ARTS & FARCES internet

State pension funds—including the one in which I am a member, the Minnesota State Retirement System—are in serious trouble. But instead of dealing with the problem head-on, politicians are pulling out the oldest play in the book, apply cuts to those workers who have yet to be hired. Mary Williams Walsh, reporting for the New York Times, writes, “Nearly all of the cuts so far apply only to workers not yet hired. Though heralded as breakthrough reforms by state officials, the cuts phase in so slowly they are unlikely to save the weakest funds and keep them from running out of money. Some new rules may even hasten the demise of the funds they were meant to protect.”

Colorado has cut benefits for current workers and on retirees. The cuts to retirees is facing a legal challenge. Colorado argues that a 1961 US Supreme Court ruling held that pension cuts for current workers is allowed when “actuarially necessary.” It hopes to stretch that ruling to cover retirees as well.

IBM lowered its pension benefits at the precise time most of its older workers were scheduled to see a bump in retirement benefits. The workers brought legal action, but a federal appellate court in 2006 found that IBM was within its rights (.pdf; 119KB) to cut the pension benefits. The IBM plan, the court noted, was “almost, but not quite, a defined-contribution plan.” Pensions are, by definition, not defined-contribution plans, but rather defined-benefit plans. The IBM employees also made the mistake of bringing the legal action on the basis of age discrimination under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) when everyone knew, as the court affirmed, “all the terms of IBM’s plan are age neutral. Every covered employee receives the same 5% pay credit and the same interest credit per annum.”

Minnesota isn’t waiting for the outcome of the Colorado case. As of 1 January 2011, post-retirement adjustments are lowered from 2.5 percent to 2.0 percent, there’s a six-month waiting period for initial post-retirement adjustments, the interest rate on future refunds is lowered from 6 percent to 4 percent, interest on suspended benefits (for those who return to the workforce) is eliminated, and the vesting period is increased from three to five years.

The question—that hopefully the Colorado retiree case will resolve—is if membership in a state pension fund is a contractual relationship. “An employer is free to move from one legal plan to another legal plan, provided that it does not diminish vested interests” or benefits already earned, wrote the court in the IBM case. In the case of my employer, the University of Minnesota, employee contributions to MSRS are mandatory.

Business

In a shocker, the University of Minnesota didn’t even place in the Star Tribune‘s list of 2010’s top 100 workplaces. Even John’s Auto Parts, Inc. was a better place to work. Here’s a sliver of a clue as to why: Faced with lowered funding from the state, a governor’s illegal unallocation, and severe budget cuts the unit in which I’m employed—the College of Design—elected to heap all the cuts on a handful of employees. Instead of an equitable across-the-board cut (like the one instituted at the University of Wisconsin), the College of Design cut the salaries of the external relations staff by 10% for fiscal year 2010. The college’s top leadership—dean, associate deans, assistant dean, and chief of staff—also took 10% cuts and salaries were restored earlier this month, but still.

Internet

Here comes the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opening an inquiry on network neutrality and already the incumbent telcos and cable companies are whining like children in the back seat after 200 miles on the back roads. Their whining was harmonized by the Republican commissioners: Robert McDowell said in his statement (.pdf; 79KB) that by opening the inquiry the FCC had “lost the moral high ground,” and that net governance should be left to the nongovernmental technical groups (populated mostly with, you guessed it, the incumbent telcos and cable companies). “For decades now, the international consensus has been for governments to keep their hands off the internet and to leave internet governance decisions to time-tested nongovernmental technical groups. Once that precedent is broken, it will become harder to make the case against more nefarious states that are meddling with the Internet in even more extensive ways than are contemplated here.” Democrat Michael Copps when right for the BP jugular (.pdf; 82KB) in his statement: “I, for one, am worried about relying only on the goodwill of a few powerful companies to achieve this country’s broadband hopes and dreams. We see what price can be paid when critical industries operate with unfettered control and without reasonable and meaningful oversight. Look no further than the banking industry’s role in precipitating the recent financial meltdown or turn on your TV and watch what is taking place right now in the Gulf of Mexico.” Buckle up; this one’s going to be interesting.

John Naughton, writing in The Observer, delineates everything you need to know about the internet. Nine enormous ideas are packed into this eminently readable article. Naughton observes that the while the internet as deeply infiltrated our lives, we’re oddly unreflective about it. Writing that much of corporate media’s coverage of the internet is negative, Naugton sets out to elucidate how we should be thinking about the net in compliance with George Miller’s magical number seven, plus or minus two. If you don’t read anything else this week, read Naughton’s piece. Highest recommendation.

Dave Winer is at it again, and if you’re an online author or publisher you’d better pay close attention. Winer has completely reworked his writing environment (when you’re a programmer you can do that) and, most interestingly, he’s exposing parts of it on the web. His writing has source code, Winer notes. “It’s always been this way, but I’ve accepted the limits of other blogging tools, and the limits of RSS, and not exposed the richer writing environment behind scripting.com. That is changing, gradually, with the new software.”

The most visible addition to Winer’s output are little plus signs, signifying a link to contextual information—something Winer calls sub-text. Click on the plus sign and contextual—or, more likely at this early date, conversational—content is revealed. Winer refers to this as an “internet-age footnote” and says it’s related to Nick Carr’s misguided article about it being time to get hypertext links out of our way.

Carr says hypertext links are a distraction. “Sometimes, they’re big distractions—we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read,” Carr writes. Uh, that’s what browser tabs are for, Nick. Carr goes on to state (without citation), “People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.” Without a citation, statements like that are of little use. From the abstract of “Reading Strategies and Hypertext Comprehension” from the November 2005 issue of Discourse Processes: “The literature on assessing the cognitive processes involved in hypertext comprehension during the past 15 years has yielded contradictory results.” (In a prior life, in the pre-web world, I wrote three books on hypermedia; I tend to follow this area with some interest).

Business

Hank Williams has a compelling perspective on Apple’s rules for iOS developers. Which are, in essence, no rules. Developers serve, Williams writes, at the pleasure of the queen. But that’s not the point of his “Apple fears the killer app.” Apple, Williams opines, doesn’t enforce its rules to keep out bad apps, as the company asserts, but rather wants multitudes of crappy apps because “numeric superiority is a huge marketing tool.” Apple is scared to death of a third party actually developing a ground-breaking, killer, app because “as platforms mature, killer apps from third party companies pose more risk. ... “Because if some third party invents something that fundamentally changes what it means to own a mobile device, and that software is available on other devices, overnight Apple is in the position of being the supplicant.” Again. Apple learned this lesson in the 1990s with Adobe and will not let it happen again. For proof of his thesis, Williams points to the fact that while there have been small successes on the iOS platform, there have not been any successes on the order of VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, PageMaker, or Microsoft Office. Highly recommended.

Internet

Maybe it’s my age or maybe my control-freakery, but I’m not enamored of cloud computing even though I trust Dropbox to keep my working documents synched between three different MacBook Pro laptops and an iPod Touch. Now comes news of Hylke Bons’ SparkleShare: An open source alternative to Dropbox. Built on Mono, GTK+, and Git, the first version will be for Gnome, followed by OS X and Windows. What’s especially interesting about this project is that Bons is a designer, not a programmer, and the project grew out of this year’s Usability Hackfest.

Law

When medical professionals involved in the US Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) torture sessions during the George W. Bush administration collected data to fine-tune the level of pain experienced, they engaged in illegal and unethical human research and experimentation. That’s what a report, “The Torture Papers,” published by Physicians for Human Rights alleges. James Risen, writing for the New York Times, refers to the report—which bases its findings on information already discovered—“the first analysis of the CIA’s interrogation program to argue that one of the unintended consequences of the Bush administration’s efforts to provide legal cover for officials involved in the program was to place medical professionals in legal and ethical jeopardy.” Both the Nuremberg Code and the US Common Rule ban human experimentation without informed consent.

Just after Apple announced its iPhone 4 and iOS 4 at its Worldwide Developers Conference, the company quietly released Safari 5. Instead of focusing on useless cosmetics (I’m looking at you Safari 4), this release pays close attention to things that matter: Speed increases, standards compliance, a walled-garden extensions system, and Safari Reader. This last item, Safari Reader, is sure to garner the attention of online publishers.

At least Apple is straight up about the purpose of Safari Reader: “Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles. So you get the whole story and nothing but the story.” As a reader, I love it; as a publisher, well, there goes the CPM ad model.

That’s not much of a problem for ARTS & FARCES but more traditional publishers may have a problem. Those articles spread unnecessarily over 11 pages only to garner 11 pageviews and 11 pages full of ads? They’re gone for good. Publishers of advertising-supported long-form content (articles spread necessarily over 11 pages) have reason for worry.

Although Clint Ecker, writing for Ars Technica reports, “it does a full, real request on every single page. The publication sees all the pageviews on every page and even ad frames get downloaded for each pageview, which could quell some publisher worries.” Doubtful. Advertisers aren’t going to pay for ads that they know are downloaded but not displayed.

The likely outcome—almost certainly highly choreographed by Apple—is to attempt to migrate publishers from the open web to closed apps. Contrary to what Eliot Van Buskirk reports for Wired, in my experience all ads are automatically stripped in Safari Reader; no user intervention required.