 Thanks to some help from my brilliant friend in Scotland, Aalia Wayfare at The LeftHander (who previously fixed the gap in the middle column of my permalink pages), the “SEARCH SITE” bar in the upper right corner of my blog is now working. Instead of using Google, this bar now uses Feedster’s search engine. From the testing I have done, not only does it pick up all references to keywords anywhere in my archives, it also updates every day, so you can even use it to find references on my seven-day home page and category pages. BTW, Aalia has just ponied up for a Salon Blog.
I’m still hoping that Google will get around to re-crawling all my pages, which should up my hit count by about 400 hits per day, and help people who rely on that search engine to find my site. I’d like to thank these wonderful people for helping me revamp my blog to make it easier for Google to crawl, and for readers with slow connection speeds to use: In addition to Aalia (who has also fixed my metatags): fellow Slogger Philip Vassar at Just Playing, Arve Bersvendsen at Virtuelvis , the blogless Ken Hirsch at No Pundit Intended, and Seth Finkelstein at Infothought, as well as Radio’s intrepid Lawrence Lee at Tomalak’s Realm. These guys are wonderful, selflessly helpful, and persistent and knowledgeable about all things technical. Thanks, guys! In the meantime, if you’re one of those unhappy with Google’s unpredictable behaviour, you can add a Feedster search bar to your own site by going here. |
February 22, 2004
THANK YOU, THANK YOU: SEARCH BAR NOW WORKING
February 21, 2004
THE POETRY OF ICE AND SNOW
 Lately I’ve been re-reading TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, surely one of the finest works of the 20th century, and started looking at some blogs that include original poetry. Here’s a sampling of some poetry I’ve found that I especially like. I realize this is a hugely subjective assessment, so I’ve included a snippet from the work of each poet to tease you, and a link to where you can find more. The theme of all these excerpts, perhaps because this endless winter is getting to me, is Ice and Snow. These are in no particular order:
The photo of the Seine River in Paris, above, is by Sam Javanrouh from his wonderful photoblog Daily Dose of Imagery. Some of my own poetry can be found here. And here are a few Ice & Snow lines from Eliot,: Midwinter spring is its own season |
February 20, 2004
CORPORATIONS VS. PEOPLE — A SPLIT DECISION
 Three more recent articles feature corporations acting in their own self-interest, and against the interests of their employees and customers. Two of the articles are about offshoring — where the corporations seem destined to ‘win’, and workers worldwide will lose:
This is, of course, corporate fraud, and the big-budget PR campaigns of these stores, telling consumers they’ve cleaned up their act, are bare-faced lies. But in the wild and wooly world of third world business, where money buys anything, just try and prove it. And be careful about charging these companies with lying to customers — as the Nike case shows, corporatists prosecute those that try to stop the lies, claiming that prohibiting deceptive advertising interferes with the corporation’s ‘rights’. There is therefore only one way to fight back: Boycott companies that offshore domestic jobs to third world countries (both manufacturing and service jobs). Encourage Consumers Union and other consumer and labour advocacy groups to maintain and communicate lists of offshorers. Pledge to buy local.
So it’s not just manufacturing and help-desk service jobs at risk. As retailing goes online, all the related services and transaction processing could be offshored. As virtual presence technologies improve, all sales, consulting and business overhead jobs could go offshore as well. No job is safe. In addition to boycotting offshorers, we need to lobby politicians to change tax regulations to put employers of domestic workers on the same after-tax footing as offshorers.
One customer is determined to strike back at abusive treatment by one notorious group of corporations, the RIAA. As reported by John Borland at CNET, Michele Scimeca, one of the people sued by the RIAA for file-swapping is counter-suing the RIAA for extortion and violations under the federal anti-racketeering act. According to CNET she “contends that by suing file-swappers for copyright infringement, and then offering to settle instead of pursuing a case where liability could reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the RIAA is violating the same laws that are more typically applied to gangsters and organized crime”. Brava, Ms. Scimeca. Now if only we could get that kind of creative strategy to deal with offshoring. Is depriving citizens of their right to a reasonable livelihood against any law? How about wrongful dismissal? Or a human rights violation? |
February 19, 2004
THE BEST GAME IN THE WORLD
 I‘ve always been a game player — cards, pool, board games, and outdoor games and sports. For me, it’s not about competition, or winning. It’s about playing. The attributes of the best games are:
Here’s my list of favourite games, and why I like them. Five years ago I’d probably have come up with a very different list, and I have yet to discover the best game in the world:
So what are your favourite games (to play, not to watch)? What do you think is the world’s best undiscovered or underrated game? And why is playing games so important to people all over the world, even as adults, an essential social activity? |
February 18, 2004
PERSONAL CONTENT MANAGEMENT: AN EXPLORATION
 In a recent post I advocated almost a complete replacement of existing knowledge management systems and intranets with a three-tiered set of simple, intuitive tools consisting of:
In my early thinking about this, I proposed a new consulting discipline called Personal Productivity Improvement (PPI) to help individuals, starting with those in the front lines of organizations, make better use of the tools and content on their personal computers. When I spoke to people in several businesses in different industries, they were very enthusiastic about this idea. On giving it further thought, however, I wondered whether PPI was the solution to the wrong problem. If the tools and information on people’s PCs and intranets are unduly complex, counter-intuitive, and inappropriate for the key business problems that front-line people need to solve, so that people use other processes (walking down the hall to speak to colleagues), other tools (the public Internet) and other sources of information (the people in their rolodex) instead of the ones supplied by their employer — doesn’t this suggest it’s the tools that need ‘improving’, not the users and the processes they use? I believe personal content management tools are the place to start, because since the earliest days of business, the principal way of sharing information has been peer-to-peer, the most valued ‘repositories’ of business information have been personal filing cabinets, and the principal schema for organizing work has been the personal desktop. It makes sense, therefore, that tools that facilitate and reflect these well-established ‘knowledge processes’, information sources and networks should be much more successful than the complex, centralized, hierarchical knowledge management tools and repositories that have been foisted on users for the past decade. I wrote the other day about attempts to replace paper, and about Gladwell’s study of why paper and documents have proven so durable and successful even in this electronic age (spatial flexibility, tailorability, browsability). And I believe any schema for personal content management needs to reflect and honour our most established ‘information behaviour’ — the shuffling of paper. The founders of a company called Alias Research (now part of Silicon Graphics, but in the process of being spun off again) were powerful advocates of making technology adapt to human behaviour rather than the other way around, and I agree with them 100%. Lowest common denominator, across all job descriptions, levels and industries, are these fundamental ‘knowledge worker’ behaviours and needs:
So, while we must be sanguine that it’s not going to make much impact on how things are done in the corner offices anyway (which explains perhaps why execs I spoke to were not enthusiastic about investing in Personal Productivity Improvement), how would we design a personal content management suite of tools to improve the effectiveness of these knowledge worker behaviours and processes? I’d start by creating a machine-readable analogue of the physical workspace. We need a Workspace Tool that allows us to shuffle virtual documents the same three-dimensional way we shuffle physical ones. That tool should replace the ‘arrow’ cursor with a ‘hand’ cursor, like the Acrobat pdf cursor but a lot more flexible. The ‘hand’ needs to be able to pick up and move a document, and to pick up and read and browse a document, and to be able to clip a document or a piece of a document to another, either temporarily (so the documents could be separated again) or permanently (so they would become a new document), and to be able to place any document anywhere in a stack of documents. The ‘hand’ needs to be able to put two documents side by side and browse them simultaneously. The tool needs to allow the user to do this on multiple three-dimensional virtual workspaces, that the user can label as they see fit. It must allow the user to make multiple copies of the document, and move or change each copy in different ways. And it must allow the user to send any copy of the document to any number of other people (without opening another ‘application’) and to ‘permission’ the document to identify who else can ‘subscribe’ to it — the set of people who they will allow entry to this virtual workspace to access it. Such a tool would allow us to capitalize on the economy of ‘virtual’ space by doing away with the ‘filing cabinet’ — that horrible black hole invented by Dewey the librarian into which documents disappear never to be found again, which Windows has tragically copied. Instead, we would ‘save’ the entire workspace, with its three-dimensional array of documents intact. It would be neatly put away but, if we needed something in that workspace again, we would simply open the entire workspace again, arranged in the way that made sense to us, and instantly find what we were looking for by where it was in the space, not by having to remember what awkward name we gave it. And then on to the next project with a ‘clean’ new workspace. This tool would need to be indifferent to the document’s format — whether the suffix was .doc or .xls or .ppt or .html or .pdf would be irrelevant. More importantly, e-mail messages and other ‘recorded conversations’ would need to be seamlessly accommodated just like any other document. There are some tools today that do limited parts of the above, but in awkward and unintuitive ways. This needs to be as simple as child’s-play, and will probably require software designers to start from scratch and throw away all their familiar technological architecture constructs in favour of the human information constructs we have used at least since Gutenburg. The Workspace Tool could eliminate the need for Windows Explorer and similar ‘file management’ tools on most computers. OK, that’s a start on the spatial flexibility and paper-shuffling spec for the tool. Let’s go on to annotation. I’ve seen some limited annotation functionality in a program called FolioViews, that ‘labels’ each user’s notes and/or changes in a publicly-accessible and centrally-controlled document. MS Word has some such functionality in its ‘edit mode’. E-mail uses blacklining or indenting to create ‘threads’ of consecutive commentary. And wikis take it to the next step — collaboration — but at the cost of not distinguishing which individuals contributed and changed what, which requires enormous trust. All of these are forms of annotation. But you have to admit they’re pretty clumsy. Again, let’s look at how it happens in the physical world, and emulate that. For short additions we use the carat and write above the line. We cross out, without eliminating legibility, to indicate deletion. We use the margins, and, if that isn’t enough, a separate page with a numbered reference for commentary and longer additions. We may use post-its for the same purpose, or for personal notes pertinent to the document. There are three reasons this is much easier with a pencil and paper than on a laptop. The first is flexibility — by writing smaller or at an angle we can squeeze a lot of changes into a small area, and we can use graphics as well as text. And we can move stuff around within the document easily. The second is recognizability — we can tell by the handwriting whose changes are whose. The third is comparability — we can put two pieces of text side-by-side to compare them or see if they’re compatible as we decide what edits or annotations to make. How could we do this in a simple, intuitive way on a laptop? This is much more challenging because of the different native formats of all the documents we annotate. I suspect any intuitive Annotation Tool would need to quietly convert each document to a bitmap in the background. It would also need to pre-set the user’s annotation ‘voice’ — using some distinctive font, typestyle, textstyle and/or font/background colour to set off the annotations from the rest of the document. It would use the pencil, rather than the hand or arrow, as the cursor symbol. It would need a simple ‘insert or comment’ functionality that would automatically expand the available space — exactly at the point of insert — to contain all that the user wanted to add. That functionality would include a simple freeform drawing tool for graphics. The tool would need a ‘mark to delete’ functionality that didn’t obliterate what was proposed for deletion. It would need a ‘replace’ functionality that combined the ‘insert’ and ‘mark to delete’ functions. It would need a ‘highlight’ function. It would need a ‘move’ function. It would ideally need a ‘cross-reference’ function that would allow the annotator’s inserts and comments to dynamically link to another place in the document, or a section of another document. The key again is simplicity and intuitiveness. When the user places the ‘pencil’ cursor in a space and starts drawing or typing, the tool would automatically interpret this as an ‘insert or comment’. Click and drag would first ‘highlight’, and then if the user started drawing or typing it would be treated as a ‘replace’, whereas if the user hit the ‘delete’ key it would ‘mark to delete’ and if the user then moved the pencil cursor elsewhere in the document and hit the ‘insert’ key it would leave a numbered flag at the original point and move the highlighted content to the new location. The key sequence ‘cf.’ could activate the ‘cross-reference’ function. No menus, no special function keys to remember. In fact, this simple analogue to the pencil could even replace the word processor and html composing tool for all but the most sophisticated document preparation. For what is composition beyond starting with a blank page, and successively inserting, replacing, deleting, moving, annotating and cross-referencing? As I’ve mentioned before, I think UXGA technology is also essential to getting us to this state, since it allows the user to review, without eyestrain or scrolling, two complete pages side-by-side on the screen. I also think significant productivity improvement will only come when the third ‘layer’ in the chart above — social networking applications that allow us to identify relevant contacts, connect to them powerfully, simply and virtually, and share our permissioned content with them — have been built on top of these newly-improved personal content management applications. Only the three ‘layers’ of tools working together can enable powerful, context-rich virtual conversations, so that Dr. Nonaka’s famous ‘virtuous cycle’ of knowledge creation (pictured just above right) can finally become a reality. And then, decision-makers will no longer be able to blame awkward and inappropriate technology for being uninformed. |
Even if this Annotation Tool isn’t able to interpret and spruce up the hand-drawn graphics into more professional form, as long as it is able to compress the annotated document to a reasonable file size for storage and transmitting to others, its product could become the ubiquitous standard format in which virtually all documents are maintained on our computers. And most important, February 17, 2004
WINTER WORLD
 Winter World, the latest book by Bernd Heinrich, whose books Mind of the Raven and Why We Run I’ve reviewed before, is not as ambitious nor as eye-opening as his previous works, which focused on animal intelligence, endurance and sensitivity. It’s more laid back, and that’s perhaps fitting for this time of the year when the deep freeze here in Ontario seems to be interminable. Heinrich’s lovely illustrations, like the one above, instil in the reader profound respect and love for the book’s subjects — the many animals who winter outdoors in the Great White North. The book is mainly about adaptability. It explains how birds, mammals, amphibians and insects are able to survive and even thrive in relentlessly cold and snow-covered lands. The chipmunk above, for example, builds a 12-foot burrow system that includes a nest chamber three feet underground, several food storage chambers, and escape tunnels as well as the main channel. They hibernate, not when it’s cold, necessarily, but when there’s a low food supply. Hibernating mammals like the arctic squirrel awaken and warm themselves up to their usual 37† body temperature periodically during the winter, for no apparent reason except to get REM sleep. My friend the beaver, creator of the fine work next door to us (a bog), builds a conical lodge that looks much like a tepee and functions similarly. Up to ten feet high, in three feet of water, it freezes solid in winter, protecting the beavers from the elements and predators, with a small air vent at the top. Entrance is only from under the ice, which is why beavers cut trees and drag them to the pond so they are accessible from under the ice all winter long (beavers don’t hibernate, and eat up to 50lbs of wood per day each). Wren males build the nest framework, and in some cases build multiple nest frameworks. Then the females choose their mates, and do the interior lining and finishing on one selected nest, to seal the marriage. The book is an engaging read with some amazing stories. At its heart it is also a mystery. There are many methods that Northern animals use to conserve energy, and science is able to show how in combination they allow so many species to live comfortable lives in what we would consider inhospitable surroundings. Heinrich’s mystery is the golden-crowned kinglet, a tiny (not much more than 1″ long with feathers, weighing 4-6 grams), energetic bird that is seen periodically in small groups in Northern winters. These birds defy Heinrich’s scientific explanations and investigations — with such tiny weight and size and such huge energy use they should simply not be able to survive in cold climates. The mystery remains unsolved — at least until Heinrich’s next book. |
February 16, 2004
WE ARE EACH OUR OWN CULTURE
 As I was reading Edward Hall’s The Hidden Dimension I began to realize how staggeringly differently each of us perceives the world. Hall speaks mostly about differences in perception between six different human ‘cultures’ — the Germans, French, British, Americans, Japanese and Arabs. But his ideas find echo in Jeff Masson’s books about the huge variability of animal intelligence and emotion due to differences in sense acuity, evolutionary needs and environment, and made me realize just how intelligent animals that are able to learn our languages must be — their entire sensory mechanism, the way they perceive everything, the way the neurons of their brains are commensurately ordered, is utterly, perhaps unimaginably different from ours.
These ideas also resonate with some of the findings of leading educators and linguists that we learn in completely different ways, and that communication is a maddeningly imprecise and largely futile process, a never-ending ‘raid on the inarticulate’ as TS Eliot put it. I’ve concluded that if we ever develop the technology to be able to put ourselves in another’s brain, and tap in directly to what they are thinking, perceiving and feeling, we will likely be astonished at how alien the experience will be. Aside from explaining how easy it is to misunderstand each other, and just how ‘alone’ we really are, what does all this mean? I think it has six very important implications:
Hall also presents some interesting, if over-generalized, observations about differences between the people of the six countries he studies. They explain why a closed door or a private office has a completely different meaning in Germany, the UK and the US, why the French would never tolerate the sell-off of public space that is occurring in the US, why the Japanese find Western room layout (and the Arabs find Western ceiling heights) claustrophobic, and how the difference in these six peoples’ ‘intimate’ (0-18″), ‘personal’ (18-48″), ‘social’ (4-12′) and ‘public’ (>12′) distances cause so many misunderstandings and conflicts. Tellingly, Hall’s generalizations are often debatable, but his anecdotes, being stories, are entertaining and compelling. The Starbucks logo, shown above, is highly offensive to people in many Arab countries, where the depiction of the human form (and not merely the naked female form) is considered sacrilegious and profane. Starbucks’ insistence on displaying it in its stores in those countries has been a major bone of contention, and is a lightning rod for anti-American sentiment. |
February 15, 2004
VITAL SIGNS
 I‘ve been a reader of the Worldwatch Institute’s annual State of the World report for many years. I just discovered that, in between, they publish a report called Vital Signs: Trends That Are Shaping Our Future. The latest edition has the following interesting data: 1. Ratio of average income of CEOs ($,000) to average income of manufacturing workers ($,000), selected countries:
2. Ratio of percentage of wealth owned by the richest 20% to the percentage of wealth owned by the poorest 20%, selected countries:
These two tables suggest that income disparity does not correlate at all with democracy or capitalism. The first table shows just how obscenely out of whack US executive salaries have become in recent years, bearing no connection whatsoever to productivity or performance. The second table ratios are the inverse of the ‘Gini index’. These ratios correlate closely to crime and incarceration rates, validating recent studies that show that wealth inequality, rather than poverty, determines crime rate. 3. Global annual grain and meat production, millions of tons
This chart shows that not only is the world continuing to produce more food than it needs, resulting in more overweight people on the planet than underweight, and more deaths from obesity-related diseases than malnutrition, but that the mix of food production is getting much more inefficient — meat production consumes 10 times the resources per calorie produced that grain production does, and most of the grain production now comes from non-native grains on heavily irrigated, heavily fertilized land that costs more in energy to grow than it produces in food energy. 4. Global consumption of energy, millions of tons of oil equivalent, by source
Despite the massive pollution and land degradation caused by coal mining, our voracious Western appetite for energy is driving us to increase, rather than decrease, coal-burning. Likewise, although nuclear power’s environmental damage, accident risk and enormous cost has reduced the number of new reactors being built, use of existing reactors continues to rise. And although renewable energy is off to a promising start, it still accounts for only 1.5% of global consumption. 5. Global carbon emissions, millions of tons, versus millions of cars in use globally
There’s nearly a perfect correlation between global energy consumption, total carbon emissions, and average global temperature, but the world’s greatest polluters continue to fund massive PR campaigns and phony research to try to convince us there is no need for action. Fortunately, this is one corporatist lie very few people are buying. And not only is the number of cars on the road growing at twice the rate of population, the average miles per car per year is also rising rapidly as drivers live further and further from where they work and shop. 6. GDP versus Genuine Progress Indicator, per capita, US
Since the late 1990s, the momentum that was building to replace the discredited and worthless GDP as a measure of economic health has stalled. This is unfortunate, since it allows the Bush regime to claim the economy is rebounding while it continues to stagnate. The Genuine Progress Indicator, which subtracts from GDP the costs of traffic, pollution, non-renewable resource use and crime, and adds back the value of unpaid work, is a flawed but certainly superior measure. Unfortunately, producing this data on a more timely basis (it’s available for only eight countries, and the latest available data is for 2000) will require governments to invest in calculating this data, and to publicize and use GPI, rather than GDP, in making economic and political decisions. Huge lobbies are working to prevent this, since it threatens their massive subsidies, and governments would prefer, especially in an election year, to be the bearer of good tidings, even if they’re patently false, than bad news that suggests most of what our economy now does detracts, rather than contributes, to well-being. |
February 14, 2004
REPLACING PAPER
 For the second time in a month, we have a new innovation designed to replace paper. Two weeks ago I wrote about Toshiba’s new erasable paper. And yesterday, the Washington Post described the steps several organizations, led by Xerox spinoff Gyricon, are taking to develop electric paper, a flexible, ultrathin, rollable, plastic, electronic display medium which can be repeatedly imprinted using a pocket-sized cylindrical device.
Last July I covered a Malcolm Gladwell article on The Social Life of Paper. In that article, Gladwell laid out three “affordances” of paper that electronic equivalents will have to match if they hope to replace it:
He could have added:
Gladwell believes that messy desks and offices are simply exploiting paper’s ability to facilitate personal, flexible organizing of information, each document “a contextual clue to an unresolved idea” and that filing cabinets (which have a lot in common with PC content management systems) offer no such flexibility and are merely “final resting places for documents that are unlikely thereafter ever to see the light of day again”. I think most of us would agree that ‘finding stuff’ in cabinets and hard drives is a frustrating, inefficient, unintuitive, and often futile process. We might even agree with Gladwell that the stuff we keep on paper is not knowledge itself but rather ‘support for the knowledge that resides in people’s heads’. Neither of the new inventions — erasable paper and electric paper — meet the six critical criteria bulleted above — yet. The challenge to replacing paper is as awesome as the benefits that would come from doing it — a huge reduction in trees cut down, waste in landfills, and polluting chemicals and processes. My guess is that no one magic product will do it, and the problem will need to be parsed: There are four main uses of paper, which, in decreasing order of landfill volume are:
Rather than a futile attempt to replace paper documents, the most complex, varied and difficult of the four applications, I think the technology innovators should be focusing on the other three. What would it take before you would replace paper, in each of these four applications, with a high-tech equivalent? Can you see it happening in your lifetime? And since my new business Meeting of Minds is developing a paper on Personal Content Management, I could also use your advice on how all your personal information — the ‘stuff’ on your desk, in your rolodex and filing cabinets and datebook and blog and accordian files and ‘My Documents’ folder, and on your refrigerator door — might be seamlessly and intuitively aggregated and integrated into a versatile schema of ‘My Information’. Not a taxonomy, mind you. A schema — an organizing mechanism. |
February 13, 2004
THE OIL WE EAT
 An article by Richard Manning entitled ‘The Oil We Eat’ in the February Harper’s Magazine (not available online) bolsters the case I made in my post earlier today about the connection between overpopulation, biodegradation, pollution, war, violence, mental illness, loss of biodiversity, and the politics and economics of food. The most remarkable argument Manning makes is that it actually costs more energy to produce a lot of our agricultural products than these products contain. This is made possible, of course, by the billions of dollars of agricultural subsidies paid mostly to low-employment agribusiness corporations, at taxpayers’ expense, so they can export these extravagant products to other countries, undercutting and dislocating those countries’ own farmers and ruining their domestic economies.
Manning talks more about this in his new book ‘Against the Grain’ due out later this month. |
