Sunday, December 26, 2004

Steve Gillmor says that the NY Times has changed its archive policy. Apparently all links older than a week are gone, even if they have the magic bits on them. If this is true, it's quite disappointing, now only the BBC maintains an archive of news stories. I've been pointing to Times articles on the assumption that they would keep working over the years. Perhaps this is just a technical glitch. I've sent a note to people at the Times asking for clarification. [Scripting News] UPDATE: I just tried a link from last month and another from last year, both with the magic bits. Both appeared to work. 8:08:52 PM    comment []

SUNDAY COMICS [Begging To Differ] 8:08:41 PM    comment []

Sunday News Quiz. I'll give you 10 news stories from the past few weeks and you tell me what they all have in common. By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN. [NYT > Opinion] 11:00:26 AM    comment []

Roland's Sunday Smart Trends #38. Here is my weekly selection of articles that were not commented here -- except if I missed them.  . . . 'Video Miners' Use Hidden Cameras in Stores "Video mining" is an emerging field in marketing research that is enabled by technology that analyzes video images without relying on human eyes. [Here is an example of what are doing 'video miners' such as ShopperTrak.] Using proprietary software to gauge the size of the images of people, a ShopperTrak computer determined that Ms. Munro was an adult, not a child, and thus a bona fide shopper. Weeding out youngsters is critical in accurately calculating one of the valuable bits of data ShopperTrak sells -- the percentage of shoppers that buys and the percentage that only browses. It arrives at this data, including the so-called conversion rate, by comparing the number of people taped entering the store with the number of transactions. Source: Joseph Pereira, The Wall Street Journal, via the Portsmouth Herald, December 21, 2004 (no registration needed) Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow When a snowplow driver spraying salt on frozen roads in Hyannis cracked the window of a parked car in March, state highway officials knew whom to blame. They looked up records from the Global Positioning System satellite network and found which contractor was plowing the road at that time. They then referred the angry driver to him. The incident is just one of dozens that have convinced state officials that GPS, used for the first time last winter, has been an unqualified success. Source: Sasha Talcott, The Boston Globe, December 20, 2004  . . . ID System Gets in Face of Criminals The Los Angeles Police Department is seeking half a million dollars from the federal government to expand the use of advanced facial-recognition systems to identify criminal suspects. Civil liberties advocates are less enthusiastic about the technology, questioning its reliability and the privacy issues it raises. Source: Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times, December 25, 2004 (no registration needed)  . . . See you next week... [Smart Mobs] 10:59:36 AM    comment []

Disassembly Required. Toy makers want their packaging to protect and show off their products, often at the expense of customers who want to get to the toy after it's been purchased. By HENRY PETROSKI. [NYT > Opinion] 10:59:23 AM    comment []

Last week's Gillmor Gang. Yesterday I listened to the identity discussion on The Gillmor Gang. It was very good, as far as it went, but it couldn't go very far, because identity doesn't go very far. This is one of the big problems that refuses to get solved. Like Jon Udell, I expected us to have a global identity system a long time ago. Doc Searls, bless his heart, offered RSS and podcasting as examples of technologies that were simple, therefore successful, and suggests that identity, if it were to be approached the same way, might have similar success. Bzzzt. Wrong. RSS was not easy, it was hard, for exactly the same reasons identity is hard. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Two ways to do identity is one too many. Politics spoiled identity, and would have spoiled RSS had the major players not converged on RSS 2.0. The difference this time was that there was a Switzerland, me, to guide RSS through its gauntlet, and I clearly wasn't in bed with any of the major publishers or vendors. The Harvard connection didn't hurt because it's a highly respected university that hadn't been involved in tech standards. Had identity had that kind of champion-ship it might not be the mess it is today. Instead, when Microsoft started moving behind the scenes in 1997, it was also busy losing the trust of the tech industry, the government, and probably to some extent, the public, by attacking Netscape and the Web. When we tell the history of this chapter of computing history, the costs of Microsoft's aggression will be seen to be very high, not just for them, but for all of us. Now we're stuck, we don't have a leader to turn to to settle the mess of identity. [Scripting News] Agree about Microsoft. Dave's entirely right. But not about what falls out from it. It seems to me that one of the reasons we haven't solved the identity problem is precisely that not everyone agrees there's an identity problem on the Internet. The Net was built and grew up without identity, hence, everything we do now on the Net we do without it. Pretty good so far, huh? We give something up to move from what we have to any identity system, and so far the arguments that we benefit on net aren't anywhere near universally persuasive (let alone sound). Identity trades against anonymity, hence against privacy. All manner of schemes well short of identity -- say, look! like the ones we used the last month and change to do our cool, holiday-related Internet commerce -- satisfy many of our identity-related, legitimate needs, without sacrificing (too much) privacy. I've agreed with a lot of the Doc Searls I've read, but often not when it comes to identity. Monoculture = bad; diverse identity ecosystem = good. 7:50:58 AM    comment []

Small Texas town sees 1st white Christmas in 86 years. On CNN [NewsIsFree: Popular Items] . . . and additional winter-weather-related stories and illustrations . . . 7:37:15 AM    comment []

At I.B.M., That Google Thing Is So Yesterday. I.B.M. is attempting to develop a new search technology that will extract the underlying meaning from stored material no matter how it is structured. By JAMES FALLOWS. [NYT > Technology] Uh huh. Right. 7:36:38 AM    comment []

Fast Food Takes a Bite Out of Chinese Culture [Washington Post: Top News] 7:34:05 AM    comment []

Pedigree of Recent Tenure-Track Hires at Top PhD Programs in Philosophy. Dr. Michael Pelczar from the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore writes:The thread in your site on publication and hiring prompted me to do some informal fact finding. I thought that there might be some interest in... [Leiter Reports] I visited the websites of the top 50 U.S. philosophy programs as reported in the latest (2004-06) edition of the Gourmet Report, and identified all the faculty members of these departments who received their PhDs in 1999 or since. There are 108 of these, by my count. (I may have missed a few, since in a handful of cases it wasn't clear when the degree was conferred.) For each faculty member, I looked up the Gourmet Report ranking of his or her PhD program at the time that he or she graduated, and for the two years prior to that. (I treated Oxford and ANU as top ten programs.) Of 108 individuals, 81 graduated from top 10 departments, 97 from top 20 departments, 103 from top 30 departments, and 106 from ranked departments. So: Top 10:  75% Top 20:  90% Top 30:  95% Ranked: 98% I don't draw any conclusions from these numbers, besides the obvious one that ranked departments have a strong preference for junior candidates from top 20 programs. Remember, of course, that categories like "top 10" and "top 20" may include slightly more than 10 or 20 faculties, because of ties. Not too surprising. Worth having my grad-school-bound students keep in mind. 7:27:55 AM    comment []