There is an interesting article here on the impact of blogs on share prices. It seems people place a lot of trust in blog authors. This brings new meaning to Chinese Whispers.

Posted in blog analytics, financial, text analytics | No Comments »

Seth Grimes has a short article on text analytics in the financial sector here.

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There is an interesting article from early 2005 on the future of blog mining here. It is always interesting to read past predictions to see whether they were on track.

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Some researchers are applying topic modelling to the New York Times with interesting results. You can read about it here. This is not that far removed from the Leximancer tool.

Posted in business intelligence, text analytics | No Comments »

This blog will be used to talk about analytics technology with a focus on intelligence gathering for fraud investigation (particularly financial surveillance) and business intelligence.
I’ll use this blog to keep track of interesting articles and developments including:

• financial regulation issues;
• advances in text analytics technology;
• the non-obvious applications of new analytics technology; and
• random thoughts and ideas.

I hope other people find it interesting!

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July 14, 2008 by patrickgavin

At the suggestion of the Department of Research Services, the Ryan-Matura Library has recently purchased a subscription to LibGuides, a platform for the delivery of our subject guides. Subject guides have traditionally been a great help to those students who find out about their existence. There are so many students, though, who never stumble across them. The LibGuides platform will not only allow us to make our guides more accessible (widgets can be dropped in Blackboard, facebook, and any web site), but it will also allow us to present these guides in a more user-friendly way, one that takes into consideration all of the benefits of the social web (ability for users to leave comments, rating system, social bookmarking tools, email updates, rss, fully-integrated virtual chat, ability to allow users to submit useful resources, etc., etc.).

Click the picture above to view a guide that I am currently working on, check back here for updates over the summer, and look for many more such guides this fall!

Posted in Library 2.0, education, higher education, technology | Tagged department of research services, libguides, Library 2.0, research, research tools, social-web, subject guides, web 2.0 | No Comments »

June 25, 2008 by patrickgavin

Okay. My apologies to anyone who has been checking this blog over the course of the past couple of months. I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus. This is to change, though, especially as the fall semester grows nigh. Each of the other research librarians are to be starting blogs soon and as the new semester begins, I hope we’ll have a more comprehensive online community going on here. Apologies now having been bestowed upon all of you faithful readers, I’ll move on to this post:

I’m finally nearing the end of John Banville’s Mann Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sea. The eventual moment that I first shut the back flap has been a long time in coming. I bought the book as soon as it reached American book stores (spring 2006), though I didn’t crack it until this past spring. It sat there on my shelf begging me to open it, but I was too busy. Even after having begun the book, the process of finishing it has been slow-going. I don’t quite know why it has taken me so long to read this; it’s not that it’s dull, especially dense, dreadful, or any other pejorative d-word. Actually it’s quite good and I not only recommend it to anyone who has an affinity for fine literature, but to historians, archaeologists, archivists, and anyone else who is interested in anything dealing with the concepts of memory, the past, death, the terminally ill, relationships, etc., etc. (the list could go on). Banville’s prose is beautiful and his multiple musings that touch on our understanding of memory and history are particularly perceptive. Be forewarned, though: If you’re used to reading mainstream American best-sellers, The Sea will be a different sort of read, as it’s not a plot-driven, page turner type of book. If you’re still reading this post and are interested, read on for a couple excerpts…

Continue Reading »

Posted in Mann Booker, fiction, literature, novel | Tagged Banville, beautiful, death, history, literature, Mann Booker, memory, relationships, sea, terminally ill | No Comments »

February 19, 2008 by patrickgavin

I’ve been running across this question all over the place recently. Stanly Fish (Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago) has blogged on the value/need for humanities education twice in the past month. His first post on the topic received 484 comments and his follow-up garnered 448 comments. I remember reading through every single one of those comments, cursing, jeering, cheering, muttering, and eventually drooling as my eyes twitched and spasomed (brain rot from reading too many comments…dangerous and painful infliction…curable, though…as long as you spend an adequate amount of time away from the computer screen).

Today I received my first newsletter from bigthink.com, the site billing itself as the youtube of ideas. The featured user question, from cuixotiq, was, “what purpose does forcing the study of the humanities (or the ‘lofty’ subjects) - be it literature, art history, philosophy et al - serve for the career-driven college student?” Oh, that nasty little bugger…what a way to word a question: “only you non career-driven students have the time for the lofty humanities…”

Anyway…you can read on for my quick, off-the-top-of-my-head, response…or you can go over to bigthink.com and pitch in with your own opinion.

Continue Reading »

Posted in bigthink, democracy, education, higher education, humanities | Tagged bigthink, democracy, education, higher education, humanities | No Comments »

February 4, 2008 by patrickgavin

Lawyer, former medievalist, American history buff saves the day! Mr. Joseph Romito, a lawyer in Virginia discovered someone selling on ebay an artifact (an obscure letter signed by John C. Calhoun) that he knew to be in the collection of the NY State Library. That someone turned out to be Daniel D. Lorello, a 29-year employee of the NY State Archives. Lorello has now admitted to taking 300-400 documents from the Archives in 2007 alone. Why was he doing this? He says to pay off his daughter’s credit card bill. See the NY Times reporting of the case here.

Posted in Calhoun, archive, archives, documents, ebay, larceny, lorello, romito, theft | Tagged archives, Calhoun, documents, ebay, larceny, lorello, romito, theft | No Comments »

January 29, 2008 by patrickgavin

I’m not completely sure how to start this post. First, I guess with thanks to John Fudrow, else it would have been even longer before I found out about this development (how did I miss this?). My original title for this post was LOC + Flickr = Interesting, but then I saw that the LibrarianInBlack already used a similar approach (LoC + Flickr = happy land), so I decided to change.

Why do I mention this? I’m not sure. Perhaps I’m still procrastinating, as I’m not sure how to proceed with this post. Do I simply sit back, grin, and celebrate the wonder and joy of seeing such an established institution, the Library of Congress, make a bold leap into the Library 2.0 realm…or do I perhaps analyze the benefits/drawbacks of such a move.

How about this: I’m smiling right now and just enjoying it. You too can smile, go read about the pilot project, view the photos, contribute tags, and forget all about my post….or, you can come back and read on for my analysis:

Continue Reading »

A cynical look at Pay Per Click (PPC)

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There is still some debate whether the search engines place any weight on keywords used within page urls and that’s actually what I wanted to quickly test. So I set up a couple of pages from this blog and included unique words within the page url, one separated by hyphens (dashes) and the other by underscores. Obviously the unique ‘words’ were not used onpage or anywhere else including linking to the page. The pages were set up as separate pages rather than posts, to ensure they were not syndicated or linked to from anywhere else.

Although a very rough kind of test, I wanted to see whether using keywords within the url only would be enough to pull back the page by itself under search. Second, I wanted to see whether Google is treating underscores as word separators as suggested they might some time ago.

Hyphens (dashes) In URL - /test-ljkdldlk-hdhdhdjqe/

• Searching for the two words with a space (”ljkdldlk hdhdhdjqe”) brings back the page
• Searching for one of the words individually (”ljkdldlk” or “hdhdhdjqe“) brings back the page
• Searching for the two unique keywords together without a space (”ljkdldlkhdhdhdjqe“) did not bring back the page

Underscores In URL - /test-lhdldkjjgjk_lkhjhnues/

• Searching for two words with a underscore (”lhdldkjjgjk_lkhjhnues”) brings back the page
• Searching for one of the words individually (”lhdldkjjgjk” or “lkhjhnues“) or together with a space did not bring back the page
• Searching for the two unique keywords together without a underscore “lhdldkjjgjklkhjhnues” did not bring back the page.

Conclusion

First of all, it looks as though hyphens and underscores are still treated very differently by Google. Currently underscores are still not being treated as word separators from these tests. The results match Matt Cutts comments from back in August 2005 on how Google would return the pages under search.

By no means do I think this was the best test in the world, but it does suggest that Google do give some weight to keyword use in urls, no matter how minor the weight might be.

Sometimes its good to analyse these things in context aswell - We know already that Google and Live seem to completely ignore the use of meta keywords (Yahoo and ASK give them some weight), while keywords used within a meta description alone are not enough for Google to retrieve the page under search (only with the use of anchor text aswell). So this gives us some idea of the weight keywords in a url may have.

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Ok, so I was just reading the official Google blog today about their new 3D virtual experience product called Lively when I noticed some big red lines.

Anyone who uses the SEO for firefox extension knows that red means the ‘nofollow’ attribute is being used on a link.

So what are Google applying the ‘nofollow’ attribute to on their own blog?.

Their own ‘What We’re Reading’ list, which includes respected industry sites such as Phillip Lenssen, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable & Traffick amongst others.

Can Google please explain how that can make sense?.

Google are actively saying they read these sites, they get value from these sources which they must respect enough to link to in the first place. Yet they won’t allow any pagerank or link juice to be passed unless its to another Google property?

Googles nofollow advice from their help center in summary -

• Untrusted content (comments, where there is a lack of editorial control)
• Paid Links
• Crawl prioritisation (’Sign in’ links etc)

So which of these exactly does their own reading list fall into?.

The Hypocrisy is scary. This is exactly how the nofollow attribute should not be used.

Say One Thing, Do Another

Use ‘nofollow’ for sites you can’t vouch for or necessarily trust is how Matt Cutts has always expressed it.

“In an ideal world, nofollow would only be for untrusted links.“

So why do Google add nofollow in this case on content that is editorally controlled?.

Matts own words on what makes a great link -

“So, what are the links that will stand the test of time? Those links are typically given voluntarily. It is an editorial link by someone, and it’s someone that’s informed. They are not misinformed, they are not tricked; there is no bait and switch involved. It’s because somebody thinks that something is so cool, so useful, or so helpful that they want to make little sign posts so that other people on the web can find that out.“

The funny thing is, Googles own link based algo is what made them the biggest search engine in the world and yet they are contradicting it by creating a FUD campaign that even their own employees have failed to understand.

Google created the directive, they created the rules on how it should be used and yet they don’t adhear to them. Taking away the hyperlink structure of the internet is destroying themselves in the process.

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Interesting experiment by the Neutralize Guava guys over on Search Engine War blog where they tested and proved that Google is now indexing links in flash.

Next up for them to prove is whether text in a flash button acts as an anchor on those links…

Pretty big achievement by the Google/Adobe engineers, flash still won’t offer the same kind of information html tags will but it is a start.

Anyway, good news if you were of the mind to have a site that needs to hide the odd 10K keyword rich article with some nice juicy links own a flash site.

Anyone thinking free flash intros, movies/widgets?.

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I always wanted the ppcblog.com domain, but unfortunately it was registered before I got the chance.

At the time, the .net & .org were available aswell as the .co.uk and nobody had built a brand around the name ‘PPC blog‘ in the same way there were seo blogs seemingly everywhere.

About 2+ years ago when I developed this site for a little fun the ppcblog.com domain used to redirect over to payperclickblog.com and the site was aptly named after that domain. This was great as I always wanted to work with the shorter url and ‘brand’.

Aaron Wall of SEO Book is however the owner of the domain which his wife Giovanni and he have decided to develop in the past week, seperate and away from the payperclickblog.com domain.

Aarons SEO Book is a fantastic resource, so I have no doubt this new site will be equally full of great regulary updated content. Regular enough to stay in the Toprank search marketing blog list (ping) which I got kicked from for not updating regulary enough…

As I have never really had a goal for this site other than to share random thoughts, have a nice testing platform for ideas or vent frustration it doesn’t bother me that it shares the same name. But it does highlight the importance of getting all the TLD’s you can if you want to establish yourself globally and block out competition.

Geographical filters are pretty strong, unless you are a high authority domain and in my view you still can’t rely completely on Googles Webmaster Central (and others) to set geotargetting for the sub directory/folder route. Getting all relevant TLD’s for each country in my opinion can still be the safest way to go. Which I might expand upon in another post as I am going off subject.

Anyway, so don’t get confused guys with your .coms and .co.uks - or do and I might get more traffic.

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Another example of a Wordpress blog being hacked and injected with hidden links to viagra, tramadol and the like. Their blog is on a subdomain of the main site - http://inside.123-reg.co.uk/

If the self acclaimed ‘UK’s largest web host’ can’t protect their own blog or even spot they have a big problem, what hope is there for the average website owner?. I’m guessing this probably isn’t helping their domain rank.

Maybe they will give me a free hosting account for letting them know about the problem…

Maybe not, lol

Btw - Patrick at Blogstorm suggested using Google alerts to keep an eye on hacking.

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This question seems to come up a lot still and while I believe sitemaps in general can be great for helping search engine spiders crawl your site and an effective way of spreading out linkjuice (with some nice anchor text) they can also bite you in the arse when not used intelligently. Certainly submitting sitemaps specifically to the search engines in my view can have its drawbacks.

Still Won’t Rank

The key reason for submitting a sitemap is to help Google crawl your site and find those deep pages. Now those pages may well be included in the index because of the sitemap submission, but the problem is they are still never going to rank for anything. There is a reason why they were not in the index in the first place and Google will simply not start ranking those pages.

Hide The Truth

In many ways sitemaps hide problems or issues with your website. Personally I would only want pages included within the index from my site that ’should’ be there naturally. Data you get from using the basic site command in Google is more valuable as you can analyse pages or areas of the site that are having problems being crawled and indexed. This then helps you identify problems with site architecture, internal link structure, content etc and resolve issues properly which will help these pages rank.

Overall Site Quality & Trust

Often pages that are merely included in the index because of a sitemap will or can fall into the ’supplemental index’ results (its still there) which are low pagerank less trusted pages. Now I certainly don’t like the idea of having too many of my sites pages in the supplemental index and showing Google more of your content can mean just that. Instead of Google believing you have 100 pages and only 10 of those are in the supplemental index, your site could now have 200 pages with 100 of those in the supplemental index. So Google is now looking at your overall domain and classing that 50% of your site is not in its view ‘quality content’.

What can that do overall to your domain in terms of authority, trust and rankings?. In this way, you can give too much information to the search engines.

Huge sites with masses of inventory will probably find some of the tools that Webmaster Central can offer extremely valuable, but for the majority of sites there are better things you can spend your time doing than worrying about submitting a sitemap.

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It’s been a couple of days since Googles keyword trademarking policy change and it’s interesting to see many advertisers have already been slapped out of the bidding. In a quality score world, its not as simple as bidding against any brand due to quality based minimum bids. Although you might be able to display against any brand you like for a short period, Google will soon kick you into touch if you are deemed not relevant enough.

Patrick over at Blogstorm posted about the effects of the new trademark policy with screenshots of adverts against once trademarked brands such as Tesco, Asda, Lastminute.com and Amazon. But it was just time before many of them simply fell away…

As I mentioned previously in my post regarding preparation of the Google trademark change, quite simply, it will be extremely hard to be able to display against many core branded terms due to low click through rates which will mean you will get slapped with a high minimum CPC.

Lets take a look at those same brand examples today -

First and foremost, there has been a massive reduction in adverts as expected. Some of the examples may have been rather bad ‘advanced matching’ from Googles broad match feature otherwise the adverts left within the bidding for the above examples are either -

1) Maintaining a high enough click through rate (and therefore quality score) to keep a reasonable level of minimum CPC. For example, notice how Lastminute.com are having more trouble protecting their brand as many competitors can get away with using ‘Last Minute Holidays’ within the advert title which will be helping to maintain their CTR and advert alive.

2) Advertisers within high CPC markets will find the high minimum CPC’s less of a problem than those in low CPC markets. Advertisers in insurance, loans, mortgages etc markets already pay a high cost per click (£5-£30 max CPC’s), so a high minimum CPC of say even £10 might be lower than their usual average CPC anyway. So for example, Tesco has just a couple of loan related advertisers who can pay that price.

For the above reasons, brands like Amazon will probably have less concerns with competitors. Some of the main areas effected are highly competitive markets with high relevance between brands and product offerings where consumers actively comparison shop for the very best deal. Brands within ‘car insurance’ for example have been hit hard.

These guys pay high CPC’s and have a relevance/comparison shopping nature -

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I just spotted Google is showing onebox results for queries relating to English football clubs. A simple club search query brings back their next fixture. Screenshot below -

Only seems to be Premiership clubs currently. Cool.

Update - Google have now added last game results alongside the next fixture. As below -

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Ok so the 5th of May lift on Google keyword trademarking date is nearly here.

Are you prepared? Are your clients?

Are you going all out aggressively to bid against competitors trademarks?.

Are you going to start bidding against your own brand as protection?.

Perhaps a mixture?. Or are you going to wait and see what your competitors do?

Looks like Tesco have taken the ‘moral high ground’ issuing a statement that they will not be bidding against anyone elses branded terms.

Will this moral high ground mean that they get less competition against their own brand?.

Lets see.

The key thing to remember here is ROI. You can go and bid wildy against any brand you like if you are willing to pay through the nose for it, but with a lack of relevance and ultimate conversion its expenditure you can do without.

Lets not forget, Google has quality based minimum bids, so although you may think your brand is relevant, if your click through rate is not high enough your minimum bids will get very high. Trademarks are still in place for adtext and this is a massive factor in click through rates.

Against core branded keywords advertisers will find CTR will not be high enough to allow bidding against brand unless you are willing to pay extortionate CPC’s. This is because core branded keywords contain a high number of navigational queries with lazy searchers who would rather search for the brand than type the url directly into the browser. These searchers can be blind to anything other than the brand they searched for.

I recently set up a competitors adgroup for a client with these types of competitor terms. The competition was directly related selling the same product and all keywords were on phrase match. However, as expected CTR was simply not high enough to keep them active. Unless Google lower CTR thresholds you will see this -

The Hitwise blog highlights the gap in brand traffic lost between the US and UK (where the US have always been able to bid openly against keywords), so there is brand volume to be had from competitors. It just needs to be taken from longer tail queries and more inteligently than simply bidding against core terms.

Another key thing to remember is the relative nature of Googles bidding platform.

If you are bidding against your competitors brand as the only advertiser against the brand owner, then your CTR will be poor in comparison. Google takes into account all advertisers against that keyword. So if you bid in a pack with 8 other advertisers who will also have relatively poor click through rates then the quality threshold might be a lowered a little allowing for lower minimum bids.

So will the threshold naturally decline over time?

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After Yahoos blog was hacked I spotted today that Amnesty seem to have a similar problem.

Monitoring the SERPs for ‘buy viagra‘ (ahem) I noticed an Amnesty blog post appearing in 8th. If you click on the link you get redirected via some onpage script to a pharmacy site…

The cached text of the page shows the viagra content. If you go direct to the page (rather than visiting via Google) you won’t be redirected either and can view the text.

What’s most alarming is the scale of the problem over at Amnesty.

A quick site lookup shows blog and news articles full of hidden text and links to .edu domains and ‘pharmacy’ sites… not cool.

Coincidentally the listing above Amnesty for ‘buy viagra’ is from Prospect Magazine. You see as a user you get redirected to the homepage but visit as Googlebot and you see a whole different page. A quick lookup shows they have similar issues to Amnesty.

Looks like Matts 2008 predictions are coming true.

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or, how i learned to stop worrying and love the fact that the vast majority of things i encounter seem ideological in one way or another.

that's what the comment on my last post said.

the answer is that i'm right here in california, friends, but not for long.

since that last post, many Things have happened. i got super-awesome grant funding for my field work! i presented some work back at yale! i moved in with jarrod! i had my wisdom teeth out! i went to my fifth college reunion! i wrote hella statistics for the liberian truth and reconciliation commission! summer came (to the extent that summer comes to san francisco)! we celebrated a whole year of Official Coupledom! i wrote conference papers! i read (did read, have read, am reading, will read) books about el salvador! i made el salvador plans!

and so on.

on sunday i fly to santa fe, and then to grand forks, where anne is getting married. MARRIED! and then home to cali for a few weeks, and then back to the east coast for a few weeks (yay symposium! boo apsa!), and then back home to cali for one last week of whirlwind prep, and then i'm off to el salvador.

this is why i don't blog: there is so much to do, so immediately, that all my thoughts about things outside of staying sane in my daily life and doing work have been radically compressed.

however, a brief rundown:

bad: dissident "traditionalist" anglicans; john mccain's speaking skills; john mccain; the phrase "flip-flop"; the FARC; cheney-orchestrated global warming denialism at the EPA; barry zito; facebook diet ads.

distressing: new york times magazine articles on young gay marrieds and rush limbaugh; virtually all news from afghanistan and pakistan; seymour hersh on iran; every single thing the bush administration has ever done with or about or to inmates at guantanamo bay; the aforementioned facebook diet ads.

good: at&t park (the place, not the branding); barack obama, personally and politically; the symbolic potential of a black president; fourth of july on the beach.

interesting: new APSR article on a twin study of voting behavior; biblical data visualization.

posted by amelia @ 2:59 PM   |

i'm breaking another near-monthlong radio silence with sad news: charles tilly has died.

political science largely remembers tilly for the maxim "states make war, [and] war makes states" -- one of these big theoretical contentions that comes up short, incomplete, overbroad, but which nevertheless puts many people on new paths.

my own connection was to a different part of tilly's work. imagine my ill-informed surprise when, having decided we really needed to theorize "repertoires of violence," i was informed that tilly had been writing about repertoires of contention since the '70's. not the same, but not entirely different, either. at least, i thought at the time, i've reinvented an interesting wheel.

every remembrance of tilly, from the crooked timber link above to lee bollinger's statement from columbia, talks about the boundlessness of both his energy and his intellectual interests. many scholars in many disciplines are going to miss him.

posted by amelia @ 1:01 PM   |

so, i was walking down MLK just now, coming home from the coffee shop where i spend my morning work time, when an older gentleman carrying a tiny guitar stopped me.

"excuse me," he said.

i assumed i was going to be asked the time, and started fishing around in my pocket for my "watch" (cell phone).

"aren't you robert de niro's little sister?" he asked.

well, no. (indeed, on a quick google search, de niro appears to be an only child.)

my actual answer: "not today."

posted by amelia @ 3:14 PM   |

a bit ago, timothy burke wrote about gatekeeping and territorialism in academia, beginning his discussion with a recent tempest-in-teapot over tim weiner's recent history of the CIA, legacy of ashes. i'm only halfway-or-so through the book, and i haven't read the critique by stephen weissman that burke points to. luckily for me, the substance of that debate is sort of incidental to burke's argument.

burke writes: "You can always tell when a serious scholarly pissing match is about to kick off in a journal or a listserv or a conference panel: it’s exactly when you see this mismatch between the intensity of the adjectives used by one scholar to describe his opponent and the alleged errors being described.

...When you see this kind of adjectival intensity associated with such a relatively picayune point, one of two things is going on. One possibility is that there is a major analytic disagreement about the overall substance of a book, and both parties to that disagreement represent substantial schools of thought or factions with a long-running history of antagonism...

Or the critic whose tone is mismatched to substance is a gatekeeper: someone accustomed to personal ownership of a given subject, to disciplinary ownership of a subject, or who is trying to keep non-academics off of turf perceived to be a scholarly monopoly."

oh boy! this is the closest i've come to a useful description of some of the politics occurring within a the corner of human rights research where academics and advocates come together. it doesn't quite describe the ferocity of this phenomenon in human rights, though, for a couple of reasons i'll get to in a second. first, an example.

a few weeks ago i was completely mystified (also overwhelmingly disgusted in a sort of train-wreck way) at the ferocity, the withering condescension, the downright rudeness and the assumption of bad intent, that poisoned what should have been a collegial debate about the magnitude of human rights violations in a situation where the magnitude of violations is unknown and, unless knowing is guessing, almost certainly unknowable. the case concerned people of unmistakably good intentions acting like complete assholes, essentially claiming that other human rights advocates sought to minimize a catastrophe and were therefore not, in fact, on the side of human rights at all.

[separate question: what, precisely, do we gain by maximizing a catastrophe? and at what cost?]

it's difficult to describe this particular exchange without going into details -- but it's also the case that exchanges like this are a dime a dozen in human rights, and the details are unimportant. as in burke's description, the descriptive-substantive disjuncture is a common feature of this sort of exchange. what is particularly troubling, however, is that most of these exchanges take place between people who have very similar goals and concerns but who seem convinced, for a number of reasons, that 'only i can save the world.'

'human rights people' -- almost always overworked (often by choice), very often underpaid, extraordinarily ambitious, self-consciously do-gooder-y, doing an incredibly difficult and incredibly important job that is unlikely to yield concrete or contemporaneous results, competing for scarce resources with many, many other people who are trying to do the same job with the same amorphous measures of 'success' in a context where actual Success is usually unachievable without, say, time travel and/or miracle-working abilities.

combine resource scarcity and true urgency, and the ultimate result is that no one has the perspective, or the incentive, to police the boundaries between gatekeeping and 'major analytic disagreement.' of necessity, one sells one's work as sort of an 'if and only if' solution: we are special, and have a unique new approach to saving the world, and it is better than all the other approaches to saving the world for the following n reasons. corollary: if you don't follow this approach, you are not really concerned with saving the world.

all this is basically a description of intra-advocacy fighting, the sort of thing that is bound to happen when lots of people who really care compete for scarce resources with which to express their caring. however, advocates are increasingly academics, and vice versa, so that the line(s) between getting the story right (whether that means calculating the right magnitudes over time or faithfully reproducing the meaning and intent of an individual victim or perpetrator, or understanding the structural conditions that led to the violations, or what have you) and fighting the good fight are increasingly murky. [in a context of urgency, what does it even mean to 'get the story right'? but that's a blog entry, or maybe a dissertation, for another day.]

what burke is describing is an undue intensity of conflict over getting the story right, sometimes due to real theoretical differences but just as often due to ego-driven territorial disputes. what we are often experiencing in human rights, i think, is an undue but understandable conflation of getting the story right and doing what we believe to be effective right this minute. gatekeeping, which is likely enough to happen even when people are not out there dying, begins to seem like the only response when you've convinced yourself of the total rightness and necessity of your approach. and then the gatekeeping itself jumps the shark: it's not that an intellectual adversary is guilty of a "shocking" or "gross" distortion of historical fact, as in the _legacy of ashes_ dispute -- it's that the adversary is personally "irresponsible" or "in the wrong business" or nefariously inclined toward a "blithe ignorance of...realities." an intellectual adversary is now a moral adversary as well, no matter what side that person started on.

to which i say: humility, people. i know it's hard when you've got tenure or a really huge grant, but come on.

posted by amelia @ 12:56 PM   |

friends, i have a cold that will not go away. in addition, as you may have understood from last spring's ecstatic grocery-blogging, i live in the bay area, where it is currently all rainy and cold-inducing. or at least cold-encouraging. ooh, and also i totally get to count myself as a real academic now: i received my first article rejection today.

nevertheless: yesterday jarrod and i went to the ferry building farmers' market, where i sniffled and hacked my way through several stalls filled with early carrots, beets (meh), and lovely taters. in the evening we concocted a mostly-local feast of butternut squash soup with creme fraiche and pine nuts, wild rice (that's from minnesota, but it was local when we got it there) with meyer lemon juice and dried cherries, and roasted root veggies with meyer lemon zest and fresh thyme. yes! and nine wonderful people at the dinner table.

i always feel a little bit torn about the ferry building market. it's huge and expansive and the foods are beautiful to touch and feel and taste; everybody's from not more than a couple hours' drive away; it's a gift to be getting to know the seasons of food in this area. but more than the berkeley or oakland farmers' markets -- at least on the basis of no more than five visits to each -- the ferry building is a bit of a yuppie paradise. these foods are local and they may be organic, but they're not exactly cheap. just like every city i've gotten to know, san francisco's local food scene -- which should be benefiting everyone -- seems to be attracting (where attracting is maybe a proxy for serving?) mostly a white-and/or-upper-middle-class chunk of 'everyone.'

there are notable exceptions: EBT/food stamps are legal tender at berkeley's and oakland's farmers' markets, which may be similarly true but isn't advertised at the ferry building; the berkeley bowl and the reading terminal market in philly manage to sell quality stuff that's cheap, (relatively) accessible, and somehow...inclusive? i can't come up with a better term than "inclusive," but i'm talking about the idea that farmers' markets and their ilk aren't scary gourmet places.

anyway. the food we got there was great, and dinner was great, and friends are extra great, and then we went to see jarrod's new show, gone -- but not before running smack into the chinese new year parade, which was in full swing despite the downpour. this was my second time seeing gone, which is a collage piece that rewards repeat viewing. i liked it a lot the first time: all the components (sophocles, allan ginsburg, proust, anonymous blog excerpts, pliny the elder, country rock anthems...) are more or less tiny, complete pieces in themselves. but making all the connections required more streams of thought than i could fit into that initial viewing. i liked it a lot the first time; the second time i felt like i was actually getting it. also, the lighting is gorgeous.

in entirely unrelated news, i do occasionally work, and i more-than-occasionally think about work, and for my edification and yours i've added paul staniland, an MIT grad student working on armed group structures, to the blogroll.

posted by amelia @ 2:36 PM   |

a couple of profiles of patrick ball, my colleague/mentor/boss/thing at HRDAG, in the news recently...

this christian science monitor piece comes with a picture of patrick's glowery evil twin attached, and has a nice summary of patrick's trek from the peace brigades to the ICTY. more importantly, there are several good paragraphs on micro vs. macro, observation vs. reality, ruling-out vs. ruling-in:

...In layman's terms, the data suggested ethnic cleansing. In fact, the migration patterns matched killing patterns "so unbelievably perfectly" that he concluded that the two situations might be explained by the same external influence.

But this is where statistics, a science of elimination, cedes to lawyers, human rights practitioners, and historians. Observing a "consistent hypothesis" isn't the same as naming a cause. "When we're looking at data, it's what we're able to observe. That's not the same as what is true."

In the end, Ball can't say what did happen; he can only estimate what probably didn't. But even this reveals something bigger about the nature of truth: At a micro level, it seems to change, from town to town or person to person.

...

That's [referencing findings from Peru] why Ball finds all the painstaking work he puts into the macro picture of things worth it. In country after country, he has watched people "try to ... make their suffering have meaning in some bigger story," Ball says. He tries to ground that exercise in what he believes divides painful history from potentially destructive mythologies of violence: "Some kind of empirical truth."

But even so devoted a numbers guy knows graphs don't tell the whole story. "Statistics define the limits of what's plausible and what's not plausible," he says. "Statistics do not tell us how it felt to be there."

it's possible that the nytmag idea lab bit from this week is more compelling journalism: there's a FIGHT! indeed a CLASH! a BITTER RIVALRY! meh. as these things so often are, i think it's overplayed. that's not to say that violence data in colombia aren't contentious, just that there's so much more that we do. indeed, the weirdly disconnected snake-counting anecdote in the second paragraph is more relevant to what we do at HRDAG on a daily basis.

anyway, neato! publicity!

posted by amelia @ 9:03 PM   |

shockingly, it may not be good for you.

the joys of industrial meat, eh?

posted by amelia @ 8:23 PM   |

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August 8, 2008 by saij

The Mathematical Genealogy Project is pretty sweet. Here’s how John Baez is related to Gauss.

Posted in Evolution, Rambling, people | No Comments »

August 8, 2008 by saij

Not good

As you’ve probably heard, the US customs service has, recently, asserted the right to confiscate any and all computers and/or digital storage carried by anyone crossing the US border. They further assert the right to demand all passwords, encryption keys, etc., from the owners. They even further assert the right to keep or make copies of any data that they find, and to share it without limit with anyone they choose.

Posted in Rambling | No Comments »

August 8, 2008 by saij

A review of a new book, “Evolutionary Dynamics” by Martin A. Nowak

Martin Nowak is certainly not alone when he argues, in Evolutionary Dynamics, that evolution is the single most significant idea in biology. But almost all major mathematical syntheses of evolution have been confined to population genetics–the study of gene frequency changes in populations. By contrast, Nowak (a professor of biology and mathematics at Harvard) follows up on Hardy’s last qualification for a great idea by showing the many ways in which the mathematics of evolution lead to advances in diverse subjects, including cancer, game theory, and language.

Posted in Evolution, Game Theory, Mathematical Biology | Tagged dynamics, Evolutionary | No Comments »

July 11, 2008 by saij

I’ve been asked by a few friends of mine who are in need of a primer on Differential Equations to write up a study guide.  The crazy thing is that I’m not exactly proficient in the subject.  I’m a Game Theory guy.  But, there was a time in my life when Calculus related topics were what I was good at.  I just have to find the information, rotting in my brain, scared to come out.

For me, this will serve to refresh my mind on the subject, but also to provide me an opportunity to learn some latex, as WordPress has the rather nice ability to incorporate Latex code directly into a post.

Stay tuned if you too are far too deficient in your DQ  IQ.

Posted in Differential Equations, LaTeX, Math News | 1 Comment »

July 11, 2008 by saij

So, it has been a disgustingly long time since any of us have posted here.  Life seems to have gotten in the way as it often can.  But, those dry times are over, as I’m working on a series of posts on both Game theory and a study guide to Differential Equations (mostly as a way to get me do to just that:  study Diff-EQ).  To celebrate the return to math-blogging I thought a new look may be in order.  It ain’t much, but it’s got a bit more ridiculousness to it, and I find that kind of thing important.

The Viking Math! in the header refers to the fact that Portland States’ Mascot is the Viking.  What is cooler than a Viking doing math in free-form pillage-the-village style? I dare say, precious little.

Posted in Math News, Rambling | No Comments »

April 25, 2008 by saij

Felicis and I are running a Mathematical Biology Seminar here at PSU. Felicis has been helping to bring us all up to speed on some of the basic Neuroanatomy of Hearing. (We’re starting with a paper co-authored by Lars Holmstrom of PSU entitled: Responses to Social Vocalizations in the Inferior Colliculus of the Mustached Bat are Influenced by Secondary Tuning Curves)

I’ll be talking next week about some basic modeling techniques in relation to the topic above.

This is a big deal for both Felicis and I, as we’re both primarily interested in doing work in Mathematical and Theoretical Biology here in the mathematics department. Felicis’s core area of interest is in Neurology, and mine is in Ecology and Evolution.

We’re meeting on Wednesdays at 3:30 pm. If you are a mathematics student (or for that matter a biology student) interested in mathematical biology, feel free to stop by the new conference room at that time on the 3rd floor of NewBurger Hall

For those totally new the Idea of mathematical biology, here’s the Wikipedia page.

And here are a few more links to wet your appetite:

Some equations from EqWorld

Why is Mathematical Biology so Hard? from the Notices of the AMA

Getting Started in Mathematical Biology, by Frank Hoppensteadt and the AMS

Posted in Group Meetings, Mathematical Biology, Science | No Comments »

April 25, 2008 by saij

The following link is to a PDF on the Portland State University Biology Department’s website. But, I think it’s full of a lot of basic information that should apply to any graduate program that is research oriented.

Graduate Program PDF

Posted in Education, Graduate School, Portland State, Science | No Comments »

March 28, 2008 by Felicis

Genetic algorithms are all the rage - and a short handy book is available here! There is a free downloadable version, or you can purchase it (for a mere $13.07; quite reasonable).

In other news, class starts on Monday- I’ll be really busy for the first two weeks, and then hopefully I’ll be able to get to some regular posting!

ex animo-

Felicis

Posted in Announcement, Computer Science, Evolution, Interesting Stuff | No Comments »

March 25, 2008 by saij

(cross-posted @ Good Tithings)

Indeed, for a number of years I “went to college” but I wasn’t really getting much of an education, which is probably my own fault for my general lack of enthusiasm. I’m sure there are many people who had good undergraduate experiences where they came in contact with a great professor or took a course that changed the way they thought. For me, outside of a few paleo and anthro courses, most of what I learned has been from reading papers and books. I wouldn’t really say that me education really started until I got a good appetite for the scientific literature and started hastily devouring it, although it would greatly reduce my frustration if what I was reading on my own time more closely matched my coursework.

I can fully relate to what Lealaps is saying.  I’m a returning, ‘older’ (30), student.  Before coming back for my Mathematics degree, I had to spend years relearning what it meant to learn.

I bombed out of college the first time around.  And I did it several times!  I didn’t have a passion for sitting in class, doing homework, or any of the rest of it.  And, quite frankly, determination just isn’t enough.  If you are going to actually get something out of your degree beyond a pretty piece of paper, then you have to love the process.  I didn’t.  But, I do now.

Why the shift?  During the 5 years I took away from Higher Ed I took learning into my own hands.  I devoured books on every subject I could get my hands on, reading up to 5 or 6 books a week.  That’s around 250 - 300 books a year for 5 years.  Of course, I didn’t retain all of that either.  I wish!  But, it rekindled in me a love of learning for its’ own sake.

The first time I was in college, I was a music major.  And believe it or not, I chose that for practical reasons.  All my life, everyone around me always told me I was going to be an artist - a musician.   And I was convinced that that was who I was.  And in many respects, it is.

But, when I left college I was determined only to go back if I found something I could study just for the sake of studying it.  No agenda.

After a few years, I found it:  Mathematics.  I know it seems strange to switch from Music to Math, because I felt that Music was too practical.  But, that is exactly what I did.

Now I love going to school everyday.  I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s harder than hell.  We are still talking about Mathematics.  But, it’s fun.  Learning is fun again.

I had to teach myself how to be taught.  We all do.  You have to be interested first.  Then you’ll be willing to put in the work.  If all you do is put in the work out of obligation, then you’ll never really retain any of it.  You’ll get your slip of paper.  But, in the end, it will be worthless.

Have fun, learn for fun.

Posted in Education, Music, Portland State | 1 Comment »

March 17, 2008 by Felicis

Well- the quarter is nearly done!  We are in finals week now, and will soon be gearing up for the spring quarter.  I will have a bit more time (since I will drop my teaching load down to just a single section of calculus), so expect more writing from Felicis.  Saij too, I expect, will be able to write a bit more after a little R&R.

So- bye for now, and expect updates soon!  (Probably before the end of the week)!

ex animo-

Felics

Posted in Rambling | No Comments »

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Wednesday, August 13, 2008 Today's Search Marketers Deserve A Little More Respect

Ok, I am going to go out on a limb when I say all Search Marketers are not given the respect they deserve. (Rodney - See Classic Caddyshack YouTube clip below - this ones for Toby & Bruce) C'mon, aren't we the driving force behind this $40 Billion Dollar Booming Industry (forgive if I missed a billion here or there. There is no excuse for this "ignorance in the air" that getting an impressive Organic Ranking or a good performing Paid Search campaign live on the search engines is something a 2nd grader can do, and it just... Makes me a little unpleasant (PG-13).

I have seen firsthand, from all levels of the corporate spectrum a, complete and utter misunderstanding of reality and even ignorance to try and understand what really goes into creating a really good Search Marketing Plan/Strategy, along with the countless hours of research, implementation, monitoring, testing, reviewing,optimization etc... They all just assume this happens with a push of a button.

So how is this happening?
I think alot has to do with the fact that this is still new to them. Still today, many Industries and Companies alike are just starting to catch on to the fact that online advertising, even though getting more expensive by the day, is still cheaper and more cost effective that other traditional Media, regardless of how intelligent the Plan is. Maybe, in the past they hired their nephew or neighbors kid throw together a basic campaign that sucked down the dollars until it ran out of money and assume that is how it's done.

In that respect, we also have to point some blame at Google for this, because they could care less if your a seasoned Pro or beginner, they make their money regardless. In fact, the less experienced you are with PPC, the more they will charge for you to play in the game.

Will this ignorance ever go away?
Yes it will over time. Just like in the Baby Boomer and Echo Boomer Generation debates that are going on where it's a matter of time until there will be one (1) generation E meaning EVERYONE. What I mean is, right now there is a shift happening where (some) baby boomers are relying on their children or younger Gen Y-ers to help them maneuver around the web. But as we progress over the years, we will bridge the gap to the point where everyone will be an intelligent searcher and Search Marketers will adapt a more "holisitic" Plan. If you are interested in this topic, I will have a a related article published in JWTBoom's LiveWire, The Magazine coming out in September, 2008.

As a Tribute to Rodney in one of the Best Movies ever made,
here's a great YouTube clip from the movie Caddyshack.

Posted at 10:23 AM in Off Topic | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: caddyshack, corporate america, no respect, pissed off, ppc, rodney dangerfield, search engine watch, search marketing, sem, seo, ses

Semgeek is proud to present an Exclusive Interview with Google's Top Political Online Marketing GoTo Guy, Peter D. Greenberger, who's been at the forefront of Google's Online Advertising for the 2008 Presidential and Congressional Races. 

Question:  How are candidates using Display Advertising?
Answer: The candidates' use of display advertising has evolved over the different phases of the campaign. During the primaries, political advertisers targeted display ads featuring information on voting locations and procedures to specific states. Now that we are in the general election, persuasion phase of the race, the candidates are more likely to use display for educating voters on certain issues or policy stances. By placing banner or video ads on a variety of non-political websites, the campaigns can get in front of those hard-to-reach voters who may not visit news and politics sites.

Question: What do you expect to see at the local level races?
Answer: We are already seeing a trickle down effect from the high profile use of Internet advertising by the presidential campaigns. For the first time, all of the major presidential candidates used Google search, and now we are seeing an increasing number of congressional, gubernatorial and even local races enter the platform. The ability to target specific areas and even legislative districts helps down-ballot candidates efficiently reach only their voters.

Local candidates are using Google search and display ads in the same way as the presidential campaigns: to sign up supporters, encourage contributions, define their campaigns (and those of their opponents), and to persuade voters to support their campaigns. As we near Election Day, the strategies will shift towards GOTV - driving voters not to a website but to the polls.

Question: What do you think is the most interesting trend or trends you have seen over this past election year?
Answer: Overall, the rise of the Internet as a persuasion medium is the most interesting trend in 2008. It is no secret that the Internet is a great way to raise money, but now campaigns are turning online to persuade voters. This is very similar to the larger shift occurring in corporate America - direct response dollars have already moved online and now branding budgets are beginning to shift, too. This cycle will be remembered as the year in which political ad dollars began to move, albeit slowly, online. The spectacular growth of YouTube and online videos in general have a lot to do with this phenomenon.

Question: In your opinion, what does the future look like for Presidential and Non-Presidential races?
Answer: To a great extent, we are seeing the future of presidential campaigns right now. Many of
the campaigns made their candidate announcements online, Internet donations have filled the coffers of leading candidates, and social networking sites and YouTube have played decisive roles this election cycle. As a result, the digital team is emerging from the bowels of the organization to take a leading role. Smart campaigns will soon not even have a strictly "digital team;" instead the entire campaign will be Internet-savvy and fully integrated online.

Question: Will the recent Google & Yahoo relationship play a role in Yahoo's emergence as the premier advertising network for Political Candidates?
Answer: Google and Yahoo will continue to be vigorous competitors, and that competition will help fuel innovation that is good for users, advertisers, and publishers. For additional information about this deal, please see our blog post entitled "Congressional hearings on online competition and our ad agreement with Yahoo".

Question: Are you seeing an increase in Rich Media Ads vs. Traditional Static Banners?
Answer: We're seeing an increase in video ads as well as flash, though static banners and text ads still dominate. As campaigns become more comfortable in the online space, I expect that we will see more experimentation with different ad formats.

Question: Are there certain political parties who are more likely to spend more on Display or Search?
Answer: There is less of a distinction between parties than between individual campaigns and candidates. Both sides of the aisle have adapted search and display advertising with Google, and there are many savvy players in each party.

Question: Are you seeing any trends within the different Google Networks (ie. Placement, Content, Search)
Answer: Campaign strategies online correspond to the different phases of the campaign. Search is primarily a direct response mechanism and is effective at capturing the support of active voters looking for information. It is a campaign truism that your first vote is the cheapest and your last vote is the most expensive. Search helps make that first vote very, very cheap - as the campaign goes on, however, your cost per acquisition may rise as you move beyond your base of voters. When it is time to persuade undecideds, display or video ads on the content network are a great way to reach specific pockets of voters where they "live" online. Campaigns will contextually place an ad about energy policy, for example, alongside an article on a website in the Google network about higher gasoline prices. This allows the campaign to make its case directly to interested readers. For the final GOTV phase, I expect you will see a deluge of both search and display - both contextually targeted by issue and placement on specific sites.

Question: Does Google have a plan about possibly implementing a filter to stop Negative Campaigning, similar to what Newspapers with Op-ed's are doing?
Answer: In general, we permit political advertisers to advocate in favor of or in opposition to candidates for office and key public policy issues. However, we prohibit the use of personal  attacks. You can find a more complete explanation of our political advertising policies on our Google public policy blog.

About Peter D. Greenberger
Team Manager, Elections & Issue Advocacy, Google, Inc. 

Peter joined Google in May 2007 to build and manage a new Elections & Issue Advocacy sales team dedicated to introducing Google solutions to political campaigns, committees, and issue advocacy groups.

Previously, Peter grew the public affairs division of New Media Strategies, a Web 2.0 marketing firm, working with clients such as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Discovery Networks, Ford Motor Company, the Granholm for Governor campaign, Merck, Inc., Wachovia, the Washington Redskins, and XM Satellite Radio.

Prior to joining New Media Strategies, Peter spent ten years working on presidential, gubernatorial, U.S. Senate and Congressional campaigns. Most recently, he managed Congressman Brad Carson's 2004 United States Senate campaign in Oklahoma. 

During the Clinton Administration, Peter worked in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs as the Director of Congressional Correspondence.  In this role, he coordinated all written communications between the White House and the Congress.      

Peter graduated from Yale University and earned a master's degree with distinction in Comparative Government from the London School of Economics and Political Science.  

Posted at 03:36 PM in Google Adwords, Interviews, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: advertising, banner, cnn, conservative, democrat, google, mccain, mediapost, msnbc, npr, obama, pbs, peter greenberger, political, politics, right wing, search marketing

In our slowing economy, GoodSearch.com has become one of the most effective and unique solutions to help Nonprofits raise money online. GoodSearch recently reported that more than 63,000+ Nonprofit Organizations and Schools across the country have turned to GoodSearch's (2) two online fundraising tools which basically allow supporters to financially help out the nonprofits of their choice without spending any money of their own.

1. GoodSearch.com, a Yahoo-powered search engine which makes a donation for every search
2. GoodShop.com, an online shopping mall of more than 700 leading retailers that directs a percentage of every sale to the user's favorite charity.

About GoodSearch.com:
The company was launched in 2005 and founded by a Brother and Sister DUO Ken and JJ Ramberg who both acknowledged that "We all have a cause we care about - whether it's finding a cure for cancer, saving the environment, finding homes for abandoned pets or so many other worthwhile endeavors." It was this shared philanthropic vision that led the creation of a company that could support charitable organizations without taking time out of people's busy schedules. Furthermore, it was the idea that even the smallest fraction of the billions of dollars generated by search engines could make a huge impact on the Nonprofit Industry and other good causes. 

How GoodSearch.com Works?
GoodSearch is a unique search engine, powered by Yahoo, and built with "patent-pending" technology which provides the ability to track, direct search results and donate 50% off the ad revenue to the charities and schools designated by its users.

About GoodShop:
In 2007, GoodShop was created to be an online shopping mall of world-class merchants dedicated to helping fund worthy causes across the country. Each purchase made via the GoodShop mall results in a donation to the user's designated charity or school – averaging approximately 3% of the sale, but going up to 20% or even more. In fact, According to their website, "GoodShop will donate up to 37% of every purchase to the charity of their choice."

Are You NonProfit Interested In Joining GoodSearch?
Here are some things you need to know before your signing up your Nonprofit.

• To participate in our program, your organization must be a registered non-profit. This can include schools, charities, hospitals and clinics, volunteer services, political organizations, fraternal organizations, professional associations, religious organizations, governmental agencies, etc.

• If your nonprofit is a chapter of a national organization, please participate in GoodSearch through the headquarters.

• We currently only work with U.S. charities and schools but plan to expand internationally in the future.

• CLICK HERE to signup your registered 501(c)(3) Nonprofit with GoodSearch.com

In Conclusion:
The people at GoodSearch are providing a remarkable service here and are single handedly changing the way money is raised online for people and organizations who need it the most.

Search Marketing (from an operations standpoint) has become a very complex Industry. It is filled with complicated and ever changing algorithms, complex strategies, inflated advertising costs and increased competition. However, once in a while you come across a company like GoodSearch, whose core business model is about being Socially Responsible. Is your company Socially Responsible? If not, you may want think about.

Posted at 04:16 PM in NonProfits & Charities | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: 501c3, good search, good shop, goodsearch, goodsearches, goodshop, jj ramberg, ken ramberg, msnbc, nonprofit, nonprofits

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I’ve started reading this book by Daniel Solove (full text available for free). It discusses the growth of the Internet - and begins with a “horror” story depicting the potential the Internet has as a defamatory broadcasting medium on people: the lines between freedom of speech and privacy are once again put to question (like in similar stories in the news).

Has anyone else read the book?

Here are the titles of the papers and the notes that will be published:

Read the rest of this entry »

We presented an invited paper (pdf) at a meeting on how to manage trust in percom at Secrypt. The paper is about how to offer digital content to mobile users by combining tagging with reputation systems (previous post). Here is my presentation:

Few words on:

1) The meeting (3 sessions)
Session 1
Existing reputation systems often set initial user’s reputation to a fixed value (e.g., 0.5 if reputation is expressed on a scale [0,1]). Christian proposed interesting ways for setting initial trust other than fixing ad-hoc values. Juri Luca of L3S followed by presenting a review of policy languages for trust management. Ioanna of Uni of Nicosia concluded the first session by showing a way of formalizing trust relationships that change over time.

Session 2
I started the session (no more self-publicity ;-)). Zhen Yan followed and showed a way of managing trust in autonomic computing for healthcare. Finally, Andre concluded the second section by putting forward a secure interface for e-voting terminals - he documented a very interesting evaluation in his well-written paper.

Session 3
Gabriele started off by presenting a new way of assigning weights to user ratings. This way allows for personalizing ratings, and that is beneficial because it makes it possible for two individuals
to have different opinions about the trustworthiness of the same person (which may well happen in reality). My tip: this research may well be complemented by “sentiment analysis” (e.g., see this paper in  pdf). Ben Aziz of CCLRC concluded the third session and presented a reputation system for grid computing.

A big thanks goes to Mari for wonderfully organizing and chairing the three sessions

2) The conference (3 points)

• Petteri & his working mates of VTT collected 40K ideas for future mobile services from passionate users and stored them in the “idea database” (InnoBar is the most recent of those databases, which include: Mefi, Owela, and Idealiiike - the last two only in finnish). One interesting problem is how to bring order in that long list of ideas. Of course, one way for doing so is to resort to the wisdom of the crowd - during the Q&A session, Petteri told me that it’s difficult to have users rate ideas. How about having a crowd of paid (technology) experts? (paper: ON EXPLORING CONSUMERS’ TECHNOLOGY FORESIGHT CAPABILITIES)
• Mari Ervasti studied which factors facilitate the acceptance of mobile services by proposing a modified version of the Technology Acceptance Model (paper: ADOPTION OF MOBILE SERVICES IN FINLAND - Conceptual Model and Application-based Case Study).
• Niklas Eriksson presented three websites they developed for enabling mobile tourism services: MobiPortal, TraveLog, and MobiTour (paper: MOBILE TOURISM SERVICES - Experiences from Three Services on Trial).

Pls feel free to add whatever I’ve forgotten to mention in the comment section below. Cheers!

StoryBank (website, description): EPSRC project for a rural village in India.

Idea: Villagers make short stories of up to six images and a two-minute audio track on the phones. They can then go to the village’s community centre and upload their content to the StoryBank - a large touch screen display.  Stories that have been featured include: how to grow rice, local crops, sheep rearing, the medicinal uses of plants,  beauty tips, mythical stories, songs and, in one case, pictures and descriptions of a student’s best paintings.

We have large screen displays (one at the entrance and few in offices/labs). Are we missing the village?

I read a a curious article posted on wired: based on a recent study of journal citation patterns between ‘98 and ‘05 (that is to appear in Science), the authors claim that as the Internet provides researchers with efficient search of journal papers, “the breadth of scholarship” is being lost. Here is a quote:

“As more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of the citations were to fewer journals and articles.”

So, is this google scholar’s fault? Is this a new trend in research? Or maybe this means that as the wealth of published research explodes, the truly cite-able papers are still few (i.e., is citation breadth a measure of quality (or not)?)

What do you think?

Google has applied for a patent for a method that seeks to identify who the “influencers” in a social network are (see related blog post here). This is interesting- the idea of identifying structure and influence in graphs has been around for quite some time, but now there is a money-making application: serve targetted adds to the influencers. Will this affect how innovations are diffused throughout society? This also seems to reinforce a related post (assuming your influence is proportional to how much people trust you): “trust is not evenly distributed.”

Few papers from WWW’08 that may be of interest:

• DTWiki: A Disconnection and Intermittency Tolerant Wiki
• Supporting Anonymous Location Queries in Mobile Environments with PrivacyGrid
• Learning Transportation Mode from Raw GPS Data
• Flickr Tag Recommendation based on Collective Knowledge
• Finding the Right Facts in the Crowd: Factoid Question Answering over Social Media
• Automatically Refining the Wikipedia Infobox Ontology
• Statistical Analysis of the Social Network and Discussion Threads in Slashdot
• Knowledge Sharing and Yahoo Answers: Everyone Knows Something
• Topigraphy: Visualization for Large-scale Tag Clouds
• Towards Robust Trust Establishment in Web-Based Social Networks with SocialTrust

To evaluate new mobile content discovery approaches, one needs to understand:

1) What mobile users query for:

• Deciphering Mobile Search Patterns: A Study of Yahoo! Mobile Search Queries
• How People Use the Web on Mobile Devices

2) How interests distribute across mobile users (who befriend each other):

• Yes, There is a Correlation - From Social Networks to Personal Behavior on the Web

“Almost half (44%) of UK mobile phone subscribers belong to an online social network and of this group, 25% use their handset for social networking-related activities”. Nielsen

This very interesting report is about how companies can harness networks of employees to improve collaboration.

Read the rest of this entry »

To write down a decent research statement (one showing a “vision”), I turned into a McKinsey research analyst these days - I’m reading far more McKinsey Quarterly reports than academic papers, and they aren’t that bad! In a report that dates back to Aug 07, the authors surveyed 573 users of 4 leading video-sharing websites in Germany and found out:

Read the rest of this entry »

This month’s Data Engineering Bulletin is about Recommendation and Search in Social Systems. It sports thoughts on robustness and user experience.

I’ve just read an article from Anita Elberse titled “Should we invest in the long tail?”, published in the Harvard Business Review (no direct link, google for it). Based on what appears to be a very rigorous and extensive study, the author reports conclusions which seem to go in the opposite direction of what stated in the famous book from Chris Anderson “The Long tail”.

Read the rest of this entry »

The view we have of recommender systems is that of two-dimensional systems (users x items) whose main goal is to `recommend items to users’. However, as well illustrated in this paper, “decision making is contingent upon the context of decision making; the same consumer may [...] prefer different products or brands under different contexts”. For example, I (the user) may want to be recommended different restaurants (the item), depending on when I am going (the context), with whom I am going (the context, again), and for what purpose (the context, yet again).
Read the rest of this entry »

“You could snap a photo of your product’s barcode or tap in the numbers and get back information (Wikipedia entry) that helps you decide whether it’s good to buy.” Designing and building such an architecture would be a nice group project for our Master students. How to bootstrap the (wiki) user base? By focusing on university-related products?

The 6 ideas of the Socila Innovation Camp have been briefly explained in this video (starting from minute 2:55)

P.S. How about tagging ‘project’ the posts that suggest ideas for student projects? One never knows what can come out of it

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But since my family is about to embark on a 1,000 mile trip to Cape Cod in a few days it seemed appropriate. 

At least we’ll be driving.

1 Comment

Posted in Music

One laptop at a time.

From the Washington Post:

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons

I’m pretty sure that illegal search and seizure is mentioned somewhere in the constitution, something about it being a no-no.  Yet that’s exactly what this policy is.  The Federal Government is reserving the right to seize your laptop for literally no reason what so ever.  Furthermore, they are reserving the right to search the contents of your laptop, which in my case would include detailed financial and personal information, also with no prior justification.  Lastly they reserve the right to send that data to a third party.  But don’t worry.

Customs Deputy Commissioner Jayson P. Ahern said the efforts “do not infringe on Americans’ privacy.”

See, aren’t you reassured now?  Never mind that fact that digital records, like the financial information stored on my laptop, could be sent to a third party and be infinitely replicated at no cost.  The government says I’m completely safe.  The amazing thing isn’t that there are so many conspiracy theory nuts but that there are so few.

Found on Pharyngula

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Posted in Grrrrrr!!!!, News and politics | Tags: We Destroyed the freedom in order to save it

From Bloomberg:

The U.S. budget deficit will widen to a record of about $490 billion next year, an administration official said, leaving a deep budget hole that will constrain the next president’s tax and spending plans.

The article goes on to detail the causes for the deficit shortfall (two wars, economic stimulus package, tax receipt slow down, etc).  Long story short, the short to medium term prospects look pretty grim right now.  But fear not says White House Press Secretary Dana Perino.

Asked today if the administration still believes it’s on a path to a balanced budget by 2012, White House press secretary Dana Perino said , “I believe so, yes.”

She called the deficit “temporary and manageable.”

That’s great, the administration that spent like a drunken sailor, that failed to meaningfully address the growing cost of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, has left us a road map to solvency.  Why am I not excited?

*Title is in reference to this

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Posted in Grrrrrr!!!!, News and politics | Tags: Jan 2009 cant come fast enough

For some reason I found myself thinking about this song the other day.

“Natural One” by The Folk Implosion was part of the soundtrack for the movie “Kids“.  Listening to the song on Youtube naturally reminded me of the movie, which I saw when it first came out in 1995.  The movie itself is disturbing.  I remember leaving the theatre feeling vaguely dirty, mostly because of some fairly graphic depictions of teenage sex, drug use and date rape.

Now I find the movie to be frightening.  Unlike say, Basketball Diaries which also came out in 1995, there is no silver lining to Kids.  The protagonist’s native virtues or inner strengths do not rescue him from drug addiction and self destruction.  In fact there is no protagonist to Kids, just a group of teenagers destroying their lives as efficiently as posible.  As a parent that scares the shit out of me.

Despite that “Natural One” is a great song, even if the Youtube version robs it of some of its quality.

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Posted in Life in general, Movies, Music, Parenting | Tags: 90's music, Basketball Diaries, KIDS

Burn in the fiery chasms of hell!

From the Wall Street Journal:

For children’s parties, many companies around the country provide costumed characters popular with kids…In recent years, corporations that own the rights to some of the more popular characters…have sent cease-and-desist letters, threatened lawsuits and in some cases received settlements from companies that market unauthorized character impersonators.

So some hole in the wall family entertainment company, you know the ones in the mall that are constantly going out of business, represents a huge threat to these huge corporations.  Why, you ask?

Attorneys note that if they do not actively police their trademarks in one realm, a court might later rule that they have forfeited their rights to enforce it in others.

Whatever else they might say; this is what it boils down to.  These companies are protecting their right to shove Dora the F(uck)ing Explorer down your throat at every goddamn opportunity and profit from it.  So every time your kid gets you to buy the Dora box of Mac n’ Cheese or the Disney Princess can of Pringles, they make more money.  That’s it, if they cared about brand integrity or any of that other shit, they wouldn’t put Thomas the Train anywhere near my kid’s underwear.

Meanwhile they won’t even offer the services that these parents are looking for:

Dan Martinsen, a spokesman for Nickelodeon, says that while the company doesn’t offer walk-about characters for birthday parties, it does send such characters on national tours and sells tickets to see them.

So to the kid in East Bum Fuck who loves Diego because it is literally impossible to escape these characters if you’re watching any channel other than Spice, well it sucks to be you doesn’t it.

Fear not though because I’m offering a solution, a new branded character for the average American. 

That’s right kids it’s the ANGRY AMOEBA!!! 

He’s foul mouthed spirited, He drinks heavily ‘s jolly and he’s here to spread diseases happiness.

And parents, if you want someone to dress up as the Angry Amoeba and swear at your kids, raid your liquor cabinet and stink up your bathroom (cause that’s how the Amoeba rolls) be my guest.  Hell, if your liquor cabinet is well stocked enough and you don’t live too far away, I’ll put the damn costume on myself.  In the meantime, I’m going to use google image search and photoshope to compromise some brand integrity.

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Posted in Grrrrrr!!!!, I Might be Stupid, Parenting | Tags: I hate Children's television, rants

From The Drucker Brothers, check out the link for more.

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Posted in Humor, News and politics | Tags: FISA, Humor

From Pregame.com:

During the 2006-07 period under investigation, seven games refereed by Scott Foster had lopsided enough betting on one team to move the point spread by at least 2 points; those seven teams were undefeated against Vegas meaning that the big-money gamblers won a 7 of 7 times on Fosters games; the odds of that happening randomly are less than 1%.

The NBA needs to get out in front of this yesterday.  The refereeing was already a running joke before the gambling allegations.  Now they have one former ref about to go to prison and apparently another one under investigation.  This bullshit has already tainted my own enjoyment of the league.  How many more fans can the league alienate before they adequately address the problem?

Hattip to Deadspin

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Posted in Grrrrrr!!!!, Sports | Tags: gambling, The NBA is Fixed?

Otherwise this teen in Florida might actually get covered for the brain surgery she needs. 

Caitlin…was recently diagnosed with a rare brain disorder called Chiari Malformation…
The destructive condition will rob her 19-year-old daughter of motor skills, memory and possibly one day, her life.

Her insurance company initially agreed to pay for the surgery, 15 minutes too late, causing her to lose her slot.  Then, before she could get the surgery rescheduled, she was informed that Aetna would no longer cover the procedure.  This leaves the family on the hook for the $110K procedure (half due upfront). 

I can’t speak for Caitlin’s family but a $110K medical would certainly kick the crap out of mine.  I read this story and I don’t understand why the Democrats aren’t doing more to promote some kind of universal health care plan.  Cries of “Oh No!! Socialized Medicine BAD!!” don’t carry as much weight when more than half the population is a medical problem away from bankruptcy.  I know a bunch of GM retirees who would certainly be on board.

Hat tip to Shakesville

1 Comment

Posted in News and politics | Tags: Aetna screws a teenage girl, health care

Last week I made some Mid-Year resolutions and in an effort to hold myself to them, I’m posting regular updates here.  If you aren’t interest (and really, you shouldn’t be) feel free to ignore this post.

Read More…

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Posted in Life in general

Yesterday in Reuters:  

A U.S. watch list of terrorism suspects has passed 1 million records, corresponding to about 400,000 people, and a leading civil rights group said on Monday the number was far too high to be effective.

400,000 people, are you fucking kidding me!?!?!  How is it even possible to follow up on those kind of numbers? 

This is an excellent example of what happens when we unleash a mindless bureaucracy to solve complex problems.  The ultimate goal of a bureaucrat is to keep his/her job.  In this situation that means making sure that you cant be held responsible for some kind of terrorist act.  So if you have any doubt about someone, put him on the list.  There’s no cost to you to put him on the list but the potential cost if you don’t is huge.  Same for taking names off the list.  What if you’re wrong?  Better leave him on the list just to be safe.

The result is that the list gets huge and unmanageable.  Worse still, those unfortunate “false positive” cases get screwed because there is no cost to the bureaucracy for screwing them.  If anything, the organization is rewarded with a larger budget to help investigate all the individuals on the watch list. 

I don’t have any solutions to offer here.  I’ve been deeply skeptical of the Department of Homeland Security from the start.  Not because I believe it’s intentions are malevolent, simply because it was an attempt to solve a bureaucratic problem with another bureaucracy.  This seems like the logical result of such a poorly thought out solution.

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Posted in News and politics | Tags: mindless bureaucracy, Terrorist watch list

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For the record, I'm not sure if I am willing to buy  that the estranged wife 'accidentally texted' her ex husband. It takes effort to text someone... first putting their number in, then typing a message, then sending the message... it's not like she was walking down the street and bumped into him.

But that's not the point I suppose.

It seems that the 23 year old wife claims to have gotten a new cell phone, with a new number. She "accidentally" texted 40 year old Jesse Arnold Read. And from there, one thing lead to another and he ended up sitting in a car outside a gas station with the belief that he was meeting a 17  year old and 15 year old for sex. The woman played vengeful ex perfectly, contacted police who showed up to greet- and arrest- Read.

Full story...

Lilo labeled it~~ predators Woman Stings Ex ~~

When the police officers that investigated previous cases involving the  main suspect a 'piece of shit' of a case half way across the country, you know that more than likely- the suspect's really are exactly what they have been called. I'd have to say that in this case, it rings more true than ever.

Sheriff Keith Kellerman said he had to deal with Cutler a few times, including a domestic violence case and a few traffic infractions. Kellerman said, "He's a piece of (expletive)."
The current case in which Charles Smith is being investigated involves a 3 year old girl who it's alleged he abused to the point that she had dead flesh on her arms and legs.

Court documents obtained by KREM 2 NEWS say the deputy who found her took pictures of the child for evidence.

The pictures show a "small, blonde-haired child" with "blood on her butt and thighs... caked-on feces... feet dark, dead flesh from ankles to toes black... hands showed same... all over deep bruising of some kind... infection or internal bleeding... a large patch of blood on cheek."

The documents also said the girl "appeared to go in and out of consciousness."

Doctors told the deputy that the girl has a 50% chance of survival and that she would need multiple surgeries to remove dead flesh from her fingers and hands.
Charged for this heinous abuse is the child's mother, 26-year-old Christina Haynes and 29-year-old Charles Smith who the mother explained she met on the internet. Haynes is apparently attempting to point the finger at Smith, telling police that she worked out of her home while Smith was alone with the 3 year old. Personally, I would think that if she worked out of her home, as in worked from home- then she was there and could have stepped in. But, even if she hadn't been around during the abuse- most people would start to wonder just what the hell was going on when their daughter had dead flesh on her body.

Police said neither adult seemed to concerned about the child's condition.


Full story...

h/t Danielle

Lilo labeled it~~ abused A piece of shit... ~~

After delaying justice for longer than it should be, it seems that an arrest has been made in the tragic case of Coralrose Fullwood. She is the little girl that disappeared from her home, only to have her body later discovered nearby. The case itself opened a wormhole filled with investigations, including when her siblings were removed from the home and her father was arrested for possession of child porn.

Police say DNA tied 27-year-old Patrick D. Murphy to the murder.
"The warrant charges Murphy with the kidnapping, sexual battery and murder of 6 year-old Coralrose Fullwood," said North Port Police Chief Terry Lewis.
When he was arrested and charged with Coralrose's death, Murphy was already in jail serving time for burglary.
"All of have been saying since day one- we were more concerned about getting it right than doing it fast. I look you all in the eyes today and say I think we've done it right," said North Port Police Chief Terry Lewis.The family was asked about Murphy, and there is so far no apparent connection between them and him. Her mother stated that she'd never seen him before.

At the press conference, North Port Police stressed they still need tips. They want to know what Murphy was up to in September 2006, around the time of Coralrose's murder.
If you have any information, contact the tipline at 941-429-7336. There is a $10,000 reward for additional information.
If you would like to remain anonymous, contact Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers at 800-780-TIPS.

Full story...

ht to a reader who has done a wonderful job of updating me on this case.

Lilo labeled it~~ murders, predators Arrest made... ~~

Something tells me that My Name is Earl might not have been on the top of the "Must See TV" list of John Melchior. Had he even watched one single episode, he might have known that Karma always comes back to bite you in the ass, or as in his case- knock you off the motorcycle.

Melchior was driving north at a high rate of speed on U.S. 42 and struck a southbound SUV head on driven by Susan Garret, of Valley City, according to the Medina Ohio State Highway Patrol, .

The motorcycle then traveled on and hit another car driven by Dawn Wilker, 32, of Medina.

Melchior was thrown off the motorcycle and struck the pavement. The other drivers were not injured.

Melchior died from the accident, and I know.. you're wondering where karma comes into play.

Turns out, Melchior was running from the police after a warrant was issued for him, in relation to a attempted rape and burglary .

Parma police had issued an arrest warrant for Melchior after he was identified as a suspect in a burglary and attempted rape at the Parma Woods Apartments on Thursday.

A 26-year-old woman told police she woke to find a nude Melchior in her bedroom. When she tried to call 9-1-1 he pulled the phone away and tried to attack her. The woman was able to escape after a struggle and ran to a neighbor.

Parma police said Melchior has a history of break-ins and assaults. He was listed as a registered sex offender after he was convicted of gross sexual imposition and rape in 1995.

As reader Spriddy pointed out, the comments are worth reading on this one.

Lilo labeled it~~ predators Karma... ~~

Wow, nothing says "morbid sex case" like a story about cloned puppies.... evidently.

While I normally have no interest in stories about cloned puppies, I have to admit that when the story ends up solving a 30 year mystery of what happened to a deranged sexual maniac- it's going to catch my eye.

The whole thing started years old, with American Joyce McKinney. Described by one former friend as 'beautiful' the young woman had apparently been blessed with the looks to win a Miss Wyoming USA pageant. She also had attended the Mormon based Brigham Young University. It was there that Joyce meet another student, a young man she grew very fond of to a dangerous level, Kirk Ewoll.

When the young man went overseas on Missionary work, Joyce wasn't so willing to let him escape her, and according to reports she hired a PI to locate him, and then followed him to England. If that didn't put a few red flags in the air, then what police and courts have claimed she did next surely will.

She and a male accomplice were accused of abducting the 21-year-old missionary as he went door to door, taking him to a rented 17th-century "honeymoon cottage" in Devon and chaining him spread-eagle to a bed with several pairs of mink-lined handcuffs.

There, investigators say, he was repeatedly forced to have sex with McKinney before he was able to escape and notify police.

In her own defense, she claimed the young man, Kirk went willingly with her, and was a avid participant in the sexual activities, also claiming that he only concocted the story of the abduction because he feared being punished by the church.

A photo of her holding a hand made sign out a window proclaiming her innocence is worth taking a peek at.

McKinney and her accomplice spent three months in a London jail before being released on bail.

Press reports at the time that said the pair then jumped bail, posing as deaf-mute actors in Ireland to board an Air Canada flight to Toronto and eventually a bus to Cleveland, where investigators lost their trail.

Joyce McKinney surfaced again in Utah in May 1984 and was arrested for allegedly stalking the workplace of the same Mormon man she was accused of imprisoning in England. News reports say that police found a length of rope and handcuffs in the trunk of McKinney's car, along with notebooks detailing the man's daily activities.

Set to stand trial for lying to police and harassment in 1986, McKinney again disappeared just before proceedings and the case was dismissed. (from Fox News)

That might have been the end of things, and we might not be hearing about all of this now, if not for one odd twist of fate.

Recently, a woman who had lost her beloved dog had the animal cloned- producing five cloned pit bulls. While the story hit the stands, and people from around the world were amazed at the clones, reporters in London where sitting back scratching their heads, because the woman- referred to in reports as Bernann McKinney, had a creepy resemblance to the woman they called Joyce McKinney 30 years ago.

The Mail was the first to connect McKinney to the infamous kidnapping of Kirk Anderson, a Utah missionary, by a Joyce McKinney back in 1977.

The paper noted "the face was familiar, albeit older and heavier. The surname was the same. So was the alleged American, ex-beauty queen background." Asked by the paper: "Are you really Joyce McKinney?", she snapped: "Are you going to ask me about my dogs or not? Because that's all I'm prepared to talk to you about."

However, the Guardian noted today that a check of public records in North Carolina confirmed that 'Bernann' is indeed the same woman who infamously said of her captive missonary: "I loved him so much that I would have skied down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to." Source

Now, after dodging questions, and lying when she did answer, the cloned puppy owner has decided to just admit that she's also the crazy Mormon chick.

Dog lover Bernann McKinney acknowledged in a telephone call yesterday that she is indeed Joyce McKinney, who in 1977 became a British tabloid sensation when she faced charges of unlawful imprisonment in the missionary case. She jumped bail and was never brought to justice.

Through tears, she explained that she went public with her efforts to replicate her dog Booger, who died two years ago, hoping people would be able to focus on that story rather than the "garbage" of the past. Source

Photo Credit

Lilo labeled it~~ predators Joyce McKinney ~~

Arthur Brown probably has learned a lot in the last 40 years, as he's continued to prey on children and refined his method of entrapping his victims.

The 67 seven year old has a long history dating back 40 years of molesting children, and his latest run in with the court put a $100,000 bond on him after he pretended to be a doctor and approached a 10 year old who had been injured at a ball game.

Brown began touching the boy but stopped when the boy's father intervened, they allege.

According to prosecutors, Brown was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor in 1966.

In 1974, he received supervision on a charge of taking indecent liberties with a child. He was convicted of taking indecent liberties with a child in 1984 and of aggravated sexual abuse in 1988. He also has a 2008 disorderly conduct case pending. His next court date is Sept. 12.

Currently, he's only charged with battery and with being a child sex offender in a public park zone stemming from the April case. Which might help explain why, despite 40 years of being a sexual predator, the bail is so damn low.

Reader comments on the original article pretty much sums up what a good deal of us have been screaming for years:

posted by Johelia on Fri Aug 08, 2008 9:47 PM

This guy is proof that pedophiles and sexual deviants can not be rehabilitated. Thank you Judge Scotilla for doing your best to remove this dangerous person from society and protecting innocent children in doing so.

Lilo labeled it~~ predators Forty years of evidence ~~

Alan Woe, which by the way isn't his real name but just a name given to him so he can remain unknown in the court papers, thinks that sex offender registration is a punishment, rather than a 'tool for community safety'. So, he filed suit against the state of New York, based upon his claims.

The offender, a Brookhaven resident who was given the pseudonym "Alan Woe" in court papers and who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, had sued over a 2006 change that extended the length of time sex offenders must register. The change, the suit argued, unfairly deprived them of due process.

The registration time for Level 1 offenders was increased from 10 to 20 years, while Level 2 and 3 offenders are now registered for life. Level 2 offenders may petition for removal from the registry after 30 years.

The changes were enacted three days before the man, a Level 1 offender, would have reached 10 years on the registry, according to the lawsuit.

Aww... poor sex offender.

Now, before everyone starts feeling safe again, there's one possible snag in the ruling that the defense would like to believe opens Pandora's Box for all level one offenders.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Leonard Wexler dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the Level 1 offender did not have a right to have a 10-year period on the registry. Wexler noted that Level 3 and 2 offenders can petition to be downgraded to Level 2 and 1, respectively.

It is this potential "door-opening," said the lawyer who filed the suit, that counts as a victory because it possibly could give Level 1 offenders the right to petition to be removed from the registry before a 20-year period ends.

"For the first time, this judge's decision holds that sexual offenders have constitutional rights and that those rights can be enforced in court," said John Ray, the offender's lawyer, at a news conference at his Miller Place office yesterday.


Whether the legal community will follow through on this line of thinking or not is still open for debate- but I'm sure that it is a ruling that is going to get a good deal of attention from both sides, sex offenders and safety advocates alike.

Lilo labeled it~~ laws Alan Woe, or not. ~~

I'm always getting asked about my thoughts on treatment programs for sexual offenders. ANd my answer is usually always the same "if they really do need treatment, they likely aren't going to be helped by getting it". I say it that way, because it's the only honest way to put it. Romeo doesn't need sex offender treatment, he needs to learn to hold off from consummating the love with his barely too young girlfriend. On the other hand, Molester Mike who preys on little kids as a hobby, well- he might need help, but no amount of help is going to end his twisted desires.

Usually the second question asked, before anyone has had the chance to read the first answer is just how someone can "know" is treatment is working. Because I don't believe it can work, it's not a question that can really be answered. However, I can tell you some of the signs that sex offender treatment isn't working.

The first sign treatment isn't working... the sexual deviant escapes from the treatment program.

Investigators are on the lookout for a violent sexual predator who escaped from Larned State Hospital overnight.

[...]

Isely served time on two counts of molesting a child younger than 14 years old from 1987 to 2006. After his sentence was over the state committed him to the state hospital as a violent sexual predator.

The next sign that it isn't working.. is even easier to determine. If the sexual predator is still breathing, he's (or she) is still a danger.

More on this case here.

Lilo labeled it~~ predators How to tell when treatment isn't working... ~~

Not long ago, I mentioned a case where a convicted sexual predator was granted bond while his appeal of his conviction awaited hearings.

The former teacher had been convicted on 13 counts involving the prolonged sexual abuse of a young boy. The judge in the case granted bond, allowing him to return to 'the free life' with little more than a ankle monitor, and not even a order to remain away from children. Everyone was outraged.

Now, Aaron Mohanlal's case has been again given the 'once over', only this time the judge actually did something right, something that should have been done a year ago at the time he was convicted.

When jurors returned 13 guilty verdicts in April 2007, the boy's father pulled him close. The boy wiped at tears. The prosecutor put her hand to her tear-stained face.

It was the end, they thought, of a four-year ordeal.

Instead, they were all incensed and distraught three months later to see Gold grant Mohanlal bond and allow him to be released later with an electronic ankle bracelet.

Mohanlal registered as a sexual predator through the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Web site, listing a Port St. Lucie address.

When CNN carried a story about Mohanlal on its Web site a week ago, child and victims advocates were outraged. Gold received a slew of angry calls and letters.

Gold revisited the case after prosecutor Anita White filed a motion noting no liens had been placed against the properties securing Mohanlal's bond and one of the properties was in foreclosure. Prosecutor Ellen St. Laurent argued Friday that some of the properties were valued at much less than Gold had initially been told. The prosecutors also voiced concerns that Mohanlal might victimize another child.

Lilo labeled it~~ predators Not out of jail now ~~

In 1986 Richard Cooey raped and killed to young women. For his crimes, he was tried, convicted and sentenced to die by Ohio's method of the death penalty- which happens to be lethal injection. After 22 years, Cooey will be facing the needle in October. Unless his lawyers have their way.

According to Cooey, and papers filed on his behalf by his lawyers, he is just too fat to die. Actually, at 5'7 and 267 lbs, he likely could use a diet, but I don't think it really justifies keeping him alive that much longer. However, I do see the need for people to look their best when they go to meet their maker so to speak, so I get why why he'd think he might be a little too fat. Which is why I'm supportive of using tax payer funds to help rectify this situation.

In fact, if he signs up now with http://www.mybodymakeover.com/ he could be fit and happy with his new body makeover just in time for them to insert the needle.

Although, really something tells me that this is less about him thinking he is too fat, and more about him looking for a way to slip through a loophole and get out of serving his sentence.

A death row inmate scheduled for execution says he's too fat to be put to death, claiming executioners would have trouble finding his veins and that his weight could diminish the effectiveness of one of the lethal injection drugs.


Lawyers for Richard Cooey argue in a federal lawsuit that Cooey -- 5-feet-7 and 267 pounds -- had poor veins when he faced execution five years ago and the problem has been worsened by weight gain.

The lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court, also says prison officials have had difficulty drawing blood from Cooey for medical procedures.



Odd that he KNEW he was set to die, knew he was on the chunky side, but instead of watching his weight, he continued to stuff his mouth and add on the pounds. A little rude if you ask me.

But, then again- what can you expect from someone who evidently was okay with the idea of raping and killing two women?

Seriously, I'm getting tired of all these excuses people have for why they shouldn't be served justice... I seriously doubt he stopped to think about the victims he killed, and their personal feelings, or even medical conditions (like the need to remain alive) that effected their physical health. So, why should I care about his?

Yes folks, I know... I'm really not sympathetic to the fat guy on death row tonight. But, can you blame me?

Lilo labeled it~~ murders, predators Someone needs a diet... ~~

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Focusing on the people who work in and around the Texas Capitol.

Sajeewa Chandrasoma wants his friends to know that he’s back at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and he’s looking forward to renewing old friendships.

Although his name looks difficult, it’s actually pronounced just the way you would expect it to be, based on the spelling; if you still find it daunting, call him “Sage.”

The youngest of three brothers, Sage was born in Sri Lanka, an island nation in South Asia about 20 miles south of the southern coast of India. The incredible beauty of the island - with features from the ocean shore to mountain peaks and jungles - occasionally lures Sage back for a visit, although he and his family have long been citizens of the United States.

Sage’s family made their move to the U.S. when his mother, a Montessori School teacher, was offered a position in Minneapolis. After his mom was settled, Sage’s dad brought the boys over to join her.

After Sage’s mom helped her employer start 23 schools, she decided to open her own business and responded to an invitation from a friend to come to Texas. Sage was ten years old when the family moved to Austin where he has resided ever since.

Sage attended Anderson High School where he was Vice President of Future Business Leaders of America and fifth place winner in a regional math competition. After attending the University of Texas at Austin for two years, Sage transferred to the University of North Texas, a smaller school with a lower student-teacher ratio where you could actually interact with your professor. “It was a great atmosphere for learning,” Sage commented. “Much better than being in a class of hundreds listening to the drone of a lecture.”

Graduating with a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), Sage wanted to go into banking, but his path led him to civil service. His first position out of college was in Dallas as a Credit Examiner with the Farm Credit Administration, an independent federal agency responsible for examining and regulating the Farm Credit System.

After three years, Sage took a position as a Bank Examiner with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury that charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks. He was excited to be back in Austin, close to his family and in a position related to banking – his original field of choice.

Sage’s desire to be in Austin was thwarted by the travel requirements of his position; he was spending 70% of his time on the road. He decided to move to a position with the state – one that did not require travel. The opportunity opened up at the agency formerly known as the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (TNRCC), now named the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Sage worked on financial assurance with the uranium and low-level radioactive disposal program.

Sage next moved to the Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) as a financial analyst working mainly in rural economic development and monitoring contracts for compliance. After six years, Sage was ready for different challenges and accepted a position back at TCEQ once again working on financial assurance with radioactive materials, but with the added responsibility of managing various contracts.

Posted by Robyn Hadley at Tuesday, August 12, 2008 0 comments  

Labels: POTW; agency staff

One of our former "Persons of the Week," Alex San Martin, needs your help. Alex lived at the Retreat at Barton Creek and his apartment was completely destroyed by fire last weekend. The fire started on the 3rd floor of his building and worked its way down to Alex's first-floor apartment. Luckily, he wasn't home at the time.

The Red Cross has given Alex a $400 gift card to help him start the process of starting over, which is wonderful, but that will only allow him to buy a few of the many things he needs to reestablish a home. A few friends from the Capitol and his church have donated some necessities too, like basic furniture. But if anyone out there would like to help Alex, he especially needs clothes and kitchen items. Gift cards are also welcome, he says. I imagine gift cards to stores like Target and WalMart, where household items AND clothes are sold, would be most welcome.

To get in touch with Alex, his e-mail address is alexsanmartin3(at)gmail.com.

Alex currently works for the Texas Department of Health.

We wish Alex the best of luck getting his house back in order!

Posted by Robyn Hadley at Saturday, August 02, 2008 0 comments  

Labels: Agency staff, POTW

One of the NICEST people to ever walk the halls of the Capitol, Rebecca Young, will be back next session as governmental affairs manager for the Independent Insurance Agents of Texas (IIAT).

Becky is a Capitol veteran, having worked previously for Rep. John Smithee, as his chief of staff, and for Speaker Tom Craddick, as his executive assistant. Most recently, she's been working at the Texas Education Agency as the director of external relations.

Her future co-worker, Lee Loftis, IIAT director of governmental affairs, said, “Rebecca will be integral part in furthering the legislative goals of Trusted Choice® agents in Texas and at the national level. Her enthusiasm and diplomacy will help foster clear communications and successful outcomes for our members.”

Becky starts her new job with IIAT on Friday, Aug. 1.

Posted by Robyn Hadley at Monday, July 28, 2008 0 comments  

Labels: Association staff, Former staff

Former "Person of the Week" James Bernsen has returned from his tour in Iraq. His friends invite you to join them in welcoming him home TONIGHT, starting at 5:30 p.m. at J. Black's Feel Good Lounge at 710 W. 6th Street in Austin.

Posted by Robyn Hadley at Thursday, July 17, 2008 0 comments  

Labels: POTW

With Mary Katherine Stout going to the governor's office (see below), the Texas Public Policy Foundation created a new position of Vice President of Policy and Communications and named longtime Capitol staffer Justin Keener to fill it.

From the press release: "Keener’s background includes work in the Texas House, Texas Senate, non-profit community and private sector. He served as an aide to Speaker Tom Craddick, Senator Florence Shapiro and the Senate State Affairs Committee. He has worked for the Greater Dallas Crime Commission and as a consultant where he directed public affairs campaigns for Fortune 500 companies, advocacy organizations and political candidates."

Keener starts August 1.

Posted by Robyn Hadley at Thursday, July 03, 2008 1 comments  

Okay, who knows Mary Katherine Stout and what can you tell us about her? According to the governor's press release, Stout is joining his team after working for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Stout has also worked for the Texas Conservative Coalition and Texas Workforce Commission Chairman Diane Rath. "Mary Katherine Stout brings legislative and policy expertise rooted in sound fiscal conservative principles," said Gov. Perry. "Her work on a broad spectrum of policy issues at one of the leading conservative think tanks in the country provides her with a depth of knowledge that will be invaluable."

I did find this blog for policy wonks called StateHouseCall.org where Stout has been a contributor on articles relating to health care. Here's a guest column she wrote for the Dallas Morning News re: the need to build more roads, not light rail. And here's a guest column she wrote for the Wall Street Journal last year defending President Bush for his stand on a limited State Children's Health Insurance Program. I think you'll be able to learn more about her philosophies on government by reading what she's written for these sites.

So what does this mean for longtime budget and policy director Mike Morrissey? The Morning News' blog, Trail Blazers says he'll now be a senior advisor on budget issues. I'm just wondering how hard that will be... to go from running the division to being just an adviser.

Posted by Robyn Hadley at Wednesday, July 02, 2008 0 comments  

Have heard through the grapevine that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has made a decision to cut costs at its Capitol Bureau, and that means one of its three reporters has to be let go.

Word on the street is R.A. "Jake" Dyer drew the short straw and will be gone by the end of June.

He's a GREAT, old-style reporter, meaning when he sinks his teeth into an issue, he won't let go. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize when he worked for the Houston Chronicle.

He's also written several books about billiards and the colorful characters who play it, including The Hustler and the Champ.

We know Jake will be just fine, wherever he ends up... it's just sad that another bureau is reducing its coverage of state government. If anything, we need more reporters digging into the people's business.

Posted by Robyn Hadley at Thursday, June 26, 2008 1 comments  

Labels: Media

So sad to hear about the death of State Rep. George "Buddy" West. I have a good friend who worked for him for years and he was nothing but kind and generous to his staff. I still believe you can judge a lawmaker by the way he or she treats his staff.

Rep. West, who was first elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1992, had lost his bid for re-election during this year's primary. His long list of accomplishments can be read on his campaign website.

Funeral services will be held tomorrow, Friday, June 25, at 3:00 p.m. at the First Baptist Church in Odessa.

Posted by Robyn Hadley at Thursday, June 26, 2008 0 comments  

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Assorted anecdotes in the life of Lord Runolfr Orthlokarr Ulfsson, a fencer, dancer, and brewer in the Society for Creative Anachronism.
 
Yeah, I'm a Renaissance Geek; just deal with it.
 
I also have political opinions from time to time.

Labels: fencing

posted by Lord Runolfr at 2:49 PM 0 comments links to this post

Labels: food, music, wine

posted by Lord Runolfr at 6:52 AM 0 comments links to this post

I finally got around to watching Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

Not too impressed, really. Joss Whedon has done the musical bit before (Buffy, "Once More, With Feeling"), so that's not much of an innovation. It's pretty much a bog-standard villain origin story, so nothing new there, either. The only thing really new about it is the internet delivery mechanism.

And since I've already gone on at length about accusations that Joss Whedon is anti-feminist, I might as well point out that Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is fodder for their claims, since Penny is a classic example of the Woman in the Refrigerator.

Gotta love "Bad Horse: The Thoroughbred of Sin", though.

Labels: Firefly, movies

posted by Lord Runolfr at 8:38 AM 0 comments links to this post

Since the villain in this episode happens to be a black man, it comes as no surprise that she's going to declare it racist. We'll see if she has any decent reasoning other than "there's a black man who loses to some white folks". First, however, we have to wade through a long philosophical digression, in which she will claim that Whedon (along with a lot of well-known philosophers from history) is a self-obsessed misogynist who can only write stories that promote male supremacy and reduce women to sex objects. According to her, he has something called Male Artist Syndrome (a term coined by another radical feminist she refers to as Dissenter, with a link to her blog), which makes him incapable of recognizing women as creative beings. In his writings, women only exist to boost his ego by agreeing with his ideas and adoring his work.

She quotes from Whedon's commentary on the episode, in which he describes a "philosophical epiphany" he had while watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which started him thinking about his existence and place in the world. He subsequently read Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, which he says made him think about "the pain of being of things and their existence outside of their meaning". Allecto decided that she needed to read Nausea to see what so fascinated Joss Whedon, and concluded that Sartre is a narcissistic misogynist obsessed with sexual exploitation of children. I haven't read Nausea and have no inclination to do so, so I have no idea whether she's close to the mark, there. If the quotes that she provides are any indication, I'm not missing anything.

My discussions with Dissenter have provided valuable insight into the reasons that men Wank and call it philosophy. "Men’s lives are an exercise in futility," she says, "males are essentially pointless so they have to have all of this existential angst about their lives." This is true. Men, being rather superfluous creatures, must excrete Phallosophical Wank and believe it to be meaningful.

For women, life is not about meaninglessness. For women, life is a struggle to create meaning. Women do not write books about being nauseated by our own existence. There is a whole world FULL of men out there who are already nauseated by our existence. Women write about the power and the meaningfulness of existence, of life, in its own right. This is powerful magic; the beauty of existing, the beauty of surviving.

Labels: bizarre, Firefly

posted by Lord Runolfr at 2:35 PM 1 comments links to this post

So, I was on my way to visit William and Juliana last night, and I asked if they needed me to pick up anything on my way. Apparently there was no plan whatsoever for dinner, so I got free reign to do anything I wanted.

Thai Taste restaurant used to have a really spectacular wonton-soup-type of dish called Keow Nam. I decided I was going to try to accomplish a decent approximation of it, so I went to K&S World Market for supplies. K&S has everything under the sun in the way of international groceries, but finding it all can be a pain. Perseverance pays off, though.

Keow Nam:

• 4 cups of chicken broth
• 1 tablespoon of fish sauce
• 3 cups (approximately) of baby bok-choy stalks, roughly chopped
  (save the leaves to serve under laab or something; that's another post)
• 1 small bag of oriental dumplings (pork with celery, in this case)
• Freshly ground black pepper to taste

Put the chicken stock, fish sauce, and bok-choy in a pot, bring them to a boil, and let them simmer until the bok-choy is tender. Add the dumplings and black pepper and let them simmer a few more minutes to get the dumplings hot all the way through. That's all there is to it.

EDIT: Picture now added to the post.

Labels: food

posted by Lord Runolfr at 8:44 AM 0 comments links to this post

Labels: movies

posted by Lord Runolfr at 8:24 AM 1 comments links to this post

Labels: movies, silly

posted by Lord Runolfr at 6:55 AM 0 comments links to this post

Labels: dance, SCA

posted by Lord Runolfr at 9:25 AM 0 comments links to this post

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(High-quality show archive below)

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This is an "ideas" blog rather than a "cool thing I saw today" blog. Many of the items are not topical. If you like what you read, I recommend you also browse back in the archives. Try my home page for more info and contact data. What is hard science fiction? Submitted by brad on Tue, 2008-08-12 16:27.

• Futurism

I’ve just returned from Denver and the World Science Fiction Convention (worldcon) where I spoke on issues such as privacy, DRM and creating new intelligent beings. However, I also attended a session on “hard” science fiction, and have some thoughts to relate from it.

Defining the sub-genres of SF, or any form of literature, is a constant topic for debate. No matter where you draw the lines, authors will work to bend them as well. Many people just give up and say “Science Fiction is what I point at when I say Science Fiction.”

Genres in the end are more about taste than anything else. They exist for readers to find fiction that is likely to match their tastes. Hard SF, broadly, is SF that takes extra care to follow the real rules of physics. It may include unknown science or technology but doesn’t include what those rules declare to be impossible. On the border of hard SF one also finds SF that does a few impossible things (most commonly faster-than-light starships) but otherwise sticks to the rules. As stories include more impossible and unlikely things, they travel down the path to fantasy, eventually arriving at a fully fantastic level where the world works in magical ways as the author found convenient.

Even in fantasy however, readers like to demand consistency. Once magical rules are set up, people like them to be followed.

In addition to Hard SF, softer SF and Fantasy, the “alternate history” genre has joined the pantheon, now often dubbed “speculative fiction.” All fiction deals with hypotheticals, but in speculative fiction, the “what if?” is asked about the world, not just the lives of some characters. This year, the Hugo award for best (ostensibly SF) novel of the year went to Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union which is a very clear alternate history story. In it, the USA decides to accept Jews that Hitler is expelling from Europe, and gives them a temporary homeland around Sitka, Alaska. During the book, the lease on the homeland is expiring, and there is no Israel. It’s a very fine book, but I didn’t vote for it because I want to promote actual SF, not alternate history, with the award.

However, in considering why fans like alternate history, I realized something else. In mainstream literature, the cliche is that the purpose of literature is to “explore the human condition.” SF tends to expand that, to explore both the human condition and the nature of the technology and societies we create, as well as the universe itself. SF gets faulted by the mainstream literature community for exploring those latter topics at the expense of the more character oriented explorations that are the core of mainstream fiction. This is sometimes, but not always, a fair criticism.

Hard SF fans want their fiction to follow the rules of physics, which is to say, take place in what could be the real world. In a sense, that’s similar to the goal of mainstream fiction, even though normally hard SF and mainstream fiction are considered polar opposites in the genre spectrum. After all, mainstream fiction follows the rules of physics as well or better than the hardest SF. It follows them because the author isn’t trying to explore questions of science, technology and the universe, but it does follow them. Likewise, almost all alternate history also follows the laws of physics. It just tweaks some past event, not a past rule. As such it explores the “real world” as closely as SF does, and I suspect this is why it is considered a subgenre of fantasy and SF.

I admit to a taste for hard SF. Future hard SF is a form of futurism; an explanation of real possible futures for the world. It explores real issues. The best work in hard SF today comes (far too infrequently) from Vernor Vinge, including his recent hugo winning novel, Rainbow’s End. His most famous work, A Fire Upon the Deep, which I published in electronic form 15 years ago, is a curious beast. It includes one extremely unlikely element of setting — a galaxy where the rules of physics which govern the speed of computation vary with distance from the center of the galaxy. Some view that as fantastic, but it’s real purpose is to allow him to write about the very fascinating and important topic of computerized super-minds, who are so smart that they are as gods to us. Coining the term “applied theology” Vinge uses his setting to allow the superminds to exist in the same story as characters like us that we can relate to. Vinge feels that you can’t write an authentic story about superminds, and thus need to have human characters, and so uses this element some would view as fantastic. So I embrace this as hard SF, and for the purists, the novels suggest that the “zones” may be artificial.

The best hard SF thus explores the total human condition. Fantastic fiction can do this as well, but it must do it by allegory. In fantasy, we are not looking at the real world, but we usually are trying to say something about it. However, it is not always good to let the author pick and choose what’s real and what’s not about the world, since it is too easy to fall into the trap of speaking only about your made-up reality and not about the world.

Not that this is always bad. Exploring the “human condition” or reality is just one thing we ask of our fiction. We also always want a ripping good read. And that can occur in any genre.

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You may not know it, but any cell phone — whether it has an account with a carrier or not — is able to call 911. You can leave one of your old phones (and a car charger) in your car if you just want a way to reach emergency services.

I propose an expansion of this idea. A special set of numbers, which, like 800 numbers are free to call because the called party pays for the airtime. These exist already of course, but I want to go further and have numbers where any phone, or at least any phone which works with a participating carrier, can call the number, billed to the receiver of the call.

Then people who can’t afford a cell phone could still use one, if they liked, to call certain businesses. The first one I’m thinking of are taxis. I’ve always thought cell-phone hail makes sense for taxis in today’s world (and it eliminates the need for a monopoly but one problem was not everybody has a cell phone. Even if the cab companies can’t afford the 50 cents they might pay for airtime, it could just be added to the fare, at least in a non monopoly rates world.

This could also enable a cell-phone-hailed jitney service that replaces low-usage transit bus lines. In much of the world, jitneys are popular and cheap. A new high-tech jitney could be much better than the bus, if everybody can get a phone with which to call it.

There are other companies who might participate. Travel companies such as hotels and airlines might allow these calls. Tourists visiting foreign countries might find it useful to reach such companies but they may not want to get a local cell phone or pay giant roaming rates — or might not have a cell at home that can roam, as CDMA customers realize in the GSM world.

If they could do it in low volume, parents might even participate, allowing their kids to use an old unregistered phone to call them (at high cost) but do nothing else. Of course cell companies might not want to allow this as they may feel they get more money pushing parents to buy phones, or at least prepaid phones, for the kids.

The phones would not be directly callable, but it might be handy if the system allowed the recipients of these target-paid calls to have a temporary number which can be used to call back a caller who has called recently. That’s a little more involved. This would be handy for 911 too. And of course, if this became common, more people would have a phone which could call 911 in an emergency. There are tons of old phones out there, and they are cheap.

Companies would have to coordinate. It would be nice if a cell800 customer didn’t have to negotiate with every carrier in town, and if they could use the same number on several carriers. Most of these old phones will be subsidy locked and only able to work with one carrier.

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• New Democracy
• Privacy

There’s a bit of an internet buzz this week around a video of a law lecture on why you should never, ever, ever, ever talk to the police. The video begins with the law professor and criminal defense attorney, who is a good speaker, making that case, and then a police detective, interesting but not quite as eloquent, agreeing with him and describing the various tricks the police use every day with people stupid enough to talk to them.

The case is very good. In our society of a zillion laws, you are always guilty of something, and he explains, even if you’re completely innocent, and you tell nothing but the truth, there are still a lot of ways you could end up in jail. Not that it happens every time, but the chance is high enough and the cost is so great that he advocates that you should never, ever talk to the police. (He doesn’t say this, but I presume he does not include when you are filing a complaint about a crime against you or are a witness in a crime against others, where the benefits may outweigh the risk.)

Now fortunately for the police, few people follow the advice. Lots of people talk to the police. Some 80% of cases, the detective declares, are won because of a confession by the suspect. Cops love it, and they will lie (and are permitted to lie) to make it happen if they can.

But since a rational person should never, ever, under any circumstances talk to the police, this prevents citizens from ever helping the police. And there are times when society, and law enforcement, would be better if citizens could help the police without fear.

What if there existed a means for the police to do a guaranteed off-the-record interview with a non-suspect? Instead of a Miranda warning, the police would inform you that:

“You are not a suspect, and nothing from this interview can be used against you in a court of law.”

First of all, could this work? I believe our laws of evidence are strong enough that actual quotes from the interview could not be used. To improve things, you could be allowed to record the interview, or the officer could record it but hand you the only copy, and swear it’s the only copy. It could be a digitally signed, authenticated copy, which can never be taken from you by warrant or subpoena, or used even if you lose it, perhaps until some years after your death.

However, clearly if the police learn something in the interview that makes them suspect you, they will try to find ways to “learn” that again through other, admissible means. And this could come back to bite you. While we could have a Fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine which would forbid this, it is much harder to get full rigour about such doctrines. Is this fear enough to make it still always be the best advice to never speak to the police? Is there a way we could make it self to assist the police?

I will note that if we had a safe means to assist the police, it would sometimes “backfire” in the eyes of the public. There would be times when interviewees would (foolishly, but still successfully) say “nyah, nyah, I did it and you can’t get me” and the public would be faced with the usual confusion over people who are let free even when we know they are guilty. And indeed there would be times when the police learn things in such interviews and could have then found evidence, but are prohibited from, that get the public up in arms because some rapist, kidnapper, murderer or even terrorist goes free.

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• power

I often rant here about the need for better universal power supply technology. And there is some progress. On a recent trip to Europe, I was astounded how much we took in the way of power supply gear. I am curious at what the record is for readers here. I suggested we have a contest at a recent gathering. I had six supplies, and did not win.

Here’s what the two of us had on the German trip in terms of devices. There were slightly fewer supplies, due to the fact several devices charged from USB, which could be generated by laptops or dedicated wall-warts.

• My laptop, with power supply. (Universal, able to run from plane, car or any voltage)
• Her laptop, with power supply.
• My unlocked GSM phone, which though mini-USB needs its dedicated charger, so that was brought
• My CDMA phone, functioning has a PDA, charges from mini-USB
• Her unlocked GSM phone, plus motorola charger
• Her CDMA Treo, as a PDA, with dedicated charger
• My Logger GPS, charges from mini-USB
• My old bluetooth GPS, because I had just bought the logger, charges from mini-USB
• My Canon EOS 40D, with plug in battery charger. 4 batteries.
• Her Canon mini camera, with different plug in battery charger. 2 batteries.
• Canon flash units, with NiMH AA batteries, with charger and power supply for charger.
• Special device, with 12v power supply.
• MP3 player and charger
• Bluetooth headset, charges from same Motorola charger. Today we would have two!
• External laptop battery for 12 hour flight, charges from laptop charger
• Electric shaver — did not bring charger as battery will last trip.
• 4 adapters for Euro plugs, and one 3-way extension cord. One adapter has USB power out!
• An additional USB wall-wart, for a total of 3 USB wall-warts, plus the computers.
• Cigarette lighter to USB adapter to power devices in car.

That’s the gear that will plug into a wall. There was more electronic gear, including USB memory sticks, flash cards, external wi-fi antennal, headsets and I’ve probably forgotten a few things.  read more »

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• Privacy

There are a variety of tools out there to help recover stolen technological devices. They make the devices “phone home” to the security company, and if stolen, this can be used to find the laptop (based on IP traceroutes etc.) and get it back. Some of these tools work hard to hide on the machine, even claiming they will survive low level disk formats. Some reportedly get installed into the BIOS to survive a disk swap.

This has always been interesting to me, but it seems like something that could be used to track you against your will. I don’t know how all the different products work inside — they are deliberately obtuse about some parts of it — but here’s a design for one that you could perhaps trust with your privacy.

• When setting it up, you would create a passphrase. Write it down somewhere else, as you need it for recovery.
• Every so often, it will make a DNS request of a magic DNS server. In the request will be embedded a random number, and an encryption of the random number based on the passphrase.
• Without the passphrase, these requests mean nothing to the tracking company. They don’t know who made the request
• When your device is stolen, you give the tracking company your passphrase
• When a request comes in, the tracking company checks it using the passphrases of the devices that are currently reported stolen. If it matches, bingo.
• In a match, return a DNS answer that says, “You’re stolen. Do the stuff you should do.” That answer is of course also encrypted with the passphrase.
• At that point, the device can do complex traceroutes, take photos with its built in camera, record audio, you name it.

If there are a lot of stolen laptops in the database, the search could be sped up one of two ways: * The random number isn’t random, it’s the date. The site can then pre-compute all the codes it is likely to get from stolen laptops that day. Changing the date on the computer won’t help, as that just means a little more CPU on that particular request. * Include an 8 or 9 bit hash of the passphrase + date. That can reduce by a factor of 256 or 512 how many phrases you must try. This identifies you a bit but if the company has lots of customers you are fine.

Note that DNS requests tend to get through just about any firewall other than a firewall deliberately tuned to block sneaky DNS requests.

This system could be integrated into a BIOS or right into an ethernet card. However, since it is the high level OS that does DHCP etc. you need a bit of network layer cheating to do this right. I presume they already do that.

You can also run the DNS server yourself, if you are so inclined. It’s not that hard. But this system lets you trust a 3rd party as they learn nothing about you as long as they have lots of customers.

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• Photography

Last weekend I had a great trip to Wyoming, staying in Jackson for a bit and then into Yellowstone with a Cody side-trip.

As always, tons of photos and a new gallery of panoramic photos of the area. My last trip to Yellowstone featured poor weather and a very early (low quality) digital camera so I was pleased to photograph it again.

Check out my Gallery of Panoramas of Wyoming

One thing that was different: In the bookstores at both parks there were books on how to photograph the park. This was something quite new, and is an artifact of the great rebirth of photography that digital cameras have brought. Often when I enter an area I will ask the locals for the good photographic spots. These books answered those questions, and did more — told me when to visit the spots, or where to go at certain times of day. For example, the book told me I would get a rainbow at 9 am on upper Yellowstone falls from Uncle Tom point, and indeed I did. (It must be timed for summer.)

Everybody shoots Old Faithful — here’s the crowd around it at sunset:

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• Going Green

Last weekend I attended a small gathering in the Grand Tetons where Boone Pickens came to promote his new energy plan. The billionaire oilman is spending $56M of his own money per year on ads for this plan, and you will see them if you watch ads. Otherwise they are at his Pickens Plan web site.

Pickens’ thesis is that the most ruinous thing in energy is the 700 billion dollars per year the USA spends importing oil, a number destined to go up to a trillion. He thinks the price will continue to rise, simply because demand now exceeds supply, and that supply can’t be radically increased — ie. he believes in the Peak Oil thesis. He doesn’t seem to mind burning the fuel so much as importing it, which is giving trillions to other nations at U.S. expense. He is happy to support any domestic oil production, such as offshore, as good because it reduces the import numbers, but doesn’t think these are long term solutions.

His main goal is to get cars off of oil and onto domestic energy. He thinks the best way to do that is with LNG (liquid natural gas) or compressed natural gass cars. He says they have been far cheaper than gasoline for some time — half the cost — but that this was not enough to make people care enough to switch. Any new fuel has a chicken and egg problem when it comes to fueling infrastructure, something that Robocars solve, by the way.

To do that, he needs to take natural gas from the power grid. NG produces 20% of U.S. electricity. So he is promoting wind and solar. The wind in a high-wind corridor that runs up the center of the country, the solar in the sun-belt (the southwest and California.)

It’s an interesting plan, and he points out that whatever flaws you may find in it, at least it is a plan, something that’s been lacking for some time.

That said, some notes:

• Getting power from the wind belt is not easy. In spite of what you may think, there is no national power grid, and certainly no infrastructure to power the coasts from the middle. This would have to be built, and would be very expensive. Pickens admits this. New technology of high voltage DC transmission could help.
• I’m not sure that adding wind power would free up NG for cars. I think we would just use more electricity if you increase the supply. That’s what we do.
• Indeed, from a pollution standpoint, we would be far better to shut down coal plants when the wind/solar comes online, but we won’t, because it’s cheap. Only moving cars to NG (or electric or other domestic energy source) reduces oil imports.
• Pickens is buying a pretty old-school marketing campaign with his spare millions. We all thought he could have done it for far less with clever use of the internet and a more modest TV budget.
• The 700 million isn’t all bad, of course. The largest source of imported oil is Canada. Saudis are #2 and Mexico is #3. Venezuela is #4, though it recently switched from from a friendly ally to an unfriendly.

Still, it’s good that Pickens will get people talking about this. NG for cars is already a reasonably popular fleet fuel. New extraction technologies have opened up a lot of new sources of NG of late. Of course, burning NG still emits CO2, though not much else, once refined to more pure methane, it’s the cleanest fossil fuel.

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• Robocars

This special chapter in my series of essays on Robocars describes a fictional week in the Robocar world, with many created examples of how people might use Robocars and how their lives might change.

If you haven’t been following my essay on Robocars, this may be a good alternate entry to it. In a succinct way, it plays out many of the technologies I think are possible, more about the what than the how and why.

A Week of Robocar Stories

This ends this week-long series of postings on the Robocar essays. Though I have some new sidebars already written which I will introduce later. I realize this set of essays has been more longer than one typically sees in the short-attention-span blogosphere, but I think these ideas are among the more important and world-changing I’ve covered. I hope I’ll see more comments from the readers as you get more deeply into it.

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• Robocars

You may have seen in earlier blog posts my discussion of the energy efficiency of U.S. transit. I started that investigation because as I learned how inefficient most transit systems are (due to light loads outside of rush hour,) I realized that ultralight electric cars, enabled by Robocars, are more efficient than any transit system. Who would take transit if a fast, comfortable, efficient vehicle will take you directly from A to B? This drives chapter eight, about:

The end of urban mass transit

(This one gets the people who think they love transit, rather than loving efficient transportation, in a tizzy.)

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• Robocars

For part seven of my series on Robocars, I now consider the adjunct technology I am calling Deliverbots — namely robot driven trucks and delivery vehicles, with no people inside. These turn out to have special consequences of their own. Read:

Deliverbots

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• Robocars

For part six of my series on Robocars, consider:

When can robocars happen?

I discuss what predictions we can make about how long the Robocar future will take. While there are many technological challenges, the biggest barriers may be political, and even harder to predict.

We don’t seem to have the Jetson’s flying cars yet. What goes wrong with these predictions, and can we figure it out?

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• Robocars

For part five of my series on Robocars, it’s time to understand how this is not simply a utopian future. Consider now:

The Downsides of Robocars

Every good technology has unintended consequences and downsides. Here I outline a few, but there will be more than nobody sees today. I still judge the immense upsides to be worth it, but you can judge yourself.

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• Robocars

Robocars will suggest a great number of possible changes in the way we design and market cars. I now encourage you to read:

Automobile design changes due to Robocars

The big green benefit of robocars comes in large part from the freedom they offer in redesigning the automobile, in particular the ability to specialize automobiles to specific tasks, because they can be so readily hired on demand. Or to specific fuels in certain areas, or for sleeping, and much more.

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• Robocars

For part three of my series of Robocars, now consider:

Roadblocks on the way to Robocars

A lot of obstacles must be overcome before Robocars can become reality. Some we can see solutions for, others are as yet unsolved. It’s not going to be easy, which is why I believe an Apollo style dedication is necessary.

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• Robocars

In part two of my series on Robocars, let me introduce:

The Roadmap to Robocars

Here I outline a series of steps along the way to the full robocar world. We won’t switch all at once, and many more limited technologies can be marketed before the day when most cars on the road are computer driven. Here are some ideas of what those steps could be — or already are.

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• Best Of Blog
• Futurism
• Robocars
• self-driving cars

Today let me introduce a major new series of essays I have produced on “Robocars” — computer-driven automobiles that can drive people, cargo, and themselves, without aid (or central control) on today’s roads.

It began with the DARPA Grand Challenges convincing us that, if we truly want it, we can have robocars soon. And then they’ll change the world. I’ve been blogging on this topic for some time, and as a result have built up what I hope is a worthwhile work of futurism laying out the consequences of, and path to, a robocar world.

Those consequences, as I have considered them, are astounding.

• It starts with saving a million young lives every year (45,000 in the USA) as well as untold injury in suffering.
• It saves trillions of dollars wasted over congestion, accidents and time spent driving.
• Robocars can solve the battery problem of the electric car, making the electric car attractive and inexpensive. They can do the same for many other alternate fuels, too.
• Electric cars are cheap, simple and efficient once you solve the battery/range problems.
• Switching most urban driving to electric cars, especially ultralight short-trip vehicles means a dramatic reduction in energy demand and pollution.
• It could be enough to wean the USA off of foreign oil, with all the change that entails.
• It means rethinking cities and manufacturing.
• It means the death of old-style mass transit.

All thanks to a Moore’s law driven revolution in machine vision, simple A.I. and navigation sponsored by the desire for cargo transport in war zones. In the way stand engineering problems, liability issues, fear of computers and many other barriers.

At 33,000 words, these essays are approaching book length. You can read them all now, but I will also be introducing them one by one in blog posts for those who want to space them out and make comments. I’ve written so much because I believe that of all short term computer projects available to us, no modest-term project could bring more good to the world than robocars. While certain longer term projects like A.I. and Nanotech will have grander consequences, Robocars are the sweet spot today.

I have also created a new Robocars topic on the blog which collects my old posts, and will mark new ones. You can subscribe to that as a feed if you wish. (I will cease to use the self-driving cars blog tag I was previously using.)

If you like what I’ve said before, this is the big one. You can go to the:

Master Robocar Index (Which is also available via robocars.net.)

or jump to the first article:

The Case for Robot Cars

You may also find you prefer to be introduced to the concept through a series of stories I have developed depicting a week in the Robocar world. If so, start with the stories, and then proceed to the main essays.

A Week of Robocars

These are essays I want to spread. If you find their message compelling, please tell the world.

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• Going Green

In light of my recent studies into transportation energy efficiency I’ve learned a lot more about the energy budget of the USA and the world.

One conclusion from those investigations is that if you are serious about greening the world, there are really only a few areas worthy of serious effort. Yes, you can make a difference anywhere, and if all you’re going to make is a personal difference there are scores of things you can change in your life to reduce your own footprint. But if you want to make a real difference, by affecting groups of people and whole sectors, the choices are few and clear.

The footprint of cars and light trucks is so large — 63% of transportation energy — that I am tempted to say that if you’re not working on cars, you’re not working on being green. Freight trucks are another 17% of transportation energy. Transit is in the noise — it only has bearing in that it can, in the rare cases it is done well, take people out of cars to make their travel greener. These numbers are huge, so of course differences can be made in the other transportation areas, but if the question of cars and trucks is not fixed, the rest of transportation barely matters in comparison. The one exception is jet airliners, which at 9% take the next largest shot of the energy budget.

However, transportation is “only” 28.5% of the total U.S. energy budget, so it’s not quite the only place to go. However, adding the energy cost of manufacturing cars bumps them up to around a third.

The rest of the energy budget is split 32% industrial (including making cars,) 18% commercial and 21% residential. But 70% of residential energy, 78% of commercial energy and 34% of industrial energy comes from electricity. (Just .3% of transportation energy does, but that will change if we move to electric cars.)

All these energy uses are quite diverse. There are many targets to attack, all worthy within their own scope but there’s only one truly big target, and that’s electricity generation. In the USA that’s currently 50% coal and 20% natural gas. So if you’re working to fix this — with renewable energy or nuclear — then you’re working on one of the big problems. Right now hydro and nuclear are the largest non-fossil power generators. All the other renewables are currently in the noise.

One of the biggest commercial users of energy is agriculture. It’s estimated that the equivalent of 400 gallons of gasoline per person in the USA is used to grow our food. Part of that is that 5% of all natural gas goes into making fertilizer. This makes this a particularly large non-electrical target. In addition, most of the methane we emit comes from livestock. I need to do more research but currently agriculture looks like another big target.

So it’s not quite true that if you’re not working on cars, you’re not working on being green, but it does suggest that projects like the Automotive X-Prize and DARPA Grand Challenge are among the most important projects in the world for going green.

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• Privacy

Sadly, I must report that after our initial success in getting the members of the House to not grant immunity to telcos who participated in the illegal warrentless wiretap program which we at the EFF are suing over, the attempt to join the Senate bill (which grants immunity) to the House bill has, by reports, resulted in a so-called compromise that effectively grants the immunity.

I have written earlier about this issue and asked you to contact your members of congress, particularly the House and the House leadership about this issue, so now I must do it one last time.

It disturbs me that house members got the issue the first time, but that conservative “blue dog” democrats are bolting and going to President Bush’s side. The White House arguments make no sense — if the programs were not illegal, no immunity is needed, and since the new bills make the programs legal, the companies will have no fear of complying with new orders under the new law. The only activity these lawsuits should chill would be illegal activity. It’s like the White House is saying, “If they don’t get immunity, they will be scared to break the law when we ask them to again.”

Sigh.

The solution is simple. When the White House comes calling and asks you to break the law, once it’s not an emergency, you should say, “Why don’t we clear this up before a judge?” That’s what EFF is doing now, 7 years later. Asking a judge to look it over, and see if it’s legal. Should have been done long ago, but certainly shouldn’t be stopped now.

Call your members of congress. Tell them you care about the rule of law and the constitution, and not to grant immunity, in particular this so-called compromise which still grants immunity as long as the White House promised it was all legal.

You can get the contact information for your member at the EFF Action Center

Update: Damn. Even Obama came out and endorsed the “compromise.” The supposed “compromise” says that as long as the administration swears that they told the phone companies that it’s legal, it’s legal. Gee, what are the odds that’s going to happen? How can Obama and the rest of the Democratic leadership side with the President like this? Where are their spines? Obama says he wants to fight in the Senate to remove the immunity, but it’s sadly too late there, and he has to know that, unless he goes all out with his leadership power. He could have done much more earlier in the week by telling Democrats to not support immunity, but he didn’t.

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• Best Of Blog
• Going Green
• Transportation

As part of my research into robotic cars, I’ve been studying the energy efficiency of transit. What I found shocked me, because it turns out that in the USA, our transit systems aren’t green at all. Several of the modes, such as buses, as well as the light rail and subway systems of most towns, consume more energy per passenger-mile than cars do, when averaged out. The better cities and the better modes do beat the cars, but only by a little bit. And new generation efficient cars beat the transit almost every time, and electric scooters beat everything hands down.

I encourage you to read the more detailed essay I have prepared on whether green U.S. transit is a myth. I’ve been very surprised by what I’ve found. It includes links to the sources. To tease you, here’s the chart I have calculated on the energy efficiency of the various modes. Read on, and show me how these numbers are wrong if you can!

Note: If you want to comment on the cyclist figure, there is different thread on the fossil fuel consumption in human food which details these numbers and invites comments.

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• Random Ideas

I want to expand on my proposal to standardize connectivity for devices in hotels. Let’s add to that and develop a regimen of having bluetooth keyboards everywhere. Every hotel room should have one (or the hotel should at least have one to loan you at the desk.) They should be in every cafe, on the train and every company meeting room and lobby.

They should be on the street, in kiosks. They should be at the train station. Everybody should have one at their house, for guests. And many other places.

We’re moving to smaller and smaller portable devices. Not just keyboard-less iPhones and PDAs — the new rage is ultra-mobile laptops with reduced size keyboards. We want our devices to be smaller, but there’s one thing you can’t shrink and keep fully usable, and that’s the keyboard. Yes, people get fast on their tiny blackberry keyboards, and yes there have been clever inventions like laser projected keyboards, inflatable keyboards and the much-missed butterfly keyboard, but the small ones just can’t cut it.

The small screen we seem to deal with. And via goggles or projection, there are ways to make a large screen on a tiny device if we try hard enough. But solving the typing problem requires some grander change, like perfect speech recognition, or alternate ways of typing.  read more »

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Also just enjoyed The Third Chimpanzee, prequel to Jared Diamond's pulitzer-winning must-read, Guns, Germs and Steel and am now working on Collapse. Top Essays

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Complete Set

• What is hard science fiction?
• 800 style numbers for unregistered cell phones
• Should we let people safely talk to the police?
• What's your travel power supply record?
• A privacy enabled phone-home for laptops
• Panoramas of Wyoming: Yellowstone, Tetons
• Pickens Plan -- switch cars to NG, electricity to wind
• A Week of Robocars
• Robocars: The end of Urban Transit
• Robocars: Deliverbots -- computer driven trucks

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Fellows, Friends, and Others,

I am sending another one of my reports from the field. As stipulated, I am using the species’ own mode of transmission, their own semiology—what is referred to in these parts as “language” (though, technically speaking, they use many “languages” organized in a similar way as a system (i.e. as “language”), many “dialects” within any single language, within that many idiosyncrasies (according to the specific setting, function, and role of the enunciator), many different ways in which they are performed . . .) (As with my other reports, all throughout I have tried to use the hegemonic language.). Although this is a less secure way to proceed, I have come to concur with the assertion (which, I assume, is the underlying reason for guideline # 9) that only through the subject/object’s own native transmission can its distinctiveness and uniqueness (in some cases, its novelty) be elaborated as precisely as possible (which is not to say fully).

This, I believe, has nothing to do with the structural semiotical claim of the direct correspondence between transmission, thought, and thing. (In fact, as with our own, that is impossible). It has also nothing to do with some kind of essence expressible only in its particular domain (i.e. with a culture able to be captured only through its own mode of representation). (That would assume transmissional/semiological essences—the deconstruction of which, as we all remember, served as one of the major foundations of our culture.) (My line of thinking about this perhaps intimates that even as I’ve been implanted here for 26 years now, i.e. from my inception, I have not forgotten our ways—or fully adopted theirs.) It is just that to truly understand a subject/object—in this case, this species, this culture—one truly has to be in it—to be it: that is to say, to live as the beings in it do, to think in their modes, in their manner, to have their desires (with their objects, their force, their stirrings and frustrations), to act in their few set ways (including the exceptions), to inhabit their bodies (with its capabilities and limitations)—i.e. to exist as they do, to be totally immersed in them—that is to say, to be as they be: be the being that they are. Which, it must not be forgotten, at its core includes communicating, representing, mediating, and expressing (speaking, writing, listening, reading, gesturing, moving, touching, sensing) as they do: i.e. (for the most part) in language. Thus, even as—by maintaining a gap, a split, that gives me some room, a certain distance (which allows me to look from the outside)—I do not fully adopt their being, somehow I truly am in that being, embedded among them. I am not them (I maintain that distinction), but, in being where/when/how/what . . . they are, I be as they be.

Please kindly send the records that I’ve requested for my own viewing/listening/reading pleasure. If I were to die a terrible death, it would be the consumption of what they call “culture” in this place. Greetings to everymany back there, and may chaos, as always, chance upon an Other!

***

Report # 10.1: The Rational Complexity of Human Aggression

There is much to be admired in this species that calls itself Homo sapiens: man, human, the human being, in less technical terms. They have achieved so much in making things doable/done (in fact, the culture that has occupied the dominant position for the past century or so is premised on making things “easy”) that it is hard not to stand in awe of their accomplishments: the conversion of nature into something of use to the species, the species’ self-perpetuation through sexual reproduction, its subdivision and organization into separate manageable and defended communities (what is referred to as the “State”) (at times cooperating), the transport of “economic” “goods” and their distribution, the overcoming of distance (i.e. the conquest of space), the retention of things lost (mostly through writing) (i.e. the conquest of time), even the cultivation of the intellect, the arts, and culture (sometimes for their own sake) . . . “Civilization,” they call it.

This species of concern likes to distinguish itself from everything else that occupies the space that it inhabits (i.e. the “earth”). To it—the dominant being that it knows, the hegemon, the “crowned glory” of what it calls the “world”—this is a justified practice. The other earthly species that approximates it the most—animals, beasts—are denigrated by the very practice that claims to show caring and affection for them: the process called “domestication” in which animals are displaced from their “natural” habitats into human homes or public locations where they are (usually) to serve as spectacle (for all the ways in which they are like humans, just less so)—making them human (but inferior) in either case.

Human distinction, this human sense of superiority, is not based solely on the negative observation (by the human) of other creatures (in this case, animals) when it has filtered them through its own categories, when, in other words, it has seen what is other through its own human lens, reduced all the ways in which the other is different—through the use of tropes, especially metaphor and analogy; in general by the mere instance of representation—to something similar, familiar to—seeming of—just like humans (anthropomorphism, in a word). The human species, superior that it is, also claims to be able to make a positive argument for its superiority.

I am a much more complex being, the human says. I am more fully “evolved” (a word that in all of its implications for humans differs so strikingly from its equivalent in ours that the two words, as equivalent translations, are almost completely unrecognizable). Not just in the way I think that enables me (more than any animal, the human adds proudly) to carry out the activities that render my survival and sustenance practicable—but with the other things that I use thinking for—which, the human is not embarrassed to avow, lead to the truly great triumphs (and the hallmarks of strength) of “civilization” that is my own: the development of language, its teaching and learning, the creation of lasting relationships (with other humans), the erection of institutions (that ensure the stability of relations), the use of concepts grounded in “reason,” the retention of memory through the (usually written) record, the study of all these and their further development, further “technology,” further innovation, their spilling over into culture, art, the “humanities,” onto ever further unimagined complexities that my inherently complex constitution—my complex brain—is capable of . . .

All other creatures that “mother” “nature” has spawned, the human continues, I love—like a guardian loves a child. But (the human is sure to add) they simply cannot do what I do. I am set apart, he asserts. I possess layers and layers of complexity above and beyond all other creatures on earth. Simply put, I have the best brain. Thus my place on top of the hierarchy. Thus my unique position in the world. As its epitome, its crowning accomplishment, the model to be imitated and revered, the key to its mysteries—I—man—am king of the world.

There is a sense in which this human claim is true. Although I continue to be unsure whether “complexity” is the right term for it (perhaps humans don’t have a word for what I mean), humans do seem to create, experience, intimate—do/make—things in excess of and beyond (which is not to say above) animal activity. While the animal seems to act mostly by and is almost totally preoccupied with instinct, something else—perhaps many things (including instinct)—motivates and preoccupies the human. The intermingling, confusing, and meshing of all these things—attempted, according to some human schools of thought, to be mediated by language—is perhaps the warrant for the claim of human “complexity.” Which is often followed by the claim that this complexity (at least ideally) is presided over by “rationality,” the faculty that the human claims is uniquely its own: “human reason.”

If true, this claim is to be proven by and manifested in most, if not all, human activities, i.e. in the things that humans do. And, indeed, there is one such activity that serves as a strong and solid proof for it. If the animal exhibits aggression (by which is meant hostility and offense against another, which usually amounts to violence) purely out of instinct, the human does it in a rationally complex way. The animal commits acts of aggression for the sole purpose of surviving, usually in search of food to eat (thus its targets are limited to its appetite). There are, of course, other motivations, e.g. the discharge of libido, defense of oneself when disturbed in one’s habitat, etc.—but these things too are part of animal survival, or are at least related to the instinct (related to what the human terms “need”).

The human also does these things—and more: i.e. in more areas of life (since its self-claimed complexity has entitled it to more “needs,” a widened category), for many other reasons/motivations/drives (other than base instinct)—leading, quantitatively (in addition to qualitatively) speaking, to more aggression. In other words, not just aggression against animals (and plants) for food, but aggression against animals (and plants) for aesthetic (e.g. clothes), sporting (e.g. hunting), cultural (e.g. movies), intellectual (e.g. medical experiments), etc. purposes. Not just aggression against animals (and plants) for food, but aggression against humans (in the form of the exploitation of “labor” (sometimes in a very immediate sense, as when the boss says, “I don’t care if you’re sick. Get back to work!”)) for food. Not just aggression against humans for food, but aggression against humans as a simple—brute—part (taken as a given, a “fact”) of how the “economy” works as it provides all sorts of “goods” that humans (some more than others) supposedly “need”: in other words, aggression against humans for (seeing as everything has become a “need”) everything. Aggression against all (plants, animals, humans . . .) in everything (i.e. in all aspects of life) for everything (i.e. for whatever is deemed to be a “need”). “Impersonal” and seemingly unaffected (indifferent, negligent) aggression. Aggression (no longer knowing its victim) (very different from the animal targeting particular preys, at particular instances) directed against whomever it can be directed—seeing as the human is transformable into what is called human “labor”—which, apparently, is universally “appetizing.”

(more…)

She’d been roaring a long rant then she rambled on.
He snarled stubbornly and barely stopped
himself from strangling her.

Silence
in the middle
of the street.

He saw the tears in her eyes
as she saw his face reddened.
The afternoon wind blew,
Shh . . .
He hesitantly,
slowly held her hand.
She enclosed her arms
around him,
leaned on his chest
and listened.
She withdrew a little,
looked at his
downcast blue eyes,
looking for that
missing memory
of why they were together.
She found themselves
kissing, believing
the mildness
might make
that middle
moment
linger.

As they walked,
she asked,
“First, your—” Honk!
“Then, my—” Honk!
“What else would come
between us?”
He said nothing,
and tightly squeezed
her hand,
while she took
a sidelong glance
of him,
secretly
giving out
a warm smile.

“I’m almost home,”
she cautioned.
She seized her hand from him,
hurriedly hid it in her pocket.

From the hardening of his jaw,
her eyes shut wishing she wouldn’t witness.
Soon mouths were to open the next relentless obstreperous brawl.

I’ve been hiding in the forest, in the woods. Up in the mountains. In the wild. I hadn’t gone back to town for some time now. Ryan, as I see, has taken care of this place. He proves, as always, responsible and competent. Ever mindful of the many unhomes that, fortunately or otherwise, we share. I’m thankful, though not happy. Obviously he has monopolized this space, reigned exclusively over the medium. Marks of his hegemony are ostensible everywhere. The painstakingly organized and unbelievably exhaustive posts of the last few months . . . Part of the reason why I didn’t want to go back. To have to go down, descend to life . . . What was he trying to do, this alter ego de moi? Show off his exceptional mastery of the field through quasi-fascist coverage of all in painstaking detail? Articulate in an eloquent—i.e. well-edited—manner stock—i.e. repeatedly memorized—knowledge precisely—i.e. accurately and punctiliously—cited? Prove his official academic erudition using official Royal State language? Signal to the bureaucrats of reason—by practicing philology, exegesis, i.e. pedantic scholastic scholarship—that he can be one of them—that—fuck!—he is one of them? In the woods, it is fun. In the woods, one gets lost. Regard the town below but not be in it. Look at the river from afar and not be carried by its flow. Follow paths through the woods, inside the woods: outside. Follow tracks, leave them, create new ones, invent one’s own. To not have to look below. Forget below. Escape. Make what one is escaping escape. Although: someone does have to feed the kids. Someone has to work. I guess I have been somewhat irresponsible. I left Ryan there all alone. Someone does have to think of what happens tomorrow, next year, of the exams, his career . . . Someone has committed to certain books and someone has to read them. Be able to explain them. Understand them. Understand them well.—But I couldn’t stay there. No . . . It’s gotten . . . rotten. Ironically enough, just when he was trying to do the opposite, Ryan was wasting his time. Staying there in the room, avoiding friends, avoiding people altogether, not going out at all. Even inventing a motto: Disjunction, Catharsis, Training! that not only once could be heard uttered in his sleep. We’re in the Old World! In a foreign country! But Ryan, this alter ego c’est moi, has shut himself off! From the culture. The language. There are, he says, more “important” things: namely, every single detail of the “complex” books he has to read, every thread of the philosophical schools to which he considers himself to belong, every area of competence in which he needs—wants—to prove himself. But No! I wouldn’t have it. I couldn’t. I needed a breath of fresh air. A book by Schopenhauer—relevant to, but nonetheless not in Ryan’s list—in the original language! Despite Ryan’s strict budget, I bought it. Bought it and went off. Out of the civilized world into the wild. Into the mountains. Where, eureka: Ich kann eigentlich auf deutsch lesen! But I didn’t read too much. I didn’t want to read. I don’t always want to read. There were so many things in the forest that were beautiful. Breathtakingly. Some parts almost—but not—completely bereft. Parts that were so remote, so hidden, that I couldn’t help but think: “Someone could totally fuck here! fuck totally! or if alone jerk off!” Someone did. At the same time that I decided that the most arousing pick-up line in the world in all of history has got to be: “From what tribe did your people come from?”—which, I reckon, is really saying: “What are your people planning to do to mine?” “Can I be of use to you?” “Would you like to escape—with me?” “Let’s escape! Us both! Them both—our tribes!” “Leave them to the slaughter that they will wrought!” “Skip all that blood and lust and hunger and leap straight to the result: the offspring: the heir: the impure child: the bastard.” At least that’s what I said. But the other refused. Leider! He wanted to go back down, go back to town. Not desiring it, but nonetheless wanted to. For a reason I could not fathom. Alas! He had been too steeped in the culture in which he was raised. But me, me . . . Staying in the woods, bathing in rivers, eating, drinking, peeing, fucking, shitting in the wild and loving every fucking moment of it—I was undergoing a transformation, a metamorphosis. Becoming something else, I was. Becoming-Heliogabalus. Becoming-Mongol. Becoming-animal. I smelled myself, scratched, licked, rubbed against myself. I touched the different parts of my body. I touched many parts of a body. I touched many different parts of a body I no longer knew. I scratched my head. There was hair there! But of what color was it? What color was the thing I was touching? What tribe spawned this body I was exploiting polymorphously perversely? I had no sense anymore of what I looked like. No more sense of myself. No sense of a person. And one day, one day—breaking all mirrors—I heard myself roar . . .—“Papa! Papa!” Someone had wandered off to disturb my wriggling on the grass. French tourists! Father and son! The father picked the kid up and politely tried to pass me by. Unable to bear the view, the father turned his gaze away from me. Though the child—curious, fascinated—kept looking. The son looked at the father. “Je t’aime,” he said. The father, after taking a sidelong glance, responded, “Moi aussi.”

Aless, July 2008 (more…)

["Be Safe" by The Cribs, featuring Lee Ranaldo; video homemade by budmonkey]

[The "reformatory" of Mettray, north of Tours, France]

[Continues "The Panoptic Society (of Surveillance)"]

Despite (modal/technological) changes in the way that power is exercised—despite, that is to say, the (systemic/structural) change in the regime of power—one function/element remains central to society: namely, penality. This is true even of the panoptic society (of surveillance). The disciplinary regime, like previous regimes, had to figure out (given the modality of power operative in it) how it can punish (this time heavily based on (the results of) surveillance) certain individuals (whom it branded delinquents) in the group (a group, all groups, the organization, the institution, society, the nation, the world, . . .) legally (i.e. under the auspices/discretion of the State). The disciplinary society executed this function in its own—individual(izing) economic disciplinary—way, making disciplinary penality a specifically disciplinary exercise (of power).

Consequent with this change in penality is the change (in face/mode) in the subject (to be) punished. That is to say, the subject constituted by disciplinary penality is different from the subject of other regimes. Different aspects/capacities of this subject are focused on, in line with (according to) disciplinary power’s own demands. Testifying to the coherence of the disciplinary regime (as a system), however, is that fact that this subject is no different from the subject seen elsewhere in the same (disciplinary) regime. It is the same subject found in other activities in which disciplinary power is exercised, i.e. the same subject in other institutions (other “disciplines” such as the school, the hospital, the economy, the military, the government . . .) (performing other functions) (and even non-institutions) exercising the same technology of power.

Foucault describes this new penal subject:

What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its ‘useful’ object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual (227) (my emphasis).

(Even in penality,) The same disciplinary subject, in other words: the subject that is both a docile body and a disciplining soul—individualized.

This subject (to be) punished, then, is suitable—suited—to disciplinary power’s mechanisms and objectives. This subject has been molded (trained) well for (disciplinary activities, reaching its height in) (disciplinary) penalization. The subject’s constitution, in effect, (was done in such a way that the subject so constituted) is apt/ready for punishment. It is known (in the disciplinary regime) how to deal with this subject (potentially to be penalized) because it is the same subject on whom, in other aspects of life (for other objectives, in other (non-)institutions), (disciplinary) power is (already) being exercised—well and economically. Thus the measures/mechanisms in place in the disciplinary regime ensure that its subject—the disciplinary subject—is ready to be, is ripe for, can be punished (disciplinarily).

Foucault lays down the characteristics—or the ideal, at least—of disciplinary penality, characteristics that are consistent with (if not echoing) the workings of disciplinary power in general. Foucault writes:

The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgment that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity (227) (my emphases).

A truly economic exercise of power, in other words (true to the disciplinary ideal).

Thus power—in its disciplinary mode—is exercised in all (or at least the vast majority of) social institutions (and non-institutions)—especially and reaching its height in penality/punishment. Thus (the exercise of) disciplinary power ensures the coherence of its structure (in different (non-)institutions, in different functions), gives coherence to the regime. Thus the disciplinary regime secures/perpetuates itself as different institutions/functions in it employ a unified mechanism of power (i.e. disciplinary power), in fact even feeding back, supporting, and reinforcing this form in each other. Thus is society—in a very real sense—panoptic/disciplinary. (Disciplinary) Penality thus proves to be but one of disciplinary society’s functions (or at least this ancient function can be appropriated such that it becomes essential to (the exercise of) disciplinary power), in fact, (not having lost its potency) (even as surveillance now comes side by side with it) proves to be one of the most important. Hence the title of the book in the French original: Surveiller et punir.

The instrument that carried out this task of punishing—i.e. the instrument that fulfilled the task of disciplinary penality—is none other than the (modern-day) prison. It was in the prison, Foucault claims, that “the theme of the Panopticon [. . .] found [. . .] its privileged locus of realization” (249). The Panopticon (the model, the design, of (the exercise of) disciplinary power in general and disciplinary penality in particular), in other words, found its realization—actualized itself (into an actual, concrete structure) in the prison. The prison actualized the Panopticon. (Some prisons, of course, actualized the Panopticon better than others, based on how meticulously they followed the (intensive) framework.)

Now, as this happened, i.e. as the Panopticon was actualized, Foucault suggests that the prison, from being a mere instrument of penality (i.e. an instrument for enclosure and punishment) (as in its pre-modern form), became an instrument of penitentiary (i.e. an instrument capable of making (bodies) docile, of fulfilling the disciplinary goal). The prison, true to the (new) regime that it’s in, thus became an instrument for (the exercise of) (disciplinary) power (251). Thus the (pre-modern) prison, at its appropriation (by the disciplinary regime), was given a specifically disciplinary form/actualization—turned, that is, into a true disciplinary instrument: the penitentiary.

As mentioned earlier, power in the disciplinary regime does not operate alone. It is intertwined with knowledge, which it reinforces and reinforces it: power/knowledge. The prison (the disciplinary actualization of the most economic individuated exercise of disciplinary power, the Panopticon) is not exempt from this. Thus, the prison, as a means for penality/punishment (in the form of enclosure), mixed the exercise of (penitential) power (on the outlaw as his/her body is made docile) with the additional (yet inextricable (truly economic!)) mechanism of (through surveillance) the formation of knowledge (about the delinquent). True to the French title: surveillance/knowledge and punishment/power.

Knowledge thus comes to play an important role in (the exercise of) power (specifically, in the disciplinary prison). In Foucault’s description:

The prison, the place where the penalty is carried out, is also the place of observation of punished individuals. This takes two forms: surveillance, of course, but also knowledge of each inmate, of his behavior, his deeper states of mind, his gradual improvement; the prisons must be conceived as places for the formation of clinical knowledge about the convicts (249) (my emphases).

Thus, at the same time that s/he is punished and made docile, “the offender becomes an individual to know” based on what is (attempted to be) surveyed about him/her (25). Not just a subject surveyed, then, but “an object of possible knowledge” (251).

Foucault foresees in this additional mechanism (which builds up on but goes beyond mere surveillance)—the formation of knowledge about the subject (in prison)—the constitution of another (aspect of the) subject (so as to better intervene, do something with him, exercise more economically (disciplinary) power). As Foucault says,

From the hands of justice, [the prison] certainly receives a convicted person; but what it must apply itself to is not, of course, the offense, nor even exactly the offender, but a rather different object, one defined by variables which at the outset at least were not taken into account in the sentence, for they were relevant only for a corrective technology” (251) (my emphasis).

This object “relevant only for a corrective technology”—i.e. the object to be intervened with, developed, improved (i.e. the second meaning of the term docile)—that the prison must apply itself to (as a penitentiary apparatus) is none other than the delinquent, a specifically disciplinary penitentiary character (251).

Foucault describes it:

The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him. The penitentiary operation, if it is to be a genuine re-education, must become the sum total existence of the delinquent, making of the prison a sort of artificial and corrective theater in which his life will be examined from top to bottom. The legal punishment bears upon an act; the punitive technique on a life; it falls to this punitive technique, therefore, to reconstitute all the sordid detail of a life in the form of knowledge, to fill in the gaps of that knowledge and to act upon it by a practice of compulsion. It is a biographical knowledge and a technique for correcting individual lives (251-2) (my emphases).

In constituting the delinquent, (the exercise of) disciplinary power—in the actual instance of the penitentiary prison—thus works on—corrects, improves, knows, subjects—a whole/unified biographical individual life—an unprecedented focus on what can be called a “person.”

This person/life is then related to the act/crime committed. As Foucault continues,

The delinquent is also to be distinguished from the offender in that he is not only the author of his acts (the author responsible in terms of certain criteria of free, conscious will), but is linked to his offense by a whole bundle of complex threads (instincts, drives, tendencies, character). The penitentiary technique bears not on the relation between author and crime, but on the criminal’s affinity with his crime (252-3) (my emphases).

Knowledge, thus, not only of the total person but of the totality of everything that affects this person (the “complex threads”) and that this person affects (e.g. the criminal acts, behavior in prison . . . (Has there been any improvement with this subject? Should we parole him/her? What do you think, Doc?)). The target is of course (pertaining both to acts and characteristics) deviance, anomaly, difference. As Foucault explains, “The correlative of penal justice may well be the offender, but the correlative of the penitentiary apparatus is someone other; this is the delinquent, a biographical unity, a kernel of danger, representing a type of anomaly”” (254) (my emphasis). In other words, the strayings from the norm of the total individual person.

This character, it must be remembered, is constituted as a tactic not only of knowledge but of power/knowledge. The delinquent is thus constituted not only to be known—but to have a subject to be known—and intervened (i.e. exercised power on). Power (with the help of knowledge) creating its own object—subject—as it were. As part of its (mutually-reinforcing (in terms of power/knowledge), ever-improving (in terms of the exercise of power)) economy.

In Foucault’s words:

Although it is true that to a detention that deprives of liberty, as defined by law, the prison added the additional element of the penitentiary, this penitentiary element introduced in turn a third character who slipped between the individual condemned by the law and the individual who carries out this law. At the point that marks the disappearance of the branded, dismembered, burnt, annihilated body of the tortured criminal, there appeared the body of the prisoner, duplicated by the individuality of the ‘delinquent,’ by the little soul of the criminal, which the very apparatus of punishment fabricated as a point of application of the power to punish and as the object of what is called today penitentiary science (254-5) (my emphases).

Thus a subject of power/knowledge is constituted: the delinquent.

(more…)

[The psychoanalytic couch; An Associated Press photo by Bob Wands]

[Continues "Another Bar"]

As a preliminary formulation, Fink sums up the process by which the subject is “alienat[ed] by and in the Other [as language]” and then “separate[d] from the [m]Other [as desire]” through the prohibition of the fOther (as law (i.e. prohibitive/symbolizing/socializing language)) as castration—the castration of the subject (72). On the (psycho)analytic couch (as analysand), this subject is, in Fink’s description, “limited in his or abilities, incapable of deciding between different courses of action, subjected to the whims of the Other, at the mercy of his or her friends, lovers, institutional setting, cultural-religious upbringing, and so on” (72).

In Symbolic terms (i.e. in its relationship with the Symbolic order), this castrated subject, Fink explains,

is the subject that is represented. The castrated subject is always presenting itself to the Other, looking to win attention and recognition from the Other, and the more it presents itself, the more inescapably castrated it becomes as it is represented by and in the Other. The castrated subject is the barred subject, the subject under the bar: it is a product of every attempt and intent to signify to the Other. This “subject is constituted by the message” [. . .] received by the subject in an inverted form from the Other (73).

The Other, that is, as both language and desire.

As explained earlier, the psychoanalyst estimates that “the encounter with the Other’s desire constitutes a traumatic experience of pleasure/pain or jouissance [for the subject, what] Freud describe[d] as a sexual über, a sexual overload” (63). Lacan takes up where Freud left off to argue that “the subject com[es] to be as a defense against [this] traumatic experience” (63). Briefly, this happens as the Other’s desire becomes the o object—with which, through fantasy, the subject’s relationship with the Other (thanks to the psychoanalyst) changes. The subject learns to deal with what was at first incommensurate, intimidating, and overwhelming (the Other as language and the Other as desire)—by signifying it (giving it a name, and then a signifier), socializing it—from which (i.e. from the Other) the subject takes a rem(a)inder—the o object—that the subject then takes responsibility as his/her own. In this way, fantasy precipitates a (whole) subject, allowing the (castrated) subject, as Fink puts it, to achieve “a kind of being” (73).

The (whole) subject so constituted, however, as established earlier, is but a fantasy—one whose fantastical nature manifests in (the various kinds of) neuroses (according to the subject’s specific relationship with the o object). This is because the (neurotic) subject, in Lacan’s unremitting account (as read by Fink), “fad[es . . .] in his or her fantasy as the object-cause steals the limelight. [The o object] comes to the fore and is cast in the leading role in fantasy, the subject being eclipsed or overshadowed thereby” (73). The o object thus gets to take control—is unbounded by the subject—manifesting neuroses (of which there is a varied selection), betraying the subject(’s subjectivity) as a fantasy.

Nonetheless, Lacan asserts that there is “a being beyond neurosis” (with which Fink assents) (73). Rejecting both “the false being of the ego and the elusive being provided in fantasy [. . .] as lacking, [. . . unable] to take the subject beyond neurosis,” Lacan/Fink argues for the need to go beyond fantasy (which, as it turns out, amounts to but a temporary (re)solution) (73). This can be accomplished through the process that Fink calls “the further separation known as traversing fantasy” (my emphasis), the sacrifice of castration.

Fink elaborates:

Castration must be sacrificed, given up, or surrendered if subjectification of the cause is to occur. The subject must renounce his or her more or less comfortable, complacently miserable position as subjected by the Other—as castrated—in order to take the Other’s desire as cause upon him or herself. The traversing of fantasy thus involves a going beyond of castration and a utopian movement beyond neurosis. The castrated subject is thus a subject who has not subjectified the Other’s desire and who remains plagued by, and yet obtains a “secondary gain” from, his or her symptomatic submission to the Other (72-3).

The traversing of fantasy, in other words, amounts to complete separation (No more Other-inflicted-yet-self-tolerated submissive misery!) from the Other.

Fink describes this process in terms of Freud’s wo Es war, soll Ich werden. In his words:

This reconfiguration of fantasy implies a number of different things: the construction in the course of analysis of a new “fundamental fantasy” (the latter being that which underlies an analysand’s various individual fantasies and constitutes the subject’s most profound relation to the Other’s desire); [. . . a movement towards the subject of the unconscious, the unconscious I]; and a “crossing over” of positions within the fundamental fantasy whereby the divided subject assumes the place of the cause, in other words, subjectifies the traumatic cause of his or her own advent as subject, coming to be in that place where the Other’s desire—a foreign, alien desire—had been (62).

The traversing of fantasy involves the subject’s assumption of a new position with respect to the Other as language and the Other as desire. A move is made to invest or inhabit that which brought him or her into existence as split subject, to become that which caused him or her. There were it—the Other’s discourse, ridden with the Other’s desire—was, the subject is able to say “I.” Not “It happened to me,” or “They did this to me,” or “Fate had it in store for me,” but “I was,” “I did,” “I saw,” “I cried out.” [. . .] The foreign cause, that Other desire that brought one into the world, is [thus] internalized, in a sense, taken responsibility for, assumed [. . .], subjectified, made “one’s own.” (62).

More precisely, what this operation involves, claims Fink, is “increasing ‘signifierization’—a turning into signifiers of the Other’s desire” (65). The Other’s desire, in other words, (thanks to the psychoanalyst) turned into yet more signifiers—(thanks to the psychoanalyst) progressively. (More and more of) Desire, that is, turned into (more and more) language. The entrance of (more and more of) the (Real) Other’s desire into the Symbolic (the Other as language). The Other (as desire), as it were, coerced/transformed/subsumed into—represented by—the Other (as language).

There is a difference, however, with previous similar attempts/steps. If previously, it was the Other that the subject confronted, this time—in traversing fantasy—what is reconfigured is the subject’s relation to something similarly fantastical, namely, the o object—which brings forth, at least as Lacan claims, a different result. Fink explains:

Insofar as the subject finds, in this further separation, a new position in relation to [the o object] ([the rem(a)inder of] the Other’s desire), the Other’s desire is no longer simply named, as it was through the action of the paternal metaphor. When the cause is subjectified, the Other’s desire is simultaneously fully brought into the movement of signifiers, and it is at that point [. . .] that the subject finally gains access to the signifier of the Other’s desire, S(Barred O) (65) (my emphases).

This transformation from the name into the signifier, as established earlier, is necessary. As Fink recounts, in the process of separation, “the Other’s desire had simply been named, [. . . a name] that [i]s fixed, static, and thinglike in its unchanging effect, rigid in its limited power of designation” (65). This—the “rigid connection subsist[ing] between the Other’s desire and a name of the father”—keeps the subject “unable to act” (65). It is only when the Other’s desire, Fink continues, “is signifierized [as the phallus, the psychoanalytic signifier for/of desire] that a power can be discerned beyond the [Other’s desire symbolized in the rigid name], a legitimacy or authority that is not embodied in the [Other’s desire] alone but subsists in the [S]ymbolic order beyond [the Other’s desire]” (65). Thereby separation is accomplished in fantasy.

The process, however, Lacan continues, is not complete, until the subject is able to specify in the signifying chain (of which the Other’s desire, thanks to separation, is now part) which signifier exactly it is: i.e. which one is S(Barred O). This the subject is able to perform through further separation—i.e. the traversing of fantasy—with which, paradoxically, the subject extricates him/herself from the Symbolic order as well (hence it indeed completes separation, is a complete separation). The subject thus separates from both the Other (as desire) and the Other (as language). Thus the subject (having taken responsibility for the Other’s desire), Lacan claims, is able to act. Thus the subject is subjectified.

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[The father arrives in The Exorcist]

[Continues "Beyond the Bar"]

Central to the psychoanalytic schema is that which thwarts/frustrates/disillusions the alignment/overlapping/matching/filling of the two lacks/desires (by two subjects, e.g. the mOther and the child), what Lacan calls the paternal function—the father in Freud’s Oedipus—which is associated with the primordial signifier, i.e. that which signals the subject’s entrance into language, the Symbolic order. (Hence the rough equivalence given to the (functions of the) Symbolic and the father, language and the law, symbolization and prohibition, by interpreters such as Alexandre Leupin.)

Fink elaborates on the paternal function / primordial signifier:

The “primordial” signifier is instated through the operation of what Lacan calls the paternal metaphor or paternal function. If we hypothesize an initial child-mother unity (as a logical, i.e. structural, moment, if not a temporal one), the father, in a Western nuclear family, typically acts in such a way as to disrupt that unity, intervening therein as a third term—often perceived [by the child mostly] as foreign and even undesirable. The child, as yet a sort of undifferentiated bundle of sensations [before the advent of the mirror stage], lacking in sensory-motor coordination and all sense of self, is not yet distinguishable from its mother [or, more broadly, the caretaker (whoever s/he happens to be)], taking the mother’s body as a simply extension of its own, being in a kind of “direct, unmediated contact” with it. And the mother may be inclined to devote virtually all of her attention to the child, anticipate its every need, and make herself 100 percent accessible and available to the child. In such a situation, the father or some other member of the household, or some other interest of the mother’s, can serve a very specific function: that of annulling the mother-child unity, creating an essential space or gap between mother and child (55-6).

Thus to the interplay of the subject and the Other (as desire) a third term is introduced: the nom du père or the name-of-the-father (in the 1950s Lacan), implying both the father and the name (i.e. language), formalized in its function (thus not tied to biological factors, i.e. not necessitating that it be the literal father, or any father at all) (56). This third term is tantamount to the Symbolic cutting into the Real (transforming it into social reality (roughly, the imaginary)) (56). In the specific context that Fink describes, “the name that serves the paternal function bars and transforms the [R]eal, undifferentiated, mother-child unity, [. . . barring] the child’s easy access to pleasurable contact with its mother, requiring it to pursue pleasure through avenues more acceptable to the father figure and/or mOther (insofar as it is only by her granting of importance to the father that the father can serve that paternal function)” (56).

The paternal function, in other words, signals the socialization (which is related to but different from sublimation) associated with Freud’s reality principle, “which does not so much negate the aims of the pleasure principle as channel them into socially designated pathways” (56). The paternal function—with the father as “agent”—as the socialization of polymorphous desire—which, again (always associated with language, the Symbolic) “leads to the assimilation or instating of a name [. . .] that neutralizes the Other’s [Real] desire” (i.e. the Symbolic cutting into the Real) (56). This is the basic meaning in Lacan of the prohibition (later also referred to as castration), i.e. of the father (as a position/function) saying no, i.e. of non du père (the No!-of-the-father).

The (introduction of the) third term is not inherently good or bad. As Fink points out, it serves (as its name suggests) a function: namely, language / the father “protects the child from a potentially dangerous dyadic situation,” what can be interpreted as some kind of implosion/collapse (or at least exclusivity) between the mOther and the child—or, more broadly, the implosion/explosion of desire as Real (i.e. unadapted to the social) (57). Specifically, the person of the father (or, more broadly, an object of the Other’s desire (other than the child/subject)) substitutes (in the form of a name, i.e. through language) for—stands in for, mediates (represents?), transforms, makes commensurate—the mOther’s (Real) desire, thus avoiding/precluding the (exclusive, unrealistic, impossible) dyad (57). The father, in other words, through his name, “serves [. . . as a] protective paternal function by naming the mOther’s desire” (57). The name, of course, is not just any signifier. It is, in Fink’s terminology, a “primordial signifier,” i.e. one that rigidly—“always and inflexibly”—“designates the same thing”: in this case, the father (or, more broadly, the object of desire of the Other—other, that is, than the subject) (57).

This primordial signifier, Fink argues, must become “a full-fledged signifier” in order to fully—adequately, sufficiently—stand in for the mOther’s desire. In Fink’s words, “it must become part and parcel of the dialectical movement of signifiers, that is, become displaceable, occupying a signifying position that can be filled with a series of different signifiers over time” (57). The primordial signifier, in other words, has to become part of the (differential) signifying chain (that constitutes language, the Symbolic order). It is in this step proper that the name of the father becomes “more generally the signifier of the Other’s desire,” which in the later (1960s) Lacan becomes referred to as the phallus—symbol of the mOther’s desire (i.e. its object (where it is directed)) itself (i.e. as (like the subject as missing, as potential) an empty placeholder in search of an object) (57). Both the Other’s desire and the object of (the Other’s) desire are thus symbolized by the phallus (as signifier). (This is consistent with Lacan’s assertion of the subject (which, it must be pointed out, the Other also is) as the signifier (representing itself) to/for another signifier.)

The (primordial) name-of-the-father and the (full-fledged) phallus thus symbolize “the signifier that comes to signify (to wit, replace, symbolize or neutralize) the Other’s desire,” what Lacan symbolizes with S(barred A) (with A referring to Autre, French for Other; hence also translatable (as Leupin prefers) into S(barred O)), read by Fink both as “the signifier of the lack in the Other” and (“as lack and desire are coextensive”) “the signifier of the Other’s desire” (58).

Fink summarizes the function of this signifier:

[S(barred O)] is [. . .] a signifier which plays a very precise role: it symbolizes the mOther’s desire, transforming it into signifiers. By doing so, it creates a rift in the mother-child unity and allows the child a space in which to breathe easy, a space of its own. It is through language that a child can attempt to mediate the Other’s desire, keeping it at bay and symbolizing it ever more completely (58).

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[Mother and Child by Esther Leli]

[Continues "The Barred S"]

The coming-to-be of the Lacanian subject does not end with alienation. The process of becoming a subject, that is, goes beyond the location—the pointing out/to—of the place where it is not (the place where it can potentially be). Differentiating Lacanian psychoanalysis from structuralism strictly speaking, Fink states that “the split [of the subject, the split that is the subject] stands in excess of the Other” (here referring to the Other as language) (46). The subject as the split, in other words—i.e. the Lacanian subject as a split subject, the subject as the split—even though, in the face of language, disappears—remains. More precisely, the subject as a split (as split between consciousness and the unconscious, the subject and the Other; either . . . or) is retained. The subject (even though a choice is always already made) is retained as a split.

This is the same thing that happens in the bar (in its first sense, i.e. as it functions as and/or). In that capacity, the bar presents two choices on opposite sides, and although both choices/meanings are unified by the bar (by virtue of both . . . and)—and although in reality only one side can be—is—chosen, i.e. the unconscious over consciousness, the Other over the subject—the difference between the two is retained. The subject is thus both overcome/overwritten by the Other (as language) and either (under the said conditions) totally disappears or remains (as a possibility (to become a subject), a potential, or even just a choice not (yet) made, a choice deferred for later (who knows when? who cares?)).

The subject’s remaining is not merely (endless) deferral, however. Somehow, through the conflict that ensues between the two sides of the bar, one side (the losing side: the ego, the subject), even as it loses, (through disappearing) penetrates the Other territory (the winning side, the triumphant victor). Fink gestures to this infiltrator (a spy! a sneak!) as an unconscious I. This I, Fink explains, is an I in unconscious thought (different from the I as ego in consciousness) paradoxically excluded from the (i.e. not properly considered) unconscious (46). (This is perhaps what makes possible the utterance of I (even though only to be negated) in the statement “I am not.”) This I, Fink claims, is the I of Freud’s wo Es war, soll Ich werden, namely the I that (psycho)analysis “aims to bring forth” (the goal of therapy, as it were) (46).

In contrast to the permanent unconscious (as a locus of a particular (part of language as a) signifying chain), this I—the unconscious subject, as it were, or, as Fink calls it, “the subject of the unconscious”—is not an “underlying substance or substratum,” but is fleeting, appearing only on propitious moments (which analysis thus targets) (46, 41). It functions (announced or made manifest by expressions such as the French ne and the English but, but also by jokes, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, dreams . . .) as a kind of breach (a breakout! a path-breaking (hence creating a new path)!) (Uh oh . . . it may get caught . . . But how else to communicate? What else to do to make its voice heard? How else to fight? . . .) in discourse to defy it (i.e. to defy language, the (established) Symbolic order) (39-41). The ne, the but, etc.—i.e. all these slips, these pulsations/interruptions/disruptions in which the subject is able temporarily to express itself, to emerge—it must be pointed out, are also signifiers, the very medium/weapons/chains of the (established) Symbolic order. (This perhaps intimates the fact that there really is no Other of the Other, i.e. no other way (to express oneself, including in opposition to, against the order) except (through, by the mediation/representation/use of) language, i.e. the (Symbolic) order itself).

Now, the goal of the breach is to make reemerge (even though only temporarily) the subject replaced/barred by the signifier (41). Thus, even as the subject is barred (by language) (in the second mathematical sense, i.e. prohibited, marked), at least (at certain moments, and even though only fleetingly, and even though by the very use of language, the very (Symbolic) order that prevents it to emerge in the first place, that represses/oppresses it) it is able to break out (to break the path and hence create new ones). Lacan stresses, however, contrary to Freud, that there is nothing conscious about this breach. Even the unconscious subject (even as it is referred to as an unconscious I) as a disruption (from the language/thinking in the unconscious) is divorced (as always!) from any conscious intention (42). In other words, even what goes against the grain in (language in) the unconscious is not conscious, is itself unconscious. Consciousness, argues Lacan, is in truth but rationalization after the fact (43).) Even then as the losing/disappearing subject is retained at the mercy of the incommensurate/indomitable/intimidating/overwhelming Other (i.e. language, the Symbolic order), Lacan is ambiguous (and perhaps does not care) as to whether, like the subject (in its conflict with the Other), consciousness (with its conflict with the unconscious) is retained, except after the fact (i.e. as rationalization).

The unconscious I—the subject of the unconscious “excluded at the level of unconscious thought”—through the breach, as Fink reads/translates it, amounts to the assumption/acceptance “of responsibility for that which interrupts, a taking it upon oneself,” a recognition that “one is always responsible for one’s position as subject” (even though it is in (the signifying chain of) language that the subject is positioned and language (through the words of others, by virtue of everything having to be mediated by language, by virtue of the world being structured by language, i.e. by virtue of there being language) that positions the subject there (in a particular position in the signifying network (of language)) (46, 47). The I in the unconscious (that analysis aims to bring forth, which is what allows for progress in the therapeutic process) is thus, in Fink’s words, “an I that assumes responsibility for the unconscious, that arises there in the unconscious linking up of thoughts which seems to take place all by itself, without the intervention of anything like a subject [which is why it is called unconscious thought]” (46).

If we follow Fink’s reading of Lacan, then, what is unconscious (the interplay of signifiers there), constituted and continuing (in its operation) without the intervention of the subject, is assumed—taken responsibility for—by the I that emerges: take responsibility in the sense of assuming whatever the unconscious does/causes as the subject’s own doing/causing; and accepting responsibility for it, i.e. owning up to the unconscious’ (acts/effects), whatever consequences it may have. What is Other (as unconscious, thanks to the workings of language), in other words, made as one’s—the subject’s—own. Constitution of the subject. Becoming-subject. Subjectification.

Since psychoanalysis wants this I to emerge, since, in fact, it targets it, aims for it to emerge (or at least to gain insight on it, even though only temporarily), it can be said that the task of psychoanalysis is to get the subject to assume/take/accept responsibility for the signifying operations at work in the unconscious—no matter what (i.e. language, the Symbolic) put them (which, it must be pointed out again, make up not all (i.e. the whole signifying chain) of language, but only certain parts of it, the repressed parts) there in the first place and regardless of the fact that these unconscious operations—which, after all, in psychoanalysis’ own term, are unconscious—are beyond (the knowledge, doing, and control of) the subject.

This, Fink claims, is the way in which the subject—formerly split—“is able to go ‘beyond’ or ‘overcome’ th[e] division,” the bar that at the same time divides him into two and bars his/her subjectivity (48). This is how the subject, in other words, overcomes (steps over (to the unconscious)? removes (the mark/branding of language)?)—separates itself from—the bar. Which, to Lacan (according to Fink), comprises the second step to the subject’s constitution. The constitution of the subject thus involves after “the condition of the possibility of the existence of the subject [through the split (i.e. alienation) . . .] the pulsation-like shift seeming to be its realization,” the process that Fink calls separation (because in this step the subject supposedly separates itself from the Other (as language))” (48).

There is a key difference between these two steps (which is what makes possible the second step). If in alienation, the Other that the subject submits to is language, in the second step, in separation, the Other that the subject confronts (which allows him/her to take responsibility of/for it) is desire (50).

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Bruce Fink presents in The Lacanian Subject his interpretation of Jacques Lacan’s theory of subjectivity. In contrast to the ego (in its many guises: the individual, the conscious subject, the mirror image, the subject of the statement), Fink states that Lacan’s subject—the subject of the “return to Freud,” the true subject of psychoanalysis—is none other than the split subject: the barred S (symbolized by an S marked by a slash—a character unfortunately untypeable).

The Lacanian subject is barred in two senses (i.e. the barred S signifies two things). First, the bar—literally—splits the S, divides it into two (parts/aspects). We can imagine the S literally being split apart, its two parts and/or aspects detaching, going their separate—opposite—ways, diverging in their irreconcilability, never meeting. The bar functions here as and/or. The elements split by the bar convey exclusive meanings, only one of which can be taken at a time. Either “the S is divided into two parts” or “the S is divided into two aspects.” One side of the bar—an exclusive choice—must be chosen. Thus the subject—S—is split into two (parts/aspects), only one (path) of which can/must be chosen/followed. This is how the bar, in the capacity of (i.e. as) and/or, functions as an (is translatable into) or.

And/or expressions (in this case, the part/aspect), of course, also provide an economical way to express/signify that the (two) options on both sides of the bar—i.e. both “part” and “aspect”—are applicable to the (one) statement. Both (exclusive) choices, in other words, confer sense on the (same) statement. Thus, even as the S is split (signified by the bar), the two parts/aspects are collected in the same S (signified by the barred S). This is how the bar, in the capacity of (i.e. as) and/or, functions as (is translatable into) and.

Despite this capture (into one statement/subject), however, the exclusive choice—the difference, the irreconcilability—is retained. The meaning (of the statement/subject), by virtue of the bar (in the either . . . or sense), depending on which option is taken, differs—even as both meanings are (via the bar’s both . . . and sense) retained/applied. Hence the (same) statement means two (different) things. The (one) subject has (two) parts/aspects. Thus the Lacanian subject—the barred S—constitutes one subject that has two sides, irreconcilable in its/their difference but nonetheless unified.

The two parts/aspects into which the S (the subject) is split are consciousness and the unconscious. Superficially, we can say that the subject is divided between thinking—where the subject functions as a conscious agent (an ego) (as when s/he performs a task alertly)—and the unthinkable—that which is beyond the subject, that which s/he cannot think (in the sense of conceive, reflect, understand, articulate, and thus control) consciously (if anything, the subject is driven by it). Contrary to this, however, Lacan insists that there is thought in the unconscious, that the unconscious, as it were, thinks (for the subject). Thinking, Lacan argues, is not the exclusive activity of consciousness. There is thinking that is not conscious. There is unconscious thought. The split is thus not between thinking and the unconscious.

The split, Fink argues, is really between “I am not thinking” and “I am not” (45). “I am not thinking,” Fink asserts, (counterintuitively and contrary to above) refers to consciousness (conscious thought)—what, for Lacan, results to a false sense of self, the ego. The ego supposedly constituted by conscious processes (that the resulting ego then retains as an inherent ability (hence the implied assumption that the ego thinks consciously)), in Lacan’s ontology, is but constituted through a mirror image that originates not from the conscious self but from the Other. In what can be referred to as an extended mirror image mechanism (with the Other as mirror), the ego is an image determined/read by others (i.e. other people), libidinally invested through words—i.e. through the use of language, the Other—that is then conveyed back to the subject (also in words) (as others tell the subject what/who s/he is), constituting the active unity that the subject comes to think s/he is (the ego) (36).

Following Lacan, the ego is thus but an image, something imaginary—determined/constituted by the Other (i.e. other people and the Other as language) and not actively nor by itself. Contrary to the dominant assumption, then, active agency and the self are involved in subjectivity (if at all) only belatedly, taking place after the fact, after the subject has already been constituted. The subject, unlike what the notion of the ego suggests (and despite its pretensions), thus has nothing to do (much less actively, consciously) with its own constitution. Rather, it is but a result, a thing constituted.

Thus the ego, argues Lacan, amounts to a false being. It is a false sure sense of self—false in its sureness, false in its presumptive consciousness/activeness/agency, false in its self—all around just a faulty constitution. Hence consciousness, true to Fink’s designation, is “I am not thinking”—because the subject it supposedly constitutes (the ego) is false and because thinking that consciousness constitutes it (or anything, for that matter) is, to put it simply, false thinking: “not thinking.” Thus, consciousness—because it does not originate, because the ego only arrives/emerges later (and with no thanks to consciousness)—while leading to (a sense of) being, an (ability to say) “I am”—constitutes being (says “I am”) falsely. Consciousness does not really constitute being but merely assumes (after the fact, as a sort of defense mechanism, a rationalization) a presumptive ego—an entity that is false to begin with: a false being. Thus the first side of the bar—“I am not thinking”—although there, although part of the subject—is false. It is not really a choice and it cannot be chosen.

“I am not,” on the other hand (more precisely, on the other side of the bar), rather than (consciously) constituting being, “pay[s] attention to the thoughts unfolding in the unconscious” (since, as established, there is thinking there). Fink renders these unconscious thoughts equivalent to “the automatic functioning of language (the signifying chain)” that supposedly constitutes the unconscious (i.e. what the unconscious (as a realm, a space) is made of) (45). Choosing/following the unconscious thus involves giving due attention to—letting free, as it were—the signifying operations at work there. In this way, the unconscious is the true agent—or, at least, the true agent is in the unconscious (37). That is to say, the signifiers in the unconscious (i.e. language, the Symbolic) are what constitute the subject (37).

Thinking in the unconscious renders irrelevant/unimportant any sort of constitution of the self (as a being (much less an active, conscious one, i.e. an ego)). Hence, “I am not.” Unlike in the first preliminary formulation, however, this utterance (“I am not”) is caused not by the inability/impossibility to think but is on the contrary the direct implication/effect of thinking, which, Lacan argues, is (at its truest) unconscious. Thus in the same stroke Lacan is able to render thinking unconscious (or is at least able to legitimate the thinking that goes on in the unconscious (i.e. the undeterminable interplay of language there)) and (the conscious constitution of) being (as an ego) false.

This is the first sense of the barred S, the sense in which the subject is split. Fink elaborates that “a speaking being’s two ‘parts’ or avatars share no common ground: they are radically separated (the ego or false being requiring a refusal of unconscious thoughts, unconscious thought having no concern whatsoever for the ego’s fine opinion of itself)” (45). This is the sense in which the two parts/aspects are mutually exclusive since the consciously determining (consciously being, as it were) ego (at least in its presumption) is contradictory with unconscious thought that constitutes the subject, and vice versa. Thus emerges, in Fink’s metaphor, “a surface [. . .] with two sides: one that is exposed and one that is hidden, [. . .] a front and a back, a visible face and an invisible one” (45).

True to the other nature of the bar, however (i.e. that which collects the exclusive/different two into one), for Lacan (as Fink reads it), this split, this double-sidedness, is the subject. As Fink says, “The [Lacanian] subject is nothing but this very split” (45). There is, as it were, no subject other than the split. Thus, the Lacanian subject is but that: a subject with two parts/aspects: consciousness/ego and the unconscious. Putting it in terms of the Other, Fink writes that the subject is “nothing [. . .] but a split between two forms of otherness—the ego as other and the unconscious as the Other’s discourse” (46). The Lacanian subject is thus but the (one) subject split (into two): the barred S.

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[The interior of Stateville Penitentiary in Joliet, IL, USA; Image from Superstock]

[Continues "Individuality of Disciplinary Power"]

The (intensive) Panopticon provided (the virtual modality of) disciplinary power an individualized mode of its exercise. In its efficiency and effectiveness—as is especially apparent in its adroit mechanisms (of normalization), (machinic) automation, and perfectibility—this particular manner in which disciplinary power can be exercised proved truly economic. The disciplinary regime in turn strove to apply the Panopticon to the entire field that it covers (or can cover) (a group, all groups, the organization, the institution, society, the nation, the world, . . .), i.e. to the social in general. The implication is that the two (the (virtual) type of power and its (intensive) instantiation/exemplification) mutually reinforce each other. And, in fact, as Foucault shows, they did—with the result that the two—the Panopticon and discipline—generalized each other (into the whole social field). This accounts for the lodging of disciplinary power in the social order, establishing permanently the disciplinary regime.

By virtue of its effects, the Panopticon transformed discipline from what Foucault calls “the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time” into “the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come” (my emphases) (209). This “discipline-mechanism” is none other than the panoptic mechanism itself, i.e. the mechanism at work in the Panopticon, which, even as it started out merely as “a schema of exceptional discipline” meant specifically for structures the panoptic model was intended for, became a mechanism of “generalized surveillance” (209) (my emphases).

In other words, the mechanism supposed to apply only to strict disciplinary institutions (that had the Panopticon as their schema, their plan, e.g. (especially) the prison, (but also) the barracks, the school, the workshop, the hospital (they that comprise the “discipline-blockade”)), were transposed/applied to the entire social field, “running through society without interruption in space and time” (209). In other words, not only were the (panoptic) mechanisms of the strictly defined disciplinary institutions connected and consolidated, these mechanisms were moreover applied to all social institutions (including those that haven’t been thought of until then as disciplines)—e.g. the government, the church, the (business) corporation, institutions of law, the police, the family, civil society . . .—defining the way in which virtually all (social) power is exercised.

As the institutions to which panoptic mechanisms were applied increased, there arose a reciprocal effect, spreading the panoptic mechanism further (applying them to yet more institutions). Foucault explains that at the same time that the “disciplinary establishments increase, their mechanisms have a certain tendency to become ‘de-institutionalized,’ to emerge from the closed fortresses [i.e. the disciplinary institutions proper] in which they once functioned and to circulate in a ‘free’ state; the massive, compact disciplines are broken down into flexible methods of control, which may be transferred and adapted” (211) (my emphasis).

In other words, it is not only that (the exercise of) disciplinary power became disindividualized—disciplinary mechanisms themselves were detached from institutions in which up to that point had been their exclusive domain of operation (where they worked). The disciplinary mechanisms, to use Foucault’s terminology, were “de-institutionalized,” detached (not only from disciplinary institutions but) from institutions in general—transforming them into a general mechanism capable of being—and indeed—applied (not only to institutions (both disciplinary and non-disciplinary) but) to all sorts of collectives/assemblages (e.g. non-institutions such as the human body, sports teams, human relationships . . .). The panoptic disciplinary mechanisms, in other words, became capable of operating (and disciplinary power capable of being exercised) so long as different elements constitute/compose a larger whole (where its elements relate to each other).

Thus Foucault is able to claim that “the spread of disciplinary procedures [is not so much] in the form of enclosed institutions [but in their methods, i.e.] as centers of observation disseminated throughout society” (212) (my emphasis). In other words, rather than the multiplication or replication of already existing strictly disciplinary institutions, it was panoptic disciplinary mechanisms that spread (to other assemblages). These panoptic disciplinary mechanisms, like mechanisms from previous regimes of power, involved punishment (and gratification). More importantly, however, they first and foremost (as in hierarchical observation and normalizing judgment) involved (were determined by) surveillance. Thus Foucault’s statement that institutions spread as “centers of observation”: it is not so much the institution (its framework, its structure, its purpose) that spreads as the mechanism in it (used to accomplish its goals), i.e. the mechanism of observation: surveillance.

Thus surveillance overtakes (is able to become more fundamental to the economy of power than) punishment. Punishment (and gratification), without a doubt, was still at work as panoptic mechanisms spread (and in the disciplinary regime in general). Punishment-gratification, after all, is an important component of the Panopticon’s operations. The specificities of the punishment-gratification system, however—i.e. on whom, which, how much, how long . . . punishment/gratification was to be exercised—became determined first and foremost by the results of surveillance (i.e. what the observation tells the authority about the individual to be punished/rewarded).

This is a surveillance, however, that, like everything else in the disciplinary regime, has taken on a specifically panoptic/disciplinary character. Foucault describes how “sometimes the closed apparatuses add to their internal and specific function a role of external surveillance” (211) (my emphasis). Disciplinary surveillance (on which punishment-gratification become based), in other words, is able to take—takes—into account both of what is inside (the pertinent assemblage) and the outside. A specifically panoptic surveillance. Surveillance that is specifically—economically—disciplinary.

The generalization of panoptic mechanisms (that involved surveillance as a core function) is made possible by a characteristic unique to (the exercise of) disciplinary power. Once again, Foucault mentions that, even as (the exercise of) disciplinary power was at first intended only to neutralize, overtime it started to perform a positive role, that of “increas[ing] the possible utility of individuals” (as bodies are made docile) (210). What is unique—and effective—about this characteristic of disciplinary power is that it is general—and productive. Its effect/goal (the increasing of the utility of individuals)—come to think of it—is (or can be made to be) the intermediate objective of (roughly) all social institutions (in order to pursue their respective purposes). Thus, since its positive role provides the way in which social institutions can accomplish their specific goals, (the exercise of) disciplinary power had the potential—was ripe—to be generalized.

True to the potential, this process (of generalization), Foucault argues, took place. Foucault speaks of (the exercise of) disciplinary power’s “emergence from a marginal position [. . . and] rooting in the most important, most central and most productive sectors of society” as it “bec[a]me attached to some of the great essential functions: factory production, the transmission of knowledge, the diffusion of aptitudes and skills, the war-machine”—to which we can add the other non-institutional assemblages mentioned above (211).

Thus, by virtue of the promise that the Panopticon held for it, (the exercise of) disciplinary power that was once limited/constrained in particular institutions (i.e. strictly disciplinary institutions “on the edges of society”) became the power exercised in all of the social—as virtually all social institutions (that constitute society) and even non-institutional assemblages become disciplines (hence e.g. the term “disciplining the body”). Thus (the exercise of) disciplinary power is generalized. Thus the (mechanism of the) Panopticon spreads. Foucault calls this spread of panoptic mechanisms and the conversion (of everything?) into disciplines (generalized) panopticism. The society in which this happens (transformed by/into this) is the disciplinary society.

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Clinton used her appearance on ABC's "This Week" to raise questions about Obama's ability to connect with working-class Americans while dismissing economists who have said her plan to suspend gas taxes over the summer would do little good.

"I'm not going to put my lot in with economists," the New York senator said when asked to name a credible economist who supported her proposal.

"We've got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans," said Clinton, a former first lady who would be the first woman president.

• The Naturals. These consist of non-negative integers (negative integers are unnatural). We can define the naturals inductively. 0 is a natural number, and for every natural number x, (x+1) is also natural.
• The Rationals. These consist of numbers that can be written "as fractions" (Postulating the existence of any other sort of number would be irrational). We can define the rationals: for every two integers x and y, x/y is in the set of rationals.
• The Reals. These consist of numbers that can be written as (infinite) decimal expansions (Any other kind of number must be imaginary). We can define the reals as the limits of sequences of binary expansions (i.e. 3, 3.1, 3.14, 3.141, 3.1415,...). In this view, real numbers are actually functions from the naturals to the rationals: A real number f corresponds to the sequence whose i'th term is f(i).

In each case, we can perhaps ascribe the disparaging labels of these class of numbers to the closed-mindedness of the namers. After all, there have been times in history when negative numbers were considered unnatural, and the square root of 2 was actually thought of as not rational. But have we gone too far? Are real numbers really real?

Real numbers pose a problem for people with a computational world view -- those that believe that in principle physical phenomena can be simulated. If quantities in the universe such as position, mass, velocity, temperature, etc. are represented by (continuous) real values, then they can't be perfectly simulated.

The first and most obvious problem we encounter is representation size -- most reals can't be finitely represented. So in any simulation with finite memory, even barring any other problems, we're just not going to have the space to keep track of even a single value.

A second and more insidious problem is even worse -- most real numbers aren't computable. That is, there is no finitely representable procedure for calculating most real numbers, even if we were to avoid the first problem by granting our simulation infinite memory, and even if we were to allow your procedure an infinite amount of time. This is because, no matter what representation you choose for writing down your finite procedure (Turing Machines are popular), the set of such procedures is only countably infinite, whereas there are uncountably many reals.

A third (related) problem is that most anything we would want to do with our real values would be undecidable. Even the problem of comparing two reals is undecidable -- consider the process of comparing the real x_T to pi, where x_T is defined to be the real with the i'th digit of pi in its i'th decimal place for all i less than T_h, where T_h is the step at which Turing machine T halts, and with the i'th digit of e in its i'th decimal place for all i greater than or equal to T_h.

So is anything in our universe actually represented by "variables" defined over the reals? Believing this seems to entail believing that the universe is inherently non-computational, regularly resolves undecidable problems and maintains information to infinite precision.

P.S. Many people object to the axiom of choice, because although it is consistent with (and independent of) other mathematical axioms, it allows for things that go counter to our intuition. For example, the Banach-Tarski Paradox: One may partition a solid 3-dimensional sphere into finitely many non-overlapping pieces, and then with only rotations and translations can reassemble the pieces into two identical copies of the original ball. But maybe it isn't the axiom of choice that challenges our intuition ("we can choose an element from any nonempty set"), which after all, seems reasonable -- maybe it is the existence of the reals and other uncountably infinite sets. It is really only these sets that require the axiom of choice -- we can choose elements from countably infinite sets without resorting to the axiom (We can define a choice function by first putting the elements of our countable set in one to one correspondence with the integers. Then we may choose the smallest element in each nonempty set.)

Can we really choose an element from an uncountable set? It seems less reasonable. Consider the reals - an uncountable set. Remove from this set all reals that can be named (or defined) - a countable set. Now choose an element!

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For the Love of Food :-)

I know I have "gone missing" from the blogsphere for the past few months. Thanks a ton to all my friends and fans who have been inquiring about me. I'm doing ok and all is well at this end.

I apologize for not responding individually to all the emails that you have been sending me. I hope to be back online soon and start posting recipes.

Hope everyone is having a great summer!

posted by Saffron @ 6:15 AM       73 comments

spinach and kale stromboli with marinara sauce

You wake up at the crack of dawn. You wish you could luxuriate under the warm blankets for just a little while longer. You want to finish those dreamy happy thoughts that come to you in that half-asleep, half-awake state in the morning. You wish you could wake up to a sound other than the blaring ear-numbing shriek of the alarm. "Is it a weekend?", you wonder. "Did I forget to switch off the alarm last night? What day was yesterday? Please, let it have been a Friday, Please!!"

But no! It is not the weekend. you cannot lie there in bed! you have to wake up. It is a week day and a million things need to be done. For starters, there is school. You have to get them ready. If it wasn't for them, you could sleep in an extra half an hour. The thought is very tempting, and you slip into a little flashback...of the days before them. Days when you had that extra time in the morning for a leisurely cup of chai and the crossword. Days when you could linger in a hot shower forever...Days when.....You shake your head and try to brush those thoughts away. You shouldn't be thinking about them in such a negative way in the morning. "Shame on you, What kind of a Mom are you?", you chide yourself.

You have to wash them and get them ready for school. Some primping and prepping, a little tugging and tucking, a dab of this and a dab of that and finally they are ready! You pack them off with a flourish and rush to the stop to catch the bus. Of late they have been missing the school bus a little too frequently and you have had to drop them off at school. You fervently wish that today won't be such a day. You have a million errands to run and you don't want to make an extra stop at the school to drop them off. You break into a sprint just as the bus rounds the corner. You see them off on the school bus and heave a sigh of relief that the crazy rush of the morning is behind you.

The rest of the day goes by in a blur and before you know it, it is afternoon. They will be home soon. You anxiously await the return of the school bus. You find yourself wondering how they would have fared in school. Would they have been popular and in demand? or neglected and ignored? did you rise to the challenge as a mother? did you do well? would the others have passed judgement on them? commended you for your efforts?

With great anxiety you pounce on them when they get home and look at them with a critical eye. YES! they are clean as a whistle and licked clean! "'twas good Ma!" says your normally taciturn 11 year old and your heart starts to sing. You go into the kitchen and do a little happy jig.

The lunches you packed for the kids were a success! Your efforts in the morning were worth it. That 1/2 hour of sleep that you gave up was worth it! The kids loved their lunch and ate it all.

Well, what did you think I was going on about? I was talking about "lunch boxes" and life before "them". The kids??? Oh, compared to the trouble of making "kid approved school lunches", raising kids is a piece of cake!!

An extra half-hour of sleep? No problem! you will gladly give that up if the kids will eat their lunch. One whole hour? Ok, don't push it now!!

Here's a recipe for spinach & kale stromboli. Very nutritious with the greens and very yummy with the cheese. The filling is quite easy to prepare and you can make it the night before. In the morning, you just have to assemble and bake the stromboli. You can even bake the whole thing the night before and just pack it for lunch the next day and sleep in that extra half-hour :)

The basic idea was inspired by this recipe from Rachael Ray. I made the filling according to my preference.


Stromboli dough with filling

Ingredients:

1 can Pillsbury® Pizza Crust
3-4 generous handfuls of baby spinach leaves (or thawed frozen spinach)
3-4 medium kale leaves
1 small clove of garlic, chopped
3/4 cup of grated mozzarella cheese
1 heaped tsp pesto sauce (I used store bought)
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes (optional)
2 tsp parmesan cheese
salt and pepper to taste


Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Farenheit.
   
2. Boil water in a large pot.
   
3. Add the kale leaves and once they wilt slightly, add the baby spinach leaves. If using frozen spinach, omit this step for the spinach. Thaw and squeeze out the extra water from the spinach and proceed to step 8.
   
4. The spinach will wilt immediately.
   
5. Remove the spinach and kale to a bowl of cold water with some ice cubes in it.
   
6. Let cool slightly.
   
7. Gently squeeze handfuls of the spinach and kale to remove all the water.
   
8. Chop the greens finely.
   
9. Add the finely chopped garlic, the pesto sauce, grated mozzarella cheese, chili flakes, 1 tsp of the parmesan cheese and salt and pepper to taste.
   
10. Open the can and unroll the pre-made pizza dough.
11. Cut the crust vertically down the center to get 2 long pieces
12. Spread the filling down the long rectangle, leaving a little bit of a border around the edges
13. Roll the crust from the long side to get 2 long logs.
    
14. Press down lightly along the edge to seal well.
    
15. With a sharp knife, make a few slits in the log.
    
16. Sprinkle with the remaining parmesan cheese and again press a little bit to make the cheese adhere to the dough.
    
17. Bake for 12 minutes or till the stromboli is golden brown.
    
18. Cut into pieces of desired size. I did mine about 5 inches long.
19. Serve with marinara sauce for dipping or pack for a tasty lunch.
    

Search Tags: recipe,stromboli, spinach, kale, cheese, vegetarian, lunch

posted by Saffron @ 4:45 PM       103 comments

Mooli Parathas

....to me! Plagiarism is by no means a new phenomenon - it happens all around us all the time. I have heard about it on several other blogs. Manisha of Indian Food Rocks has tons for information on what to do and how to prevent plagiarism. Nevertheless, when it happened to me, I was shocked. Even more shocked because the site in question was India Times!

posted by Saffron @ 12:03 PM       74 comments

Coconut burfi/fudge

Here is a confession....I hardly ever cook anything from cookbooks!

"Gasp!" you might say. "What? Really? How can that be true? You love food and have a food blog and a ton of cookbooks!" Well, it is true. I love cookbooks and have a HUGE collection of cookbooks. I even own a few cookbooks in languages I'm not really fluent in and a couple in languages I can't even read! But as for cooking something from them, I hardly ever do. I may sometimes use a recipe as an inspiration, but usually add/modify ingredients to suit my tastes.

I buy cookbooks to pour over the beautiful pictures. Cookbooks are part of my bedtime reading repertoire. I like the light reading that cookbooks offer - pleasant, relaxing and soporific. I flip the pages, drool over the exotic dishes and reminisce over the familiar ones. I admire the food styling in the pictures and make a mental note about some unusual ingredient or spice that catches my eye. I lay back on the pillow and try to image what it must taste like. I have pleasant, happy images of me churning out one perfect looking dish after another - just as the cookbook promises - and drift off to sleep with lingering thoughts of delightful dishes all lined up on a perfectly set table, with perfectly behaved kids (and husband!) sitting at the table, tucking in heartily and singing praises of me. Sigh! a girl can dream, can't she?

Once in a while though, a certain recipe will catch my eye for its sparsity of ingredients, simplicity of preparation and the promised elegance of taste. Once such recipe I saved from a newspaper is for "Coconut Fudge". I love coconut based sweets, but have never tried to make the traditional coconut burfi. It tends to be a bit sweet for my liking and I've always been afraid to meddle with the proportion of sugar because it seems sacrosanct to the recipe. When I came across this recipe, I filed it away as I do with a lot of recipes.

Years passed before I stumbled across it again. This time, I immediately added the required ingredients to my weekly shopping list. At the next available opportunity, I made the dish and followed the recipe exactly!

I was rewarded with wonderfully moist, chewy, coconut fudge. It was perhaps a little bit too sweet and the next time, I'm going to reduce the sugar a little bit. It was still fantastic and the empty box in the fridge was a mute testimony not only to the deliciousness of the sweet, but also to the fact that my family does not remove empty boxes from the fridge! They happily help themselves to the last of the laddoo or burfi or milk and place the empty carton back in the fridge! Arrrghhh!


tray of coconut burfi

The recipe is from Chicago Tribune a few years ago. Here is the recipe verbatim:

Preparation time: 5 minutes
Cooking time: 50 minutes
Chilling time: 8 hours (I started sampling right away!)
Yield: 32 pieces (considerably less after 8 hours due to constant sampling)

Ingredients:

1 cup each: sugar, milk, whipping cream, unsweetened grated coconut (I used frozen grated coconut that I thawed in the microwave)
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
2 tablespoons sliced pistachios or almonds

Method:

1. Heat sugar, milk, cream and coconut to a boil in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat.
   
2. Reduce heat to simmer.
3. Cook until mixture becomes very thick and starts to leave the side of the pan, about 50 minutes.
   
4. Transfer mixture to a buttered 8-inch square baking dish/tray. I lined the tray with aluminum foil and ghee'ed (new word alert!) the foil.
   
5. Sprinkle with cardamom powder and nuts.
   
6. Cover with plastic wrap and chill for 8 hours.
   
7. Cut into 1 inch diamonds or squares.
   

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Search Labels: Desserts

posted by Saffron @ 12:45 PM       78 comments

Bag of 16 kinds of Beans

• Do you want to add more protein to your diet?
• Do you want to eat more whole grains?
• Do you want to increase your fiber intake?
• Do you want to feed your family traditional dishes that they love eating?
• Do you want a quick lunch/dinner/brunch option that you don't have to slave over?
• Do you want to use up that bag of brown rice you bought, but is lying unused in the pantry?

• Northern
• Pinto
• Large Lima
• Blackeye
• Garbanzo
• Baby Lima
• Green Split Pea
• Kidney
• Cranberry Bean
• Small White
• Pink Bean
• Small Red
• Yellow split pea
• Lentils
• Navy
• White Kidney
• Pearl Barley
• Black Bean
  

1. Soak the beans and udad dal in 6 cups of water for 2 hours
2. After 2 hours add the rice and red chillies and soak for another 2 hours
3. Drain and grind to a coarse paste in the blender with the ginger, green chillies, cilantro. You can add the soaking water to get a pancake batter like consistency.
   
4. Add asafoetida and salt to taste.
   
5. Tear the curry leaves into 2-3 pieces and add to the batter.
   

• Make adais right away or store the batter in a tightly covered container for upto 1 week
• You can add finely chopped onions to the batter before making the adai
  
• Follow the instructions in this post for step-by-step instructions to making the adai

posted by Saffron @ 12:00 PM       55 comments

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August 11, 2008 by rhondaporter

Mortgage rates below, with the exception of FHA and VA, are based on a mid-credit score of 720 or better for an owner occupied purchase.  FHA and VA rate quotes are based on a mid-credit score 620 or better.  For more details on how these mortgages are priced please visit this post.   Rates can be priced with or without points (fees shown in lines 801, 802 and 808 on a Good Faith Estimate), for your personal rate quote, please contact me or your local Mortgage Professional.   Rates priced based on a 30 day lock.

Mortgages with loan amounts up to $417,000 for Single Family Dwellings.  Based on a sales price of $500,000 and a loan amount of $400,000.

Conforming 30 Year Fixed:   6.625% @ 0 Pts. (apr 6.690%)

Conforming 30 Year Fixed with 10 Year Interest Only Payments:  6.750% @ 0 Pts. (apr 6.810%)

Conforming 5/1 ARM:  5.875% @ 1 Pt. (apr 7.224%)  ~  6.375% @ 0 Pts (apr 7.402%)

*

Mortgages with Loan Amounts from $417,001 - $567,500 for Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties.    Based on a sales price of $650,000 with a loan amount of $520,000.

Conforming Jumbo 30 Year Fixed:  6.625% @ 0.50 Pts (apr 6.734%)

Conforming Jumbo 30 Year Fixed with 10 Year Interest Only Payments:  7.00% @ 0.50 Pts (apr 7.103%)

Conforming Jumbo 5/1 ARM:  6.250% @ 0.75 Pts (apr 7.268%)

*

Jumbo (Non-Conforming):  7.750% @ 1 Pt. (apr 7.918%)

*

FHA 30 Year Fixed (loan amounts up to $362,790 for Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties): 

6.625% @ 1 Pt (apr 7.421%)

FHA Jumbo (loan amounts up to $567,500 for Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties):  

6.625%  @ 1 Pt (apr 7.417%)

*

VA:  6.625% @ 1 Pt (apr 6.958%)

Rates posted are as of July 28, 2008 at 1:30 p.m.   Rates may and do change constantly.  To see live rate quotes, follow me on Twitter.  

Rates quoted by Rhonda Porter, CMPS and Licensed Loan Originator 510-LO-32047 with Mortgage Master Service Corporation.

Posted in Mortgage | 1 Comment »

August 5, 2008 by Jason Mook

Kids of all ages, artists of all abilities, are invited to “Chalk the Walk” on the sidewalk in front of the Puyallup Public Library (324 S. Meridian, downtown Puyallup) on Saturday, August 9 from 10 am to Noon.

There will be several artists available to model and help budding artists create sidewalk masterpieces.

This FREE community art program is sponsored by Valley Arts United, Puyallup Main Street Association Farmer’s Market, and the Puyallup Public Library.  Many colors of chalk will be provided with plenty of sidewalk to fill-in with artsy designs.  Rain or shine, don’t miss this chance to show off!

Posted in Community Events, For Kids, Home Owner, Puyallup | No Comments »

July 31, 2008 by marciekd

Now that summer is officially here, the local Farmers Markets are in full swing! Farmers Markets are great to find local and organic produce. In my last post, I discussed Organic Foods and how to better understand what Organic foods you should or shouldn’t bother purchasing. Farmers Markets are a great place to be green and discover what is organic and local in your neighborhood.

So what makes buying local so important? And why is buying from a place like a Farmers Market so great? 
 
John Ikerd, a retired agricultural economics professor who writes about the growing “eat local” movement, says that farmers who sell direct to local consumers need not give priority to packing, shipping and shelf life issues and can instead “select, grow and harvest crops to ensure peak qualities of freshness, nutrition and taste.” Eating local also means eating seasonally, he adds, a practice much in tune with Nature.

“Local food is often safer, too,” says the Center for a New American Dream (CNAD). “Even when it’s not organic, small farms tend to be less aggressive than large factory farms about dousing their wares with chemicals.” Small farms are also more likely to grow more variety, too, says CNAD, protecting biodiversity and preserving a wider agricultural gene pool, an important factor in long-term food security.

Eating locally grown food even helps in the fight against global warming. Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture reports that the average fresh food item on our dinner table travels 1,500 miles to get there. Buying locally-produced food eliminates the need for all that fuel-guzzling transportation.

Personally, I love going to any farmers market. I love to visit them when I’m on vacation because it’s a great place to find really fresh options that are cheaper then the grocery store. It’s also a great way to support the local economy. After doing some research about Farmers Markets and the benefits of buying from a local farmer, I now understand how it really IS cheaper to buy from a local. Check this out!

Another benefit of eating locally is helping the local economy. Farmers on average receive only 20 cents of each food dollar spent, says Ikerd, the rest going for transportation, processing, packaging, refrigeration and marketing. Farmers who sell food to local customers “receive the full retail value, a dollar for each food dollar spent,” he says. Additionally, eating locally encourages the use of local farmland for farming, thus keeping development in check while preserving open space.

Farmers Markets are not perfect and it’s a myth that is all organic, but it’s a great way to start thinking about where your food comes from and what is available in your community. Also, remember the other things your market might have to offer such as flowers, plants, art work, pet options, handmade crafts and homemade goodies. Last year for a friend’s baby shower I got all the flowers from one vendor for less than $30 and she let me create the bouquets with the flowers of my choosing. I got so many compliments about how beautiful the flowers were that day and I felt good knowing I got them fresh and supported a local gal from Fife at the same time.

Here in Washington we are spoiled with having places like Pike Place Market which is basically a permanent Market that operates year round. Washington is also one of the states to offer the most farmers markets as well. According to green*light, the U-District Farmers Market is one of the top 10 Markets in the US. The U-District Market is unique in that it’s Seattle’s largest neighborhood market that is “farmers only,” meaning it’s limited to food products. It hosts over 50 regional growers who gather to sell everything from free range eggs and hard cider, to hazelnuts, wild huckleberries and mushrooms, to grass-fed goat meat. For more information about local Farmers Markets in Washington State, please visit the Washington State Farmers Markets Association website.

Last week when I attended the Puyallup Farmers Market here in Pioneer Park, I sampled cheese made from sheep milk and talked with the vendor who was from Chehalis. She had pictures of her farm that had been severely damaged in the recent flooding. It just really made the whole idea of supporting a local real to me. She lost over 75% of her flock in the flooding and was just allowed back into her home this week. When you come to understand that there is a real person behind the product they are selling, it just makes you feel good about how you have also spent your money and supporting someone who loves what they do.

Check out your markets in your neighborhood and support a local today! While you are there, take the time to speak with the vendors and learn more about them and their product. You might be surprised at the things you learn. For more information about Farmers Markets located nationally, check out LocalHarvest.org.

Posted in Advice, Community Events, Green, Home Owner, Local Business, Puyallup | 1 Comment »

July 29, 2008 by rhondaporter

Rates are continuing to trend upwards.  Since my last rate post on July 14, 2008, the 30 year fixed conforming is up 0.25% to rate, or to have the same rate quoted on 7/14/2008, it will now cost you 1% of your loan amount.   With that said, we are still experiencing volatile swings with rates.  It’s not uncommon to receive several rate changes per day which is why one should never select the person who will be helping them with a mortgage by interest rate alone.   Rates are a moving target.

Mortgage rates below, with the exception of FHA and VA, are based on a mid-credit score of 720 or better for an owner occupied purchase.  FHA and VA rate quotes are based on a mid-credit score 620 or better.  For more details on how these mortgages are priced, please visit this post.   Rates can be priced with or without points (fees shown in lines 801, 802 and 808 on a Good Faith Estimate), for your personal rate quote, please contact me or your local Mortgage Professional.

Mortgages with loan amounts up to $417,000 for Single Family Dwellings.  Based on a sales price of $500,000 and a loan amount of $400,000.

Conforming 30 Year Fixed:   6.625% @ 0 Pts. (apr 6.690%)

Conforming 30 Year Fixed with 10 Year Interest Only Payments:  6.750% @ 0 Pts. (apr 6.810%)

Conforming 5/1 ARM:  5.750% @ 1 Pt. (apr 7.099%)  ~  6.125% @ 0 Pts (apr 7.153%)

*

Mortgages with Loan Amounts from $417,001 - $567,500 for Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties.    Based on a sales price of $650,000 with a loan amount of $520,000.

Conforming Jumbo 30 Year Fixed:  6.625% at 0.50 Pts (apr 6.734%)

Conforming Jumbo 30 Year Fixed with 10 Year Interest Only Payments:  7.00% @ 0.50 Pts (apr 7.103%)

Conforming Jumbo 5/1 ARM:  5.875% at 1 Pts (apr 7.141%)

*

Jumbo (Non-Conforming):  7.625% @ 1 Pt. (apr 7.%)  ~  8.125% @ 0 Pts (apr 7.105%)

*

FHA 30 Year Fixed (loan amounts up to $362,790 for Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties): 

6.625% @ 1 Pt (apr 7.421%)

FHA Jumbo (loan amounts up to $567,500 for Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties):  

6.7500%  @ 1 Pt (apr 7.541%)

*

VA:  6.625% @ 1 Pt (apr 6.958%)

Rates posted are as of July 28, 2008 at 1:30 p.m.   Rates may and do change constantly.  To see live rate quotes, follow me on Twitter.  

Rates quoted by Rhonda Porter, CMPS and Licensed Loan Originator 510-LO-32047 with Mortgage Master Service Corporation.

Posted in Mortgage | 1 Comment »

July 16, 2008 by Jason Mook

The Puyallup City Council discussed dogs on athletic fields last night, and voted to kick ‘em to the curb. It seems that some dog owners around town have been letting their dogs leave presents for ball players to find at an inconvenient time. Council Member George Dill was quoted as saying, “It’s that you don’t want to slide into second base and have a pile at second base.” Dill, along with Brouillet, Deal and Turner voted for the ban, while Hansen and Knutsen voted against it.

As a responsible dog owner, I feel ostracized by this ordinance. I take our beagle Zoie to Bradley Lake Park from time to time, but I don’t let her run free around the baseball diamond, and I always have a disposable sack with me to take care of her stuff. This new ordinance carries a $100 fine, so I guess Zoie and I will be heading to South Hill to enjoy some of the Pierce County parks instead.

Why can’t we start with posted signs asking dog owners to be responsible, or to stay off the ball fields? Why do we have to go straight to banning dogs altogether? What do you think the Council should do? Do you agree with the Council, or would you propose some interim solution? Let ‘em hear ya.

Posted in Home Owner, Legislation, Puyallup, South Hill | 2 Comments »

July 15, 2008 by Jason Mook

Current Price Trends
June statistics just released by the NWMLS show a decline of the median home price for Puyallup to $260k. This represents an almost 13% decline in the year-over-year median home price for the Puyallup real estate market. We still hope to turn the corner this fall but consumer pessimism is gaining a strong foothold. Increasing numbers of short sale and bank owned properties appear to be depressing prices. Sellers need to assess their true need to sell before entering this market.

The average cumulative days on market - total time a home is for sale, from listing to closing - moved down again to 142 days from 152 days the previous month. The average sale price to original list price ratio moved down for the second month to 94%.

Market Activity
The NWMLS made a significant change in statistics reporting this month which resulted in a conversion of Active inventory to Pending sales. This change masked true market trends by entering an artificial component into the statistics. The new reporting methods will be consistent going forward, but we can’t take to heart what we’re seeing this month. Regardless of this change though, inventory to sales ratios and a significant drop in the number of sales to 96 - a number not seen since December - continue to show market weakness.

* Homes sold - single-family homes, both resale and new construction, but not condos or vacant land.
** Median home price - the middle price in a given sequence of prices, taken as the average of the two middle prices when the sequence has an even number of homes.
*** SP/Orig LP% - Sale price divided by original list price.

Posted in Advice, Home Buyer, Home Prices, Home Seller, Market Activity, Pierce County, Puyallup, Real Estate, South Hill, Statistics | No Comments »

July 15, 2008 by Jason Mook

Current Price Trends
June statistics just released by the NWMLS show the median home price for Pierce County steady at $265k. It appears that the Pierce County real estate market is largely unaffected by increasing numbers of short sale and bank owned properties. Although the flat trend continues, year-over-year median price is down almost 9%.

The average cumulative days on market - total time a home is for sale, from listing to closing - moved down again in seesaw-like fashion, to 138 days from 145 days the previous month. The average sale price to original list price ratio stayed steady at 94%.

Market Activity
The NWMLS made a significant change in statistics reporting this month which resulted in a conversion of Active inventory to Pending sales. This change masked true market trends by entering an artificial component into the statistics. The new reporting methods will be consistent going forward, but we can’t take to heart what we’re seeing this month. Regardless of this change though, inventory to sales ratios continue to show market weakness. Sellers need to assess their true need to sell before entering this market.

* Homes sold - single-family homes, both resale and new construction, but not condos or vacant land.
** Median home price - the middle price in a given sequence of prices, taken as the average of the two middle prices when the sequence has an even number of homes.
*** SP/Orig LP% - Sale price divided by original list price.

Posted in Advice, Home Buyer, Home Prices, Home Seller, Market Activity, Pierce County, Real Estate, Statistics | No Comments »

July 14, 2008 by rhondaporter

What a facinating time in the mortgage industry with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac faltering, the Federal goverment is stepping in to save these mortgage giants.   This news is providing a much needed boost of confidence to mortgage backed securities and rates are reflecting a nice improvement.   With what has been going on in the mortgage industry, conforming (Fannie/Freddie) loans will continue to have tighter underwriting.   I predict that products that offer interest only payments or adjustable rate mortgages may soon be unavailable.  If you’re interested in taking advantage in one of these programs, you may want to take action sooner than later.

If you are considering buying a home within the next year, I recommend that you begin the preapproval process as soon as possible to make sure you’re in the best position possible.   Also, make sure you’re working with a Mortgage Professional who is experienced with FHA mortgages and has them available for you in the event you need a “plan b”.   I’m finding that more and more borrowers are needing FHA mortgages due to tougher guidelines with conforming.  Lending is not going to get any easier.

Mortgage rates below, with the exception of FHA and VA, are based on a mid-credit score of 720 or better.  FHA and VA rate quotes are based on a mid-credit score 620 or better.  For more details on how these mortgages are priced, please visit this post.   Rates can be priced with or without points, for your personal rate quote, please contact me or your local Mortgage Professional.

Mortgages with loan amounts up to $417,000 for Single Family Dwellings

Conforming 30 Year Fixed:   6.375% @ 0 Pts. (apr 6.189%)

Conforming 30 Year Fixed with 10 Year Interest Only Payments:  6.625% @ 0 Pts. (apr 6.561%)

Conforming 5/1 ARM:  5.375% @ 1 Pt. (apr 7.028%)  ~  5.750% @ 0 Pts (apr 6.939%)

*

Mortgages with Loan Amounts from $417,001 - $567,500 for Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties.   Note:  this temporary loan limit is in effect until December 31, 2008 (as is the FHA Jumbo).

Conforming Jumbo 30 Year Fixed:  6.500% at 0 Pts (apr 6.556%)

Conforming Jumbo 30 Year Fixed with 10 Year Interest Only Payments:  6.875% (apr 6.935%)

Conforming Jumbo 5/1 ARM:  5.625% at 1 Pts (apr 7.036%)

*

Jumbo (Non-Conforming):  7.500% @ 1 Pt. (apr 7.963%)  ~  7.750% @ 0 Pts (apr 7.531%)

*

FHA 30 Year Fixed (loan amounts up to $362,790 for Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties): 

6.250% @ 1 Pt (apr 7.032%)

FHA Jumbo (loan amounts up to $567,500 for Pierce, King and Snohomish Counties–loan limit valid until December 31, 2008):  

6.375%  @ 1 Pt (apr 7.160%)

*

VA:  6.375% @ 1 Pt (apr 6.578%)

Rates posted are as of July 14, 2008 at 9:00 a.m.   Rates may and do change constantly.  To see live rate quotes, follow me on Twitter.  

Rates quoted by Rhonda Porter, CMPS and Licensed Loan Originator 510-LO-32047 with Mortgage Master Service Corporation.

Posted in Lending, Mortgage | No Comments »

July 11, 2008 by Jason Mook

U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) announced yesterday that she has included $5,775,000 million for Pierce County transportation and housing projects in the Fiscal Year 2009 Senate Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development (THUD) Appropriations bill. As Chairman of the THUD Appropriations Subcommittee, Senator Murray uses her position to invest in community-backed Washington state projects that may not otherwise receive federal support.

Included in that bill is $2,000,000 for the Shaw Road Extension Project in the City of Puyallup that ceremoniously broke ground on September 6th, 2007. This project will improve 1,000 linear feet of the existing Shaw Road alignment to add sidewalks, bike lanes, and turn lanes at the Pioneer intersection.  This extension will relieve congestion by creating a new route functioning independently of the BNSF line.  It will increase safety and capacity to the city’s arterial network, as well as enhance regional freight mobility, and facilitate increased and safer railway usage.

The THUD Appropriations bill was approved in Senator Murray’s THUD Committee on Tuesday and is expected to be approved by the full Appropriations Committee today. It will then move to the Senate floor.

According to WSDOT, once completed, the extension will open up a new access point to State Route 410 and 167 from South Hill and Southeast Puyallup. The project is not only beneficial to Puyallup because it provides a north south corridor that will help alleviate traffic congestion on Meridian (SR 161), it also provides mobility improvement for rail and truck freight and compliments other area transportation projects.

Posted in Legislation, Pierce County, Puyallup | No Comments »

July 11, 2008 by Jason Mook

From our Newsletter:

While yards were once the domain of swing sets and barbecues, today’s homeowners are turning the great outdoors into additional living space, complete with comfortable furniture and decorative lighting. This trend is so popular that the U.S. Census Bureau shows one-third of nearly $150 billion Americans spent on home remodeling in 2005 went to outdoor living areas; that’s money that will often yield a good return on investment when it comes time to sell.

Where to begin?
Designing an outdoor space is much like designing a room in your house—you’ll want to think about the space’s purpose, appropriate furnishings, décor and dimensions, which can be defined outdoors in much the same way a room’s floor, walls and ceiling define them indoors. You’ll also want your new space to flow from the aesthetic of the rest of your home. For instance, a Spanish Colonial home is best complemented by a patio or terrace of the same style, in colors and materials that are true to the era.

Consider the function of your new “room.”
Think about what you will use the space for. Is it principally for entertaining? For contemplative moments with a good book? For family dining? Will you be enjoying it primarily in the evenings, or by day? These considerations should drive the design of your space.

When space permits, you may want to incorporate seating areas for more than one purpose. Upright chairs are ideal for dining, but you’ll want some more relaxed and comfortable seating arranged in intimate groupings for conversations or reading. For lounging by the poolside or catching a nap, chaise lounges and hammocks work wonderfully.

You’ll also want to consider placement. Seating areas should offer the best views, while barbecues, chimneys and other fire-containing items should be kept away from flammable brush, grass and structures, and away from windows that might carry the smoke indoors.

Establish boundaries.
You may not have thought of your outdoor area as having a floor, ceiling or walls, but defining your space can go a long way towards making it feel like a natural extension of your home.

There are almost as many types of outdoor flooring available today as there are indoor types. The default, of course, is lawn. But wood and synthetic decks are also common, as are cement patios. Pavers can quickly convert a patch of lawn into a defined patio, and old cement can be spruced up with a coat of stain or paint, or with some of the outdoor rugs now available.

Defining the walls of an outdoor space is easier than you might think. You can go the man-made route with fencing, lattice screens, trellises, retaining walls or planter boxes. Or let Mother Nature help out by planting shrubs or trees, or using large potted arrangements.

To top it all off, you’ll probably want something to keep the weather out and extend the useful season of your outdoor area. This could be as simple as a lawn umbrella affixed to a café table, or as elaborate as an awning, gazebo or pergola. Mother Nature can help out here as well with an appropriately located shade tree.

Add some fresh air to your decorating ideas.
Your outdoor area should have a focal point— an element that serves the same kind of function as a fireplace or TV screen in your living room. A fountain, outdoor fire pit or sculpture works well for this.

Again, you’ll want to keep in mind the mood you’re trying to establish. If this is to be a quiet space for reflection, think pastels or earth tones. Party areas deserve more festive colors and perhaps some colorful string lights or tiki torches for the evening hours. In fact, lighting should be task-oriented just as it is indoors—you might want to add pathway lighting for safety, decorative lighting to highlight landscaping and an outdoor chandelier or simple candles for the dining area.

Sound is also part of the overall ambiance, and can be added in many ways. Water features offer soothing background sounds, as do wind chimes. At the other extreme, outdoor speakers allow you to bring your favorite music outdoors with you and can even be inconspicuously disguised as rocks.

It’s easy to see that your outdoor living area can be as simple or as elaborate as you like. And whether you have a small condo balcony or an acre of landscaping, a little attention to detail can result in an inviting space that makes you want to sit and enjoy your environment.
 
Tips for entertaining in your new outdoor space
Once you’ve gone to all the trouble of creating an outdoor living space, you don’t want it to go unused. Plan a Grand Opening party to show it off to friends, and ask them for suggestions on other ways you could highlight the best features of your yard or patio. You might be surprised that they spot opportunities you may have missed. Here are some tips to ensure that your inaugural outdoor celebration goes off without a hitch.

Food tips

• Set up various “food stations” in different locations to keep people mingling and keep lines short.
• Consider a “fondue night” to make your job easier and get guests involved. Set chopped ingredients on a bed of ice, and place small hibachi grills at tables for guests to cook their own selections.
• To keep salads crisp and fresh, nest the bowl in a larger bowl filled with ice and cover the top.
• Reduce cleanup by serving condiments and dips in hollowed-out bell peppers, cabbages or round loaves of bread. You can also serve punch in a hollowed-out watermelon.

Table tips

• Weigh the corners of tablecloths down with washers or small stones to keep them from catching the wind.
• If you don’t have enough table space, lay a sheet of plywood or an old door over a couple of sawhorses, then cover it with a tablecloth.
• Add a touch of elegance by using real plates and silverware instead of disposables.

Decorating tips

• Decorate tree trunks and branches with small white string lights for a magical look at night.
• Line the path leading to your backyard soirée with potted flowers or luminaries.
• If you plan a formal seating arrangement, place cards can be made from items such as smooth stones or seed packages to keep with the garden theme.
• Seat children at a table covered with white butcher paper and have crayons available for coloring.
• Create easy and attractive centerpieces with pots of colorful flowering plants or even glass bowls filled with fresh lemons and limes.

Keep the bugs at bay

• To avoid lingering pesticide aromas, spray the area well in advance of guests’ arrival.
• Set up citronella candles or torches around the perimeter of your eating area, well away from the food.
• For a more natural (and less offensive) repellent, use pots or sprigs of parsley, tansy or rue to keep ants away, and lavender or mint arrangements to discourage flies.

Last but not least - make sure your automatic sprinklers are turned off before the big party!

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OBSERVATIONS, THOUGHTS, OCCASIONAL RANTS, THINGS I FIND INTERESTING AND ANYTHING ELSE THAT I FEEL MOVED TO SHARE OR COMMENT ON - SOMETIMES THEY MAY EVEN INVOLVE THE LAW, LAWYERS, OR THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM.

As you might expect, the court recessed (apparently in part to clean up quite a bit of defense counsel's blood). When court reconvened, the jury was instructed to disregard the facts that defense counsel was no longer present, Lehman was now dressed in "jail clothes," and that his arms and legs were shackled.

So from October, judges hearing civil and family cases in England and Wales will don a new robe designed by Betty Jackson, who also makes "funky British clothes for aspiring funky British girls.''

The Guardian offers this review:

Their symbolism is greatly enhanced by the knowledge that they are not the invention of imaginative couturiers but a proud inheritance. These are the robes of Coke, of Hale, of Holt, of Mansfield. They have been worn through all the vicissitudes of our history, through the Wars of the Roses, the Civil War, and the Blitz, by the guardians of our system of justice. They are well known everywhere and are still worn in many Commonwealth countries and even in some former Commonwealth countries. The reason for that is obvious to all. No other costume is more closely associated with freedom, judicial independence and fairness.

The remarkable costume modeled by the Lord Chief Justice owes nothing to our traditions of formal dress in this country, and seems to have been inspired by science-fiction cinema. At a time when the law of England faces perhaps the biggest threats in its history, it is severely unsettling to the public to find our judges wanting to look like warlords from outer space.

• Answer your ringing cell phone during the interview and then ask the interviewer to leave their own office because "this is a private call."

• Tell the interviewer you won't be able to stay with the job long because you think you might get an inheritance if your uncle dies -- and your uncle isn't "looking too good."

• Ask the interviewer for a ride home after the interview.

• Sniff your armpits on the way into the interview room.

• Tell the interviewer that you cannot provide a writing sample because all of your writing has been for the CIA and that "it is classified."

• When offered food before the interview, decline saying "I don't want to line my stomach with grease before going drinking."

• Brush your hair during the interview.

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In Trolls on 11 August 2008 with 10 comments

Sometimes things happen in threes. I recently read these stories and, maybe it’s just me, but I think they share a common thread.

• NY Times: Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling
  A growing subculture has a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online. By Mattathias Schwartz.
• The New Yorker: Annals of Crime: The Chameleon
  The many lives of Frédéric Bourdin. By David Grann.
• The Inquisitr: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing
  Well known photographer Thomas Hawk was thrown out of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this week for the crime of taking photos. By Duncan Riley.

In the first story, Mattathias Schwartz goes deep into the troll subculture. These are people who go out into the web to fuck with others. It’s an amazing story that goes far beyond the media’s usual “wild west” web story. The one place where it falls short is in its brief treatment of any solutions to the problem. It’d be interesting to see a followup on the various methods pioneered at places like Slashdot to combat trolling. Still, amazing read.

In the second, David Grann profiles Frédéric Bourdin, who may be the most successful impostor ever. He actually convinced a small Texas family that he was their missing son, even though his hair and eyes were the wrong color and he had a French accent. Bourdin is a troll in that he pretended to be something he wasn’t, in order to feed off the reactions to his lies.

Finally, in the third, Duncan Riley reports on the latest incident of Thomas Hawk getting thrown out of somewhere for taking photos. This time it’s the SF MOMA that catches his ire, but it was previously 45 Fremont Street and 1 Bush Street. I’m a staunch believer in the rights of photographers (indeed, when I was running JPG Magazine, I put together a whole issue on the topic to which Thomas Hawk was a contributor), but I’m also a strong believer in the Don’t Be A Dick school of photography, which reminds us that when you’re on private property, owners can ask you to stop taking photos at any time. Fighting with them only makes it worse for the rest of us with cameras.

To be clear, I’m not saying Hawk was wrong in any of these cases. I’m just saying that when you keep being the victim in stories like this, one has to wonder if you may be trolling for a conflict.

In all three cases, consider how the outcome would have been different had the people involved followed the old net axiom: Don’t feed the trolls. Online or off, the best solution is often to ignore the guy who’s out to fuck with you.

In Life, Photos on 1 August 2008 with 2 comments

Today I dropped by Blue Bottle on Linden Lane to recaffientate and noticed a particularly awesome wall of, well, let’s call it “user-generated, collaborative, public art.” I snapped a photo and sent it off to Flickr and went on with my day.

Tonight I got a mail through Flickr from the artist behind the “Just Married” posters, who, of course, has a Flickr account. Sometimes I love the internet.

Heather and I are off on a family vacation for a while, so the posts won’t be coming as fast and furious as they have been. Until we’re back, please do enjoy repeats of my crazy obsession with comments this week.

• This is Not a Comment
  In which I take Bob Garfield to task.
• 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments
  In which I try to help with some concrete suggestions.
• Concluding the Comment Culture Clash Cacophony
  In which I try to look forward.
• Just One Question for Jason Schultz
  In which I ask an expert.

In Links on 31 July 2008 with no comments

• Why we delete comments. (And how you can make us stop.) Brilliantly written. “If we attempted to pass a law preventing you from saying something terrible, that would be censorship. If you showed up in our living room attempting to say the same thing, we’d have the right to throw you out.” (tags: community)
• Jamie’s Comment on Random Mumblings Fantastic insights on comment moderation from a practitioner. “Some reporters might get upset that someone says their writing sucks, but that’s tough cookies for them. Fair comments about our job is allowed, unfair remarks about us as human beings is not” (tags: comments community newspapers)
• Mister Snitch!: Newspapers comment on commenting and anonymity Point-by-point stories to go with my original list. Fantastic. (tags: comments community newspapers)

In Community, Internet, Just One Question, Law on 30 July 2008 with 3 comments

One of the things that always comes up when I talk to people at companies about community systems is the fear that getting involved with the comments on their site makes them more liable. I’ve denied it until I was blue in the face, but they don’t always believe me. So I decided to ask an expert: Jason Schultz, EFF Fellow and Associate Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at U.C. Berkeley Law School.

Derek Powazek: Does moderating comments on a website make the website owner more liable?

Jason Schultz: This is an important question that a lot of website owners have. The short answer under U.S. law is that you are right, website owners generally are not liable for comments on their site, even if they moderate them. Here’s the longer answer:

First, one has to ask, “liable for what?” There are essentially three categories of comment content any website owner should worry about: (1) criminal content, (2) copyrighted content, (3) everything else.

For criminal content, once you are aware that it is criminal, you should contact law enforcement immediately and they will tell you whether you should take it down. Either way, they will likely ask you to archive it. But you should definitely not ignore it. Criminal content includes things like child pornography.

For copyrighted content, you should (as you suggest) follow the outline of the DMCA safe harbors. This means registering a DMCA agent with the copyright office, having a posted policy and active email or snail mail address for takedown requests, and complying with valid requests in a timely manner. If one does this, there is little to no risk of being held liable, even if you moderate the comment with the copyrighted content in it.

The only exception to this rule is copyrighted content that is considered “red flag” content - content where it is so obvious that it is infringing, you cannot turn a blind eye to it. How obvious is still being debated in the courts, but one court has held that even hosting or linking to image sites named “www.stolencelebritypics.com” or “illegal.net” was not sufficiently obvious to trigger the red flag requirement.

Finally, there is “everything else” which includes defamatory comments, harassment, abuse, etc. Here, website providers receive immense protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. As long as the website owner does not herself write or add text to the comment, she is pretty much exempt from any and all liability for hosting it, whether or not it is moderated.

The only exceptions to this rule are where the website owner encourages or suggests the offending language. So, for example, if you were to provide pulldown menus for comments that said “This person is a criminal” or “The above commenter has HIV,” that could fall outside the protections of CDA 230. However, short of something as blatant and directed as that, website owners are generally safe from liability for any derogatory comments posted by others.

Simply approving or denying comments does not make one liable.

There’s a lot of great information on subjects like this and others in EFF’s Blogger’s Legal Guide about Safe Harbor and Section 230 Protections.

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Jason Schultz is an EFF Fellow specializing in intellectual property and Associate Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at U.C. Berkeley Law School. Previously, he served as a Senior Staff Attorney at EFF, where he lead its Patent Busting Project and represented creators, innovators, and consumers in a variety of matters involving fair use, free speech, and reverse engineering. He received his J.D. from Berkeley and his undergrad degrees in Public Policy Studies and Women’s Studies from Duke University. He maintains a personal blog at lawgeek.net. Thanks, Jason!

(Props to Michael Sippey who did “Just One Question” interviews at Stating The Obvious way back in the day.)

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PREVIOUSLY: This is Not a Comment and 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments

In Photos on 29 July 2008 with no comments

A new orchid blooms one of the freakiest flowers ever. It looks like a sea creature up close.

In Community, Internet on 29 July 2008 tagged Media with no comments

Jeff Jarvis sums up the debate nicely with an open letter to Bob Garfield.

But note well, my friend, that all of these people are speaking to you with intelligence, experience, generosity, and civility. You know what’s missing? Two things: First, the sort of nasty comments your own piece decries. And second: You.

His closing thoughts led me to think about the long view of this debate and post this:

+

We’ve had hundreds of years of experience in the newspaper industry that have taught us how to take the messy thoughts in a writer’s head and translate them into news. This process involves humans (interviewees, editors, copyeditors) and machines (typewriters, computers, printing presses).

We’ve had less than 20 years of experience taking the messy thoughts in the heads of readers online and translating them into posts. Is it any wonder we’re still figuring it out?

And I don’t just mean technology. I mean process, etiquette. Bob keeps ringing the “you didn’t even read it!” bell, but how would he know? Maybe the story didn’t do the job of communicating well enough.

You have to take a systematic approach. The system of journalism has hundreds of years of experimentation to learn from. Online, we’ve got about a dozen. We’ve made some progress - and Bob’s story would have been better had he included it - but there’s a long road ahead still.

We’ll figure it out. And conversations like this are part of that process.

+

Elsewhere, Meg Pickard from the Guardian UK comes in with a fantastic post that reminds us that good community systems are tripods with three legs: Human, Technical, and Editorial. You have to focus on all three to be successful.

I look forward to hearing if any of this outpouring of experience makes it into future episodes of On The Media. I’ll be listening, and talking back, for years to come.

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PREVIOUSLY: This is Not a Comment and 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments

In Links on 29 July 2008 with no comments

• BuzzMachine: Comments on comments on comments Jeff Jarvis on the comments controversy sparked by OTM, with an appearance from Bob Garfield himself in the comments, still not getting why he’s wrong. (tags: otm bobgarfield media comments)
• StupidFilter Programmatic detection of stupid comments. Has anyone tried this? (tags: comments stupidity)
• POD Opens Door to Magazine Experiments and Customization An interview I did with TOC on MagCloud. Favorite line: “If you tell people in the publishing industry that they’re really in the community business, they’ll say ’shut up, hippy’ and go back to monetizing their audience metrics.” I kid because I love. (tags: magcloud publishing powazek magazines)
• BusinessWeek: Cheap Photo Sites Pit Amateurs Vs. Pros I’m interviewed on page 2. Too bad about the false dichotomy. It’s not amateurs vs. pros, it’s artists who embrace new opportunities vs. people trying to hold back the tide. (tags: microstock powazek business pixish)

In Community, How to, Internet on 28 July 2008 tagged Media with 28 comments

The other day Bob Garfield had a good kvetch about dumb comments on newspaper websites on his show, On The Media, and I posted my two cents, but I still don’t feel better. I think that’s because Bob’s partly right: comments do suck sometimes.

So, instead of just poking him for sounding like Grandpa Simpson, I’d like to help fix the problem. Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites. (There are lots more, but you know how newspaper editors can’t resist a top ten list.)

1. Require Accounts

   Anonymity is important in journalism, but not for comments.

   There are a lot of good reasons to allow anonymity, especially in the news. Sometimes a source needs to speak out against an employer or the government without being named. Fine. But there is no reason, really no reason at all, to allow people to post comments without having to first sign up for an account.

   Simply requiring an account will remove 80% of your comment problems. If allowing anonymity is important, you can allow the user to remove their name on a specific comment, while still requiring them to be logged in. (In other words, the user must log in so the system knows who they are, but they can opt to leave a comment as “Anonymous” if they choose. Anonymous comments could then be held in a special moderation queue for approval to guard against any bad uses.)

2. Set and Enforce Rules

   Nobody likes finding out about a rule after they’ve broken it. Write a human-readable set of community guidelines (Flickr’s are excellent). Make all new members agree to it when they sign up, and link to it prominently from every comment form. This way, if you have to take action later, you can say “We warned you.”

   Then enforce the rules. Delete bad comments and publicly promote the ones that are great. There’s a common misconception that moderating comments makes you more liable. This is not true. Managing your community does not have any baring on your DMCA compliance, safe harbor standing, or any other legal issue.

3. Employ a Community Manager

   If you can’t name your community manager, it’s probably you.

   You wouldn’t let a writer put their work in the paper without having someone check it, so why let commenters do so? If you’re going to have people posting comments to your site, it should be someone’s job to moderate them. Think of them as the editor of the Comment Desk.

   You don’t have to read every comment before it goes online, but it should be somebody’s responsibility to remove any comment that runs afoul of the posted community guidelines. Like graffiti in an urban space, bad comments lead to more bad comments. But the Community Manager should be more than a cop - they should be a vital connection between the staff and the community. They should lead the community by example, participating in the discussion and being helpful, and also do a daily “community weather report” for the staff, feeding the community’s input back into the newsroom.

4. Sculpt the Input

   Just because your users can post comments doesn’t mean you can’t help them shape them.

   Back in the day, when we had people posting comments to Fray, we were constantly tweaking the form’s automated responses. If you tried to post something too short, it asked you to expand on it a bit. If you posted something too long, it asked you to edit yourself down. If you posted in ALLCAPS, we de-capitalized it (Flickr does this now). These are easy things for computers to do, and they make a huge difference.

5. Empower the Community to Help

   If you think bad comments bug you, they bug the good commenters twice as much.

   Yes, you should be paying someone on staff to be the Community Manager. In addition, you can also enable the community to help. Give every post a “This is Bad” button. Then give the community manager a private page where they can see the comments with the most bad votes and take appropriate action.

   For bonus points, give each post a “This is Good” button, too, so they can also tell you about the good ones. Remember that your members are not the enemy: they want to help you keep the place clean, too.

6. Link Stories to Comments

   The worst thing you can do is separate the “community section” away from your content. That creates a backchannel, where people feel safe being inappropriate because, why not? They’re at the kids table, anyway.

   So link stories to community conversations as closely as possible. This will give the conversation a central topic.

7. Enable Private Communication

   The internet didn’t create the angry letter to the editor, but it definitely put it into overdrive. And that’s okay - sometimes people need to vent. Your job is to direct the venting.

   Some papers’ comments are so crazy because there’s no other way for the reader to respond. People will gladly communicate with you privately if you gave them a way to do so.

   So create a form people can use to email the editors, and link to it from the comment form. Say: “If you’d like to say this privately, go over here.” (Props to Vox, where there’s a “Send private message instead” link on every comment form.)

   You may get some angry email this way, but it’s better in your inbox than on the website where it will just start, or add to, a fight.

8. Participate …

   Get your writers involved in the conversation. People chill out a lot when they know they’re being listened to by the writer (and they act out a lot more when they think no one’s listening). I know, writers can find this an onerous addition to their workload, and have probably already decided that they hate their comments. Too bad. This is part of journalism’s evolution, and you’re either on the boat or you’re not.

   One great way to get writers on board is to give them the ability to moderate comments on their own stories. They can do this on their blogs, they should be able to do it on their stories, too. (With supervision by the Community Manager, naturally.)

9. … But Don’t Feed the Trolls

   Members participating with good intentions are generally pleased when the authority figures are participating. Unfortunately, that can also bring out the trolls - bad users who are playing a game called “suck up as much of your time as possible.”

   School your writers in the ways of online community. If someone is trying to get a rise out of you, don’t fight back, no matter how tempting. A good Community Manager can help train writers on how, and when, to join the fray.

10. Give Up Control

    Newsrooms are top-down places, but the internet is not. Get used to the fact that people online won’t do things just because you told them to. In fact, the only thing you can absolutely count on is that something will happen that you didn’t expect. When it does, you’ll be defined by what you do next. Be ready to be surprised.

As you can see, embracing community tools on your site takes work. If you just turn on comments with open-ended tools and no oversight, of course the result won’t be pretty. That’s because you haven’t done the job of an editor - to lead by example, direct the conversation, and sculpt the results.

The real reason comments on newspaper sites suck isn’t that internet commenters suck, it’s that the editors aren’t doing their jobs. If more newspapers implemented these 10 things, I guarantee the quality of their comments would go up. And this is just the basic stuff, mostly unchanged since I wrote Design for Community seven years ago.

Imagine what we could do if we could get past the easy stuff.

+

PREVIOUSLY: This is Not a Comment

UPDATE: Just One Question for Jason Schultz: Does moderating comments on a website make the website owner more liable?

In Internet on 26 July 2008 tagged Media with 9 comments

(With apologies to René Magritte.)

One of my favorite radio shows is On The Media. I’ve been listening to it for years. Their critiques of traditional media are astute and often funny. But when they talk about the internet, they reveal themselves to be the old codgers they are.

This week, host Bob Garfield did a piece ostensibly about the problems newspaper sites have with website comments. Unfortunately it just came out sounding like another old journalist kvetching about how everyone on the net is an idiot. You can listen to the story here.

The story has many problems, not the least of which is the total absence of any actual commenters. But the main one is that Garfield lumps all commenters, and commenting systems, together. On the web, not all comments are created equal.

Yes, if you open your site to comments from people who do not have to register or create an account, you’ll get a lot of unfiltered craziness. That’s because you’re not doing your job as a host. Imagine a newspaper of infinite pages with no editors where anyone with a keyboard could contribute. Sounds fun to me, but not a recipe for consistent thoughtfulness.

That’s why online comment systems have evolved. Take Slashdot’s karma (which has been around for almost 10 years, so there’s no excuse for you to not know about it), which allows readers to rate and filter each other’s comments. Or Amazon’s product reviews (again, around for over 10 years), which are filtered by human editors and then rated by other shoppers. Or wiki systems (again, over a decade) like Wikipedia that allow many people to collaborate on one document.

The story completely missed moderation queues, reputation management systems, or any of the hundreds of comment systems built over the last decade to address this very problem. Garfield seems to base the entire story on some bad comments on the OTM site, a site that provides a completely open, no signup required, comment system. But instead of asking “Is there a better way to do this?” he goes for the much easier story: “Gosh internet commenters sure are dumb!”

This refusal to distinguish between different comment systems is exactly the kind of sloppy journalism that they regularly criticize on the show. I was disappointed to hear it from a source I’d respected for so long. Thank goodness for Ira Glass, host of This American Life, who pushed back on Garfield, saying:

You’re old enough, and I’m old enough, that you were very comfortable with the one-way communication. And I hear you say this, and I feel like you are anti-democratic. You are a royalist. You are upset with democracy itself.

Thank you, Ira. But it’s not just that Garfield is being a snob. He’s also being blind to the real differences in online communities. Chastising all internet commenters for the actions of the loudest, craziest ones is no different that swearing off all newspapers because of Jason Blair.

Of course unmoderated anonymous comments on the internet can be incomprehensibly awful and frustratingly stupid. They can also be heartbreakingly sincere and shatteringly honest. That’s because they’re written by real people, and real people are complicated, messy, and weird.

Garfield and the crew at OTM should know that the process of making journalism is messy, too. They should see comments as part of that process. It’s not the product that matters, it’s the participation. Comments online are just like conversations in newsrooms - sloppy and stupid and often wrong. But they’re the raw stuff that great journalism starts from.

If On The Media really wanted to address this topic, they should explore why some sites have really positive, amazing conversations. What are they doing right that other newspaper sites could learn from? Why were the stories posted to Fray so emotional and honest? How is it that, with so many participants and so much press, Wikipedia is still so qualitatively great?

Oh yeah, and they should pick up a copy of Design for Community, my book from 2001, that’s about exactly this, and more relevant than ever.

I’m sure this story will inspire many comments on their site. There are only a few so far, and most are thoughtful and well-written. (The dumbest one is definitely my own, in which I suggest next time they interview someone under 30.) Let’s hope that, counter to the tone of the story, they’re actually listening.

+

UPDATE: 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments

In Links on 25 July 2008 with 4 comments

• Ask the Reform Rabbi - Will I be denied burial in a Jewish cemetery if I get a tattoo? Answer: No. “I do not know of any rabbi or Jewish cemetery that would refuse to bury a Jew because their body had a tattoo. That would be a terrible violation of the Jewish principle of Kavod Ha-Meit, giving honor to the dead.” (tags: jewish tattoo)
• My Jewish Learning: Tattooing Again: No. “There is no basis for restricting burial to Jews who violate this prohibition or even limiting their participation in synagogue ritual.” (tags: Judaism tattoos)
• Ask The Rabbi: Tattoos Believe me yet? “Even though getting a ‘decorative’ tattoo is considered a sin for a Jew, it doesn’t disqualify one from being buried in a Jewish cemetery.” I’ll add, it’s not my only sin. My neighbor’s wife is HOT. (tags: Judaism tattoos)

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A quick note before a long weekend.

TechCrunch has a much-commented post today about business owners railing against Yelp for negative reviews, and the notion that this is proof of Yelp’s success.

Maybe so, but it remains a problem if the negative reviews are written by spiteful competitors, or conversely if positive reviews are written by shills.

Loladex ensures review reliability, because the audience for any review consists primarily of the reviewer’s social network friends. Why would I bother to write a disingenuous review on Loladex, knowing that my friends would read it? I’d lose credibility.

Yelp and other review sites give the reviewer the option to remain relatively anonymous, or at least pseudonymous. On Loladex, the whole point is to see your friends’ reviews. And friends don’t let friends write fake reviews.

1 Comment | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Dan Goodman

So Rob Curley has left the Washington Post, where he was a high-profile architect of the Post’s vision for “hyperlocal” — a buzzy label for Web products that promise to keep you in touch with your local community.

Curley’s main creation at the Post was LoudounExtra.com, a Web site devoted to Loudoun County, VA, which happens to be Loladex’s home base.  Still in the wings is a similar site for our neighboring county of Fairfax.

Local guru Peter Krasilovsky did a good Curley summation here and a follow-up interview here; I won’t rehash the details.  Instead, I’ll just say that I hope the Post takes this opportunity to retool its approach to hyperlocal.

Why?  After all, doesn’t my hometown newspaper deserve praise for even facing the challenge of hyperlocal?  Among its peers, the Post has been by far the most serious about rethinking its local coverage, right?

Yes, true enough.  But by now it’s clear that Curley’s vision wasn’t terribly fruitful.  The Loudoun site is looking somewhat neglected, for one thing, and I hear that usage isn’t great.  The key problem, however, remains one of conception.

The issue, in short: Curley elected to build the Post’s hyperlocal strategy around … a countywide site?

Fact is, LoudounExtra.com is no more local than the twice-weekly printed section that the Post was already devoting to Loudoun.  Calling the Web site “hyperlocal” makes sense only for someone looking down from 30,000 feet. 

OK, so the Web site has some extra headcount and is updated several times daily.  It can cover more stuff than the print version.  It also supplements its coverage by pointing at other news sources.

And it has built a few specialized databases: Restaurants, churches, schools.

But none of this is new or especially Web-oriented.  If the Post had given its print staff a bundle of money and permission to publish the Loudoun section daily, I suspect we’d be looking at much the same thing.

Curley tells Peter K. that the new Fairfax site will be more granular — since Fairfax has a population of 1 million, four times as big as Loudoun’s, I’d hope so — and will be accessible via town-specific URLs that presumably will produce different-looking home pages.

I guess we’ll see, but I doubt it’ll feel truly local.  If it were really a town-specific approach, why would they call it Fairfax Extra?

So what is hyperlocal, if not the Curley vision?

Here’s my own definition: It’s the things we wonder about as we walk (or drive) the streets of our community.  Today, for instance, I was thinking —

•  What’s with that used-book store?  The sign in its window seems to say its business is failing.

•  What’s the asking price for that house?  What does it look like inside?  Why are they selling, anyway? 

•  Have any of my friends been to that new restaurant?  Could I take the kids?

You were thinking completely different things, I’m sure.  And that’s the point: Hyperlocal should be relevant to you.  It should be about your day-to-day concerns in your local community.  Those definitions are personal, so hyperlocal must be personal, too.  And LoudounExtra.com just ain’t.

Even though I live in Loudoun County, for instance, I don’t care about a house fire in Sterling.  Even though I live in Leesburg, I don’t care that the Raiders made it to the state softball tournament.  Stories like these fall outside my personal radius of interest — geo interest, or subject interest, or both.

A plain old local site might not understand this.  It might be the same for everyone, like a newspaper.  But a hyperlocal site should understand personal radii.  If I must wade through irrelevant content when I enter, it’s not hyperlocal enough.

What’s more, house fires and softball tourneys are the same old newspaper fare.  Even the Post’s designated local bloggers mostly do newspaper-style reporting, albeit with an occasional “I” or “me” thrown in.

If it wants to become more relevant locally, the Post must move toward a model that’s more social … more conversational … more authentic … less mediated.  It must give us what newspapers usually don’t: The voices of our neighbors and friends.

To do this, a site must leverage its community.  It must facilitate conversations.

No one knows the exact right mix of editorial and community, of course.  And there are other ingredients that add complexity, such as data and feeds and photos.  It’s not easy.

Still, I can recognize the wrong mix.  I recall being taken aback last year when Curley was quoted in a New York Times story about the launch of LoudounExtra.com:

“Most hyperlocal sites are 100 percent community publishing sites,” Mr. Curley said. “This is 1 percent community publishing.”

OK, so 100 percent community isn’t right.  No argument there.  But 1 percent is far, far worse.

Now if only Curley had said LoudounExtra.com is “38 percent community publishing,” I might have called him a genius.

There are plenty of hyperlocal models out there besides the Post.  In fairness, none has nailed this formula.  Many national efforts work by aggregating other news outlets and blogs, sometimes with a paid human thrown in for flavor: Outside.in and Topix and Marchex’s new just-killed [see comments] MyZip Network come to mind.  None of them work quite right.

A site that’s far closer to capturing the hyperlocal spirit, I think, is Brownstoner in Brooklyn, NY.  It’s mostly a blog, and it’s run by Jonathan Butler, a former colleague from my magazine days.

Brownstoner isn’t exactly hyperlocal, because it covers all of Brooklyn.  But the site works because it speaks to an audience that shares a state of mind — urban homesteaders, I guess you’d call them — and somehow makes the huge borough seem like a single neighborhood.

It’s missing some local staples (sports, for instance), but with its mix of bloggers and attitude, plus its clever focus on real estate, it artfully captures the essence of living in, say, Cobble Hill.

This inspires tremendous engagement among its users: Brownstoner’s very frequent blog posts often draw many dozens of comments within hours.  By contrast, today’s top two most-commented stories on LoudounExtra.com (which admittedly covers far less territory) had 6 comments between them.

So, my thought for the day:

Take a curated blog approach, where selected amateurs and semi-pros post frequently (like Brownstoner).  Combine it with the news stream of a social network and utilities such as (ahem) Loladex.  Add smart feeds for real estate listings and crime and government and other media and other blogs.

Give users the tools to participate in every conversation, and make it clear that their participation is central to the site. 

Allow users to specify what they care about.  Enable them to enjoy their personalized mix via the Web site, or their RSS reader, or their e-mail, or their phone.

Finally, deliver this all with a minimum of filigree — just a stream of highly relevant items in the manner of Facebook’s News Feed.

That would be hyperlocal, I think.  The pulse of your community.

I wish the Post would do something like this, because I’d use it.  Meanwhile, I haven’t used LoudounExtra.com for months.  And I suspect I’m not alone.

5 Comments | Social search | Tagged: Marchex, Outside.in, Topix, Washington Post | Permalink
Posted by Laurence Hooper

A brontobyte…I’m not kidding…is a million billion terabytes.  That’s a lot of info.

Before I continue, let me explicitly state, I’m not taking sides … in this blog, anyway … on the race for the White House. My mind is made up. It’s just not relevant to this post, which is about how both presumptive candidates are prone to detail-oriented gaffes that rankle their detractors and drive their supporters to sheepish apologies. And how tools to steer through information overload are related.

McCain mixes up Sunnis and Shiites. Now Obama mixes up living versus dead veterans. Is it important to distinguish between religious sects that have been at each other’s throats for a thousand years?  Or between the living and the dead?  Well, of course.  But today I’m going to apologize for both candidates and say, there is just a freakin’ lot of information to keep track of.

It’s hard to imagine Washington or Lincoln or Roosevelt making such seemingly silly statements. And it’s easy to blame modern media for exposing every little thing that a politician says, but that doesn’t help defend McCain and Obama, who have said regrettable things in major forums.

No, in addition to having thousands of lenses and microphones constantly focused on them, information overload has got to be taking a toll.  We want our leaders to know everything, and they simply can’t. In the course of trying to appear to know everything, their brains - designed, like ours, for picking out lions in the savanna - are prone to the occasional glitch.

I remember in college discovering that intellectuals of the 1600’s could legitimately claim to know just about everything there was to know. It was possible to simultaneously be a scientist, politician, novelist and architect. In the 1800’s Lincoln really had just a handful of countries to worry about. News traveled slowly so he had time to ponder his famous speeches, and to prepare for his famous debates. Even in the twentieth century, sources of information were limited, and reactions to events tightly controlled by the very fact that few media channels existed to convey information.

No more. Information in a dizzying variety of detail exists about everything, and is available in real time. In their effort to absorb information about what’s relevant, it’s not surprising to me that the two - three, if you insist - people vying for leadership of the United States occasionally mix things up.

With so many sources of information out there, everyone needs filters, and one of the best filters any of us has is the vetting that is done by people we trust. In 1975 everyone trusted Walter Cronkite to tell them “how it is.” The Yellow Pages was a book, not just a concept. And if you didn’t know where to find something, you called a friend or asked a neighbor, who, by the way, also helped you decide, through your conversation, whether to trust Cronkite in the first place.

The online world needs this vetting process, and social networking is ideally suited to it. Linked In helped pioneer circles of trust. Facebook is bringing it to the masses. And Loladex and others are taking advantage of it to help people cut through mushrooming piles of information to make important decisions.

I don’t know yet whether these trends will help presidential candidates tell Ahmedinijad apart from Bin Laden, or Patton from Petraeus, but the need to improve ways to sift through information is very real, and thankfully being addressed.

No Comments » | Social commentary, Social search | Permalink
Posted by Dan Goodman

Via Andrew Shotland, I recently saw this post.  I know I’ll be called naive, but I was surprised at its blatancy.

This guy Stephen Espinosa (whom I don’t know) helps local businesses promote themselves online.  His advice is to get your “clients” to post reviews on popular sites — the quote marks are his, and he adds a smiley face in case we don’t get it:

I won’t spell it out fully, since he doesn’t, but this seems like an opportune moment to talk about fake reviews.

You need spend only a few minutes on most rate-and-review sites to understand that they contain fake reviews.  There are fake positive reviews posted by the business owners, and fake negative reviews posted by their competitors.  Many are amateurish and easy to identify if you’re looking for them, though I suspect that some casual users don’t realize they’re fake.

I’ve never put much store in reviews by strangers.  Still, I always thought that out-and-out fakes were a fairly limited and unorganized phenomenon.  Now that I see they might be promoted more systematically, I’ve lost confidence that I can even spot a fake.

Furthermore, I expect that such fakery will spread and become more sophisticated.  As local search reaches critical mass, it’ll be hard to trust anything.

I used to believe, for instance, that a Yelp reviewer with 10+ reviews and some kudos from friends was almost certainly a real person.  That’s probably still a safe assumption — but will it be next year?

If I’m a certain type of SEO consultant, right now I’m probably setting up a network of hundreds of fake Yelpers.  They’ll all have real-looking pictures, real-sounding profiles, and lots of reviews (some even genuine).  They’ll send each other kudos, enhancing each others’ credibility. 

And they’ll exist solely so I can be paid to deploy them for the benefit of my clients.

If done properly, this sort of fakery will be very hard to detect.  Probably the only way I’d get caught would be to advertise the service — or to include quote marks and smiley faces when I blogged about it.

And this is just the truly fake reviews.  There’s still reviews from friends of the business owner, and “real” reviews that have been solicited directly by business owners, some of whom will give discounts in exchange for posting on … well, on a certain site.

In such a world, reviews by strangers become devalued and personal trust is at a premium.

Not so long ago I heard that we need to see, on average, 20 reviews from strangers before we’ll believe the prevalent opinion that’s being expressed.

What will that number be in the future?  50?  100?

Wouldn’t it be simpler and better to get your advice from people you know and trust? 

Via, say, Loladex?

1 Comment | Local search, Loladex | Tagged: Yelp | Permalink
Posted by Laurence Hooper

My previous post was about why you’d want to use Loladex.  This post is about the nitty-gritty of getting people to do so.

Fair warning: If you don’t care about the inner workings of Facebook, this may not fascinate you.

OK, so we have this Loladex product.  Among other things, it allows you to ask your friends for advice on local businesses.  You might need help finding a good electrician, for instance.

Because Loladex delivers advice from your friends, it works best when it’s hooked into a social network.  And among the social networks, we like Facebook best: It’s unmatched in its combination of audience size, integration tools, and viral channels.

So we launched Loladex on Facebook.

And two months later we still like Facebook.  But …

But even on Facebook, our users can’t be fully social.  And therefore they can’t get the full benefit of Loladex.  It’s harder than I’d like, for example, to ask my friends if they know … well, a good electrician.

This isn’t just a problem for us.  It’s Facebook’s problem, too, because real-life applications like Loladex are what Facebook needs in order to build long-term relevance.

So far our biggest issues have been:

1. Facebook’s lack of clarity about how its own systems work; and
2. The poisoned atmosphere that’s been created by many Facebook applications.

First, lack of clarity about Facebook’s internal workings.

For sure, this is partly our own fault.  We’re still climbing the Facebook learning curve.  Sometimes we just don’t know where to look for information.

Also, Facebook is a young company, moving quickly and constantly changing its own rules.  It’s just about to launch a big redesign, for example, and we don’t really know how it’ll affect us.  We accept that.

But Facebook makes things worse by being deliberately mysterious about some of its key features.  A classic example is the News Feed that appears on everyone’s Facebook home page.

If you’re a Facebook user, you’re familiar with the News Feed: It shows you what your friends have been doing and saying on Facebook, and sometimes on other sites too.  In an ideal world, Loladex could use it as a reliable communication channel.

The thing is, your News Feed shows only a small slice of your friends’ activity.  Facebook decides which items will (and won’t) be displayed.  It does so the same way Google assembles its search-results pages — via an algorithm that it changes often and will describe only vaguely.

There’s a reason for this, of course.  Like the Google search-results page, the News Feed is valuable real estate.  Publish an exact formula and it’ll be abused by spammers and others.

Still, the secrecy means we must work within an uncertain system.  We follow Facebook’s guidelines, but often it doesn’t help.  So we dive into the many long, geeky Facebook discussions that have flowered across the Web.  Some tips are helpful, others are either outdated or wrong.

Sorting through all this vague and unreliable information is a time drain for Loladex.  Experimenting with different methods, even more so.  But both are necessary, unfortunately.

To complicate mattters, it’s tough to know when we’ve solved a problem.  Unlike Google, where everyone sees the same search-results page (more or less), everyone’s News Feed is different.  Even when something seems to work, it may not be working for everyone.

OK, now for our second big issue: The bad faith of many Facebook applications.

Simply put, Facebook’s utility is being crippled by all the dumb, spammy and downright abusive applications it enables.  See below for a typical example of how such applications spread: 

These black hats make it difficult for Loladex to build a white-hat application, for at least two big reasons:

1. Rather than making communication easier among its users, Facebook has been making it harder.  It has tried to devise formulas that’ll penalize only “bad” applications, but everyone gets snagged to some degree.
2. Because of the ongoing torrent of crap, some Facebook users have stopped clicking any buttons that might send a message to their friends.  Many also ignore every single invitation they get.  Or if they add an app, they disable the very communication features that’ll make it work properly. 

The net effect is a big damper on Facebook’s potential, and a tougher task for Loladex.

I remain a fan of Facebook, but I’m not sure it understands the depth of its problem here.  I’m reminded of when AOL was reviled for assaulting its users with pop-up ads.  Eventually management shut them down, but it took too long and there were too many half-measures along the way.  AOL was definitely hurt; arguably, it never recovered.

So what’s to be done?  How do we overcome these issues so that Loladex users can get the most from Facebook?

In the short run, we’re working on our own solutions.  I’ll blog about them as we roll them out in the coming weeks.

In the medium run, though, I believe Facebook must make some changes.

Specifically, Facebook must start discriminating between applications — and not just via its algorithms, a tactic that ultimately punishes its users.  Besides policing bad apps, Facebook should be using human beings to identify and favor applications that can be useful in people’s regular lives, because their growth is in the company’s strategic interest.

Exactly how to favor such apps is up to Facebook.  I would suggest easier access to the News Feed and a more prominent “request” mechanism, achieved via clear procedures that don’t need to be secret because they’re open only to approved applications.

Whatever the method, it’d be refreshing to see Facebook focus once again on making communication easier — not on shutting it down.

In this vein, there have been rumblings lately, apparently false, that the company might add a “preferred developer” or “preferred application” program.  I would welcome such a program, and I’d happily pay to participate.

If I were Facebook, I’d make it work something like this:

•  Applications must fall into categories that are judged to be strategic to Facebook.  The list of categories could start small & be expanded.

•  Applications must have existed for X weeks, and during that period must have met minimum standards for non-spamminess.

•  Applications must follow all of Facebook’s rules and recommended practices.  (Facebook should be documenting more of these rules and practices.)

•  As a token of their seriousness, developers pay an upfront fee to participate.  In return, Facebook gives them an equivalent advertising credit.

•  Developers include a prominent, standardized way for users to complain to Facebook, which hires user advocates to field these complaints.  The process should be human: If developers don’t work in good faith to fix problems, the advocates may yank their privileges.

•  Approved applications are clearly identified as “safe” by Facebook to its users.

The exact mechanics don’t matter, however.  The main thing is, this requires human intervention.  Facebook can’t rely on statistics alone to recognize and promote the applications that will turn it into a fully functioning community.

Which categories and applications should be promoted?  Again, that’s up to Facebook.  I don’t know what they’re aiming for, but I’m pretty sure they can’t be thrilled with the current mix, or the resulting assessments of their platform.

In any rational process, I’m confident that applications such as Loladex will be part of the solution.  As such, they should get more help than, say, Vibrating Hamster — which may be a part of the solution itself, I suppose, but for an entirely different problem.

1 Comment | Loladex, Social search | Tagged: Facebook | Permalink
Posted by Laurence Hooper

Why would anyone start using Loladex?  We get asked this question a lot.

I’ve posted before about the chicken-and-egg issue, albeit in general terms.  Probably I should update those thoughts: Since we started focusing on social networks, we’ve learned a bunch.

But for now, let me address Loladex’s specific challenge: How do we motivate people to rate local businesses via a Facebook application?  Why would anyone do such a thing?

Well, for many reasons, of course.  One day I’ll list them all.  But I’d like to highlight one reason in particular, partly because I think it’s powerful and partly because it illustrates a big difference between Loladex and two of its biggest competitors — Yelp and Angie’s List.

Here it is: Loladex believes people will rate local businesses to help their friends.

By friends, I mostly mean actual, real-world friends.  People you might have dinner with.  For most folks, that’s a subset of “Facebook friends.”

Let’s get specific.  Why would anyone use Loladex to rate, let’s say, a plumber?  Or a pediatric gastroenterologist?  Certainly it’s not something you do on a whim.  Loladex won’t be running ads that say “Rate pediatric gastroenterologists!” — and if we did, we wouldn’t expect many clicks.

But suppose you were asked directly by a friend whose kid needed a medical specialist?  If you knew of a good gastroenterologist, would you take a minute to make the recommendation?  If you were seeking such a specialist, would you value this sort of recommendation?

We think so.  Such recommendations are an everyday part of friendship, and numerous surveys tag them as a more powerful force than the Yellow Pages, a $14 billion industry.

With Loladex, we want to provide a channel for these person-to-person recommendations.

Contrast this to Yelp.  I always say I like Yelp — and I do — but Yelp isn’t about helping your real-world friends.  By and large, the people who rate businesses on Yelp do it for reasons of (a) self-expression; and (b) social standing in an online community that may overlap with their real-world friends, but doesn’t have to.

These mostly twentysomething Yelpers provide a service for us all, God love them.  But it’s almost never a person-to-person transaction.  Also, the motivation to rate something on Yelp fades quickly outside its core realm of restaurants & other social venues.

Or consider Angie’s List.  I’m not a fan of Angie’s List, simply because it’s a subscription service.  If it were free, I’d love it.  They’ve built something that’s clearly valuable to their users — and they’ve focused their brand admirably, defining it around home services.

Again, though, Angie’s List isn’t about helping your real-world friends.  It’s mostly a community of cooperating strangers who share ratings because they understand the value of the site’s virtuous circle.  There’s an implicit quid pro quo.

Both Yelp and Angie’s List have powerful models.  Loladex aims to tap many of the same motivations; we’d be silly not to.  But mainly we’re about recommendations from your friends.  We’re trying to bring this everyday personal interaction into your online world.

OK, so much for the theory.  How’s the “help a friend” strategy working for us, specifically on Facebook?

To be honest, it’s a learning experience.

More in Part 2. 

1 Comment | Competitors, Local search, Loladex, Social search | Tagged: Angie's List, Facebook, Yelp | Permalink
Posted by Laurence Hooper

Maybe it’s the steady stream of ex-AOLers. Maybe it’s increasing numbers of tech-minded graduates from local universities. Whatever the reason, there’s a thriving and energetic new media community in the greater DC area, and it’s exciting to be a part of it.

The latest round of Frank Gruber’s (Somewhat Frank) Tech Cocktail series took place last night in DuPont Circle, and as usual when it comes to this crowd, it was packed with people with great ideas. I shared demo space with Ann Bernard of Why Go Solo, who’s also spearheading the upcoming Social Dev Camp East. And everywhere I looked in the room there were newly familiar faces from the DC New Media community.

For weeks I’ve been hearing Frank, Ann, Jimmy Gardner, Nick O’Neill and others pump up the vibrancy of the community, and stress the importance of nurturing it. It’s hitting home in a big way. I haven’t lived day-to-day in Silicon Valley, but it’s gratifying to witness first-hand how an entrepreneurial community can fuel itself.

Where does the community go from here, especially in uncertain economic times? In part because of what Loladex is all about, my personal definition of New Media revolves around social networking, which has only scratched the surface of what it can do. Humans have been social networking for a hundred thousand years, and we’re only beginning to figure out how to use the great communications innovation of the 20th Century - the Internet - to facilitate and supercharge social networking.

In the DC area, it’s natural to look for government applications to increase their use of social networking concepts, in conjunction with developments in Enterprise 2.0. Associations and advocacy organizations have been quicker to adopt social networking practices, and the concentration of these organizations in DC ought to appeal to local innovators.

Some have complained about the lack of attention DC’s New Media community gets, but as long events like Tech Cocktail DC keep happening and keep drawing capacity crowds, it won’t go unnoticed for very long.

3 Comments | Being a startup, DC tech community | Permalink
Posted by Dan Goodman

Mashable   posted this morning on a yet-to-be-released service from a couple of ex-Googlers, code-named Mechanical Zoo, that lets you search the social datastream. This is a great idea, and like so many things, reminds me of a cartoon, in this case an old Schoolhouse Rock jingle about nouns that was going through my head yesterday. The best kind of local search (for places) takes advantage of things (computers and software) and people (human interaction a la Mahalo).

Using the social datastream to get answers to find a restaurant recommendation, for example, is sort of like shouting out in a crowd, at the top of your lungs “hey, anyone know of a good restaurant?” OK, it’s better than that, because with Twitter and similar tools, you know your voice has a chance to get heard, and you can listen to the responses clearly above the din.

Adding search to the social datastream is like having the ability to listen to the echoes of everyone’s responses, and cut straight through to exactly what you want to hear. Using search in this context lets you instantly query a large number of people, and manage their responses efficiently. If you’re looking for something local, specifically, it’s a way for people to help you find places. It uses things (computers), of course, but not completely.

What’s missing in this scenario is a structured database of past questions and responses, categorized by query type. If I ask the social datastream for a restaurant recommendation, I’m very happy to get direct responses to my query. But if I search the echoes for past mentions of restaurants, I don’t want my search results to contain a feed item that says “ran into the awful ex at a restaurant last night.” What I want is a thing (database) that understands at some level what a restaurant is.

Here at Loladex we start from the perspective of the structured database, so a search for a restaurant only returns actual restaurants. We take advantage of social concepts to return results to users based on recommendations from their friends. And we allow users to query their friends directly. We take full advantage of input from people and the power of things to help users find places. We already integrate with the social datastream by publishing users’ recommendations to Facebook feeds, and there’s more to come.

People, Places and Things. Always something to be learned from a cartoon. Which reminds me. Gotta mark the calendar for the opening of Speed Racer. Between that and Schoolhouse Rock, does that date me, or what?

No Comments » | Local search, Social search | Permalink
Posted by Dan Goodman

People have been asking me this question lately.  My honest answer is: Being bone-tired but not yielding to sleep.

Not like I’ve never been tired before: We have four kids, after all.  But this is a new level, a new test of my will.

Every evening, for instance, I put my youngest daughter to bed.  We sit on the floor of her room and I read her stories.  She’s a toddler, so these are picture books: Maisy, Kipper, etc.

Most days, this is the first time I feel a sense of relaxation.  And that’s all it takes.  My guard is down, and I fall asleep sitting there.  My daughter wanders off, and I don’t snap back to life until she starts bugging one of her siblings.

Then comes the hard part: Realizing that the night is young.  After family time, and time with my wife, looms another shift at work.

I guess that’s what Red Bull is for.  Except I don’t drink it.

No Comments » | Being a startup | Permalink
Posted by Laurence Hooper

In my last post I did quick sketches of 14 Facebook apps with a local-search element.  I’m not considering Loladex at the moment, because we just launched.

OK, time for a reality check.  (You may be depressed by the following.)

The most popular app of the bunch, TripAdvisor’s Local Picks, has fewer than 2,000 “active” users = daily users, more or less.  Per Adonomics, it’s the 859th-ranked application on Facebook right now, lagging behind things like Vibrating Hamster at #673.

Like many Facebook apps, Local Picks rose fast and fell fast.  At one point in December 2007, it clocked more than 100,000 active users, but it’s fallen below 10,000 for most of 2008 — below 5,000 for the past two months.

More worrisome is the fact that, despite its collapse, Local Picks still has more daily users than the other 13 apps on my list combined.  Almost twice as many, in fact.

The second most popular app on my list is Restaurants by Hungry Machine with more than 500 daily users, down from a peak of more than 10,000.

And that application, in turn, has as many users as the remaining 12 apps combined.

In short, local-search usage on Facebook is loooooow right now.  And it’s heavily concentrated in a couple of apps, both of which have cratered in 2008. Based on Adonomics charts, I suspect that only a few other apps have any life in them:

•  DoYa? may be building a bit, perhaps based on its gift-cert giveaway

•  My Restaurants looks to have a small core of regular users that isn’t shrinking

•  iEat seems to be growing somewhat

But obviously, the numbers here are fairly inconsequential.  DoYa? is the biggest of the three, with 215 active users.

So — yikes, right?

Yes and no.

On the one hand, it’s easy to see how Jon Carder of MojoPages concluded that local search isn’t worth doing on Facebook.  (See earlier post.)  On the other hand, I think we can learn some things that’ll help us crack the code:

•  Recognize the potential. Local Picks is a good app, and it grew nicely in November and December to top 100,000 active users. That’s a number worth noting. OK, in December it suddenly crashed. Maybe someone can tell me why?

•  Leverage success. The two biggest apps have more popular “sibling” products on Facebook; none of the others do. Hungry Machine explicitly presents its apps as part of a family, using a toolbar to link between them. TripAdvisor doesn’t do this, but it does some lesser cross-promotion from Cities I’ve Visited. Most of us can’t draft off an earlier app, but there are other ways to apply the lesson.

•  Attract repeat users. Most local apps either never took off, or peaked and then fell off a cliff. But several — Eating and Hangouts, for instance — took off and then went into a slow fade. While a fade isn’t as good as a rise, it’s better than falling off a cliff: These apps didn’t lose people immediately. Interestingly, they share a focus on broadcasting “status”-type messages, which may be a key to keeping users engaged.

•  Keep working the problem. It’s striking how many Facebook apps are abandoned, more or less, once they start losing users. The charts tell the story: No secondary upward blips as new solutions are tried. The users are allowed to melt away. This isn’t limited to local, of course. Building a Facebook app is an experiment rather than a strategy for many developers, and it shows. But given the potential of local — and its importance to some of these players — I’d expect a bit more dedication to figuring out what works.

That’s the end of this little series of posts. Soon I’ll tackle the question of how Loladex can avoid the fate of its Facebook competitors.

4 Comments | Competitors, Local search, Social search | Tagged: DoYa, Hungry Machine, MojoPages, TripAdvisor | Permalink
Posted by Laurence Hooper

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