Knowledge Work

I’m still active on the Internets, to put it mildly, but mostly I’m microblogging now on Twitter and Facebook.

My online presence is indexed here: Barry Campbell.

Projects I am keeping up with include:

enrevanche (@posterous, @blogspot)

And videos like this one:

The Fried Show, Episode 1: Frittering it all away from Barry Campbell on Vimeo.

True confession: I am a business professor who does not understand the financial crisis. Ask me to explain things like derivatives and I’ll look blankly at you. My credentials in economics, negotiation and law should qualify me to speak, but often the news leaves me slack-jawed with confusion. Bring me to a panel discussion, and I’ll ask dumb questions. In short, I am a role model. I want my students to be more like me.

Each semester, I introduce my students to a key idea: I want them to join me in the fight against the fear of looking dumb. Overcoming that fear can save them from serious traps.

Ask the dumb questions (Seth Freeman, USA Today, 13 Jan 2009)

See also: Dumb is the new smart (“Public Offering,” the Columbia Business School blog)

(via bNet)

Via Kottke, a fascinating article from Kevin Kelly about the adoption of modern technology by Amish and Mennonite communities:

At first pneumatics were devised for Amish workshops, but it was seen as so useful that air-power migrated to Amish households. In fact there is an entire cottage industry in retrofitting tools and appliances to Amish electricity. The retrofitters buy a heavy-duty blender, say, and yank out the electrical motor. They then substitute an air-powered motor of appropriate size, add pneumatic connectors, and bingo, your Amish mom now has a blender in her electrical-less kitchen. You can get a pneumatic sewing machine, and a pneumatic washer/dryer (with propane heat). In a display of pure steam-punk nerdiness, Amish hackers try to outdo each other in building pneumatic versions of electrified contraptions. Their mechanical skill is quite impressive, particularly since none went beyond the 8th grade. They love to show off this air-punk geekiness. And every tinkerer claimed that pneumatics were superior to electrical devices because air was more powerful and durable, outlasting motors which burned out after a few years hard labor. I don’t know if this is true, or just justification, but it was a constant refrain.

[...]

The Amish are steadily, slowing adopting technology. They are slow geeks. As one Amish man told Howard Rheingold, “We don’t want to stop progress, we just want to slow it down,” But their manner of slow adoption is instructive.

1. They are selective. They know how to say “no” and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ban more than they adopt.
2. They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory. They let the early adopters get their jollies by pioneering new stuff under watchful eyes.
3. They have criteria by which to select choices: technologies must enhance family and community and distance themselves from the outside world.
4. The choices are not individual, but communal. The community shapes and enforces technological direction.

Amish Hackers (Kevin Kelly, 10 Feb 2009)

Whew, talk about crossing the chasm…

Some interesting thoughts here.  I particularly like Number 11:

Kris Kristofferson got it backwards: nothing left to lose is just another word for “freedom.” Don’t hold back.

“You’ll be reading the Sunday New York Times on your cell phone.”

From RGE Monitor, Nouriel Roubini’s latest analysis of the financial crisis:

ALERT

RGE Monitor

January 22, 2009

RGE Monitor Estimates $3.6 Trillion Loan and Securities Losses in the U.S.

Nouriel Roubini and Elisa Parisi-Capone of RGE Monitor release new estimates for expected loan losses and writedowns on U.S. originated securitizations:

• Loan losses on a total of $12.37 trillion unsecuritized loans are expected to reach $1.6 trillion. Of these, U.S. banks and brokers are expected to incur $1.1 trillion.

• Mark-to-market writedowns based on derivatives prices and cash bond indices on a further $10.84 trillion in securities reached about $2 trillion ($1.92 trillion.) About 40% of these securities (and losses) are held abroad according to flow-of-funds data. U.S. banks and broker dealers are assumed to incur a share of 30-35%, or $600-700 billion in securities writedowns.

• Total loan losses and securities writedowns on U.S. originated assets are expected to reach about $3.6 trillion. The U.S. banking sector is exposed to half of this figure, or $1.8 trillion (i.e. $1.1 trillion loan losses + $700bn writedowns.)

• FDIC-insured banks’ capitalization is $1.3 trillion as of Q3 2008; investment banks had $110bn in equity capital as of Q3 2008. Past recapitalization via TARP 1 funds of $230bn and private capital of $200bn still leaves the U.S. banking system borderline insolvent if our loss estimates materialize.

• In order to restore safe lending, additional private and/or public capital in the order of $1 – 1.4 trillion is needed. This magnitude calls for a comprehensive solution along the lines of a ‘bad bank’ as proposed by policy makers or an outright restructuring through a new RTC.

• Back in September, Nouriel Roubini proposed a solution for the banking crisis that also addresses the root causes of the financial turmoil in the housing and the household sectors. The HOME (Home Owners’ Mortgage Enterprise) program combines a RTC to deal with toxic assets, a HOLC to reduce homeowers’ debt, and a RFC to recapitalize viable banks.

Looks like India is having its very own Enron/Arthur Andersen moment, but this time the players are Satyam and PricewaterhouseCoopers:

The chairman of India’s Satyam Computer Services resigned on Wednesday after confessing to fixing the IT outsourcing company’s books for the past “several” years, the country’s first major fraud case to emerge following the global financial crisis.

In a letter to Satyam’s board, B Ramalinga Raju admitted wildly inflating Satyam’s margins to paint a picture of good performance and retain his management position, in one of the worst scams to have hit India’s outsourcing sector.

“It was like riding a tiger, not knowing when to get off without being eaten,” Mr Raju said, explaining how the fraud got out of control over a period of years.

Satyam is India’s fourth biggest IT outsourcing firm by revenue and is listed in New York and Mumbai, and the scam has rocked the country’s business world.

Satyam chief admits to falsifying books (Financial Times, 7 January 2009)

Dave Winer reminds us that this is the Mac’s 25th anniversary year:

On January 24, 1984 a couple thousand people were present at Flint Center in Cupertino at the birth of something with real lasting value, the Macintosh.

[...]
Hard as it is to believe — that was almost 25 years ago!
http://mac25.org/

My arc with Macintosh is not quite that long… I’m coming up on 20 years myself, with a couple of longish intervals of Windows/PC use:

First Mac purchased – Mac SE, 1989
(Other Macs owned: Macintosh LC, two PowerBooks… plus a couple of Newtons in there somewhere.)

Moved to NYC in 1996 as a Mac user (brought PowerBook with me) and promptly went to work for an all-Windows shop.

Windows/Linux user from 1997-2005, despite an all-too-brief interregnum working in an all-Mac shop in 2000.

2006: After a bad experience with Microsoft Vista, I buy a Macbook for home use.

I liked it. I liked it a lot… and still do.

Most recent Mac purchases: 24″ iMac, 2007; MacBook Air, 2008.

(And a couple of iPhones in there somewhere.)

So… from this:

To this:

In 20 years. Not bad.

Jobs pulled the original Mac out of a carrying bag in 1984 and it was a sensation (“never trust a computer you can’t lift”) – in 2008, he pulled the MacBook Air out of a standard manila interoffice envelope, and that was just the logical conclusion of a lot of advances in technology and engineering since 1984.

I really hope that Apple doesn’t introduce the long-rumored tablet Mac at the upcoming MacWorld Expo… Steve Jobs’ absence would suggest that AAPL will never again use MacWorld for major product introductions.

I hope they wait for warmer weather to announce general availability of the tablet Mac. I hate standing in line in the cold. (And I’m already on record as stating that I’m buying two of these – one for me and one for her.)

Related: Mactracker is a great walk down memory lane if you’re an older Mac owner, or an owner of older Macs if you prefer.

Over at Carrie’s new blog, an intriguing post about how good data visualization can help decision-makers and policy-makers:

As part of his larger mission of promoting “fact-based” public health policy, Swedish physician Hans Rosling founded Gapminder.org, which aims to make world health data available and understandable to everyone. Back in 2006, Rosling gave a well-received TED presentation on the principles of Gapminder, showing, among other things, relative historical changes in life expectancy and GDP. (He spoke again in 2007.)

Hans Rosling and Gapminder (See What I Mean: Information Visualization)

December 1998:

AltaVista is the best full-text search tool on the Web. When you are looking for a site containing a certain word or phrase, go to AltaVista.

Amazon is a great place to buy books, music, and videotapes online. (If you’re looking for used or rare books, try BookFinder.)

Ask Jeeves is an amazing search tool that understands plain-English queries. (“Where can I learn about basketweaving?” will produce reasonable results, for instance.) It is a very forgiving search tool for novice users. Highly recommended.

BBC News offers another perspective on the news; great international coverage. Their US coverage is consistently interesting and often provides much-needed counterpoint to our own media. Also audio and video clips.

Breaking News From A.P When the big story breaks, don’t go to CNN or MSNBC. The Associated Press have been covering breaking news for decades. They still do it best.

CBS MarketWatch – Front Page Excellent damn-near-realtime coverage of money and markets; quick to update when things move. (For analysis, read the Wall Street Journal, registration required.)

CIA World Factbook A great quick reference for why we’re bombing, funding, praising, punishing, etcetera.

CNN is the granddaddy of the news sites. Quality control has suffered somewhat lately, but it’s still the one the world watches for breaking news.

The Economist (registration required) The eminent British newsweekly’s foray into the Web is not without technical glitches, but persevere! The content’s great, and worth the effort (and the money.)

HotBot is Wired Magazine’s full-text search engine; claims to index more pages than AltaVista.

MapQuest! will tell you where to go and how to get there.

MSNBC Microsoft and NBC team up to bring you the news. It’s better than it sounds like it ought to be.

My Yahoo Customize your search engine, and pick up a free e-mail account that you can use anywhere in the world (as long as there’s web access…)

NYC Blue If it’s in New York City, this page probably links to it.

NY Daily News New York’s Hometown Paper.

NY Post New York’s Hometown Travesty.

NY Sidewalk New York’s Local Borg Unit.

NY Times The web site of record.

Slashdot “News for nerds. Stuff that matters.”

The discussion of cyberattacks and cyberwarfare is complicated by widespread disagreement over how to define these terms. Many cyberattacks are really examples of vandalism or hooliganism, observes Bruce Schneier, a security guru who works for BT, a British telecoms operator. A cyberattack on a power station or an emergency-services call centre could be an act of war or of terrorism, depending on who carries it out and what their motives are.

For a cyberattack to qualify as “cyberwar”, some observers argue, it must take place alongside actual military operations. Trying to disrupt enemy communications during conflict is, after all, a practice that goes back to the earliest telecommunications technology, the telegraph. In 1862, for example, during the American Civil War, a landing party from Thomas Freeborn, a Union navy steamer, went ashore to cut the telegraph lines between Fredericksburg and Richmond. The Russian navy pioneered the use of radio jamming in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. On this view, cyberattacks on infrastructure are the next logical step. The attacks on Georgia might qualify as cyberwarfare by this definition, but those on Estonia would not, since there was no accompanying military offensive in the real world. As Mr Schneier puts it: “For it to be cyberwar, it must first be war.”

Not everyone agrees. For years there has been talk of a “digital Pearl Harbour”—an unexpected attack on a nation’s infrastructure via the internet, in which power stations are shut down, air-traffic control is sabotaged and telecoms networks are disabled. There have even been suggestions that future wars could be waged in cyberspace, displacing conventional military operations altogether. Why bomb your enemy’s power-stations or stockmarkets if you can disable them with software? So far there have been no successful attacks of this type, but that does not stop people worrying about them—or speculating about how to launch them.

Do cyberattacks count as war? (The Economist, 4 December 2008)

When I say that I’ve blogged in fits and starts for about ten years now, most people don’t believe me.

Here’s a representative week from February 1999 on my old web site:

“A New Germ Theory” (Judith Hooper, Atlantic Monthly, February 1999) describes the work of scientists Paul Ewald and Geoffrey Cochran, who have applied the maxims of evolutionary biology to the study of infectious diseases with startling and provocative results. Try this on for size: they hypothesize, and with their colleagues are amassing evidence to prove, that many forms of heart disease, many cancers, and some of the major mental illnesses might actually be caused by pathogens (viruses and bacteria).
(19 February 1999)

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Do you like maps? Boy, I do. I was tickled to discover Tiger, a service of the US Census Bureau. Give Tiger the latitude and longitude you need, and Tiger gives you a map. You can even use it from your own web site, passing the query through the URL. Here’s Manhattan.
(19 February 1999)

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Jean Q. Publique buys his daily loaf: behold the BaguetteCam.
(17 February 1999 – and a tip of the beret to Carrie)

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Take a dip in the memepool.

Cool links I found there tonight:

(1) The Air Force wants to develop a ballistic missile defense system involving extremely powerful lasers mounted on 747s.

(2) Tommy Chong (of Cheech and Chong) has a new web site (and it’s a more powerful argument against marijuana than any D.A.R.E lecture I can imagine.)

(3) The Museum of Bad Art .

Nice breadth.
(17 February 1999)

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Microsoft’s webzine Slate just went free again, after an abortive attempt to support itself on a subscription revenue model. Is content dead? No, but people won’t pay for it directly unless it’s about making money or looking at pictures of naked people. So Slate is going free-content, selling ad space and hoping for the best… the traditional magazine publishing model.
(11 February 1999)

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Now that the impeachment’s over, what are you going to ignore?
(11 February 1999)

Impressively, in the posts above, most of the links still work ten years later. Except:

(1) The BaguetteCam is no more. (We’ll always have Paris, I guess.)

(2) The URL for the Museum of Bad Art returns a 404… but in this case, it just graduated to a URL of its own: MOBA lives here now.

Detail from The Adventures of Action Item, Professional Superhero

I wrote this post after spending a couple of very frustrating hours sorting out corruption issues in a Microsoft Word document.

WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) word processors, which show you an accurate screen-based simulation of exactly what you’ll see on the printed page, have ruled the roost since the advent of the Macintosh user interface and the ascendancy of its vastly more popular copycat edition, Microsoft Windows.

The most popular WYSIWYG word processor on the market today is Microsoft Word. Word is absolutely great for casual users but absolute hell on professional writers.

(Word is designed for people who don’t know much about computers, and makes it easy for them to write short, simple documents like letters and brief reports. Ask any writer who works with complex documents about their experiences using Word, and you’ll hear war stories, I guarantee it. Formatting nightmares. Corrupted documents and style sheets. I could go on. Oh man, could I ever go on.)

WYSIWYG has not always been so dominant. And for some of us, it still isn’t: technical and academic writers have very different needs from casual word processing users. Tech writers regularly produce long documents (with complex structures and lots of graphics) on the job. And so even today, in the WYSIWYG era, many writers who work with long, complex documents prefer to use markup-language based systems, which completely separate content from formatting.

HTML, the basic markup language of the Web, is an example of a markup language that most people (who would hang out at this blog) are at least a little familiar with.

The advantages of a markup language are many, but chief among them: you can take the same source document and spit it out in a bunch of different formats without altering the source.

And mysterious, unexplainable problems that crop up in (say) Word documents just don’t occur.

Among commercial products these days, the best examples of markup language-based publishing systems would be Adobe FrameMaker 8 and MadCap Flare. Both of these systems use XML. (There are many, many free, open-source implementations of XML, but these products are more like Erector sets than authoring and publishing systems; you have to figure out and customize a great deal of the workflow yourself.)

I use FrameMaker, and I’m evaluating Flare.

But as the saying goes, you never forget your first.

Let me, at this point, wax nostalgic for a moment about Sprint.

No, no, not the phone company – Borland Sprint, the best PC-based word processor it has ever been my pleasure to use.

Sprint, based on an award-winning early markup language called Scribe, was so far ahead of its time that it’s not funny.

Unfortunately, it arrived on the US market just as the Mac and then Windows were taking off like rockets, and WYSIWYG, that pixel-painted hussy, led the unwashed masses down the garden path with its fancy interface and seductive graphics.

But for one brief shining moment – ok, a couple of years – I got to produce documents using the nicest PC-based system a professional writer could hope for.

The Wikipedia article on Sprint lists some of the product’s features – and they do not exaggerate, not one little bit:

Crash-proof: Sprint [had] incremental back-up, with the swap file updated every 3 seconds, enabling full recovery from crashes. At trade shows, demos were made with one person pulling out the power cord, and the typist resuming work as soon as the machine restarted. Swap files could also be saved separately and transferred between machines.

Spell-as-you-type: With this feature, Sprint could beep at you in real time when detecting a typo. (MS-Word needed almost ten years to have the red snakes under the suspect words.)

Multilingual editing: Sprint included dictionary switching, support for hyphenation, and spelling and thesaurus dictionaries that have yet to be matched by the competitors.

Separate formatter and programmable editor: These have been very useful features for corporate environments aiming at standardizing documents or building “boilerplate” contracts. In France, for example, sophisticated applications were built for Banques Populaires (loan contracts) or Conseil d’Etat, while some local government agencies created specific applications for tenders and contracts.

Powerful programming language: Programming in Sprint is done with the internal language of the word processor – a language which is very much like C.

Programmers have the ability to “get under the hood” and to add modifications and extensions to an extent not possible with other word processors. Once written, Sprint programs are compiled into the interface, and run at full speed.

Interface switching: Modifications and extensions to Sprint can be saved into separate interfaces which can be easily and quickly switched. This is very useful for people working in different languages, as the keys can be mapped to the accents and characters of each language, depending on the interface.

File handling: Users can work in up to 24 files at once.

Handling large documents: Sprint has the ability to publish very large documents (hundreds of pages) with strict formatting consistency and automatic table of contents, index generation, tables of figures, and tables of authorities. These features made Sprint a leader in the production of technical documents – and Borland itself did all its manuals on Sprint, for years.

PostScript capabilities: Sprint could print in-line EPS images with dimensioning, and also had the ability to add in-line PostScript procedures. This made the product rather popular in the printing industry. For example, making a 200 page novel fit into 192 pages was simply a matter of changing the point size from 11 to 10.56. Sprint could size by 0.04 increment and scale the line spacing and kerning accordingly. (The 192 pages size is important in the printing industry, where the number of pages often has to be dividable by 32. A 200-pages book would have to be printed using 224 pages, the extra 24 pages being empty.)

Not only was it a superior system for its time, you could still do useful, professional work with it today… since you could output to PostScript, a PDF is only a step away.

If only I could get my hands on a copy.

Well, would you look at that.

Oh, this is lovely:

as real as it gets posted by wandaaaa on Flickr

taa-daa … print and poster work for software-asli.com

agency : Bates141 Jakarta
creative director : Hendra Lesmono
art director : Andreas Junus & Irawandhani Kamarga
copywriter : Darrick Subrata
photgrapher : Anton Ismael

Via BoingBoing

Something extraordinary has happened in the market for portable PCs over the past year: a new category of devices, tagged variously as ultra mobile PCs (UMPCs), netbooks or mini-notes, has emerged. It was Taiwan-based Asus that launched the new sector when it brought out the first EeePC models and took many of the biggest makers of laptops by surprise in the process.

Unlike UMPCs such as the Samsung Q1 and the OQO Model 01, machines like Asus’s EeePCs and Acer Aspire One are designed for everyday, ordinary use that prizes convenience. Instead of tiny touch-based screens, BlackBerry-style keyboards and sky-high price tags, netbooks look and work like shrunk-down versions of full-featured, full-sized laptops, with traditional if smaller keyboards and bright 8in-10in colour LCD screens.

[...]

Most of the new netbooks are built around low-power Intel Atom microprocessors typically running at 1.6Ghz, come with 512Mb or 1Gb of Ram and either traditional hard drives or flash-memory-based SSDs (solid state drives). They usually support WiFi wireless networking (but not necessarily the fastest 802.11n standard) and come with Ethernet cable ports, and two or three USB ports for connecting peripherals including external hard drives, a mouse and 3G cellular broadband cards. Some have a standard VGA port for connecting a bigger external display or projector, slots for SD (secure digital) flash memory cards and, occasionally, an Express Card expansion slot – useful for plugging in 3G cellular data cards.

FT.com/Columnists/Paul Taylor – Pint-sized laptops grow up

The Wall Street Journal has Walt Mossberg, but the Financial Times is doing just fine for themselves with personal technology columnist Paul Taylor. This is an an excellent primer on the new cheap netbooks, including evaluations of the more popular models.

If I hadn’t already shelled out bux for a MacBook Air, I’d be a serious candidate for an MSI Wind running Ubuntu, with one of those 3G wireless modems plugged in… for what I paid for the Air, I could have a 3G broadband always-on-the-net netbook, pay for 2 years of cell data plan, and still come out ahead… 5.5 hours of battery life with the 6-cell battery… sigh.

Related:

• Ubuntu (free for the asking)
• Apple MacBook Air MB003LL/A 13.3 Inch Laptop (1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive) (at Amazon)
• MSI Wind U100-432US 10-Inch Mini Laptop (1.6 GHz Intel Atom, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, 6 Cell Battery, 802.11 b/g/n+BT, XP Home) Black (at Amazon)

How do you run the A/C on a spy plane? Where’s the Start button on a nuclear power plant? Don’t try to wing it—read the directions!

A photo essay of classic instruction manuals. (Wired, 20 October 2008)

Modern-day technical writing came out of the aerospace and defense industry.  Wired has a loving look back at some of the classics, starting with the Project Gemini Familiarization Manual.

As the hullabaloo of the banking crisis fades, it seems increasingly to have been a kind of distraction from the wider topic. Investors are now once more contemplating the non-financial corporate world. It is not a pretty sight.

As an apparently minor sign of distress, take the Baltic Dry Index, which measures bulk shipping rates. It has halved this month, and is down more than 90 per cent from its peak in May.
[...]

The main reason, apparently, is that shippers cannot get trade credit. This is the time-honoured procedure where exporters get a guarantee of payment from a bank, for a fee, until the end customer settles.

[...]

It is also part of a wider issue. As Ian Harnett of Absolute Strategy Research points out, the entire model of global industry over the past 20 years has been based on the premise of cheap, abundant credit. Take that away, and what happens, for instance, to outsourcing? Indeed, what happens to globalisation?

[...]

According to the latest Merrill Lynch fund managers’ survey, the danger least preying on global investors’ minds at present is geopolitical risk.

They might perhaps ponder the fact that derivatives markets are now pricing in some quite startling probabilities of sovereign default: 90 per cent for Pakistan, 80 per cent for the Ukraine and so forth.

The idea of the already tottering Pakistani state defaulting is not reassuring. The fact that China apparently offered last week to underwrite Pakistan’s overseas debt payments is not necessarily comforting either.

The view isn’t pretty as the banking crisis dust settles (Financial Times, 19 October 2008)