrison’s grave is in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. His long-time girlfriend, Pamela Courson, who was the one who found him dead, herself died of a heroin overdose in 1974... at the age of 27.

The music is your special friend
Dance on fire as it intends
Music is your only friend
Until the end

Licenses for music venues

I’ve been hearing a few things, lately, about a push that the music industry is making to require places that host live-music events to have licenses for the music that’s played there. Here’s an article about it in the Boston Globe, and here’s a radio program that has the article’s author as a guest to talk about it.

The issue here is that if musicians play copyrighted music at a live venue, and the musicians who are performing don’t own the copyright, then the venue — not the musician, or maybe in addition to the musician — is responsible for any copyright violation. And when the copyright owners are the performance rights organizations (such as ASCAP and BMI), they are aggressively enforcing the rule, going out to small venues and shaking them down. To avoid trouble, these small venues — coffee houses, local libraries, and the like — have to fork out around $300 to each organization each year, just in case someone plays a song owned by that organization.

At one level, this sounds good: if I play your song at one of my performances, you should be paid for it. There are some problems with that, though. For one thing, if I’m playing your songs, it should be I who has to have a license from your company. It doesn’t seem that the venue should be responsible for that. For another, as you might expect, it’s mostly the PROs and the major songwriters who benefit from this. Small songwriters — the ones we’d all like to see get their due — get almost nothing from it, because, of course, the PROs have no way to know when someone happens to play your song in the South Salem Library in New York. They distribute the money based on expected balance, and a singer is much more likely to perform a cover of, say, an Eagles song than of one of yours.

Some venues have tried to insist that their performers do only original material, but they’re still getting strong-armed by the PROs, which say — correctly, I suppose — that the venue can’t be sure that the performers are complying with the demand, and if they might play covers, the venue needs to be covered.

That’s prompted some small places to stop having music, and that’s a sad thing. And I wonder where it ends. Square dance callers, who use recorded music and often call dances in school gyms and church social halls, have long had to have BMI and ASCAP licenses. But will the halls now have to get licenses as well? If so, will they refuse to rent their facilities to events such as those, which use copyrighted music? Whom does that benefit?

As I see it...

1. Demanding that both the performers and the venues have licenses from the PROs is abusive.
2. For the most part, performers should be the ones to get the licenses, since it’s they who are performing the copyrighted material, and they who are making the choice.
3. In cases where venues need to be licensed, small venues such as local coffee shops and libraries should be exempt.
4. If performers say they’re only performing their own material, no one should be expected to hold any licenses. Enforcement of this is as enforcement of anything else like it: the PROs will have to do spot checks, and challenge violations. They can’t be allowed to collect from everyone, just in case.
5. There needs to be a way for a performer to make sure the writers of the songs he sings are the ones who get paid from his license money. If I only ever cover songs by Bill Staines, say, then I don’t want Metallica getting my license fees.

It’s not in my job description

Amy Alkon comments on this item from the New York Daily News:

Equal Pay For Equal Work...

Doesn’t that mean...equal pay for equal work? Meaning...the women do the same work the men have to do?

According to a story by John Marzulli in the New York Daily News, one of the charges in a harassment suit against the NYPD accuses the department of having a female officer perform heavy manual tasks normally assigned to males.

Sorry, but is that discrimination...or equality?

Now, the officer’s complaint points out a number of things, and the one singled out above is taken out of context. So let’s look at the issue of what constitutes job requirements, and, therefore, what can fairly be required of employees.

When I worked at IBM, my job involved computer software stuff, management stuff, working with people in other parts of the company, working with other companies, and so on. Once in a while, of course, we’d need to move a piece of equipment, but my job did not involve moving heavy things. That said, if we needed to shift a 21-inch CRT display^[1] from one place in the lab to another, I’d either muscle it myself or ask someone to help me carry it.

Alternatively, I could have called a mover in; we had people on site to do just that sort of thing. Put in a request, and they’ll be there in a day or two. Call directly and ask nicely, and you could often get someone over within the hour, if they weren’t already swamped.

But we’d do it ourselves, usually, because we could, and it was easier and quicker. It wasn’t, though, part of the job, and no manager would assign it to any of us. And, indeed, it’s not reasonable to ask a 110-pound person — of either sex — to move a bulky computer display that weighs more than 70 pounds.

Police departments don’t likely have movers sitting around at the stations, and when some heavy stuff has to get moved, they can call in contractors and wait a few days... or they can ask the officers who are there to do it. We can be sure that a sergeant is more likely to ask a couple of 250-pound men to do the moving, and less likely to call on a 130-pound woman.

But more to the point: what are the police officers there for? Is it to lift heavy stuff? Or is it to do any number of things we more commonly associate with police work?

Hm.

And, so, the point here is that we do things that aren’t strictly in our job descriptions, because it just makes sense to go ahead and do them. It helps us get things done, and it helps us get along. And in doing those things, we don’t worry so much about spreading the work as we do about who’d best suited to do it and get us all back to what we’re supposed to be doing.

It’s likely that the heavy manual tasks in Officer Glover’s complaint fell into this category, and they were normally assigned to males for exactly these sorts of reasons.^[2] That they were given to her was not a question of doling out job-related work, but formed part of a pattern of workplace behaviour that was meant to give her a hard time for being a woman in a man’s job, and for being a lesbian, on top of that. And that she objected does not bring into question her fitness for the job — the job that she was hired to do.

So, to answer Ms Alkon’s direct question: No, it’s not equality. It’s abusive behaviour — not on its own, but as part of an established pattern.

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^[1] They’re heavy — more than 70 pounds each.

^[2] I suspect that the men could also complain about such assignments and refuse to do them, and I suspect that the union would back their refusal. They don’t refuse, because it’s all part of doing what needs to be done and getting along.