What are a journalist’s responsibilities on Twitter?

By dave | August 24, 2010

I’ve never really thought of myself as a journalist. Sure, I write a column for an online magazine, and even get paid for it. But as a columnist, my job is a little different from that of a reporter. I have a distinct point of view—I promote research blogging—which is the kind of thing reporters try to avoid. That said, I also have been a critic of those who want to draw sharp lines between “journalists” and “bloggers,” and I’d add “columnists” to that list too, so I probably ought to resign myself to the fact that, for better or worse, I am a journalist.

But sometimes I take off my journalist hat and just chat with people. Sometimes I write completely non-journalistic blog posts about my travels. Sometimes I rant on Twitter (that one lost me a couple dozen followers).

And sometimes I express my amazement at an inane court ruling: “Yikes! Judge halts stem cell research http://is.gd/eAPR4″. This last statement, to my surprise, has given rise to a bit of controversy online. You can read about it here. Drugmonkey seems to feel that the statement is misleading because it could be read as meaning that the judge has halted all stem cell research (according to the article I linked, the ruling is unclear and may roll back all federally-funded research involving any human stem cells, or it may have a more limited impact).

While I agree that the statement could be misread (I suggested “Yikes! Judge halts a whole mess of stem cell research” as a revision), I do wonder if it’s reasonable to hold journalists’ tweets to the same standards we hold their edited articles and headlines to. A blog post or news article can be corrected, but a tweet quickly takes on a life of its own. It can be retweeted, and even if it’s deleted, it remains on people’s mobile devices and third-party Twitter apps. Maybe this means we should have *higher* standards for tweets.

On the other hand, few people see tweets as the definitive word on something. Unless they come directly from the source (e.g. Lady Gaga tweeting that she’s carousing in Vegas), we don’t take tweets as truth. More typically, tweets point to something else to gain authority — Like a New York Times article about a court decision.

I don’t think I’d enjoy using Twitter as much if all journalists and scientists were as careful in crafting their tweets as they are when they write formal publications. And I don’t think I’m alone. Twitter gets its power from its conversational nature. If everyone on Twitter had to be constantly on guard to avoid statements that might be misunderstood, then few people would think it was worth the bother.

Posted in Technology | 6 Comments

A first stab at a science blog aggregator

By dave | August 20, 2010

(Cross-posted from ResearchBlogging.org)

Soon after my two posts on science blog aggregation, Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker contacted me asking for my input on a site they were thinking about creating.

The three of us had similar ideas: Now that many leading bloggers from ScienceBlogs have moved elsewhere, there’s no central place readers can go to find out what’s going on in science blogging. Anton and Bora realized that a basic hub for science blogging wouldn’t be difficult to create from existing tools: Wordpress software and a few key plugins. So, after a couple weeks’ discussion, we put together a first-stab at a science blog aggregator in a few days. You can find it here:

Scienceblogging.org

The site is really just an aggregator of aggregators. Everything you see on the front page is a feed from some other bundle of blogs. In a couple cases, we made our own bundles using Friendfeed. The site is flexible enough to add additional bundles as bloggers and publishers form new blogging communities. It’s not ideal — I think the ultimate science blog aggregator will allow users to view blog posts by topic, and perhaps have some way of identifying the best posts. But it’s flexible enough that with some input from the community, we might be able to shape it into something really special. Check it out, and let us know what you think.

Posted in Technology | 5 Comments

Vacationblogging 2010: Now, with fewer photographs!

By dave | August 15, 2010

I’m sitting on an airplane taking advantage of in-flight wifi as I mull over the past six weeks away from home. We started with a week in Kalaloch, enjoying the beautiful Washington coast. Then we spent a month in Olympia, Washington, for a “workation” that turned out to be quite a bit more work than vacation. Greta and I have this idea that as our kids become more independent, rather than going on a typical vacation for week or two, we could spend the entire summer in an entirely new place, keeping up with work about half the time, and enjoying a different part of world the other half.

Because of scheduling issues with work and kids, this year’s workation was somewhat of a trial — not quite the whole summer, with only four weeks in full workation mode. And as it turned out, for different reasons, we both ended up doing more work for that month than we had planned. We still think the concept has some merit: We got to explore Olympia, a beautiful, walkable small city with an amazing Farmer’s market and some great restaurants. But we were working so hard, we really didn’t get to enjoy the place like we might have. We had planned, for example, to spend some of our leisure time reading the Iliad, discussing it each week over coffee. We only made it about halfway through.

We both agreed that if we do the workation thing again, we have to be in career situations that allow us to really take an honest break and not work 40+ hours a week.

Then last week we went back into full vacation mode, heading to San Francisco with Jim and Nora for our “last” vacation as a family. Jim will be heading to college in the fall at Berklee College of Music, and Nora is entering her senior year of high school, so although we’re not ruling out future travels with our kids, this is really the end of an era.

We had a great time in San Francisco, but since it was foggy most of the time and I didn’t want to carry a backpack around the city, I didn’t take many pictures. Coit Tower is a surprisingly engaging place to visit, not only for its stunning views of the city and its wonderful murals, but also for the walk down the stairs on Telegraph Hill through an amazing hillside neighborhood. The homes are connected by rickety wooden steps, with no automobile access at all. The “street” is a lovely wooded garden, inhabited by a flock of parrots, which I’m assuming are escaped housepets.

San Francisco is a great city to walk around, and I made a map of our exceptional (if hilly) walk that day. Nob Hill, Chinatown, and Telegraph hill are all highly recommended. Even the tourist-saturated Fisherman’s Wharf was a nice end to a long day hiking about town.

I also loved visiting the Golden Gate Park, which I was surprised to find is several miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s sort of a not-so-Central Park for San Francisco, with art museums, a science museum, and a fantastic Japanese garden and separate, enormous botanical garden. The only real disappointment was the Shakespeare Garden, which tourist guides said included every plant mentioned in Shakespeare’s works, along with plaques of the relevant quotations. It did include both of those things, but separately, so unless you were a botanist, there was no way of telling which plant went with which quotation.

Finally, for the last two days, we fulfilled our “kids’” request to visit Disneyland. It was fun reliving the memories of past Disney visits, and there were some excellent light shows at night, but I have to say, the next time I visit a Disney theme park, it’s probably going to involve grandchildren.

I did take a few photos, but I don’t have them at my fingertips here at 30,000 feet. If any of them turn out to be worthwhile, I’ll add them sometime over the next week.

Posted in vacationblogging | Leave a comment

Some thoughts about science blog aggregation

By dave | July 27, 2010

After the shake-up at ScienceBlogs over the past couple of weeks, there’s been a lot of buzz in the social media networks over what to do next.

Sure, there are some other burgeoning science blog networks, but none seem to be prepared to assume the ScienceBlogs mantle (which ScienceBlogs itself hasn’t actually yet ceded). There are also some lists of all the bloggers who’ve left ScienceBlogs, but they don’t capture all the other science bloggers who were never a part of ScienceBlogs, or the many excellent bloggers who chose to stay.

To me, the obvious next step would be to find some way of collecting all these disparate voices in one place. Sure, ResearchBlogging does some of that, but it only captures posts specifically about peer-reviewed research, which is probably less than ten percent of what scientists and science communicators actually blog about.

One idea that shows promise, at least as a stopgap, is to use an existing social network to do the task. There’s already discussion over at Friendfeed about doing just that. The advantages of such a system is that Friendfeed already has tools in place to help people “like” and “dislike” posts, discuss them, and so on.

To see how this might work, I created a FriendFeed group for Anthropology, based on blogs registered with ResearchBlogging.org. You can check it out here. But this isn’t all Anthropology blogs, or even all Anthro blogs registered with ResearchBlogging — I cheated a bit because my default report of regisered blogs doesn’t include RSS addresses. I only used blogs from Blogger and Wordpress since their RSS URLs are easily reproduced based on the blog URL. And there are other problems. Many blogs cover multiple topics. How would you decide how which list(s) to put them on? What if someone started posting pseudoscience, or moved their blog? Who would be in charge of monitoring the list to make sure it remains useful? And how many people would actually register with FriendFeed just to follow blogs? The beauty of a site like ScienceBlogs is it stands on its own — you go there to read blogs about science. Someone who’s only interested in science (and not social networking) is less likely to hang around a site like FriendFeed just to read science blogs. I’m unconvinced that a set of feeds could have the same influence as a dedicated science blog aggregator.

A more elegant system would be built into ResearchBlogging itself or a similar site. Then bloggers could register once, and change their information themselves as necessary. ResearchBlogging already has editors who ensure that the registered blogs report high-quality science.

But of course, such a system takes time and money to build. It would need to somehow differentiate itself from ResearchBlogging because it would be filling a different purpose. I think it’s a good idea, but I’m not sure I want to be the person in charge of it (and that’s assuming I can convince the management at Seed to pursue it). Maybe, even though it could be a slower process, a better approach might be to build the FriendFeed groups first, then see if the interest level is high enough to support a more sophisticated dedicated website. Even those will take a little work, which I can’t do on my own. It takes a lot time to copy and paste hundreds of RSS URLs into FriendFeed, so ideally we should divide the labor (I think I can provide a list of blogs and RSS addresses sorted by topic). Who’s interested in helping out?

Posted in Technology | 8 Comments

Leaving ScienceBlogs: What next?

By dave | July 20, 2010

In case you’re not up on the goings-on in the science blogosphere, let me bring you up to date. About two weeks ago, ScienceBlogs made a disastrous decision to sell Pepsi a “nutrition” blog with equal standing to all its independent, hand-picked science blogs. The hypocrisy in handing a nutrition podium to a company that is seriously implicated in the global obesity crisis was astonishing, and even worse, the dozens of bloggers who’ve worked for years to build ScienceBlogs’ reputation were taken completely by surprise.

Perhaps at least ScienceBlogs’ resident nutrition bloggers should have been consulted. Instead, they and many others have now left the collective. The icing on the cake occurred today when science networker extraordinaire Bora Zivkovic wrote a manifesto proclaiming his own departure.

Coincidentally, Greta and I left ScienceBlogs about six months ago, for different reasons. I simply wanted to move on to other topics, and because of our special system for managing the blog, Greta couldn’t keep up the blog on her own.

I decided to try an experimental blog, with a brand-new theme, The Daily Monthly. While many CogDaily readers made the shift to the new site, it never approached the popularity of Cognitive Daily, and readership stagnated. I decided to shutter that blog after just four months. While ultimately I don’t think it was a great concept for a blog, I do think that if The Daily Monthly had been a part of ScienceBlogs, it probably would have attracted much more attention — perhaps not achieving the popularity of Cognitive Daily, but still, attracting a decent share of readers.

Why? Because ScienceBlogs, for all its troubles, remains an incredibly powerful idea. As Bora points out in his post, there are now some other good blogging networks, but it’s unclear whether they will ever hold the same sway that ScienceBlogs does (did?). The site I manage, ResearchBlogging.org, can serve as a partial solution as well, since it loosely brings a large group of blogs together. But ResearchBlogging in its current form can’t highlight the issues of the day like ScienceBlogs does — not all science news, and little “breaking” science news, is peer-reviewed, which is a requirement for appearing on our site.

Social networking, too, can take up some of the slack, but it still doesn’t deliver the power of a dedicated, hand-picked blog network — otherwise The Daily Monthly should have been easily able to take off from the base of readership we had built at Cognitive Daily.

If they want to continue to have the kind of influence they used to have at ScienceBlogs, I think the bloggers who have left the site need to do something more than just start or restart their old, independent blogs. They need to form a new network — perhaps built around different principles, but a network nonetheless. They might choose to have a central site based on RSS feeds or some other aggregation system, but there needs to be a systematic way to connect their conversations. Otherwise, most readers will tune out. It’s simply too much work for most readers to follow a diverse set of disconnected blogs. Social networking sites like Twitter can bring important individual posts to light, but are less effective at sharing the extended conversations that go on between blogs.

The bloggers who remain at ScienceBlogs might be tempted to leave because their friends are leaving, but I’d suggest a cautionary approach. Even with all its problems and distractions, ScienceBlogs remains the most influential science blogging network in the world. If it is managed well — and I believe it is still in good hands with Evan Lerner as editor — it can move beyond this. Frankly, for most bloggers on ScienceBlogs, they have more opportunity to share their views with the largest possible audience by staying than they do by leaving. While Seed does make mistakes, it is capable of learning from them — it shut down the Pepsi blog before it had even gotten started.

Although ScienceBlogs may struggle to regain its credibility, for an individual blogger, leaving the network and retaining your influence is a much more daunting task.

Posted in General, Technology | 3 Comments

Vacationblogging 2010: Kalaloch Summer

By dave | July 18, 2010

You know you’ve arrived in Washington when you look out your airplane window and see this:

However, even though we arrived two weeks ago, that was just about the only view I had of Rainier until last Thursday. That’s because we spent our first week in Washington in a cabin near Kalaloch (pronounced “CLAY-lock”), at the mouth of the Queets River, on the Washington coast. There was a whole other mountain range (and usually plenty of fog) between us and Rainier. But I was surprised to actually get a decent photo of Rainier from the plane because they usually don’t turn out very good. We flew in just before sunset, so the light was quite dramatic. You can even see what remains of Mount Saint Helens in the background (it’s now barely half the height of Rainier, though, and considerably farther away, from this angle).

During our beach week, we were told that there was a heat wave going on, but we barely noticed. The warmest it got was about 75 degrees. That was warm enough for some tourists to test out the 38-degree ocean water, but not us. We’re used to 75-degree ocean and 95-degree weather at the beach in North Carolina.

Apparently once you got inland, the temperatures were hotter. It even surpassed 90 degrees in Seattle. But most days at Kalaloch were in the 50s and 60s.

This summer, with an 18-year-old son getting ready for college and a 17-year-old daughter off in France, Greta and I are trying something different — vacationing by ourselves. We got a cozy little cabin on the bluff above the water, and were on our own for a week, except for two days when my dad, stepmother, and stepsister stopped by for a visit.

The cabin we rented was on a steep bluff. You had to hike down a rough trail, then clamber over logs to get to the beach:

Once you were on the beach, however, it was isolated and pristine. We could walk a half-mile south to the Queets river, or miles and miles to the north. The farthest we got was the Kalaloch Lodge, which was part of Olympic National Park and served a mean bowl of clam chowder. While there were a few “crowded” spots near campgrounds and lodges, in general, the beach looked like this:

(Click on the picture for a bigger version). So basically it was an experience in isolation. The closest house to ours was a half-mile away, and not visible through the forest.

We took a couple excursions, most notably to the Hoh rain forest, filled with giant mossy trees:

Greta didn’t think I should try to climb up this one, which had fallen across the river:

Another amazing thing about the beach we were staying at was the abundance of eagles. We saw at least one eagle a day. One morning after a run on the beach, an eagle had landed on a piece of driftwood about 30 feet from where our trail met the beach. My dad had gotten back from a walk and was standing about 100 feet away. We approached to within about 20 feet before he flew away — the closest I’ve ever been to an eagle in the wild.

I didn’t get a picture of that one, but here’s one perched a bit farther away:

(Click for a close-up). While it was foggy for much of the time, we were treated to a couple very nice sunsets. It was lovely to sit on top of our bluff and watch the sun descend into the sea. On one occasion, due to principles of optics beyond my ken, the sun appeared to set three separate times. Here’s the best sunset photo I got:

Posted in vacationblogging | 2 Comments

Resolving (or complicating) the iPhone resolution debate

By dave | June 11, 2010

On Tuesday I posted that the iPhone 4 is nowhere near the capabilities of the human retina. But yesterday over at the Bad Astronomy blog, Phil Plait argued the opposite:

Jobs wasn’t falsely advertising the iPhone’s capabilities at all. … But a lot of people read the headlines and it taints their view; someone reading that article may be more likely to think Jobs, once again, has overblown a product to excite people. He didn’t.

Plait was talking about an article on Wired, which cited display expert Raymond Soneira, who argued that 477 ppi would be necessary to match the human retina at a distance of 12 inches.

Meanwhile, I was arguing for 1060 ppi, at 10 inches! Who’s right?

In a way, we all are. Again, I think the Clarkvision site has the clearest explanation of the research:

Blackwell (1946) derived the eye’s resolution, which he called the critical visual angle as a function of brightness and contrast. In bright light (e.g. typical office light to full sunlight), the critical visual angle is 0.7 arc-minute (see Clark, 1990, for additional analysis of the Blackwell data). The number above, 0.7 arc-minute, corresponds to the resolution of a spot as non-point source. Again you need two pixels to say it is not a point, thus the pixels must be 0.35 arc-minute (or smaller) at the limit of visual acuity.

In other words, at 0.7 arc-minutes, you can tell that a light source is not a point. So an 0.7-arc-minute pixel would be too big. Therefore, Clark argues, for a pixel to match the resolution of the retina, it must be half this size — 0.35 arc-minutes. Meanwhile, Soneira says a pixel need only be .6 arc-minutes. We know a .6 arc-minute pixel is indistinguishable from a point — you don’t have to go as small as 0.35 arc-minutes, so that makes some sense.

But Clark cites other research with converging evidence that we see pairs of objects at a resolution of 0.7 arc-minutes. That means single objects (pixels) need to be half that size. Plait counters with a Wikipedia link claiming 1.2 arc-minutes. Who’s right?

It’s hard to say, but in any case, these studies are all measuring something very different from what you use your computer display to do. They’re testing your ability to see lines, dots, or other very simplified figures. Why not study actual pictures, or actual text?

In fact, Clark did exactly that. He had viewers sort pictures printed at 150, 300, and 600 ppi. They could successfully sort the pictures from lowest- to highest-resolution. Thus, it’s quite clear that the 326 ppi of the iPhone 4 doesn’t display the highest resolution detectable by the human eye in realistic conditions.

Calling the new iPhone display the “Retina Display,” therefore, is an exaggeration at best.

Posted in Psychology, Technology | 3 Comments

Does the “Retina Display” live up to its name?

By dave | June 8, 2010

I’m a pretty big Apple fan. I have Apple computers, an iPhone, an iPod, and an iPad. But yesterday as I watched the coverage of Steve Jobs’ WWDC Keynote, I bristled at the name of the new iPhone 4 display. Jobs called it the Retina Display and seemed to be making the claim that there was no need to make a higher-resolution display because the human eye wouldn’t be able to detect any more pixels.

The new display does sport some impressive specs: 960 X 640 pixels, for a resolution of 326 pixels per inch (ppi). That’s four times the resolution of the previous-generation iPhone, and perhaps 10 times the pixel density of a typical desktop computer display. But the real question is, how does it compare to the human retina?

The answer is a bit more complicated than you might think. The retina isn’t like a computer display—it doesn’t have consistent resolution throughout. Most of the eye, in fact, has quite low resolution. You only see details in a tiny portion of the visual field, defined by a special portion of the retina called the fovea. But since the eye can move, a display needs to match not the average resolution the eye can detect, but its highest resolution—the resolution of the fovea, corresponding to just 1/2 of a visual degree.

The area seen by your fovea is roughly equivalent to the size of your thumbnail at arm’s length. But since your eye is constantly moving, you’re able to construct the illusion of seeing fovea-level detail in your entire visual field. And, in fact, you can see it, because as soon as you focus on a region of a display, your fovea orients to it.

What’s the resolution of the fovea? The best calculation I’ve seen is here. This is the critical bit:

How many pixels are needed to match the resolution of the human eye? Each pixel must appear no larger than 0.3 arc-minute. Consider a 20 x 13.3-inch print viewed at 20 inches. The print subtends an angle of 53 x 35.3 degrees, thus requiring 53*60/.3 = 10600 x 35*60/.3 = 7000 pixels, for a total of ~74 megapixels to show detail at the limits of human visual acuity.

The 10600 pixels over 20 inches corresponds to 530 pixels per inch.

Aha! Not 326 ppi, but 530, at a distance of 20 inches! But who holds their iphone 20 inches away? I’d submit that many of us hold it only 10 inches away. This means that to achieve the highest resolution discernible by the human eye, the iPhone would need a resolution of 1060 ppi, or roughly 3200 X 2100 pixels! My 23-inch iMac has a resolution of just 1920 X 1200. So if you could shrink my computer display to the size of an iPhone display, you’d still need to triple its resolution to match the perceptual power of the human retina.

But there’s another problem with the “Retina Display” claim. The iPhone, along with all computer displays, can’t display nearly the range of colors that the human eye can perceive. Take a look at this diagram (source: Wikipedia):

This is a 2-D slice of the 3-D range of colors the retina can detect. The triangle represents the range of a typical computer display. See how much lies outside that display? That’s stuff you can see that your computer can’t show you.

So while the new iPhone display is indeed impressive, and leaps and bounds better than the old version, it’s still nowhere near the capabilities of the human retina.

Posted in Psychology, Technology | 6 Comments

Is the iPad really that bad?

By dave | May 28, 2010

Maybe I just had low expectations for my iPad. I didn’t think it was going to revolutionize computing, or replace my laptop, phone, and TV set. I didn’t think it was going to have much impact at all on how I lived my day-to-day life, except for one thing: I hoped it would encourage me to read more.

Even though I was an English major, I’ve never been a great reader. I’m not the sort of person who devours multiple novels each week. Heck, I’m lucky if I read three or four per year. Sure, I spend plenty of time surfing the web, and I need to read a lot of blog posts and journal articles for my job, but that means that I’ve been spending a lot less time just sitting down and reading books over the past few years.

When I bought the iPad, I was thinking its primary use would be as a way to encourage me to do more of that. So, how have I done? In the nearly two months since I bought it, I’ve read about 1.5 books. That’s better than I had been doing, but not by much. I had also hoped to read more magazines and other periodicals on the iPad. How’d I do there? So far, only one magazine that I read frequently has come out for the iPad: WIRED. So I decided to pony up $5 and see what that was like.

My first impression: This is just like the physical magazine. It’s got all the things I like about WIRED, and most of what I don’t like. I didn’t hate it as much as some of the other early reviews, but I agree that it’s not the sort of transformative application that will suddenly return the magazine industry to profitability.

For $5 (well, $4.99), you get one copy of the magazine. This isn’t a subscription, it’s just a one-shot deal. I think that’s about what it costs on the newsstand, but if I have my iPad with me, I’m not typically going to be trolling newsstands for something to read. The price, clearly, has to come down.

Once you figure out the interface, it works well enough. The articles are clear and easy to read. If you rotate your iPad from horizontal to vertical, each page transforms to a completely new layout. The typography is much better than on a typical app or web page, with proper hyphenation and justification. Text is a little blurry, but very readable. Reading a feature-length article like Steve Silberman’s excellent story on biobanks is a much more satisfying experience than reading the same story online.

As the interfacelab review points out, the app is a bit of a hack job, an enormous 500-meg file, with each page of text presented as a jpeg image, not true dynamic text. This of course means you can’t search, select, or copy/paste. Other than the file size, that doesn’t really bother me. It’s a magazine, not a reference work. Still, particularly because of the file size, I’m hoping this is fixed in future versions.

Similarly, books on the iPad are a pleasure to read, but hardly an improvement over the real thing. Other than the convenience factor, I’d be just as happy with paper.

Where the iPad excels, however, is with PDFs. The experience of reading a PDF on the iPad beats a computer hands-down. I bought the iAnnotate App, which isn’t perfect, but does an admirable job with PDF annotation. I can highlight, type notes, bookmark, and search, both for my own notes and through the PDF text itself. Scrolling around the app is actually easier than fumbling through paper copies, and miles better than reading on-screen. Note-taking is intuitive and easy. Yes, importing and organizing PDFs could be easier (My ideal app would combine Mendeley and iAnnotate), and there needs to be an export function for your annotated PDFs, but overall, it’s fantastic. I haven’t printed a PDF since I bought this app. I even used it to go over my taxes—over a hundred pages (you don’t want my finances)—before filing them.

The other use I had planned for the iPad was Twitter. I love Twitter, but it’s a big time sink when it runs in the background on my main computer and distracts me from the task at hand. Now that I have confined Twitter to its own shelf, I get a lot more work done. That’s great, but I wish the Twitter experience on the iPad was a little smoother. Since the iPad doesn’t support multitasking, it can be hard to do simple things like copy and paste a link into a tweet. If you start a tweet in Twitterific, then need to add an @reference to it, your work might be lost while you search for the name.

Another major annoyance is cursor control. It works just like the iPhone: you touch your finger to the spot you want to place the cursor, and a little magnifying glass appears above your finger so you can line it up exactly right. The problem is, if you end up one character to the left of where you want to be, you have to do it all over again. Sometimes it takes me two or three attempts to get the cursor where I want it. If only the iPad’s virtual keyboard had cursor arrows, this problem would be solved. Cursor arrows are a MUST for the next-generation of the iPad OS. In case some people don’t like losing the screen real estate, it could be a user-configurable option. But once they have better cursor controls, I can’t imagine many people would want to go back.

A slightly thornier problem is cut and paste functionality. To select text to copy, you tap the screen and wait for a contextual menu to appear, then click on “select”, then select the text you want. But there’s a slight lag before the menu appears, and I often end up tapping several times. The same thing happens when I click somewhere to paste the text, but the problem is compounded because if the cursor is in the wrong spot, I have to start over. So even editing tiny 140-character tweets can be a bit of an ordeal. This needs to be streamlined in the future.

Surfing on an iPad is for the most part okay, but I can’t help feeling that everything loads just a little slower on the iPad. This may be due to ads, which I often have blocked on my computer, but even pages that I don’t block seem to load quicker on the computer. For me, this isn’t a big deal. Generally if I want to surf, I’m going to use a computer.

I do wish iPad developers would offer more “light” and “trial” versions of apps. With many apps costing $10 or more, it’s frustrating buying apps that end up not meeting my needs. I think if trial versions were available, developers would end up selling more paid versions.

But overall, the iPad does everything I hoped it would when I bought it. It’s a much more convenient way to keep all my reading material in one place (compared to physical books and magazines), and it’s a superior reading device for the documents I read most: PDFs. Now I just need to cross my fingers and hope magazine prices come down—and that the magazines I actually would like to read become available. Atlantic, Scientific American, National Geographic, and (ahem) SEED, let’s get going on this!

See also: iPad: First impressions

Posted in Technology | 3 Comments

Can we use social networking to build better textbooks?

By dave | May 19, 2010

About 7 years ago, I attempted to start a non-profit organization dedicated to producing peer-reviewed open-source textbooks.

While the organization received considerable support (and several submissions) from like-minded academics, in the end the project fizzled due to logistics. I had a background in traditional textbook publishing, and I was following their labor-intensive model for producing books, which doesn’t work very well when you’re producing a product you plan on giving away for free.

Wikibooks has made an admirable attempt to produce textbooks, but unfortunately, the textbooks I’ve seen there don’t really hold a candle to professionally-produced texts. While it’s great that Wikibooks has created an Introduction to Psychology text, just making a book doesn’t cut it. It needs to be a book people want to use. In this case, the paucity of visual and instructional aids make it unlikely that this book would actually be used to teach a course. A collaboratively-produced online text should be better than its print equivalent, not just a semi-workable substitute.

The other problem I see with the wikibooks model is that there’s not much room for innovation. In a wikibook, you’re limited to the tools available on their website, and you’re limited by their production model, which tends to lock in to a particular structure for a book.

Traditional textbooks (and wikibooks) start with a table of contents. The book is then written to fill out the contents, and rarely strays from that original structure. Even revised editions of a text might change the order of a chapter or two, but rarely stray far from the initial conception of the book. A truly innovative text that can grow and adapt needs to be flexible enough to accommodate a variety of approaches to teaching a class.

This is where social networks can come into play. Rather than building a text the traditional way, modules can be constructed independently. These modules can then be collected and adapted to a number of different course syllabi. There might even be multiple modules covering each topic.

Where would these modules come from, and how would they be organized coherently? The rudiments of both are already freely available online: Science bloggers readily share tons of useful information on blog posts. Much of this is tagged by topic on sites like ResearchBlogging.org (okay, I can’t think of any others, but that’s a good start!). Similarly, lots of science teachers share their syllabi online. All that’s needed to create some very engaging course materials is some way of linking the two, and some way to adapt the blog posts into true teaching modules.

In fact, the framework provided by a wikibook could offer a great start on a textbook-like product, but I’d like to see online texts that make more use of the capabilities of the internet, using graphics, video, animation, and interactivity to create a richer experience for students — one that would not only compete with, but ultimately surpass traditional texts.

The key to all of this is some way to combine the existing resources online and leverage them with social networks — either ones that already exist, like Twitter and Friendfeed, or a new one that offers additional functionality.

Comments? Suggestions?

Posted in General, Technology | 1 Comment

Today’s Infographic: The Uncanny Valley of Bathroom Activities

By dave | May 13, 2010

Posted in General | 1 Comment

iPad — First impressions

By dave | April 3, 2010

Hmmm… I wonder how many blog posts with this headline will be written today?

The iPad has to be one of the most-anticipated launches in Apple history, and with the possible exception of the iPhone, it’s a device that may change more about the technology/media ecosystem from its outset than any other.

What media companies really seem to want to do with the iPad is charge as much or more as they do with their old print editions. Popular Science has an app they’re selling for $5 — per issue! The Wall Street Journal offers a subscription for $16 per month. Cmon, people, we’re paying your print and distribution costs by buying a $500 device to read your content. You need to give us a break on the price of your content to make up for it.

Fortunately the web page versions of many sites are very nice indeed on the iPad. The New York Times, for example, works great. On the iPhone you’re generally better off using the NY Times app, but on the iPad I much prefer the actual web site. Even videos play perfectly. YouTube and Vimeo videos play fine as well — according to a couple respondents on Twitter they’ve upgraded their sites to detect the iPad and feed HTML5 versions of video instead of the non-supported Flash video.

The iPad is a bit smaller than I realized. It’s not quite as big as an 8.5 X 11 sheet of paper. Here’s a photo comparing the iPad to the iPhone and the MacBook Air:

I’ve found that sitting and reading it like a book works okay, as long as you have someplace to rest your arms. Otherwise, it begins to feel a little heavy in your hands after 10 or 15 minutes. I have slightly different plans for how I’ll work with the iPad, which I’ll reveal next week on Daily Monthly.

One way I was hoping to use the iPad was as a paper-free way to read PDFs. I don’t like reading PDFs on the computer screen because my PDF reader is fairly clunky for annotating texts. I’d at least like to be able to highlight or underline relevant sections of text, and the pre-eminent iPad PDF-reading application, Papers, doesn’t offer that functionality.

Similarly, unless I’m missing something, the otherwise very nice Kindle for iPad app doesn’t seem to have annotation capability.

You can highlight and annotate text in the very nice Kindle for iPad app — it took me a while to figure out how: Just select the text you want and a menu comes up giving you the option to highlight or add a note. Unfortunately you cannot copy and paste. Silly DRM!

Battery life appears to be quite good. I’ve been running this thing through its paces for a solid 4 hours and still have a 57 percent charge — 8 hours of heavy use seems easily attainable, and I’m sure you could stretch it to 10 hours or more by turning down brightness and volume.

I’ll have much more to say about the iPad in the future, but this ought to satiate you for now — I’d like to get back to using it!

Posted in General | 2 Comments

How I’d fix Kachingle for $110,000

By dave | March 31, 2010

I think Kachingle is a really great idea. In fact, I’m a paying subscriber and my blog The Daily Monthly is a member.

Basically, the way their site works is this: Readers pay a $5/month subscription fee that is distributed to their favorite blogs based on how often they visit them. So if I visit 5 blogs equally, each blogger gets $1 a month from me. I’m supporting great blogging, and the bloggers actually make a little money — or a LOT of money, if they have, say, 10,000 readers.

The problem is that not many bloggers are signed up with Kachingle. As of now, they have 108 sites signed up, and not all are even English-language sites. In fact, none of the blogs I regularly follow has signed up. So I’m paying $5 for nothing. It’s only worth it to me if my favorite blogs are signed up, and they’re not.

On the other end, bloggers don’t have much incentive to sign up unless there are a lot of people handing out money. The biggest payout so far has been $85.92, to Carta, a German site, based on 34 people who support the site.

I have to imagine Kachingle is burning through quite a bit of capital getting their system up, what with coders, marketers, support staff, and rent to pay. But they’ve got a chicken and egg problem. They won’t get readers without content, and they won’t get content without paying readers. How to fix it? Use some of that money to buy themselves a henhouse preloaded with both chickens and eggs. Here’s how:

They need both bloggers and readers. So what they should do is give bloggers some seed money to prime the pump. Send emails out to 100 influential bloggers in a variety of specialties: politics, gossip, sports, science, and so on. Here’s the text of the email:

Dear Blogger,

Would you like to divide $1000 between yourself and your readers, while building a steady revenue stream for your blog?

We’ll give you the $1000 if you register for our site for one year. Not only do you get to keep $400 right off the bat, but the rest of it goes directly to your readers, who will in turn use it to support your blog and others like yours.

That $600 will support 10 subscriptions to Kachingle for a full year. Every time your readers visit your site, you get some of that money. And YOU get to pick which readers get the money. You could run a contest, pick your favorite commenters — whatever you want. And since we’re giving out a full $100,000 to bloggers like you, you’re likely to get a whole lot more money back as their readers discover your site via kachingle.com.

Visit our site at kachingle.com for more information, and feel free to contact us if you have any additional questions or would like to claim the $1000 for you and your readers.

Sincerely,

Kachingle.com

Now they’d have 100 top blogs registered for the site, 1,000 readers who actively support those blogs, and a whole lot of publicity from the best bloggers in the business.

When new readers visit Kachingle, they’d actually have a worthwhile array of blogs to choose from, so they’d be more likely to sign up for real money. When new bloggers sign up, they’d see that others are making real money for the site and so would be more likely to do it without an incentive.

A site like Kachingle needs a critical mass to get started, and a program like this, which seems expensive, is actually cheap compared to the years of capital they’d have to spend to build a content and subscriber base from scratch.

Oh, and what about that extra $10,000? That’s my fee for setting this project up for them.

Update: It just occurred to me that they don’t need to spend that $100,000 all at once. The $60,000 in subscriptions gets paid out $5000 per month. The $40,000 in blogger fees should probably come in two chunks: $200 at the start of the year and $200 at the end. So this project would only cost $25,000 for the first month (plus my $10,000 fee, of course!).

Posted in Contraception and abortion, General | 1 Comment

The problem with “literacy”

By dave | March 19, 2010

I’ve always been a little annoyed with people appropriating the word “literacy” for things that have nothing to do with literacy. Literacy derives from the Latin word for “letter,” and refers specifically to the ability to read.

The problem I have with using literacy for other domains is that even in the world of literature it has no agreed-upon meaning. Is it simply the ability to understand written words? How many words do you need to know? Or do you have to understand the meaning of those words and how to write your own? Some would say you’re not “literate” until you’ve read Shakespeare: Think of the difference between saying “he’s quite literate” and “90 percent of the U.S. population is literate.”

That said, “literacy” has a much more concrete meaning for most of us than simply “knowledge” or “competence.” I could know about reading without knowing how to read. By contrast, in order to be “literate” in the Shakespearean sense you must first be able to read and understand the literary works in question.

So even though literacy is ill-defined, everyone has the sense that there is a requisite series of skills, some of which must be acquired before the rest are attainable.

If we start talking about “computer literacy” rather than “computer knowledge” or “computer competence,” we’ve implicitly said that there is a requisite series of skills need to be an effective computer user—whether or not this is really true. The problem, when you’re talking specifically about computers, is that there’s much less agreement on what that set of skills is. I don’t need to know HTML to surf the web. I don’t need to understand the file structure of Windows to create and save a file in Microsoft Word. Sure, these skills are useful, but I can muddle along fine without them. By contrast, if I don’t understand the different combinations of letters and what sounds they represent, I can’t read Shakespeare.

By using terms like “computer literacy” and “science literacy” we imply that these things are just like learning to read. But these things aren’t like learning to read. They’re actually more like learning Shakespeare. Just as I can save a Word document without understanding the file structure of Windows, I can also read Shakespeare without knowing what iambic pentameter is. If I had those abilities, I’d be more competent in both fields, but I could certainly manage without.

I can become an expert in Microsoft Word without understanding Excel, just like I could be an expert in Shakespeare’s sonnets without having read the plays (although plenty of people might expect me to do both). But to be “literate” in a general sense, do I need to read Shakespeare? What about Langston Hughes? Virginia Woolf? Chinua Achebe? It depends on whose definition of literacy I use. Similarly, is a “computer literate” person required to know how to do a Boolean search? Use HTML? CSS? Or just understand the difference between a slash and a backslash?

The problem with using “literacy” for computers, or science, or art, or emotion, or any number of non-literary fields is that there’s no agreement at any point for the basic abilities that are needed. None of these fields have anything like “reading” as a core ability. But implied in using “literacy” to describe them is that there is such a core ability. I suspect that many people who use the term “literacy” are actively using it to impose their own set of assumptions on a field of knowledge or study.

In the end, I suppose I’m okay with using “literacy” to describe general competence or knowledge in a field. But I don’t agree that every field of study has a well-defined set of core competencies and concepts. Even literature.

Posted in General | 2 Comments

More on “Are Animals People”?

By dave | March 18, 2010

My column on Seed this week has attracted some attention across the web. The most interesting comment may have come from DrugMonkey, who simply linked to his 2008 post critical of the idea that animals can have “insight.”

Now, in my column, I’m not actually asking whether animals have “insight” — I’m asking whether they should be treated as “persons.” Arguably, there’s a difference. Does being a person require insight?

I’m not sure I want to get into the semantics of all this, but I did offer this response to the DrugMonkey post:

Good post. I tend to fall on your side of this argument. I still think there’s an issue there in terms of how “human-ly”/”humanely” we treat animals. But I agree that there’s a pretty big gap between human and animal “insight.”

To which DrugMonkey replied:

Dave, what “issue”? And what principles and or facts (or I should say “facts”) do we use to inform our answers to such issues? What abuses of scientific knowledge do we put up with, or commit, to provide seemingly objective cover for our subjective beliefs?

The issue as I was trying to put it in my brief comment is the question when we cross the line between merely treating animals humanely and offering them all the same rights we offer humans. In my book, that comes down to the motivations we have for offering rights to anyone.

Even DrugMonkey would agree that a newborn infant has less “insight” than an adult chimp. Why does the child have rights the chimp doesn’t have? At first glance, it’s either because of the potential of becoming a fully functional adult or the property rights of the parent. Arguably it’s not the latter because even parents don’t have the right to abuse their children. Even with parental consent, you couldn’t subject a baby to the treatments we routinely administer to lab animals.

But it’s not the former, either. Even humans with lower IQs than chimps have rights the chimps don’t have.

Apparently just possessing human DNA qualifies you for “human rights.” But not all of them. Minors don’t have voting rights or property rights. Mentally impaired adults can’t drive, or in some cases, even leave their detention facilities treatment centers. Even so, we don’t force mentally impaired people into potentially deadly experiments against their will.

A friend of mine who’s active in the fight against animal rights extremists has argued that if we didn’t have animals to experiment on, in certain cases it would be justified to use mentally impaired humans. It’s distasteful, but from a philosophical perspective, it’s hard to argue with.

The question then becomes: At what point in terms of mental ability does it make sense to treat an animal like a person? Have any animals crossed that line? DrugMonkey argues that since no animals have ever shown true human insight, there is no such case.

To me, the problem is a little more complicated. The general consensus in America seems to be that some animals, which have more advanced cognitive abilities, do deserve some of the privileges we give humans. We don’t euthanize chimps when they’re too old for the circus or scientific study: we put them in retirement homes. SeaWorld decided not to euthanize Tilikum, but a lion that attacked its trainer would probably have been put to death.

I’m not saying these decisions are correct–what I’m saying is that it’s difficult to determine exactly where to draw the line. Maybe chimp retirement homes are a pointless indulgence. Maybe it’s wrong to keep any chimps or cetaceans in captivity except where they could be used for research that saves human lives.

To answer DrugMonkey’s question, I don’t believe we should put up with any distortions of science in support of these arguments. But even if everyone agrees on the science, I’d argue that where to draw the line on the ethical treatment of animals is still not easy.

If you asked me my opinion, I’d have to say the chimp retirement homes are indeed a pointless indulgence. Some of these chimps are treated better than humans in many parts of the world—I’d say our dollars would be better spent helping people, not chimps. But that’s just my opinion. It doesn’t mean it’s not a debatable question.

Posted in General | 7 Comments

The complete kettle washing archive

By dave | February 24, 2010

We move from saving the planet to a subject of much more immediate urgency.

A while back I did a little experiment to determine whether it was more energy efficient to heat water on the stovetop or in the microwave. The microwave was the clear winner, but many commenters suggested that I should really consider an even more efficient device, the electric kettle.

This past Christmas, our kids gave us an electric kettle, and we’ve been happily using it for all our water-boiling needs ever since. But recently I’ve begun to wonder what the maintenance requirements for such a device were. Little did I know, this is a controversial topic. Innocently enough, I started a twitter discussion on the subject. This post attempts to chronicle the entire debate:

# davemunger
A question for the brits: how often do you wash your electric teapot? 9:00 AM Feb 23rd via TweetDeck

# Evidence Matters
@davemunger If by teapot, you mean electric kettle, I clean mine 2x a week & descale it 1x 4 weeks. 9:03 AM Feb 23rd via web in reply to davemunger

# davemunger
.@EvidenceMatters I mean the electric gizmo that I use to heat water for coffee/tea 9:05 AM Feb 23rd via TweetDeck

# labratting
@davemunger … what is an electric teapot! You have just made me realise that I’ve never actually washed my kettle though… 9:04 AM Feb 23rd via web in reply to davemunger

# LouiseJJohnson
@davemunger If you mean electric kettle, never (except to descale it now I live in hard water area). It only ever has boiling water in! 9:06 AM Feb 23rd via web in reply to davemunger

# EvidenceMatters
@davemunger Good - that’s what I thought you meant so previous figures stand for my kettles. 9:06 AM Feb 23rd via web in reply to davemunger

# davemunger
Oops, sorry, I used the wrong term. How often do you wash your electric kettle? 9:07 AM Feb 23rd via TweetDeck

# LouiseJJohnson
@davemunger I know people who insist that you shouldn’t wash teapots ever either. I think they hope, eventually, not to need teabags anymore 9:08 AM Feb 23rd via web in reply to davemunger

# JonSatriani
@davemunger London water requires I give mine a pretty good sluicing about once a week. 9:09 AM Feb 23rd via Echofon in reply to davemunger

# labratting
@davemunger ah right. In that case: I have never washed my electric kettle. But a) it’s only one year old and b) I’m an undergrad. 9:09 AM Feb 23rd via web in reply to davemunger

# YoniFreedhoff
@davemunger People wash electric kettles? 9:10 AM Feb 23rd via TweetDeck in reply to davemunger

# EvidenceMatters
@LouiseJJohnson @davemunger I should, perhaps, declare that I take both tea & coffee w/out milk so a tad careful @ water/kettle/pots. 9:10 AM Feb 23rd via web in reply to LouiseJJohnson

# arinapz
@davemunger Never. Well, unless the water’s really hard and I need to use vinegar to get the residue off. Should I be washing it? 9:11 AM Feb 23rd via Seesmic in reply to davemunger

# davemunger
Let’s clarify further: If you only use your electric kettle to boil water and you don’t have hard water, should you ever wash it? 9:13 AM Feb 23rd via TweetDeck

# YoniFreedhoff
@davemunger Do you wash your home’s pipes? 9:14 AM Feb 23rd via TweetDeck in reply to davemunger

# mentalindigest
Good grief! OCD much? ;-) RT @EvidenceMatters: @davemunger If … you mean electric kettle, I clean mine 2x a week & descale it 1x 4 weeks. 9:15 AM Feb 23rd via TweetDeck

# EvidenceMatters
@davemunger Yes. There is a nasty film build-up even in absence of obvious hard-water deposits. You also need to clear bacteria 1/2 9:15 AM Feb 23rd via web in reply to davemunger

# labratting
@davemunger I don’t see the point in washing it. It *boils water*. Anything that comes out is going to be sterile almost by definition. 9:15 AM Feb 23rd via web in reply to davemunger

# davemunger
@YoniFreedhoff No, and I don’t wash my kettle either. But I was wondering what the custom was. Getting quite a variety of responses! 9:16 AM Feb 23rd via TweetDeck in reply to YoniFreedhoff

# EvidenceMatters
@davemunger from standing empty/lukewarm between uses if you use water at diff. temps for diff. teas & coffees. In my opinion. 2/2 9:16 AM Feb 23rd via web in reply to davemunger

# YoniFreedhoff
@davemunger It seems rather crazy to me to wash something that boils water. What do people think survives the next boil? 9:17 AM Feb 23rd via TweetDeck in reply to davemunger

# SciencePunk
@davemunger What are you supposed to wash it with?? 9:18 AM Feb 23rd via Echofon

davemunger Wow, quite a debate going on the electric kettle question. Do we need a hashtag? #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:17:58 +0000 - tweet id 9527198069 - 1 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:17:58

mentalindigest @davemunger Well…you bring up kettles and the Brits will have something (A LOT) to say on the matter ;-) #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:19:00 +0000 - tweet id 9527237506 - 2 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:19:00

michaelmeadon @davemunger I’d say wash it once a year or something #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:19:27 +0000 - tweet id 9527254898 - 3 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:19:27

davemunger @YoniFreedhoff I’m with you. But they say you need to boil several minutes to purify water, & a kettle brings just to a boil #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:20:39 +0000 - tweet id 9527301843 - 4 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:20:39

LeighJKBoerner @davemunger I’ve had mine for…how long have I been in grad school now? 5 years. I’ve never washed it and I’m not dead yet. #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:21:00 +0000 - tweet id 9527315120 - 5 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:21:00

LouiseJJohnson @davemunger Depends how often you use it, perhaps? I boil mine every few hours so water never sits around in it. #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:21:06 +0000 - tweet id 9527319026 - 6 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:21:06

mentalindigest @EvidenceMatters Then I understand ;-) I’m in soft water, and hardy environmentals building up in my kettle don’t worry me #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:22:00 +0000 - tweet id 9527352950 - 7 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:22:00

hashtager # Wow, quite a debate going on the electric kettle question. Do we need a hashtag? #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:22:28 +0000 - tweet id 9527371179 - 8 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:22:28

davemunger What I’ve learned from the #kettlewashing debate so far: You can justify pretty much any practice when it comes to boiling water
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:25:21 +0000 - tweet id 9527481961 - 9 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:25:21

“LeighJKBoerner @davemunger Since you bring the water to a boil, I don’t see why you’d need to “”wash”" aka disinfect it. #kettlewashing”
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:25:23 +0000 - tweet id 9527483556 - 10 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:25:23

labratting @mentalindigest I’m on hard water, but I’m pretty sure limescale won’t kill me, and I honestly have better things to do. #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:28:50 +0000 - tweet id 9527614536 - 11 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:28:50

davemunger @EvidenceMatters I take it you have a deluxe model that allows you to specify the temp. We don’t have such luxuries in the US #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:29:37 +0000 - tweet id 9527644638 - 12 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:29:37

davemunger @samplereality I think #MarksDEAD2011 could benefit from a plenary session on the social dynamics of online #kettlewashing debates
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:33:45 +0000 - tweet id 9527809873 - 13 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:33:45

davemunger @EvidenceMatters So if you’re serving immunocompromised people and don’t boil the water, regular #kettlewashing is a must. No argument there
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:36:34 +0000 - tweet id 9527918027 - 14 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:36:34

davemunger @EvidenceMatters But if your water supply is okay, is there any way for hardy pathogens to get introduced into the kettle? #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:40:38 +0000 - tweet id 9528075647 - 15 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:40:38

mentalindigest Cleaning kettles can be dangerous though (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5635891) lol #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:41:22 +0000 - tweet id 9528104338 - 16 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:41:22

davemunger LO freaking L. I’m dying here RT @mentalindigest: Cleaning kettles can be dangerous though (http://is.gd/90nEz) lol #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:42:29 +0000 - tweet id 9528148064 - 17 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 09:42:29

mentalindigest @EvidenceMatters I have WASHED my kettle. Just saying. #kettlewashing
Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:15:04 +0000 - tweet id 9547789320 - 18 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-23 18:15:04

EvidenceMatters Well, that’s reassuring :) rt @mentalindigest I have WASHED my kettle. Just saying. #kettlewashing
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:11:45 +0000 - tweet id 9567391775 - 19 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-24 03:11:45

EvidenceMatters Seriously tho’ - following yesterday’s discussion initiated by @davemunger - am I really the only person who goes in for #kettlewashing ?
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:12:57 +0000 - tweet id 9567419109 - 20 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-24 03:12:57

prateekbuch does d-scaling count? RT @EvidenceMatters: that’s reassuring :) rt @mentalindigest I have WASHED my kettle. Just saying. #kettlewashing
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:13:01 +0000 - tweet id 9567420447 - 21 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-24 03:13:01

davemunger @EvidenceMatters There were a couple others. Maybe I should publish the complete #kettlewashing archive (including pre-hashtag posts)
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:15:48 +0000 - tweet id 9573185969 - 22 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-24 07:15:48

EvidenceMatters @davemunger It would make me feel less alone *half-sob, half-laughter* #kettlewashing
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:17:54 +0000 - tweet id 9573247588 - 23 - geo info [ 0 0] - 2010-02-24 07:17:54

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Fly less?

By dave | February 23, 2010

Earlier today I put up a post on Twitter asking for suggestions about places to donate money in bulk to counter the carbon emitted due to my travels.

One suggestion came from @SFriedScientist:

TerraPass is pretty good, founded by a Duke alum and has some decent people on their advisory panel http://www.terrapass.com

So I checked out TerraPass, and it seems like a pretty slick operation. Basically they spend the money you give them on projects that wouldn’t happen otherwise, resulting in reclaiming or avoiding emissions (landfill projects seem popular this year).

TerraPass has a handy calculator for your family’s entire carbon output.

So, I entered our two cars, the cost of our home’s utilities, and an estimate of the number of flights we take each year (8 medium, and 4 long round trips). Here are the results:

Whew! That’s a fair chunk of change — but when you consider that you’re covering all the carbon a family of four is responsible for generating in a year, in some ways it’s not so bad.

Still, not necessarily the investment one takes lightly, especially since in the grand scheme of things it probably won’t make much of a difference. Sure, I’ll feel a little less guilty about all that flying (and heating and air conditioning), but if everyone else on the planet isn’t doing the same thing, global warming is still going to happen.

Then I got this comment from @imascientist:

Err, fly less?

Right. Paying $300 a year, which few others are willing to do, isn’t going far enough to solve the problem, and instead I should simply not fly.

I could do that, I suppose. I was planning on traveling to a conference in San Francisco for my job next month, but my boss would probably understand that I’d rather “save the environment.” I was planning a vacation this summer, but why should I do that when the fate of the world is at stake?

Now, I realize that people like me, with their cars and houses and plane travel, are responsible for a disproportionate share of the problem of global warming. But it’s not clear to me that just “flying less” is going to help any more than paying for carbon mitigation. If I pay for carbon offsets, money gets invested in preserving the environment, demonstrating that a carbon-neutral society is economically viable. If I just don’t fly, I’m not convinced that the world will be better off. Proportionally, that will get noticed less than contributing to the success of a carbon offset company.

But neither “solution” is going to get anywhere near solving the problem. For the problem to get solved, the world has to come together. I just happen to think that’s more likely to occur if companies like TerraPass are thriving.

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Me and my telemarketing friends

By dave | February 17, 2010

So, I get a call from a “toll free number.” What possesses me to answer it, I don’t know. Clearly it’s some sort of telemarketer.

Me: Hello.
Telemarketer: Hello, may I speak to Margaret Moljer?

Okay, it’s definitely a telemarketer, who’s apparently targeting my wife Greta Munger.

Me: No, I’m sorry, she’s not here, may I take a message?
Telemarketer: No, that’s okay, I’ll call back at a later time.
Me: Well, if you do call back, you’re not going to get anywhere if you call here during business hours. She’s got a job, you know. And don’t you know we’re on the do not call list? Or do you think because she bought socks from you three years ago, you’re entitled to inconvenience us whenever you like? If you’re so sure she won’t call you back, then it’s pretty much a guarantee that she’s not buying whatever your selling. Why even bother?

Of course, I never got a chance to say that last bit. The phone call was over before I knew it. But really, what’s the point? Why ask for a particular person? Shouldn’t you just try to sell your product to whoever answers the phone? That way I can hang up on you and we won’t have to repeat this charade every few days when you call back.

If I ran a shady telemarketing operation, things would be different, I tell you!

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Is it time to ditch the term “new media”?

By dave | February 5, 2010

Over the course of the afternoon, I’ve had a really nice conversation with Carla Casilli on Twitter. It started out with Carla’s observation:

When will we stop calling media on the internet “new media”?

To which I replied:

Shortly after “new york” reverts to its rightful name, “york” ;)

After a few back and forths, Carla and I agreed that perhaps instead of “new media,” we should just say “mannahatta” — the original Lenape Indian term for New York.

After all, it makes just as much sense to use #mannahatta as a catch-all for media on the internet as it does to say “new media.” I worked for what would become HarperCollins’s “New Media” department over 20 years ago!

Thus, in the name of all that is Right and Just, I declare that henceforth, the term for media on the internet is #mannahatta. It’s obsolescence-proof since it doesn’t include the term “new.” Just think of all the old “new” things that just seem silly today. The literary school of new criticism was old by the late 1960s. New Coke died in the 1980s. My once-new Prius is now the shameful progeny of a dinosaur of a car company. So if you want to talk about online media, shun the new, and just say #mannahatta.

40 years from now, when people are talking about “new mannahatta,” you’ll be able to tell them you remember when…

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Introducing The Daily Monthly

By dave | February 1, 2010

With any luck, I’ve kept you on pins and needles for the last week and a half as I prepared you for the unveiling of the “Mystery Project,” or what I’m going to be doing with all the time I freed up from shutting down Cognitive Daily.

Although it will live forever on my server in a folder called “MysteryProject,” its public name is The Daily Monthly, and it’s now live.

The idea behind the site is pretty simple. Each month, I pick a new topic, and I write about it with the same care and attention I gave Cognitive Daily. I hope the site will appeal to a somewhat broader audience than CogDaily, and accordingly, I’ve adjusted the tone just a bit (don’t worry, it’s still going to be intelligent, thoughtful writing).

The posts will be a little more personal than CogDaily, and a little more journalistic. I’ll be conducting interviews and visiting the people and places I describe, just like a real reporter. But I’ll also do some reading and explaining of technical research papers, just like I did for CogDaily.

The first month’s topic is AIDS in America, and I’ll be following the story of Charles Roth, a long-time friend of mine who I just learned has been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. I’ll also tell the stories of some dedicated people who are researching, treating, and trying to prevent HIV/AIDS. At this point, you might as well just head on over there. And make sure you check back every day.

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