Using a webcam to help with audio-only phone conferences

I'm certain someone has written about this, but I couldn't find it on a quick web search.

Office videoconferencing has been limited by corporate bandwidth and the dismal state of USB webcams [1]; there's no practical solution that enables one to share whiteboard work over a video link for example. Even so, I've recently been persuaded that for many people, including me, even crummy low resolution images enable better social interaction and higher quality communication.

So I've started using a webcam with Office Communicator 2005. Unfortunately the people I communicate with don't usually have a webcam, so it's one way. They see me. I either see a blank space or my own face.

That's where I made an interesting discovery. It helps me, when on a phone call, to see my own face. It helps me be more patient, and even to be a better listener. Of course, as Emily points out, a mirror would have the same effect -- but a mirror in my office would seem a bit .... odd.

So I'm experimenting with viewing my own face and body language when I'm on voice only calls. I'm guessing it will help me be more conscious of my own reactions, and better able to manage the call. 

I suspect this might be a bigger help for people with geek-genes than for non-geeks. 

This would make an interesting psychology study btw ...

(I'm sure someone has written about doing this with a mirror in the "old days". One could probably use an iPhone with "mirror" wallpaper in place of a physical mirror or webcam.)

[1] BTW, the built-in Mac webcams aren't the equal of the much mourned firewire iSight (best webcam ever) but they produce much better results than my Microsoft LifeCam. It's not just resolution, it's also video rate, color balance, focus, white balance and, above all, adjustment for variable lighting.

The meaning of median compensation with a high school education

The problem with this statement

William Kristol's bad grade in economics - How the World Works - Salon.com

...For American men with only a high school education, Rodrik writes, median compensation has declined by 10 percent since 1980...

is that the average man with only a high school education in 1980 is probably not the same as the average man with only a high school education in 2008. In 2008 we're talking about someone who's either making some very bad decisions or who has a very significant cognitive disability. In 1980 the group would have included many people who would now go to college or trade school; back then these folks could enter the blue collar labor market and be reasonably well paid.

I think if one adjusted for IQ the income decline would be much less than 10%.

Odd to find myself almost defending Kristol here, as I do believe that much of America is being "Left Behind" - economically speaking. It's just that I have a hard time letting an illogical statement stand ...

Sometimes medical progress is exceedingly slow

Much is made of the great speed of medical progress, of impossibility or keeping up, etc, etc.

Sometimes yes, that is true -- though much that is "new" does not last. Often though, progress is glacial.

One of my medical hobbies is using a Pubmed feed to track articles written about aphthous stomatitis (aka canker sores). This is a generally benign (albeit painful) condition that remains almost as mysterious today as it was when I entered McGill in 1982.

For example, today's feed tossed up an article that could have been written thirty years ago: Topical minocycline for managing symptoms of recur...[Spec Care Dentist. 2008 Jan-Feb].

Sheesh.

In 1982 we were pretty sure canker sores would not be a great mystery in 2008. Of course in 1995 we were certain everyone would have fiber to the desktop by 2001 ...

Dark energy is not a force, and another take on fermions and bosons

This December post by CV has been in my queue for a while. He starts out complaining about the popular depiction of Dark Energy as a "force", but soon digresses into lots of basic physics I have trouble remembering.

Here are the parts I particularly liked:

A Dark, Misleading Force | Cosmic Variance

... The wrong part is referring to dark energy as a “force,” which it’s not...

... quantum field theory implies that the ingredients of a four-dimensional universe are divided neatly into two types: fermions, which cannot pile on top of each other due to the exclusion principle, and bosons, which can. That’s extremely close to the stuff/force distinction, and indeed we tend to associate the known bosonic fields — gravity, electromagnetism, gluons, and weak vector bosons — with the “forces of nature.” Personally I like to count the Higgs boson as a fifth force rather than a new matter particle, but that’s just because I’m especially fastidious....

...dark energy is definitely “stuff.” It’s not a new force. (There might be a force associated with it, if the dark energy is a light scalar field, but that force is so weak that it’s not been detected, and certainly isn’t responsible for the acceleration of the universe.) In fact, the relevant force is a pretty old one — gravity! Cosmologists consider all kinds of crazy ideas in their efforts to account for dark energy, but in all the sensible theories I’ve heard of, it’s gravity that is the operative force. The dark energy is causing a gravitational field, and an interesting kind of field that causes distant objects to appear to accelerate away from us rather than toward us, but it’s definitely gravity that is doing the forcing here...

...Anyone who has spoken about “energy” or “dimensions” to a non-specialist audience has come across this language barrier. Just recently it was finally beaten into me how bad “dark” is for describing “dark matter” and “dark energy.” What we mean by “dark” in these cases is “completely transparent to light.” To your average non-physicist, it turns out, “dark” might mean “completely absorbs light.” Which is the opposite! Who knew? That’s why I prefer calling it “smooth tension,” which sounds more Barry White than Public Enemy.

What I would really like to get rid of is any discussion of “negative pressure.” The important thing about dark energy is that it’s persistent — the density (energy per cubic centimeter) remains roughly constant, even as the universe expands. Therefore, according to general relativity, it imparts a perpetual impulse to the expansion of the universe, not one that gradually dilutes away. A constant density leads to a constant expansion rate, which means that the time it takes the universe to double in size is a constant. But if the universe doubles in size every ten billion years or so, what we see is distant galaxies accelerating away — first they are X parsecs away, then they are 2X parsecs away, then 4X parsecs away, then 8X, etc. The distance grows faster and faster, which we observe as acceleration...

Italics mine. I left out his further discussion on negative pressure, he persuaded me that it's a dumb concept (sort of like "centrifugal force").

Challenges of software as service: Spolsky's version

Amazon's S3 was down the other day. A lot of company's that use S3 were down too.

Such are the woes of 'software as service' -- what we used to call "application service provision".

Amazon didn't say much about the S3 outage, but when something similar happened to Joel Spolsky's product he had quite a few interesting comments:

Five whys - Joel on Software

..Most well-run online services will have two, maybe three outages a year. With so few data points, the length of the outage starts to become really significant, and that's one of those things that's wildly variable. Suddenly, you're talking about how long it takes a human to get to the equipment and swap out a broken part. To get really high uptime, you can't wait for a human to switch out failed parts. You can't even wait for a human to figure out what went wrong: you have to have previously thought of every possible thing that can possibly go wrong, which is vanishingly improbable. It's the unexpected unexpecteds, not the expected unexpecteds, that kill you.

...Think of it this way: If your six nines system goes down mysteriously just once and it takes you an hour to figure out the cause and fix it, well, you've just blown your downtime budget for the next century. Even the most notoriously reliable systems, like AT&T's long distance service, have had long outages (six hours in 1991) which put them at a rather embarrassing three nines ... and AT&;T's long distance service is considered "carrier grade," the gold standard for uptime.

Keeping internet services online suffers from the problem of black swans. Nassim Taleb, who invented the term, defines it thus: "A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations." Almost all internet outages are unexpected unexpecteds: extremely low-probability outlying surprises. They're the kind of things that happen so rarely it doesn't even make sense to use normal statistical methods like "mean time between failure."...

Spolsky cares deeply about customer service, his company's response is impeccable.

Others don't do nearly as well. I have trouble imaging large corporations caring enough to delivery truly reliable service, though the phone companies (for all their many ills) managed it for many years.

Even Nader's sympathizers are appalled

James Fallows turns out to have an unexpected history with Ralph Nader. So his judgment carries more than average weight: Ralph Nader: tragedy to farce.

Can someone hand the BBC's Kevin Connelly a clue?

How can he describe Nader's latest curse without mentioning that Nader gets his campaign funds from the GOP?

Legislative review: Obama and Clinton

Daily Kos: State of the Nation is a well researched review of the Obama and Clinton legislative records. Obama gets the nod from the blogger, but Clinton doesn't do badly either.

Personally I think both records show Congress spends far too much time on micromanagement of peripheral issues, but I guess that's what American's want. If we wanted politicians to tackle the real problems we'd elect different people.

Hey, we still have rabbit ears!

This was on a list of "obsolete skills":

Obsolete skills - Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger:

...10. Adjusting the rabbit ears on your TV set.

Huh?

Our sole source of television is a pair of rabbit ears on a 9" CRT. I still have rabbit tuning skills.

The power of video - the beef recall

This really is the video generation.

We're "pithed frogs" about lethally contaminated Chinese manufactured meds, but a video of "downer" (meaning prion-packed, example: CJD/mad cow disease) cattle being slaughtered raises the roof:

The Biggest Beef Recall Ever - New York Times

A nauseating video of cows stumbling on their way to a California slaughterhouse has finally prompted action: the largest recall of meat in American history.

Well, maybe it shakes the shingles for a day or two.

This is what you get after 8-12 years of the GOP taking apart American government (depending on how you measure GOP control during the hallowed Clinton years).

The video was supposedly done randomly, but even if it wasn't there's nothing in our system to suggest that this isn't routine. I suggest a prayer to George the II the next time you eat a hamburger, feed your pet, buy a child's toy, or give a medication to your child.

Or save your energy and use it to campaign for whoever gets the Democratic nomination.

I destroyed Facebook

I knew this would happen ...

BBC NEWS | Business | Facebook 'sees decline in users'

Social networking site Facebook has seen its first drop in UK users in January, new industry data indicates.

Users fell 5% to 8.5 million in January from 8.9 million in December, according to data from Nielsen Online....

...Nic Howell, deputy editor of industry magazine New Media Age, said the site was no longer as popular among its core audience of young people.

"Social networking is as much about who isn't on the site as who is - when Tory MPs and major corporations start profiles on Facebook, its brand is devalued, driving its core user base into the arms of newer and more credible alternatives," he said...

After all, I did this.

Imagine the horror of a 17 year old seeing a geezer's face.

Heh, heh.

I enjoyed doing them in.

So, who do I take out next?

Word file formats: the Nisus achievement and a gentle wish for .DOC

I use Nisus Writer Express for OS X, and one of these days I'll probably upgrade to Nisus Writer Pro. There are many fine features of this high quality product, including the fact that they don't emulate Microsoft Word. The key features for me [1], however, are that:

• Nisus uses RTF as a native file format
• Nisus can, optionally, use Word .DOC files as their native file format and do a pretty reasonable job of editing existing Word files without messing them up too much.

I've learned many times over many years that data mobility is a critical requirement of my digital world [2]. In 2008 RTF is the closest thing we have to a mobile word processing file format, .DOC is next, and the Oasis OpenDocument File format is a very distant third.

Recently Microsoft released the specification for Word's .DOC binary file format [3]. Joel Spolsky tells us a bit about that format:

Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds) - Joel on Software

...The assumption, and a fairly reasonable one at the time, was that the Word file format only had to be read and written by Word. That means that whenever a programmer on the Word team had to make a decision about how to change the file format, the only thing they cared about was (a) what was fast and (b) what took the fewest lines of code in the Word code base. The idea of things like SGML and HTML—interchangeable, standardized file formats—didn’t really take hold until the Internet made it practical to interchange documents in the first place [jg - 4]; this was a decade later than the Office binary formats were first invented. There was always an assumption that you could use importers and exporters to exchange documents. In fact Word does have a format designed for easy interchange, called RTF, which has been there almost since the beginning. It’s still 100% supported.

...Every checkbox, every formatting option, and every feature in Microsoft Office has to be represented in file formats somewhere. That checkbox in Word’s paragraph menu called “Keep With Next” that causes a paragraph to be moved to the next page if necessary so that it’s on the same page as the paragraph after it? That has to be in the file format. And that means if you want to implement a perfect Word clone than can correctly read Word documents, you have to implement that feature. If you’re creating a competitive word processor that has to load Word documents, it may only take you a minute to write the code to load that bit from the file format, but it might take you weeks to change your page layout algorithm to accommodate it. If you don’t, customers will open their Word files in your clone and all the pages will be messed up.... [6]

Hats off to Nisus. Their ability to work with .DOC file formats [5] is a great achievement, and a testimony to coding excellence and true grit.

Beyond Nisus (buy it) this is another illustration of why we need to care about file formats. Is the Word 2007 .DOC binary file format really the a good way to carry our documents forward?

Today uber-geeks like Schneier seem to be discovering lock-in - decades after I put (small) audiences to sleep with it. A bit late, but it's a start.

Die .DOC die.

--

[1] Nisus doesn't really promote this as a feature. I think they should, but I'm a market of one.

[2] My biggest concession to data-lock is iPhoto. Even there I know that with AppleScript I could extract the majority of the data structures in my photo libraries - not easy, but doable. If I'm every lacking for work to do I might turn that into a product.

[3] A grudging effort to appease governments. I suspect China is a big driver.

[4] Spolsky used to be a Microsoft guy, which is probably why he doesn't remember that WordPerfect, Ami Pro, MacWrite and many other extinct applications used to read and write Word's .DOC format. It was "practical to interchange documents" eons before HTML/SGML - in fact it was a necessity as Microsoft rode its proprietary file formats and trade press control to victory.

[5] Not perfectly of course. Even Nisus Writer Pro can't read and represent an style-generated Word table of contents -- a feature I use extensively.

The trial of Khalid Mohammed - America's next opportunity for shame

Khalid Mohammed is alleged to have planned the 9/11 attacks. While being tortured, he is said to have confessed to many crimes.

So will his testimony under torture be used against him in a military tribunal?

Morris Davis, an Air Force colonel and chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 2005 to 2007, responds:

Unforgivable Behavior, Inadmissible Evidence - New York Times

...My policy as the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo was that evidence derived through waterboarding was off limits. That should still be our policy. To do otherwise is not only an affront to American justice, it will potentially put prosecutors at risk for using illegally obtained evidence.

Unfortunately, I was overruled on the question, and I resigned my position to call attention to the issue — efforts that were hampered by my being placed under a gag rule and ordered not to testify at a Senate hearing. While some high-level military and civilian officials have rightly expressed indignation on the issue, the current state can be described generally as indifference and inaction.

At a Senate hearing in December, the legal adviser for the military commissions, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, refused to rule out using evidence obtained by waterboarding. Afterward, Senator Lindsey Graham, who is also a lawyer in the Air Force Reserves, said that no military judge would allow the introduction of such evidence. I hope Senator Graham is right about military judges, and it is unfortunate that any might be put in a position where he has to make such a decision.

Regrettably, at a Pentagon press briefing last week announcing that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and five others had been charged and faced the death penalty, General Hartmann again declined to rule out the use of evidence acquired through waterboarding. Military justice has a proud history; this was not one of its finer moments.

That is not to say those subjected to waterboarding get a free pass. If the prosecution can build a persuasive case without using the coerced “confession,” then whether a defendant endured waterboarding is immaterial in determining guilt or innocence.

There are some bad men at Guantánamo Bay and a few deserve death, but only after trials we can truthfully call full, fair and open. In that service, we must declare that evidence obtained by waterboarding be banned in every American system of justice. We must restore our reputation as the good guys who refuse to stoop to the level of our adversaries. We are Americans, and we should be able to state with conviction, “We don’t do stuff like that.”

This guy ended his military career to save America's honor, and nobody cared.

Meanwhile McCain is backpedaling away from what was once a principled stand against torture.  The Khalid trial may be a factor in his craven reversals.

Khalid Mohammed doesn't matter any more. What matters is that America has another chance to disgrace itself, or a chance to move away from the Bush legacy.

Catastrophic extinction in the Anthropocene: now for the sharks

Sharks were old when Dinosaurs pounded the ground. 100 million years ago they looked like those that live today.

Now they're headed for extinction.

Ocean's fiercest predators now vulnerable to extinction

Sharks are disappearing from the world’s oceans. The numbers of many large shark species have declined by more than half due to increased demand for shark fins and meat, recreational shark fisheries, as well as tuna and swordfish fisheries, where millions of sharks are taken as bycatch each year.

Now, the global status of large sharks has been assessed by the World Conservation Union (IUCN), which is widely recognized as the most comprehensive, scientific-based information source on the threat status of plants and animals...

...Research at Dalhousie University over the past five years, conducted by Baum and the late Ransom Myers, demonstrated the magnitude of shark declines in the northwest Atlantic Ocean. All species the team looked at had declined by over 50 per cent since the early 1970s. For many large coastal shark species, the declines were much greater: tiger, scalloped hammerhead, bull and dusky shark populations have all plummeted by more than 95 per cent.

A 50% decline in about 30 years. In the geologic record we use to track extinctions this is meteor-impact fast.

We truly live in the Anthropocene. Of course it may be a relatively brief geologic era; if so the sharks might squeak through ...

Science and the alternative

Eons ago, Emily and I wrote an editorial in the now defunct Journal of Family Practice [1] on the topic of alternative medicine. It was titled "Science and the Alternative" which sort of gives away our opinions (see also).

Oh, to be clear, it's not that I think herbal remedies can't work (for example), but rather that it's magical thinking to assume they're fundamentally safe because they're "natural".

Today CV tackles the topic, after discovering, to his horror, that his readership doesn't necessarily know what science is ...

Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory | Cosmic Variance

...If we can show that psychic phenomena are incompatible with the laws of physics we currently understand, then our task is to balance the relative plausibility of “some folks have fallen prey to sloppy research, unreliable testimony, confirmation bias, and wishful thinking” against “the laws of physics that have been tested by an enormous number of rigorous and high-precision experiments over the course of many years are plain wrong in some tangible macroscopic way, and nobody ever noticed...

[1] The name lives on but the journal died.

PS. I love that Michael Crichton, the climate change denier, is also a spoon bender.