Were you born mobile?

(Not to be confused with Goin' Mobile, wherein you can play the tape machine, make the toast and tea ...)

Qualcomm has received a lot of attention for its keynote at CES, and not necessarily the good kind.  Apparently, they were trying to invoke some inspirational vision of a new generation -- "Generation M", they called it -- untethered from antiquated wired connections, claiming the mobile web as their birthright.  And they, um, missed.

Verge has a typically scathing writeup (typical for coverage of this event, not necessarily for Verge), complete with Tweets from various Twitterati doing their best snark.  Overall reaction seems to run from "Hey, whizzy technology.  Kinda strange presentation, though" to "Oh ... my ... God ... what ... were ... they ... thinking?"

Disclaimer: I didn't watch the whole thing. I'm not sure I could.  I'm pretty sure I got the gist from the intro (up to Paul Jacob's "... or a CEO.") and excerpts of the rest.  I certainly haven't come across anything saying "Never mind the cheesy intro.  It gets better."  Even if it did, Qualcomm chose its lead-in to set the tone for all that followed.  For better or worse, the face of Qualcomm for some time to come will be this, this or this (I mean the characters here.  I don't know anything about the actors, but I do know that if I were an unknown actor and someone offered me the keynote at a major consumer electronics show, I'd jump at it.  Just maybe not quite so quickly now.)

Qualcomm has been around for quite a while, even if not in the limelight.  Indeed, that was one of their points.  Nor are they completely incompetent at marketing in general.  I wouldn't expect this ad for their Snapdragon processor to win any Clio awards, but it's kinda fun and gets the point across.  That ad was, in fact, part of the keynote.  Sadly, it seems to have stood out for its non-cringeworthiness.  So why did it all go so badly awry?

Off the bat:

• If there were any real geeks on the writing staff, they must have been acting under duress.  For that matter, if there were any actual social-networking popular-types on the writing staff, they must have gone out for lattes while that part was being put together.  Who talks like those three?  Put any of them in their supposed native element and they would be driven from the room by howls of "Who is this poseur?" or whatever.  It's like watching a 70s after-school special where the dad tries to "be cool" with the kid and the child actor is thinking "Get my agent on the phone!" Or like rapping public service announcements in the 80s and 90s.  Tornado92?  Really?
• One does not simply declare a new generation.  "Generation X" was taken from a 1991 novel title that caught on, no doubt with a little help from the association with Billy Idol's old band (who took their name from an older use of the term).  "Generation Y" came out of an Ad Age editorial, and has sort of caught on, though no one really knows when it started or whether to call it that or something else.  "Baby Boom" was a demographic term used in various contexts since the 19th century that ... caught on.  And so forth.  Besides, the whole "Generation ___" thing has been done to death already.
• If there really is a "Born Mobile" generation or "Generation M", it's going to be younger than the actors on stage.  Looking at US statistics for example, there were essentially no wireless-only households until around 2005.  Granted, the US is not cutting-edge when it comes to mobile adoption, but even in Scandinavia, home of Nokia and Ericsson, cell phone usage doesn't really start to take off until the turn of the millennium.  Smart phones, which is what Qualcomm is really talking about, are even more recent.
• But at the same time, this is all old news.  The time to announce a new, "Born Mobile" generation is before everyone has a cell phone.  The penetration rate in South Korea has already passed 100%, or one cell phone per person.  Suburban malls in the US don't just have cell phone stores, they have specialized kiosks hawking teen-friendly cell phone accessories.  Have had for years.  We didn't have a generation "Born Mobile".  We've got a generation born sessile that has picked up mobile technology in a considerable hurry.  Except, it's not just one generation. You don't get to 100% penetration that way.  Three generations of my family have cell phones, and that's hardly unusual.

Not that a trade show opening event is supposed to be a technical symposium, but tell me something I don't know.  I know mobile technology is important.  I'm sure your processors are fast.

But there's something else, cultural, here.  The whole show hearkens back to a long-ago time when no one knew how to sell technology.

Time was, I seem to recall, that a furry geek from another planet could stand up in front of an audience of business people and stammer something like "Um, our new system has a 6502 processor running at 1MHz, 64K of RAM expandable to one megabyte, and a BASIC interpreter in ROM, so we think it's pretty cool," and the business people would scratch their heads, mutter "what's a RAM?" and somehow figure out what to buy.

Then the professionals came in.  There was, I believe, a brief period of feeling around in the dark, of figuring out whether to say "slash" or "backslash" or to mention that you need a browser to get to a web site, to take a couple of more recent, webbier examples, but this didn't last.  Professional marketers may not have known tech at first, but they do know what works and doesn't work in marketing and will adjust accordingly.

Somewhere in that early mix was a time when no one, not even the geeks, knew what to do with these "computer" things.  There was a grasping on the part of the geeks toward "real people" ... moms and neighbors, say, and a grasping on the part of the marketing folks toward, well, markets.  For some reason, one popular thing to say about a personal computer was that you would have one in your kitchen to help you organize your recipes.  I don't think anyone really believed that, but at least it was something to grab onto.  The intro to the Qualcomm presentation has something of that feel to it, which is odd coming from a company that had had enormous success selling wireless technology for decades.

...

Toward the end of the intro, the "entrepreneur" tells you about his billion-dollar idea -- because, you know, any college graduate can come up with a billion-dollar idea these days.  Of course, he's not really going to tell you what it is, but his cover story is "funny cat videos meets Gangnam style".  Because that's as up-to-date as you could possibly get, right?

Gangnam Style long ago passed from quaint goofy-looking video from across the ocean to cultural phenomenon to "please, please, don't play that again" on its way, I'm sure, to weapon of choice for drunk and clueless wedding guests, but there's actually something to it.  I've always found that culture shock is much worse coming back to one's own country, and here is Psy, returning to his native land and creating what, on closer examination, is a sly but sharp satire of a lifestyle.  A lifestyle of young, hip, heavily debt-ridden twentysomethings whose lives are much, much less than meets the eye.

Boom.

Processed meat product update

Following my announcement that I had turned off anonymous comments in response to an uptick in obnoxiously irrelevant comments, I saw another rash of such comments, more noxious than usual.  Normally I get a sprinkling of unwanted comments spread across recent posts, and not many, but this was several times the usual volume, and all concentrated on that particular post.

I'm curious whether this was just because the problem commenters had temporarily gained the upper hand against Blogger's filters and were focusing on the most recent post, or because that post used a popular four-letter word for unwanted messages in its title.  Which is why I'm specifically not using that word in this post or its title -- or its labels, at least for now.  If this post (or the most recent at the time) collects bothersome comments, then it's probably the former case.  If they continue to stick to the old post, it would be the latter.

Fitting Twitter into the bigger picture

I've just re-read the nineteen previous posts labelled Twitter on this blog and I think I've sufficiently hammered on two main points:

• There's no more reason to believe a "Twitter and new media will supplant traditional news media" narrative than in so many other "Everything is Different Now" cases that have come along.
• Twitter is not particularly self-correcting and there's no clear way to sort fact from fantasy beyond good old-fashioned skepticism -- or referring back to other sources.

So once we dismiss the usual strawmen, where does that leave us?  What is the real relationship between Twitter and traditional media (which themselves have adapted significantly to the web)?  The easy answer is "it's complicated", which seems true as far as it goes but really doesn't say much.  So how about a few random data points?

Item: Tweeting is now a standard part of the celebrity publicity machine.  In turn, gossip magazines and sites routinely report on celebrity's tweets.  It would be interesting to know to what extent celebrities and their publicists are tweeting directly to fans and to what extent they're tweeting to magazine/web site editors.

Item: In the recent scandal leading to the resignation of George Entwistle the head of the BBC, one of the more devastating points of John Humphrys' interview of the soon-to-be-outgoing head was Entwistle's admission that he was unaware of a highly relevant tweet about an upcoming BBC Newsnight documentary (that, and his also having been unaware of the documentary itself).  Humphrys goes on to assert that even if Entwistle hadn't been personally following Twitter, someone on his staff should have been.

With further prompting from Humphrys, Entwistle then goes on to admit he also missed the front-page story in the Guardian denouncing the Newsnight piece, leaving one to wonder what, if anything, Entwistle was aware of.  Nonetheless the presumption, coming from a well-respected traditional journalist in a rather high-stakes context, was that Twitter was something that the head of the BBC, and journalists in general, should pay serious attention to.  (Lest this post present too one-sided a view of Entwistle, here's a transcript of the interview -- the Torygraph uses a less annoying format than the Grauniad article I complained about.)

Item:  Swirling in the same cloud of scandal, was the shockingly prolific criminal behavior of a recently deceased well-known television personality.  The resulting public outrage included, as one would expect by now, a major Twitter storm.

Item: Twitter continues to be an important means of smuggling information out of repressive states.  I'm glad to say that Google's Speak2Tweet service has played a role in helping bypass state internet crackdowns, most recently in Syria (I have nothing personally to do with providing this service, and I don't know anything about it that you don't, but I'm happy to be associated with it indirectly as a Googler).  On the other hand, a fair bit of mis- and dis- information makes its way into the unfiltered feed.  Considering the stakes, it seems wise to be more cautious than usual in judging the reliability of tweets, to say nothing of acting on them.

Item: A recent Twitter spat between an American economist and the president of Estonia is being made into an opera.  The opera will premiere in Tallinn, to be performed by an Estonian mezzo-soprano, so one can imagine that the Estonian side might come off rather better.

For the most part, Twitter seems more like a parallel channel to the traditional media, rather than something likely to supplant them.  In all but one case, Twitter looks like one more tool in the box.  Publicists have always promoted their clients by any means available, the public has always complained by whatever means is at hand, dissidents have always found ways to get their story out, and pop-culture oriented artists have always grabbed on to whatever was floating by.  To the extent that it's harder for regimes to prevent suppressed information from leaking out, credit should go mostly to the internet and web as a whole, acknowledging that Twitter has been particularly effective.

The second item is more intriguing.  In this case, Twitter looks more like something new intruding in the traditional media game.  Imagine radio journalists in the mid twentieth century realizing that they needed to pay attention to this wild and wooly new "television" thing, and print journalists some time before that realizing that there really was something to these new "radio" devices or, for that matter, the current interplay between traditional outlets and blogs.

The key here is not the technology, but who's involved and how.  In the first item, Twitter is effectively acting as a new medium in the traditional publicity structure.  Likewise, in the last three items, the people, or the artists, are making use of Twitter as they would any other medium.  In the second item, the whole point is that Entwistle should have been treating Twitter as another medium for gathering information (or perhaps he did, by ignoring it).  The implication, really, is that treating Twitter as another medium among many is the normal thing to do, and by not doing so, Entwistle showed himself to be woefully out of touch.

Spam spam spam

A while ago I turned off CAPTCHA for comments on this blog, so you wouldn't need to read a nearly-unreadable blob of gibberish in order to post a comment.  "Looks more professional," they said.  "Spam filters work fine," they said ...

It did work fine for a few months, but lately there has been a rash of spam comments and the filters haven't caught up yet.  I considered my options:

• Spammers gonna spam.  Just let it be and hand-delete the comments every so often.  That seemed OK when it was one or two a week, but ignoring the problem hasn't seemed to make it go away.
• Limit comments to people with Google accounts.  A large portion of the spam content, though not all, was anonymous.  Requiring a Google login gets rid of that, at the cost of making anyone who really wants to post anonymously here put together a fake account.  Like, um, a spammer would.
• Turn CAPTCHA back on and go back to the inconvenience that entails.
• Turn on moderation and review comments by hand.  Comments would not show up until I happened to check through them, which would probably be somewhat more often than I actually post.

For now, I'm trying the second option.  If you want to post a comment, you'll have to be logged in to your Google account, but that doesn't seem like a showstopper.  Almost all of the legitimate comments here are from logged-in users.  Again, if you feel the need to post anonymously, I'm sure you'll know what to do.

If that doesn't at least keep it down to a dull roar, I'll probably go with moderated comments.  Re-instating CAPTCHA would be a last resort.

More Silly UX

Searching for "Humphrys Entwistle interview" (OK, full disclosure.  I actually searched for "Humphreys ...") to see one of the BBC's own interviewers "shred" its director general on air, I ran across this page from the Grauniad.  It's a fine example of why web pages should not try to re-invent features, in this case displaying text, that are already widely implemented.

The text transcript of the interview, set in a typewriter font presumably so you can pretend that the Grauniad's staff of crack transcribers just typed it up fresh for you, was a little small for me to read comfortably.  Not to worry, though.  There's a zoom slider.

Slide the slider and the whole document gets bigger within the fixed-sized window on the page.  On the plus side, the text is now easily legible.  On the not-so-much side, half of it is now hidden.  Not to worry, though.  There's a horizontal scroll bar so you can scoot back and forth for every single line in order to read what's there.

Sorry, no, thanks.  Life is too short for horizontal scroll bars on text.  You'd think an organization with its roots in printing text in narrow, readable columns would get that.  I can't think of any situations where, if the idea is just to get the content of the text across, the right answer is anything other than formatting it into whatever column is available.  If the reader wants larger text, then make the words bigger and wrap the text -- like you would anyway -- with fewer words per line.

Or you could spend a fair bit of effort implementing a clever-looking but near-useless solution to a simple non-problem.

Getting Smart with email

It appears that two participants in a prominent scandal -- if you're reading this now, you know which one, and if you're reading this later, it won't really matter -- tried to cover their email tracks by not actually sending email at all.  Instead, they shared an email account and would write messages but save them to the Drafts folder for the other to read.

I'm a bit unclear on how this helps significantly, particularly since it doesn't seem to have worked all that well in this case.

The act of sending email itself is reasonably secure.  If you and your recipient are both using one of the major providers (the same provider, that is), then sending email just means copying some bits, if that.  Nothing need go out over the public internet.  Likewise, reading that email just means logging in and viewing it.  You are using HTTPS, aren't you? Probably, even if you don't know it, but it's worth checking your email settings just in case.

If you're up to no good and storing email on an unencrypted local drive, you deserve to lose.

So it really comes down to how many passwords you would have to crack to get at the messages.  Consider two scenarios:

1. Alice and Bob have separate accounts with MyEmail.com, which supports two-factor authentication.  That means that it's not enough just to know the password.  When you log in, you give not just the password, but a magic number from a text message sent to your phone, or from some other kind of device that produces single-use magic numbers.
2. Alice and Bob share a TOP SEEKRIT "drop box" account with just a password.

In scenario 2, if I can crack that one password, I can see the whole correspondence, so long as I think to check the Drafts folder.  Alice and Bob basically have a password plus a bit of security through obscurity, otherwise known as "no additional security".

In scenario 1, I have two passwords to try to guess, which means two chances at success instead of one.  So far, so good. I crack one of the passwords and log in.  The login screen then says "enter the magic number we just sent to your phone".  Oops.  Not only do I not have the magic number to log in with, Alice (or Bob, as the case may be) now knows that someone is trying to log in.

I suppose it would be possible for Alice could set her phone to forward magic number messages to Bob (or vice versa, but not both!) and use two-factor authentication that way, assuming no one will ask why Bob is getting strange texts with random numbers in them for no apparent reason.  I'd then have to crack the shared password and steal a phone, more or less what I'd have to do in scenario 1, except instead of having a choice of passwords to crack, I have a choice of phones to steal.

Note that some two-factor authentication schemes use a cryptocard or something similar as a second factor.  That would make sharing the account physically impossible, unless Alice and Bob are in the same room, in which case the Cone of Silence is probably the better option.

All bets are off if The Man is able to force MyEmail.com to give up access to the account, but that applies equally well in either scenario.

How to tell the web has really, truly woven itself into our lives

The cashier at the pizza place today had tattooed on her wrists:

<love>
</hate>

It hardly seems fair to point out that that's not valid XML (or HTML).

More stuff to be uneasy about

Previously I mentioned a couple of attempts to mine the Twitterverse for signs of what's going on in the world.  It's also perfectly possible to mine the conventional media.  One such effort is globalincedentreport.com, a "global display of terrorism and other suspicious events". [The link is now broken. I'm not going to chase down when the site shut down, but I don't remember ever running across a reference to it after stumbling on it for this post -- D.H. July 2025]

Global Incident Report gathers together news stories and plots their locations on a global map using eye-catchingly garish icons.  There are several categories of incident, such as disease outbreaks, gang-related activity, drug interdictions and terrorist threats (you'll need to establish an account to view those and a couple of other categories, which seems reasonable).  Basically everything that makes your local TV news the angst-fest it is, right there in one handy web site.

Comparing this to Twitter, I'd say the geo-tagging is more accurate (though the site seems to think Miami, OK is on the Kansas-Missouri state line) and of course the information is more reliable.  Sorry, Web 2.0 fans, but I've been up and down this one.  Mainstream media have their own problems, but I'll take "rush-job vetting and curation aimed at selling ads" over no vetting and curation at all.

There's a clear sampling bias.  Since the reports are all in English, incidents tend to cluster in the US, UK and India.  Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the Commonwealth are sparser, but they're also generally less populated.  Beyond the bias toward English, it's not clear which feeds the site samples, which it self will be a subset of which feeds are made available.  So, definitely, caveat lector.

Even with the caveats, it's an interesting effort.  The mapped incidents link directly to primary sources -- transparency is good -- and the global view lets you get the big picture of what's going on.  Or at least what's being reported.  And tracked by the site ... anyway, still interesting.

More ESRI and Twitter

A while ago I posted about a map from esri.com that incorporated social media such as Twitter with more traditional sources of fire information.  My conclusion was that the social data was not that helpful.

ESRI has just put out another set of maps, this time on acceptance same-sex marriage.  The first map uses a proprietary demographic model to try to rate how likely a given county is to favor same-sex marriage.  As far as I can tell, this model isn't particularly based on, say, polling data or election results from ballot measures, but more on factors like how urban or rural the county is, how many people have gone to college and so forth.

The second map shows state laws.  It corresponds roughly with the first map.  With the interesting exception of Iowa, the first map shows significant support where same-sex marriage is legal, as one would expect.

The third map is based on Twitter data.  It says there is strong support for same-sex marriage across the country, opposition in five states (including Minnesota, despite significant support in the populous Twin Cities), and very strong opposition in exactly one state: North Carolina.  Idaho, Wyoming and Vermont had insufficient data.

The support map shows North Carolina as fairly similar to neighboring Virginia, which the Twitter data shows as strongly supportive, and as more supportive than neighboring South Carolina and Tennessee. The Twitter data show both of those states as moderately supportive.

Clearly something is out of line here.  Two possible explanations:

• Concerning the overall map, the Twitterverse is not a representative sample.  Overall, Twitter traffic is much more supportive of same-sex marriage than the country as a whole.  This probably shouldn't come as a surprise.
• Concerning North Carolina, the Twitter data covers May 9 through June 30, 2012.  As the map explanation notes, North Carolina had voted on May 8 against a proposition supporting same-sex marriage, by a roughly 60-40 margin after a very intense campaign.  It would be interesting to know what portion of the Twitter traffic surveyed is from the immediate aftermath of that election.  My guess would be a large portion.

Along with the fire map I mentioned above and a study on Twitter rumors after the London riots, which was presented in the Guardian as confirming the notion that Twitter is a good, self-correcting source of information but in fact shows anything but, this is the third piece of evidence I've run across suggesting that you should treat any inferences drawn from Twitter traffic with a grain of salt.

Twitter may well be a great way to find out what people, at least those with Twitter accounts, are paying attention to at the moment, but it's risky, to say the least, to draw conclusions about objective facts from that.

Curiosity online

The Curiosity rover, formally the Mars Science Laboratory, landed on Mars late on August 5th (or early on the 6th, depending on your time zone).

This was a major accomplishment.  Mars has a habit of eating space probes.  The majority have failed, sometimes quietly and sometimes spectacularly, at least once due to the kind of basic coding error that would send a regular geek cursing back to the keyboard.  Except when it comes to interplanetary travel there's generally no "next release".

The Curiosity landing was more complex than any Mars landing before it, and parts of it had never been realistically tested, much less the overall sequence.  This was not out of negligence or cut corners but a simple necessity.  Mars's atmosphere is much, much thinner than Earth's.  At its thickest it's equivalent to Earth's atmosphere at about 35 kilometers (about 20 miles, or about four times as high as the summit of Mount Everest).  Mars's gravity is about 40% of Earth's.  There's simply no practical way to re-create those conditions at the necessary scale anywhere near Earth.

This thin atmosphere is a real problem.  There's just enough of it you can't ignore it, but not enough for a parachute to take the lander all the way to the surface safely.  To land Curiosity, which is considerably larger and more massive than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers before it, NASA put together a landing sequence that Rube Goldberg might have appreciated:

• The probe slams into the atmosphere, protected by a heat shield and pulling upwards of 10g of deceleration, possibly as high as 15g (This is from NASA's press kit from before the landing.  I don't know what the actual numbers were, but clearly it's not going to work with humans aboard.)
• Once the the probe has slowed enough not to need the heat shield, the heat shield is jettisoned.
• The probe then deploys a parachute, which slows it to about 300 km/h (about 180 mph).
• The parachute is then jettisoned and a rocket-powered descent stage takes over, carefully avoiding the parachute and the back shell it's attached to.  If the rockets don't work, the probe will hit the surface, hard, in about 20 more seconds.
• The descent stage lowers the rover on nylon cords while it slowly descends, since landing completely under rocket power risks kicking up enough dust to damage the rover.
• While the descent stage is doing this, the rover gets its landing gear into place.
• When the rover is safely on the ground, the cords are cut loose, using explosives, and the descent stage flies off to crash land some distance away.

What could possibly go wrong?  Mind, this is a simplified description (and any inaccuracies are mine).  The full details include several more maneuvers, through six different configurations in all, with 76 pyrotechnic devices, ballast jettisoned at various points and dozens of people sweating bullets in the control room and elsewhere.

"Seven minutes of terror", they called it.  Damn impressive engineering, I call it.

OK, so now that we've paused to admire NASA/JPL's chops, what does this have to do with the web? 

I'm old enough to sorta kinda remember Apollo and grainy black-and-white TV coverage.  And Tang.  Cool, and, it must be said, more culturally significant than today's missions, but technically not even close to what we have today.  This is true not only of the vehicle itself, but of the communications technology.  In the 70s we had grainy black-and-white video.  For better imagery you had to wait for the astronauts to bring back the film.

Now, using essentially the same technology as a cell phone camera, NASA is able to capture digital images and put them up on its web site for the world to see immediately (as many have pointed out, much more quickly than NBC saw fit to broadcast Olympic events).  The web gallery includes not only the pretty press-release pictures but also the raw frames they were made from, including pictures of Curiosity staring at its feet and other such that didn't make the cut.  There are plenty of other goodies as well.  I particularly like the "white-balanced" images, which have been post-processed to show what the same terrain would look like under sunlight on Earth.

And there are, of course, a Twitter hashtag (#MSL) and (obligatory plug) updates on NASA's Google Plus page.

As inspiring as it may have been to watch thrilling news coverage with Walter Cronkite narrating, there's something much more intimate about being able to visit a web site from time to time and watch the story unfold directly from the source.

Dear Reader,

When I was in school (a while ago, admittedly), we learned how to write a letter:

Dear So and So, 

Blah, blah, blah ... 

Sincerely,
David Hull

(or, with a close friend or family member, "Love, David" or "Yours, David", or such)

In email these days, if there's any salutation or closing at all, it's something like:

Hi So and So, 

Blah, blah, blah ... 

Thanks!

Some of this, I'm sure, is because times change.  The canonical letter of my youth is miles and miles less formal than one from, say, the 1700s.  Nonetheless, I think the switch from snail mail to email has had an influence.

For one thing, it feels a little funny to add a salutation and closing at all, when the email header includes the names of the sender and recipient.  On the other hand, it can feel a little funny not to have at least something.  So, I think, we tend to revert to what we'd say in a conversation, with both participants standing right there and knowing who the other is.

Beyond the switch to a new medium giving an opportunity for new forms, the medium itself influences the forms.  This has been true with letters as well.  Formal letters with half a page of salutations and closings make more sense when hand-writing and sending a letter is difficult and therefore reserved for occasions like petitioning the royal court, where you are quite possibly addressing an official you only know by name and trying to establish your reputation by means of any titles you may have.

Y'r Humble & Ob'd't S'v't
Etc., etc.