Internet matters – Page 36 – a sibilant intake of breath

The Obameter

This strikes me as a rather good idea:

PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken.

So far, the site lists seven promises as ‘kept.’ Of course, new events may alter how Obama should and will implement his platform. Also, there is some subjectivity in assessing whether a promise has been kept. Still, it will be interesting to see how his score develops.

Armchair iceberg tracking

In July 2008, a 27 square kilometer iceberg calved from the Petermann Glacier: between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. Scientists from the CCGS Amundsen placed radio beacons on the iceberg, which has subsequently shifted position and lost some volume. You can actually track the beacon online. The larger piece remains 22 square kilometers in area, and thus may pose a risk to the offshore oil industry in spring of 2009.

Apparently, with an iceberg of this size normal ‘iceberg management’ techniques cannot be employed. You just have to hope it doesn’t run into something.

Steve Jobs’ health and the future of Apple

During the last few days, it has been saddening to read about Steve Jobs’ worsening health problems. Regardless of where you stand on the various Mac-related techie debates, it cannot be denied that the man turned that company around, making it into one of the most innovative and successful ones in the industry. Under his tenure, it has also produced some very high quality products. While some people scoff at the high prices associated (or nitpick about aspects of the products they dislike), it seems fair to say that Apple’s sense of style and sophistication has impacted the whole industry in a positive way. Pixar is also a notable success

Of course, it is foolish for anyone to try and write Mr. Jobs’ professional obituary so soon. He has had one round with serious illness already and returned, to say nothing of his twelve year stint away from Apple. With luck, a bit of time away from the stress and the spotlight will allow him to recover from whatever health issues he is facing. It should also give Apple an opportunity to think more seriously about a succession strategy. As closely tied as the company and Mr. Jobs remain in the public eye, the former must seriously prepare for the time when the latter will no longer be at the helm.

The carbon footprint of this blog

According to Slate, the energy usage associated with running a blog is between 9 and 16 kWh per gigabyte of data transferred. That is based on data about “electricity needed to run the servers hosting the data, the Internet backbone over which those data travel, and the network connections through which the data flow.”

Since sindark.com became active in 2007, the total data transferred has been about 67.7 gigabytes. Based on the high estimate, that suggests about 1,080 kWh of total electricity usage – worth about $54.16 at Ontario energy prices. That equates to greenhouse gas emissions of between 430 and 1,126kg, depending on the source of the electricity. In all probability, the emissions associated with all the computers people used to access the site are considerably larger.

Internet footprints and future scrutiny

Both The Economist and Slate have recently featured articles about the increasingly long and broad trails people are leaving behind themselves online: everything from comments in forums to Facebook profiles to uploaded photographs. Almost inevitably, some of this content is not the kind of thing that people will later want to see in the hands of their employers, the media, and so forth. I expect that more savvy employers are already taking a discreet peek online, when evaluating potential hires.

The two big questions both seem to concern how attitudes will evolve, both among internet users in general and among scrutinizers like employers. It’s possible that people thirty years from now will view our open and informal use of the internet as roughly equivalent to the famously uninhibited sex had by hippies in the 1960s: a bit of a remarkable cultural phenomenon, but one long dead due to the dangers inherent. It is also possible that people will come to view the existence of such information online as an inevitability, and not judge people too harshly as a result. Less and less human communication is the ephemeral sort, where all record ceases once a person’s voice has attenuated. As a result, more of what people say and do at all times of their lives (and in all states of mind) is being recorded, often in a rather durable way.

Personally, I suspect that the trend will be towards both greater caution and greater tolerance. Internet users will become more intuitively aware of the footprints they are leaving (especially as more high-profile cases of major embarrassment arise) and employers and the media will inevitably recognize that almost nobody has produced a completely clean sheet for themselves. Of course, there will still be a big difference between appearing in photographs of booze-fueled university parties and appearing at KKK rallies. The likely trend is not that a wider range of activities will be excusable, but rather that more evidence about everything a person has done will be available.

We can also expect the emergence of more private firms that seek to manage online presence, especially after the fact. Whether that means bullying (or bribing) the owners of websites where unwanted content has cropped up, creating positive-looking pages that outrank negative ones, or stripping away elements of databases through whatever means necessary, there will be a market for data sanitation services. While some people are likely to push for revamped privacy laws, I don’t see these are likely to be much help in this situation. When people are basically putting this information out in public voluntarily, it’s not clear how legislation could keep it from being scrutinized by anyone who is interested.

A few related posts:

Location data and photography

Before long, I expect that many cameras will have built-in GPS receivers and the option to automatically tag every photo with the geographic coordinates of the place where it was taken. That will allow for some neat new kinds of displays: from personal photo maps that show the results of a single person’s travels to composites of the photos a great many people have taken of the same place.

For those who would be interested in such things, but don’t yet have equipment that can locate itself, it seems like there could be a simple workaround. These days, low-cost GPS tracking devices are very affordable. All you need is a camera and a tracker with coordinated clocks. Then, you carry the tracker with you when you take photos. After you upload them to a computer, you can run software to automatically attach location data from the tracking system to the photos. Given the increasing number of cell phones with GPS capability, they might be the ideal devices to provide such locational data. You could even configure one to automatically upload a track of your movements to a web service which would then match up that information with photos you upload later.

One snag would be photos taken in areas where GPS doesn’t work, such as on the subway. To deal with that, users could be presented with a few choices. The coordinates from the closest point in time where data is available could be used, a very general coordinate for the city or region in question could be substituted, or such photos could simply be left untagged.

No doubt, people could dream up some very clever ways of using this kind of data, especially once a lot of it was online. You could, for instance, produce collages of how a particular area looked over time. A mountain valley could be presented from the perspectives of everyone from those hosting afternoon picnics to those undertaking technical climbs of the peaks, with spring and summer photos contrasted against snowy winter shots. Groups of friends could also watch their trails of photos diverge and overlap, as they move around the world.

All told, it could be a very interesting experiment in communal memory.

Sorting digital music

When it comes to the organization of music, I am probably one of the most obsessive people out there. I would actually rather delete a song I cannot properly categorize than retain it as ‘Track 1’ by ‘Unknown Artist.’ Also, once I start categorizing something such as music or photos, I cannot rest easy until the task is done. It’s a tendency I need to be aware of and careful about. The decision to tag all my iPhoto images for which friends are in them, for example, produced about three days worth of intense work.

Of course, iTunes is the ultimate enabler for music organization obsessives. It puts everything into a big database: song ratings (all my songs are rated), artists, titles, play counts, last played dates, etc. It lets you set up smart playlists that, for example, consist only of songs rated four or five stars and haven’t been played in the last two weeks. You can also tag your songs as Canadian, too obscene to be included in a random party playlist, or whatever other designations are useful to you. I have most of my good music sorted into mood-based categories, including angry, brazen, demure, dramatic, energetic, rebellious, sombre, and upbeat.

One annoying element of the age of digital music is the enduring character of mix CDs consisting of CD-style music tracks, rather than data files. Almost invariably, this means that someone somewhere converted the uncompressed music on a CD into an MP3, AAC, or WMA file. Then, someone took that compressed file and stretched it back into CD format. If you then try to re-compressed the previously compressed and de-compressed file, you encounter a notable loss of quality. It would be far better if people made mix CDs consisting of data files (those in a lossless format would be especially appreciated, and still significantly smaller than uncompressed music files).

One final annoyance I will mention is the fact that my iPod is no longer large enough to store my music collection. Since I am now about 500 megabytes beyond its capacity, I need to manually ‘uncheck’ songs so that it can synchronize properly. Beyond being a pain, this somewhat undermines the iPod concept, which is really to have all your music available at a touch. My iPod is an old 4th generation 20GB model. It was replaced four times under an extended warranty that has since expired, and it probably doesn’t have enormously more time left in the world of working gear. When it bites the bullet, I will buy something large enough to store many years worth of future musical acquisitions.

Most visited posts of 2008

As the year comes to a close, it seems worthwhile to link back to the posts that got the most attention over the past twelve months:

1) By far the most popular was this post on Greyhound bus security, arguing that incorporating airport-style security into the bus system doesn’t make sense. Largely because it got linked by Bruce Schneier, the post was viewed over 2,000 times – more than 1,000 of them on the first day when it was linked.

2) Second post popular was this post on Health Canada’s climate change report. It’s not much of a post, really, when it comes to new content from me. What it does do is make the PDF files of the report available for easy download: something Health Canada itself opted not to do.

3) The third most popular post came very early in 2008, and was about how high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission could be a major enabler for renewable electricity generation.

4) The fourth post once again demonstrates the power of getting linked on a popular site. Zoom directed a lot of people towards my odds guessing experiment, the results of which were posted subsequently.

5) Finally, the fifth most popular post of 2008 was my flowchart for voting in Canadian elections. Strategic voting was a big issue in Canada this year, as was the difficulty of interpreting any electoral result. Voters are simply trying to express so many different preferences through such a narrow channel that knowing precisely what any vote means is impossible.

Taken together, these posts demonstrate a few basic realities of the blogosphere: (a) the small fry get a lot of attention when they can catch the eye of bigger fish, (b) failing that, it pays to be Google-bait, (c) it pays to be the one providing access to something popular, and (d) posts with the most substantive content won’t necessarily get the most traffic.

My thanks to the 36,418 absolute unique visitors who stopped by this year, viewing 117,400 pages. Hopefully, next year will be even better, both in terms of the quality of writing, photography, and discussion and in terms of how many people participate.

Video on copyright in Canada

Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law is a 50 minute film about copyright in Canada, produced by Michael Geist and Daniel Albahary. It is largely a response to the Conservative government’s deeply problematic proposed copyright legislation.

Equitable copyright laws are an important issue. In the first instance, that is due to the overwhelming importance of information, who controls it, and who can do what with it. Secondly, it has to do with societal decisions about what kind of conduct is acceptable, who enforces the rules, and what the consequences for violating them can legitimately be. Rules on when technical means of copyright enforcement can be legitimately circumvented are especially important, since that is a new sort of right potentially being extended to content owners. As such, the balance between the societal interest of fair use and the content owner’s claim to protection needs to be evaluated in a more profound way than has occurred so far.

As with many of the new developments on this issue, I found out about it through BoingBoing.

Legit Monty Python becoming available online

In another victory for the internet at large, Monty Python has launched a YouTube channel – providing free access to an increasing number of their videos at reasonably high quality.

For the uninitiated, and those seeking to rekindle their appreciation for all things Python – I offer a few viewing suggestions:

They will be using the channel to try and sell DVDs of their films and television episodes, but that seems very fair.

I look forward to when some of my other favourite sketches become available, such as the Cheese Shop sketch, the ROMANES EUNT DOMUS segment from The Life of Brian, the Crunchy Frog sketch, ‘I Wish to Report a Burglary,’ and the ‘I’d Like to Get Married’ sketch.