Freed medics describe Libyan captivity - International Herald TribuneThe courts will grind on. One day, a small semblance of justice will be done.
...Asked if they were ready to testify in a Bulgarian court in a future case against her torturers, Valcheva said calmly, 'Yes, we are ready.'
Apple's iPhone may not have launched quite as well as Apple might have hoped. I like that. Apple is more likely now to second guess some of their mistakes, like a headphone jack that, for no sensible reason, doesn't fit most headphones. Maybe they'll even create a task list, enable notes synchronization, open the phone to signed Cocoa apps, put FileMaker Mobile on the phone, provide synchronization to Google Calendar, fix the broken Outlook synchronization (255 character contact notes?!?!) etc, etc.
On other side of the iPhone equation, AT&T may rethink pricing, and in particular rethink how much an iPhone is worth given their weak coverage and demonstrably slow and unreliable data support.
So if you've been thinking of buying an iPhone, please hold off a bit. I very much want to buy an iPhone, but I want Apple and AT&T to suffer enough to bring it a bit closer to what I need. (Voice dialing and GPS wouldn't hurt either, but I can live without them.) If you're still feeling tempted, contemplate this list of iPhone v1.0 Bugs (AppleHound). There, don't you think you can wait another three to five months?
You can wait a bit longer ... really. Apple's got tons of cash -- they're not going away. We just want them to suffer a bit. Heck, if the share price drops 20% you can make a good investment too ...
The very latest research suggests to some that Iraqi feelings should be treated as meaningful, even human ...
Study: Iraqis May Experience Sadness When Friends, Relatives Die
CHAPEL HILL, NC— A field study released Monday by the University of North Carolina School of Public Health suggests that Iraqi citizens experience sadness and a sense of loss when relatives, spouses, and even friends perish, emotions that have until recently been identified almost exclusively with Westerners.
"We were struck by how an Iraqi reacts to the sight of the bloody or decapitated corpse of a family member in a not unlike an American, or at the very least a Canadian, would," said Dr. Jonathan Pryztal, chief author of the study...
... "We are, in truth, still a long way from determining if Iraqis are exhibiting actual, U.S.-grade sadness," Mayo Clinic neuropsychologist Norman Blum said. "At present, we see no reason for the popular press to report on Iraqi emotions as if they are real."
The Onion has produced another bitter classic. I would applaud any newspaper that routinely followed "3,500 US dead" with "and over 300,000 Iraqi dead" .... (Thanks FMH)
Damn Interesting: The Thugs of India
...Their extreme secrecy combined with their mastery of murder made the Thugs the deadliest secret society in all of history. In the early 19th century they were credited with 40,000 deaths annually, stretching back as far as anyone cared to count. Some estimates put the overall death toll as high as 2,000,000, but with the cult potentially operating for more than 500 years before formal records were kept, the true number is impossible to determine.
Gordon's Notes: Riding the dragon - Fallows on ChinaSo how can one escape the smile and restore "balance to the force"? One approach is fundamentally Darwinian. Strong brands invest in defect analysis and early detection, eliminating suppliers who deliver flawed product. Consumers forget about commodity products and invest in brands. Consumers miraculously develop a memory for what brands fail...James Fallows .... The curve is named for the U-shaped arc of the 1970s-era smiley-face icon, and it runs from the beginning to the end of a product’s creation and sale. At the beginning is the company’s brand: HP, Siemens, Dell, Nokia, Apple. Next comes the idea for the product: an iPod, a new computer, a camera phone. After that is high-level industrial design—the conceiving of how the product will look and work. Then the detailed engineering design for how it will be made. Then the necessary components. Then the actual manufacture and assembly. Then the shipping and distribution. Then retail sales. And, finally, service contracts and sales of parts and accessories.
The significance is that China’s activity is in the middle stages—manufacturing, plus some component supply and engineering design—but America’s is at the two ends, and those are where the money is. The smiley curve, which shows the profitability or value added at each stage, starts high for branding and product concept, swoops down for manufacturing, and rises again in the retail and servicing stages. The simple way to put this—that the real money is in brand name, plus retail—may sound obvious, but its implications are illuminating....
2007I'm puzzled Dyer doesn't have a larger blog profile. It's true that his web technology is medieval, but I suspect it's simply a lack of big name attention. Now if Brad were to start reading Dyer ...
July 1 Perspectives on Terrorism
July 3 The United States of Africa
July 6 The End of Cheap Food
July 10 The New York Times vs. Reality
July 14 North Korea: Five Wasted Years
The Big Picture | The Cheapest Days to Buy Certain ItemsOf course if everyone were to follow this advice the advice would become worthless ...
Great article in Smart Money that fits in well with recent Retail Day: how and why certain pricing strategies occur...
Airplane Tickets
When to Buy: Wednesday morning.
Why: 'Most airfare sales are thrown out there on the weekend,' says travel expert Peter Greenberg, a.k.a. The Travel Detective1. Other airlines then jump into the game, discounting their own fares and prompting further changes by the first airline. The fares reach their lowest prices late Tuesday or early Wednesday....
James Fallows(I wanted to embed a clip of the movie, but they'd set it up to start playing on page load. That's obnoxious so you'll have to visit the site if you want to see it ....)
...Next week Charles Ferguson's documentary No End in Sight opens in DC and New York, followed in August by "select other cities." It is worth making time to see this film...
... It covers almost exactly the same terrain, including many of the same sources and anecdotes, as did my book Blind Into Baghdad. But rarely have I seen a clearer demonstration of how much more powerful the combination of pictures, sound, music, real-people-talking, etc can be than words on a page... there are times when the experience of seeing, for instance, chaos on the streets of Baghdad transcends any mere verbal description of it....
China Makes, The World Takes, James Fallows, The Atlantic July/Aug 2007So today, my mother can't buy a phone that works. I can, but I use research tools unimaginable ten years ago to find the one model available for sale at the moment that will work reliably for at least two years (A Panasonic phone was my last answer). On the other hand, I've given up on finding a DVD/VCR that's reliable, or a toaster that I can trust. In those cases, I just do without.
... One facility in Guangdong province, the famous Foxconn works, sits in the middle of a conurbation just outside Shenzhen, where it occupies roughly as much space as a major airport. Some 240,000 people (the number I heard most often; estimates range between 200,000 and 300,000) work on its assembly lines, sleep in its dormitories, and eat in its company cafeterias... From the major ports serving the area, Hong Kong and Shenzhen harbors, cargo ships left last year carrying the equivalent of more than 40 million of the standard 20-foot-long metal containers that end up on trucks or railroad cars. That’s one per second, round the clock and year-round—and it’s less than half of China’s export total......But what is of intense interest to him, he said, is a company that has built up a brand name and relationships with retailers, and knows what it wants to promote and sell next—and needs to save time and money in manufacturing a product that requires a fair amount of assembly. “That is where we can help, because you will come here and see factories that are better than the ones you’ve been working with in America or Germany.”
Here are a few examples, all based on real-world cases: You have announced a major new product, which has gotten great buzz in the press. But close to release time, you discover a design problem that must be fixed—and no U.S. factory can adjust its production process in time.
The Chinese factories can respond more quickly, and not simply because of 12-hour workdays. “Anyplace else, you’d have to import different raw materials and components,” Casey told me. “Here, you’ve got nine different suppliers within a mile, and they can bring a sample over that afternoon. People think China is cheap, but really, it’s fast.” Moreover, the Chinese factories use more human labor, and fewer expensive robots or assembly machines, than their counterparts in rich countries. “People are the most adaptable machines,” an American industrial designer who works in China told me. “Machines need to be reprogrammed. You can have people doing something entirely different next week.”....
... You are an American inventor with a product you think has “green” potential for household energy savings. But you need to get it to market fast, because you think big companies may be trying the same thing, and you need to meet a target retail price of $100. “No place but China to do this,” Mr. China said, as he showed me the finished product...
... Casey’s PCH has a Google Earth–like system that incorporates what he has learned in 10 years of dealing with Chinese subcontractors. You name a product you want to make—say, a new case or headset for a mobile phone. Casey clicks on the map and shows the companies that can produce the necessary components—and exactly how far they are from each other in travel time. This is hard-won knowledge in an area where city maps are out of date as soon as they are published and addresses are approximate. (Casey’s are keyed in with GPS coordinates, discreetly read from his GPS-equipped mobile phone when he visits each factory.) If a factory looks promising, you click again and get interior and exterior photos, a rundown on the management, in some cases videos of the assembly line in action, plus spec sheets and engineering drawings for orders they have already filled. Similar programs allow Casey and his clients to see which ship, plane, or truck their products are on anywhere in the world, and the amount of stock on hand in any warehouse or depot. (How do they know? Each finished piece and almost every component has an individual bar code that is scanned practically every time it is touched.)...
... Even some newly built facilities leave to human hands work that has been done in the West for many decades by machines. Imagine opening a consumer product—a mobile phone, an electric toothbrush, a wireless router—and finding a part that was snapped on or glued into place. It was probably put there by a young Chinese woman who did the same thing many times per minute throughout her 12-hour workday....
... It is conceivable that bad partnerships, stolen intellectual property, dilution of brand name, logistics nightmares, or other difficulties have given many companies a sour view of outsourcing; I have heard examples in each category from foreign executives. But the more interesting theme I have heard from them, which explains why they are willing to surmount the inconveniences, involves something called the “smiley curve.”
The curve is named for the U-shaped arc of the 1970s-era smiley-face icon, and it runs from the beginning to the end of a product’s creation and sale. At the beginning is the company’s brand: HP, Siemens, Dell, Nokia, Apple. Next comes the idea for the product: an iPod, a new computer, a camera phone. After that is high-level industrial design—the conceiving of how the product will look and work. Then the detailed engineering design for how it will be made. Then the necessary components. Then the actual manufacture and assembly. Then the shipping and distribution. Then retail sales. And, finally, service contracts and sales of parts and accessories.
The significance is that China’s activity is in the middle stages—manufacturing, plus some component supply and engineering design—but America’s is at the two ends, and those are where the money is. The smiley curve, which shows the profitability or value added at each stage, starts high for branding and product concept, swoops down for manufacturing, and rises again in the retail and servicing stages. The simple way to put this—that the real money is in brand name, plus retail—may sound obvious, but its implications are illuminating.
At each factory I visited, I asked managers to estimate how much of a product’s sales price ended up in whose hands. The strength of the brand name was the most important variable. If a product is unusual enough and its brand name attractive enough, it could command so high a price that the retailer might keep half the revenue. (Think: an Armani suit, a Starbucks latte.) Most electronics products are now subject to much fiercer price competition, since it is so easy for shoppers to find bargains on the Internet. Therefore the generic Windows-style laptops I saw in one modern factory might go for around $1,000 in the United States, with the retailer keeping less than $50.
Where does the rest of the money go? The manager of that factory guessed that Intel and Microsoft together would collect about $300, and that the makers of the display screen, the disk-storage devices, and other electronic components might get $150 or so apiece. The keyboard makers would get $15 or $20; FedEx or UPS would get slightly less. When all other costs were accounted for, perhaps $30 to $40—3 to 4 percent of the total—would stay in China with the factory owners and the young women on the assembly lines....
Of course you know how this goes ...
In February, 2001, the Bush State Department issued a highly critical report documenting Russia's human rights abuses, both domestically and with regard to its treatment of foreign detainees. I found the document randomly today while searching for something else. Among the Russian moral outrages we protested...
Yeah. We do all of 'em now. Routinely.
One bright side of the GOP regime is that our righteous diatribes now cause hilarious laughter instead of irritation or embarrassment. Well, it's a bright side for people like Putin.
Krugman had a similar rant a while back. I don't think the '11th grade' is the full story; we need an insider to figure this one out. I do agree that the US media have about as much right as the GOP to be sanctimonious. Their star hangs low.Digby on the media and John Edwards
...Ambinder says right out that "fairly or unfairly" the press can't stand John Edwards and so they are going to bury him. This is, of course, not unprecedented, since we saw what they did to Al Gore for the same reason. The matter-of-factness of his statement still made my head spin a little, but I appreciate the candor. At least we now know what we are dealing with. (And there is no question about whether it's fair. It most certainly isn't.)
Now, I am not especially surprised that the press corps doesn't like John Edwards. Many of these people probably didn't like guys like him in high school either and one thing we know about the political press corps is that they have never matured beyond the 11th grade. (See: chilean bass stupidity.) But I have to ask, once again, just who in the hell these people think they are and why they think they are allowed to pick our candidates for us based upon their own "feelings" about them? I don't recall electing them to anything. (But, hey, maybe we should just poll the kewl kidz and find out which candidate they "like, totally, like" and we can cancel the election and save a lot of time and money.)
This is exactly this kind of thing that makes people like me laugh when I get lectured by professional journalists about "objectivity" and "ethics." At least I put my political biases up front. These phonies hide behind a veil of journalistic conventions so they can exercise their psychologically stunted desire to stick it to the BMOC, or the dork or whoever these catty little gossips want to skewer for their own pleasure that day. Please, please, no more hand-wringing sanctimony from reporters about the undisciplined, unethical blogosphere. Their glass houses are lying in shards all around their feet.
Each time they've pulled this puerile nonsense in the last few years, it's resulted in a mess that's going to take even more years to unravel. And they learned nothing, apparently, since they are doing exactly the same thing in this election. If the press really wants to know why they are held in lower esteem than hitmen and health insurance claims adjusters, this is it.
I was reflecting today on what I've learned over the past year about the state of the art in data mining, data rights, trading in data rights. What I see now, and what I think is coming, suggests this is a good time to summarize the themes of privacy and reputation management (including identity management) together, with a bow, as always, to David Brin.
It's not hard to drive to the bottom line. You should live your life as if you have no secrets. Assume that anything you write, say, do will one day be visible. Assume that every aspect of your medical history, your employment history and the time you yelled at the kids is public.
No, we're not quite there yet. You can still assume multiple digital identities, manage them carefully, and be one small step away from Google. If you don't have a credit card or a phone or a license you can still be surprisingly hard to find, and you can probably live. The trend is clear though, barring a dramatic awakening of our stunned citizenry we will be there within 5-10 years. When we get there there will be a large retrospective effect, so that transparency will propagate backwards in time. What you can conceal now will become public then.
That's why, today, you must assume you live in the proverbial fishbowl. Live accordingly.
Ah, you don't want to live that way? Well, you might try taking a cattle prod to your fellow voters. Personally I don't hold out much hope however, I think we might as well get used to the idea that this battle was lost ten years ago, and focus instead on making identity theft a serious crime with penalties for the corporations that own and manage our identities.
I'm a 'connections' kind of person. Everything is more or less enmeshed and connected to everything else, everything is recursive and emergent. It's not necessarily a strength -- complexity can be paralyzing. Reality is overrated. This connection, though, is hard to avoid. It's a connection between brands, blogs, why blog, and identity management, and the odd emergent consequences of Google.
The story is quickly told. I ran into some operational issues with a software vendor suffering from a successful product release and I wrote about in my ultra-low subscription mildly pseudonymous tech blog. The blog has low subscription numbers, but Google seems to like it; it appears in searches and gets read. I've had some interesting experiences with posting about corporate issues -- not infrequently I get a comment back from the CEO.
As usual, a company that searches the web for bad reviews (an industry spawned by Google and brand management, in this case the search might have been internal) found the review and sent it on to the vendor's sales organization. The twist this time was that I'd also complained directly to the vendor, under my true name (John Gordon F.). The details and timings of the problems were sufficiently similar, and my pseudonym shield sufficiently mild, that I received a direct phone call from the head of sales. She admitted their sales process was bunged up, and I said if she submitted a comment to that effect and said they were addressing the problem that I'd willingly add an addendum to my post. (She didn't actually post a comment, so I've left the post unchanged.)
I wasn't bothered by the exposure (see a later post), but I was amused. It's a story that illuminates the modern connections between blogs, brand management (reputation management for a vendor), identity (reputation management for a person) and emergence. All favorite themes of mine.
Incidentally, I ought to update my why blog post -- the tech blog is an amazing way to get very direct feedback to vendors.
blog.pmarca.com: Book of the week: Best book for tech entrepreneurs this yearSteve Blank is a super-experienced Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur who is best known for starting E.piphany, a successful software company, and also founded or worked at a broad range of meaningful tech companies over the last 30 years including Zilog, Convergent, MIPS, Ardent (one of the most innovative mini-supercomputer companies of the late 80's), and Rocket Science Games....
... he's just written and published a book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, that is a very practical how-to manual for startups.
In a nutshell, Steve proposes that companies need a Customer Development process that complements their Product Development Process. And he lays out exactly what he thinks that Customer Development process should be. This goes directly to the theory of Product/Market Fit that I have discussed on this blog before -- in this book, Steve provides a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit.
I fell behind on reading Schneier on Security. Mistake. I see a dozen posts I'd like to expand, integrated, comment on, cheer about, etc. Instead, here's the rundown:
This theory explains, with a clarity I have never seen before, why so many people make the bizarre claim that al Qaeda terrorism -- or Islamic terrorism in general -- is "different": that while other terrorist groups might have policy objectives, al Qaeda's primary motivation is to kill us all. This is something we have heard from President Bush again and again -- Abrahms has a page of examples in the paper -- and is a rhetorical staple in the debate. (You can see a lot of it in the comments to this previous essay.)
In fact, Bin Laden's policy objectives have been surprisingly consistent. Abrahms lists four; here are six from former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer's book Imperial Hubris:
- End U.S. support of Israel
- Force American troops out of the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia
- End the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and (subsequently) Iraq
- End U.S. support of other countries' anti-Muslim policies
- End U.S. pressure on Arab oil companies to keep prices low
- End U.S. support for "illegitimate" (i.e. moderate) Arab governments, like Pakistan
Although Bin Laden has complained that Americans have completely misunderstood the reason behind the 9/11 attacks, correspondent inference theory postulates that he's not going to convince people. Terrorism, and 9/11 in particular, has such a high correspondence that people use the effects of the attacks to infer the terrorists' motives. In other words, since Bin Laden caused the death of a couple of thousand people in the 9/11 attacks, people assume that must have been his actual goal, and he's just giving lip service to what he claims are his goals. Even Bin Laden's actual objectives are ignored as people focus on the deaths, the destruction and the economic impact.
Perversely, Bush’s misinterpretation of terrorists' motives actually helps prevent them from achieving their goals.
