Jobs working less than 40 hours

Interesting juxtaposition of headlines in Google News just now.... Yesterday's inaugural address mentioned people who are voluntarily working less than full time jobs so that colleagues can stay employed; meanwhile, compensation experts are taking Steve Jobs to task for standing for re-election to Disney's board. They argue that if he can't work full time for Apple, he can't fulfill his duty as a director.

Click for full-size image.

The unnoticed Presidential transition

Newsmap makes Google News a lovely headline cloud

After 9/11 Google turned its home page into a sort of a portal with information about the disaster, how to donate relief, etc. I chronicled the evolution of their home page in an article for First Monday in October 2001, The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine. I predicted that Google would get into the news business, but they'd do it with robotic crawlers and indexers, not human editors.

Sure enough, in April 2002, Google News was released in beta. And sure enough it chose categories and headlines based on robotic algorithms. Most of the time the robot does remarkably well, but sometimes it makes some pretty funny gaffes.

Since that time the Google News interface and presentation have changed very little. For instance:















Now comes a critter called Newsmap, which transforms us from the boring text-only Google News to a cloud map of stories with headlines in proportion to apparent importance of each story. Check it out (click the image to see it full size):














A very cool graphical view. Wonder if Google will send a cease-and-desist letter, or hire the clever folks who devised this clever presentation?

Take a quick peek in case Googleshysters make it go away: http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm

Julian Bond, national media, get the Michigan primary story wrong

Over and over again, the national media get the facts wrong about the Democratic Presidential primary held on January 15.

Over and over again, the press reports that Hillary Clinton was the only candidate on the ballot. Blatantly false and misleading.

Over and over again, Julian Bond, a man I've admired since I was a teenager, speaks of "disenfranchisement" if the delegates are not retroactively blessed. Disenfranchisement occurred on January 15, when voters faced a ballot that listed Hillary -- and Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Uncommitted.

But the actual ballot we were offered omitted major contenders Barack Obama and John Edwards, who asked to have their names removed from the Michigan primary ballot because the Democratic National Committee pressed all candidates to promise not to campaign in Michigan and Florida because those states violated DNC rules against moving the date of the primary earlier.

Hillary Clinton left her name on the ballot, and now, in desperation, she wants the Michigan delegates (and the Florida ones) seated at the convention. This is ludicrous; she signed a commitment that Michigan would not count, and now, as the only leading Dem on that ballot, she suddenly, and desperately, wants those votes counted.

Julian Bond claims that African-American voters will be "disenfranchised" if Michigan is not seated. ALL voters who might have voted in the Democratic primary were disenfranchised on January 15. No write-ins were allowed. Obama was not on the ballot. No black person in Michigan had a chance to vote for Obama that day. No one -- white, black, yellow, or any hue in between -- could have voted for Obama, or Edwards (or Richardson or Biden) if they so chose.

Therefore many Democrats either voted for Uncommitted, or, as is allowed in Michigan, they crossed over and voted in the Republican primary. They either voted for the candidate whom they found least distasteful -- probably McCain -- or they voted to spoil the race by voting for Romney or Huckabee.

Any plan that proposes to seat all or the majority of Democractic Michigan delegates for the "winner" is bogus. You can't have a race if you forbid leading contenders from lining up at the starting gate.

And now, we have national media outlets such as The New York Times, the LA Times, and NPR falsely reporting that Hillary Clinton was the only name on the ballot on January 15. Never mind that Gravel and Kucinich were on the ballot, and that in places such as Washtenaw County, "Undecided" actually won -- probably a proxy vote by frustrated voters for Obama.

Measuring Obama's popularity

One measure of a Web site's popularity might be how it melts down when you visit it. Web sites tend to fail in strange and mysterious ways when overloaded. If you visit the official Web site for Barack Obama right now, you see a very artful photo of Barack and his family. If you click through, you see this:

Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Host 'web10.colo' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /home/obama/htdocs/ext/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 376Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Host 'web10.colo' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /home/obama/htdocs/ext/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 376Warning: mysql_pconnect() [function.mysql-pconnect]: Host 'web10.colo' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /home/obama/htdocs/ext/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 376Warning: problem running db_change: Host 'web10.colo' is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /home/obama/htdocs/config/blue_config_autosetup.inc.php on line 25Fatal error: error on SELECT for config data - does table exist? in /home/obama/htdocs/config/blue_config.inc.php on line 258

Civilized Wi-Fi in public spaces, versus Caesar's Palace

In November I gave a talk on Web search analytics in Barcelona, and this week, in Las Vegas.

In Barcelona we were at a hotel called the AB Skipper. Their approach was totally civilized. Free Wi-Fi (and Ethernet) in all the rooms, and free Wi-Fi throughout the hotel.

The conference was at Caesar's Palace. They charged $13.99 per 24 hours of Wi-Fi. They offered no free Wi-Fi in public spaces or conference rooms.

I write at the McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. They provide free Wi-Fi throughout the airport. They even advertise it.

When I connect in Minneapolis and in Detroit, the airports will charge for Wi-Fi.

I'm not a Utopian who believes that Wi-Fi will set you free. I think, for instance, that attempts for cities to paint the whole town wireless were doomed to failure. (And in fact many have failed.)

But I do think it makes much more sense to follow the model of the AB Skipper and of McCarran than to attempt to squeeze extra dollars of people stuck on your premises. On the way to the airport I passed a Motel 6 that had a banner offering free Wi-Fi. Major hotels and airports should offer Wi-Fi just as they provide electricity, and make their money off the bars and not amenities people have come to expect.

Yes, Mr. Dvorak, Windows can't count, but Mac can't either

John Dvorak recently wrote about how poor Windows is at multitasking. For instance, you're writing a Word document while in the background copying a huge file, but your keystrokes don't get priority.

He also complained that Windows is goofy about calculating how long it wil take for that file copy to complete. Windows seems unable to make a reasonable calculation. Its first guess as to time is often way off, and Windows fails to adjust to reality during the copying process.

It's a valid complaint, one that I shared with folks at work. But it's not just a problem with Windows. My colleague Davin Granroth sent me this jewel -- Stuffit on MacOS thinks it'll be centuries before it'll finish decompressing a file.

Extremely targeted marketing by Orbitz

Last week I purchased tickets for a trip to Barcelona. I researched fares using Northwest.com, Orbitz, and other providers. Today, days later, I was looking up information about, of all things, the Superman comic saga, and the banner ad at About.com remembers my recent searches:










Hmm, they used to say "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you." I have not done any searches related to Barcelona in days. So About.com picks up an Orbitz tracking cookie days later and offers me great fares.

For weeks I was quoted fares of $1000 or more. Then suddenly a fare of about $750 was offered. I do wonder if the NWA and Orbitz computers take note of how many times you've looked up fares, and, like a mule trader of old, from time to time offer a special deal.

Dear Jane letter to the iPhone

Hilarious stuff. More than one reviewer wants to love his lovely iPhone, but it just isn't going to work out. I kid my friend and colleague Trevor that he's driving a Ferrari on a dirt road.

Don't get me wrong; I think the iPhone is an absolutely amazing piece of engineering. In 2007 it is 100 times more than the Newton, and it makes my beat-up Treo 650 a dinosaur. But listen to two iPhone lovers whose love has altered when it alteration found:

See:

http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/07/13/return_iphone/


...and...

I'm Dumping the iPhone

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-case/im-dumping-the-iphone-_b_57748.html

Dearest iPhone,

I must admit that things between us had a great and beautiful start. I
was in love with your bag before I even saw you. And when I logged onto iTunes
for easy activation, I was enthralled with your sleek beauty. Remember our first
night together? We stayed up all night getting to know each other and then you
went to sleep in my arms. God, you were gorgeous.

Yet, a few weeks later, it seems that none of the promises that we
planted in those fields of hope has flourished. In fact, after a brief and
torrid first few days together, things have gone steadily downhill, making me
realize that it's best to sever ties now while we still both have our dignity
and I have not smashed you on the sidewalk in frustration.

Unfortunately, simply put, it just didn't happen for us. Nothing
remains of what looked like a growing love, besides some memories
and a few dozen photos that are now safely tucked away in my iPhoto, images
of a love that once burned white hot, but now are just a flicker of sadness.
How did everything lose its enchantment so quickly? All that remains is a
bitter taste of what once tasted like such sweet candy.

....

Twin heartbeats: watching a multi-core processor at work

Recently I started using a Lenovo (nee IBM) Z61t laptop, replacing my late lamented X40. The new computer sports a dual core Intel processor. This means it sort of has two CPUs.

It's fun to watch the two processors vie for work to do when a single-threaded task is at hand. I do a lot of work crunching search logs, and when you exceed about 32,000 rows in an Excel spreadsheet, things begin to bog down. Even gathering the data in a large Internet Explorer window can take a lot of CPU and a lot of real time. If you are running one single-threaded program, Windows reports your CPU as 50% or so until the task completes. The Windows Task Manager shows this in action. The "extra" core of the processor is available to handle other tasks, and the work appears to be divided equally between the two:

Click to see full-size image

If you're running more than one app, or if the app you're running is multi-threaded, then both halves of the CPU can do useful work. For instance, when I copy 200,000 rows of data from IE to Excel, the CPU runs at close to 100%.

My friends Chuck Severance, who literally wrote the book on high performance computing, and Bill Punch, who heads the High Performance Computing Center at Michigan State, understand all this full well. For me, an amateur observer of the end of Moore's Law and our multi-processor future, it's fun to watch.

Ladies and gentlemen, the amazing book digitizing machine

Last week I saw the incarnation of an amazing book digitizing machine, something that my friend Mark Grebner and I dreamed of circa 1999. This by no means is not to say that others did not imagine such a thing before us; of course they did. But it was exhiliarating to see the actualization of something so important.

Every year in June I join my wife at her professional association meeting, the Special Libraries Association, or SLA. Attendees include some smart folks: science librarians, law librarians, medical librarians, and more.

Like many conferences, SLA offers presentations and a trade show. At this year's trade show in Denver I was delighted to see this:

This is way, way, cool, even astonishing. The device has two digital SLRs aimed across each other at 45 degree angles, so as to shoot the even and odd pages at once. After the pages have been shot digitally, a robotic arm moves over, and a gentle vacuum pulls the right-hand page up and folds it over. Here's a short movie I took showing how this gizmo inhales a digital copy of a book

The company selling this device, Kirtas, is not the one serving the Google Book digitization effort. But the concept is the same, and Kirtas has a number of library customers who are scanning precious collections for preservation.

While I marveled at this device last week, Al Gore was about 400 feet away signing 500 copies of his latest book. I implored an SLA official to bring the former Vice President to see this, gizmo, as Gore once told an allegory of a schoolgirl in Carthage, Tennessee benefitting from a digital Library of Congress. Alas, his path that Sunday evening was scripted by Secret Service and event obligations. I'm sure Al Gore would've loved to see in action a device that can scan an entire book in minutes.

Mark Grebner has used consumer-grade digital cameras to digitize voter records for over 7 years now. The Kirtas device uses high-end D-SLRs to do the same, at much higher resolution, but the concept is the same.

Surgical masks when you fly?

Saw an unusual sight on my first flight since the idiot lawyer from Atlanta flew to and from Europe despite his TB infection: a guy in front of me wore a surgical mask the entire trip:





It could be he has a pre-existing condition, but my guess is this fellow feared risk of TB. That, of course, would be innumeracy: the odds that someone as selfish and stupid as Andrew Speaker are next to you on the plane are infinitesimally small.

Back during SARS you saw a fair number of people in airports wearing masks. That wasn't innumeracy; the disease was highly communicable and did reach North America. If or when Avian Flu hits, it will be strange to see everyone walking the streets wearing masks. But strange sights will be the least of our worries.