ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

In the financial reform bill that isn’t, Senate Republicans threatened to block the legislation unless the proposed tax on big banks and hedge funds was removed. Democrats spinelessly obliged. The compromise? Taking about US$11 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to pay for it. So, instead of the banks paying the cost of re-regulation, the US taxpayers will be footing the bill.

As if you had any doubt, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has published a report by Kathy Ruffing and James R. Horney that clearly shows that George W. Bush’s policies are entirely responsible for the deficits the American citizenry will face over the next decade. “Nevertheless, the fact remains: Together with the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years,” write Ruffing and Horney. Included is a neat takedown of the Heritage Foundation’s most recent propaganda. Highly recommended.

Censorship

Instead of complying with Chinese censorship, last March Google began redirecting searches originating in China to servers in Hong Kong. The Chinese have responded by ordering Google to stop the redirection or lose its ability to conduct business in the country. Google blinked and has stopped redirecting its Chinese search traffic. Dan Gillmor, writing for Salon, reports that Google’s Chinese users can “still get the mostly uncensored Hong Kong results, but now they have to do so via hyperlinks rather than automatically.” Sooner or later Google will have to decide to either cease operations in China or continue to make concessions. “Will its fiduciary duty to shareholders outweigh moral concerns,” Gillmor writes. “Right, silly question.” Silly because American law dictates that the sole responsibility of a corporation is to return profit to its shareholders.

ESRD

Laura Sanders, writing for Wired, cites three independent papers in the 2 July issue of Cell Stem Cell reporting that a routine blood draw can produce stem cells that can form any human tissue type. All three approaches reprogram immune cells into induced pluripotent stem cells.

A New Jersey Superior Court Judge has ruled that a 42-year-old Jamaican home health aide cannot refuse dialysis. The woman’s doctors told the judge she “was overridden with fear of the dialysis machine, partially because, in her view, machines that duplicate bodily functions overly intrude into God’s domain.” The woman was also not convinced she’d most likely die without dialysis. A devout Christian, the woman believed “God would cure her kidneys and prevent her from dying.” When I first started dialysis I remember receiving print material about my treatment options. One of the options outlined was to simply opt-out of all treatment—it was even condoned by the Catholic Church. So, Art Buchwald can refuse dialysis and go off to die (many months later) at home, but a New Jersey judge eliminates an individual’s right to self-determination with a ruling that a woman with less means cannot.

Intellectual property

The US Supreme Court did little to fix the broken American patent system in its decision this week regarding business methods. Bilski and Warsaw applied for a patent on a system that institutions could use to hedge their energy purchasing. The application was denied because the process didn’t meet what’s known as the “machine-or-transformation” test. The process was neither tied to a specific machine nor transformed anything. One glimmer of light was Justice John Paul Stevens writing in a concurring opinion: “The court is quite wrong, in my view, to suggest that any series of steps that is not itself an abstract idea or law of nature may constitute a ‘process.’” Stevens goes on to call for the court to find “business methods are not patentable.”

Internet

NeighborGoods has launched. What a great web application. Enter your zipcode, share your stuff with your neighbors, and borrow their stuff.

Law

Media

Glenn Greenwald, writing for Salon, reports on a new study from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (.pdf; 288KB) finding “evidence of how thoroughly devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than checking) government officials. The students’ study examines how waterboarding has been discussed by the four largest corporate newspapers in the US over the past 100 years. Not surprisingly, waterboarding was almost invariably referred to as torture until the US began using it openly and insisting it wasn’t torture. From that point on, waterboarding is almost never referred to as torture.

Publishing

Jeffrey Zeldman has written the definitive resource guide to publishing ebooks. It succinctly covers everything from BookGlutton’s HTML to ePub Converter and Adobe’s documentation for exporting ePub from InDesign (.pdf; 674KB) to using O’Reilly’s Bookworm and other services and applications to test ePub files before distribution. Now, if only Zeldman would publish ebook versions of the titles he publishes.

Kit Eaton, writing for Fast Company, wonders if AOL’s content farm is journalism or content spam. AOL’s new strategy is to make all of its content fit within 17 “super networks” making it easier to sell advertising against. David Eun, president of AOL’s media and studios division, plans to possibly double his editorial staff from the current 500 editors and 40,000 freelancers. Each piece of content will be “valued” based on the number of click-throughs, time spent on the page, and advertising revenue generated. Eaton quotes Jeff Levick, AOL’s president of global advertising, as verbalizing everything you need to know that this isn’t journalism: “We have insights into our audience, and can produce content they want, which leads to engagement, which leads to what advertisers want.”

Sustainability

In 2008 Berkeley launched a program whereby homeowners could retrofit their homes with solar panels and other energy saving technologies using loans from the city which are repaid over 20 years through special property taxes. Berkeley’s Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program was so wildly successful that it was adopted by 22 states. Relatively few people have participated in the PACE programs (950 in Sonoma County, CA; 600 in Boulder County, CO) because they’re generally not very well publicized. The US Energy Department has designs to change that using US$150 million in stimulus money to help communities set up and administer PACE programs. All of that is threatened to come to a screeching halt with threats from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the US government-chartered agencies that resell most home mortgages, announcing they might not accept loans for homes that are tied to the PACE program. Fannie and Freddie are requiring the assessments to be paid off before they’ll approve loans. Todd Woody, writing for the New York Times, reports a county commissioner worries “that treating the energy liens as loans could set a precedent that would undermine local governments’ ability to pay for municipal improvements through tax assessments.”

User experience

Yahoo! released its digital style guide this week, written and edited by a team led by Chris Barr, CNET’s founding editor-in-chief. Do we need yet another style guide? Yeah, in this case we really do. The print edition won’t be available until next week, but the online edition is really useful and well done. So, on a daily basis I refer to Chicago, Wired Style, University of Minnesota, and now Yahoo!

Volume 2, Issue 1 of the Journal of Information Architecture is available. I haven’t quite made up my mind about this publication yet—it’s certainly not the definitive IA journal—but it’s worth a look.

Oh, my. Proportional leading comes to the web. Stuff & Nonsense takes a close look at the MSNBC redesign of its article pages and delivers the goods. More CSS3 media query goodness.

Chris Turner is giving up on content strategy because “the business world doesn’t deserve content strategy.” Well, it’s true, the business world has never deserved content strategy (neither has higher education) but some of us have been doing it much longer than the latest buzzword. The challenges and rewards have been the same for as long as I can remember in my professional career (long before the web); there’s always been content and it’s always needed managing. But Turner’s core point—“When a business doesn’t want to make friends with content strategy, it’s likely to throw rocks at it until it dies or runs away—is as true now as it’s ever been. That’s why we end up with the typical business website that is unusable, unnavigable, and content-clueless.