Tapping the Zeitgeist

When writing the online version of our annual holiday newsletter, I've often added a little bit on new technologies that have affected our lives in the past year. This year, I cited two technologies: the iPhone and social networking. The iPhone has been a big part of our life this past year. That was my gift to my husband last Christmas, and as my Mom often says, that was the best Christmas gift ever. With social networking, while that's been around for many years, I opined that it seemed to have reached a tipping point this year. However, I cautioned that that may just be my own skewed perspective. I only just joined Facebook a few weeks ago (careful, it's addictive!), and have been running into all sorts of friends there, most of whom are also relatively recent. I think the kids have been onto it for quite a while, but perhaps it's just opened up for the over-forty crowd. Well, it turns out I do in fact have my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, at least according to Google, who just released their 2008 Year-End Google Zeitgeist report, showing "iphone" and "facebook" as #2 and #4 fastest rising search terms. Social networking is called out on their "top trends". I guess I'm not so late to the party after all.

What Does Your Browser Tell About Your Gender?

This guy who blogs on advertising created a clever piece of JavaScript that analyzes your browser history against the Quantcast Top 10K websites demographic information, and calculates an estimate as to your gender based on the websites you visit. Several of my favorite bloggers have been trying it out, so I had to give a spin. The theory being that if you visit sites more frequented by men than women, you're more likely to be male. The JavaScript is clever (it can't directly access your browser history, but it creates a virtual webpage with links to all the top 10k sites, runs it by your browser, and observes which links get colored the "visited" color), and the statistical calculation is sound enough, but the results can vary. While my husband was pretty evenly split (52% male / 48% female), I'm apparently a much more girly browser. I was pegged as:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 65%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 35%

What went into the result was a bit surprising. While Google is close to neutral, AOL is female (0.82 male/female ratio). On my male side, Blogger is slightly male (1.06), Flickr a bit more so (1.15), the LA Times is quite male (1.3), and Fry's is a manly 1.6. What pulled me to the female was LinkedIn -- at 0.94, I guess women network more -- and with Southwest.com and hotwire.com at 0.77, I guess women do more travel planning. And with ancestry.com at 0.67, it seems genealogy is very girly. (Fortunately, Mike hasn't done the age demographic calculations yet, as I expect the genealogy puts me in older company too.)

Try it out yourself here.

Fry's Geeks Are Smarter Than Geek Squad Geeks

They say things come in threes, and I hope I'm done with my computer glitches for a good while cause I've had three in one week. (My home PC is also almost exactly three years old, which unfortunately is the average life expectancy for computers.) First, my monitor died, then my computer fan went into permanent overdrive, and then when I tried cleaning out my computer with that canned air, it wouldn't come back on because my power supply was fried. So I just unplugged everything and took the PC up to Best Buy. The guys at Geek Squad at Best Buy were good about confirming my dead power supply and replacing it for me. They confirmed the diagnosis right away by just plugging in a spare power supply right there on the counter, and said they could put a new one in for me in about a half hour. So that was all good, and the computer was ready as promised when I returned from Starbuck's. However, when I got it home, it came up and ran fine, except that the fan was still in overdrive. After Googling around for info, I found a handy freeware utility called SpeedFan that lets you monitor and control your fans and your PC temperature. It was then I discovered that while the ambient temp in my case was okay, but CPU was running at 70C when idle, and up to 85C when taxed. That is way too hot, so I immediately shut down the computer and headed right back to the Geek Squad. The guy opened it up, saw that all the fans were running okay, and said that if it wasn't giving any evidence of slowing down and it wasn't seizing up, I should just run it, and not worry about the loud fan, and it should be fine. (Apparently, the newer Pentium chips are designed to slow themselves down when they get too hot.) At that point, I was wondering whether my CPU was truly as hot as the motherboard sensor was reporting, or whether the fan was just needlessly cranked because the sensor had gone awry. I tried searching in the HP support website (I have an HP Pavilion PC), but did not find any useful info there about thermal issues (beyond advice to clean out your dust bunnies, which I'd already done). I did, however, find very good information on the Intel site (my PC has "Intel inside"), which suggested that one possible problem was the thermal conductor material that transfers heat from the CPU to the heat sink can go bad. That seemed plausible, so I shut the PC down again and planned to take it in to Fry's (which is near my office) first thing in the morning. So when I took it in to Fry's, just by the questions the guy at the service counter was asking me, I could already tell that here were more knowledgeable geeks than the guys at Geek Squad. He suggested tying some cables back that may have been impeding the airflow, as well as reseating the CPU fan when they reapplied the thermal conductor. He started taking it apart while I was there at the counter, and discovered that two of the four screws that held the CPU fan in place had stripped, and that the fan, though apparently working fine, had lost solid contact between the CPU and the heat sink, and *that* was the real source of trouble. He helped me pick out a new fan, and had it fixed up in about a half hour. And it was only $15 for the fan, $4 for the thermal goo, and $30 for the service. Money well spent to save my CPU, which really was overheating after all. So, lessons learned:

• if your fan goes into overdrive, there's a reason
• Intel's support site is much more useful than HP's
• Fry's geeks are smarter than Geek Squad geeks

Commuting with the Dalai Lama

Since I got an iPod for my birthday earlier this year, my commute to work (about 40-60 minutes each way) has become much more enjoyable. I have a bunch of regular podcasts I enjoy (including Good Food, This American Life, Left Right and Center, Dan Savage). I've "read" a number of books from audible.com. I've been getting my dose of classic lit with The Classic Tales podcast (a free weekly download). And now, I've just started to sample from Apple's new offering iTunesU, which syndicates audio content from colleges and universities across the country. I spent the last couple of days listening to the Dalai Lama and Cornel West, courtesy of Stanford's Aurora Forum. I'd read both of them before, but you get such a different sense of the person from hearing their actual voices and their own more spontaneous words. The Dalai Lama took a bit of concentration, because he spoke some in English and some Tibetan through a translator, his accent was thick, and sometimes I wasn't sure when he switched gears. But it was worth the concentration to hear the words of this amazing man. He is much more down-to-earth and pragmatic than you might expect, and he laughs and jokes often. He is compassionate and politic in a way that is so foreign to the American temperament. A number of questions were put to him where he was encouraged to take a position, American-style, in such a way that the questioner hoped to be able to go off and say "I'm right about X, and the Dalai Lama says so." Instead, His Holiness' answers were always Solomonic, expressing his thoughts clearly, but with a lot of appreciation for context and the complexity of life, and not giving anyone any ammunition for an argument.

I've only just started Cornel West, but his voice is different than I had imagined. He speaks pretty softly and kind of raspy. I was a bit surprised at first by his cadence, which is somewhere between preacher, rapster, and poetry performance (think City Lights), but reflecting on some of his writings (his appreciation of jazz), it seems in character. It really makes the commute go by more enjoyably having such intriguing company in the car.

Wiki wiki

The name "wiki", used to describe a community-maintained content management system (Wikipedia being the most famous example), comes from the Hawaiian word for "quick". Tom Chatfield (no relation :-)) of Prospect Magazine makes this observation about how fast Wikipedia gets updated (hat tip Andrew):

Ever wondered how fast a page updates on wikipedia nowadays? It took all of three minutes after Roger Federer’s victory in the US Open for this to appear on his biography there:

In the 2007 US Open, Federer beat 3rd seed Novak Djokovic in the final in straight sets 7-6, 7-6, 6-4 WOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!.

And within the time it took me to copy and paste that extract, the offending exclamation had been removed. Clearly, there’s no such thing as too many editors.

Earlier this year, I had my own experience with the amazingly rapid updating of Wikipedia. A day or two before we were to leave on our vacation to Spain, I was trying to figure out the logistics of getting from Madrid's airport to our hotel in the city. Rick Steves' guidebook informed that the metro connected directly to terminal 2, and a hook-up was expected to the new international terminal 4 sometime in 2007. So I figured I would check Wikipedia to see what it said about Madrid-Barajas Airport, and it said simply that the Metro runs to terminal 2 and terminal 4. Wanting to get independent confirmation, I Googled, and discovered that indeed the connection was open to T4. In fact, the ribbon-cutting ceremony had occurred, oh, a few hours previous. So the ribbon had barely hit the floor before someone had updated Wikipedia. We were some of the first arriving passengers to use the new metro station, and Wikipedia already had the scoop. Wiki wiki indeed.

Flickr as Stock Photo Resource

Since I discovered the unique photo-sharing site Flickr last fall, I have found more and more things to like about it. Recently, I have discovered its value for finding "stock" photos for projects. I had been working on a photo-biography for a good friend's 40th birthday, and while I mostly used my friend's personal photos, there were a few spots where I wanted a few other photos for particular scenes (e.g., his college campus, places where he worked, etc). Using a combination of Flickr's tag/keyword searching and its geographic searching, I was able to find some very cool photos for my purpose. I could easily drop a line to the photographer to ask their permission, and everyone was very cool about letting me use their photos for this personal purpose.

Now I find that even professionals are seeing the same utility. A few weeks ago, I got an email from a travel site letting me know they'd like to use one of our vacation photos in their Edinburgh Guide. I gave them permission, and now our vacation photo is being used to show the B&B that we stayed in on the Schmap Edinburgh Guide. Very cool!

Windows Vista Pain and Agony

I'm no fan of Macs (twice the money for half the performance, and if their interfaces are intuitive, then I've got a defective intuition), but recent experiences with Microsoft do lend some credence to their appeal. (And their amusing ads sure do hit home.) I recently bought my husband a new PC, because apparently 256Mb of RAM was no longer sufficient for someone who basically just uses AOL and IE. These days, what with Vista and all the bloatware that Windows drags along and the pervasive-ware of Windows apps (is there no such thing as a simple app anymore? must every little thing install itself into my system tray, plug itself in to my explorer toolbar, and start as soon as my system boots?), it seems a hi-speed Pentium-4 processor with 1Gb of RAM is a minimal configuration for your most basic home user. I was curious to see what Vista was like. As I expected, it's got a few cool new gadgets, but it's impossible to find anything because they've rearranged all the menus, control panels, and even the way the explorer looks and works. There's nothing compellingly better about it, it's just different for the sake of being different. (Fortunately, there's a "classic view" option on the Control Panel, at least.)

I did get it set up without too much pain, and aside from the fact that Vista is still bleeding new, and Vista device drivers aren't available for everything yet, it's been running well enough for the first month. Until today. This morning my husband calls me in a panic, saying he can't log in because it's giving him a message saying "Invalid product key - Windows activation required". Vista has a thorough security feature that helps Microsoft stop pirated copies of Windows. They spin it as a protection for the user ("you'll know you've got an authentic copy of Windows"), but of course it's really all about protecting Microsoft. For the user, all it is is something else to go wrong, and when it does, it's a royal pain in the butt to sort out. OEMs like HP/Compaq pre-install Windows and pre-activate it (which entails entering absurdly long strings of digits), sparing their customers a tedious out-of-the-box experience. Unfortunately, Vista has a bug where installing certain software or turning the machine off at the wrong time or various other innocent actions can cause Vista to lose its factory-installed product key, and to think that it's a pirated copy, locking down your computer. Microsoft recognizes this bug and offers a patch for it on their support site. Which would be nifty, except that Microsoft doesn't allow your computer to download anything from its support site unless you're running a "genuine" copy of Windows. So in other words, the only computers that will be able to download the patch are the ones that don't have the bug. How brilliant is that? We tried an option to manually re-enter the product key (a 25-character code found on a sticker near the back of the computer), which failed. So we tried an alternate option to get a "confirmation code" by speaking a 54-digit(!) code into a voice response system. That too failed, and we ended up speaking to a live Microsoft technician. After two more failed attempts, and several reboots, he was able to give us a correct 54-digit code that enabled the computer. (You think a 16-digit credit card number is easy to mix up over the phone, try a 54-digit number!) If we ever have to go through this ordeal again, I will scream.

Wading into the Wiki World

Since I first discovered Wikipedia about a year ago, I've been fascinated with the whole concept. If you aren't already familiar with it, you should be. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia maintained using the concept of a "wiki", which is to say that it is maintained by anybody and everybody. Articles in Wikipedia may be written, edited, or corrected by anyone who feels like they have something to contribute. Unlike a conventional encyclopedia, no particular authorities are sought out to write or review articles. On this surface, this may sound like a recipe for disaster, for all sorts of quackery and unsupported claims to be put forth. In practice, in turns out to be quite effective. (A peer-reviewed comparison of Wikipedia with Encyclopedia Britannica conducted by Nature magazine on 42 science topics found the same number of major errors in both encyclopedias, and a moderately smaller number of minor errors in Britannica.) What makes it work is the ease of update, allowing it to immediately be corrected, plus what amounts to worldwide peer review. The more people who use it, the more people will be interested in maintaining it. (It's now in the Top 50 most visited websites.)

It occurred to me that this concept could be very useful for genealogists. At its best, genealogy is a collaborative endeavor, with multiple researchers looking into overlapping areas of interest, and double-checking one another's assertions. There is much room for such review. When one looks at the vast amount of family tree information posted on the Internet, one soon realizes how much of it is poorly researched, with legends and jumped conclusions being propagated too easily. That's where a wiki could really help. Turns out a number of people have had a similar notion, and I've already found several sites doing genealogy wikis. Just to get my feet wet, I figured I should give one of them a try. I've spent many late nights the last few weeks putting together my first Gen-Wiki page, on my very interesting ancestor, Captain William H. Dobbs, privateer and patriot. Do check it out, and if you happen to see any corrections that need made or new information to add, please feel free to do so. That's what a wiki is all about!

Incredible Shrinking World

It's become trite to observe how the Internet is shrinking the world (or at least making it "flatter", as some have preferred to say), but it's still remarkable when you think about it. It has become especially apparent to me in the last few days. My quiet little blog has only a handful of readers and only rarely gets comments, but in the last few days, my thoughts about the Danish cartoon controversy, as well as the Palestinian elections, have drawn the comments of a Malaysian Muslim girl, a Muslim immigrant in Australia, and someone who seems to be Palestinian. I am amazed and delighted that people of such different perspectives than my own can reach across the world to share their thoughts with me. (I only wish they hadn't all posted anonymously. It would be fascinating to continue the conversation and get to know any of them a little bit better. I'm sure I could learn much from such different viewpoints.) Comments like these give me hope for our world.

Nothing Ever Dies on the Internet

Anyone who has done or said much on the Internet, or anymore even just in the public sphere, is probably aware of leaving "footprints" on the Internet. Such footprints can be found by simply Googling your own name. I know that a Google search of my name turns up a fairly rounded picture of me, including links on my politics, hobbies, and professional career. Some of that goes back pretty far, back to the days of Usenet, a loose collection of "newsgroups" (topic-oriented bulletin boards) that preceded the Internet as we know it today, and that only older geeks will remember. I'm somewhat surprised that near the top of the hits list in Googling me, one finds several references to things that I once wrote on a newsgroup called soc.motss (a gay social bulletin board) in the early 1990s. Things that I wrote 12 or 14 years ago have been squirreled away by somebody somewhere and have been discovered by Google over a decade later.

We used to talk about many things on soc.motss, but one "thread" (conversation) that I had long forgotten was about a book called "Love and Limerence" by Dorothy Tennov, a psychologist whose project was to apply the rigors of social science to an analysis of falling and being in love. I never read the book, but merely responded at some point, to someone's summary of it. I was rather sceptical, thinking that being in love was more a proper topic for poetry and literature than social science. Describing lovers as "limerent objects" and trying to analyze and measure romance seemed as ridiculous as trying to touch a mirage. Well, anyway, I guess something that I said about it got quoted by someone else, and that quote got squirreled away by someone else, and that footprint is still out there. I guess I wrote that some 14 years ago or so, but I'd certainly forgotten all about it. That is, until yesterday, when I received a petulant email from none other than Dorothy Tennov herself, who wrote:

From: Dorothy Tennov
To: Tom Chatt
Subject: your comment about me was wrong

Totally wrong: The whole project [the sociologist Tennov's theory of "limerence"] depends on the belief that vector mathematics is meaningfully analogous to human emotions. Sorry. I just don't buy it.-- Tom Chatt

I'm not a sociologist, I'm an independent scholar. And I never said anything about vector math. Look me up.

Dorothy Tennov

I just shook my head in amazement. Some things never die on the Internet. I guess Dorothy Tennov was Googling herself and somehow came across that snippet of a newsgroup thread circa 1992. Poor Dorothy needs to get a life. I did look her up. The first thing on her website, after her nebulous grand mission statement, is her rebuttal to a 1994 critical review of her book. Talk about defensive. I'm guessing that "independent scholar" really means "I couldn't even find a social sciences faculty who would take me seriously". Even her rebuttal to my quote shows pretty poor reading comprehension. I thought of replying to her email, but it seems more appropriate to just let it surface in some Internet search. Maybe in 2018.