Grasping Reality with Both Hands

Burning Chrome...

Greg Farrell:

Former Goldman employee accused of cyber-theft: Law enforcement officials in the US arrested a former Goldman Sachs employee over the July 4 holiday weekend, accusing him of stealing sensitive automated trading codes and uploading them to a server based in Germany. Sergey Aleynikov, a computer programmer who joined Goldman in May 2007 and resigned last month, was arrested late Friday as he disembarked from a flight at Newark International Airport and charged the next day with theft of trade secrets and transfer of stolen property.

According to an affidavit filed by a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in the matter, Mr Aleynikov – who held the title of vice-president at Goldman before leaving June 5 – was part of a team that developed and improved the software codes used in the firm’s computerised trading programs. Mr Aleynikov was bound by Goldman’s standard confidentiality agreements. The FBI affidavit alleges Mr Aleynikov, after accepting the offer from his new firm – which has yet to be identified – downloaded approximately 32 megabytes of proprietary trading platform data from his desktop computer at work as well as his laptop at home on four separate occasions between June 1 and June 5, his last day at Goldman.

Hoisted from Archives: The Invisible College

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Invisible College: J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Invisible College," Chronicle of Higher Education Review 52:47 (July 28, 2006):

The Chronicle: 7/28/2006: The Invisible College: Right now I'm looking out my office window, perched above the large, grassy, Frisbee-playing, picnicking, and sunbathing area that stretches through Berkeley's campus. I'm looking straight out at the Golden Gate Bridge. It's a view that I marvel at every day. I wonder why the chancellor hasn't confiscated such offices and rented them out to hedge funds to improve the university's finances.

I walk out my door and look around: at the offices of professors who know more about topics like the history of the international monetary system or the evolution of income distribution than any other human beings alive, and at graduate students hanging out in the lounge. It's a brilliant intellectual community, this little slice of the world that is our visible college. You run into people in the hall and the lounge, and you learn interesting things. Paradise. For an academic, at least.

But I am greedy. I want more. I would like a larger college, an invisible college, of more people to talk to, pointing me to more interesting things. People whose views and opinions I can react to, and who will react to my reasoned and well-thought-out opinions, and to my unreasoned and off-the-cuff ones as well. It would be really nice to have Paul Krugman three doors down, so I could bump into him occasionally and ask, "Hey, Paul, what do you think of .. ." Aggressive younger people interested in public policy and public finance would be excellent. Berkeley is deficient in not having enough right-wingers; a healthy college has a well-diversified intellectual portfolio. The political scientists are too far away to run into by accident — somebody like Dan Drezner would be nice to have around (even if he does get incidence wrong sometimes).

Over the past three years, with the arrival of Web logging, I have been able to add such people to those I bump into — in a virtual sense — every week. My invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least.

Plus, Web logging is an excellent procrastination tool. Don't feel like grading? Don't feel like writing that ad hoc committee report or completing the revisions demanded by clueless referee X? Write on your Web log and get the warm glow of having accomplished something.

Plus, every legitimate economist who has worked in government has left swearing to do everything possible to raise the level of debate and to communicate with a mass audience rather than merely an ivory-tower audience. That is true of those on the right as well as the left. Web logging is a promising way to do that.

Plus, there is the hope that someday, somehow, all of this will develop in a way to provide useful tools for teaching or marketing one's books, or something — that Web logging is a lottery ticket to something in the future, unknown but good.

Plus — and this is the biggest plus — it is a play in the intellectual influence game. My blog got about 20,000 page-views a day last month.

The hope of all of us who blog is that we will become smarter, do more useful work, be happier and more productive, and will also impress our deans so they will raise our salaries. The first three hopes are clearly true: Academics who blog think more profound thoughts, have a bigger influence on the world — both the academic and the broader worlds — and are happier for it. Are we more productive in an academic sense? Maybe. We will see when things settle down.

Are our deans impressed? Not so far, but they should be. A lot of a university's long-run success depends on attracting good undergraduates. Undergraduates and their parents are profoundly influenced by the public face of the university. And these days, a thoughtful, intelligent, well-informed Web logger like Juan Cole or Dan Drezner is an important part of a university's public face. Michigan gains in reputation and mindshare from having a Cole on its faculty. Yale loses from not having an equivalent.

A great university has faculty members who do a great many things — teaching undergraduates, teaching graduate students, the many things that are "research," public education, public service, and the turbocharging of the public sphere of information and debate that is a principal reason that governments finance and donors give to universities. Web logs may well be becoming an important part of that last university mission.

Page Rank

Storage at Fifteen Cents per Gigabyte

And the flashdrive is the new paperclip...

Robin Sloan's Iran News Superfilter

#IranElection tracker for the easily overwhelmed (robinsloan.com): Super-filtered #IranElection info for the easily overwhelmed...

Via Xeni Jardin.

"Retro Me Sathanas!" Internet-Always-on-a-Problem Blogging

Mark Thoma emails:

Uh oh. The iPhone cut and paste works a little too well. Wonder how much time this will suck up. It will be good in boring seminars though. Or pretty much anytime the mind has a moment. Yep, uh oh.

The Future Is Here, It Is Just Not Easily Distributed (Iran Edition)

Author Walter Jon Williams says that he has an unimportant problem toay:

Angel Station: Watching My Uncompleted Novel Go Down in Flames: There is a scene just like this in the novel I'm working on. My whole novel is playing itself out before my very eyes. All its specialness and wonderfulness, coolness and invention is curling up and dying in fire, as if one of the incendiaries from Fahrenheit 451 found it before I could even finish it. The Twitter Revolution in Moldova was bad enough, but at least it didn't get a lot of coverage over here, and most Americans never heard of Moldova. Iran is different. I feel like all those guys who were working on Cold War novels when the Wall fell.

The parade of demonstrators in Tehran today was nine kilometers long. It's a People Power revolution fired up by social media--- you don't get a crowd that big by sticking up posters on lamp posts. (Does the use of Twitter in Iran somehow absolve it of totally sucking?) Hackers are also proving useful, by attacking Iranian government web sites. (But be careful, script kiddies of the world--- you don't want to bring the whole system down.)

And he has a recommendation for what you can do to help the people with serious problems:

If you want to turn your computer into a proxy server to help Iranians avoid government roadblocks, "Austin Heap" provides instructions here. Be sure to read the disclaimers. I'd do this myself, but I have to admit that it's all beyond my competence.

And he notes that the usual suspects are still acting badly, as usual:

As a final note, I'm startled by the wave of support for Ahmedinejad by American neocons like Marty Peretz ("Maybe the regime fiddled around a bit with the numbers at the polls and after the polling. Still, the outcome had a sense of authenticity.") and Martin Rubin. Maybe if there's regime change, and the Iranians liberate themselves, then the neocons won't get their holy war with Iran, and we won't get to liberate the Iranians by killing zillions of them. A great disappointment, to be sure.

UPDATE: The neocons aren't all speaking with one voice, it seems. Bill Kristol now demands that Obama immediately issue a statement of support to the protestors. Why? Because Hitler invaded Poland in 1939! (No, really! Read it yourself!) Ahmadinejad is Hitler! Obama is Chamberlain! So I guess Kristol's idea is for Obama to support the protestors, Ahmadinejad to denounce them as American puppets and kill them, and then we still get to invade Iran! Yay!

Nerd Tourism

Leila Abu-Saba sends us to Alison Chaiken's Technical Tourist's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area:

Technical Tourist: Sick of netnews? Caught up on all your blogs? You could always exercise, floss, call your mom or perform a breast self-exam. Nah. Perhaps you need:

The Technical Tourist's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area

1. Tour the Geysers, Calpine's geothermal generation plant in Middletown, Lake County. See giant turbines and clouds of sulfuric acid steam! The link is, ahem, optimized for a non-Mozilla browser, so you can also call toll-free (866)-GEYSERS for more information.

2. Visit the GM-Toyota NUMMI auto manufacturing plant in southern Fremont. There are fascinating robot welders and giant metal stampers. The tour is quite suitable for children in my unexpert opinion.

3. Particle accelerators are big fun. Consider an outing to the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley or the Stanford Linear Accelerator. The LBNL tour may also visit other facilities such as the National Center for Electron Microscopy, the Environmental Energy Technologies Division and the Center for Beam Physics.

4. For more gigantic steel structures, check out the Port of Oakland tour. Enjoy giant cranes and a boat ride too. (Thanks to Meg.) To get an even closer look at the cranes (and a fine view of San Francisco as well), walk around and have a picnic at Middle Harbor Shoreline Park.

5. The Menlo Park branch of the USGS is a reliable source of entertainment. Every couple of years there's an Open House. In the meantime browse the quads, fault maps and satellite photos at the Earth Science Information Center, which is located in Building 3 at 345 Middlefield Road and is open Monday through Friday from 8 to 4.

6. Meditate on earthquakes while hiking the San Andreas Fault Trail in Palo Alto or seeing the Loma Prieta Epicenter in Forest of Nisene Marks. (I'll confess that the Nisene Marks hike is a bit dull: miles and miles of trail through dark second-growth redwood forest.) Many more earthquake-related outings are described in Geologic Trips: San Francisco and the Bay Area, which I highly recommend. Another book of interest is Geology Trails of Northern California, which I haven't yet had the chance to purchase. If you're really interested in local seismology field trips, send for the Field Trip Guidebooks from the Conferences on Earthquake Hazards in the Eastern San Francisco Bay Area that were sponsored by Cal State East Bay.

7. Take the ferry to Sausalito and view the San Francisco Bay Model. (Thanks to KML.)

8. While you're in Marin, visit the Nike Missile Base in the Headlands. (Thanks to KML.)

9. The Hiller Aviation Museum specializes in early helicopters which range from the admirable to the laughable. The annual Vertical Challenge should not be missed. (Thanks to KML.)

10. Speaking of aviation, the Moffett Field Museum is now open Weds-Sat from 10-2. Learn all about Moffett's history with lighter-than-air craft.

11. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View is full of treasures. Besides the Visible Storage there's an excellent speaker series. (Until the interpretive material at the exhibits is expanded, this one really is for nerds only.)

12. The San Jose Astronomical Association will invite you to a star party. Alternatively drive up Mount Hamilton and take in the Lick Observatory. In the summer Lick has astronomical lectures and public viewing plus concerts. And the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland has free public telescope viewing every Friday and Saturday night. (Thanks to Leila.)

13. Arthur Frommer rates the San Francisco Cable Car Museum as "one of the top ten free attractions in the world." (Thanks to Leila.)

14. Take the Hazel-Atlas silica mine tour at the Black Diamond Mines in Antioch. There's also a lot of old mining equipment at Almaden Quicksilver County Park in San Jose. (Thanks to KML.)

15. We still haven't gotten around to visiting the Intel Museum in Santa Clara or the Exploration Center at NASA Ames in Mountain View. South San Jose hosts the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center but there's no indication when it's open.

16. A bit further afield, the California State Railroad Museum looks appealing. Of course you could take the remarkably scenic and comfortable Amtrak Capitol Corridor line to get there. Closer to home you can ride the Niles Canyon Railway in Fremont or the Roaring Camp Railroad in Felton. If you still have railfanning on the brain, consider the Western Railway Museum on Highway 12 between Suisun and Rio Vista. (Thanks to Mark.)

17. No matter how you feel about our California water politics, the acqueducts and dams are certainly an engineering marvel. The Sunol water temple is open 9 AM to 3 PM Monday through Friday. The similar Pulgas Water Temple, adjacent to the Crystal Springs Reservoir, has more reasonable hours but no longer has any water. (Thanks to Mark and, come to think of it, KML.)

18. The American Society for Mechanical Engineering has a Northern California Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering web site. Some of the sites can be visited in person while others just have cool photos. (Thanks to LSK.)

19. Visit the California Academy of Science in their temporary home at 875 Howard Street in San Francisco and be amazed by the ant colonies. The museum is open every day from 10 to 5. (Thanks to LSK.)

20. In the recent past I've seen advertisements for tours of the Altamont windfarm and the Cargill salt processing facility in Newark, but I can no longer find information about these excursions. Anyone?

21. If you care about engineering history, check out the local chapter of the Society for Industry Archeology.

22. If all else fails, go to Central Computer and hang out. CC employs staff who have actually used computers before.

23. Know of any Bay Area technical highlights that I've omitted? Have a similar web page highlighting nerdly landmarks in another urban area? Please send email.

alchaiken@gmail.com

Fun with Issuu...

http://issuu.com/delong/docs/20090601_issuu_slouching.vi

Open publication

---

Online Economics Courses--Video, etc.

Mark Thoma: http://www.youtube.com/user/markthoma

Josh Hausman writes:

Dear Brad,

Berkeley is a clear leader in this area. Most schools have nothing online except course syllabi and perhaps some problem sets. In almost every google search I tried, http://econ161.berkeley.edu/macro_online/, http://delong.typepad.com/berkeley_econ_101b_spring/, and/or Berkeley webcasts http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ came up at the top of the results....

[W]hat some other schools do have:

1. MIT OpenCourseWare: A disappointment. None of the economics courses on the site have any audio or video of lectures. And most of the course materials are a few years old. http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Economics/index.htm

1. Yale's 'Open Yale' site may be better than MIT's OpenCourseWare. There are two economics courses online: Shiller's Yale course on financial markets. It has a very complete website with audio and video of lectures: http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/financial-markets; Ben Polak's course on game theory: http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/game-theory/contents/sessions.html.

1. Audio or video of Timothy Taylor lecturing on economic history is available for purchase here: http://www.teach12.com/storex/professor.aspx?ID=24.

2. From the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, a video game that teaches introductory microeconomics (students can receive credit for successfully playing the game!): http://web.uncg.edu/dcl/econ201/. Also see this article about the game: http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2006/09/ECON-201-A-University-Economics-Course-as-an-Online-Computer-Game.aspx?Page=4&p=1. And Online Economics College Courses at UNC Greensboro.

3. 'World Lecture Hall', out of UT Austin, has links to dozens of courses with online materials. But only two of the economics courses (both micro) seem to have video attached: http://web.austin.utexas.edu/wlh/browse.cfm.

4. Utah State has five economics courses online with audio of each lecture: http://ocw.usu.edu/courselist.

5. I like how the AEA combined video and slides in these webcasts: http://www.aeaweb.org/webcasts/assa2009.php.

Limits to Growth...

Charlie Stross:

Charlie's Diary: LOGIN 2009 keynote: gaming in the world of 2030: I don't think we're likely to get much more than a terabit per second of bandwidth out of any channel, be it wireless or a fibre-optic cable, because once you get into soft X-rays your network card becomes indistinguishable from a death ray...

Apple Computer's Marketing Becomes Much Much More Sophisticated...

And Henry Farrell succumbs:

Switch and bait: I was working in my office, when a work-study knocked on my door with a brand new MacBook Pro.... I was nonplussed, and told him that he must be wrong, that I hadn’t ordered one etc, but he insisted, and indeed my name was on his work-order form. So I finally acquiesced, on the grounds of gift-horses.... 2 hours later, I was completely hooked.... 3 hours later, I discovered that of course it had been a mistake, and that it was in fact intended for a colleague with a vaguely similar name....

I have finally taken the plunge and bought a MacBook Pro for the new book that I hope to start writing. Good software recommendations and general tips are gratefully appreciated...

Google Reveals Its Business Plan!

A message has started appearing:

Gmail: You are almost out of space for your Gmail account. You can view our tips on reducing your email storage or purchase additional storage.

10GB for $20 US a year, it seems.

Against Misrepresentation the Bloggers Themselves Contend in Vain...

Henry Farrell sends us to Julian Sanchez, who says highly intelligent things:

Making a hash of it — Crooked Timber: Julian Sanchez on climate change debates.

Sometimes, of course, the arguments are such that the specialists can develop and summarize them to the point that an intelligent layman can evaluate them. But often—and I feel pretty sure here—that’s just not the case. Give me a topic I know fairly intimately, and I can often make a convincing case for absolute horseshit. Convincing, at any rate, to an ordinary educated person with only passing acquaintance with the topic. A specialist would surely see through it, but in an argument between us, the lay observer wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which of us really had the better case on the basis of the arguments alone—at least not without putting in the time to become something of a specialist himself.

Actually, I have a plausible advantage here as a peddler of horseshit: I need only worry about what sounds plausible. If my opponent is trying to explain what’s true, he may be constrained to introduce concepts that take a while to explain and are hard to follow, trying the patience (and perhaps wounding the ego) of the audience.

Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. Certain bad arguments work the same way—skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that it’s both intelligible—even somewhat intuitive—to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”

This is both true and smart (as is Julian’s work more generally; in my opinion, he is by far the most consistently interesting and intelligent of the young sort-of-libertarian opinion journalist set).

My Fifteen Minutes of Fame Are Ebbing...

And let it be said that as Brad DeLong I assert the moral right to ownership of the tag "brad delong," and I expressly forbid its use by anybody who uses either of the tags "ludwig von mises" or "lew rockwell"; expressly forbid repeat forbid.

To Look Forward, Look Back: Clay Shirky on Elisabeth Eisenstein

Clay Shirky on newspapers

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky: Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it. One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several.... In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason. The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiency, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals..... Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad.... When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based....

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!”... “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke. With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability. What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the effects of the press circa 1500. To describe life before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?” Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation.... That is what real revolutions are like.... Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing.... And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril....

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.... The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads....

The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers.... So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs? I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here....

Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case. Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism....

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work. We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of.... For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.

Felix Salmon Joining Reuters Opinion Start-Up

Jeff Bercovici:

Jeff Bercovici: Felix Salmon has opinions. Lots of them. More than any one person should be allowed to have, probably. On finance, sure, but also on food, architecture, climate change, men's grooming, and, of course, media, to name just a few topics. So if you're a global financial news service and you're looking to seriously beef up your opinion offerings, Felix is a pretty good place to start. Thomson Reuters recognized this and hired him away to work on a new, yet-to-be-christened online opinion hub set to launch at some point this summer. He starts April 1.

"I am sort of their -- I guess you could call it 'headline blogger,'" he says. Beyond doing what he's done here every day for the past two years -- in more than 4,000 individual posts -- he'll also have a role as what he terms an "in-house evangelist," helping to tutor the other 25 journalists on his team in the art of blogging. "I'm going to be the person going, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, blog, it's great,' and I'm going to be the person saying, 'Of course you can do that, and, no, you don't need me to edit it, and the faster you can put it up the better, and don't worry about being wrong'"...

Technological Synergies...

The interaction of the iPhone, Amazon Kindle for the iPhone, and dead time because I am early to a rendezvous with nothing in hand but my cell phone may prove expensive in the long run.

Just saying...

How come I have never before heard of the existence of Steven Brust, Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille?

And is this going to be a tragedy, a love story, a slacker-musician story, or an unlikely-troop-of-misfit-heroes-saves-the-galaxy story?

WOOT!! WOOT!!! WOOT!!!!!

From Engadget:

Amazon's Kindle for iPhone hits the App Store: Sure, Amazon could pit the Kindle squarely against phone- and PDA-based e-book apps, but why not play both sides? The company had previously mentioned its desire to embrace non-Kindle devices in its digital delivery ecosystem, and the first fruits of that labor have now hit the iPhone App Store. The uncreatively-named Kindle for iPhone allows you access to all of your Kindle content right from the comfort of your iPhone or iPod touch, and if you have the good fortune of owning an honest-to-goodness Kindle, Whispersync will kick in to keep your location synchronized between readers. It's a huge win for owners of both devices, considering that the Kindle's still just a little bit big to be carrying everywhere you go, but your phone -- well, if you don't have that everywhere you go, you're just plain weird.

Amazon's Kindle and the Recovery of Readerly Naivete; or, Were-Bats--the Big Bug Scourge of the Skies!

Jane Austen:

Northanger Abbey: The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity...

In a normal book, an author cannot have the antagonist fall with an ensorcelled death-sword in its belly with one-third of the pages left to go and expect the reader to be surprised at what comes next. The thickness of the pages beneath one's right hand scream: "THAT'S NOT THE ANTAGONIST, SCHMUCK!!!"

Reading it on the Kindle--the sudden appearance of the were-bats has an extra punch that it cannot have in the hard copy...

Could Somebody Please Tell Me What Happened Around January 10? I Was Hopelessly Jet-Lagged...

Technorati Search: Brad DeLong:

Four Hours into the Progress Bar...

I do not think that phrase "this will just take a moment" means what you think it means:

TypePad - Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong - Integrating:

Management by... Something or Other

Joel Spolsky:

Amnesia - Joel on Software: I’m turning into one of those crazy bosses that approves things, and then gets upset when you do them. This keeps happening. I must be driving people crazy.... The solution, of course, is what I’ve been saying all along. STOP FRIGGIN’ LISTENING TO ME. I don’t know what I’m talking about. If you work for me, you’re welcome to get my advice, but you have to make your own decision because chances are you’ve thought MUCH MORE about the issue than I have and in fact we probably hired you because you’re smarter than I am.

Is TypePad Saying that It Has Broken My China and Is Now Painstakingly Glueing It Back Together?

I find this hard to understand:

Everything TypePad: A quick update on migration: We’ve had great feedback from the community about enhancements we’ve made to TypePad. We also know some of you are still patiently waiting to see the new features. The TypePad migration is kind of like moving out of a house and into a new one. If you've been in a house for a long time, it's going to take you longer to pack everything up and move it. Much the same with some of our favorite, longer-term bloggers. We're being really careful with "packing up" your data and metadata - posts and photos, links, comments, trackbacks and all the other elements that make your blog great. We know how important your blog is to you, so we want to be certain we're moving everyone quickly and carefully. One of the best benefits of TypePad is that we handle all the moving and upgrades for you. We're so happy you've chosen to blog with us. If there's a way we can show our appreciation to you, please let us know in the comments.

John Markoff Wrings His Hands About Computer Security

John Markoff tiptoes around the easiest thing we could do to improve computer security: switch to unix-based systems:

Thieves Winning Online War, Maybe Even in Your Computer: SAN FRANCISCO — Internet security is broken, and nobody seems to know quite how to fix it. Despite the efforts of the computer security industry and a half-decade struggle by Microsoft to protect its Windows operating system, malicious software is spreading faster than ever. The so-called malware surreptitiously takes over a PC and then uses that computer to spread more malware to other machines exponentially. Computer scientists and security researchers acknowledge they cannot get ahead of the onslaught....

The sophistication of the programs has in the last two years begun to give them almost lifelike capabilities. For example, malware programs now infect computers and then routinely use their own antivirus capabilities to not only disable antivirus software but also remove competing malware programs. Recently, Microsoft antimalware researchers disassembled an infecting program and were stunned to discover that it was programmed to turn on the Windows Update feature after it took over the user’s computer. The infection was ensuring that it was protected from other criminal attackers.... Microsoft has monitored a 43 percent jump in malware removed from Windows computers just in the last half year.

The biggest problem may be that people cannot tell if their computers are infected because the malware often masks its presence from antivirus software. For now, Apple’s Macintosh computers are more or less exempt from the attacks, but researchers expect Apple machines to become a larger target as their market share grows...

I wonder why?

Gee. This iPhone's Camera Is Better than I Would Have Believed Possible

Unanticipated Hazards of Blogging Part XIV: Gym Shorts

I cannot believe this! Blogging in gym shorts I have burned my thigh! This so-called "laptop" is a heat engine!

More Yuppie Laptop Blogging

Yali's Cafe East in Stanley Hall on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley is a wintel-free zone: six Macintosh laptops, and no competitors...

Linkrot

Felix Salmon finds linkrot:

felixsalmon.com: — Broken link datapoint of the day: Four years ago, Apartment Therapy ran a Sleeper Sofa competition. (Evidently, four years ago the switch from "sofabeds" to "sleeper sofas" had already happened.) Apartment Therapy put together a shortlist with 15 sofas on it. I found it quite quickly, when I started looking for a sofabed myself. And how many of the links to those 15 sofas are now broken? All of them. People, I'm all in favor of keeping websites fresh. But don't break all your old links when you do so.

And quote enough of the context you are referring to for your own posts to be intelligible.

Fear Not That the Walls Have Ears; Fear That They Have Tongues! (Jim Fallows Fears His Email Edition)

Jim Fallows is scared of his email. I think he is wrong.

Fallows:

Check out Josh Green's memo haul: [I]t is very much worth reading my colleague Joshua Green's new story about what went wrong with Hillary Clinton's campaign, and the trove of memos he collected while reporting the story.... The magnum opus among the memos, based on what I've seen, is this one from Mark Penn, which is sure to be parsed and reflected-upon for months and years.

Related thought that comes to my mind while reading through these documents: I make my living writing things down, but even I have reached the point where I am not willing to put any sentiment whatsoever into reproducible form -- in an email that could be forwarded, in a document that could be cut-and-pasted -- without thinking about how it would look if it got into unintended hands.

That is, the perfection of the technology for spreading and sharing written material has made writing weirdly less useful for conveying private thought. It's risky as a way to share thoughts about running a political campaign; it's reckless as a way to say anything about any other person you might not want him or her to hear. The evolution of technology may return us to the era when the no-tech face-to-face meeting, or the hard-to-copy handwritten note, is the most secure means of communication. And when written statements, even in the "privacy" of email, are necessarily blanded-down by pre-knowledge that they could turn up somewhere unexpected months or years or decades later.

Two thoughts. First, Jim Fallows has clearly not yet figured out how small and how good tape recorders are: meetings are no protection. Second, for most of us the big problem has never been that people will repeat what we say, but rather that they will repeat what we did not say--or take what we say out of context.

I think the solution has four parts:

• Say what you mean.
• Be polite and charitable about those with whom you disagree--or at least adopt the manners of a gentleman, who is someone who never says anything that might give offense unintentionally.
• Memorialize your conversations.
• Insist that everything remain in its proper context.

And this is where people like Dana Milbank and organizations like the Washington Post are absolutely poisonous. We remember how Milbank took Barack Obama's:

It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It's about America. I have just become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions...

And turned it into:

President Obama Continues Hectic Victory Tour: Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee. Fresh from his presidential-style world tour... Obama settled down to some presidential-style business in Washington.... The 5:20 TBA turned out to be his adoration session with lawmakers in the Cannon Caucus Room.... Inside, according to a witness, he told the House members, "This is the moment... that the world is waiting for," adding: "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions"...

In such a world as this one in which we live in, email and other means of communication that automatically create a record that can be used to push back against distortions is a blessing.

---

Here, for the record, is Mark Penn's email: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_pdf/20080812_Penn_Memo.pdf

Progress is Non-Linear

John Gordon:

Gordon's Notes: Progress is non-linear: Palm vs. iPhone Address Book: My iPhone Address book, with about 400 entries, is pretty darned slow.... The Address Book is very slow to launch (4 secs on my phone), but Google Mobile search also searches the Address Book -- and it's fast.... My Palm address book, with about 600 entries, launches instantly. There's no perceptible delay. Time to select an address on the Palm? Maybe 1-2 sec. On the iPhone? Maybe 6-7 seconds. (Faster if you use Google Mobile.) The iPhone has, of course, at least fifty times the processor speed and more than 1,600 times the memory capacity of the original Palm.

The Palm had essentially instantaneous responsiveness from day one. It was one of the design goals of the original team. The Palm was to have instant on, no user waiting for a system response, and no crashes. Incredibly, the original Palm team met those goals. Later... well, that's a sadder story.

Apple will one day fix the iPhone Address Book problems. Heck, Google Mobile already has. It is a good example, however, of the random walk aspect of progress. The iPhone does a lot that the Palm never could, but the original Palm did a lot of things well that the modern iPhone does poorly or not at all. Technological progress is squirrelly.

Ebook Formats...

Kindle:

Amazon Kindle - Wikipedia: Although it supports unprotected Mobipocket books (.MOBI, .PRC [and .PDB if renamed .PRC]), plain text files (.txt), and HTML (.html) and Word (.doc) documents, Kindle also uses its own proprietary, DRM-restricted format (AZW). It does not fully support Portable Document Format (PDF), but Amazon provides "experimental" conversion to the native AZW format...

ereader for iphone:

eReader.com: Moving Personal Content to eReader for iPhone and iPod touch: [Y]ou may browse from within the eReader application and directly download material from any web site that offers eReader format PDB files.... [You may u]pload your personal content to your eReader.com or Fictionwise.com account.... You may either upload eReader format PDB files, or a ZIP file that contains a bunch of eReader PDB files...

And then there are the encrypted ebooks, which encryption I want to break to make my life more convenient.

So once again I am reminded of the immortal words of Guy Fleegman:

I don't like this. I don't like this at all. Sure, they're cute now, but in a second they're gonna get mean, and they're gonna get ugly somehow, and there's gonna be a million more of them...

Why Did I Never Blog About This?

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/04/predictions-abo.html

Apple, AT&T, and Null River: The iPhone Netshare Saga

Ongoing...

Nullriver Introduces 3G/EDGE Tethering App for iPhone [Updatedx4] - Mac Rumors: Nullriver, Inc. has released NetShare onto the iTunes App Store this evening (via iPhone Alley). The $9.99 application promises to allow you to share your iPhone's network connection with your computer.

Share your iPhone's EDGE or 3G Internet connection with your computer using NetShare. NetShare provides a SOCKS5 proxy for your computer to connect to.

NetShare's inclusion in the App Store is a curiosity, as Apple must have manually approved its inclusion. It's unclear if the Application would go against AT&T user agreements. AT&T typically charges Smart Phone users $30/month extra to use tethering applications....

Update: The application appears to have gone missing from the App Store....

Update 4: NetShare is back in the App Store...

---

Nullriver Software : Home: Update 2: Apple has taken it down again, with no explanation yet again. Update: NetShare is now back up and available from the AppStore! We're not quite sure why Apple took down the NetShare application yet, we've received no communication from Apple thus far. NetShare did not violate any of the Developer or AppStore agreements. We're hoping we'll get some feedback from Apple today. Sorry to all the folks that couldn't get it in time. We'll do our best to try to get the application back onto the AppStore if at all possible. At the very least, we hope Apple will allow it to be used in countries where the provider does permit tethering...

---

TelecomTV - TelecomTV One - News: Did AT&T choke on the prospect of giving away more of its new 3G bandwidth for no extra cost? Either way, this is bang out of order. You'll notice the words "open application environment" in the header of this post; I use these words to describe the inclusive nature of App Store, allowing everyone to take part. But it's far from being open in the traditional mobile ecosystem sense of the word; with Apple controlling the distribution of applications 100%.

You want ease of use, nice clean interfaces, low costs, wide range of content? Well, you had better be prepared for an equal measure of control, oversight, censorship and interference. If Apple and its partners don't want you to have something, then you ain't gonna get it!

Of course, you could work around not having a dedicated application. Into Mobile posted such a guide recently, but you'll have to jailbreak your phone first -- which is not for everyone. And so we await a statement from Apple.... but don't hold your breath. Remember Apple's IBM Big Brother Ads? How things change...

---

The alternative to NetShare for wannabe tetherers:

Tether your iPhone 3G to your laptop - Use your iPhone 3G as a wireless modem: Posted by Will on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 12:38 pm under Mac OS, iPhone, Apple, Applications, Announcements:

The iPhone tethering solution (”tethering” is a method that allows your laptop to use your mobile phone’s wireless data connection to surf the web, check email, etc.) that allowed first-generation iPhone owners to hop on the information superhighway at EDGE speeds wasn’t exactly what you would call preferred method for getting web access on-the-go. But, EDGE data speeds were enough for short-stints of web-surfing and email checking - when you absolutely need an internet-fix with no landline or WiFi hotspot in sight.

With the iPhone 3G launched in over 22 countries, mobile warriors the world over are cruising along at UMTS/HSPA speeds with abandon. And, now that the iPhone Dev Team has busted the iPhone 3G out of its file-system lock-down, second-generation iPhone 3G owners can now tether that delicious 3G data connection to their data-hungry laptops. Forget EDGE, 3G data is how you want to be perusing the intertubes, regardless of whether you’re using an iPhone or laptop.

You’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone 3G to its 3G data connection through to your laptop, so make sure you brush up on your iPhone 3G jailbreak protocol before jumping in to this iPhone 3G tethering guide.

Follow this tutorial to get your iPhone 3G tethered and playing nice with your laptop:

Jailbreak your iPhone 3G
Install 3Proxy and MobileTerminal
Fire up the “Cydia” application that was installed during the iPhone 3G jailbreak
Navigate to Install>All Packages
Find and install MobileTerminal
Find and install 3Proxy
Hit the “Home” button to verify that MobileTerminal is now installed on the homescreen (3Proxy isn’t a GUI app, so you won’t see an application icon)
Create an ad-hoc WiFi network on your laptop
Name it something memorable - like “Tether-ific”
Lock your iPhone 3G on to the ad-hoc WiFi network you just created
Settings>WiFi Networks
Find out your iPhone’s IP address
Setting>WiFi Networks
Tap on the little blue arrow to the right of the WiFi network you just joined - “Tether-ific,” in this case
Write down the iPhone IP address
Fire up MobileTerminal on your iPhone 3G
Execute the proxy program
Type in “socks” and hit enter
You won’t get any confirmation that the SOCKS server is up and running, but it is
Hit the “Hom” button to return to homescreen
Remember to quit the MobileTerminal application by opening it later and holding down the “Home” button and forcing it to quit
Start up your iPhone’s Safari browser and open a web page
Wait for your iPhone’s Safari browser to realize that it can’t use the ad-hoc WiFi network (because it leads nowhere, for now) and then switch to using the 3G data connection
This step takes a little while, so be patient
Configure Firefox to use your iPhone proxy
Preferences>Advanced>Network>Setting
Find the “SOCKS Host” field and enter the IP address you wrote down earlier
Set port to”1080″
Go to Firefox’s address bar and type in “about:config”
Hit Enter
Find the “Filter” field and type in “socks”
Hit Enter
Find the entry that looks like “network.proxy.socks_remote_dns”
Double click
Change value to “true”
You’re done, get to surfing the web through your new iPhone 3G tether!
Remember to quit MobileTerminal when you’re done surfing at 3G speeds. Start up MobileTerminal again and hold down the “Home” button until the application force-quits

Apple Doing a Lot Better than Expectations

John Gruber:

Daring Fireball: I just went through Apple’s iPhone availability checker for all 50 states in the U.S.: one store in Hawaii has one model (8 GB), one store in California (out of 38 in the state) has one model (16 GB black), and the Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York has one model (16 GB white). That’s it.

So much for my “just wait a week and then cruise in and pick one up in five minutes” plan.

This doesn't appear to be an "underproduce to make sure you keep the buzz" stockout. This appears to be a genuine surprise stockout...

The Transparent Society...

Distributed global surveillance:

Yes, Google News Comments Works...

Now I have another time sink: obsessively googling myself on Google News...

I need staff. I need staff badly...

Distributed Co-Creation

From Blaise Zerega:

What Hath Open Source Wrought?: Five years ago this month, economist Brad DeLong asked a question central to the value of information technology. If the industrial age yielded the assembly line, what, he pondered, will the information age yield? "From a historical perspective," wrote DeLong in a Wired magazine column, "it's not at all surprising that we are thrashing about, still trying to figure out how to use these new tools most effectively." By tools, he was referring to computers, software, and of course, the web. The answer, he hinted, was to be found in open source software.

Fast forward to the present. It's obvious to anyone who has paid attention not just to advances like open source software, but to crowd-sourcing and to the importance of user-generated-mass-production. While we still have some thrashing about to do, it's going to be a glorious thrashing about. And you know a development is real when McKinsey gets involved. In June, the firm published The Next Step In Open Innovation (free registration required). The authors cite such examples as LEGO, the LAMP stack, and the design of the ATLAS particle detector. It's definitely worth a read this holiday weekend.

Oh, and the report offers up an answer to DeLong's thorny question: the authors dub the phenomenon he described as distributed co-creation. Gotta love it.

---

From Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui, and Brad Johnson:

next step in open innovation: For most companies, innovation is a proprietary activity conducted largely inside the organization in a series of closely managed steps. Over the last decade, however, a few consumer product, fashion, and technology businesses have been opening up the product-development process to new ideas hatched outside their walls....

Suppose that a wireless carrier, say, were to orchestrate the design of a new generation of mobile devices through an open network of interested customers, software engineers, and component suppliers, all working interactively with one another... open-source platforms developed through distributed cocreation, such as the “LAMP” stack (for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python), have become standard components of the IT infrastructure at many corporations. What facilitates this new approach to innovation is the rise of the Web as a participatory platform....

Distributed cocreation is too new for us to draw definitive conclusions about whether and how companies should implement it. But our research into these online communities and our work with a number of open-innovation pioneers show that it isn’t too soon for senior executives to start seriously examining the possibilities....

In nearly every sector, many of the ideas and technologies that generate products emerge from a number of participants in the value chain... suppliers understand the technology and manufacturability of their pieces of the end product better than the OEMs do.... The benefits of specialization and collaboration seem obvious today.... The example of Wikipedia suggests that companies can take even greater advantage of specialization by ceding more control over decisions about the content of products to networks of participants (suppliers, customers, or both) who interact with one another. Does this seem far-fetched? IBM apparently doesn’t think so: it has adopted the open operating system Linux for some of its computer products and systems, drawing on a core code base that is continually improved and enhanced by a massive global community of software developers, only a small fraction of whom work for IBM....

While distributed cocreation does seem promising, it isn’t entirely clear what capabilities companies will need (or how they will organize those capabilities) to make the most of it....

Many cocreating online communities assume that “crowds”5know more than individuals do and can therefore create better products; as the open-source-software expert Eric S. Raymond has said, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” It is far too early to know with certainty if this idea holds true across all kinds of products, but a growing consensus maintains that in software development, at least, distributed cocreation is a ticket to quality.... Apache runs more than half of all Web sites and that eight of the ten most reliable Internet hosting companies run Linux....

Research that we and others have conducted on consumers participating in online communities demonstrates that most cocreators recognize that the brand—not they—will own the resulting intellectual property. Why then do they get involved? Rewards and fame were certainly motivators, but participants are largely interested in making a contribution and seeing it become a reality.... In choosing between competing ones, brand affinity is the most important factor for users willing to cocreate, and 40 percent of would-be cocreators will refuse to cocreate with companies they don’t like or trust...

---

Brad DeLong:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/view.html?pg=5: In the spring of 1994, I wiped the game Civilization off my office computer. I wiped it off my home PC. I wiped it off my laptop. I threw away the original disks on which it had come. It was clear to me that I had a choice: I could either have Civilization on my computers, or I could be a deputy assistant secretary of the US Treasury. I could not do both. It wasn't that my boss ordered me to - she herself played a mean game of computer solitaire. In this, I was the boss, and I had decided that with Civilization on DeLong's hard disk, DeLong's productivity would be unacceptably low.

Computers are tremendous labor-saving devices. They give us power to accomplish extraordinary amounts of work in extraordinarily short intervals of time: financial analysis, data mining, design automation. But they also give us the capability to do things like play solitaire. Or send instant messages. Fiddle with fonts. Futz with PowerPoint. Twiddle with images. Reconfigure link rollovers. At the organizational level, however, the uses of high tech that might be valuable for an individual can be pointless or counterproductive. Consider a meeting to decide between two courses of action. Often, the same decision would be made whether weeks were spent preparing overheads or no overheads were prepared at all. It's easy to see that, from the company's point of view, all the hours spent on PowerPoint slides are dissipated waste.

Now, I don't want to say that computers and communications haven't increased productivity. They have. They've tripled the underlying rate of productivity growth since the bad old days of the Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr. economies. Large investments in computers and communications seem necessary for rapid, industry-level productivity growth. Still, there is a strong sense that computers are less of an asset to the economy than they might be if we truly knew what they were good for and how to use them.

McKinsey and its brethren tell horror stories of companies investing heavily in computers that were of no more use than doorstops: Kmart applied computers everywhere except in preparing to handle fluctuating sales volumes; automated check-imaging systems wound up saving banks neither time nor money. (McKinsey will also tell you that the best way to avoid such organizational dysfunction is - surprise! - to hire McKinsey.)

Meanwhile, we are a long way from the old-fashioned version of white-collar control, where you sat at your desk and either stared into space or did your work. Most often you stared, until you got so bored that your work seemed interesting. Today, white-collar workers want to use their machines to be more productive and impress their bosses, but also to do things like shop and read blogs, which make their lives happier and their workdays more interesting.

From a historical perspective, it's not at all surprising that we are thrashing about, still trying to figure out how to use these new tools most effectively. As Stanford's Paul David was the first to point out, much the same thing happened a century ago when the electric motor came to American manufacturing. New general-purpose technologies work well only if they are the base of a system, or form a cluster of reinforcing and self-sustaining changes in the way work is organized. With electric motors, the important gains arrived only when engineers used them to reorganize factory layouts to improve workflow, giving birth to mass production.

We do not yet know what will be to the information age as mass production was to the electricity age. Detailed monitoring of every keystroke, every word entered, every image viewed? A more relaxed workplace that accepts the mix of activities that fill our lives? Successful automation that makes jobs more interesting by off-loading the boring tasks onto microprocessors in a more thorough and comprehensive way?

Those who work for large organizations will likely face a future of increasing surveillance - in which managers know hour-by-hour how many items have been scanned through the register, how many keystrokes have been made in writing a legal brief, how many directory assistance calls have been answered, and in which modern technologies distinguish those who just look busy from those who are busy. If this happens, bosses can step up the pace and reduce the on-the-job leisure that we all enjoy.

The underlying ideology of the large company - that your time is its time - will, for a while, make the idea of using surveillance technologies irresistible to high-level managers. I hope this proves inefficient and counterproductive, that after a decade or a generation, such bosses will realize detailed, hour-by-hour surveillance simply doesn't boost output...

Bill Gates Reviews Windows...

This is the good version of Windows--XP, I think:

Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant:

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack ... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn't in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system ... and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn't Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn't use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like "Open" or "Save". No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Moviemaker is just not there at all.

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don't you just love that root certificate message?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.

Firefox 3 Now Controls Scott Eric Kauffman

Who writes:

Acephalous:: If you're the kind of person who likes to open 423 articles in JSTOR so as to bring the CPU of his relatively new computer to its knees, you should download Firefox 3. Right now, I have 78 tabs open.  More than half of them are JSTOR articles—for those without access, that means gigantic memory-hogging images—and Firefox is currently occupying 298,732 K of memory.  Yesterday, it would've easily engorged 1,400,000 K and had my CPU in tears. 

Short of extreme protestation, I'm not sure how to make this endorsement sound earnest at this point. But it is.

Ask the Mineshaft

Three questions:

1. How do I get my few old Amazon digital downloads onto my brand-new Amazon Kindle? I mean, an ebook should be an ebook should be an ebook, shouldn't it?
2. How do I get my Google Books books onto my brand-new Amazon Kindle?
3. Why does http://unfogged.com call its advice sections "Ask the Mineshaft" anyway?

She "Lost" Her Phone, Ha-Ha!

Megan McArdle says that she has to buy a new-model iPhone today because she "lost" her cell phone:

Megan McArdle: What do you do with your old iPhone?: Well, today's the day that Jobs is supposed to unleash his new creation on the world--and not a moment too soon, as I seem to have lost my old cell phone...

I would snark without mercy, except that I really did lose my cell phone last week. Honest. Swear. I can provide affidavits...

For those who have not lost their iPhones, she has advice:

For those who are still in full possession, however, this presents a problem, at least if they are iPhone owners. The new phone will have better data speeds, probably better call quality, and several new features like GPS. This suddenly renders the price of their old phones--well, probably you can still trade it in that currency composed entirely of gigantic stones. The word on the street from my shadowy hipster associates is that the thing to do is jailbreak the phone and then ebay it internationally to some country where the iPhone is not yet sold through a carrier. In those fabled lands, a jailbroken iPhone 1.0 is probably worth almost as much as you paid for it.

Sound

Derek Powazek writes:

The Quest for Perfect iPhone Earbuds: V-Moda Vibe Duo. PRICE: $101. PROS: Best sound of all: big bass, clear highs, love it. I like the style of it, especially the feel of the cords. And they’re way comfy in the ear. CONS: The sharp metal bits can scratch the iPhone if you put it all in the same pocket. The clicker button can be difficult to find without looking. By far worst reliability of any headphones I’ve tried. I’ve gone through four pairs now. Each time, one of the earbuds stops working after a few months. Returning them for replacement is easy enough, but still a hassle. VERDICT: My favorite earbuds of the bunch. They must be - I’m on my fifth pair. (Aside to V-Moda: You must know about the failure rate by now. Fix the damn things.)

The Worm Ouroboros...

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors:

Feminist Law Professors: Why I Love Being A Law Prof, Blogging Edition: I’m listening to Jack Balkin (of Balkinization) give a talk, whilst sitting next to one of my very favorite law prof bloggers, Michael Froomkin (of Discourse.net), and next to him is Brad DeLong (of Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong). Nearby is James Grimmelmann (of The Laboratorium). Yesterday I was on a panel that also included Bill McGeveran (of Info/Law) and Frank Pasquale (of Madisonian.net and Concurring Opinions). I’ve heard presentations by very smart people like Wendy Seltzer (of Legal Tags), and Andrea Matwyshyn (Jurisdynamics Idol) and gotten to catch up a little with the wonderful Susan Crawford (of Susan Crawford blog) and Chris Hoofnagle (of Chris Hoofnagle.com).

There are lots of great non-bloggers too! The weather here stinks but the pizza is great. As some of you may have already guessed, I’m in New Haven. Next week I’ll get to hang out in Montreal with Bridget Crawford (of this blog of course!), Sudha Setty (of The Title IX Blog) and Christine Hurt (of The Conglomerate) at the LSA Annual Meeting, because we are all on a panel about Blogging As Feminist Legal Method, along with Alison Stein, author of the very cool article discussed here. Life is good, especially during the summer conference season!

Shades of David Lodge's Small World...

Bloomberg San Francisco Bureau at Pier 3

Do we have wifi? Yes! We have wifi! Does it connect to the net? Yes!!

I am stunned and awed by the Bloomberg San Francisco bureau--they have been in it since February. It is amazing what you can do with an old cargo terminal/wearhouse built out over San Francisco Bay... with a few coats of paint... and some hardwood flooring... and more miles of gigabit ethernet cabling than I have ever seen in my life... and teh scuba divers to lay the foundations for the elevators...

Wow! I suppose that two-thirds of the time it must be either dark or foggy, but the remaining third it is absolutely glorious!

Here to do Tom Keene's show: http://www.bloomberg.com/tvradio/podcast/ontheeconomy.html

And to do a panel on exchange rates:

FX panel discussion on 5/20: "Dollar Weakness and Financial Crisis: A Bloomberg Panel": 4PM, Bloomberg San Francisco Bureau (Pier 3, SF, 94111): In this historic year, Bloomberg L.P. brings together two top, but different minds to discuss the interdependencies of the economy, credit and foreign exchange markets. Particular focus will be made on the imbalance of Pacific Rim and European capital flows. Moderated by Thomas Keene, host of Bloomberg on the Economy, the seminar will address recent dollar strength as LIBOR spreads...attempt to narrow.

Panelists: J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics, University of California at Berkeley; Robert Sinche, Head of Strategy: Global Rates, FX & Commodities, Bank of America

Little Brothers: Panel on David Brin's "The Transparent Society": Thursday May 22 Omni New Haven 3-5 PM George A&B

Thursday afternoon in New Haven, CT, I am on a panel to talk about David Brin's decade-old book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? at the 2008 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference: http://www.cfp2008.org/wiki/index.php/%22The_Transparent_Society:%22_Ten_Years_Later.

Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale
155 Temple Street
New Haven, Connecticut 06510
Phone: (203) 772-6664 or (800) 843-6664.
Fax: (203) 974-6777
Web site: http://www.omnihotels.com/FindAHotel/NewHavenYale/MeetingFacilities/CFP2008ComputersFreedomandPrivacyConference5.aspx

David Brin, Alan Davidson, J. Bradford DeLong, A. Michael Froomkin, Stephanie Perrin, Zephyr Teachout

Here are posts from the past, hoisted from the archives:

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Lots of Little Brothers:

Not Just Big Brother, But Lots of Little Brothers Too...: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: My father is jolted by his new issue of Reason:

The latest issue of Reason magazine arrived in the mail, and the cover causes a jolt. It is an aerial photo of my neighborhood, with my house circled and the legend underneath: "James DeLong: They Know Where You Are!"

But then he calms down:

The accompanying story has a rather different spin, though. Written by Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent for News.com and keeper of the well-known politech email list, it is entitled "Database Nation: The upside of 'zero privacy.'" The theme is that the increasing availability of data is excellent news for all of us in many ways, primarily because of the increases in efficiency and choice in the provision of goods and services that are enabled by information.

After all, if you think that a counterparty's possessing too much information about you is not to your benefit, you can always hide your identity in some way--undertake a transaction through intermediaries, establish cover identities via forgery and using them to set up PayPal accounts and anonymized email addresses, make sure to only use public-access computers out of the range of spycams, et cetera.

And he concludes:

As for the jolt of surprise -- my address has been in the telephone book forever, so anyone with a map and a crayon could always do what Reason did. My feeling of a loss of privacy is actually rather illusory.

I don't have settled (or especially informed) views on this, Dad. But I wonder if your first reaction might not have been more accurate. It takes 20 seconds to find and circle a house with a telephone book, a map, and a crayon--at $10 an hour total cost for low-wage labor, that's six cents an address. Very few people will have an incentive to organize and analyze their data on you at that cost. Those whom you want to send you magazines every month will, but how many others. I think we do have to worry about how governments--future Stasis--will use computers. And there are additional (but far lesser) potential vulnerabilities: weaknesses of the will at the personal or household level that might be exploited. One reason Ann Marie and I never let the kids watch Saturday morning cartoons was that we didn't want to be eroded by advertising-induced waves of pressure for X or Y. We hang up on all telephone solicitations immediately because we know our vulnerability to persuasion too well. And once enough people out there have figured out who we are, our internet wire transmits information both ways.

The way Larry Summers put it was that he wants everybody in the world to know that trying to sell him golf stuff is a waste of time, but that he might well bite if offered tennis stuff. But at the same time he's profoundly uneasy about negotiating with or interacting with somebody who knows and has had plenty of time to think about every detail about all of his purchases for the past twenty years.

Sometimes what look like quantitative changes--the falling cost of information processing--make qualitative differences. This may or may not be one of them. But it may be time to start thinking about how one would live in a world in which every conversation (even informal ones with close family members) may be broadcast around the world.

Useful Comments:

Isn't the kind of privacy we're concerned about losing here a very modern development? I spent a couple of years living in a village in a developing country, and everyone knew everything about everyone else. The universe of people local enough to be interesting was small enough that any tidbit of information: an unusual purchase, a change in routine... anything, was synthesized quickly into a coherent narrative that got passed around to everyone in the village. If you wanted to do something privately, you had to literally keep it a secret -- do it behind closed doors without in any way signalling publically that there was anything untoward going on. This certainly sounds annoying from a modern American point of view, but it really wasn't all that unlivable once you got used to it, and it's how people have lived since the dawn of history. The anonymity we're used to, being able to do things publically that we would prefer our acquaintances to remain unaware of by relying on the difficulty of compiling the huge amount of public information out there, is very new, probably post-WW II for most Americans. What are the ill effects we expect from losing it? Posted by: LizardBreath on May 16, 2004 08:23 AM

For those who missed it, medical privacy in the US is apparently at an end (see http://www.medicalprivacycoalition.org/). I have no idea whether the situation is similar here in Canada, though I should. "The Justice Department now states that patients "no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential," adding that federal law "does not recognize a physician-patient privilege."" Posted by: Tom Slee on May 16, 2004 08:24 AM

Suddenly, monitoring and information processing is cheap, and so, potentially, control is cheap. The "ethics" of a society/polity in which monitoring/information processing was expensive no longer apply. Listing your phone number in a phone directory no longer has the same implications. The penalty for, say, speeding on the freeway, which is appropriate, when the police can only observe and cite, say, one in 4,000 speeders, is not going to be appropriate when the police can cite one in 50, or one in 5. The ACLU approach, which is a reactionary attempt to prevent use of cheaper monitoring to do what corporations and governments will do, is hopeless and misguided. Misguided because it stands in the way of desirable increases in technical efficiency and productivity; hopeless because you cannot stop a force of nature. I suspect the solution is the "empowerment" of the individual by the same technology. Concealment of a kind is made cheaper by the same technology, which makes monitoring cheaper. by: Brian Wilder on May 16, 2004 09:43 AM

"In the greatest surveillance effort ever established, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has created a global spy system, codename ECHELON, which captures and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world. ECHELON is controlled by the NSA and is operated in conjunction with the Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) of England, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of Canada, the Australian Defense Security Directorate (DSD), and the General Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) of New Zealand. These organizations are bound together under a secret 1948 agreement, UKUSA, whose terms and text remain under wraps even today." http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html "An international surveillance network established by the National Security Agency and British intelligence services has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, as lawmakers in the United States question whether the network, known as Echelon, could be used to monitor American citizens. The House Committee on Intelligence requested that the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency provide a detailed report to Congress explaining what legal standards they use to monitor the conversations, transmissions and activities of American citizens." http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/05/cyber/articles/27network.html Connect the dots: ECHELON --->BUSH --->ENEMY COMBATANT. We've got nothing to worry about though. Right? Right??? Posted by: Dubblblind on May 16, 2004 10:51 AM

"The biggest threat to our society, he warns, is that surveillance technology will be used by too few people not by too many." Brin does not strike me as someone who has a realistic view of human psychology. His claim is basically that with good enough surveillance tech, everyone has the potential to survey and monitor everyone else so might as well dump privacy to practically eliminate crime, government oppression, etc. As far as I can see this is quite a silly view. We will combine the worst aspects of small villages with the worst aspects of big societies. In a small village everyone knows what everyone else is doing. This produces community but also an often rather straitjacketed conformity. In a big city you lose some of that community but you can also more easily escape the busybodies who try to enforce conformity. In an urban surveillance society, on the other hand, you start to get some nasty social dynamics. Because while it may be easy to COLLECT certain forms of information, it is not so easy to ANALYZE and USE the masses of data that result. In interpersonal affairs this would be a victory for moralists and busybodies. There will be enough of them to immediately tie any "deviant" behavior to an individual and make it public. But the elimination of privacy would not magically bring tolerance for the nonconformists. You will get a "small town" conformity effect enforced not by community rumor but by a small minority of people driven by enough moralistic outrage to spend lots of their time observing others. This observation will be directed disproportionately at deviants. Unlike a real small town where people know about everyone, there will be relatively few people interested in processing the information about your typical average, boring person and then disseminating it where it can do the most damage. A similar thing applies to the government, but with a difference in technological expertise and capabilities. Frankly the internet and advancing personal surveillance tech do not and will not give citizens some magical capability to observe the government. You won't even be able to use your mini-cameras to catch cops beating people in jail if they use the simple expedient of removing such devices from suspects. It's not like you're going to be able to set up webcams in NSA headquarters either. I certainly don't see how it would do anything about the potential for intelligence abuses - collecting information on dissidents and threatening to use that against them. Indeed, they can sit back and relax while that information is collected for them and the public demands that something be done about the undesirables. We're a society that doesn't watch CSPAN or support real investigative reporting. How the heck would there be enough people to do the difficult and mostly-boring job of collecting lots of amateur intelligence about their own government? Hell no, we're far more interested in gossip about each other and in enforcing conformity, that's where virtually all of the energy will go. Posted by: Ian Montgomerie on May 16, 2004 12:16 PM

DeLong's aware of Brin's ideas on this subject. He reviewed Brin's "The Transparent Society" soon after its publication: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/Transparent.html I'm moderately ashamed to say that I haven't read Transparent Society, despite having read most of Brin's fiction, and having been exposed to his basic thoughts on privacy and transparency in lite form there. Posted by: RT on May 16, 2004 02:30 PM

I had a recent experience that relates to the issue of privacy, albeit peripherally. Bear with me and go easy on the flames if you feel that this is irrelevant: "I got a call from someone at the Ford Motor Company Credit department concerning someone whose name I did not recognize. I assumed that this person (let's call him Joe Blow, although I forgot his real name) had listed me or someone whose name was similar to mine as a credit reference and FMC was calling to check up on him. I didn't want to screw the guy's chances of getting credit because a mistake was made, so I called FMC (during my workday, because the time difference necessitated it). It turns out this was not a credit check gone wrong, but instead Mr. Blow was my upstairs neighbor at the apartment complex I lived in, and the FMC representative started to ask me a number of questions about him. No, I had never met him. No, I had never seen a black Mustang in the garage where I park. And no, there is no way that I would relay a message to him. Actually, I regret saying no to that last one. I should have said yes, then asked how much I would be paid to work as a paid agent of the Ford Motor Company Credit Division, and whether they would insure me if Joe Blow took umbrage at the messenger of bad news and beat the shit out of me." I guess all this is to say that I think that private corporations will be as blithely unconcerned as the government about the privacy (and safety) of others, and will eagerly enlist unrelated parties to do their dirty work. Yes, what the government can do to you is generally worse than what corporations can do to you (at least here in the U.S.), but the experience was far creepier than any I have had with any governmental agent. Posted by: no name on May 16, 2004 03:21 PM

I spent Saturday afternoon with my eight year old son on a tour or Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena. I have a friend who works there (Cal (BS) '82 MIT (PhD) '85); it was the annual open house to the public and science exhibitions for children. He showed my son and his daughters around. The highlights were the kids lying down and having a six-wheeled robot truck drive over them; and, looking as the 42" flat panel screen hanging on the wall outside my friend's office and moving a mouse to zoom in on an image of the Western United States, then California, then Southern California, then Los Angeles County, then Jet Propulsion Labs, then over to my neighborhood, then to my street. I'm told they can get a lot closer with a lot better resolution. My friend is now mapping the rain forests to track deforestation using radar technology to make maps and pictures. Posted by: Cal on May 16, 2004 10:13 PM

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Book Review:

David Brin (1998), The Transparent Society, (New York: Addison-Wesley: 020132802X): For perhaps two centuries people living in today's advanced industrial societies have had a modicum of privacy. Before two centuries ago, privacy was nearly unheard-of: you lived in a village where everyone knew everyone else and everyone else's business. Between two centuries ago and the present, people moved out of the village and out to a--relatively isolated--farm, or into a city where the sheer number of people made relative anonymity--and thus privacy--possible. But, at least according to David Brin, the future will be different. In the future privacy as we know it today will be nearly impossible to attain.

In the future privacy will be next to nonexistent because of the explosion of audiovisual, communications, and computer technologies. Cheap hard disks will allow people to collect massive information about transactions: who did what. Cheap cameras will allow people to collect massive amounts of information about locations: who was where. Cheap computer power will allow the sorting and searching of massive amounts of information in search of those nuggets of data relevant to any one particular person. And cheap computers will allow anyone--or anyone with access codes--to access what will essentially become the stored life history of anyone. From David Brin's perspective, this change is coming. The only question is who will have access to the information that will be contained in the great surveillance databases. Will the information be "secret" and "private"--in which case only governments which may turn thuggish will have access? Or will the information be "open" and "public"--in which case we will once again be back in the village, where nearly everything is done in public and everybody knows everybody else's business: truly a global village.

Brin makes a good case that the technology will bring us to one of these two outcomes. And he argues that the first outcome--in which we try to preserve our "privacy" by restricting access to the great surveillance databases--is a very dangerous outcome. It is a dangerous outcome because secret knowledge is power, and if the twentieth century has proven anything it is that governments cannot be trusted with secret knowledge. The great tyrannies of the twentieth century flourished because their surveillance gave them control and their secrecy kept enough citizens from realizing what they were up to fast enough. The advent of modern audiovisual, communications, and computing technologies greatly amplifies the power of surveillance, and greatly multiplies the danger if it is not countered by a greatly amplified power of the people to survey the government. And popular surveillance over the government carries as a side effect a potential loss of privacy. Anything that restricts popular access to information about other citizens restricts popular access to information about the government as well.

I believe that Brin's book is not necessarily an accurate forecast. The futures that he envisions will probably never come to pass. And the choice that he foresees may well never be posed in the stark form in which he poses it. Yet the book is useful: the future Brin envisions is clearly one of the possible futures that might come to pass, and the consequences of what he sees as the wrong choice in that possible future could turn the twenty-first century into an abattoir that would make the twentieth century look like a Sunday picnic.

If enough people read Brin's book, or are brushed by the currents of thought in represents, then it may turn into a self-negating prophecy: a warning of dystopia that by virtue of the horror it paints helps avoid that horror. That was the function of George Orwell's 1984. That is an honorable role for anyone's book.Book Review:

David Brin (1998), The Transparent Society, (New York: Addison-Wesley: 020132802X): For perhaps two centuries people living in today's advanced industrial societies have had a modicum of privacy. Before two centuries ago, privacy was nearly unheard-of: you lived in a village where everyone knew everyone else and everyone else's business. Between two centuries ago and the present, people moved out of the village and out to a--relatively isolated--farm, or into a city where the sheer number of people made relative anonymity--and thus privacy--possible. But, at least according to David Brin, the future will be different. In the future privacy as we know it today will be nearly impossible to attain.

In the future privacy will be next to nonexistent because of the explosion of audiovisual, communications, and computer technologies. Cheap hard disks will allow people to collect massive information about transactions: who did what. Cheap cameras will allow people to collect massive amounts of information about locations: who was where. Cheap computer power will allow the sorting and searching of massive amounts of information in search of those nuggets of data relevant to any one particular person. And cheap computers will allow anyone--or anyone with access codes--to access what will essentially become the stored life history of anyone. From David Brin's perspective, this change is coming. The only question is who will have access to the information that will be contained in the great surveillance databases. Will the information be "secret" and "private"--in which case only governments which may turn thuggish will have access? Or will the information be "open" and "public"--in which case we will once again be back in the village, where nearly everything is done in public and everybody knows everybody else's business: truly a global village.

Brin makes a good case that the technology will bring us to one of these two outcomes. And he argues that the first outcome--in which we try to preserve our "privacy" by restricting access to the great surveillance databases--is a very dangerous outcome. It is a dangerous outcome because secret knowledge is power, and if the twentieth century has proven anything it is that governments cannot be trusted with secret knowledge. The great tyrannies of the twentieth century flourished because their surveillance gave them control and their secrecy kept enough citizens from realizing what they were up to fast enough. The advent of modern audiovisual, communications, and computing technologies greatly amplifies the power of surveillance, and greatly multiplies the danger if it is not countered by a greatly amplified power of the people to survey the government. And popular surveillance over the government carries as a side effect a potential loss of privacy. Anything that restricts popular access to information about other citizens restricts popular access to information about the government as well.

I believe that Brin's book is not necessarily an accurate forecast. The futures that he envisions will probably never come to pass. And the choice that he foresees may well never be posed in the stark form in which he poses it. Yet the book is useful: the future Brin envisions is clearly one of the possible futures that might come to pass, and the consequences of what he sees as the wrong choice in that possible future could turn the twenty-first century into an abattoir that would make the twentieth century look like a Sunday picnic.

If enough people read Brin's book, or are brushed by the currents of thought in represents, then it may turn into a self-negating prophecy: a warning of dystopia that by virtue of the horror it paints helps avoid that horror. That was the function of George Orwell's 1984. That is an honorable role for anyone's book.

Manna From Heaven for the iPhone!

Hosanna:

Ecamm Network: PhoneView FAQ - Disk mode for the Apple iPhone: Q: What kinds of files can be converted into Notes? A: You can convert text files, rich text files, PDF files, Word files, and HTML files into notes on your iPhone by dragging them into the notes list. See the instructions for details...

James Fallows vs. Vista

James Fallows continues his war against bad hardware and software:

My three computers (MacBook Air saga, cont..):

1. The sublime elegance of VMWare Fusion... once it was installed, it let me run PC programs and Mac programs side by side, in normal screen windows from which you can cut and paste text back and forth. My cherished PC program Zoot is there in a window right alongside the Mac's Scrivener or DevonThink Pro. And so are Microsoft Outlook and Word 2007. I have learned to be skeptical of the assurance that something "just works." But for me, over three months, Fusion has just worked.... Of course... under Fusion they are actually running on Windows XP, not Vista as on this ThinkPad.... This leads us to the second point for the day:

2. The bottomless villainy of Vista. I am sure I would not be in the middle of switching platforms now if I hadn't bought a Vista-equipped laptop 15 months ago.... [N]early a year and a half after it went on the market, Vista is still an unbelievable dog (as many senior Microsoft officials knew before it was released.)... 99% of the problem turns on slowness... slow to start up, slow to shut down, slow to detect and connect to wireless networks, slow to get programs like Outlook up and running.... It has taken my Vista/ThinkPad at least eight minutes to come fully to life, to recognize the local wifi network, to become responsive with Outlook, to stop its disk churning.... The MBAair was ready to go in well under one minute....

3. The willful inelegance of the Mac keyboard.... Whether or not the Mac layout is objectively better or worse than the PC's, it's different, which requires countless small adjustments....

Sooner or later, three more points (including about MBA's battery, operating temperature, and so on)...

James Poulos on the Invisible College

A good college--visible or invisible--is composed of people who (a) know stuff, and (b) think well. The best colleges are made up of people who know different stuff, who think well in different ways, and who--most important--understand that when they listen to people who know different stuff than they do and who think well in different ways than they do, they learn.

James Poulos:

James Poulos » In Defense of Blogger Collegiality: [W]hat has drawn this motley crew of bloggers together in such a way? Surely not a freakish felicity with constitutional law, or even a common writing style. In fact, all of the bloggers mentioned in this post share what I at least think are fairly wild mutual divergences in style and tone, as well as in content and slant. If anything, there’s a vague libertarian consensus among those identified on the right. But Ramesh is a different kind of conservative than Ross, I am a different kind of conservative than both of them, and Reihan has just identified himself succinctly as a

Rawlsekian neoconservative singulitarian meliorist humanist neoliberal infosocialist Viridian postliberalincrementalist.

Add other blog greats with whom many of us are familiar, like Andrew and Daniel, and the valences of intellectual diversity are only intensified. The main common attribute, it seems to me, is idiosyncrasy, which isn’t necessarily correlated with collegiality in any way. What looks like a nonthreatening difference of opinion to one idiosyncratic blogger might strike another as a dangerously or dumbly uncategorizable source of opposition.

No, the big conspiracy here I think is one among people who like a good conversation, and have discovered a consistent set of conversation partners whose content and style best compare and contrast with their own. Professional bloggers are paid conversationalists — or should be, at least. And the good social art of collegiality well understood is an essential part of good conversation — especially good public conversation. People sometimes fear that the blogosphere will close itself off to new talent, but, based on the dynamic I’ve just outlined, that strikes me as impossible. The ‘gold rush’ is probably over, but blogging will probably take on the generational tempo of the music world, with big acts retiring for a while to pursue real lives and then making comeback tours after a suitable hiatus — and with lots and lots of new acts competing for attention. Sometimes attention is won by mere novelty, but more often it’s won by talent. That may be somewhat boring when the talent involved is taking ‘Baba O’Reily’ and turning it into a Nickelback-style gruntfest, but may be less so when the talent involves daily attention to political, economic and cultural life.

Charlie Stross Takes His Sense of Indignation for Its Sunday Walk

The large bandwidth downside of advertiser-supported media:

Charlie's Diary: Why your internet experience is slow: Here is a random-ish URL from Salon.com, a not too unusual online magazine: http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2008/05/09/askthepilot276/. This HTML page contains the first chunk of a piece of journalism by Patrick Smith... 950 words of text... 6.5Kb.... (Patrick, if you're reading this, I am not picking on you; I just decided to do some digging when I got annoyed by how long my browser was taking to load your words.)

In actual fact, the web page my browser was downloading turned out to be 68.4Kb in size. The bulk of the extra content consists of HTML tags and links.... But that's just the text, and as we all know, no web page is complete without an animated GIF image. So how big is this article, really?... I switched off my browser anti-advertising plugins (AbBlock and NoScript), hit "reload", and then saved the web page. Inline in the page are: 4 JPEG images, 4 Shockwave FLASH animations, 4 PNG images, 8 GIF images (of which no less than five are single-pixel web bugs), 4 HTML sub-documents, 6 CSS (style sheet) files, 22 separate Javascript files... in order to read 950 words by Patrick Smith my cable modem had to pull in 948Kb, of which 942Kb was in no way related to the stuff I wanted to actually read....

This is a novel in HTML.... "Accelerando" runs to 145,000 words; it fits in about 400 pages.... It is 949Kb in size, or about 10Kb larger than a Salon.com feature containing 950-odd words....

If content is king, why is there so little of it on the web? And why are content providers like Salon always whining about their huge bandwidth costs, given that 99% of what they ship — and that is an exact measurement, not hyperbole — is spam?

(Note: these are rhetorical questions. Despite the burning certainty that someone on the internet is wrong, you don't need to try and explain how the advertising industry works to me. Really and truly. I'm just taking my sense of indignation for a Sunday walk.)