Arkansawyer

It’s very simple: The assumes I don’t know that every application, whether open source or proprietary, requires upkeep. I find that patronizing on a good day and insulting on a bad one.

First off, I had one really neat idea, for which I’d like to get a simple implementation done quickly. I’m not sure doing so is within one person’s spare time efforts, but still, it was a neat idea. Other things:

1. The language used around data portability is confused and incoherent. Look at phrases describing data portability: take back, pull out, portable, removable, get out. Do those mean data portability meaning the ability of the user to access and copy? Or data portability meaning the ability of the user to remove–delete or make inaccessible on the original system–and transfer to another service. Data portability is itself an ambiguous term. Which of those meanings does it have for you?
2. Privacy advocates tend to believe what users say rather than what they do. I heard people argue this point at great length, at one point interpreting an experiment by danah boyd comparing perceived versus actual privacy settings for users–users think they’re much more private than they really are, boyd says–as showing users care more about privacy because they say they care more. I’ll look up her paper.
3. Many privacy issues will resolve (and have resolved) as social and cultural change destigmatize nonstandard behavior. We’ve seen this happen drastically in the aftermath of the sixties. Gay people are out of the closet all over the country. No one looks askance at a child born outside of wedlock. Just think what other changes have come, and what behavior no longer needs to be kept private. Those social changes solved many privacy issues by eliminating them.

Using technology from top Silicon Valley companies, advertisers are creating a new breed of digital signs that can be customized depending on a viewer’s age and gender, and on the age, gender, and intent of the person standing next to the viewer, standing behind the viewer, or looking furtively over the viewer’s shoulder.

“Anyone can microtarget advertisements to individuals,” said Norman Davidson, chief privacy officer of FaceFacts, “but our new FaceFacts API (FFAPI) allows microtargeting of groups. Not just as individuals, but by inferring their social relations and serving ads targeting the needs uppermost on their minds at that time. Let’s show some examples.

“Here we see a couple shopping for an engagement ring,” Davidson said. “First, facial recognition lets us ID both of them. Now we drill down, and there are their names and ages–that’s his real age, by the way, not what’s on his driver’s license. Back up and over to the biometric readings. Note his pupil dilation. That’s good for an extra three to ten percent markup at the jeweler’s. We get a taste of that.

“Now, look closely at this one. You’ll see one gentleman in the foreground and another in the background. The man in the background has been arrested three times for assault and robbery. We’re going to suggest pepper spray to the man in the foreground and, as he passes and the man in the background approaches, a nice set of handcuffs.”

Okay, I’ll bite. The ten(nish) books that most influenced me are these, which I read well before I turned twenty-one:

1. Billy Bass, by R. W. Eschmeyer From this book I gained two things in particular: The “fact” that fish don’t feel pain and a visceral revulsion toward pollution.
2. The Golden Treasury of Natural History, by Bertha Morris Parker, and The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, by Robert Brent and Harry Lazarus Our friend and veterinarian Doc Sturdivant gave me the Treasury when I turned six, and I discovered the Experiments in the St. Paul’s library in second grade. I still have my original Treasury. My parents gave me (over time) two copies of the Experiments; I know where one page of one copy is.
3. The Freddie the Pig series, by Walter R. Brooks These books fueled my imagination, with the Federal Animal Republic, the clockwork boy, the overt anti-communism, the whole enchilada.
4. Marie Curie, by an author I can’t place I also discovered this at St. Paul’s Lutheran in second grade and it’s stuck with me over time. One dreadful detail of fact haunted me for years: jura Znevr erprvirf Cvreer’f rssrpgf, vapyhqvat gur pybgurf ur jnf jrnevat jura ur qvrq, fur pbzrf npebff n fpnes ba juvpu cneg bs Cvreer’f oenva unf pehfgrq. (to translate)
5. Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein These books bent my mind, in both good and bad ways, and the traces remain to this day.
6. The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 7th Edition, edited by Judith Merril There are about a dozen pieces in this anthology who helped shape my thinking: Fritz Leiber, Shari Tepper, Fredrick Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, Mack Reynolds, James Blish, Leo Szilard, Cordwainer Smith, Maxine Kumin, Edward Gorey, Kit Reed, Anne McCaffery, Lawrence Durrell, Alice Glazer, Merril herself. All Merril’s anthologies were good, but this one was great, at least for me.
7. The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber, and Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delaney These two books, as different from each other as War and Peace from Ulysses,  were the earthier side of my Heinlein obsessions.
8. Sometimes A Great Notion, by Ken Kesey It’s the best novel written in English in the twentieth century, in my opinion.
9. First Course in the Theory of Equations, by L. E. Dickson, and Calculus, third edition, by George B. Thomas These books opened my mind to higher mathematics. The Dickson book was a way of thought that I’d never before encountered; Thomas developed basic calculus in a way that eventually made real analysis much easier and much more meaningful.
10. Another Roadside Attraction, by Tom Robbins Robbins’ unashamed sensuality and iconoclastic sensibility fit me perfectly at the time, and I hope does to this day.
11. Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson and Masks of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson Books full of lies, truths about lies, lies about lies, lies upon lies. Truly a case of the abyss staring back.

There are other, possibly more disreputable books I could put on, but this is my list. I’m not sure where I’d cut it. It seems Mad Magazine and The National Lampoon should be on there, too. There are also books I read much later which are, in their way, influential on me. What we read when we’re young, though, that’s what grooves into our brains. ”What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a chlid?”

Terrible, Terrible Experience
When I ordered this, it said it would arrive on the 16th, but it didn’t show up until the 18th, and even then it was delivered while I was out buying garden supplies, so I had to go pick it up the next day. It works fine, but I’m so upset about the poor customer service I’m giving it one star.

Don’t miss the three-star review at the end.

To whom it may concern,

Due to the recent downgrade of your website, I am no longer able to post payments to my account. (I note you’ve added the highly insecure “personal question” to your authentication process; that’s not my issue, but it does suggest shoddiness in the rest of your redesign.) Honestly, what do you care who pays my bills, so long as they’re paid? What use is an ISIS account to me, or to you?

Enclosed find a check, to show good faith. Please advise on how to make future payments.

It’s a darned shame they don’t have this sort of technology in Iran. It would’ve made stopping those demonstrators a whole lot easier.

And those civil rights people in the south? They never would have been out of the observation of the police. The KKK would’ve had a field day, when their allies in the police force passed this information on. Why, if they’d had these tools, black people still might not be able to vote.

So don’t worry, citizen. It’s all being done for you!

(And for the well-connected towing companies:

I told them to build a bigger impound yard because we’re going to fill it up.

Cash flow city!)

At least it bespells it correctly.

I’d lost track of Vidoop after they moved out of Tulsa till this post from Chris Messina last Friday:

When I was laid off from Vidoop last month, I didn’t so much as tweet about it. The circumstances were different this time. But because the lack of information coming from the company is disappointing (if not frankly irresponsible) it seemed time that I wrote down my recollection of what went down.

So why should you care? Why do I care? For one thing, identity management (what a hackneyed phrase!) is, if I were given two things in the technical world to work on, one of the two things I’d pick.

For another, well, there they were in Tulsa, and here we are in Little Rock. Between the inevitable job cuts following the Alltel buyout, the slow attrition from Acxiom, and the desperate need for some good economic news in the area, one would hope that a really good idea, driven by a team that wanted to succeed, could flourish here, with our reasonable cost of living and our unique culture. Tulsa might even be a better place:

A month after I joined, I took a trip down to Tulsa to meet the crew for a company all-hands and get a taste of life in the wild wild west (as Luke called it).

I was surprised at the size of the company (around 40 at the time) and the feeling of familiarity ( in the “familial” sense ) among the employees — clearly these folks cared a great deal about each other and what they were doing and were eager to prove to the world that Oklahoma could product high-tech stars too.

But:

Joel Norvell — the unassuming CEO and one-time ballet dancer and former chairman and CFO of a jewelry manufacturer — surprised everyone, standing atop a stump to declare that the company would be relocating to Portland.

The rest of the story makes for good reading–I recommend it to you–but it raised this question for me, which I posted in Chris’ comment section:

Chris, I’m curious about something in particular: What impact would staying in Tulsa have had?

I know I lost track of Vidoop after they left the neighborhood, and I was greatly disappointed that they’d left. From my time in Tulsa (working there twice and spending time with relatives there all my life), I’d say it’s one of the nicest cities of its size: Two fine museums, an opera company, beautiful Art Deco architecture, low cost of living.

If a startup can’t stay there, where can it stay?

Chris gave what I understand is a typically generous answer, the most relevant section quoted here:

I do think that having representatives in Portland and on the West Coast made sense for Vidoop. Honestly, the deal flow is typically better in those environs for tech startups — and there’s a more vibrant community to provide inspiration, ideas and a source of talent.

However, the slow burn of being in Tulsa was something to be considered — the costs of the west coast are high — and for a startup with a fairly large number of employees, might have been a better environment to keep people on the job without incurring higher human resources costs.

It’s hard to say that any one thing lead to the Vidoop’s demise — and I’m not sure that it was geography alone that accelerated the fall…

After this, he goes on to talk about other factors involved in Vidoop’s problems, all worth reading if you (like me) are interested in technology and startup culture. It didn’t quite reach my real question, which I didn’t quite ask, namely: “Granted that you need representatives where the deals are made, could a successful company remain based in a city like Tulsa or Little Rock? Could it keep a significant presence there if growth and business needs dictated putting more resources elsewhere?” It’s not just a question for start-ups. Acxiom is surely asking itself those questions lately. And Arkansas’ eight-hundred-pound gorilla, Wal-Mart, continually seeks radical change in itself. Parts of their apparel buying have moved away from the Bentonville offices to where fashions are designed and sold. How much more might go away?

What can we build that won’t go away? Must we look to build something that meets our local needs, and those alone, if we plan to keep the fruits of that building here? What is to be done?

On the care and feeding of CEOs:

You should respect your gut when that internal “he’s insane” flag starts waving, but that doesn’t mean you should stop listening. There’s more data to gather and there are times where an insane approach might be the right thing.

via Brent Simmons