ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Evidence is increasingly slim that any sort of US economic recovery is underway, but at least we’ll have beautiful, informative infographics about how bad it is: Edward Tufte named to President Obama’s Recovery Independent Advisory Panel.

Just as private pension funds are heading for the hills—abandoning the stock market in favor of long-term bonds—public pension funds (like mine) are doubling down on the stock market. Higher returns mean higher risks and investor and former chair of the Texas Pension Review Board, Frederick E. Rowe, tells Mary Williams Walsh, writing for the New York Times, “In effect, they’re [the public pension funds] going to Las Vegas. Double up to catch up.” Experts say assuming an eight percent rate of return is untenable, but “nobody wants to adjust the rate, because liabilities would explode,” Trent May, chief investment officer of Wyoming’s state pension fund told Walsh.

Censorship

Alvin Poussaint is a recognized expert on children’s health. He’s a Harvard Medical School professor and director of the Media Center at the Judge Baker Children’s Center, a Harvard-affiliated children’s mental health center. Last October, Poussaint’s Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood forced Disney to offer full refunds to anyone who purchased Baby Einstein videos from June 2004 - September 2009. Tamar Lewin, writing for the New York Times, reports that “days after the Disney refunds were described on the front page of The New York Times on Oct. 23, campaign officials said they were contacted by Judge Baker officials expressing unhappiness with the group’s activities.” Two weeks after the New York Times story appeared, Poussaint’s campaign was evicted from Harvard. Lewin reports that in a 10 February letter to John Weisz, president of the Judge Baker Center, Poussaint wrote: “... You told me that the mission of CCFC—to protect children from harmful exploitation by corporate marketers—is not in line with the Judge Baker mission. Indeed, we were told that we could no longer criticize any corporations, even if they were exploiting children.” For the last 3.5 years, I’ve been working once again in higher education (I started my career in higher education) and I’ve been struggling to understand just what matters there anymore. This incident significantly clarifies that for me.

Cryptography

Two things have been bothering me about cryptography since the Clinton presidency: Why hasn’t strong public-key cryptography been more widely accepted; and why did the Clinton administration give up on trying to reign it in? Conspiracy theorists will have a field day with that last bit in light of news that University of Michigan researchers have announced a way to circumvent RSA’s strongest encryption. Maybe the intelligence community knew this all along? Turns out that if the voltage on a device using the encryption is manipulated, the private key is exposed.

Internet

Designers have been pining for typography on the web for, well, as long as there’s been a web. For years, the only typefaces safe to use on the web were Arial, Helvetica, Times (and Times New Roman), and Courier (and Courier New). Avant Garde, Bookman, Garamond, and Palatino usually—but not always—work cross-platform. For the last few years Andale Mono, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Georgia, Impact, Trebuchet MS, and Verdana were safe bets. Now comes the @font-face CSS syntax, allowing hypothetically any typeface to be used on the web. Hypothetically because typefaces have to be specifically licensed for web embedding. Font Squirrel’s wonderful @font-face generator is available as a free service and relies on the honor system for users uploading only typefaces licensed for web embedding. The new WOFF font format is supported and three CSS options are available. If only the traditional type foundries (Adobe and Monotype, I’m glaring at you) would license their typefaces for web use.

Privacy

President Barack Obama continues to follow in George W. Bush’s footsteps on matters of civil liberties. Obama supports mandatory DNA testing for everyone arrested in the US, regardless if charges are filed or a conviction is obtained.

Publishing

Joe Clark has a great article at A List Apart, “Web Standards for E-books” that should be required reading for every publisher either already publishing ebooks or contemplating it.

It’s a given that if you sell a publication for Apple’s iPhone/iPad, Apple gets between you and your customer because the only way you can sell your publication is through Apple’s iTunes store. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chair of the New York Times Company, clearly thinks he has a way to route around Apple: “‘Having that direct relationship with our customer is critical,’ Mr. Sulzberger said during the question-and-answer portion of the meeting’s keynote session. ‘We are going to continue to have that, because it’s critical to our business success.’” Is Sulzberger deceiving himself, or does he know something the rest of us don’t?

Former newspaper executive Martin Langeveld offers bullet-points for publishers wondering how to embrace the coming mobile wave. Among his key points: The iPad will have unpredictable impacts on digital behavior but count on a huge increase in mobile shopping; this, in turn, will have a tremendous impact on direct mail and newspaper inserts; close to 70% of adults will use internet-connected mobile devices all day, every day; and we’ve barely started to understand what’s possible.

Technology

Wondering just how bad Apple’s iPhone Developer Program License Agreement (.pdf 684KB) is? Well, it’s pretty bad, including prohibiting making “public statements regarding this Agreement, its terms and conditions, or the relationship of the parties without Apple’s express prior written approval.” And if it wasn’t for the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) ingenious Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, we still wouldn’t know. When NASA released an iPhone app, the EFF made the request. Read it, it’s much worse than you think.

Brad Stone and Miguel Helft have a compelling story in the New York Times about the next round of bare-fisted brawling in Silicon Valley. This time the contenders are Apple and Google. Three quick hit-and-run comments: I wish the story was better sourced; I think Mitch Kapor is dead-bang on when he says, “tight control helps in the beginning, but it tends to choke things in the long term;” and I desperately wish Bill Campbell—instead of trying to broker peace between the two tech companies—would weed his own garden at Intuit with regard to that company’s pitiful Mac software. Finally, the article might be about a death match between Apple and Google, but what it’s really about is the almost total irrelevance of Microsoft in the mobile segment. Okay that was four.

User experience

Are pictures—really big pictures—and infinite zooming the future of the browsing interface, replacing the hypertext link? Microsoft’s Live Labs thinks so, and Frederic Filloux agrees. A gigapixel image contains 2.6 billion pixels. Microsoft’s acquired Seadragon technologies let the user deep-zoom and -pan into that image with a database bringing up only the necessary “tiles” of the image region. One of the demos Filloux was shown was a gigaimage of an entire year of a daily newspaper on a single screen.

Erin Kissane has written an insightful article about how content people are fascinated with—but generally ignore—visual content. Kissane accurately pegs the problem as context disassociation: “content workers must consider the fate of visual content that breaks loose from its original home. Each piece of visual content needs to include a hook back to its source in case it gets passed around separately….” A second problem is basic laziness on the part of web content people. “The web, which gives publishers an opportunity to back up broad overviews with background content and abundant data, has also made it easier and easier for readers to spot fluffy, shallow approaches to communication. Visual content must not become an excuse for presenting only the eyecatching, the easily grasped, and the universally appealing.”

In her third part of an overall analysis of a web design, using MIX Online as a case study,” Tiffani Jones lays out compelling reasons to pay very close attention to content strategy and web writing in any web project. “... problems arise when confusion about what content strategy is meets high expectations, low budgets, and an undefined process,” writes Jones. Ask 10 content strategists about what their areas of responsibility entail, and you’ll get 15 different answers. I don’t completely agree with Jones or one of her core sources, Kristina Halvorson, but at least we’re all in the same ballpark. That said, I’ve got to say that I very much like a lot of how Jones approaches the discovery phase of the MIX Online project and I’ve already stolen part of it. I especially like Nishant Kothary’s visually compelling scatter graph of the methodology for the project from the creative director’s perspective.