ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

This interview with Craig Silverstein, Google’s first hire, by Mike Swift, writing for the Mercury News, indicates there is little hope for Google or corporate news organizations. Swift writes that Silverstein defends “charges that the company ‘sold out’ in its proposed deal with Verizon over net neutrality.” Nothing of the sort happens in the published version of the interview, where Silverstein acknowledges that the Verizon proposal was a pragmatic compromise that wouldn’t have happened five years ago. Silverstein’s net worth—the actual purpose of Swift’s interview—“has been estimated somewhere north of US$800 million.”

ESRD

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned Fresenius Medical Care that the latter had not fixed problems with its Liberty Casettes, Naturalyte Acid Concentrate, and Phoslo products. Regarding the Liberty Cassettes product, the FDA wrote, “Your firm failed to follow your health hazard assessment procedure in that you failed to identify any actions to reduce the risk of Liberty Cassettes in commercial distribution.” Reportedly there was a problem with leakage during dialysis treatments that Fresenius identified and rectified. But Fresenius failed to resolve the problems with units already in the distribution chain. With regard to the Naturalyte Acid Concentrate product, patients were using the wrong concentration because of usability issues with the product’s labeling. The FDA also expressed concern about problems with Fresenius’s Phoslo, found to contain grease.

Intellectual property

Cory Doctorow has a stellar follow-up, “The real cost of free,” to a sloppily written and researched article, “The cost of free” by Hleienne Lindvall. After schooling Lindvall on his speaking fees and arrangements, Doctorow goes on to explain why he speaks regularly for free or almost so: “The topic I leave my family and my desk to talk to people all over the world about is the risks to freedom arising from the failure of copyright giants to adapt to a world where it’s impossible to prevent copying. Because it is impossible. Despite 15 long years of the copyright wars, despite draconian laws and savage penalties, despite secret treaties and widespread censorship, despite millions spent on ill-advised copy-prevention tools, more copying takes place today than ever before. ... For me, the answer is simple: if I give away my ebooks under a Creative Commons licence that allows non-commercial sharing, I’ll attract readers who buy hard copies. It’s worked for me – I’ve had books on the New York Times bestseller list for the past two years.”

Internet

If, like me, you use the bit.ly URL shortener, you may want to rethink your strategy. The vb.ly domain was seized by the Libyan domain registrar for violating Libyan Islamic/Sharia law. Because the .ly top-level domain is owned by Libya, all websites running within that top-level domain must comply with Libyan Islamic/Sharia law.

Media

David Carr, writing for the New York Times, has a well-researched piece on Sam Zell’s takeover of the Tribune Company (Chicago Tribune, WGN, Chicago Cubs, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant, and the Orlando Sentinel). Zell, who purchased the Tribune Company for US$8.2 billion, proceeded to run the company straight into the ground, mostly by putting Randy Michaels—who, like Zell, had no newspaper experience—in charge of the media properties. Zell was a real estate developer and just knew that a highly leveraged deal (Zell invested only US$315 million of his own money and raided the company’s pension fund to finance the deal) paired with cutting costs to the bone would be a slam dunk. Less than a year after Zell’s purchase, the Tribune Company was in bankruptcy. Describing how Michaels transformed the culture at the Tribune Company, Carr writes, “... Mr. Michaels’s and his executives’ use of sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective shocked and offended people throughout the company.” Carr goes on to describe Tribune Tower, the palace of the conservative media empire, as a “frat house.” While the company was foundering, Michaels and his buddies were receiving “tens of millions of dollars in bonuses,” according to Carr. Meanwhile, more than 4,200 Tribune Company employees have lost their jobs.

Lou Dobbs, as a blow-hard commentator at CNN, blew hardest against illegal immigrants and especially the employers who hire them. Turns out Dobbs is one of those employers of illegal immigrants against which he railed so strenuously and can add hypocrite to his resume. Issabel Macdonald, writing for the Nation, reports “... Dobbs has relied for years on undocumented labor for the upkeep of his multimillion-dollar estates and the horses he keeps for his 22-year-old daughter…,” writes Macdonald. She notes that Dobbs opined “...‘illegal employers who hire illegal aliens’ should face felony charges…” on his show in April 2006.

Politics

More evidence that the privatization of government services, so cherished by the teabaggers, isn’t working out so well: Subscription-based firefighters in rural Tennessee stood and watched as a family’s house burned to the ground because the family hadn’t paid protection money subscription fees to the fire department. Zaid Jilani, writing for ThinkProgress, gets the hat tip.

It’s no surprise that the US Chamber of Commerce, a 501(c)(6) organization, supports Republicans. And it’s disturbing that as a 501(c)(6) organization, under the US tax code it can raise and distribute unlimited money to political candidates it favors without disclosing its donors. But it’s inexcusable that the organization is soliciting foreign money to do so. Lee Fang, writing for ThinkProgress, reports that “the Chamber funds its political attack campaign out of its general account, which solicits foreign funding.” US campaign finance law clearly bans foreign involvement in US elections.

Privacy

In a last, desperate, flailing attempt to avoid regulation, the advertising industry is trotting out yet another method to allow users to opt out of being tracked online. According to Tanzina Vega, writing for the New York Times, advertisers will place the “Advertising Option Icon” near ads that collect data used for behavioral targeting. When users click on the icon, an explanation of the ad’s display and the opportunity to opt-out will be presented.

Publishing

Dan Gillmor, writing for Salon, has a great analysis of how book publishers are, yet again, shooting themselves in the collective foot. Earlier this year, publishers got in a pissing match with Amazon over ebook prices, and surprisingly won. Amazon had been pricing ebooks at US$10—less than it was paying the publishers—to establish an acceptable price point and to gain market share. Apple helped the publishers avoid an Amazon hegemony by pricing ebooks for its iPad higher. The result was that the publishers migrated from a wholesale model (bookseller sets the price) to an agency model (publisher sets the price). Everyone knew that ebook prices would go up. What no one could have possibly foretold was that the greedy publishers—and that would be every corporate publisher—would be collectively stupid enough to raise ebook prices close to hardcover prices. In a handful of cases, the prices for ebooks actually exceed that of hardcovers.

Sustainability

In 2009, a team of researchers from Conservation International’s Rapid Assessment Program spent two months in the forests of Papua New Guinea looking for new species. According to a recently released report, the researchers found more than 200 previously unrecorded species including a tube-nosed fruit bat, dozens of new frogs, nine new plants, almost 100 new insects, and two new mammals.

When the United Nations’s (UN) Declaration of Human Rights was initially written, access to water as a basic human right was glaringly missing. Earlier this year that was rectified when the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation. As Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN noted when introducing the resolution, 24,000 children die every day from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water and that more children die from lack of access to safe and clean water than from AIDS, malaria, and measles combined. Think the UN resolution is the final word? Not a chance.

Technology

That a Google secret project has seven autonomous cars that have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control is great—a breakthrough even. But instead of working to apply this technology to individually owned vehicles, how about we start with applying it to existing personal rapid transit (PRT) technology. Part of not doing evil would almost certainly include working to serve the greatest number. Autonomous vehicles are still a long way from commercialization—much longer than advocates would like. And once again, the US legal system is failing to keep up, as all applicable traffic law assumes a human driver. As John Markoff writes in his article for the New York Times, “An in the event of an accident, who would be liable—the person behind the wheel or the maker of the software?” The last two grafs of Markoff’s article obliquely refers to PRT in all but name, so maybe Google’s on top of this. But then again, seeing as how Google can build an autonomous car but can’t keep the spam out of its search engine listings, maybe not.

Anne Eisenberg, writing for the New York Times, reports that Alcatel-Lucent has announced a more than doubling of fiber optic bandwidth by using “the polarization and phases of light to encode data” instead of just turning the light itself on and off. “In the new system from Alcatel-Lucent, two binary digits or bits can be encoded by using four phases of light,” Eisenberg writes, citing Alcatel-Lucent scientist Andrew Chraplyvy. “And the polarized light can vibrate up and down or sideways. In this way, four bits of data can be transmitted per time slot instead of one.” Eisenberg reports that Alcatel-Lucent researcher Gabriel Charlet moved data at a rate of 7.2 terabits per second over a single fiber strand for more than 7,000 kilometers. Because the fiber plant that makes up the infrastructure is already in place, bandwidth costs should come down.

User experience

Jakob Nielsen, in his latest Alertbox, reckons that alphabetical sorting of interface elements—in most cases—should be used only as a last resort. Other sorting methods—ordinal sequences, logical structuring, timelines, or prioritization (by importance or frequency) among others—almost always yield more usable results. According to Nielsen, alphabetical sorting is useful only when the user knows the name of the element they want, as in a list of US states or world countries from which the user is expected to pick a single element. In most cases, alphabetical sorting fails because either the user doesn’t know the name of what she’s looking for or the collection of elements “have an inherent logic that dictates a different sort order.”

Mitch Kapor is one of the early funders of LUXr—the lean user experience residency. LUXr is a low-price user experience and design program for startups where teams come together one day each week for three months.

In the broader user experience community recently there has been a struggle over terminology related to the relatively newly anointed practice of content strategy. None of the elements of the practice are new, but the content strategy label seems to be putting some UX practitioners off. Erin Kissane has written a useful article, “What Do Content Strategists Do?,” that addresses the squabble. Writing that her interpretation of content strategy “falls somewhere between traditional editorial leadership, communication strategy, and information management,” Kissane goes on to outline the specific tasks she does in her content strategy practice. I find her model closely resembles my own.