R.I.P. Delicious: You Were So Beautiful to Me

It was beautiful. And now it’s gone.

32 GB versus 32GB: Almost everyone is writing it wrong

The International System of Units, otherwise known as the metric system, sets the standards for not only what a given quantity is, but how to express it. On page 133 of the SI brochure, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures says, “The numerical value always precedes the unit, and a space is always used to separate the unit from the number […] The only exceptions to this rule are for the unit symbols for degree, minute, and second for plane angle.” (emphasis added)

Pedantry aside, I do this wrong all the time.

Official Google Blog: Find out what’s in a word, or five, with the Google Books Ngram Viewer

Since 2004, Google has digitized more than 15 million books worldwide. The datasets we’re making available today to further humanities research are based on a subset of that corpus, weighing in at 500 billion words from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. The datasets contain phrases of up to five words with counts of how often they occurred in each year.

The Ngram Viewer lets you graph and compare phrases from these datasets over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years. One of the advantages of having data online is that it lowers the barrier to serendipity: you can stumble across something in these 500 billion words and be the first person ever to make that discovery.

As much as I get to armchair rib Google for Chrome OS and the App Store, it’s stuff like this: that a company the size of Google can afford to let brilliance go to work in every little corner of the organization, that makes it an exceptionally interesting time in our history. They’re a great model for humanities research right now.

Yahoo! Products All Hands Screener

I certainly don’t know details — it was just leaked. The thing that strikes me is that it appears that Yahoo! is choosing to focus on all products with direct and compelling competition, while de-emphasising or closing properties with true uniqueness, innovation, and potential. The loss of Del.icio.us is a real tragedy – that’s been a go-to service for me for years.

African Pouched Rats Sniff Out Unexploded Landmines

The landmine-sniffing rats are trained Pavlovian-style. When a rat stops to sniff the odor of an explosive, the trainer alerts with a loud click (using a clicker similar to those employed by some dog trainers) and gives the rat a food reward.

I love rats. I’m very much a rat person. They’re sweet, clean, and falsely accused of being nasty to people, by in large. We have two sweet rats, Samwise Wunderkind and Maxamillian Fog, and they’re the perfect pets for our kids. That said, I think it might be a touch odd to have rats the size of our beefy house cats. Still, check out the picture — priceless.

It can reach up to anywhere from 4.5 to 6.8 kilograms (10-15 pounds) in weight. In its native Africa, this pouched rat lives in colonies of up to twenty, usually in forests and thickets, but also commonly in termite mounds. It is omnivorous, feeding on vegetables, insects, crabs, snails, and other items, but apparently preferring palm fruits and palm kernels.

Unlike domestic rats, it has cheek pouches like a hamster. These cheek pouches allow it to gather up several kilograms of nuts per night for storage underground. It has been known to stuff its pouches so full of date palm nuts so as to be hardly able to squeeze through the entrance of its burrow. The burrow consists of a long passage with side alleys and several chambers, one for sleeping and the others for storage. The Gambian pouched rat reaches sexual maturity at 5–7 months of age. It has up to four litters every nine months, with up to six offspring in each litter. Males are territorial and tend to be aggressive when they encounter one another; otherwise, this rodent is extremely friendly and has become popular as an exotic pet.

It is intelligent, social and can be very gentle if handled from an early age.
In Africa, it is routinely eaten as bushmeat. It is (along with other mammals) referred to by the pidgin name of “beef”.

Thomas Hawk » An Open Letter to Carol Bartz, CEO Yahoo Inc.

So many nice points, I’m not sure what to share. Read the whole thing — Thomas serves as an illuminating voicebox in support of flickr.com. Then go read Bartz’ letter to the Yahoo staff.

I know if I were CEO at Yahoo I sure as hell would have a Flickr account. In fact I’d set up accounts really on all of the services that I was commander and chief of and I’d actually use them from time to time to build a familiarity with what works and what doesn’t.

and

Despite the fact that you won’t come down out of your ivory tower to actually get down in the trenches and work with us (your users) to figure out how we can make your products better. Despite all of this. You, yes you, were the highest paid CEO in the Standard & Poors 500 last year.

That’s right. At least according to this report you made $47.2 *million*. Now in addition to paying you all that dough, you also wasted $100 million on a stupid ad campaign saying that the “internet was under new management, yours.”

(true, it was ridiculous; and true, that’s a stunning number in this political climate) and

And your complaint about the fact that your layoffs were leaked ahead of your actually axing people? Get over that. Your acrimony towards bloggers, your iron clad commitment to containment and secrecy within the Yahoo ranks isn’t working. People want honesty and transparency these days. So be transparent. Be human.

That’s the thing that gets me: that as CEO of Yahoo!, (arguably) a company that exists in the social space of the internet, Bartz incredibly has an expectation of privacy around issues that affect so many people, so very, very deeply.

Yogi Bear Alternate Ending: ‘BooBoo Kills Yogi’ Parody Video Creator Speaks! – Speakeasy – WSJ

Earle decided to re-fashion a new ending to “Yogi Bear” by casting the titular hero and his sidekick Boo-Boo as the leads in his take on “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” a drama written and directed by Andrew Dominik and starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck.  He chose “Jesse James” because he happened to be watching it at time, and thought the drama would be an excellent counterpart to a picnic basket-stealing bear. “It was an organic creation,” he says.

Not for kids. This would damage mine for good. But if you haven’t seen this parody yet, it’s certainly worth checking out. Big hats off to Edmund Earle. Priceless work.

Below is an image of Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online as displayed in Chrome on the left, after installing the “web app” in my “Web Store Account,” and on the right is the same “web app” after “typing the URL” into my “browser.”

So, what’s the benefit of this Chrome Web Store, again? I think I’ve missed the thread.

Dianne Feinstein: Prosecute Assange Under the Espionage Act – WSJ.com

From Feinstein’s piece this morning in the WSJ Opinion page:

When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove—more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage. The law Mr. Assange continues to violate is the Espionage Act of 1917. That law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to possess or transmit “information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” The Espionage Act also makes it a felony to fail to return such materials to the U.S. government. Importantly, the courts have held that “information relating to the national defense” applies to both classified and unclassified material. Each violation is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. No doubt aware of this law, and despite firm warnings, Mr. Assange went ahead and released the cables on Nov. 28.

Whatever you think of Wikileaks and the disclosure of previously classified materials as practice, doesn’t this escalation of political language stink disgustingly of angry parent berating us kids of the terrors in the big world we could never possibly understand?

Continued…

Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions. But he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.

And yet, insofar as politics is awash in hand-wringing, it’s the media outlets working directly with Wikileaks who are acting as arbiters of release. According to the AP late last week, in fact Wikileaks did not release the cache of cables indiscriminately — and has released only a fraction of the 250,000 total — but called on expert journalists to carefully select and release the documents appropriate to the national dialog.

The Associated Press: Respected media outlets collaborate with WikiLeaks

“The cables we have release correspond to stories released by our main stream media partners and ourselves. They have been redacted by the journalists working on the stories, as these people must know the material well in order to write about it,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian’s website Friday. “The redactions are then reviewed by at least one other journalist or editor, and we review samples supplied by the other organisations to make sure the process is working.”

 

Each publication suggested a way to remove names and details considered too sensitive, and “I suppose WikiLeaks chooses the one it likes,” El Pais Editor in Chief Javier Moreno said in a telephone interview from his Madrid office.

…

The media outlets agreed to work together, with about 120 journalists in total working on the project, at times debating which names of people cited in the documents could be published.

After the mainstream media released their stories, vetted by journalists arguably as expert (if not more so) as those trying to prevent Wikileaks release, Wikileaks itself publishes related source cables on their own site.

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told readers in an online exchange that the newspaper has suggested to its media partners and to WikiLeaks what information it believes should be withheld.

 

“We agree wholeheartedly that transparency is not an absolute good,” Keller wrote. “Freedom of the press includes freedom not to publish, and that is a freedom we exercise with some regularity.”

These are not clowns inconsiderate of the political, ethical, and professional implications of publishing dangerous information. Not The New York Times. Not Le Monde. Not The Guardian. Not Der Speigel. Not Julian Assange. And, as if to prove that point, the U.S. Government mistook outreach from Assange himself to help determine what should and should not be released as “half-hearted gesture.”

Days before releasing any of the latest documents, Assange appealed to the U.S. ambassador in London, asking the U.S. government to confidentially help him determine what needed to be redacted from the cables before they were publicly released. The ambassador refused, telling Assange to hand over stolen property. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley called Assange’s offer “a half-hearted gesture to have some sort of conversation.”

Even the Secretary of Defense stands by his early call that it’s premature to sound the alarm, as they continue their own investigation. This, from August:

Gates, Wikileaks, Aug 16, 2010

The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security; however, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure.

And this, his most important point, from the WSJ November 30:

Gates: WikiLeaks Isn’t ‘Game Changer’ – Washington Wire – WSJ

The release of the WikiLeaks documents also showed, Mr. Gates said, that there was little difference between what the U.S. said privately and what it said publicly.

 

Mr. Gates defended the expansion of information sharing, as part of an effort to improve the intelligence military troops on the front lines had access to, but said that sharing had gone too far. “No one at the front was denied, in Afghanistan or Iraq, any information that would be helpful to them. Now obviously that aperture went too wide,” he said.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul: Don’t prosecute WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange – Yahoo! News

Alex Pappas reports in the Daily Caller on Ron Paul’s predictably libertarian response: “‘In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth,’ Paul wrote on Twitter Friday. ‘In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.'”

[Weirdly, I can’t find the Paul Twitter post anymore. Paul’s account appears to have no posts and the link from the Caller article on Yahoo! news is dead.]

Normally, it’s easy to dismiss Paul as a kook. But he’s carrying an important flag in Washington and we need to think about this one carefully. If Feinstein and Leiberman have done anything in this mess, it’s elevate Assange in status and importance, even on this, the day of his arrest. After all, isn’t it some part of the Golden Rule that reminds us not to put in print that which we’d be afraid our mothers might read?

Chrome Web App demos – Engadget Galleries

I love a lot of what Google does. I’m a daily customer. But come on — between this and the new Google eBookstore we have a failure of creativity.

WikiLeaks arrest: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrested – latimes.com

Reporting from London — Julian Assange, the founder of the controversial WikiLeaks website, was arrested here Tuesday and ordered to remain in custody until a hearing next week on his possible extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations that he sexually assaulted two women.

Frustrating day for Diane Feinstein and Joe Lieberman for many reasons, but mostly because Henry Chu worked the word “lickspittle” into the piece, and that’s enough to get your hackles up on its own.

Stephens has denounced Sweden as “one of the lickspittle states” that have kowtowed to American demands in the past, particularly by assisting in the controversial practice of “extraordinary rendition” of terrorism suspects.

Facebook: We’re Not Kicking Wikileaks Off Our Site

Facebook’s response, from Andrew Noyes, the company’s D.C. based Manager of Public Policy Communications: “The Wikileaks Facebook Page does not violate our content standards nor have we encountered any material posted on the page that violates our policies.”

Fascinating.

Dwight Silverman on “Consumer Reports: AT&T is the worst carrier”

These results have got to sting for AT&T, which has spent billions of dollars in the last few years beefing up its network. As far as Consumer Reports’ readers go, they’re apparently seeing the company’s network get worse, not better.

Yesh. That’s… ummm… telling? Yes, yes I think “telling” is the word I’m looking for here. And in response, from AT&T:

We take this seriously and we continually look for new ways to improve the customer experience. The fact is wireless customers have choices and a record number of them chose AT&T in the third quarter, significantly more than our competitors. Hard data from independent drive tests confirms AT&T has the nation’s fastest mobile broadband network with our nearest competitor 20 percent slower on average nationwide and our largest competitor 60 percent slower on average nationwide. And, our dropped call rate is within 1/10 of a percent – the equivalent of just one call in a thousand – of the industry leader.

Translation:

“Yes. Yes we are scared shitless about Verizon getting the damned iPhone.”

[sloshes tumbler of Courvoisier clumsily, stumbles over ottoman, lodges foot in open mouth of bearskin rug]

“See? We can be honest. We can cryyyy. What do you think of us now, bitches?”

In terms of handsets, Samsung’s Galaxy S series cleaned up… behind iPhone, that is, which Consumer Reports still refuses to recommend.

Columbia University Walks Back Anti-WikiLeaks Advice

In an email to students last week, SIPA’s Office of Career Services warned students that tweeting or posting about WikiLeaks on Facebook could endanger their job prospects with the federal government, according to an alumnus working at the U.S. State Department.

Generally, probably a good idea to vet phonecalls from an alum before promoting their message to the general alumni body. Just saying. But the response from Dean Coatsworth was good:

December 6, 2010

Dear SIPA Community,

Last Tuesday, SIPA’s Office of Career Services received a call from a former student currently employed by the U.S. Department of State who pointed out that the U.S. government documents released during the past few months through WikiLeaks are still considered classified. The caller suggested that students who will be applying for federal jobs that require background checks avoid posting links to these documents or making comments about them on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter.

OCS emailed this cautionary suggestion to students, as it has done many times with other information that could be helpful in seeking employment after graduation. We know that many students today share a great deal about their lives online and that employers may use that information when evaluating their candidacy. Subsequent news stories have indicated that the Department of State has issued guidelines for its own employees, but has not issued any guidelines for prospective employees.

Freedom of information and expression is a core value of our institution. Thus, SIPA’s position is that students have a right to discuss and debate any information in the public arena that they deem relevant to their studies or to their roles as global citizens, and to do so without fear of adverse consequences. The WikiLeaks documents are accessible to SIPA students (and everyone else) from a wide variety of respected sources, as are multiple means of discussion and debate both in and outside of the classroom.

Should the U.S. Department of State issue any guidelines relating to the WikiLeaks documents for prospective employees, SIPA will make them available immediately.

Sincerely,

John H. Coatsworth

Dean

So, the response is fine. That a place like SIPA would instinctively send out a post telling students to watch what they post online implying potential government reprisals in the hiring process is tantamount to implying government reprisals elsewhere as well. It’s about as dangerous a precedent a university could set and is a terrific and leading indicator for public understanding of these complex issues.

“That seems really dark…”

“No, no, no… it’s not dark. You’re misunderstanding me, bro.”