Over the Edge

Clay Shirky is one of my favorite writers about the Internet. Only some of that is because I was the first editor to put his essays in general circulation; the rest is that he's such a wonderfully clear thinker and writer. We don't usually agree entirely, but our conversations always leave me more informed than when we started.

His latest is an investigation into the meme "Half the world has never made a phone call." Clay does what someone should have done a long time ago: he tracks down who first said it, and when, and why. Then he talks about why it probably isn't true -- and why it doesn't matter one way or another.

I don't usually read the Education section of the Sunday NYTimes, but its lead piece caught my eye this week.

In New York State, people have a constitutional right to an education. The question is: How good an education?

... the court ruled [last week] that schools were obligated by the state Constitution to do nothing more than prepare students for low-level jobs, for serving on a jury and for reading campaign literature ÷ the equivalent, the court suggested, of an eighth- or a ninth-grade education.

Yep. Sure makes me want to send my kids to a public school. (And let's not forget that New York State sends less money per kid to New York City schools than to any other district in the state.)

In the discussion of kids as economic units vs kids as citizen units, I'd venture that this ruling does credit to neither. Whatever happened to the notion that an educated electorate is necessary for an adequately functioning democracy?

I once saw a grafitto scrawled on a bridge in Boston: "If voting mattered, they wouldn't let you." Sometimes I do wonder if our government doesn't prefer an electorate that's easy to lie to.

My friend Semi, who used to produce an entertaining if erratic e-mail newsletter, has joined the weblog thang. I'd like to think that he was inspired by my sitting in his basement last month, sucking up his bandwidth while writing OTE and trying in vain to hide from controlled bedlam all 'round.

Pretty good writer, Semi is. You'll especially enjoy his piece today.

From Ernie the Attorney:

Can you copyright silence?  Some people think so.  But, of course, some people are frigging idiots.

Oh, good Lord. Me, I read it that someone's overreacting just a wee tad.

A couple of years ago, the April edition of Electronic Musician magazine ran a "review" of a disc of samples of silence, suitable for use in your favorite sequencer. Funny stuff.

(We'll just ignore that silences really do sound different from each other. The silence in Carnegie Hall is different from the silence in an airplane hanger. I wouldn't want to try to make an acoustic model to prove it, though.)

As the Editor of NetGuide, I spent a fair amount of time deriding Yahoo! Internet Life. Making fun of its name was easy; making fun of its content was much much harder.

And it was no fun at all to look across the battlements and realize that I was competing with Barry Golson, who once edited TV Guide and who conducted some of the best known Playboy Interviews of the 70s and 80s. What made it worse was the realization that his management knew what it meant to create a great consumer title, and while mine didn't have a clue.

YIL outlasted NetGuide by a ridiculous length of time. Ziff Davis folded it today: bad ad environment. Its 1 million-plus circulation probably just made it too expensive for advertisers, and Ziff is in no position these days to carry titles that aren't making it. But the closing sucks greatly nonetheless -- a bunch more of my friends are now out of work.

Barry, Angela, Ron, Scott: have a round on me. Lord knows you've earned it.

Blogspace has been passing around this article by Janis Ian (the songwriter and singer of "Society's Child" and "At Seventeen") -- a particularly clear exegesis of the recording industry from the viewpoint of an independent musician:

I don't pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing. If a music industry executive claims I should agree with their agenda because it will make me more money, I put my hand on my walletｷand check it after they leave, just to make sure nothing's missing.... Every time we make a few songs available on my website, sales of all the CDs go up. A lot.

Back in the day, the two major wire services (that'd be UPI and the AP, sonny) got together and issued a consolidated style book. They agreed on things like tricky spellings and usage and correct form for datelines. Each service went a little beyond the basics, though. The UPI Stylebook was studded with entries such as:

burro, burrow: A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a journalist, you are expected to know the difference.

That one never made it into the AP version, which is about all you need to know about the difference between UPI and the AP.

Except for this: for years, the AP book was titled "The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual." It doesn't take a genius to read that at least two different ways. So I mourned just a little today when I saw that the latest edition -- two years old now -- is called "The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law."

You Snooze You Win, Learning Study Reveals

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Walt Kelly. "Now is the time for all good men to come to." [Quotes of the Day]

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"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

-- Galileo Galilei.

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We're back.

OTE and the entire Dan Rosenbaum family of fine information products was unexpectedly offline from Friday evening until Monday noon. Some sort of switch problem that knocked out the mail and web servers -- and apparently a bunch of other machines.

The good news is that the outage encouraged me to get away from the machines so I had a lovely weekend full of lots of family. The other good news is that I've more or less forgotten all the things I wanted to post.

Piece this morning in the Wall Street Journal (it's behind a tollbooth, so no link) about the sorry state of Central American economies tied to coffee prices. Seems that there's now a global glut; wholesale prices are at 50 cents per pound, while production costs in the high mountains are 80 cents per pound. The result is a lot of people out of work -- and the very real possibility that they'll turn to growing something a whole lot less benign than coffee.

What makes the article worth looking for is a rundown of how high coffee prices were an instrument of American foreign policy during the Cold War: strong prices means stable governments, which meant slim pickings for the Godless Pledge-fearing Commies. Now the Vietnam (speaking of Godless Pledge-fearing Commies) has joined Brazil as a major exporter of low-quality beans, supply outstrips demand.

Not that you'd notice it at the checkout, of course. WSJ points out that while wholesale prices have dropped 80 percent in the last five years, retail prices have dropped 20 percent.

Favorite quote:

"Up to 75% of a typical can of coffee is now made up of the cheap stuff, which they then cut with Central American or Colombian [arabica] beans so your coffee doesn't taste like a shoe," says Eric Poncon, director in Nicaragua of ECOM Group.

Interesting Net-related ruling last week from the New York State Court of Appeals (NY's highest court).

The question before the court is whether an item on the Web is published when it's first made available, or when it's seen? The more aware of technology you are, the more subtle the question may become. Many sites -- including this one -- don't create static web pages, but rather generate the content on demand. That means the page you see is different from the page that someone else might see, but that both of them are created especially for you and aren't necessarily stored anywhere in that precise form.

So if I libel you on a dynamically created page that you don't see for three years after the offending item is first available, when precisely have I libelled you? When you see it? Or when it was first see-able? It makes a difference because in New York, you have just 1 year after the libel to file suit.

Anyway, the AP reports that in New York, publication happens when an item is first posted:

The Court of Appeals said it made little sense to adopt Mr. Firth's argument that a new publication took place ÷ and a new limitation period started running ÷ with every downloading of a document.

I'm not sure that's right technologically, but it feels right on the merits.

"I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers."

-- Mahatma Gandhi

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There's a bad news tech story floating around that's getting spun idiotically as a good news story. Some San Francisco consultancy says that 93 dot-coms have closed down since the beginning of the year. The good news is supposedly that that's down from the 345 that folded in same period as last year, and the 862 that folded the year before.

What seems to have eluded both InformationWeek (where the story originated) and the AP (which picked it up), is that the dot-com world is hardly the target-rich environment that it was two years ago. Yes, the number of failures is down dramatically; it apparently hasn't occurred to anyone connected with this story that there are a hell of a lot fewer companies available today to fail.

Let's put it this way. There are 25 people in a room, and 15 of them die on the first day. Ten more die on the second day. By this consultancy's reckoning, the second day represents progress, since fewer people died that day than on the first day.

Janet Reno to host dance party

"We've consistently heard from people that if we had a dance party of our own it would be a terrific way to engage young people in the campaign."

Voter polls show Reno leading the race for the [Florida] Democratic gubernatorial nomination. If she wins the September 10 primary, she will face Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, the younger brother of President Bush, in the November general election.

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The blue dot over by the Blogrolling table is an experiment in randomization. Go ahead. Click it. You'll be tossed through the rabbithole of the Internet to some other weblog. I have no idea where, and it'll be different everytime you click on it.

The only thing the other weblogs have in common is that they all carry the blue dot, a project of Joe Jennett's Best of the Cool.

Let me know where you land.

From  the excellent Privacy Digest via the also excellent The Shifted Librarian:

Last week the Berkman Center held their second annual Internet Law Program, an intensive course in (surprise) internet law and developments. You probably didn't spend the time/money to attend, but the topics covered are interesting enough (to me anyway) to check it out even second-hand. Dan Gillmor attended and posted his notes: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5 part 1 and Day 5 part 2. Donna Wentworth was there, trying to record the seminar in real-time; hopefully she's learned her lesson. There is tons of interesting stuff in there - it's worth your time to read through if you have any interest in the subject matter at all."

Tons of interesting stuff indeed. I spent most of the week being depressed that I wasn't there. What a great thing that must have been....

More on the Denver kid hauled into court over an overdue library book.

"Marisa is scared to check out books," Norma Gohr said. "This whole situation is ridiculous."

 

From CNET:

Are Mac users smarter?. A new study compares Mac-using Web surfers with their PC-wielding counterparts. If you're reading this on Windows, feel free to take your time on the big words.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that this study comes out the week before MacWorld Expo. But what do I know? I use Windows.

Blog Panic. Atlas Says "Goodbye World, Hello Tequila!"

"Today I'm accepting something important.

I cannot cope.

I am now subscribed to 37 news sources.  I add about one new source a week.  Each of these is easily capable of delivering at least one or two items each day that are really interesting to me.  That I want to talk about.  But I cannot absorb this quanitity of new information even on a good day.  There is no time to reflect, to mull, to doze on it.

So I have resolved that I don't care.

I won't cope.

I'll let good stuff go by the wayside.

Other people will find it.

Google will keep track of it.

It's all their when the time comes.

I'm not Atlas to the internet.

Even to my own small chunk of it.

There.

I feel better now." [Curiouser and curiouser!]

This is a difficult thing to accept, especially when you have an aggregator that pulls everything in for you. I hit this stage a few months ago, but it's especially daunting when you go out of town (or injure your back!).

And that's what it is - a stage. I think there are stages to blogging. Excitement, Fun, Overwhelmed, Panicked, Acceptance, and then the cycle starts anew. Are there "12 steps of blogging?"

From the NYTimes:

Outlook Improves for Magazines Ads. The decline in advertising pages in magazines slowed in June, falling by the smallest amount for any month so far this year, according to data released yesterday by the Publishers Information Bureau.

Slim comfort, but comfort nonetheless, when the best you can say about your industry is that a calamatous decline is slowing. You want to help? Go out and buy a page in your favorite magazine. If you can't think of which one, let's talk -- I'll be glad to build one to your specifications.

Big fire at the Quad/Graphics printing plant in Lomira, Wisconsin.

Quad, if you don't know, is one of the world's largest printers. The Lomira plant is the biggest printing complex in the Western Hemisphere; this story says the 46-acre campus employs 2000 people and includes an apartment complex. From CNN:

The area where the fire broke out was a new part of the printing plant that had only been in operation for a month, Feiereisen said. The 10-story building was used for paper storage and contained 25,000 palettes of paper with 1 ton of paper on each palette, he said.

[Later: Here's the report from the local newspaper, the Fond du Lac Reporter.]

Peggy reads Good Housekeeping, bless her.

If you can believe it, Good Housekeeping has some cutting edge content in the current August 2002 issue. Of course, it's all in the ads, but what a shift it reflects:

......

So what do we have here? Pages that advertise the internet embedded in your main kitchen appliance, credit card protection for online shopping, and the new mini-Discover Card that you can carry around on your keychain. They're all selling modern convenience the same way they sell dishwasher detergent and diapers. I did a double-take when I saw the ad for the LG refrigerator because it's the first time I've seen it mentioned in a mainstream magazine aimed at women, implying that it's actually ready for prime-time and available for sale.

I think it would be interesting to go back and trace the evolution of ads for internet-based products, along with the curve for adding URLs to general ads. I think the first one I ever saw with a URL was a TV commercial for a car company, and I did a double-take then, too. Now we've got the internet refrigerator ad in Good Housekeeping. They don't have to sell the internet anymore - they can sell the convenience it offers because we've accepted its ubiquitous nature.

Exactly right. The Net isn't an application, it's a platform, and it's a platform that's approaching what may be indistinguishible from ubiquity.

A bunch of years ago, Yahoo ran its first TV ads. I was very proud until I noticed that they did not include a URL. Unbeliveable.

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From Ananova, but too good to not quote in its entirety.

An Italian professor says it takes 15 minutes of oral sex to burn off the calories consumed in a long sip of wine.

Dietician Bruno Fabbri has been looking into the exercise value of sexual activities.

He found a 26-minute sex session which ends with an orgasm gets rid of half a pizza.

French-kissing for 53 minutes can help you lose the fat found in a burger and chips meal.

News2000 website reports that even undoing a bra can help you lose fat.

He said: "That's not of course if you unclasp the bra with two hands, which will cost you just eight calories, but unclasping it with only one hand statistically takes the count to 18.

"Trying to unclasp a bra with one's mouth instead takes an average 87 calories."

It's noon Saturday, and tickets to the E Street Band's Summer/Fall tour are imminently going on sale. I'm sitting in bed, laptop propped up, Ticketmaster loaded, mouse finger twitching, waiting for the stroke of 12. My wife, Olivia, brings in the twins (who turned seven months today) to play on the bed. M is still slithering, but J is undoubtedly crawling. And curious.

The clock ticks over to noon, and I'm reloading pages. Instead of the 25 shows that Springsteen played in the New York Area last time, he's doing just two, so feel a degree of urgency. Against the odds, the Ticketmaster ordering page loads. I quickly punch in the information it wants, and click Order Tickets. I'm going to Jersey, I think, when, the computer beeps and the previous page loads.

Whaaa? J has crawled over and in an excess of enthusiams for mimicing his Dad, stumbled on the key combination for Back. I gently (really!) shoo him away, and reload. The Order Ticket pages comes up again, and I'm about to click Order when this time the screen goes black. J has somehow put the laptop into sleep mode -- a neat trick because I myself don't know the key combination to do that.

I know when I'm beat.

When Microsoft announced its "trustworthy computing" initiative, I foolishly thought it meant that the company would concentrate on shipping software that didn't crash and that didn't create critical security vunerablities for its clients. Turns out they had in mind something like Palladium.

Mitch Wagner has been doing a stellar job in unspooling what Microsoft has said about Palladium, what it hasn't said, what it meant to say, and what it most assuredly didn't mean to say. You need to read his stuff -- which can get dense, because it's a dense subject -- if you want to understand how you may be forced to use your computer in five years.

Essentially, if I understand it correctly, Microsoft says that the best way to assure software quality is to control the entire computing ecosystem -- hardware and software; server, client and network. Even the data.

There are a lot of obvious problems with that, and more that are more subtle than obvious. If you care, and you should, bookmark Mitch's site; he's on the hunt.

I was poking around the Fond du Lac Reporter for the Quad Graphics story, and found this:

Ricky R. Bridges, of 379 N. Peters Ave., Apt. G-8, was charged with operating a vehicle without the owner龝 consent after he allegedly stole an Old Dutch Potato Chip truck, and ate some of its contents.

<snip>

A witness said she saw the suspect stumble out of the truck, apparently intoxicated, clutching a bag of chips.

Bridges told police he was at the Walleye Weekend festival during the weekend, and doesn穰 recall stealing a potato chip truck, but he did find a key in his pocket when he woke up the next morning.

 

From the NYTimes:

OUTH HUNTINGTON, N.Y., July 17 ÷ It was the classic news story: man bites dog.

Why is it that when you tune in to a rerun of a show you saw only once during the previous season, they're inevitably showing the exact episode you saw last time?

The Babysitter's Network is a wonderful thing. We've known for about a week that this has been going on, because babysitters talk to each other.

An EDP (emotionally disturbed person) has been running around my neighborhood  for the last week or so, offering to relieve mothers/babysitters of their babies. In at least four cases, apparently, she did more than offer; she made physical attempts to take the kids.

 Last week, the cops took her off the street and had her remanded for psychiatric evaluation. She apparently was OK enough to be released from the hospital; she was arrested on Tuesday. Turns out she has a record of 10 arrests, five of them for child snatching in Manhattan between 1994 and 1997.

The NYTimes had only a brief on it (second item) and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle's web site is a piece of crap. The Daily News had a good full story.

"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency."

-- Alan Turing

Reuters is reporting that scientists in England are on the verge of perfecting really thin-screen televisions:

Roll-up, flexible televisions, akin to the melting watches of Salvador Dali's surreal landscapes, have become possible thanks to a glowing plastic compound perfected in the laboratories of Britain's Cambridge Display Technology (CDT).

"You're effectively printing televisions," CDT Chief Executive David Fyfe told Reuters. "They can be printed onto thin plastic almost like paper."

<snip>

"Realistically, you will see roll up displays around 2004 or 2005," he added.

 

Meow Mix cat food is apparently shopping around a TV program aimed at cats. Not cat lovers. Cats. CNN points out one of the flaws in the concept:

Lacking opposable thumbs, felines will have to rely on their owners to tune in to the half-hour show.

The other major flaw? It's a stupid idea.

The S.F. Chronicle carries a story about the Postal Service's trial of Segway scooters in Bagdhad on the Bay. The USPS bought 40 scooters at $9,000 per.

Scott Tucker, the Postal Service district manager for the San Francisco area, said the Segways would be used on five routes in the Pacific Heights and Steiner Street Station areas, some of the hilliest in the city.

The scooters are apparently sidewalk-legal in 24 states, California not among them. This, San Francisco being San Francisco, is causing some controversy.

Semi's gonna have a ball with this one.

There's a new director of the Pentagon's new Information Awareness Office, part of the DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (It was DARPA's organizational predecessor that gave the world the Internet. But I digress...) This new director is one John M. Poindexter.

Yes, that John Poindexter. Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor. The one who was convicted in the Iran-Contra affair. Remember? He sold weapons (illegally) to Iran, and used the cash to (also illegally) fund the Contra insurgency in Nicaragua. Ollie North's buddy. It was in all the papers.

Poindexter was convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying documents. The convictions were overturned; Poindexter had been given immunity before Congress (after invoking his Fifth Amendment rights). His testimony, though public and nationally broadcast, was inadmissible, courts said.

So here he comes sliming his way back into public service, this time running an office that is supposed to:

create a new intelligence infrastructure to allow ... agencies to share information and collaborate effectively, and new information technology aimed at exposing terrorists and their activities and support systems.... The key to fighting terrorism is information.  Elements of the solution include gathering a much broader array of data than we do currently, discovering information from elements of the data, creating models of hypotheses, and analyzing these models in a collaborative environment to determine the most probable current or future scenario.

To me, this sounds a lot like what the NSA is supposed to be doing. If you read the IOS's page closely -- and there's no way to read it casually -- it looks like IOS is developing ways to massage and pass around raw data that the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office and all that crew develops.

Which is not a bad thing. And it's surely a comedown for a past National Security Advisor to have an office that's probably deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, far from corridors of power. And it speaks well of the man that he still wants to be in public service.

But still. John Poindexter should be in jail, not in the Pentagon. He waged a private war that was contrary to the policy of the government he swore to serve. He should not be pulling a government paycheck -- much less with a high security clearance.

Here's a ton of links about Poindexter and Iran-Contra. Thanks to bOing-bOing for the original link.

A story in the Washington Post says administrators at American University are apparently using copyright as a means to suppress a campus gadfly's taping of a public lecture by Tipper Gore.

"It is a very technical charge to assert as the basis of campus punishment," said First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams. "A lawyer can make a case that her copyright rights were violated, but it is a very unattractive case."

 

XM Satellite Radio will start carrying Playboy Radio on September 3. Playboy Radio?

When the World Trade Center was destroyed, a big part of downtown Manhattan's mass transit hub went with it. The weekly broadsheet NY Observer fronts a story about options for rail in the rebuilding.

As with most infrastructure projects in New York, this one is proving difficult, with competing interests from different rail agencies, and divisions of the same agency. The core question is whether commuter rail should be extended from Midtown to Downtown, or should the city keep the current (and prior) system of requiring suburbanites to change to a subway -- and pay an extra fare -- to get Downtown?

One interesting option -- and this is real inside baseball for rail foamers  -- will bring a kind of hybrid subway/commuter rail from Long Island to Downtown:, using existing track:

... the plan would require LIRR commuters to switch at the Jamaica station for a special shuttle that would follow existing LIRR tracks to the Atlantic Avenue Terminal in downtown Brooklyn. From there, it would use a "drill track" fifth center track used only in emergenciesn the A line until just before the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop. There, it would move onto the F line and use the Rutgers Street Tunnel that currently runs between the York Street F stationhe last in Brooklynnd the East Broadway station on Manhattan龝 Lower East Side. From there, it could make any number of switches onto existing tracks into lower Manhattan.... Commuters from Long Island would make only one stop after boarding the shuttle in Jamaicat MetroTech in downtown Brooklynefore barreling towards lower Manhattan.

From CNet:

Year-end surge to lift IT spending. A last-minute shopping spree as IT buyers scrape out their budgets will push computer technology spending beyond 2001 levels, predicts research firm IDC.

It's news to me that IT buyers have budgets to scrape out. But what's more important to me, frankly, is that IT sellers start to advertise again. Jeez, could magazines get any thinner?

The NYTimes architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, presents an idea for rebuilding the World Trade Center site, simultaneously fixing another problem with lower Manhattan. Interesting reading.

So while Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom are splashed across the airwaves and the front pages, as the stock market plummets and people's retirement funds are wiped away in a matter of weeks, what's Congress doing? Why, making it harder for poor people to declare bankruptcy, of course.

A "bankruptcy reform" bill has been moving through Congress for the last year, and the NYTimes reports that it's finally cleared a conference committee. The most salient point in the bill is that credit card debt would not be discharged in a bankrupcty; it would still have to be paid off.

It should surprise no one that the moving force behind the legislation is MBNA, one of the more aggressive mass-marketers of credit cards -- particularly to the "sub-prime" borrowers who have worse credit and fewer financial resources. These people, of course, pay higher rates, tend to carry balances, and default more often. The plan was that the fees these borrowers paid would offset the higher default rate. It didn't work out that way, and MBNA has successfully gotten Congress to bail out its damaged business plan.

Some interesting points from the Times that should be skipped by those who still respect the legislative process:

• "Ranked by employee donations, MBNA was the largest corporate contributor to President Bush's 2000 campaign."
  
• "The company acknowledged that it gave a $447,000 debt-consolidation loan on what critics viewed as highly favorable terms to a crucial House supp