Chaos Program

Two unrelated things clicked in my head today as actually being related on a theoretical level. Thing one I spent some time the other day looking over the websites of some potential vendors. I’ve done this sort of thing lots of times before. As per usual, I was unimpressed by the websites themselves (which may or may not say much about the company itself). Thing two: Someone cracked the algorithm for cell phone signal encryption (really a sort of hiding) to the internet. Both these things show the conflict between the old industrial era way of doing things (let’s call it web 0.5) and the newer Twitter-ified way of doing things (web X.0). It tells us a lot about the changing generations and the growing struggles of the information age.

After that slightly pompous lead in, it’s tempting to just stop but I’ll add some detail, starting with the cell phone encryption code, which is a pretty big deal news-wise. The biggest weakness of cell phone security – and it’s a very big weakness – is that, in order to work, cells broadcast their signal in all directions at once. It’s not like the old fashioned landline phones that send their signal down a wire. In order to intercept the signal of one of those old phones, you have to tap the physical wire. In order to intercept a broadcast signal, on the other hand, you just need to be within range with the right equipment.

For a couple decades now, most cell phones have attempted to evade broadcast interception by (somewhat) randomly changing frequency multiple times during every transmission. That way it’s very hard to intercept more than a single tiny portion of the signal, hopefully too tiny a portion to make sense out of the message. The flaw in this scheme is that for the message to be received, the other end (the cell tower) must be able to follow all the frequency hops and put the complete transmission back together. So both ends need to be synchronized. True randomness is impossible.
read more »

A few years ago when I took a course in web development, I had an assignment to survey a number of different websites all from the same industry. Since I worked for a newspaper at the time, I chose the newspaper industry. After spending many hours on this assignment, my conclusion was that the newspaper industry was completely devoid of creativity or any thought, whatsoever, about the needs of the consumer. I found the web pages for all the different papers to be essentially the same, offering the same news in the same format, with the same crappy navigation system using the same old web 1.0 (or maybe 0.8) technology.

Since then, we have had a few years for web technology to develop and for companies to learn the ropes of the new system. For the most part, though, newspaper web sites haven’t improved beyond adding some video and maybe a search function. Circulations are down, advertising is way down but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of creativity going toward finding solutions.

Or does there?

read more »

A random roundup is what happens when I’m so busy (or lazy, or disorganized) that I start a number of blog posts over a period of several days, but never seem to finish or post any of them. So instead, I slam them together into one big one and pretend like I’m being conscientious. The latest crop includes some notes about Twitter, Facebook, Roadrunner and my old employer the Democrat & Chronicle.

Twitter is bad for you

In other news – if you can call it that – Twitter makes us less moral. Really. Scientists said so (Can Twitter Make You Amoral? Rapid-fire Media May Confuse Your Moral Compass). Apparently, someone thinks that the stream of consciousness that characterizes much Twitter content is too fast to allow people to reflect on other people’s feelings. Do we need to use more smileys? Can you do smileys on Twitter? Having never used a smiley anywhere, I wouldn’t know. But surely those will make us more moral by putting our feelings out there for others to see, right?

Actually, the research seems to imply that Twitter is not good for teaching morality and that someone brought up on 140 character or less communication may have some deficiencies. So when raising children, remember to talk to them sometimes, not just Tweet at them.
read more »

The stream of bad news for newspapers has been almost constant for months. Yesterday, we heard that the New York Times would be cutting pay across the board (New York Times set to impose 5% pay cut on all staff). Last week, Gannett announced 1 week of paid furloughs (2 for higher paid employees) in Q2 of 2009 (Gannett calls for second-quarter furloughs). This is in addition to a week of furloughs imposed on employees in Q1 (where old newspapers go to die). This is exactly the same as a pay cut except with the added bonus of giving people extra free time to stew about it. Who says big companies don’t care about morale?

But wait! There’s hope! US Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-Maryland) (Cardin’s official website) has introduced the Newspaper Revitalization Act, which would allow newspapers to operate as non-profits – That is, as organizations exempt from taxes on their profits because of a stated dedication to a purpose approved by the government as being beneficial to the greater good, as opposed to their common current status as “failing to make a buck in spite of trying REAL HARD.” Apparently the theory is that letting them keep all of the money they make will help them stay healthy (Don’t ask why that doesn’t apply to the rest of us. I don’t know). In order to justify the non-profit designation, papers would no longer be allowed to endorse political candidates (apparently the Senator thinks we don’t know who the papers favor otherwise).
read more »

Does anybody know if scientific journals are making money lately?

I don’t have any idea. A lot of commercial print information sources are having serious troubles. There are reports, for example, that the San Francisco Chronicle is in deep trouble [http://sfist.com/2009/02/24/sf_chronicle_for_sale.php] and even venerable (if you can imagine that word in this context) Playboy may be up for sale. [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100906383&ft=1&f=1020] I’ve discussed before some of the troubles in journalism in general. But what I’m asking about today concerns the plethora of scientific and technical journals out there that seem to make up a huge industry.

The question came up because I came across a report that the International Journal of Technology Transfer and Commercialisation has a paper in an upcoming issue about how social networking could be used to discover prior art related to patent applications and thereby speed up the review process [http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/02/23/social.patents]. It seems there’s an enormous backlog of patent applications and there isn’t much hope of reducing it with current procedures.
read more »

The subject of my last post, the serious problems faced by news media today, hasn’t gone away. If anything, maybe I was early commenting on it. The news came out today that my old employer, Gannett corp, is furloughing workers for one week without pay. See D&C employees to take one week unpaid leave. Once again I find that my decision to leave was the right one – but I’m still worried and unhappy for the good people I left behind. They work hard and try to put out the best product they can. They deserve better.

One of those good people posted an interesting link to a blog post entitled When newspapers are gone, what will you miss? It’s an interesting post. Here’s the money quote: “Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction.” read more »

On Twitter I follow a feed called THEMEDIAISDYING (http://twitter.com/themediaisdying). It posts numerous updates throughout the day about changes in newspapers, television and magazines. Not surprisingly, given the name, most of those changes are negative. There have been a lot of layoffs lately. Since I used to work for a newspaper and still have friends who do, I take a morbid interest in what is happening to the industry.

The picture ain’t pretty and I don’t believe the current recession is the whole reason. It’s just the last straw on the camel’s poor old back. When I was still at the paper, the signs of decrepitude were rampant. It was obvious for years that upper management regarded the internet with suspicion, at best. At less than the best, they showed outright hostility, even while they publicly claimed to be pleased at having new opportunities to serve the community and blah blah blah. In the editorial area blogs are still regarded with  suspicion, if not contempt, even when papers start their own sites that they call blogs.

That’s always funny. Seen the Wall Street Journal’s new tech blog? It’s at http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/. I have no idea why they refer to this slick, overstaffed exercise as a blog. read more »