Comments from a mutant slime-snake-monkey-person.
Barry Leiba
New York, United States
My work-related web page: http://internetmessagingtechnology.org
(Please see the note at the bottom of this page.)
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I know it’s all relative, but....
Here’s the headline of an article from the New York Times:
Prevention: Cervical Cancer Vaccine Shows Little Benefit for Older Women
And here’s the lede:
Women older than 40 are unlikely to get much benefit from the vaccinefor the virus that causes cervical cancer, a new study reports.
Women over 40 are “older women”? Oy.
Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:
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I had a few ideas for some light Saturday posting, and was deciding which one to go with... when, yesterday, Ray took care of the problem by sending me the hands-down winner.
We don’t expect much from Ryanair — the European discount airline that threatened to install pay toilets in their planes (no, they wound up not following through with that one). But we don’t usually have such low expectations of their passengers.
It seems that an unidentified passenger on a flight “from Poland to the East Midlands” bought a lottery scratch card on board, and found it to be a winner — €10,000 worth (about $13,500, enough to pay for hundreds of Ryanair flights, or 50 on a real airline). One can imagine his jumping up and down, waving his arms, and shouting for joy, as he demanded his money. On the spot. Then and there, in flight, on board the plane.
Of course, the crew, as they told him, doesn’t have that kind of money “kicking around the aircraft”, and the company that provides the cards would have to verify his win and pay him some while after landing. Reasonable, one would think.
But not if one were this passenger. The delay infuriated him, and, so, he did what any sane person consummate loon would do: he ate his winning ticket, ensuring that if they wouldn’t pay him his winnings now then, by God, they wouldn’t get to pay them to him ever!
That’ll show them!
On the good side, the €10,000 will now go to charity. Silver lining, and all that.
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So far, I’ve not had any interest in watching videos on the 2-inch by 1.5-inch screen that is my BlackBerry, though it can play them for me. I use it to play audio all the time, but even if I could get CNN or the local news on it, I wouldn’t want to bother, though I might happily listen to audio from the same programs. And Desperate Housewives would be completely beyond the bounds of reason.
It seems odd that not long after we moved into bigger-is-better high-definition televisions (my own 34-inch Sony is tiny in comparison to what most HDTV owners have opted for), we seem to be embracing the micro-mini-mini television experience.
And, so, Eric Taub tell us, in his Gadgetwise blog on the New York Times, that broadcasters are looking toward the ability to send their now-digital signals to us en route. And he reminds us of the dangers... and the illegality:
While it is illegal to watch video in a vehicle’s front seat in most states, easily receiving live video on an iPhone (and other smartphones) will make flaunting the law that much easier.
Now, check the bottom of this post for the labels, and note that “Technology” isn’t listed, but “Words/Language” is. Because even though Mr Taub[1] is writing a blog, and not a NY Times news article, we should still call him on his use of the wrong word.
The word he wants here is “flout”, not “flaunt”. To flout a rule is to openly ignore it, to the point of demonstrating contempt. Walking past a police officer while smoking a joint — and perhaps stopping to blow smoke in his face on the way by — is flouting a law.
It comes from Middle English flouten, meaning “to play the flute.” I guess smoking your reefer in front of the cop is like playing a flute in his face; I can see that, yes.
To flaunt something is to display it ostentatiously, but implies no scorn and no rule breaking. You can flaunt your intelligence, your body, or your car. You can flaunt your mobile television, surely, but doing so doesn’t flaunt the law that it flouts. (And the origin of this one, is uncertain.)
Update, 8:30: Since I wrote this, the word has been corrected on the blog, without any notation of the correction. Tsk, tsk.
[1] Taub means “dove” (the bird) in German, in case you were wondering. [Update: No, it means “deaf”; see Eric’s comment to this post.]
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This New Scientist article reminds me of a project I worked on about ten years ago. The article talks about analyzing mobile-phone location data to establish patterns of how the users move around. We didn’t analyze predictability rates, but we did look for patterns that foretold other patterns, like this bit from the article:
“Say your routine movement is from home to the coffee shop to work: if you are at home and then go to the coffee shop it’s easy for me to predict that you are going to work,” says co-author Nicholas Blumm.
We similarly looked for patterns that predicted that you were on your way home, to work, or some other such. We used that to set up some experimental stuff, like adjusting my house thermostat (which I can control over the Internet) when I was on my way home. It was fun stuff to play with.
At the time, I wrote a program for the BlackBerry that would, if you installed it and enabled it, send telemetry to a “context server” that we created. The telemetry included information about the cell to which the BlackBerry was connected, and it was sent at intervals, and also whenever the cell changed. And we had a mapping of the cell IDs to the actual locations of the cells. We would never get that today, unfortunately, but we could learn the mapping for the user’s local area. And by aggregating the information from many users, we could probably made a pretty good mapping ourselves.
One of my colleagues visited family in northern Virginia, and had his BlackBerry sending telemetry on the way home, on a Monday. I remember mapping that in real time, and watching his progress up US 15, I-78, and I-287. I could even tell where he’d made significant stops, and we had a good time going over the trip when he was in the office on Tuesday.
That was a fun project, and we got some interesting results, though we ultimately didn’t go very far with them. It’ll be nice to see where this new group of researchers goes.
Maybe we’ll track them on their mobile phones.
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New Scientist tells us that some of my former IBM Research colleagues have been busy looking at ways to give bloggers inspiration:
Want to get more people to read your blog? A software tool that provides a list of topics for you to write about could help.
Blog Muse [PDF], developed by Werner Geyer and Casey Dugan at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, produces the list based on other users’ suggestions or by matching the blogger’s profile with other writers’, and scouring their posts for keywords.
It was created after a poll of IBM bloggers showed that new writers often struggle to come up with initial topics and were hesitant to write if they didn’t already have an audience. “People may not write about exactly what was requested, but the suggestions might inspire them to explore a new avenue,” says Geyer.
Of course, it’s not rocket science to know that people trying to figure out what to write about could use some advice. What’s cool about this, then, is how they find other bloggers with profiles similar to yours, and use what they write about — and what they say they want to read about — as a jumping-off point. I like that approach, and I think it’d be useful.
And what’s more, it appears that blog entries using Blog Muse suggestions were more popular:
While the system was intended to tackle writer’s block, bloggers using it proved to be no more prolific than others. But those who wrote blogs based on topics Blog Muse suggested were twice as likely to receive comments, the numbers reading it rose, and where readers assigned ratings to the posts, these were also higher.
It’s not clear how well this work, which was tested within IBM, would carry over into the Internet blogging world. The researchers selected participants from IBM’s BlogCentral internal blogging site, and that site has some significantly different characteristics to Internet blogs. As its name implies, it’s a central system that has the blogs cross-referenced and collected. Finding blogs to follow is a very different process there than on the Internet. On top of that, there’s a dashboard feature that shows the recent blog entries, making it easy for users to see what’s being written, even on blogs they do not follow.
It’s also not clear how effectively we could collect “what I want to read about” topics on the Internet at large, without filling the list with so much noise and silliness that it becomes useless (consider slashdot, for instance).
In any case, this is interesting work that looks like it’d be fun to play with and to adapt for the Internet. And I hope the authors have a chance to take it in that direction.
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You know what I would like? An Internet camera. It would be just like the digital camera I have today: it would take pictures, compress them into JPEG files, and store them on an SD card in the camera. Of course, it would also have a GPS receiver, and it would include the GPS information in the file’s metadata, so the photos would automatically be geotagged. Nothing we aren’t already doing.
The difference, though, is that it would also have WiFi and 3G capabilities (and maybe Bluetooth as well). Using that, it would connect to the Internet (perhaps through your mobile phone, with Bluetooth). It would have software that knows how to interface with popular photo-sharing sites — Picasa, Flickr, Facebook — with an easy way to create extensions to support others.
What would happen is that after a new photo is compressed and stored, an elf software in the camera would, if configured by the user to do so, upload the picture to the user’s chosen photo-sharing site. The user would, of course, have full control over this: which site to use, the login credentials used, the album/group/set it’s put into, the privacy settings for new photos. It would happen in the background, not affecting the use of the camera (maybe with a few-minute delay to give me a chance to decide to delete a bad shot first). When there’s no Internet connection available, it would re-try a little later.
We can already email photos — or post them to sites — from our mobile phones, of course. But we have to do that manually, one at a time, and the photos from most phones suck are less than perfect. Having this happen automatically, in the background, and on a real camera would have a lot of benefits. Perhaps there might be an option for me to trigger the upload, photo by photo. If it were a quick one or two button process, that’d be OK.
There are issues, of course. For one, it’d be wisest to have the photos that are uploaded be private by default. That means that when you get a real winner that you immediately want to share with the world (or just your world of friends), you’d still have to manually change the privacy for that photo.
Sending large image files up to the Internet all the time would also eat battery power, and that’s a significant issue. As it is, I can go wild taking pictures all day on one set of batteries. I might need three or four sets, or even more, with this feature.
Is there already a camera that does this? A search of Amazon doesn’t find any. Cockamamie idea, maybe? The battery-life problem would be a killer?
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In her new blog, The Thrifty Epicure, D. gives her recipe for minestrone, and notes something about the pronunciation:
As I ordered the minestrone, the waitress looked at me as if I had strange things coming out of my head, and I finally had to point to the board so that she could see I really was ordering something from the menu. "Oh, you mean mine-strone?" She was incredulous at my pronunciation of "Min-est-roney", and seemed to think we were saying it that way to mock her.
That one seems pathological (the waitress simply had no clue), but I run into various Americanized pronunciations of foreign foods all the time, and it often amuses me.
Of course, there’s cruh-SANT for “croissant”. I never expect Americans to get French words right (try “bouillabaisse”, for another great one). The “croi” combination is hard, and I’m prepared for folks’ not knowing that the “nt” shouldn’t be pronounced distinctly, but makes the “a” nasal. But, really, we should at least be able to open up the “a” a bit, and say cwa-SAHNT; that’d be tolerable.
The Greek meat sandwich called γύρος, transliterated as “gyros”, isn’t a plural and is not like the first syllable of gyroscope. It’s not “a gyro”, but is pronounced, approximately, YEE-ros, with an unvoiced “s”. Order it that way, though, and unless the waiter is Greek you might get the same puzzled look that greeted D. at Dunkin’ Donuts.
But Italian foods can be the funniest, in part because Italian-Americans themselves have done a lot of Americanizing, adding that on to the southern Italian practice of not pronouncing the final vowels. “Manicotti” becomes ma-na-COTT, for instance, but that’s not going to cause any confusion. Try ordering a sfogliatella, though, as sfo-lya-TEL-la, and things are different — they pronounce it FOO-yuh-DELL.
And “pasta e fagioli”, a soup whose name means “pasta and beans”, is called pasta fa-ZOOL here in New York.
A colleague told me an amusing story, many years ago. Her pre-teen son invited a friend of his over for dinner, and the friend asked what they were having. “Pasta fazool,” was mom’s answer. Her son’s Italian-American friend was especially fond of pasta e fagioli, and enthusiastically accepted the invitation.
At dinner, my co-worker served up plates of elbow macaroni with ground beef and tomatoes — their non-Italian family just thought that “pasta fazool” was a fanciful name for pasta with stuff mixed into it, and had no idea that it was really a specific thing. “This isn’t pasta fazool!”, said the friend, disappointed.
He later got his mother to invite the family over for real pasta e fagioli, to show them how it’s supposed to be done.
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Here’s a montage of three photos I took from my hotel room the other day, of San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The first is at about 10 p.m., the second the next morning at 7, and the third that afternoon at 5. Click, as usual, to enlarge. Every morning was socked in by fog that way, but it always burned off soon enough.
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Last week, the New York Times published an item about putting wireless Internet on a school bus. Using a $200 router and $60/month for Internet service, a school district in Arizona has equipped a bus, and is allowing students to use the Internet connection on the way to and from school. It’s working wonderfully, not only giving the students a chance to use the dead time, but also making the bus ride more serene:
Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students call it the Internet Bus, and what began as a high-tech experiment has had an old-fashioned — and unexpected — result. Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.
“It’s made a big difference,” said J. J. Johnson, the bus’s driver. “Boys aren’t hitting each other, girls are busy, and there’s not so much jumping around.”
What a great idea! I’d like to see this expanded. The cost is very small — even if the router should need to be replaced each year, equipping one bus for a school year (September thru June) costs $800. If that benefits 40 students, it’s only $20 per student. What else could we do that would give any sort of benefit for that little outlay?
And what a benefit! Sure, many — perhaps most — of the kids will be playing games, watching YouTube, or using Facebook, but there are some, as the article points out, doing school work during bus time. And by quieting things down, it’s reducing stress on the driver and making for a safer ride. Everyone wins here.
I’ll be sending this to my local school district. And I hope they’ll have been flooded with them by now.
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Here’s another from the week’s meetings. In a discussion, someone asked this:
How many people are reactionary? Do you respond to problems in a reactionary way?
In the words of Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
The speaker in the example above was asking whether people wait for problems to happen and then react to them, as opposed to trying to anticipate potential problems and take preventive measures. The word for that is “reactive”.[1]
“Reactionary” is something else.
To be “reactionary” is to be ultra-conservative, to oppose progress, or, indeed, any sort of change, and prefer to go back to how things used to be.
That’s not what the guy was asking about, but it took me a moment to figure out what he was really getting at. I didn’t think he was talking about Teabaggers, but....
Words have meanings for a reason.
[1] And with “reactive”, context is everything. In chemistry, sodium is reactive and argon is not. In electrical engineering, a reactive circuit is one with a high level of reactance.
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In yesterday’s meetings, someone presented some data, showing us rates of sending spam, month by month, broken down by country. The summary page showed the change from six months ago to last month. Here’s an example of the summary table, with made-up numbers:
| Country | Jul 09 | Jan 10 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parador | 39% | 17% | -22% |
| Slobovia | 4% | 8% | +4% |
| Gumana | 2% | < 1% | -1% |
Maybe you already see the problem with this.
A change from 4% to 8% does not represent a 4% increase. It’s a 100% increase — the spam from Slobovia has not gone up by 4% in six months, it’s doubled. And similarly for the other numbers: Parador showed a 56.4% decrease.
What is true is that Slobovia’s contribution to the total has increased by 4 percentage points (which is not the same as saying that it’s increased by 4 percent). And if it’s clear that that’s what you’re saying, it’s a fine thing to say... we can then debate which number is more useful, and the answer to that will depend upon what we’re using the numbers for.
But it’s very misleading to list those numbers in a table like that, and entirely wrong to say that “the amount of spam from Slobovia has increased by 4% since last July.”
Gotta be careful with percentages.
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I’m attending some meetings this week, so I thought I’d just take the opportunity today to tell a personal story during a lull.
Around 1983, when I lived in the Washington, DC, area, I was in New York for a couple of days for meetings. My paternal grandparents were alive at the time, and lived in Brooklyn, so I phoned them on the first day, to see if I could stop by for a visit. Grandma answered.
Grandma was from Poland, Grandpa from Romania, and they both came to New York near the turn of the 20th century, in the nineteen-aughts or -tens; I’m not sure exactly when. They met here. Grandma’s English was always a bit spotty and heavily accented — she preferred Yiddish, when she had the option. She didn’t have that option with me, as the only complete sentence I can say in Yiddish translates to, “He should grow like an onion, with his head in the ground!”[1]
Once Grandma understood that I was in New York and wanted to visit, she, of course, delightedly said I should come that evening. “Vit us you’ll have dinner?”, she asked, a question in form only. I said that I could do that, or I could eat first and then stop by. “Vit us you’ll have dinner,” she replied, no longer a question in any form.
Great. So I asked how I get to their apartment by subway. Ah, not Grandma’s long suit. I should call back when my grandfather was home. 4:00.
I called again at 4:05, and Grandpa answered. His English was fine, from many years of driving a cab in New York City, and his voice was strong and firm.
“Ah, Barry, it’s good to hear your voice. Your grandmother was so worried. You were going to call at 4, and so at ten minutes to 4 the phone rings once and they hang up. Your grandmother answers and there’s no one there, she thinks it was you, you got mugged in the phone booth!”
Having settled that it hadn’t, in fact, been me, and that I was fine, he gave me subway directions and I arrived around 6:30. For dinner. With them.
As it turns out, though, their habit was to eat much earlier than that, and they had already eaten. “You didn’t tell us before, so I couldn’t make special for you,” said Grandma, who then proceeded to evert the refrigerator onto the kitchen table. Polish sausage, smoked fish, beef brisket, stuffed cabbage, beets, carrots, potatoes, salads, breads... the table was covered. She didn’t have to make special for me; it was a feast, and I had a nice talk with them.
When time came to leave, it was around 9:00... not late, but it was dark, and I think it was late from their perspective. Grandpa passed on some advice for taking the subway home, advice given in a heavy stream.
“You already know how to go to the subway station. When you’re walking there, don’t stop, don’t talk to nobody. They want the time, you don’t have a watch, they want a light, you don’t smoke, just keep walking. When you wait for the train, wait near the token booth so there’s somebody to see you, and then get in the middle car, where the conductor stays. It’s jungle out there, they killed a cop last week, nobody’s safe.”
I don’t know how things were back then, really (it was over 25 years ago, which is hard for me to imagine, as I remember it now), but I don’t remember feeling unsafe, particularly as early in the evening as 9:00. The streets were busy enough, as was the subway. Certainly, I wouldn’t worry now. 25 years ago? I don’t know.
In any case, the story amuses me when I think about it. So here it is, now shared.
[1] The Yiddish sentence actually appears in the Val Kilmer movie Top Secret. It’s just a throwaway line, if you don’t know what it means.
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A friend recently sent me a link to this page, which outlines the author’s idea for a “reimagined Mail Access Protocol” that he would use to replace IMAP. The author starts with the premise that “IMAP is a complex and difficult protocol,” a claim I’ve heard often. My friend says, “I’m not convinced that IMAP is as badly in need of replacement as he says,” and asks what I think.
The short answer is that I’m not convinced either. I also have a much longer answer; read on, if you’re interested in technical details of email protocols.
The author, Gabor, wants his new design to be based on Representational State Transfer (REST) concepts (in the jargon, he’ll make it RESTful). REST architecture is certainly good for many things, and is a useful thing to consider. Unfortunately, as often happens in this business, REST seems to be all the rage these days, the new buzz-word. Everything now has to be RESTful, or it’s not cool enough. I’d want to see a compelling case for throwing away IMAP in favour of a new design, and that would include an analysis of why a new design based on REST would be better than what we have — and would be so much better as to be worth the work, the bugs, the risk, and the deployment problems.
We (the email folks at the IETF) have actually talked about doing a simplification of IMAP and a webmail overlay on it. But there’s that general “IMAP is too complex and difficult” attitude that I really don’t get. Having implemented IMAP on both clients and servers multiple times, I can say that it’s not bad. There’s a little that I would yank out, perhaps... but not a lot. Those who would reject it in favour of “something simpler” would soon find out that there are good reasons for what’s there, and that eliminating something means implementing it in another way. There is, as Heinlein wrote, no such thing as a free lunch.
What’s more, I think the operative bit for Gabor’s outline is here:
One of these days, I’ll write up a spec for the mail access protocol of my dreams. I’m planning to call it the “reimagined Mail Access Protocol” (short: reMAP) which is handy because reMail already owns the domain name
Well, exactly: he needs a business model for his startup. If he can convince enough people that it’s a better mousetrap, he wins.
But is it a better mousetrap? I looked at each of his specific points.
1. All communication over HTTP / HTTPS: TCP connections are great, but for transferring large amounts of email securely, HTTP is the way to go. Problems like security, parallel downloads, persistent connections, caching, compression, download continuation via ranges, and so on have already been solved. There is no reason to solve them again.
I don’t see how HTTP “solves” any of these things. Mostly, HTTP relies on TCP and TLS/SSL to solve them, all the while he’s saying that “TCP connections” don’t do it. Does he not know that HTTP uses TCP connections, and depends upon TCP features?
2. Stateless: There’s no reason to introduce state like IMAP does with its selected mailboxes. All you need is a HTTP session cookie used for authentication purposes. Session cookie also allow for things like OAuth. OAuth would let third parties get your permission to access your email without having to give them your username and password.
It’s certainly true that you can design a mail access protocol that uses state, or one that doesn’t, and one can argue either way on which is a better design. But if he really thinks that “Session cookie [sic] also allow for things like OAuth,” then he doesn’t understand OAuth. (Apart from that, I have concerns about OAuth — not from a protocol-design point of view, but from a human factors one; maybe that’s another blog post some time.)
3. JSON and UTF-8: All data that’s ever sent to or received from the server would be in JSON format. JSON is much more human-readable than XML. UTF-8 would be the only encoding allowed, since it is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard.
Who cares about whether what’s on the wire is more human-readable? Honestly.... It’s true that implementors sometimes initially make mistakes in producing or parsing the IMAP protocol. The same is the case for XML and JSON — any format has to be gotten right, but once the code is written and tested, you’re set.
And it’s great to turn everything into UTF-8, but how will he deal with all the difficulties we have today with email and character sets and languages, including stuff that’s mis-tagged or un-tagged? There are far more problems here than can be waved off with a statement that we’ll just use UTF-8 — that’s not a magic wand.
4. Conversations as first-order objects: Gmail, the iPhone SMS app, and Facebook’s messaging system have shown the value of viewing messages not individually but in the context of conversations. In reMAP, the server would be responsible for grouping together messages. While you could still access individual emails, the first-order unit of data would be a conversation.
See the IMAP Thread extension.
5. Labels, not folders: Labels are much for flexible than folders. Each conversation should have multiple labels, and the labels would be included when you request the message, rather than having to scan all folders for the message via IMAP.
An implementation detail. Labels can easily be implemented in IMAP with the Annotate extension. It’s a question of getting the email client software to switch from the folder model to the label model. Of course, you have to get them to do that if you want to replace the protocol, as well.
6. Stable and unique IDs: IMAP has a UID for each message, but it changes the moment you move the message into a different folder. An IMAP server can also declare all UIDs to be invalid at any moment throughout the session. No more! reMAP would have stable and unique IDs for all conversations, emails, and attachments.
Again, Annotate can handle this. Or one can do as many servers do, and use the Message-ID header field.
It might be useful to have an document that specifies some standard annotations that can be used in standard ways, and “labels” and “guid” (globally unique ID) would be good candidates.
7. The beginning of the end for MIME: Yes, you could still get the MIME representation of each message that is sent. But MIME is a messy and complex beast. Instead of requesting the MIME-encoded message parts, you could just ask the server to give you the message as represented in plain text or HTML. Attachments can be downloaded in separate HTTP calls.
Ah, and so he’s attacking MIME as well. It’s true that there are things that should have been done better, and the MIME document editors will be the first to say that, but it’s widely implemented and stable. It’s perfectly fine to turn a received message into HTML when you store it, but, as with item 3, you still have to deal with the MIME that everyone’s sending around, and if you want to replace that you have to figure out how to put those attachments into the message. Unless he’s proposing to replace SMTP as well.
Apart from that, one of the features of IMAP is that it lets the clients not have to deal with MIME, putting the burden on the server (just as he is). There’s really no difference in retrieving multiple message parts through IMAP or through HTTP, is there?
8. Push built in: The two prevailing methods for implementing push email are the IMAP IDLE command (not widely available in IMAP servers) and Microsoft’s ActiveSync, which requires developers to purchase a license from Microsoft. In reMap, clients could just call an HTTP endpoint on the server which returns as soon as new messages are arrive.
IDLE very much is widely available in IMAP servers. Every major one supports it. Even Gmail’s implementation supports it.
And HTTP does not have push either, of course, so he’s proposing using the long-polling hack. The newly chartered HyBi working group should help here.
9. Full-text index on the server: reMAP servers would need to maintain a full-text index of the contents of all messages. There’s no reason clients should be required to download and index everything in order to do an exhaustive full-text search of your email.
And, surprise, IMAP servers do the same thing. Is he unaware of the IMAP SEARCH command?
On the surface, I would say that the guy is either inadequately prepared for this, or is intentionally misrepresenting things in order to promote his idea. It’s certainly possible to design a slimmer, groovier email access protocol — no one, not even the original IMAP author, thinks IMAP is the Best of All Possible Worldstm — but this doesn’t seem to be much of a step toward that, and it’s not clear how much it’s needed anyway. The budding effort in the IETF died for lack of real interest.
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In headlines such as this one, it’s particularly important to beware of adjacent-letter transpositions that spelling checkers won’t catch:
U.S. Officials Plan $78.5 Million Effort to Keep Dangerous Carp Out of Great Lakes
Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:
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A week ago, NPR’s Robert Siegel talked with Los Angeles Times reporter Ken Bensinger about the current recall of Toyota cars (the sticking accelerator), and about a possible forthcoming one (the brake problem on the 2010 Prius). Mr Bensinger tells us that this is the fifth largest auto recall ever, but then points out, about 2:50 into the audio, that not all recalls are equal:
But it’s also important to remember that recalls run the gambit from serious problems like the ones that Toyota is looking at now to minor things like radios that don’t work the way they’re supposed to work.
Apart from his downplaying the severity of faulty radios, Mr Bensinger has a problem here:
The phrase is “run the gamut”, not “run the gambit”.
A gamut is a complete range of something, as a gamut of emotions from joy to sorrow, and to run the gamut is to span the entire range.
The origin of the word is interesting: it comes from two terms for the lowest notes in Medieval Latin musical scales. Gamma referred to a low G note, as we would currently call it, and ut was syllable associated with the lowest note in a rising scale used in a Latin hymn. We still know the acrostic syllables from that hymn today:
Ut queant laxis
Resonare fibris
Mira gestorum
Famuli tuorum
Solve polluti
Labii reatum
In English we’ve changed “ut” into “do”, but the French still use “ut” to designate the first note of the diatonic scale.
[A gambit, on the other hand, is an opening strategy, and “run the gambit” is meaningless, despite the number of Google hits you’ll find for it (including, soon, this one). It’s a common error.]
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A friend sent me this recent op-ed piece, with the note, “Read this, and wherever you see ‘Microsoft’, substitute ‘IBM’. It seems eerily familiar.”
The article, written by a former Microsoft vice president, is about how Microsoft is missing the boat on Internet innovation because its internal organization is hostile to the process of getting cool things out quickly to the masses. As a result, top innovators have left the fold, and the company has become a mundane follower, looking to acquire interesting technology after the fact.
Yes, that does sound quite familiar, right from the opening paragraph:
As they marvel at Apple’s new iPad tablet computer, the technorati seem to be focusing on where this leaves Amazon’s popular e-book business. But the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future, whether it’s tablet computers like the iPad, e-books like Amazon’s Kindle, smartphones like the BlackBerry and iPhone, search engines like Google, digital music systems like iPod and iTunes or popular Web services like Facebook and Twitter.
There’s a part that isn’t parallel, though, between IBM and Microsoft.
What happened? Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.
But IBM did have a top-notch (“world class”, we would have said) system for innovation. Our Research Division, in its heyday, was up there with Bell Labs as one of the two best research organizations in the computer industry. It was a sparkling place to work, full of the best ideas for both hardware and software, and able to deliver them to the product line when the time came.
So, what happened in IBM?
Two things:
Innovation in personal computing has been a problem in IBM Research from the start. IBM has never developed — and has never aimed to develop — a system for selling to individual consumers. Perhaps you’ll recall, if you were around back then, that IBM tried to sell its personal systems through Sears.
All the software we developed in Research for the PC and its successors was aimed at businesses. Terminal emulators, systems to manage data centers, world-class speech recognition systems (marketed as ViaVoice), the best anti-virus software of its time (sold to Symantec, which then buried it), collaboration systems (before and after the 1995 acquisition of Lotus), experiments with pervasive computing... all of it has leaned toward a corporate market. Even when we had the opportunity to forge ahead with OS/2 version 2, far superior to Windows NT and boosted by the late delivery of Windows 95, we couldn’t market it. IBM sold a lot of OS/2 licenses to businesses that needed servers. But putting OS/2 on Grandma’s desktop? Not a chance.
Perhaps more damaging, though, was the change in how research was funded. There was a time when researchers at the leaves of the tree could have ideas, tell their managers, and get approval to go ahead with them. Middle management had a lot of leeway, and could use their judgment in aligning innovative work with product strategy. Results weren’t expected from quarter to quarter, or even year to year.
That doesn’t mean there was no accountability, of course. There certainly was. What there wasn’t was incessant pressure to show a direct connection between most research projects and short-term product impact.
That’s terribly important: it’s critical to separate research funding from the demands of development schedules, while still making the development end of the business have a stake in the research. We used to have that separation.
And then came the ironically named “joint programs”. Set up with representatives from both Research Division and a development division, each joint program would have funds to allocate, and would approve projects related to the development division’s product strategy. These projects would look forward, beyond the horizon that the development side normally sees. That’s the theory.
In practice, this puts development too closely in charge of the research projects, and turns much of the software research into little more than extra bodies for short- to medium-term product development. The funding is in the hands of the development division, and, as is often said: follow the money.
There certainly is still interesting work in IBM Research, and I enjoyed it there. And long-horizon, innovative concepts could be pursued as adventurous research, emerging technology, or whatever else it was called from year to year. But those had to be approved at the vice president level — the flexibility has long been taken away from middle management, the approval is difficult to get, and the accountability is tight. For most researchers, even if the work is fun and interesting, it’s a small step above product development most of the time.
The innovation that will produce the next technological innovation that will change the world... will not come from that way of funding research. You can bet that the software that makes everyone’s life different in 2013 will not come from Microsoft... nor from IBM.
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Several months ago, I posted an item in which I wondered about the artistic value of digital manipulation of photos. “Is it art,” I mused, when you click a button and have some bit of software alter your photo for you?
Then, too, are the other sorts of alterations that we collectively call “Photoshopping”, regardless of whether Adobe Photoshop was actually the software used. People add or remove items from photos, put different faces on bodies — eliminate power lines, add rockets, and put John Kerry and Jane Fonda at the same peace rally, when they were never there together.
Some software researchers have taken this to the next level. They’ve developed a program that will rearrange the primary images in photos to make the photos more pleasing, aesthetically. With the click of a button, the software will analyze a photo, find the major shapes, and move and resize them to give the photo a better sort of feng shui.
What more could one want?
From an artistic point of view, if you didn’t have the eye (or the angle) for getting the right shot, hey, you’ll soon be able to have software compensate. Does that make you a better artist?
From the point of view of documenting reality, you’ll be able to alter “reality” more easily than ever. And, consequently, we’ll be able to trust that what you’re showing us really looked like that... even less than ever before.
We used to say that the camera doesn’t lie. Nowadays, it does little but.
[As for me, I limit what I do to my photos to cropping and minor lighting adjustments (brightness and contrast). I think anything else is a kind of distortion that I’m not interested in. I don’t expect everyone to agree with that, but it’s what I want for my photographs.]
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In a tweet yesterday, one Dave Pacheco said this:
Sarah Palin is running for President in 2012, just like the Mayans predicted.
That really does sum things up perfectly.
Well, it’s not really that a Sarah Palin bid for PotUS actually signifies the end of times (though perhaps, truly, her success in that endeavour would). It’s that she has a lot of support. And that GWB had a lot of support, in his day. And that insane morons like Tom Tancredo and Sam Brownback and James Inhofe and Michele Bachmann and Pat Robertson have a lot of support.
It’s all we can do to remember, at this point, that Abraham Lincoln was the first President of the United States who was associated with the Republican Party, formed in 1854 by anti-slavery activists, progressives looking to move society forward. It’s hard to remember that Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were Republicans.
Because what we have now, at least at the forefront of the party, are fringe lunatics who say “freedom” while they work to limit freedom; who support the First Amendment by restricting free speech, free assembly, and a free press while imposing their own ultra-Christian values in the name of religious freedom; who try to dictate everyone’s lives without considering how little they would like it if theirs were dictated by others.
Their predecessors, 50, 100, and 150 years ago, sought to free people, to live their own lives, to be as they wanted to be. They sought to keep us healthy and free, to protect us from what would interfere with real freedom.
Now we deal with rooms full of nut cases who restrict civil rights as sham protection against imagined threats, who oppose and ridicule science and research, and who impose religious doctrine, not caring who agrees with them or who doesn’t. We have political leaders who label their opponents “un-American”, who actually believe that people are possessed by demons, who think homosexuals should be killed, who would have foreigners deported, and who favour faith healing and biblical creation, denying the science of evolution and global climate change.
WTF is wrong with these people and those who support them? You’d think this was 1710, not 2010. Abraham Lincoln would be glad not to be alive to see this.
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In case you’ve wondered how long it might take to run up the stairs — 86 floors — of the Empire State Building, the answer, revealed in the results of the Empire State Building Run-Up, is 10 minutes and 16 seconds.
At least, if you’re a world-record holder, like Thomas Dold, from Germany.
616 seconds to run up 1,576 steps, comes to about two and a half steps a second. More, probably, because that doesn’t figure in the landings.
Forgive me, but I think I’ll use the elevator.
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My business domain name, internetmessagingtechnology.org, is registered by my hosting service, and the registration is included in the fee I pay them for hosting. They automatically renew it each year, as long as my account is paid up. It’s something I don’t have to worry about.
As it happens, it expires on 3 Feb each year. But, as I said, I don’t care; it’s automatically renewed.
The folks at Domain Registry of America would have me care. They want to take my business. And that would be fine — that’s what businesses do. Except they’re not being straight about it.
If they were being straight, they’d send me a flyer that tells me why their hosting service is better than what I have. They’d sell their service to me and give me an incentive to switch.
That’s not what they did. Instead, they sent me a “Domain Name Expiration Notice”, warning me that my “domain name registration is due to expire”, and that “failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity making it difficult for your customers and friends to locate you on the Web.”
Yes, sprinkled throughout the text are other things that say — if you read it carefully — that they’re asking me to switch from my current registrar to them. But this is intentionally laid out and worded to look like a bill from my registrar for a simple renewal. It’s misleading, and that’s not an accident. (And, to boot, their “Registration Agreement” is printed on the back of the “notice”, a solid 8 inches by 8 inches of four-point, low-contrast type! (Click the image on the right to see it.))
No, I won’t be doing business with them, because I don’t like their marketing choices. They remind me of spammers.
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There aren’t many billboards around where I live, and I do my best to avoid advertisements. A result of that is that I’m often among the last to know about a particular advertising campaign. I’ve only recently seen the current abomination advertisement for the Droid, pictured on the right. In case you’re one of the six other people who hasn’t seen it, it says
a bare-knuckled
bucket of does.
So, as this post’s title says, does this really work for anybody? I absolutely can’t make myself turn the third-person singular of the verb “to do” into a noun that fits at the end of that sentence fragment. I know what they mean, but I just keep reading it as a group of female deer, which kind of blunts their message.
And the image that I am about to be mugged by the ladies who hang out on my front lawn... well, it just does not prompt me to go out and buy what they’re advertising.
I can cope with the slogan in the corner: “In a world of doesn’t, Droid does.” But overall, I find this to be one of the worst ads I’ve seen in a long time. It just... well, it “doesn’t.”
Is it really working? Or should they fire their ad company?
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I had a sandwich for lunch, the other day, that reminds me of what I’ve long considered the best sandwich on the planet. But this is going to be a story, a bit of a ramble, before I get to that, specifically.
There’s a great sandwich place in Gaithersburg, MD, called Roy’s Place; the eponymous Roy just died last May, sadly. I was introduced to Roy’s Place as one of the first things, when I moved to Gaithersburg in 1977. Over 200 sandwiches there, with all sorts of crazy ingredient combinations, and some not so crazy. They have sandwiches with crab salad, sandwiches with baked beans, and sandwiches with fried oysters. And the sandwiches all have silly names, and many have silly stories to go with them. The five-decker “Bender Schmendertm” comes with “a psychiatric appointment.” It can take an hour to look at the menu.
They used to sell souvenir menus for a dollar (“If you stop stealing our menus, we’ll stop slashing your tires!”), and I see they’re $3.75 now. And, of course, the menu is online these days. “The Dirty Tom Glentm” (number 79) and the “Mother’s Ruintm” (number 34) were two of my favourites, but I used to get all different ones, from visit to visit.
I had a friend who didn’t, though. Charlie was something of a picky eater, and after poring over the menu for what seemed longer than anyone had before, he decided on “The Count Jampolskitm” He liked it, and that was the end of it: every time after that, without even consulting the menu, Charlie would order The Count Jampolski. He knew he liked it, and why play with success? Too limiting, I thought, but it worked for him.
One time, long before the menu was online, I put all the sandwiches and all the ingredients into a database on my computer (reading from one of the menus I stole bought for a buck). I could search for all the sandwiches with "roast pork" and "golden sauce", for example. Fun.
They have a sandwich called “The Concupiscent Carlatm” (number 102), and one day when a group of us from work went there for lunch, one of my colleagues wrote “concupiscent” on his blackboard when he got back to the office, intending to look the word up. Before he had a chance to, another colleague wrote under it, “adj: horny”. Yes, that works.
The first time my parents came to visit after I moved there, I wanted to take them to Roy’s for dinner. My dad, though, said he didn’t want sandwiches for dinner, and insisted on going to a chain “family” restaurant instead. I took them to Roy’s for lunch later in their visit, and he was very impressed. He said, "We could have come here for dinner." Right.
Anyway, with all those silly/fancy/involved/huge sandwiches, it turns out that everything above was a digression, because none of them qualifies as the best sandwich on the planet.
For that, we go to a tiny health-food shop in McLean, VA, which I suspect is long gone now: Mother Nature’s. They had a sandwich made with avocado, American muenster cheese, hummus, tomato, and alfalfa sprouts, on light, but hearty, multi-grain bread. Simple. But, damn, that was so good. Didn’t need crab salad, didn’t need fried oysters, didn’t need baked beans nor chicken bosom nor golden sauce.
And, so, the other day I had avocado, cheddar, hummus, tomato, and lettuce on light, but hearty, multi-grain bread. It took me back, in my mind, twenty-five years. The muenster (instead of cheddar) and the sprouts (instead of lettuce) really do make it better, but one uses what one has to hand.
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An old hobby of mine, but one I haven’t engaged in for more than 30 years, is amateur radio (also called “ham radio”, for reasons lost in antiquity[1]). I keep my license current (N3BL), but, while I was active in high school and college, I dropped it after that, initially because I had no way to install an antenna, and then mostly because I was too busy with other things.[2]
Many “hams” deal with the antenna issue by sticking to higher frequencies — VHF and UHF, the two-meter band and above — which need only small antennas that can pretty much go anywhere. But communication at those frequencies is generally short-distance (due to radio propagation issues) and by voice (by convention), and my preference, when I was into it, was long-distance communication with Morse code.
There’s a ham-radio term for long-distance communication: DX, following a convention of using an initial with an “x” to replace the rest of the word (TX is transmitter or transmission, RX is receiver or reception, and so on). What qualifies as DX varies by context; a contact on UHF that’s 200 miles away would be DX there, but on the 20-meter band one expects to contact the world.
As a general term, “DXing” usually refers to talking with people in other countries. In fact, there’s a certificate one can get, called DXCC (DX Century Club), which acknowledges that one has demonstrated contact with 100 countries. There are stickers for increments of 50 beyond.
The other day, it occurred to me that we could do a new kind of DXing, and maybe look toward a DXCC for it. We could record the countries from which we got spam. A sort of Internet DXing for the 21st century, yes?
Of course, we have to have some sort of “rules” to determine the country of a spam message. I’ve decided on these, admittedly a bit fluffy, in order of priority:
Of course, this means I have to actually start looking at my spam, more than I already do (I actually do scan it now, and read some of the ones that look like they might be amusing), but it should be fun to keep track of the list. So far, in three days of checking, here’s what I have (go here for the current list):
I’m well on my way. Who wants to play too?
Update: I have created a permanent page to hold the current list.
[1] There are many suggested origins, all of questionable veracity; let’s just stick with “origin uncertain.”
[2] I’ll note that some of the commenters to these pages are also hams; I know that Jim, Ray, and Brent are.
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I’ve really been trying not to think of Ross Douthat as an idiot, but it’s been hard. When he replaced Bill Kristol as the token conservative on the New York Times op-ed team, I knew it had to be an improvement, and it has been so. His columns are sometimes good. Unfortunately, I still too often, when I read them, find myself smashing nose-first into a wall of ideas that were conceived with blinders on.
His latest column is a good example. His basic point is a reasonable one to debate: Should we have national standards for how to teach kids about sex, or should we defer to local sensibilities? Your answer to that will depend upon whether or not you think that there’s an objective “best method” that transcends local mores, and that letting the locals decide will cause problems for kids in areas where they would choose to deviate too far from what’s best.
Mr Douthat thinks there is not such an objective “best”, and that’s a fair conclusion. The problem is how he got there.
From his column, “Sex Ed in Washington”:
Liberals hated almost everything about George W. Bush’s presidency, but they harbored a particular animus toward a minor domestic policy priority: abstinence-based sex education. The abstinence effort accounted for about a hundred million dollars in a trillion-dollar budget, but in the eyes of many critics it was Bushism at its worst — contemptuous of experts, careless about public health and captive to religious conservatism.
Indeed, with a spotlight on the “careless about public health” part. It was shown over and over not to work, and it has been once again with new numbers recently reported: teen pregnancy went up in 2006, and “liberals” blame abstinence-only education.
For what Mr Douthat thinks of that, let’s go back to his column:
The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it “crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work.”
In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton’s presidency. If you blame abstinence programs for a year’s worth of bad news, you’d also have to give them credit for more than a decade’s worth of progress.
No. No, no, no, no.
Because, yes, Bill Clinton funded abstinence education as well. Forty years ago, my parents and my school taught abstinence. We have been teaching teens and pre-teens not to have sex until they’re older and emotionally, socially, and financially ready ever since we figured out what causes pregnancy. The problem is not that we teach abstinence.
The problem occurs when we teach only abstinence. The problem shows up when we fail to prepare children with information on how to protect themselves when they, despite the moral values we’ve instilled in them, fall victim to a natural urge that’s more powerful than a locomotive.
When I was young, alongside the lessons that told us to wait were lessons about pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, lessons about condoms, IUDs, and contraceptive pills, lessons about what to look for and when to go see a doctor. These lessons did not confuse us, did not give us mixed signals, and did not chip away at the moral framework our families and communities were passing on to us. We understood the priorities — but we had a backup plan, for when things went awry.
And that’s the point — contrary to what Mr Douthat says, teaching abstinence with a backup plan does work, and has been shown to, through the years. What fails is the policy of teaching abstinence only.
Now, we can still have the debate about whether communities should be forced into one lesson plan or another through federal policy. But let’s frame it properly, and not dismiss a major part of the argument out of hand by misrepresenting it.
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Forty years ago today, mathematician, philosopher, peace and human rights activist Bertrand Russell died at the age of 97. Russell has appeared in these pages before, in a discussion of Russell’s paradox.
Today, in Russell’s memory, we’ll give him this page to speak for himself. Specifically, he’ll talk about his view of religious belief, in this clip on YouTube, embedded below. I’ll help him out by posting a transcript below the video.
Q: Why are you not a Christian?
Russell: Because I see no evidence whatever for any of the Christian dogmas. I’ve examined all the stock arguments in favour of the existence of God, and none of them seem to me to be logically valid.
Q: Do you think there’s a practical reason for having a religious belief, for many people?
Russell: Well, there can’t be a practical reason for believing what isn’t true. That’s quite... at least, I rule it out as impossible. Either the thing is true, or it isn’t. If it is true, you should believe it, and if it isn’t, you shouldn’t. And if you can’t find out whether it’s true or whether it isn’t, you should suspend judgment. But you can’t... it seems to me a fundamental dishonesty and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it’s useful, and not because you think it’s true.
Q: I was thinking of those people who find that some kind of religious code helps them to live their lives. It gives them a very strict set of rules, the rights and the wrongs.
Russell: Yes, but those rules are generally quite mistaken. A great many of them do more harm than good. And they would probably be able to find a rational morality that they could live by if they dropped this irrational traditional taboo morality that comes down from savage ages.
Q: But are we, perhaps the ordinary person perhaps isn’t strong enough to find this own personal ethic. They have to have something imposed upon them from outside.
Russell: Oh, I don’t think that’s true, and what is imposed on you from outside is of no value whatever. It doesn’t count.
Q: Well, you were brought up, of course, as a Christian. When did you first decide that you did not want to remain a believer in the Christian ethic?
Russell: I never decided that I didn’t want to remain a believer. I decided... between the ages of 15 and 18, I spent almost all my spare time thinking about Christian dogmas, and trying to find out whether there was any reason to believe them. And by the time I was 18, I’d discarded the last of them.
Q: Do you think that that gave you an extra strength in your life?
Russell: Oh, I don’t... no, I should’t have said so, neither extra strength nor the opposite. I mean, I was just engaged in the pursuit of knowledge.
Q: As you approach the end of life, do you have any fear of some kind of afterlife, or do you feel that that is just...
Russell: Oh, no, I think that’s nonsense.
Q: There is no afterlife?
Russell: None whatever.
Q: Do you have any fear of something that is common amongst atheists and agnostics, who have been atheists or agnostics all their lives, who are converted just before they die, to a form of religion?
Russell: Well, you know, it doesn’t happen nearly as often as religious people think it does. Because religious people, most of them, think that it’s a virtuous act to tell lies about the death beds of agnostics and such. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t happen very often.
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During my recent visit to Florida, I went to the Boca Raton Museum of Art and to Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, and I’d normally post photos of them, too, as I did with the wetlands. Only, neither of them allow photography inside. The Boca museum has a sculpture garden, but it’s small, and Vizcaya has gardens, and you can, of course, take pictures of the outside of the house. But in both cases, the most interesting stuff is inside.
Now, what are you likely to do when you’re looking around on the Internet and you see some pictures that really appeal to you? I think you’re likely to say, “Ooh, I’d like to go there!”, especially when it’s someplace readily accessible (“Hey, I’ll be in Florida this spring, so I should check that out.”)
Far from being any sort of copyright infringement, quite the opposite of deterring visitors (“I’ve already seen it on the Internet.”), people’s posting of photos is free advertising, which draws visitors to the real thing. In addition to that, it’s my feeling that any sort of museum that’s run by the government or otherwise relies on public money has a responsibility to allow the sort of public use that citizens taking photographs represents.
I’m very happy that many of the museums I frequent — the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the Smithsonian museums in DC — allow photography. Some (the Guggenheim and the Whitney, for example) don’t. But why not? They all should.
I am not a number!
I am a free man!
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