April 2008 Archives

No, really. Check it out.

Only two weeks after the 65th anniversary of the most interesting bicycle ride ever, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann has passed away. He was 102.

It appears we missed some sort of set-to in re: Miley Cyrus' pix in Vanity Fair. The whole thing is confusing as hell, since obviously the Mileys (like the Birtneys before her) sell at least partially on sex appeal, aspirational and otherwise, but whatever.

Thankfully, Defamer is on the case. Allow us to summarize their excellent summary of the whole affair, and the proper reaction thereto:

ZOMG111!!!!!!1 TEENAGERS FUCK!!!!! HORRORS! Meh.

Thank you, and good night.

Clay Shirky's "Gin and the Cognitive Surplus" is really an amazing summary of at least one way of looking at where we are, now, societally, and how interactive, collaborative media is on the cusp of radically changing the societal landscape.

In this piece, Shirky talks a lot about how TV sort of came to the rescue of a suddenly (relatively) idle public in the postwar expansion, a public that never before had much in the way of "free time" to deal with. The sitcom was born, and we all watched, and we watched for decades, and people continue to spend a lot of time in this one-way medium. In so doing, we consumed, for a while, an enormous cognitive surplus. Instead of creating something new, we watched a shitload of TV.

Anyway, he continues to relate the story of an interview with a TV producer who wanted to see if he was suitable for the show in question. In answer to a question about what sorts of "interesting" things he was seeing online, he talked a bit about the flurry of activity around the Pluto Wikipedia page as the astronomy community shifted its categorization from "planet" to "nonplanet thing," expecting the follow-up questions to be about authority, participation, collaboration, and the like. The TV producer's response? "Where do people find the time?"

And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

It's about participation, and how any level of participation -- LOLCats! -- is more engaging, more important, and fundamentally more interesting than what people have been doing with that time since "I Love Lucy" showed up. It's not all LOLCats, though. Social networks are already powerful and interesting, for example. If we use some tiny percentage of our TV time to do something participatory, something collaborative, something interesting and creative, how long before one of those somethings dwarfs Wikipedia and social networking in net value? Of course, TV people don't want to hear any of this, but it's almost certainly true.

Shirky ends with a fantastic anecdote that has this as its punchline:

Here's what four-year olds know: a screen that ships without a mouse ships BROKEN. Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.

WORD.

(Warren Ellis has the video here, which is worth watching.)

This NYT covers a somewhat surprising development in the smartphone market: it's now a fight between relative newcomer Apple and corporate darling Research In Motion (i.e., the makers of Blackberry). Stalwart Palm and Microsoft's Windows Mobile are at best also-rans, and tiny Symbian never really had a chance.

The key bit, which could fortell hard times for RIM, is this:

(RIM co-CEO) Mr. Balsillie thinks that R.I.M. is in the best tactical position for the coming fight. He points to its close relationships with 350 carriers around the world -- like Verizon and AT&T -- that sell, often at steep discounts, BlackBerry phones and the accompanying monthly e-mail service.

Apple and Google, on the other hand, are vocally trying to dislodge the carriers from the nexus of the North American wireless market. Unlike other phone makers in the United States, Apple sells iPhones from its own stores and has negotiated relatively stingy contracts with the carriers, in exchange for limited periods of exclusivity. Google, for its part, unsuccessfully bid for wireless spectrum this year in an effort to force carriers to be more open to allowing various handsets and Internet services on their networks.

R.I.M. makes its alliances clear. "We are sort of polite and amiable and we gently interrelate with the carriers and try to find compatibility," Mr. Balsillie said. "It may be a better strategy to fight the carrier. We may be wrong. The carrier may get disintermediated, in which case we fade with them."

In other words, R.I.M. is content to please carriers, not actual customers. Apple has turned that whole ecosystem on its ear by creating a phone that has literally made AT&T's year, financially, because people wanted it People actually LIKE it. On the other hand, people with Blackberries are typically folks who have never touched another smartphone, and who use what their IT drone tells them to use. Of the non-corporate BB users I know, most have switched to the iPhone for sheer ease of use and lack of hassle.

It's important to note that the Blackberry system is dependent on R.I.M.'s servers to work, even for private, ISP-based emails (unless you just use the browser to access a webmail account); the iPhone forces no such Rube Goldberg mechanism on its users (though neither do the offerings from Palm, WinMo, and Symbian). Up to now, R.I.M. was also the only real game in town for centrally-controllable mobile email; a lost Blackberry can be wiped remotely, over the air, by an administrator. This summer, that feature -- along with holy-grail native Exchange support -- comes to the iPhone, which means Apple is seriously bringing it to what has been R.I.M.'s essentially uncontested territory.

Kottke, whom we were about to stop reading, re-wins his spot in the morning rotation with this post calling our attention to these illustrations of Wire characters done in the style of the Simpsons. It hurted my brane.

In a brief phone call with Mrs Heathen, we discussed how many llamas there are named "Dolly."

Mrs Heathen suggested that, while it's true that expressing it as a percentage of the total llama population does neatly sidestep the need to know exactly how many llamas exist, llama population distribution also influences name statistics. If llamas are mostly in large groups, then there will be more names used less frequently; a llama farmer is unlikely to name two of his own llamas the same thing. On the other hand, if llamas are mostly in smaller groups, each such group could have its own "Dolly Llama," and the overall percentage of Dollys is likely to be higher.

None of this, however, properly accounts for any large-scale industrial llama husbandry, where we presume the llamas aren't named at all, though if we stipulate that we're discussing only the universe of named llamas, we're back on solid ground.

Prince covers Creep at Coachella. Video is shakey, audio is okay. Whoa.

Travel a bunch? Consider signing up with Dopplr, which -- in addition to being yet another victim of the vicious web 2.0 anti-E hysteria -- helps you figure out whom you may know who's also travelling to the same places.

Today's moment: Doing a teleconf in an old-skool strip-mall Chinese restaurant because that's where the iPhone told you had wifi.

Dear Intarwub: please get us one of these.

This fantastic prank letter gives me hope for the future.

BoingBoing points out that one record lable, Magnatune, is doing quite well selling DRM-free music, and that in fact its classical division is growing by leaps and bounds in a market where conventional classical sales are in the toilet. We've got a couple of their releases, and they're amazing. Check 'em out.

The Consumerist is great fun, but sometimes they, or their commenting public, kind of miss the mark -- as they do in this story about a declined check at a K-Mart.

S. wrote a check at Kmart earlier this month and it was denied. No reason was given—just "denied." It turns out a separate company, Certegy, made the decision, so S.—who writes, "I've never had a bounced check"—tried to track down someone at Certegy who could tell her what was wrong with her checks.

Cry me a river. First, you're writing checks in 2008? Seriously, WTF?

More seriously, though, what the whiner ran into was a risk-based turndown. This post describes something that's pretty common in the check verification industry. I used to work in software development for Telecheck, but it's been a long time. The basics of the business are probably unchanged, though.

Back then (late 1990s), TCK had two main products for merchants:

1. Their flagship guarantee product; and
2. A verification-and-collections product that was cheaper.

Guarantee cost a percentage of each processed transaction, but it meant that if TCK issued an approval code, then the merchant was covered -- if the check went bad, Telecheck paid him anyway, and collected the money plus the bounce fee on the back end.

Verification-and-collection was just what it sounds like: they'd run checks at POS, and approve or deny against the same database (with some differences), but bad checks were just bad checks. The merchant would only get paid for them if TCK managed to collect, minus a commission.

So, when a check is run through the system, the first thing that happened was a search for any actual negative data. For TCK, you're negative pretty much only if you actually owe TCK money and/or the bounce fee. People who bounce checks and then pay TCK later after a paper notice are TCK's favorite people (think about it), so neg-data turndowns only happened if you had an open item; that turndown was called a Code 4. Owe Telecheck money, or owe a Telecheck verification client money? No checkwriting for you. Don't? No neg data. Knock yourself out.

That was the end of the story, as I recall it, for verification customers.

However, with guarantee, actual risk analysis turndowns came into play for people without neg data. As a boss of mine used to say, there are two kinds of bad checks: people borrowing money, and people committing fraud. The former are collectable, and the latter aren't. The trick is knowing which is which.

To try and eliminate fraud, they used scorecards. There used to be a single checkwriting scorecard, across all SIC (essentially, type of merchant) codes, published by (I think) Fair-Isaacs. TCK developed a whole bunch more, since it turns out that LOTS of factors correlate to the relative riskyness of an unknown checkwriter, for example:

• Men are riskier than women
• Younger people are riskier than older people
• New accounts are riskier than established accounts
• Low check numbers are riskier than higher check numbers
• Checks written at the end of the day, or in particular Friday afternoon, are riskier than checks from earlier in the business day/week.
• Etc.

Obviously, too, some merchandise is riskier than others. Subwoofers are risky. Carrots aren't. All this intelligence -- and there was a half a floor in Houston full of very smart people doing the analysis behind this -- came into play only for guarantee customers, since it was actually Telecheck's money getting risked there.

Getting a risk-based turndown from TCK meant you looked too dicey for them to say, absolutely, we're gonna cover this check for the merchant. The merchant could, of course, decide to take it anyway (but would get no guarantee), and will certainly suggest another form of payment, but TCK just doesn't want any part of it. For Telecheck, the risk turndowns were Code 3.

Now, back then, some other companies were trying to also do risk management turndowns, but they'd do stupid things like simple velocity turndowns ("no more than N checks in Y period of time"), which is mathematically indefensible, or even simple cumulative price limits (also stupid). TCK had LOTS of years of actual POS data to draw from to create valid predictive models, which is what made them the higher-end provider back then.

So, at the end of the day, risk turndowns are just that: risk management. I don't know anything about these new companies in the check verification market, and (as I said) my TCK insider knowledge is a decade old, but back then the whole code 3 thing wasn't surprising or weird to me. It seemed like good business based on the inherent riskiness of checks and the inventive product (for the time) that TCK was selling (guarantee). Sure, people whined about it, but TCK wasn't and isn't in business to make checkwriters happy. They're in business to make sure POS checks are as safe as possible for their clients.

Endnote: Since college, I've never written POS checks, even when I worked for TCK. Too much trouble. Amex uber alles.

Microsoft has announced that they will be shutting down the servers that authenticate music purchased through MSN Music or related services, which means anyone with media purchased from those outlets is screwed if they ever want to move said media to a new computer, or upgrade the computer's OS. This, by the way, is MS's famed "PlaysForSure" music store.

This is what happens with DRM every. single. time. You don't own the music. They do. And at the end of the day, they don't care about you.

Behold Wordpress, destroyer of CPUs.

Mmmm, trees.

Some bits:

1. I'll put a link on the side, but comments here will accept formatting in something called Markdown; hit the link for a summary. You'll find your paragraphs separating as you'd expect automatically, though.

2. I've finally fixed the permalinks and census/archive links over at the old site, though I don't have stats for Jan-April 08 owing to the hosting debacle. I thought about fixing the script to do the math, but then I realized that no one gives a shit, so you monkeys will have to be content with plain-old links to those months.

3. We're playing with something called Typo here, which is built on Ruby on Rails. Don't worry if you don't now what any of that means. Mostly, it just means I had to hack shit for a couple hours to make an immature framework and poorly documented blogging system sit up and play nice.

   It's shocking that there are still NO decent and easy-to-set-up blogging systems. MoveableType is an absurd hodgepodge of PHP, Perl, and God knows what else, plus it's a resource joke. WordPress is a giant flashing "please hack my server" sign (the front page of their blog notes two critical security problems in the last six months alone). A hosted service is Right Out. In a word, GAH.

4. Expect the template to keep changing as I figure out how to make it do what I want.

5. Comments are officially BACK. Enjoy.

This NYT story points out that while the US accounts for only 5% of the world's population, we have nearly a quarter of the world's prisoners. China, with a population far greater than hours, has about half as many prisoners. We incarcerate ONE PERCENT of all American adults.

This cannot be good.

This is from MarsEdit. Let's see if it works. Also, does it understand Markdown?

Everything is subject to change. You can, however, now comment again. Archives are still back at the old site for now. Everything subject to change, and obviously we won't be putting up with a lame-O canned theme for very long. Inshallah.