Office 12's promised Open XML file format: I'll chew my hat.

InformationWeek > Breaking News > Office 12 To Boost XML Support, Document Security > June 1, 2005

When Office 12 debuts next year, the default 'save-to' file format of the applications will be XML. Or at least a version which Microsoft is calling Microsoft Open XML Formats.

If Office 12 actually uses well documented file formats without intellectual property entanglements that other applications can readily and safely read and write, I'll (at least) chew my hat. File format control is so fundamental to Microsoft's business model this would only make sense if they are planning a radical transformation of their business model.

It does make sense if Microsoft plans to move to a 'rented software' model rather than the current no expiration 'licensed model'. Since I believe they very much want to move to a rented software model this move is not utterly inconceivable. So I'm only promising to chew rather than eat my hat.

BTW, Microsoft promised XML file formats for Office XP, but the implementation ended up being very proprietary and basically useless. This implementation resembles the OpenOffice file design: ascii XML with binary objects embedded in an enclosing zip file. Apple does something quite similar with their Office competitors.

Washing keyboards -- in the dishwasher

You CAN Put Your Keyboard in the Dishwasher

This is an old practice -- clean out a dirty keyboard by washing it. I read of this practice at least 8 years ago, and it's probably older.

Surprisingly it's said to work well for a variety of electronics, but not motors of any kind. Don't rapid-dry the keyboard. Fan drying is fine. Most people don't remove the keys, but older or somewhat loose keys may fall off and should be removed and stored prior to the dishwasher. Some say to avoid soap, but most agree a small amount of standard dishwasher soap works well.

The drying stage can take a few days.

Camera vendors of Brooklyn -- home of the "great deal"

Central Digital, d.b.a. dBuys.com, IBuyDigital.com, IBuyPlasma.com, RealDealShop.com, DigitalMegaStore.com, and CentralDigital.com

Brooklyn is the home of the low cost camera "deal". The companies selling these cameras operate on very low margins, and it turns out they have store fronts to match (and about 7 different names each).

Some of these vendors make money by cheating their customers. Others make their money on bundled accessories. I had a good personal experience with iBuyDigital, and, by comparison to their peers, they have a palatial store front (link above).

(iBuyDigital did pester me to buy some higher margin accessories, but that's only fair. I only used them once however. My other purchases have been at more traditional venues and Amazon.)

Making a threat threatening: six strategies for business

HBS Working Knowledge: Strategy: Six Steps for Making Your Threat Credible

Did you know there are entire journals dedicated to Negotiation? This is taken from an article by Deepak Malhotra (Harvard Business School). The tactics only work, however, if the opponent is clever enough to recognize them. I don't think that's always true. It's possible to be too clever ...

Israeli hackers use trojan software to spy on rival companies: Neuromancer lives

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli firms 'ran vast spy ring'

Neuromancer was not the first science fiction novel to describe a world of corporate hackers spying upon one another's software -- but it was the best of this genre. I hope someone interviews William Gibson for his commentary on this historic story. Historic because the events described will soon be so commonplace...

Police in Israel say they have uncovered a huge industrial spying ring which used computer viruses to probe the systems of many major companies.

At least 15 Israeli firms have been implicated in the espionage plot, with 18 people arrested in Israel and two more held by British police.

Among those under suspicion are major Israeli telecoms and media companies.

Police say the companies used a "Trojan horse" computer virus written by an Israeli to hack into rivals' systems.

Interpol and the authorities in Britain, Germany and the US are already involved in investigating the espionage, which Israeli police fear may involve major international companies.

Imagine the situation in Russia and China.

The last remaining shards of the media squeak up.

Washington Post: Assault On the Media

The barbarians have leveled the house and set fire to the fields. They advance on a loan scribe deep in the rubble. It gradually dawns on him that there's a war on, and maybe he should "fight back".

...I resisted writing about this subject precisely because I do not want anyone to confuse my own views with Newsweek's or The Post's.

I write about it now because of the new reports and because I fear that too many people in traditional journalism are becoming dangerously defensive in the face of a brilliantly conceived conservative attack on the independent media.

Conservative academics have long attacked "postmodernist" philosophies for questioning whether "truth" exists at all and claiming that what we take as "truths" are merely "narratives" woven around some ideological predisposition. Today's conservative activists have become the new postmodernists. They shift attention away from the truth or falsity of specific facts and allegations -- and move the discussion to the motives of the journalists and media organizations putting them forward. Just a modest number of failures can be used to discredit an entire enterprise.

Logic, rationality, empiricism. That's so Enlightenment. Bush is either pre-Enlightenment or post-modernist or both. BTW, I don't think he would have much of a problem with that assertion. Bush famously remarked that the "jury is still out on natural selection". He's no rationalist.

The ultimate iMac accessory: an air conditioner

Faughnan's Tech: iMac essential: a thermal monitoring program

Let's assume Apple has fixed the power supply and the fans in the new (last month's) 2nd generation G5 iMac. They still have one huge problem -- IBM's CPU. In contrast to Intel, who invested wisely and heavily to destroy power-efficient competitive CPUs with their own excellent solution, IBM and AMD have followed the hot road.

So I don't think Apple has solved the G5 iMac's heat dissipation problem.

So if you want a G5 iMac, what else do you need? A well air conditioned room with an external fan pushing cool room air into the iMac's air intake. This kind of defeats the purpose of a quiet machine, but at least the room will be comfortable. One could compromise by running the iMac in its low speed setting and allowing the room temperature to rise a bit. A high quality large low speed external fan could even be fairly quiet.

My guess is that the combination of an internal thermal monitoring system, judicious use of external drives to reduce internal drive heating, lower performance settings, room air conditioning and a quiet external fan, all taken together, will allow one to use a 2nd generation G5 iMac for at least 2-3 years. When you need power for video editing, crank the external cooling and let the machine rip.

Yes, Apple has a problem.

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History to screen the Discovery Institute's anti-evolution propaganda

Smithsonian to Screen a Movie That Makes a Case Against Evolution - New York Times

Reading the article one is left with two possible conclusions:

1. There's been significant incompetence at the museum.
2. This was an informed decision. That implies either non-scientific leadership or profound political cynicism.

This is another substantial victory for the Discovery Institute (largely funded, btw, but far right proponents of christian government) and a significant defeat for american science. We are continuing to lose ground. It may yet be reversed, by Monday morning the office of the museum's director will be getting some interesting phone calls.

Happiness is a selective memory - manipulating memory for good and for profit

EconLog, Framing Effects and Memory, Bryan Caplan: Library of Economics and Liberty

A central assumption of much of my research is that people can choose their own beliefs. There are many possible mechanisms, but Vrij's discussion suggests yet another. If you want to believe something, just describe the relevant event to yourself using appropriately loaded language. Your memory does the rest.

Conversely, if you want to prevent your desires from affecting your beliefs, use measured language to describe it to yourself. Otherwise, you're burying a time capsule of deception for yourself to dig up at a later date.

The more we understand our minds, the more ephemeral and contextual we appear to be. Belief is particularly fluid. This adds new dimensions to classic books describing mass movements.

My approach to creating a selectively-false and happy set of memories is a large collection of family photos that cycle across our array of computer displays. These leverage the principle of selective reinforcement of memory -- given two proximate events, unbalanced reinforcement of one will decrease retrieval of the second. It as though as one memory grows it usurps the foundation of its "neighbor" memories. In this experiment the happy photos selectively blur away all other events.

Truth is fundamentally overrated in our current universe.

PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) may work the other way. By constantly reinforcing very negative memories all good memories seem to be subsumed. This is why some therapies for PTSD have been hypothesized to be potentially counter-productive. I think that PTSD research is now focusing on "selective destruction" of memory and reinforcement or implanting of more positive memories.

Memory therapy, involving the selective implantation of false memories for the the benefit of the patient, will be an increasingly interesting subject over the next twenty years. Particulary if it is done without the informed consent of the patient. Of course, some would say advertisers have done this for years.

Speaking of memory, I thought I wrote on this topic some time ago, but my searches aren't turning anything up. Maybe I did that in an alternate time slice :-).

Gender imbalance in China: the contribution of Hepatitis B infection

The Search for 100 Million Missing Women - An economics detective story. By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt

Fascinating. There are two fascinating claims here that seem reasonably persuasive:

1. Hepatitis B infection biases live births to male infants. (Hep B infection is very common in some areas of China and used to be very common in Taiwan -- until they began immunizing newborns to prevent perinatal infection.)
2. This phenomena accounts for a significant portion of China's gender bias (too few women -- the other explanations are selective neglect of liveborn girls and selective abortion, the old explanation of 'stopping after the first boy' doesn't work).

Economics and public health are meeting in increasingly interesting ways.

Signs of the end times? Or just new times ...

First - Crooked Timber: I think I’m going to be sick: The Economist’s new venture is:

...an inspirational lifestyle magazine which instead of helping readers make decisions in their professional life, helps them do the same in their personal life”...

... Take white-collar boxing – the latest stress reliever for Wall Street and City elite. Tired of punching a bag at the gym, they have now moved on to punching each other in front of a paying audience. ...

... If smacking around your colleagues doesn’t sound appealing, how about brushing up on your space travel tips so you can be first in line to book your space flight?

... Other articles include the latest on gadgets, health innovations, luxury items and how to order your own bespoke car.

and ...

The April 22, 2005 business section of a "local" paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, printed the compensation rankings for the CEOs of publicly traded Minnesota companies (the numbers are in millions of dollars, they don't distinguish between CEO-founders and CEO's hired into a mature company):

1. William McGuire, UnitedHealth Group: 125
2. Robert Ulrich, Target: 40
3. Jerry Grundhofer, US Bancorp: 39
4. Steve Sanger, General Mills: 18
5. Randall Hogan, Pentair: 10
6. Joel Ronning, Digital River: 8.6
7. James McNerney, 3M: 8.5
8. Kendrick Melrose, Toro: 8.1
9. Richard Rompala, Valspar: 7.8
10. Arthur Collins, Medtronic: 6.7

and

• the Wall Street Journal has a front page essay on America's rigid class structures
• the New York Times runs an entire series on the same topic
• Cohen and DeLong write in The Atlantic about globalization and class upheaval in near-future America. The primary thesis? There will be vastly more money and wealth going to multinational companies, but it will not go to workers exposed to the income pressures of globalization. Where it will end up settling (deflation, shareholders, senior management) is unclear and may depend on social factors such as corruption.
  

There's more, but the above provides a decent overview. We are an aging society, so we may respond to these circumstances with less social upheaval than we would have 80 years ago. All the same, I do expect a green/socialist party to emerge in America in 2012, rather to the shock of pundits everywhere. (I'm a middle-of-the-road Clinton Democrat myself btw, but I'm old too :-).

Search engines I use now

At the pretty wired (ok, it was in Minnesota) .com startup I worked for in the 90s I was the first to discover and use Google. Alta Vista, my old favorite, had been in decline and Yahoo was still pretty much a directory/indexing company (for manual indices, I then preferred the Encyclopedia Britannica's site!).

Google was the clear winner from the start. It's been a Google world ever since.

There are rumblings, though, of rebellion. Googe's indexing engines are slow to hit many pages, especially Gooogle's own blogs. Yahoo seems to hit the pages Google misses. And, as Phil Bradley notes, there are many special purpose alternatives.

Here are a few I've lately found useful - or at least interesting:

Mindset (Yahoo): Yahoo search biased to commercial or non-commercial
http://mindset.research.yahoo.com

Grokker: visual results
http://www.grokker.com

Brainboost: just facts
http://www.brainbost.com

Google Scholar: academia
http://scholar.google.com

Google Portal: Google + Gmail + Google History search
http://www.google.com/ig

Froogle and Pricescan: Shopping, also Amazon for the best overall user reviews.

Google Print: search full text of books
(added 5/28, thanks to a reference from Phil Bradley's blog)
http://print.google.com/

Water boarding and other American recreational activities

The Torture Feature: Taxonomy of Torture

Form Direct Questioning to Sleep deprivation to Isolation to Water boarding to old-fashined beatings-to-death. All unremarkable everyday routines in modern America and our outsourced torture sites.

Intelligent design: the game of Spore

BBC NEWS | Technology | Sims creator takes on evolution

In the game, players start off as an amoeba in a 2D world, reminiscent of some early video games.

The aim is to grow and evolve generations of creatures, with players able to choose the physical attributes of their creation.

"You get to play every generation of the creature," said Mr Wright. "I want something boys can make scary things or casual gamers can make cute things."

He said the computer would analyse a creature's design and work out how it should behave.

In the demonstration, Mr Wright created a three-legged creature and said the software would work out how it should walk.

"This is the hardest piece of technology I have ever had to solve," he said.

The creatures are supposed to evolve through natural selection, and intelligent design. As I've noted in the context of another game, SkyNet comes not from the integrated missile defense system, but rather from the first generation of networked games that includes rat neural tissue in the networked game consoles ...

Security costs money, it's cheaper for banks to pay the crooks.

PBS | I, Cringely . May 26, 2005 - Phish or Phisher?

Cringely tackles phishing scams, and he's sufficiently impolitic to point out why credit card companies and banks don't fuss about this fraud:

Another problem is that a large group of phishing victims -- banks and credit card companies -- don't want to publicize their losses, which might lead to a loss of business as customers start to worry about being victimized. But it goes even further, because the financial institutions are only on the hook for reported thefts. So by not making a big deal of it, maybe you won't notice that extra $30 charge and won't demand that your credit card company cover the loss. Being upfront about phishing could easily double corporate losses because of it by forcing these outfits to actually assume the risk that they say they'll assume.

So nobody talks about it, and the costs of phishing are generally hidden in the average eight percent that credit card companies figure they'll lose through theft, bankruptcies, etc. In a business with interest charges often going above 20 percent, phishing is tolerable...

This has been true forever. When credit cards started being used outside of brick-and-mortar settings fraud and identity theft exploded -- but the costs of fraud are still much less than the costs of preventing fraud. Especially if the victims don't notice their losses.

It's no different with checks. Check fraud is a very common crime, but in general the banks and police don't bother to bring these cases to court. It's just not worth the hassle -- for them.

Of course we bear the costs, but that's another story. Happily there are plausible solutions:

... Thinking there must be a better solution I contacted Max Levchin, who used to chase phishers for a living as co-founder and CTO of PayPal, a company he left a few months after it was bought by eBay back in 2002.

"The way to nail phishing," says Max, "is for the companies being impersonated to offer cash bounties -- to the first person to report the incident, the first person to call the free host and take down the site, the first person who figures out the identity of the perp. This would mean admitting that the matter is much more serious than most people realize, but that's going to have to happen, sooner than later, if columns like yours continue to give coverage to the matter. On the other hand, it's peanuts, financially, for the companies involved. There is the adverse selection problem -- why not set up phishing sites, report them, and collect the bounties? -- but it's easy to mitigate this by making the pay-outs contingent on all kinds of personal information from the good samaritan, and making the bounties really significant financially only when criminal charges are brought against the perpetrators. In fact, about a year ago, I was thinking of starting a site that would be an independent agency, holding the bounty money in escrow, ensuring the actual payments, and providing the war-room-style up-to-the-second information about what the latest phishing scams were. In the end, I decided this was a project not too different from my PayPal work, and I could do more fun things with my personal time, but still think the idea is sound."