Business: January 2004 Archive Page

[L]et's face facts, she could do your $70,000-a-year job for the wages of a Taco Bell counter jockey - she won't lose any sleep over your plight. When I ask what her advice is for a beleaguered American programmer afraid of being pulled under by the global tide that she represents, Jairam takes the high road, neither dismissing the concern nor offering soothing happy talk. Instead, she recites a portion of the 2,000-year-old epic poem and Hindu holy book the Bhagavad Gita: "Do what you're supposed to do. And don't worry about the fruits. They'll come on their own." | This is a story about the global economy. It's about two countries and one profession - and how weirdly upside down the future has begun to look from opposite sides of the globe. It's about code and the people who write it. But it's also about free markets, new politics, and ancient wisdom - which means it's ultimately about faith. --Daniel H. Pink --The New Face of the Silicon Age (Wired Magazine)

Wired is the idealistic champion of Silicon Valley culture. While the quality of the writing is always top-notch, one rarely finds in the pages of Wired any serious criticism of technology -- and certainly none of the Slashdot "the government is taking control of your lives, datum by datum" variety. Pink writes himself into the story a bit more than I would prefer, but I do appreciate the way he paints himself as the devil's advocate on both sides. I feel a lot of pain for the very good CS majors who are now graduating into a world that is very different than it was in 1999 (or so) when they entered college with a career path in mind.

Still, something lurking in the darker parts of my English major soul remembers the sneers of the "toolies" who, even before they got their diploma, bragged of their $50,000 job offers.

The Africans and Irish and Poles and Italians and Norwegians and everyone else -- including the Indians -- who came to America in search of a better place took the less desirable jobs. This led to inevitable conflict with the working class Americans, but after a generation or two, the newcomers turned into what Archie Bunker might call "regular Americans" who were themselves threatened by the next wave of immigrants. This has been an ongoing part of American history. Just look at the names on America's olympic rosters or the faces of people wearing American military uniforms.

But now, the jobs in question are highly desirable positions, and -- more shocking to America's future -- people don't even have to leave their home country to do it!

I was surprised and pleased to see Wired publishing a lenthy, literary, and insightful examination of the American reaction to this particular side-effect of the new global economy. The U.S. auto industry lost business to Japan in the 80s, which caused a wave of "buy American" protectionism; and in return, Japan became a tremendous consumer of American culture. If I were truly interested in economics, I would of course have listened to the e-school toolies and ditched my English major; but upon reflection, Wired Magazine publishing an article with a sympathetic angle on global outsourcing shouldn't be any real surprise. Because, from the look of things, Wired Magazine has read the writing on the wall, and expects to sell a lot of subscriptions in India.

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IKEA WALKTHROUGH v2.3.1
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IKEA is a fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure that allows you to role-play the character of someone who gives a shit about home furnishings. In traversing IKEA, you will experience a meticulously detailed alternate reality filled with garish colors, clear-lacquered birch veneer, and a host of NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS (NPCs) with the glazed looks of the recently anesthetized. --IKEA Walkthrough v2.3.1 (The Morning News)

Open Source in EducationVarious, via KairosNews)

KairosNews has a few good links to articles about the open source movement. "Open Source and Education: A Sea Change?" is a roundup of links to recent "rumblings" on open-source content. Most exciting is the Chronicle of Higher Ed's report on a multi-million-dollar effort to create an open-source course-management tool.

Charlie's post links to a page that is in the Chronicle's "temp" directory, so I won't repeat it here... you can find it on the KairosNews entry. Charlie notes with amusement the reaction of the chairman of Blackboard (a commercial provider of course-management tools), who uses the standard FUD defense in order to scare potential users away from open-source (and thus protect his revenue stream).

I don't like using commercial course-management tools because I don't like the idea of putting so much work into a database that is only accessible as long as we have subscribed to the service. I understand that Seton Hill has recently churned through two or three of these course management tools, requiring faculty to re-learn a new system each time. We're currently using J-web, but I only use it to post a link to my online syllabus, to post final grades, and to take attendance. But even then I find it limiting... there's no way to differentiate between an excused absence and an unexcused absence. If I cancel class for a day, or want to take attendance at an extra-curricular event, there's no way for me to add or remove columns. If a student comes in late or leaves early, there is no way for me to record a partial absence.

Now, if there were a way that I could use XML to label the various components of my online syllabus, and then run a utility that would slurp up all that data into the standard course management interface that the students are familiar with from their other classes, that would be useful.

At the turn of the century a Maryland Quaker, Lizzie Magie, was trying to develop a game that would illustrate the inequities of capitalism and promote a popular "single tax" movement led by Henry George. A century ago this month she received a patent for The Land lord's Game; the illustration in the US Patent Gazette is eerily similar to Monopoly. | The Landlord's Game became a Quaker pastime; over the years little improvements and local details were added by players. Eventually it became known as Monopoly, and a version that used the streets of Atlantic City, New Jersey (still used in the US version of Monopoly) was shown to a man named Charles Darrow in 1931. He sold the rights to Parker Brothers games in 1936. The Quakers' 30-year-old instructive little anti-capitalism game became, in other hands, the opposite. --Tim Dowling --I rolled a two - and got a ghetto stash  (Guardian)

Some background supplied on the history of "Monopoly," as part of the reaction to the export of "Ghettopoly" to Britain.

One of the things on my list of "things I remember from my youth that I wish I could find again" was a science-fiction story in which a group of customs officials (I think) are testing products being imported to Earth. One of the products is a suspicious war toy with little robot soldiers that keep disappearing; but that toy turns out to be a distraction -- the real threat is a board game that teaches children to make business decisions that will result in some offworld faction taking over the economy of the solar system. (The customs officials only glanced at the rules, and didn't notice that you get points for losing your empire.) I found this via Crooked Timber.

Do not use profanity. Be very careful when discussing financial or business affairs. Avoid any mention of your private parts. Do not offer any guarantees, or refer to checks that may or may not be in the mail. | Refrain from describing anything or anybody as "free." Abstain from the exuberant use of punctuation marks. Shun simple salutations like "Hello," and opt instead to craft a detailed, personalized subject line. --Michelle Delio --Spam Filters Grab Good With Bad  (Wired)

Spam is evil.

The above article lists some of the new rules of e-mail. I have my e-mail spam filter set to block any message with more than two exclamation marks or the word "sex" in the subject line. (The only person who might ever want to talk to me about sex is my wife, and she doesn't need to use e-mail to get my attention.)

I've stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, adding anti-spam protection to our SHU installation of MoveableType. There were scores of links to viagra, digital camera, and gambling websites tucked away in older blog entries. (The spammers want Google to find links to their sites, thus artificially raising their rankings.)

I've also read that we can expect to start seeing full-screen advertisements that load stealthily in the background while we are surfing a site, and that play after we click away from a website.

I have four different ad-blocking tools installed on the computer I'm using now: Webwasher (which not only blocks ads but closes up the space on the screen where the ad used to be; I sometimes have to shut off because it interferes with my webmail), Google's Toolbar (great for stopping popups; hold down ctrl when clicking if you know you want a popup this time; or, click a button to permanently allow popups on the domain -- very useful), NoFlash (which kills Macromedia Flash ads; I can easily turn it back on if I know I want the flash thingy), and a few minutes ago I just added the unimaginatively-named Mike Skallas's Ad Blocking Host File (a list of ad-serving hosts that your browser will ignore, registering only errors where the ads are supposed to be... not pretty, but effective).

On this day in 1984, after a year of deliberation, the US supreme court ruled in favour of Sony (makers of the Betamax video-recorder) and against Universal Studios and Disney, who had claimed that viewers recording television programmes were stealing copyrighted material. The counter-argument was that home-tapers were "time-shifting": rescheduling programmes through convenience rather than greed. The acceptance of that argument was decided on a 5-4 vote, meaning that if one justice had been a little crustier, television viewers might now be confined to their homes on the nights of their favourite shows. --Mark Lawson --Going for the Record (Guardian)

I'm sure that many of the record company executives who complain about people stealing music by downloading it have no ethical qualms about videotaping TV shows for their own personal libraries (and I'll be they fast-forward through the commercials, too). Of course, the media titans are also going after TiVo and other tools with commercial-zapping goodies inside them.

Back then, it was technology maker vs. Hollywood. Now, Sony is one of the big media companies (owning both the technological platforms and the creative content for movies, TV, music, and videogames). Sony tried to stem the tide of file-sharing by selling audio gadgets that had security features to prevent Sony from losing money on the files, but users didn't like paying for a clunky gadget that didn't let them do what they really wanted to do with files (namely, get them for free).

I neither buy nor "share" music files, but then I don't buy CDs either, other than occasionally grabbing one out of a $5 bargain bin (and I can't even remember the last time I did that).

--History of Computer Game Design: Technology, Culture, Business (Stanford University)

This course website features an excellent bibliography of computer game history and scholarship.

While blogging's earliest advocates operate on the "information wants to be free" principle, many businesses would shudder at the very thought. | "Information is power" is a more likely mantra in many organisations. Whenever you hear those three words, you're hearing the signal of the kind of closed information culture where there's also a heads-down, bunker mentality utterly unsuited to the openness required for a convincing weblog, be it an external PR effort, or knowledge-sharing internal one. --Neil McIntosh --Why blogs could be bad for business (Guardian)

A few months ago, I was at a fancy on-campus dinner event. The university president, JoAnne Boyle, was working her way through the crowd, laying on the charm. I was part of a little group of people who were treated to a funny story about a well-known donor who called with some crotchety advice about one of the big topics on campus. When we all finished laughing at the punch line, I asked for the donor's first name again, because I hadn't caught it, and someone kidded me, "So, is this for your blog?" We all chuckled, but JoAnne's face turned white, and she quickly went off to charm someone else.

A little while later, as she was giving an impromptu welcome speech, she noticed who I was sitting with, and said, "The reporter who's the bane of my existence is sitting next to the faculty member who's the bane of my existence!"

Everyone turned around to see me recovering from what was almost a spit-take.

I don't think of my own blog in terms of power... goodness gracious, I'm just trying to teach a few things and enjoy doing what I do. I noticed that Alexa, a website ranking service, has placed jerz.setonhill.edu above www.setonhill.edu, and has recently replaced the screen capture of Seton Hill's home page with a screen capture from my own curricular home page. (My curricular website gets 57% of the traffic to the *.setonhill.edu domain, and the main site gets 29%, at least according to however Alexa measures it. The blogs.setonhill.edu subdomain gets 12%, by the way, which is up from 8% the last time I checked.)

I don't really know what any of this means, but, like businesses, universities also operate with a rigid power structure; administrators know things that faculty members don't need to know; tenured faculty members know things that their nontenured colleagues don't need to know.

Since I know that some of my students read my blog, I've found myself screening my blogging, since I don't want my blog to give away the "big twist" I want to throw into my lecture. And one day last term when I was very sick, a student blogged about how mentally befuddled I was. That student wrote sympathetically, but what if she hadn't?

Many of the students who started blogging for me last semester will be blogging for me again in different classes this term. I've learned a few things about instructional blogging... for one thing, I need to get the students reading each other's blogs more. We spent perhaps too much time counting the number of comments each blog entry generated, and not enough time getting students to link to each other's conversations. I'll be introducing three classes to blogging this week, and I plan to move pretty quickly from the basic "show me that you can post a link" to writing thickly-linked texts, with well-chosen links that not only demonstrate the student is keeping up with other blogs, but that gives readers a map to good reading online. We'll see what happens.

The entrenched business culture may not adopt blogging beyond the basic public relations and customer service approach. But a university's function is to educate -- to pass on skills and knowledge, by giving students the intellectual tools, in a microcosm of the society that awaits them after they graduate. Progressive educational philosophy emphasizes empowering the student. A weblog forces students to come into contact with that outside world a little earlier, which can be a burden. But with that responsibility comes power.

I'd rather the university president not think of me as the bane of her existence because of my blog, but at the same time, it's nice to be noticed.

Today, 30 years into feminism, we have models who look not just weak and unsophisticated, but also dumb and victimized. Academic feminists haven?t complained because the models are supposedly playing a subversive role and subversion is inherently politically correct. Moreover, many of the young photographers are female. But now we?ve moved into ?fashion vérité? and the models still look stupid. Is this how women in fashion see themselves? --Karen Lehrman --The Decline of Fashion Photography (Slate)

I don't find the subject of fashion photography terribly gripping, but I did enjoy the form of this essay, and found this particular query worth making.

The game's artificial intelligence borders on idiotic. At one point, I conversed with the civic manager of Upper Seattle in his office. After our chat, he conveniently walked into the hallway and blankly looked on as I hacked into his safe and stole secret information.

I was especially disappointed with Invisible War because its ambitious technological underpinnings held much promise.

Graphics were filled with realistic nuances such as hanging lights which swayed to and fro when I bumped them. Boxes and other objects had real weight and could be picked up and thrown.

But all this technical wizardry was for naught and had no real bearing on gameplay. --Matt Slagle --PC version of Deus Ex: Invisible War disappoints (AP/USA Today)

I had been looking forward to this game -- the original Deus X was fantastic: a first-person shooter/role-playing/adventure hybrid with fully voiced dialogue and multiple solutions to every problem. Looks like the designers put too much energy into the technology, and not enough into the storyline. I'll read a few more reviews before I make up my mind, but I can tell right now I'm not buying this title for full price.