Gordon's Notes

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Gwynne Dyer: four new essays

The historian and journalist Gwynne Dyer has four new essays online:

Pakistan: Bhutto's assassination voided any deals with Musharraff and thus ended his power. Dyer detects a faint ray of hope.
Tibet: China will crush the uprising just as they did in 1959, Olympics or no Olympics. China has been uncharacteristically restrained up to this point.
Iraq: Iraq's ethnic partitioning will aid recovery. Even Lebanon stopped fighting. Was it worth it? We'll never know.
Abkhazia: Dyer makes a peculiar argument that Russia actually likes International law and the UN, and therefore won't truly advance Abhkazian separation from Georgia. I have to admit it's a novel idea! That never would have occurred to me.

Bush's brilliant ploy, and why we should abolish the presidential pardon

The Presidential pardon (think Marc Rich) is an anachronism, a legacy of royalty.

The pardon system allows Bush to run illegal operations, and to guarantee protection to his minions. It incents Bush to run the clock until pardon time.

Bush's latest clock running gambit is to freeze the Office of Legal Counsel until the end of his term (emphases mine) ...

My Way or the Highway - New York Times

... In a lower job in that office, Mr. Bradbury signed off on two secret legal memos authorizing torture in American detention camps. The first approved waterboarding, among other things. When Congress outlawed waterboarding, the other memo assured Mr. Bush that he could ignore the law.
Mr. Bradbury is widely viewed on both sides of the aisle as such a toxic choice that he will never be confirmed. The Senate has already refused to do so twice...
...The head of the Office of Legal Counsel is one of the most important jobs in the Justice Department, charged with telling the executive branch whether it is acting legally. His advice is supposed to be based on the law, not the party line.
Mr. Bradbury, however, continues to defend his cynical memos, and the odious practices they blessed. In a Senate hearing, he tried to justify the way the Central Intelligence Agency does waterboarding by comparing it with the Japanese military’s World War II practice of forcing prisoners to drink huge amounts of water and then jumping on their stomachs.
Human rights experts say the Bush and Bradbury-approved method of waterboarding — strapping down a prisoner under gushing water to make him fear drowning — puts the United States in the company of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the French in Algeria and the security services of the Burmese dictatorship. There is certainly no comfort in that.
When Mr. Bush refused to withdraw the Bradbury nomination, the Senate’s Democratic leaders decided to stop processing other controversial nominations. Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, twice offered to resume confirmations and compromise on candidates if Mr. Bush withdrew Mr. Bradbury — and forwarded the names of six Democrats chosen for bipartisan panels like the Federal Election Commission. The White House refused, and Mr. Reid took to keeping the Senate in pro forma sessions during vacations to prevent Mr. Bush from making a recess appointment of Mr. Bradbury and other objectionable choices.
At this point, according to a review by Politico.com, the election commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board and the National Labor Relations Board do not have enough members to do their jobs. Scores of federal judgeships are vacant. The Council of Economic Advisers is down to one adviser...

This is brilliant, in a perfectly evil way. Bush needs to disable the Office of Legal Counsel, and by nominating a toxic figure he's done that. At the same time he's disabled a bunch of government services he'd prefer to eliminate forever: "the election commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board and the National Labor Relations Board".

The appropriate response to this behavior would be to impeach Bush, but that would put Cheney in power. There's not enough time or votes to impeach both Cheney and Bush, and any impeachment effort would probably help Bush's latest protege -- John McCain.

Diabolical. Bush and Cheney win, again. He ain't stupid, unfortunately.

So for now we resist as best we can, and work for whoever the Democratic nominee is. If McCain loses, however, we really ought to look at abolishing the presidential pardon. That would require a constitutional amendment, but if a Democratic president proposes the fix then Republican senators might go along ...

Google: creating the missing ecosystems

This simple statement is both emintently reasonable and quietly astonishing:

A Letter from Larry Page

...Sometimes you don't get a good answer to a search because the information simply isn't available on the web. So we are working hard to encourage ecosystems that can generate more content from more authors and creators....

Google Search has to work so that Google's advertising revenue grows. When content is missing, Google does not build the solution (can't scale), they build the ecosystem.

Blogger is one obvious example. I'm still amazed by how often what I write in my tech blog appears at the top of Google searches -- despite a very small subscription readership. I write things that fill content gaps, and Google finds them.

Google Books is a less obvious example that might yet have a big influence. On the other hand, Google gave up on Google Answers -- a ecosystem that failed.

I wonder how far Google will go to provide an ecosystem for content producers, and to open new knowledge fronts. They have very large levers! Google Scholar is being used to increase readership of open journals, and thus weaken the publishing empires that keep vast amounts of knowledge hidden from most of the world. Regular Google Search was used to crack open the New York Times and end their experiment with paid access.

Google could buy the Encyclopedia Britannica, but I suspect they're looking for ways to pressure them to run off Ad Words ...

I wish Google would try micropayments other than through advertising, but that's only a weak wish. So far humans have been really resistant to the idea.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

What is schizophrenia? Not what we thought.

Some recent results for a study of the genetics of schizophrenia got a lot of press attention. Among other things, the studies are one more indication that the term "schizophrenia", like the term "autism", is obsolete.

First, here's the best of the coverage I read. One came from a blog, the other from the Washington Post. The rest of the coverage, including the NYT and Scientific American, was pretty bad. (Unfortunately Science does not allow public access to articles, I really wish they'd go out of business):

Schizophrenia involves an increased rate of mutations (Ars Technica)

... schizophrenics displayed a high rate (three times the expected level) of genetic mutations at the chromosomal level, where individual genes were either absent, or present multiple times, leading to over-representation. In patients with early-onset schizophrenia, this rate of mutation was four times the expected level.

The genes involved turned out to be important in brain development including neuregulin and glutamatergic signalling, along with ERK/MAPK signaling and genes that are involved in adhesion and synaptic plasticity. Interestingly, the mutations were not common across the schizophrenic patients, instead differing along familial lines...

Schizophrenia Linked to Rare, Often Unique Genetic Glitches (Rick Weiss, Washington Post)

Patients with schizophrenia are three to four times as likely as healthy people to harbor large mutations in genes that control brain development, and many of those glitches are unique to each patient, researchers reported yesterday.

The findings are forcing scientists to rethink the reigning model of how genes and environment conspire to cause the debilitating disease, which affects about 1 percent of the population worldwide.

In part, scientists said, the new view is daunting because it suggests that many people with schizophrenia have their own particular genetic underpinnings.

At the same time, the study shows that new screening techniques can find and differentiate among those various mutations. In the long run that could help doctors choose the best medications for individual schizophrenics and speed the development of drugs tailored to certain patients' needs.

"If the genetics tells us that schizophrenia is really 10 different disorders, then let's have 10 treatments that optimize the outcomes for everyone and not just use the same drugs for everybody," said Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which helped fund and conduct the study.

The work also offers evidence that autism shares some genetic roots with schizophrenia.

"Take away schizophrenia's hallucinations and delusions," said Jon McClellan, a child psychiatrist at the University of Washington and a leader of the study, published in yesterday's online issue of the journal Science, "and the symptoms that remain, the lack of social interest and withdrawal, are what we call autism. There is clearly an intersection of the brain systems involved."

... scientists [had concluded] that the mutations contributing to schizophrenia are probably common in the population but have little impact individually, and that only when several occur together is a critical mass of neurological trouble achieved.

The model emerging from the new study is quite different. It says most cases of schizophrenia may be caused by rare genetic glitches that are individually potent.

The turnaround is the result of sophisticated gene scans conducted on 233 schizophrenics, including 83 who got the disease in childhood, a more serious condition. The scans looked for rare stretches of DNA where more than 100,000 "letters" of genetic code were either missing or mistakenly present in duplicate.

About 15 percent of schizophrenics, and 20 percent of those affected in childhood, had such glitches, compared with 5 percent of healthy individuals who were also studied. Yet the glitches, including one previously associated with autism, were different in each person.

Unlike previous scans based on older technology, which could at best find general genomic "neighborhoods" where mutations associated with schizophrenia are present, the new scans pinpointed the individual genes affected...

...The genes implicated are diverse, but many are known to play crucial roles in how the brain gets wired early in life. Normally that process starts with a huge overproduction of neurons, followed by a controlled winnowing that leaves only those that have made proper connections.

"Changes in these genes could bias the way circuits get sculpted out and could perhaps lead to a brain in which signals that would normally get filtered out don't get filtered out," which could interfere with thinking and prompt hallucinations, Insel said.

The delayed onset of the disease can be explained by the fact that some genes and brain connections do not take on central roles until young adulthood, said Jonathan Sebat of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, one of the study leaders...

Rick Weiss of the Post did a far better job than anyone else on summarizing these results. The NYT coverage, in particular, was disappointing.

This feels big, but note that that only 15% percent of "schizophrenics" fit this pattern. This is not the whole story, but it's the biggest piece we've gotten so far.

I'll summarize the key implications:

Schizophrenia is not a disease. It's the name given a fairly large number of unique disorders of brain development that have, among their endpoints, social withdrawal, hallucinations, and fixed beliefs.
A good number of cases of "autism" and "schizophrenia" are different manifestations of overlapping sets of mutations.
There may be"no genes for most instances autism and schizophrenia". There are sets of large scale mutations that are similar between close genetic relatives, but similar appearances are resulting from disorders of quite different components of brain development.
One in twenty seemingly normal people have big, ugly looking mutations that ought to be messing up their brain development. Yet they seem "normal". Seventeen in twenty persons with "schizophrenia" do NOT have these nasty scattered "sledgehammer" mutations. (So called because it's as though something took a sledgehammer to the genome.)
The age onset of schizophrenia is determined by when the disordered developmental genes are activated. There's a lot of this going on in late teen years. The implication is that the same thing explains why "autism" presents around ages 2-3, and why it can seem to appear fairly suddenly. This may also explain why some conditions seem to improve at other ages. Schizophrenia syndromes often improves in middle age, for example.
If every person with autism has a somewhat unique disorder, then treatments and prognosis are also unique. This validates the age old practice of asking someone with a cognitive/psychiatric disorder what treatments have worked for relatives.

The puzzle is far from complete, but one part of it has been filled out. We don't know what's causing these scattershot mutations, though a viral infection in very early development is one obvious possibility. I think this picture is also consistent with my earlier speculation that schizophrenia and autism are evolutionary disorders (see also).

Incidentally, Emily reminds me that autism was once considered a childhood variety of schizophrenia.

To me one of the most amazing results of the study is that 1/20 randomly selected health individuals have major derangements of genes responsible for brain development -- yet their brains still work. That's a group I'd really like to study!

Friday, March 28, 2008

Juggling identities: Udell, Cameron and Identity Woman

I've written about identity and reputation management, including a call for identity management services ...

We need more identity management tools that let us rapidly switch our personae (visible identities) and facets, while tracking our associated reputations and providing a visual cue as to our current identity. These tools can also remind us what each identity is designed for; it's not hard to forget the purpose or a persona, and thus to misuse it.

Obviously such a tool should have a biometric component, though it would need to be optional at first. One way to generate a revenue for such a service would be to provide the service free, but charge for the associated token*, biometric authentication component, or personal VPN add-on...

I figured there had to be people thinking deeply on these topics, but I couldn't make a good connection. I finally found one in an older post of Jon Udell's that's been sitting in my reading queue for months:

A conversation with Dick Hardt about British Columbia’s digital identity initiative « Jon Udell

On this week’s ITConversations show I chatted with Dick Hardt about that project. According to Kim’s Information Card thermometer, 10 percent of desktops are now running CardSpace or an equivalent identity selector technology such as DigitalMe. I’m not sure where the tipping point will be, but even if you’re in that 10 percent it’s hard to find concrete examples of how the technology will simplify your life...

DigitalMe? CardSpace?

This if from the Wikipedia CardSpace article:

...Windows CardSpace (codenamed InfoCard), is Microsoft's client software for the Identity Metasystem. CardSpace is an instance of a class of identity client software called an Identity Selector. CardSpace stores references to users' digital identities for them, presenting them to users as visual Information Cards. CardSpace provides a consistent UI that enables people to easily use these identities in applications and web sites where they are accepted...

...Because CardSpace and the Identity Metasystem upon which it is based are token-format-agnostic, CardSpace does not compete directly with other Internet identity architectures like OpenID and SAML... Information Cards can be used today for signing into OpenID providers, Windows Live ID accounts, SAML identity providers, and other kinds of services...

Microsoft initially shipped Windows CardSpace with the .NET Framework 3.0, which runs on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista. It is installed by default on Windows Vista and is available as a free download for XP and Server 2003 via Windows Update. An updated version of CardSpace shipped with the .NET Framework 3.5.

So. I think I've picked up the scent now. Then from Jon Udell to the Cameron blog he mentioned: "This blog is about building a multi-centered system of digital identity that its users control." The most recent post promotes a conference run by "Identity Woman Kaliya"...

User-centric identity is the ability:

To use one’s identifier(s) on more then one site

To control who sees what information about you

To selectively share presence and profile information

To maintain multiple identities and personas in the contexts you wish

To aggregate attention, navigation, and purchase history from the sites and communities you frequent

To move and share your personal data, relationships, documents, and other publications as you wish

Ok, that sure sounds like the "identity management services" I was asking for.

So I've found sources to track. Here's the odd part. Both Jon Udell and Kim Cameron work for the Borg.

I've read Udell since his BYTE days, and now I've added Identity Woman (not Microsoft) and Kim Cameron to my blogroll.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

The American corporation and the centrally planned economies of the soviet empire

Once in a while two loose neurons bang together and I look at the world differently.

That happened earlier today.

I'm almost always sure somebody's explored the idea, but in the dark ages there was no easy way to find out. I'd write my thoughts down move on. Now I just have to toss a few terms at Google.

Which is how I came to discover that this morning's unoriginal insight was the subject of a Brad DeLong paper written in 1997 when he worked for the Clinton administration.

My version of this insight struck because I've recently been thinking about some of the things all corporations have trouble with. This is work related rather than my usual idle speculation, so I can't provide details here. Suffice to say that my topic started small and concrete, but soon became quite grand. In the end I needed to consider three different sorts of exchanges of goods and services:

exchanges within a corporation
currency-based exchanges within a market economy
collaborative exchanges between academics at different institutions or departments.

Sometime in the midst of this review, the obvious smacked me in the face:

The best publicly traded companies are an almost exact analog to the most finely tuned centrally-planned "command economies" of the Soviet empire, particularly the Czechoslovakian command economies of the late 1970s.

No wonder so many Soviet and Communist Chinese bureaucrats had smoothly shifted into running massive corporations. Everything must have seemed so familiar. Conversely, the designers of the Czechoslovakian central planning process must have based it on their knowledge of American corporations.

I knew this insight couldn't be original, so I went looking for affirmation. Using the terms "corporation" and "planned economy" Google gave me a good hit on the first page:

The Corporation as a Command Economy by J. Bradford DeLong

University of California at Berkeley, and National Bureau of Economic Research July 1997

Most of us spend more than one-third of our waking lives working for large, modern corporations: organizations where we do not know personally either those at the top or the bulk of those at the bottom of the organization's administrative hierarchy. This is a striking change from two centuries ago, when a productive organization of more than thirty was unusual, and one of more than three hundred an extreme oddity....

...I am going to focus on the issues of corporate control. A corporation is a hierarchical organization. It has a boss--today the he (almost always a he) called the CEO, whose theoretical power is autocratic throughout the scope of the corporation, and subject only to the periodic continued approval of the Board of Directors and the annual meeting of the shareholders. But we were all told a decade ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed, that hierarchical organizations simply did not work as modes of organizing economic life--that you needed a market in order to achieve anything better than low-productivity, bureaucracy-ridden economic stagnation.

What, then, are all these large corporations--ATT and IBM, General Motors and Toyota, Microsoft and USX--doing? What methods of corporate control have saved them from turning into smaller versions of the unproductive Soviet economy?

So my comparisons are not original, and yet, as I scanned Brad's article, I was left with the impression that he gave too much credit to the efficiencies of General Electric , and not enough credit to the remarkable persistence of the planned economies.

My own prejudice is that today's corporations struggle mightily with the same challenges that brought down the planned economies of the Soviet era, and that they succeed more from their impressive ability to hold critical resources and to eliminate weaker competition, than through a unique gift for channeling and distributing resources.

If a new entity were to arise that combined the brute power of the corporation with the intelligence of a true market I think the modern corporation would go the way of the Soviet planning bureau.

That's a large if however. I am not aware of any serious challenger to the corporation, and so the planned economies of the world shall continue into the 21st century ...

XPonlinescanner: malware attack or very nasty ad? Interesting, either way.

Last week I ran into Firefox attack while browsing a local website. I posted about XPonlinescanner.com: Malware infection on Star Tribune and other news sites.

I figured I'd hear something more about this, but a Google search today only shows my original post. So maybe I was imagining things.

Except my original post continues to attract about one comment a day, along the lines of:

I've never heard of or been to the Star Tribune website, but this pop up has appeared on starting up firefox on both a Linux and a Mac computer. I don't use MS Windows.
It would appear that this is wider spread than just a rogue web site.

I just received it this morning. But I believe this one actually popped up while I was on Photobucket.
I closed it but it just opened into a window saying it was scanning and then I just closed it again. I'm hoping it didn't do anything else.

Started this weekend on the jsonline.com (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) site. Complaint has been filed with site owner.

I've seen several versions of the install file over the past week which is an indication that someone is up to no good.
The source was: hxxp://xponlinescanner.com/2008/download'
XPantivirus2008_v77011816.exe
XPantivirus2008_v880136.exe
XPantivirus2008_v77024205.exe
XPantivirus2008_v880181.exe
I submitted these files to TrendMicro and they all came back as malware containing a Trojan downloader.

This popup is a Trojan Horse malware, users should close the window and not use any buttons presented in main popup.

just got the same treatment from them via salary.com and I notice it didn't install anything. They have a script that just resizes the browser really small and then they put a confirmation dialog on top of it. I closed the confirmation window and it resized my browser to the height and width of my screen and claimed to be scanning my computer....

I do wonder what's going on. If this is indeed a malware attack, it's interesting that it's propagating without comment across multiple sites. If it's not a malware attack, then it says something about the state of web advertising and the desperation of news sites.

Update 10/2/09: I wonder if the NYT breach of 9/15/09 was something similar...

...According to security experts, groups that are often based in Russia and Ukraine create the fake antivirus software and then recruit people to help distribute it by giving them a cut of any money made by selling the software. These so-called affiliates can mimic the advertisements of legitimate companies, learn their techniques for submitting ads to networks and sites, meddle with ad servers and then go so far as to provide customer support for people who install the software, keeping the scam running as long as possible...

Did the Strib ever realize it had been hacked? I don't think they ever admitted it.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Whimsley: a new addition to my bloglist

I came across a new-to-me blog today, via Nicholas Carr. I enjoyed the post on Mr. Google's Guidebook and a few others, so I added Whimsley to my bloglist.

I'd like to see a bloglist that could mix a random sample of old posts with a current feed (probably could do this with Yahoo Pipes), there's so much past material here that would be new to me. I did go to the very first post. The blog has survived the book mentioned below, but the original theme has persisted ...

Whimsley, Nov 2005:

This blog is a shameless attempt at promoting my forthcoming book, "No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart", which the fine people at Between the Lines are publishing next spring.
The book is an argument against a certain kind of thinking -- a very common way of thinking I call MarketThink. MarketThink is the belief that (in the absence of government action) the world really does work according to the rules of the idealized free-market. MarketThink is the claim that, as long as we can exercise individual choices, the invisible hand of the free market guarantees that we get what we want.
The title of the book comes from one particular phrasing of that claim. Wal-Mart has commonly been criticised for the damage its edge-of-town stores do to city centres. In response to these criticisms, one of the arguments that Wal-Mart's supporters make is that "no one makes you shop at Wal-Mart", and that if people really felt that Wal-Mart was bad for their cities, they would not patronize it.
An example of this kind of thinking comes from Ron Galloway, director of the new film "Why Wal-Mart Works & Why That Makes Some People Crazy", who said on CNN's Showbiz Tonight on October 31 that "138 million people vote with their feet to go to Wal-Mart. And Americans are pretty smart. And I think Wal-Mart, if Wal-Mart were really doing something genuinely wrong, the American people would be able to figure it out and not go."
What is wrong and why? Well, that's what this blog is about.

MarketThink has at least a nodding connection to the "folly of crowds", but I'm guessing he also discusses market failures, premature local minima traps. I wonder if he discusses future shock and fraud, and how they mislead the crowd.

I'm sure I'll have some more comments over time ...

The Market as a satisficing mechanism for finding local minima - where did I get this from?

A few months ago I fell into conversation with an exotic person -- someone young. This one had fallen into a familiar trap; he'd confused The Market with The Moral.

Bush and the GOP were, of course, lost down that rabbit hold eons ago.

Anyway, being pompous prone, I launched into a lecture about how markets are systems for developing "good enough" (satisficing) solutions to complex problems. They find "local minimal", not some magical optimal solution that's the best of all possible worlds.

This ability, of course, is miraculous. The Market is the best way we have to find the local minima. The role of society, and sometimes government, is to decide that the "minima" is not good enough, and to perturb the market into finding another, perhaps better, solution. Sometimes we even think we know where the perturbation should be directed.

There were two problems with my dissertation. One was that I'm pretty sure he didn't (care to?) understand a word of it. More importantly, I fear I was more-or-less making it up.

I say "more-or-less" because I think I read this sometime, but in the months since that conversation I've not come across a reasonable reference. This "more-or-less" business comes from reading a lot but having an average memory and a creative imagination -- I can't reliably separate what I've read from what I've invented.

I tried a search: market "local minima" "good enough" satisficing solution economics but only found some papers on AI problem solving.

Can someone point me to a reference?

Don't buy your iPhone this week -- iPhone order backlog

There are lots of possible reasons for an imbalance between iPhone demand and supply:

AppleInsider | Briefly: NYC iPhone sellout; new Jersey store; 2008 PC shipments

...AT&T retail stores in Manhattan aren't yet feeling the affects of the shortage, though Apple's online store is also reflecting an approximate 1 week delay for all new orders, suggesting that considerable backlog currently exists for whatever reason...

One of the possible explanations is that Apple is about to launch a new model.

I have been expecting a new model to be announced on June 31st and to be generally available around August, but I'm a pessimist. If you're considering buying an iPhone I'd wait a couple of weeks. If new models are coming out then the better Apple rumor sites expect the 16GB model to continue to be sold at a lower price point, and the 8GB model to be discontinued.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

What if you lived in a world where nothing worked?

You know, like Bizarro world.

I think I've been slowly migrating into that world.

My MetLife experience today was typical. I have an ancient annuity with them (odd story), and I decided to try to update my online profile.

It went like this:

Login with the default settings.
Submit -- returns to login screen. No error message, just the login screen.
Phone in, get password reset.
Try again - get request to change password. Looks good.
Login, oops, Back to #2.
Do an online password reset. Notice button press doesn't seem to work with Firefox 2.
Try it again with IE 7. It works.
Now login again. back to #2.
Wait -- what was that brief flicker of text? Something about a popup?
Turn off IE 7 popup blocking.
Try again.

The entire interaction with the MetLife web site occurs inside a popup window. The original login window remains behind, that's why I kept returning to the above step #2 when the popup was blocked.

Incidentally, if you ever want to hack into someone's account, I recommend MetLife. They implement the usual array of misguided security measures, including the laughable: "secret question". (Does any crook not know my mother's maiden name by now?)

I'm picking on MetLife, but these days I feel like a live in a great cloud of "stuff that doesn't work". Our world won't burn up or rust out, it'll just collapse in a great cascade of stuff that doesn't really work ...

PS. Most of the science fiction I've read assumed either a post-apocalyptic world or a world of uncanny reliability. Dysfunctional dystopias don't get their due. Terry Gilliam's (a famous Minnesotan!) Brazil and Twelve Monkeys are notable exceptions; Gilliam seems to have this niche to himself.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Head still exploding: The AT&T mobile phone rebate card scam

After I wrote this post I wondered if I was over-reacting:

Gordon's Notes: John's head explodes: AT&T rebate paid with an AT&T debit card

Ok, so I knew when I did the deal with Satan's pond-sucking scum that I should expect a shaft or two, but this one is so audacious.

I just noticed, in a very fine print amongst all the paper work of a new cell phone contract, that AT&T pays its rebates with an AT&T debit card.

AT&T has been sued over this practice...

I received my two cards ($50 each, one for each line of the family account), which are accepted "anywhere Visa debit cards are accepted", except you have to "tell the cashier" to "process the card as a credit transaction, not a debit transaction".

You need to activate the cards before use, by entering the number they're assigned to. AT&T tells me the number ends in 8. For both cards. Because both our phone numbers end in 8.

The cards expire in July of 2008, about three to four months after they came to us.

There are lots of complex rules about how to spend them. The only reasonable way to use them is to spend MORE than the card amount, then arrange with a flustered and irritated cashier (and their manager too?) to pay the residual through some other means.

Ok, so now I go to www.att.com/wirelessrebatecard to try to activate the cards. I'm redirected to https://www.888extramoney.net -- they're probably outsourced the scam. I'm asked to enter the "first 10 digits of your account number from your AT&T card". Well, I don't have an AT&T card, but I'll try the first 10 digits of the first VISA rebate card number -- since that might be tied to my phone number.

It turns out my theory is correct, from there I get a login screen that requests the entire card number and the last four digits of each cell number. I guess right on those and my cards are "activated". [1]

I could spit nails if I didn't have so many other battles to fight. I signed up with AT&T because of the #$!$#! iPhone. Compared to similar services from Sprint our family costs have gone up about 70% a month. Sprint, for all their many sins, didn't make me jump through these hoops.

In a just world AT&T would have to pay out billions for this kind of scam, but in this world George Bush is President, we have a Republican governor in Minnesota, and our state Attorney General has been neutered.

I just know some mid-level AT&T exec made SVP and a golden handshake when s/he came up with this scam to reduce rebate payments. I suppose it's unbecoming for me to to imagine her/his pending appointment in the eighth circle of hell ...

... The fraudulent—those guilty of deliberate, knowing evil—are located in a circle named Malebolge ("Evil Pockets"), divided into ten bolgie, or ditches of stone, with bridges spanning the ditches...

... Bolgia 10: Groups of various sorts of falsifiers (alchemists, counterfeiters, perjurers, and impersonators) are afflicted with different types of diseases. (Cantos XXIX and XXX)

[1] It's not documented, but if you login this way you can see the record of card transactions and the residual balance.

Update 12/29/08: One commenter suggested using the AT&T card to buy a gift card at a reputable retailer. Then you can use it when it suits you.

Update 3/6/09: As per a most appreciated comment AT&T has settled with the New York attorney general's office ...

A $2.63 million agreement with AT&T Mobility over a misleading and deceptive sales promotion involving rebate offers that were fulfilled with onerous and condition-laden rebate cards by the New York's Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo.

AT&T is required to provide more than $2.63 million to consumers who received rebate cards from AT&T in fulfillment of its rebate offers on cellular phones and other wireless equipment and services.

I sincerely hope Minnesota climbs on board.

This isn't AT&T's only mobile services scam. They're also shafting their customers with EDGE phones, effectively eliminating data services people have paid for by contract and phone purchase.

Update 4/20/09: Dilbert on mobile phone rebates. "Dude, we spent it before you left the store."

Sad days for the American Academy of Family Physicians: AFP and FPM behind the paywall

The AAFP is putting American Family Physician and Family Practice Management behind a paywall. After April 1 new issues will only be available to members.

This is sad news. For years I've admired the academy's policy of public access to AFP, it's been a great patient and provider information resource. No more.

The academy is also restricting the default distribution of Family Practice Management to members in office practice; a good change overall but probably another indicator of diminishing advertising revenue. I suspect there are other economy measures going on that aren't being communicated to members.

What's going on?

I'm still a member, but I'm very removed from the AAFP these days. I don't really know. My guess is that advertising revenue, in particular, is down. I also wonder if membership is falling off; I suspect a lot of members were unhappy when the Academy failed to resist the peculiar board certification changes implemented by the American Board of Family Medicine [1].

It fits with a ten plus year trend of declining interest in primary care in general, and family medicine in particular. I think the crowd is wrong again, but I fear it will be another ten years before we rediscover that primary care physicians are a cost-effective way to deliver quality care. I also wonder if pharmaceutical advertising revenue is down across the board -- the pharmas are thought by many to be entering a period of grim economic news.

I hope the AAFP will reconsider. I'd be very surprised if removing AFP from public access is going to help finances and/or recruiting in any significant way. This is a bad economizing measure.

[1] Admirable in theory, in practice they're the equivalent of putting a patient with congestive heart failure on a high speed treadmill.

The emperor's clothes, Microsoft Word, and the folly of crowds

In the fairy tale version the impolitic child comments on the emperor's birthday suit. All the people who thought they were imaging the emperor's nakedness realize they're not crazy after all. The emperor is laughed out of town.

That's not how things work in the real world.

I thought of this recently as I revised my sister-in-law's Masters thesis*. Well, revised isn't quite the right word -- my job was to fix up a structured Microsoft Word document. In the old days in-laws typed up handwritten theses, now we repair Word documents. A much quicker job, but far more technical. Hmm. That about sums up the last 30 years of technological progress, doesn't it?

Anyway, as I adjusted styles, auto-generated lists of figures and tables from captions, set alignment styles for document objects, created section specific pagination rules, etc I recalled my 2003 rant against Microsoft Word. It's still pretty current, even though I've given up on my macro workarounds. Honestly, Word is broken**. It's been broken since 1995 or 1997, when some misguided Microsoft development team merged two different formatting models and produced the software equivalent of "the fly".

The Emperor is buck nekkid.

In the real world though, the crowd of hundreds of millions figures the child is deluded, and they must simply be doing something wrong. Surely a bazillion dollar company couldn't be producing junk - could it? Sharepoint must be a good document management system - because everyone uses it. Real estate must be a good investment - because everyone's buying houses. Global warming can't be a real problem, because our government would tell us if it were. Gmail's contact management and list functions can't be completely lousy -- because Google is full of geniuses. Crowds must be wise, because that's what the book says. Crowds re-elected George Bush, didn't they?

Hmmphh.

Either humanity has some serious loose screws, or I'm a loon.

Or both ...

PS. I don't believe in this "wisdom of crowds" stuff. Just to be clear. On the other hand, there's tons of money to be made betting on the folly of crowds.

* I think she's written a doctoral thesis, but that's another story. I hope she turns it into a book.

** Office 2007's XML based structured documents might be an improvement, but that requires a completely proprietary file format that none of my other applications can read.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Google goes to warp speed, oddly fond of me

This morning I wrote a post about worrisome behavior associated with XPonlinescanner.com. At that time a search on the term led to the spammer's web site.

As of this evening a search on the same term leads to my blog post. This morning three people who ran into the same worrisome ad behavior left comments on my initial post -- they found it at the top of their searches within 15 minutes of the original posting.

This evening I posted about the frustrations of using iMovie '08 with a Flip Video camcorder. A few minutes after I posted it I decided to see if anyone else had discovered that Mike Ash's QTAmateur would translate the AVI files. I found exactly one post on the topic- mine.

Google indexed my blog post within 15 minutes of creation.

I then experimented with a post I made this evening to Apple's Discussion group. It too was indexed within 30 minutes of posting. That's nothing about me of course, Google is indexing that massive archive at an astounding speed.

This is unnerving on two levels. Personally it's unnerving that Google is so oddly fond of my blogs. They're not high readership blogs, though I do like to imagine my readership is unusually perceptive. Weird.

The personal focus is odd enough, but the indexing speed is even more uncanny. Google has quietly turned on a warp drive; how the heck are they able to index so quickly? What does this say about their bandwidth capacity -- that they're basically reading large portions of the net in almost real-time?