Two Cheers for Technology

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Being a little technosmug I recently volunteered to revive the website for the Kitchener-Waterloo NDP. The results so far are online at http://www.kwndp.ca. In getting this far I’ve learned a whole lot of new words and been hugely impressed by some of the software that is now available. It’s a new world out there kids. But of course, being also technosceptical, I have some second thoughts.

First things first.  I am lazy of course, so I wanted to make sure that not every change
to the web site had to go through me. Also, I wanted a system where
members can log in, so a database-hosted site of some kind made sense.
I found and went with a content-management system called drupal. To see whether this is widely used I did a google trends search and it seems like quite the thing these days, although not quite so much as its newer offspring joomla (google trends comparison here).
I went with drupal because it seems a little more open, if a little
less user friendly. It’s a PHP package that is usually hosted on a
MySQL server using the … Continue reading

Packaging

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I bought a pair of heavy duty kitchen scissors.

They are secured to a cardboard backing panel by two thick translucent plastic bands, one around the blade and one around the handles.

I need to cut these plastic bands.

I need a pair of heavy duty kitchen scissors.

Continue reading

Good Guys or Bad Guys in Afghanistan? It Makes Little Difference

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Following revelations that Afghans captured by Canadian troops have been tortured by the Afghan police and intelligence forces, Globe and Mail columnists Christie Blatchford and Margaret Wente rushed to defend the troops in separate columns last Tuesday.

Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, they say, are fine people. Blatchford writes that Canadian soldiers "treat their Afghan prisoners fairly and indeed often with gentleness." Wente writes that "I have deep sympathy for our military leaders, who genuinely want to do the right thing".

But these good guys are in a bad place. Blatchford says "Afghan justice is rough justice at best. This is a country steeped in decades of war and violence and vengeance" and Wente says "Nothing could be less surprising than the revelation that the Afghan secret police practise routine torture".

The problem is the Afghans themselves. Blatchford says that "not all of those who were detained and handed over by Canadians were merely mild-mannered farmers unfairly caught up while they tended their crops" and Wente says that "abuse of Afghan prisoners by Afghans" is  "regrettable, but what else can you expect?"

The idea that most people caught up in a war are innately … Continue reading

Predicting hits may be like predicting the weather

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In the New York Times sociologist David Card physicist turned sociologist Duncan Watts writes about how cultural hits may be, like the weather, impossible to predict. It comes down to how much we like stuff because it’s good and how much we like it because other people like it. If it’s the latter, then it becomes impossible to predict at some point. What’s nice is that they did some experiments to demonstrate some of this in the lab too – you’ll have to click through to see it.

A side effect of this would be that there is a strong limit to the effectiveness of recommendation schemes from Amazon and Netflix and so on. Maybe our preferences are just too damn quirky to be captured, no matter how fancy the algorithm.

Here’s a few paragraphs from the article.

Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in
cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of
the millions of individual people who participate in them. From this
common-sense observation, it follows that if the experts could only
figure out what it was about, say, the music, songwriting and packaging
of Norah Jones … Continue reading

Independent Bookstores in the UK

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I didn’t mean to write about things like book sales and so on, but one thing leads to another, so here I am.

The Guardian has an article about the shape of the UK book market and the surprising health of independent bookstores. Here is a graph based on numbers taken from the article (and taken, in turn, from the consumer research group Books Marketing). Click it to see it bigger.

Ukbookmarket

It shows that from 2003 to 2006 the big winners are the supermarkets and the online retailers – the twin jaws of the digital vice. No surprises there.

It also shows that the big losers are the chain bookstores (Waterstones in particular) and the direct mail book clubs. Again, no surprises.

The green line is the independent bookstores.  They are still bigger (for a few years anyway) than online retailers and have actually improved their share from 15.6 to 15.9% of the market.

There are some other statistical nuggets in the article. See if you can make sense of these:

Figures vary for the … Continue reading

Infotopia

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Cass Sunstein is a University of Chicago Law Professor whose book, Infotopia, I got to read on a recent trip. The subtitle is How Many Minds Produce Knowledge and it’s all about mechanisms – particularly Internet-driven mechanisms – for combining the insights of many people to produce, as he says, knowledge. It’s a good, thought-provoking book and I recommend it.

Here’s something I had to struggle with: Sunstein is a big proponent of using prediction markets to make some kinds of decision, and he is very doubtful about the merits of deliberation: sticking people in a room and talking things out to come to a decision.

My first reaction is that I feel deliberation should be workable, and my first reaction to markets is suspicion – enhanced by the fact that Sunstein comes from the University of Chicago, where the very right-wing Economics and Law movement came from. I don’t know Sunstein’s politics, but it’s clear from the book that his heart is in the right place. He believes in the importance of marginalized people whose opinions and knowledge are too often overlooked, and in the contributions they can make. So is there a … Continue reading

Starting Non-Fiction Books With Stories: Give it a Break

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I’m tired of the way so many business and cultural books start with a story. It was cute for a while, but I’ve had enough. It’s time for a change.

Here are the beginnings of ten books – not one of which is a novel. Aren’t they stupifying in their sameness after the first two or three? (Can you identify them? – Number 5 is a giveaway.)

  • Don Verrilli might as well have uncorked the champagne bottle right then and there on the marble steps of the Supreme Court — the case he was about to argue was a slam dunk. It was late March 2005 and Verrilli must have felt like he was on top of the world.

  • No one ever gave me directions like this on a golf course before: "Aim at either Microsoft or IBM". I was standing on the first tee at the KGA golf club in downtown Bangalore, in southern India, when my playing partner pointed at two shiny glass-and-steel buildings off in the distance, just behind the first green.

  • It was late in the afternoon, on a typically harsh Canadian winter day, as Rob McEwen, the CEO of … Continue reading