World's first mobile phone

This is remarkably cool: a demonstration of the world's first (AFAWK) mobile phone, in 1922:



I was surprised to see the fire hydrant mentioned as evidence of an American city. British cities don't/didn't have fire hydrants?


Via RAIN

Selling your soul

I missed this when it hit the news two weeks ago, but some 7500 gamers unwittingly sold their souls to GameStation earlier this month. In an April Fool's joke, but one with a serious point to make, they inserted the following clause into their online contract;

"By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions."

The point, of course, is how many of us click through contracts without really reading them. Bad on us. The roughly 10% who did read it, and selected the opt-out option provided, were rewarded with a £5 voucher and the right to entertain other options on their souls. Perhaps the most amusing part - or, perhaps not - is that the company feels compelled to email all these people and explicitly waive all claims to any souls, just because there are a lot of yahoos who would seriously worry about a thing like that.

The more things change ....

Interesting short article at WSJ: Twitter Updates, the 18th Century Edition

A quick look at a few of the entries from several diaries shows that Twitter’s famous 140-character limit wouldn’t have been a problem for these writers:

April 27, 1770: Made Mead. At the assembly.
May 14, 1770: Mrs. Mascarene here and Mrs. Cownsheild. Taken very ill. The Doctor bled me. Took an anodyne.
Sept. 7, 1792: Fidelia Mirick here a visiting to-day.
Jan. 26, 1873: Cold disagreeable day. Felt very badly all day long and lay on the sofa all day. Nothing took place worth noting.

Before the end of the 19th century, diaries weren’t considered private or introspective. Instead, people wrote semi-public diaries that were often shared among faraway family members and others. And space was at a premium; by the mid-1800s, popular “pocket diaries” were only about 2 inches by 4 inches and were intended to be more mobile than earlier books.

A word is worth a thousand pictures

I'm reading the Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access and I come across the following diagram:



Got it? Crystal clear, isn't it? Aren't you glad you didn't have to wade through a dozen paragraphs of text to get the point?

Oh, wait. You didn't get the point? Maybe the accompanying text will help you out:

Choices available to decision makers are conditioned by core attributes common to all preserved digital assets and those that apply only within specific contexts.

Okay, that helps. We're talking about preserving digital assets, which wasn't at all obvious before. And the point? It's that, when making decision regarding preserving digital materials, some of the factors you consider will be unique to your specific situation, but there are other factors that are true of pretty much all digital preservation.

That's a bit obvious, but a valid introduction to the real point: identifying the "core attributes," those things that all preservation will have in common and so you might as well be aware of right from the start. In this case,

Preserved digital assets share four essential attributes as economic goods.

1. The demand for digital preservation is a derived demand.
2. Digital materials are depreciable durable assets.
3. Digital assets are nonrival in consumption and create a free-rider
potential.
4. The digital preservation process is temporally dynamic and pathdependent.

The most significant point is #3, the nonrivalrous consumption. That's a key difference between digital goods and physical goods.

I just wish to Gog or Hell or whatever that people could make their points without those damned relational diagrams which add not one whit of clarity to the text. In fact, I'm more often slowed down trying to figure out what is supposed to be so damned significant about placing bubbles to the left or right and drawing lines between them. There's some sort of a relationship, but drawing a line doesn't tell me what it is. Drawing arrows instead of lines is usually less helpful than the writer imagines. In this example, why does the "context-specific" attributes sit between the "core attributes" and the "choice variables," and not the other way around? It would make just as much sense to say that the context-specific attributes are mediated by the core attributes as vice versa. Perhaps that's because neither formulation manages to say much at all.

I see these diagrams everywhere and it's very rare that I find one worth the time to look at it, let alone the time to construct it. They say nothing that the text doesn't say more clearly and often in less page space. Can't we be done with this ridiculous fad?

Sigh. Okay, back to reading the report so I can gather the real information contained therein - in the text.

Blogging template

Here's how to do it:

This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post

This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence.

Read more

via Millard Fillmore's Bathtub

The networked world

Many developing countries have connected their people with telephones by skipping the land-line phase and going directly to cellular phones. The Economist predicts that world-wide access to the internet will arrive in similar fashion, via mobile broadband technology.

Edward Kennedy, internet pioneer

A Slate staff member twitters that Edward Kennedy was the first member of Congress to have his own web page:



If you look closely, you'll see that the site was hosted at MIT. This is about 1994, before there was anything like a senate.gov or Google. I think that was also the year I bought my first PC and learned to use the internet - until someone called me on the phone and broke the connection.

One of the comments links to this blog post which has more. Betcha didn't know all that.

How to tell you missed the big time

Donald Rumsfeld got an opera singer. Sarah Palin gets William Shatner:

Why the President's advisors don't tweet

Google News offered me this little article, which is a nice explanation of why working in the White House is different from sitting in chem lab.

Firstly and most obviously, in a sensitive environment such as the White House, controlling the flow of information to the outside world is extremely important. Secondly, Twitter is not immune to malware, viruses, and scams. Then there is the Presidential Records Act, which requires all White House communications to be saved. Abiding by these rules would prove difficult on an external service such as Twitter.

O'Brien also explains why switching to free Firefox would actually be rather expensive.

You CAN buy this kind of press

Elsevier is caught trying to bribe 5-star Amazon reviews for one of its textbooks.

Congratulations and thank you for your contribution to Clinical Psychology. Now that the book is published, we need your help to get some 5 star reviews posted to both Amazon and Barnes & Noble to help support and promote it. As you know, these online reviews are extremely persuasive when customers are considering a purchase. For your time, we would like to compensate you with a copy of the book under review as well as a $25 Amazon gift card.

This is the same company that has been publishing fake journals that were designed to hide the fact that they were nothing but corporate advertising.

Here's my favorite part - the attempt at damage control that proves they really don't get it:

Cindy Minor, marketing manager for science and technology at Elsevier, said that the e-mail did not reflect Elsevier policy. She called the request for five star reviews "a poorly written e-mail" by "an overzealous employee."

Poorly written? Is there some clever way to write a bribe offer that would be something other than a bribe offer? Bribery is wrong only when it's done without a sense of style? Why do people always do this - you get caught in a bad action and you apologize only for the fact that it looked bad?



[via librarian.net]

Is internet access a right?

Eric Pfanner at the New York Times asks, "Should Online Scofflaws Be Denied Web Access?" You see, some folks* believe that people who pirate copyrighted media should be denied their own internet connections.** A bill to do just that was defeated in France last week and European consumers are reported as being strongly against any such thing. In fact, according to Pfanner,

Last month, in a pre-emptive strike, the European Parliament adopted a nonbinding resolution calling Internet access a fundamental freedom that could not be restricted except by a court of law.

At first blush, that sounds a little far-fetched, calling internet access a fundamental freedom. What's next, a fundamental right to quarter-pound hamburgers? Plus a constitutional right to fries?

At second blush, though, maybe not entirely far-fetched. The internet has now become the most basic informational, organizational, and administrative infrastructure we have. It's how I get the news, it's how I write to people, it's how I access my bank account and pay many of my bills, it's how I do much of my work at home, and it's almost the only way to hunt for a job nowadays (and often the only way they want you to apply for one). Would losing all that be proportional to the crime of sharing music files?

How often do we punish a person by depriving them of access to fundamental infrastucture? I mean, aside from actually tossing them into the pokey? The nearest equivalent I can think of is taking away their driver's license. But here's an illustrative point about traffic laws: we make this big distinction between moving and non-moving violations. You can have your car impounded for not paying parking tickets, but they don't permanently confiscate the car or prevent you from driving someone else's because of it.

You're still allowed to drive after offenses like that. We only take away your license when you're just too damned dangerous to be allowed on the road.*** It's the crimes that are likely to lead to mayhem and death that justify barring a person from the road. Not property crimes; just threats to life and limb. And internet piracy doesn't offer any equivalent to drunk drivers or street racers. Property crimes don't justify cutting someone off from the virtual world, because that's where everyone is doing real business nowadays.


____________
* Often spelled R-I-A-A.

** Presumably, they could still go online at a library or coffee shop, but not have their own ISP. This gets trickey, because many household connections are shared by several family members and some wireless connections are shared by multiple households. Then there's the possiblity of someone hacking into your wireless account, and ... it's just not as easy as saying "Here's the ISP, so we have the guilty party."

*** And often not even then. It's so crippling to be barred from the road in our culture that we're reluctant to impose that penalty even on maniacs.

You got served ... on Facebook

Australia OKs Facebook for serving lien notice

A court in Australia has approved the use of Facebook, a popular social networking Web site, to notify a couple that they lost their home after defaulting on a loan.

* snip *

The documents were sent last Friday after weeks of failed attempts to contact borrowers Gordon Poyser and Carmel Corbo at their Canberra home and by e-mail.

Interestingly, Facebook is highly pleased with the turn of events:

In a statement, Facebook praised the ruling. "We're pleased to see the Australian court validate Facebook as a reliable, secure and private medium for communication. The ruling is also an interesting indication of the increasing role that Facebook is playing in people's lives," it said.

I might have thought they'd be concerned that they could lose customers who would now have reason to be even more concerned about their ability to remain private. Guess that doesn't apply to Facebook people. The company seems ecstatic at how mainstream they're becoming.

Presidents can't use BlackBerrys

Lose the BlackBerry? Yes He Can, Maybe

But before he arrives at the White House, [Obama] will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive.

Meanwhile, electronic records and the PRA are still not reconciled for the outgoing Administration.