No longer Businessman of the Year

I ignored the first fax from Tom Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee telling me that I've been chosen as Businessman of the Year. But the second fax had a plaintive note that got me to call the 800 number.

Rose answered. "First, Tom Reynolds wants to thank you for your support in our tremendous victory." In fact, because of my efforts, I have been awarded Businessman of the Year. Not just nominated, but awarded it.

"Why?," I asked. "There must be some mistake."

"It's based on your past support of the Republican Party."

"I really didn't do anything."

"I don't know the exact selection process."

I told Rose I hadn't contributed any money. She said that she knew that, but they valued my role as honorary chairman of the Massachusetts Business Advisory Council.

"I assume there were dozens of those."

"Yes. There were several." She then told me what I'd won: An invitation to the inauguration, and participation in a ceremony to be held during the tax summit in DC in March where the award would be given. There are several Businessmen of the Year awards given in each state. Ah, and my name would be listed in an ad in the Wall Street Journal.

"I think there must be a mistake. I didn't do anything at all to support your electoral efforts."

"We value your support."

"I actually didn't even vote for Bush."

Rose chuckled. "You didn't vote for him?"

"I don't like his economic policy and I sure don't like his foreign policy."

"Would you like me to remove your name from consideration?," she asked pleasantly.

"I think that would be best."

Too bad! When they start rounding up the enemies of the state, flashing my Republican Businessman of the Year award might have given me a ten-minute head start.

Berkman Lunch: National Health Information Infrastructure

Alan Goldberg of Goulston & Storrs (and HealthLawyer) is giving a Tuesday lunchtime talk on the national health information infrastructure.

He says it's a big deal: Medicare has 1 million providers who are involved in 1 billion claims per year. NHII crosses political boundaries; everyone from Bush to Hillary, from Ted to Newt, all support having an infrastructure that enables electronic record sharing. The NHII will require technologies, standards, systems, values, applications, and laws.

The standards are arising from the industry (says Alan), not from the government, although the government's adoption of these standards counts for a lot.

He says NHII has four areas of concern:

First area of concern: Uniformity of privacy laws. HIPAA says that stricter state laws on privacy override the baseline federal standards. That complicates things. And you have to balance privacy against the desire to share medical information among providers. "Maybe we have to change HIPAA" says Alan.

Second area: Access & control of patient medical information. NHII can exacerbate the tension between the "duty to warn" patients of medical risks vs. the right to privacy. "Should you be entitled to access information via the NHII to find out if your spouse-to-be" has a sexually transmitted disease?

Third area: Secondary uses of medical information. Secondary users of health information may not be covered by the HIPAA privacy rules.

Fourth area: Miscellany. Is NHII conduit, custodian or architecture? Who owns the info contained in NHII? Should the data be mined for the greater good? Should the FDA regulate parts of NHII?

A couple of days ago, the head of the NHII issued a Request for Information, i.e., public comment, about communication among doctors and health institutions.

Alan says that Bush is the more committed to creating an NHII than any other president. [On the other hand, he set up the NHII without budget, employees or the mandate to propose law.]

Q: The linchpin is patient privacy. If people think the system doesn't protect their privacy, they'll filter the information they provide, which will result in worse medicine and more malpractice cases. In fact, AG Ashcroft in the partial birth abortion case said that HIPAA means there's no longer a presumption of privacy. What's missing from this infrastructure if patient consent.

[HealthLawyer.com looks useful but, jeez is it ugly and overly disclaimed.]

The Factual Core

I have an article on facts and values (using uBio as an example) up at Esther Dyson's re-done site. (Free registration is required.)

How to de-stink a Volvo

Note: Before following these instructions, be sure to read the first comment on this entry, from the Head Lemur.

We recently managed to pour a full half-gallon of milk from the front passenger seat in our 2001 Volvo S60 ("The Car that Cluetrain Bought") on to the floor. Here's how to de-stink your car:

Use main force to remove the end caps from the four ends of the two runners on which the seat sits. They snap on onto either the front or the inside edges. Yanking hard with a screw driver did the trick. (Ah, yanking hard...what can't it do?)

Get out your ratchet set. The seat is held in by four 14mm bolts. Once you break the lock-tight seal, they should come off pretty easily.

Try not to let all four bolts roll down a storm drain. If you put them in four different places, you are more likely to preserve one as a template, although you are also just about guaranteeing that you'll be making a trip to the hardware store with the template bolt in your pocket.

Tilt the entire seat forward in order to scrape your knuckles mightily. Yank the back carpet out from the molding into which it's been neatly tucked. You will have to pull the rear seat up. It unsnaps, but so does everything if you pull on it hard enough.

Remove the driver's seat the same way. Yank the rest of the carpet out from underneath it.

Rock the passenger seat back and remove the front carpet. You will have to undo a plastic, slotted turn-y thing under the glove box.

Repeatedly hose down the carpet and the molded foam underneath it, squeezing soapy water through it by stamping on it. That may or may not get enough of the stank out of them. It will, however, make you feel better.

If the stank remains, purchase new Volvo carpets. Our local dealer sells the right front carpet for $167.38 and the rear carpet for $222.59. Consider visiting your local junkyard. (Hint: Use your other car.)

Close up the car for an hour. If when you open the door, you are pushed back two feet by a smell that is on the verge of achieving self-awareness, the spilled milk was also absorbed by the passenger seat.

You can replace the passenger seat's bottom cushions for $232.24 and the upper backrest for $274.30. The foam padding for the right front button cushion is $75. Or, you can go on ebay and find an entire Volvo S60 seat for $150 (including shipping).

If you need to replace the seat itself, you will need a torx (sp) wrench — the ones with star tips. Our Volvo has heated seats ("The Warm Ass that Cluetrain Bought"), so you have to remove some electrical bits first. On the bottom of the seat are two black boxes, each held on by a single torx screw. Remove and deposit at the bottom of a storm drain, just to teach yourself a lesson. The big black box has wires going into it that you're going to want to detach by pulling out the plug. DON'T. Instead, pop up the entire back end of the box — it has a hinge on one side that you should keep attached. The entire assembly detaches that way. That just leaves the seatbelt. For that you'll need a big torx screwdriver. I didn't try it.

Read these instructions backwards to reassemble.

Throw the left over parts down the storm drain.

Note: I am an irresponsible moron. It is entirely possible that if you do what I say, you will hurt yourself, destroy your car, or make your car unsafe by wiring the seat heater to the airbag or by not tightening the seat bolts so the next time you come to a stop sign, the rear carpet replaces your brain pan. In short, if you hurt yourself or destroy your car by following these directions, you are a moron for listening to me.

Braff Blog

Garden State (the movie) has a blog written by Zach Braff, its author and director. He's also the star of Scrubs, of which my son and I are inordinately fond. Zach's latest post tells how he drunk-dialed an Australian movie reviewer.

Yes, the blog takes comments...lots and lots of 'em. Yes RSS. No blogroll. No Creative Commons. Yes, a video thank-you to bloggers (yes, complete with a plug for the Garden State dvd).

Place dream

I woke up with a start this morning. All I remember from my dream is the image of a satellite above the beautiful earth and the idea that a place is not where you are but what you see.

Halley's sitcom

In "My New Jewish Husband," Halley documents the beginning of a new genre: Reality sitcoms. All she needs is one more encounter with those Hadassah ladies and a guest appearance by Jason Alexander...

Glenn on Firefox

Glenn "Unsolicited Pundit" Fleishman was on public radio today talking about Firefox and security. Here's the MP3 and here's the Real Audio.

Lovemarks and the Clown Suit Rule

The Head Lemur has a scathingly funny bit about Lovemarks. Let's just say he's not as kind to the idea as I was. A snippet:

When I was a teenager we had lovemarks. They were called hickeys. That is where you sucked on the body of your partner until you raised a bruise.

And Doc's not feeling too well-disposed towards the idea either:

"To me, lovemarks achieves 100% marks in both rationalization and delusion. An expensive psychosis, if not an especially harmful one."

Gotta love the title Doc gives his piece: "Cool! Involuntary tatoos I might love!"

AKMA's meaning

I just noticed in AKMA's sidewall the published version of an essay of his that I'd seen (and blogged about) in draft a couple of years ago. It's on the ethics of interpretation, and it's a beautiful piece of work. AKMA is such a fine writer. For example, here he's explaining the idea (that he does not agree with) that a text has meaning even when people don't know what it is:

The presence of a cement floor in my basement provides sufficient evidence for me to infer the existence of its opposite side; the presence of a text in my hand provides sufficient evidence for me to infer the existence of its meaning.

AKMA is trying to find a ground between saying there is one right interpretation of a text (particularly the Christian Bible) and saying every interpretation must be taken as valid:

A differential hermeneutic permits practitioners to see in interpretive variety a sign of the variety in human imagination (in establishing historical facts as well as in drawing theological inferences), to account positively for difference among interpreters, to envision the practice of biblical interpretation less as a contest of experts and more as the shared effort of Christian communities, and at the same time to provide clearer, more specific and more modest criteria for correctness and legitimacy in interpretation.

...practitioners of differential hermeneutics observe that the act of offering an interpretation involves not only the author and the text but also one’s interpretive colleagues and the audience of the interpretation. interpretation. Hence, interpreters must devise interpretations that are accountable not only to text and author but also to rival interpreters and audiences.

AKMA is such a Jew! : )

Lovemarks: What's love got to do with it?

Lovemarks — a site, then a book — is the product of Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, the ginormous ad agency.

Lovemarks are brands that "inspire loyalty beyond reason." ("Lovemark" is a play on "trademark," I assume.) Roberts analyzes products using The Love/Respect Axis:

Because brands "have run out of juice," his ad agency "looked closely at the question: What makes some brands inspirational, while others struggle?" The 2x2 above says the difference is love. Yet, oddly, the site instead focuses on respect — "At the core of every Lovemark is Respect" — and says nothing about love. Instead, the main explanatory page talks only about the "three intangible, yet very real, ingredients" of respect: Mystery, sensuality and intimacy. The site has a few sentences about each of these, and love — what really differentiates brands from lovemarks — pops up only in the first sentence in the section on intimacy: " There is nothing more personal than love!" I find this confusing.

Why does Roberts focus on respect instead of love, despite his own analysis? Could it be that spelling out how to get us to love a brand would come across either as cynically manipulative or something beyond the control of marketers? (Note: This is based on the lovemarks site. I haven't read the book.)

And that gets at why I'm not ready to have my ticket punched on the Lovemarks Express. On the one hand, it's useful to think about why some products are special to us. And as victims of marketing, we'd probably be better off if companies adopted the Lovemarks approach. On the other — and maybe I'm just projecting my own cynicism onto Roberts — Lovemarks isn't just a way of analyzing brand loyalty, it's a formula for creating it. Yes, "Remember only the customer can decide Lovemark status"...but now that you know how it happens, go forth and Lovemark your brand. It's like "experience marketing" that teaches you the tricks for convincing people that The Olive Garden is a rustic cafe outside of Florence instead of earning their respect as a damn good restaurant on the second floor of the Youngstown Mall. You want brand loyalty? Be a great freaking product. Also, it wouldn't hurt if I grew up watching my mother use it.

For me, the best part of the site is the page with the latest reader nominations for lovemark status. This morning anyway it's delightfully loopy in the way we earthlings are — Shah Rukh Khan, the Lotus car, DisneyWorld, Whistler (the town in Canada), books by Nicholas Sparks, the Australian Breastfeeding Association, all of Europe...

(Thanks to Tony Goodson for the link. And Hugh MacLeod suggests a "Lovemarks-Cluetrain Deathmatch." Hah! In fact, already last August RageBoy was taking a bite out of Lovemarks' ass.)

OK, it looks like Roberts meant to type "Love" instead of "Respect" in the sentence: "A Lovemark's high Respect is infused with these three intangible, yet very real, ingredients: Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy." I say this based on another article by Roberts. There the subsection entitled "A Recipe for Love" begins: "By focusing on Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy business-as-usual can be transformed with new emotions and new ideas."

Yet, this article is more off-putting to me, precisely because it promises S&S's clients that the agency can move them from respect to love. For example:

Now the new challenge is Love and Love demands the same investment and the same rigour we brought to the capture of Respect. Our client Toyota gets it. Don Esmond at Toyota USA crystallized the new Toyota challenge: "It’s time to move from the most respected car company in America to the most loved."

But the elements of love Roberts lists are, well, jejune. For example, he defines "sensuality" by listing the five senses. If that were the case, then everything would be sensual. Sensuality may be a particular quality of sensory experience or it may be the way particular sensations touch earthbound elements of our soul, but it sure ain't just the five senses. And listing the five senses does nothing to advance our understanding of love. The points about mystery and intimacy range from the pretentious ("Myths and icons — a reference library of the heart") to the true-but-well-known ("Passion — to energise the relationship"). This "recipe for love" does not fulfill the promise of transforming business with "new emotions and new ideas," especially since his lead example of a company that does this well is Starbucks. (Hugh Macleod usefully contrasts this with this.)

The more I read, the less I like it. Is the Lovelinks approach better than having to listen to the same tagline 563 times while I'm on hold? Absolutely. Is it still about manipulating me? Yup.

Technorati bookmarklet

Technorati (disclosure) has a beta of a bookmarklet that will show you what the blogs Technorati indexes (all 4.7M of them) are saying about the page you're on. It's a painless way to expand your bloguniverse, not to mention the endless, both-hands-on-the-keyboard masturbatory ego surfing! (Dave Sifry of Technorati refers to it as a favlet, which may be different than a bookmarklet, except like a bookmarklet, it sits in your bookmarks and excutes a teensy bit of code whenever you select it.) (Found via Joi.)

Bo ke

"Bo ke" is a Chinese neologism for "blogger." New Scientist has a fascinating article by Xiao Qiang about the growth and importance of blogs in the Middle Kingdom. Snippet:

Blogs play an important role in republishing and spreading information as quickly as it is banned from official websites. One example of this played out in September when China’s most influential bulletin board, Yitahutu, was closed down by the net police...

After the closure, all the major university bulletin boards were instructed to delete any discussion of the event. Even the name of the site was censored from Chinese search engines.

But the net police found it much harder to purge discussion of Yitahutu’s closure in the blogosphere. Bloggers are quick to find euphemisms so that they can continue conversation despite keyword filtering...

Lots more great info.

[Thanks to Scott Feldstein for the link.]

Social danah

I'm enjoying danah boyd's articles over at Operating Manual for Social Tools. The new one is on why we bother telling a social networking tool who our friends are. (I'm blogging there, too. See the disclosure statement.)

How comment spam doesn't work

Would you please allow me to be dumb in public? Again? Thank you.

I use Movable Type and have yet to upgrade from 2.66, but I ask the following not only for practical reasons. I want to know how comment spam works.

A few months ago, I tried installing some cgi stuff that was supposed to generate a graphic of random numbers embedded in swirly shapes; if you didn't enter those numbers into a box on the comment form, your comment would be rejected. But I couldn't get the graphics library installed correctly, so it didn't work and uninstalled it.

No, I'm not looking for help installing the graphics library. I want to understand why it wouldn't work simply to ask commenters to type any particular string - the same for everyone - into a box on the comment form and then reject any submissions that leave that box blank. In fact, why would I even have to make people type in a number? Why not just set a hidden value in the form? Do comment spammers actually note the parameters embedded in the <form> or do they simply find the address of an MT blog entry and assume that all MT comment pages use the same paramater names and values? Or am I way off in my understanding?

I tried experimenting with this yesterday, adding code to comments.pm to have it look for an extra parameter, which would explain why if you tried posting a comment on my site yesterday afternoon you got back intense mounds of gibberish.

(Note to self: Possible new Joho tagline: Generating intense mounds of gibberish since 1999.)

Half shot of espresso

According to Luca de Biase, whom I got to hang out with at the Microsoft Search Schmoozefest, L'espresso ran an interview with me. It's off the home page and I can't find it, but it's a pay site anyway. Besides, Luca has run the text of the interview, in Italian. (Apparenty, my Italian is fluent, although since I don't read Italian, I can't confirm that fact.)

Gone for Thanksgiving

I'm at my sister's, eating everything except the turkey, and removing the passenger seat from our car to see if we can mop up the half gallon of milk we spilled last week. Ah, tradition!

BlogExplosion

I'm trying out BlogExplosion, a free service designed to build traffic on your site. Click on a button on the site and it sends you to one of its member's sites. For every two sites you visit, it sends one member to your site. I'm doing it primarily as an experiment in structured random browsing.

This could be a really cool service if it were more heavily international than my first handful of clicks indicates...

Dec. 1 discussion at the Berkman

Here's the topic for the next discussion I'm leading at the Berkman Center:

What's ours on the Net?

Put aside for the moment question of what's legally ours on the Net. Instead, consider what's ours in a less explicit and less rigorous sense. Google feels like ours (even though it legally belongs to its shareholders) while Microsoft's new search site feels like theirs. Weblogs feel like their ours while online columns do not. The Mac feels like it's ours while Dell computers do not. Craigslist feels like it's ours while newspaper classified ads and Monster.com feel like theirs. In fact, many of us feel and act as if downloaded mp3s were ours. Is this sense of "ours" an illusion? Is it a temporary artifact that will vanish in months or years? What makes something that's not legally ours still feel that way, on the Web or off? And does this provide a way of figuring out why many of us feel so passionately about the load of bits we call the Net?

It's 6-7:15 on Wednesday, December 1, at the Berkman Center on Mass. Ave in Cambridge. Pizza shall be served.

Edelblog

News flash! Head flack at largest indie flack shop blogs without flacking! Um, I mean Richard Edelman, head of the world's largest independent PR company, has started blogging and it's not overtly about Edelman PR. In fact, Richard's entries so far tend towards the long-form, serious and reflective, sometimes about his industry but also about his avocation (he's a Civil War buff) and his family history. It'll be interesting to see how this particular intersection of PR and bloggery evolves as the PR industry tries to figure out what it's going to become in an age impatient with spin and mediated connections.

My $0.02 for Richard: 1. Add a blogroll. 2. Put multiple stories on a page. 3. Write more often, maybe including shorter bits. 4. Get some other Edelman voices online. 5. It's good! Keep it up!

[Disclosure: I've done a little work for Edelman PR and know Richard a bit.]

There's no ID in irony

I'm now receiving spam about ID products "because you registered to attend Inside ID Conference & Expo that was held November 15-17, 2004..." Spamming people who attended an ID conference? Someone dial 211 and connect me to the Irony Squad...

Jake Shapiro on Public Radio Exchange

Jake Shapiro of Public Radio Exchange is giving a lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center about how PRX is making it easier for creators of radio programming to get their stuff found and picked up by non-commercial radio stations.

PRX sits between stations and producers. It's "a web-based service for digital distribution, peer review, and licensing of radio content." You upload content, and others can peer-review it. Then stations can download it and use it. Creators get royalties. PRX is a fair and transparent broker between producers and multiple stations. Jake says the market is ready for it because there's a desire for new voices, because people are concerned about commercial consolidation, and because we're getting used to new distribution paths.

Core tools: Digital storage and delivery, searching, peer review, rights management (not hardwired into the files themselves) and the "PRX economy" (i.e., producers and stations pay PRX, and royalty checks are sent to creators). So far, they've paid out $25,000. "But mainly that's for pieces that otherwise would have gone for zero." Stations pay based on their size. Producers pay for storage ($50 for 5 hours). Anyone can create an account and upload stuff. Only non-commercial radio stations can download, although there are some exceptions and Jake expects there will be more. Anyone can listen to a program — registration is required but free — although it's intended for other producers to review it. (Jake says anyone can listen to the programs, but it's not well set up to be used as an Internet radio station itself.)

They opened their gates 14 months ago and now have 2,045 pieces (filling 539 hours), 4,544 accounts, 1,968 reviews, 220 radio stations with accounts, and about 1,500 pieces that have been broadcast. They use peer reviews to surface items, but also use an editorial board to write "magnet reviews." PRX generally doesn't deal with pieces with immediate news value, although they're working on it.

Rebecca MacKinnon points out that PRX could be a valuable source of international news and features that aren't showing up elsewhere. It's already happening to a small degree, Jake says, and they'd like to do more.

Yes, they're experimenting with podcasting. In fact, they're listening to podcasters and wondering which ones would make good radio producers. But, Jake says, often production quality is poor; sticking a mic into your laptop apparently just doesn't cut it. Jake recommends Transom.org for information about tools.)

This is exciting stuff.

Citizen Deliberative Councils

Jock Gill points to an article from a year ago in which Tom Atlee compiles a fascinating set of links about Citizen Deliberative Councils: "A Citizen Deliberative Council (CDC) is a temporary council of citizens convened to deliberate about public concerns (either about a specific issue or the general state of the community and its future) and to provide guidance for officials and the public." (Quote from here.) Atlee writes that in British Columbia, Canada, one Citizens Assembly "on electoral reform, been given the power to put a proposal directly to a vote by the people in a regular election."

He describes it in an email that's circulating:

This Assembly was formed with 160 randomly selected citizens charged with reviewing existing and innovative voting systems. After ten months of study, reviewing hundreds of written submissions, holding public hearings, hearing from experts, and deliberating together, they finally announced their recommendations in October 2004 (see the newsletter below). It is quite clear these citizens really love the new system they've designed. It's a combination of instant runoff voting and proportional representation (see notes below) which they have customized for their province and named BC-STV, short for British Columbia Single Transferable Vote. 146 of them voted in favor of it. Only 7 voted no.

Before they launched this remarkable democratic exercise, the government pledged to submit their recommendations (whatever they were) as a referendum to the voters in May 2005. Now, if that referendum passes, the government has further pledged to push through legislation that organizes the province's electoral system to use the new voting method in the 2009 elections.

Fittingly, the Assembly did its work in public, including on the Web.

Leaves on surfaces

I got my Canon S60 in part because Tim Bray recommended his S50 so highly, and I've been very happy with it.

Tim's posted some photos he took with his camera before he upgraded to the S70. They're lovely. The subject of one reminded me of a picture I took last week after our autumnal snowfall here in Boston.

These photos by Max Lyons, on the other hand, make me want to leave for Scotland immediately.

Transcription

I ran the audio of my Library of Congress presentation through DragonSoft, thinking that this would be an easy way to make a transcript. Here's how it renders the opening:

To him here are sure you are in the OK when loan. And I have a want a and were a Shannon I. here in him that we here, third and or Shannon, there will you a very moral him the now I will to him eight. All for your has no longer so I know I'll tell you are you sure you will I know him the eight him she and her to him we will be in the only to the him to all or me one alone are sure to in yeah, I here you to him are the only in normal, her know there are no more I mourn air him sure all the handle or in yeah, only yeah OK I did yeah for your third him I will or a travel and hey him in I mourn room will sure you sure you a little. The interim, hey oh, that her him to enter yeah there will all or of the and they yeah, yeah yeah fo their him a little room should him in him in him the him. We him to you or you all or yeah r yeah

I seem to have the "Translate into Molly's Sililoquy" option on.

Yes, I did train the software. In fact, if I play the WAV file over the speakers into a microphone, DragonSoft does much better...but not good enough to make it an appealing option for this project.

Fingers crossed...

I just received a hand-written fax from Congressman Tom Reynolds:

David -

As I was watching the returns on election night...gonig through the roller coaster ride of misinformation before we finally declared victory, I thought of all the Businessmen [sic] whose hard work made our triumph possible. As such, I've nominated you to receive the 2004 Businessman of the Year Award. Your official nomination documents are enclosed. Please call my assistant right away at 1-800-810-1894 to accept your nomtination. Your chances look great!

Tom

Woohoo! Republican Businessman of the Year! And it's practically a lock! Unfortunately, the 800 number was busy, but I'll keep trying!

Request for help: Thunderbird script

To help me fight comment spam, I really need to be able to programmatically open all selected messages in Thunderbird and process the contents. I had a script in Outlook that did this, but I can't find or figure out how to do it in Thunderbird. The hard part is opening the selected messages. Anyone have a code fragment or two that they can post or point me to?

Thanks!

Brand Democrat

Oliver Willis has an open thread for branding the Democratic Party. There are some kickass ideas there.

(Thanks to Ina Steiner for the link.)

How to Fold a Shirt translated

For those who thought there might be some trickery in the fabulous How to Fold a Shirt video I posted about, here's a translation I found on a message board:

"Start by laying the Tshirt flat and sideways in front of you, neck opening to your right. Find the centerpoint on the far side and pinch it with your left hand, about two inches in from the far edge.

With your right hand, draw a line from your left hand to the right edge of the tshirt, parallel to the edge of the shirt. This brings your right hand to the neck-opening side of the shirt. Grasp the edge with your right hand.

Now, while maintaining your grip, cross your right hand over your left, towards the opposite (waist-opening) end of the tshirt. Maintain the same imaginary line you've been working on (about two inches from the far edge of the shirt, parallel to the edge) and add the new edge to the grasp of your right hand.

This is where the magic happens. Simply uncross your hands and extend them in front of you, lifting the shirt perpendicular to the floor. Complete the fold by letting the loose arm hole drop to the floor and folding the shirt in half over it!

PS: The msg board requires registration, so here's a link to the Google cache of it.

PS: The instructions work.

Attorney R. General

Joshua Glenn wonders in the Boston Globe today why the adminsitration will not release what the R in "Alberto R. Gonzales" stands for. What's Gonzales got to hide?

Joshua guesses that R might stand for Rosebud, Ragnar, Reuben, Rico, Romeo or Rudyard. Or pehaps, he says, it's something French such as Rémy, Robbe-Grillet. Or perhaps Roewade, Rove or Rambo.

Personally, I think it's Alberto Roosevelt Gonzales, but I'm open to speculation.

Library of Congress mp3s

Thanks to Michael Shook, here are some MP3 versions of my talk to the Library of Congress on Monday:

Speech (15MB)
Q&A (19MB)
The whole shebang (39MB)

The Quicktime movie of it is here in the unlikely event that you think seeing me will improve your experience of it. Or maybe C-SPAN's Real version of it will work for you.

Can't we all just get along? My way?

Found on Craigslist by Kelly Sue (via Joi):

"Straight male seeks Bush supporter for fair, physical fight - m4m"

I would like to fight a Bush supporter to vent my anger. If you are one, have a fiery streek, please contact me so we can meet and physically fight. I would like to beat the shit out of you.

Mark Dionne, who is apparently feeling a tad nervous about post-election America, tremulously wonders in an email whether the Red states or Blue states have more nuclear weapons under their control.

(Yes, he's joking.)

Conferenza - Professional blogging

Before bloggers were blogging, Conferenza was sending protobloggers to conferences to write up reports for those back home. Shel Israel has just sent me his write-up of PopTech, and it's durn good - concise and thoughtful. And I agree with him that this year's PopTech was superb. (No, his reports aren't always this upbeat, and even in this one he isn't shy about pointing out the few clunkers.)

Conferenza costs $200/year for individuals, although first-timers get a 50% discount. Is it worth it? The quality is excellent, but you'll have to decide if it suits your needs. One thing it makes clear, though: There's a huge difference between the type of spotty live blogging I tend to do at conferences and having a reporter there who is responsible for covering the event.

How to fold a shirt

I believe this is very old news, but it sure is amusing: Learn how to fold a t-shirt perfectly in 3 seconds. (Well, it takes about 15 seconds to learn how to fold it, but folding it actually takes less than 3 seconds.)

Video of my talk to the Library of Congress

I've been having trouble getting C-SPAN's video of my talk to the Library of Congress to work, so I've made a Quicktime version that you can try accessing here. It's 90MB of streamin' video. I'm working on posting some other formats as well.

Zephyr for president

I love Zephyr Teachout's post over at Personal Democracy about what Net stuff worked in the campaign, what didn't, and what will work next time. Not to mention that she's a heck of writer.

Evoting tea leaves

Hmm. John Kerry just wrote me a note — it was so personal it was practically in longhand (and, by the way, "longhand" is a good example of a word with a "gh" in it that is not pronounced as it is in "rough" and "bough") — pledging to continue fighting, yada yada. Then there was this sentence:

Regardless of the outcome of this election, once all the votes are counted — and they will be counted — we will continue to challenge this administration.

What's that intended to signal and/or who is it intended to appease?

Meanwhile, here's an audio message from Kevin Zeese, Nader's campaign spokesperson:

We're seeking a recount in wards in New Hampshire where there have been mathematical anomalies...When we look at those numbers it turns out that most of those anomalies occurred in wards where the vote was counted on the Diebold AccuVote Machine, in fact 78% of those unusual votes were on those machines. This is the first audit in a Presidential Election of an electronic voting count system so it's an historic moment. Either way it turns out it will be good for our democracy.

Of course, to judge the significance of that 78% figure we'd need to know what percentage to the precincts used the Diebold machines, but I'm sure they'll get that all straightened out...

BBC World Service goes RSS

This is way cool — a major news service (hey, we're talking The Beeb here!) distributing its news by letting us view it wherever and whenever we want. And in lots of languages.

Here's an informal email (lightly edited) from someone who works there:

BBC World Service have gone public with RSS 1.0 feeds

I'm proud to say we at the BBC World service have launched RSS 1.0 (RDF) feeds to the public and automatic discovery of the rss feed is also in place.

There is no help or notification page of any type yet because we are tackling the problem of working with many different languages. The multi-language rss reader and aggregator market is still very much in flux it would seem. We are very much relying on automatic discovery at this stage, as not to confuse our audience.

We chose RSS 1.0 because of its universal acceptance throughout the blog/web sphere and it includes a date element for every single news entry, giving our audience a better experience of RSS. In the future we may offer RSS 2.0.

We do not believe anyone else has RSS syndication in as many languages as we currently do, making this a worlds first for the BBC. We have yet to release any information to the press or news sites like Slashdot or boingboing yet because we have not created pages to help people who are unfamiliar with rss.

—- If you would like to try some of the World service RSS, here are some examples.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/albanian/index.rdf Albanian news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/albanian/indepth/index.rdf - Albanian in-depth news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/albanian/pressreview/index.rdf - Albanian press review
http://www.bbc.co.uk/hungarian/index.rdf - Hungarian news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/hindi/sport/index.rdf - Hindi sports news
http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/arts/index.rdf - Persian arts news

Comments are welcome at my blog

So, put one of them feeds in your aggregator and smoke it!

Note: The author of the email requested that I remove his name from this blog entry, which I have done.

ASIS&T conference

I spent the day at an academic conference for just about the first time since I left the philosophy biz 20 years ago. And the rush of memories generally weren't pleasant. But, that's just my scar tissue talking.

Today was the last day of the American Society for Information Science and Technology conference in Providence. I came to learn about cataloging and classifying, and I heard a couple of really interesting presentations. My favorite was by Frank Miksa of the U of Texas at Austin. He pointed out that we all tend to believe that "there exists a realm of knowledge that grows through individual contributions, is transmitted from generation to generation such that its existence is thought to be continuus and is capable of being examined." But, he said, that idea is collapsing as it's become clearer to us that we aren't slotting books (say) into eternal subject categories; the books themselves create subjects.

I also enjoyed David Blair's brief overview of Wittgenstein as well as the panel on blogs and wikis (Cameron Marlow and Sunir Shah), but they were fun in part because they were more familiar territory.

Much of the rest of the day I heard talks that were either too far over my head or seemed to me to be simple ideas wrapped in a lot of academic mystification...just like the American Philosophical Association meetings I used to go to. One of the presenters even used text-only foils. No, he wasn't wearing spats.

The woman who introduced the blogging panel said that last year there was nothing about blogging, and ASIST ought to be in the lead of the information technology revolution. I was only there for a day, but what I saw was not vibrant with the ideas that are breaking all around us on the Net. Maybe I just missed it, but in this area, ASIST seemed to be catching up, not leading.

The hallway time was great. I met a bunch of people I'll be following up with.

danah on social interaction

Over at Operating Manual, danah is insightful about designing artificial social networks for interactions instead of for "users." (See disclaimer.)

An idle question

Why does knowing how a magic trick is done ruin the trick but knowing how a movie's special effects are done doesn't ruin the movie?

Nov 3 Theses

Lots of good stuff in these 2919 theses. Some are even inspirational. Now all we need is the positive vision, the words to put it in, the leaders who can lead us towards that vision, a functioning organization on the ground, and 15,000 red. white and blue balloons attached to the ceiling of a large facility.

(Thanks to Seth Gordon for the link.)

"A Plea for Excuses" online

Steve Kruba has discovered an online version of John Austin's classic essay, "A Plea for Excuses," which I mentioned a few days ago. In it, Austin shows that our casual, ordinary use of excuse terms is actually quite precise and subtle...but when experts use those terms, they get all bollixed up.

This is where Austin asks us to consider the differences between:

a1 He clumsily trod on the snail. a2 Clumsily he trod on the snail.
b1 He trod clumsily on the snail.
b2 He trod on the snail clumsily.

Warm earth

Joi blogs some science about global warming. Scary stuff. I'm coming to think that that the guy we elected president may not be the one with the best platform on this particular issue.

Don't miss the discussion in the comments after Joi's post.

RicketyPedia

Robert McHenry, Former Editor in Chief, the Encyclopædia Britannica, does not much care for the Wikipedia. It isn't reliable enough for him. His example: The uncertainty of Alexander Hamilton's birthdate got edited out by someone at some point, and the user won't even know it. Good point. But I notice that the Hamilton article now has been amended with both dates, and has details about the controversy.

Ok, I admit that's a cheap shot because it distracts from the general problem McHenry points to. But the way to resolve whether it's truly a problem is to see how the Wikipedia develops. If it turns into a swamp of misinformation, then McHenry is right. If not, he's wrong. And, so far, my casual use of the Wikipedia shows that he's much more wrong than right.

(Thanks to Tim Bray for the link, whose comments on the topic are, as always, well worth reading.)

Digital ID slides

If for some bizarre reasons you want to see my slides for the Jupiter Inside ID conference, they're here.

Username: insideid
password: nov04

Unfortunately, they're mainly graphics and won't make much sense. Also, the file is 7MB. Also, unless you have Powerpoint XP or greater, they won't animate.

Photos from Fallujah

Photos don't tell the whole story. They tell stories in inevitably weighted ways. But they do speak. Here are some from Fallujah that I haven't seen in any of the mainstream media. Of course, I haven't done a lot of looking for them.

Preserving Books

Jeez, what an interesting day.

I spent the morning at the the Jupiter Inside ID conference. Then I had lunch with six folks from the Library of Congress who have a variety of interests and deep, passionate expertise. We talked about if, when and how the Library's 150M objects will be digitized and how that will change the institution, research, knowledge, authority... It was completely fascinating. Then I got a tour of the Library's 100-person conservation/preservation division. May I use the "fascinating" word twice in one paragraph? I've been mightily impressed by the people I've met there.

Now, after a spicy Indian dinner with my nephew and a friend of his, I'm in a hotel in Providence that promised free wifi. Instead I get messages about out of date certificates and about reaching the redirection limit as it tries to connect with the wifi service provider's home page. I'm using dialup for the first time in a looong time and feeling just a tad cranky about it.

Was Ohio stolen, you ignorant slut?

Salon has a point/counterpoint on election fraud in Ohio featuring the name-callin', contempt-drippin' Greg Palast saying Ohio belongs to Kerry and Farhad Manjoo defending his article saying that Kerry really did lose. If it's not obvious, I think Farhad comes out ahead on this one.

On Thursday Night, I heard Farhad lay out the issues at the beginning of an NPR talk show. He was excellent. then Heather Gerken and Steve Ansolabehere, from Harvard and MIT respectively, were interviewed. They were good, too, but I was quite surprised to here Ansolabehere say that he was "100%" confident that Bush won Ohio. Gerken responded similarly. When do researchers and academics ever say they are 100% certain? Is it literally beyond all imaginings that the e-voting machines were hacked? I mean, I'm 98% certain they weren't, but how could I ever get to 100% on such a topic? Maybe I'm over-reacting — and I was listening in the car and not taking notes, so I may not have gotten the exchange right — but I feel like the media are on a mission to reassure the public. And that is not the media's role. That's why we have politicians and soma.

Tom Hartmann was also on the show also, and while I am not as alarmed as he is, it was good to hear a skeptic.

Digital ID and leeway

In a few hours I'm keynoting Jupiter's Inside ID Conference. Since I know less about digital ID than anyone in the audience, I'm going to say something like the following:

When it comes to digital ID and anonymity, let's take our cue from the real world where we've worked out these issues with great subtlety and precision.

In the real world, anonymity is the default.

Let's look at what ordinary language philosophy might say about the term "identity." It turns out that an identity isn't something we have. Rather, it's used primarily when someone has a reason to go from doubt to knowledge about how to connect us to some other piece of information, in order to accomplish something (e.g., arrest us or return our wallet).

So, we should only have to identify ourselves to the level of distinction that justifies a difference in treatment.

But why is anonymity good? Because we need leeway to live together.

Then I argue against "accountabalism," the magical belief in accountability. Accountabalism is eating us alive.

Then it's on to how accountability tramples the value of the implicit.

Thanks, God bless, and drive safely...

(Or something like that.)

This is a more ruminative (= incoherent) talk than usual, and the first one that includes a photograph of J.L. Austin.

After that, I get to go back to the Library of Congress for some discussions, which I believe center on the spellling of verko