Monthly Archive for October, 2009

In Science, FAIL = WIN

Published by Jarred on October 27, 2009 in Energy and Science. View Comments

Science WinIn April, I wrote about a little debate some coworkers and I were having about whether politics could be studied scientifically, and whether that approach was valid (I said it could be, and that it was one among many valid approaches).  One argument tendered in opposition was that we simply don’t have enough information to even make a successful politico-scientific model, let alone to test whether it works or not.  Any attempt to construct such a model, or to delineate variables and units of measurement, would be in vain.

I think that is incorrect, because in science, the cool thing is that fail = win.  What I mean is that science is all about testing something, getting results, and developing a conclusion based on those results.  If your model sucks and your experiment fails as a result, you’ve learned something.  You rebuild, you try something else, and you chalk your first try up on the list of things that don’t work.  Launch and iterate, my friends.  It’s the Google way, and we’ve done alright so far.

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Worrying About the Real Time Web

Published by Taylor on October 25, 2009 in Culture, Sociology, Twitter and Web 2.0. View Comments

Paul Carr at TechCrunch as a long and thoughtful post questioning triumphialism about the real-time web.  Carr ties together experiences at a recent Weezer show (similar to the mobile-phone-armed masses I wrote about in this post) as well as his discomfort watching how social media  seems to be driven in the wake of disasters, and how perilous Twitter and other real-time communications can be in an environment like a jury room (an issue I’d like to see some lawyers respond to like this).  It’s well worth reading the full piece, which I’ll pull a few large chunks from here:

[The] real-time mentality – pictures/tweets or it didn’t happen – continues to seep into every aspect of our lives, both personally and professionally. Whereas once we might attend a conference to watch the speakers and perhaps learn something, today our priority is to live blog it – to ensure our followers know we’re on the inside; first with whatever news might be broken. And it’s not just journalists doing the live-blogging, but anyone with a laptop and a wifi connection.Worse still, we’re told that this is the future. The real-time web – a web where every single thought that enters our head, or image that passes our eyes, can be instantly captured, shared and archived for the approbation of our friends and followers. [..]

The assumption at all of these events is the same: real-time is where we’re heading; real time is good. Newspapers were good, cable news was great, blogs were better, instant attention bursts are best.

Hmmmm.

[...] it’s not just a question of micro-ego: when a juror is tweeting teasers from the jury room, part of them must know that a guilty verdict is much more exciting to their audience than one of innocence. How can that not subconsciously influence them? Likewise when we – the real-time generation – watch someone being attacked in the street or a plane crashing into our building and instinctively reach for our phones, can we be sure that our first impulse will be to dial 911, rather than firing up Tweetdeck or clicking the camera icon to ensure we get props for being there? I mean, really sure? In a perverse twist on the uncertainty principle, knowing that our behavior is being observed inevitably changes it for the more dramatic. Just look at reality TV.

And that’s when the real-time web – for all the attention it’s getting right now – starts to look less like a brave new world, and more like the path to a hideous dystopia. A world where our reaction to any event, no matter how serious, is influenced, not by what’s right, but by how it will play with our micro-audience. An audience that, thanks to Google and Microsoft’s wholehearted support of the real-time web, is about to get even bigger and more tempting.

When I wrote about some of these difficult questions, I defended those who would tweet and share and document their experience online out of the belief–one I still hold–that the enriching experience of the social web is our ability to be many places at once and maintain an ambient awareness (Jarred brought this term to my attention, and I love it) about the activity of those we love and those with whom we wish to be connected.  Ultimately, understandings of balance and moderation fuel this debate.  Journalists try their hardest not to “become the story.”  That mandate is hard to follow when we can all be at times documentarian, entertainer, friend, expert, citizen, community leader, the subject of news or the target of criticism.  The ubiquity of self-publishing tools (in other words, the social- and real-time-web) demands that we define for ourselves how far we will go, and at what cost (if at all) we will craft our reality to draw pageviews and re-tweets.

I think it is absolutely correct and important to question the real-time web.  But at this point, the “real-time generation” that Carr describes has arrived.  It is incumbent upon us–content creators and, perhaps more importantly, consumers–to embrace technology in ways that enrich our lives without detracting from the offline obligations that ultimately define our relationships with others and our commitments to values like integrity, honesty, and justice.

Google Reader Gets Magical

Published by Jarred on October 23, 2009 in Google, News and Web 2.0. View Comments

I try not to spend too much time pimping Google’s products in this space, but let’s face it: we make really cool stuff, and whether I work for the company or not, I absolutely adore most of our products.  Fact is, our engineers and product teams cook up tools that are really useful for those who are ready to embrace the digital future.  Google Reader is one of those tools, and the team has just released a set of features that have got me plain jazzed.

Google Reader is a tool for pulling interesting content to a central inbox via “feeds.”  Almost every website on the web that publishes regular updates also sends out a feed that can be subscribed to via various tools.  As a result, instead of clicking through a long list of bookmarked sites to see if there’s something new to read, you can just subscribe to that site’s feed and all the new content will build up in your inbox.  (If you want to subscribe to Tropophilia‘s feed, click here.)

Though it got off to a rocky start, Reader has been incrementally socializing and personalizing itself over the past two years.  First it let you share items publicly; later, those shared items became directly available to your contacts who also use Reader.  Recently, the team introduced the ability to “like” an item in addition to sharing it, and it also created a section of “recommended” feeds based on your reading, sharing, and liking history (although it was a little hard to find).  It has also given users new ways to share with the “send to” feature that lets you post to Twitter and other third party sites.

At first, it was confusing as to why there was both a “like” and a “share” feature, with many people not understanding when they would do one without doing the other.  This week, the Reader team cleared that up by delivering the punch line:

  • You can now sort any feed (including the comprehensive feed) by “magic.”  The sorting is based on what Reader has determined you’re interested in, as reflected by your reading/liking/sharing history.
  • The “recommended feeds” feature now has prime real estate in the main sidebar in a new “Explore” section.
  • There is a new “popular items” feed (also sortable by your personalized “magic”) that shows you what items have been popular across the web recently.

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Rebooting Justice

Published by Jarred on October 17, 2009 in Legal Issues. View Comments

Yesterday, I had an envelope in the mail from my dad.  I opened it up to find a photocopy of the “Opening Statement” of the Summer 2009 issue of Litigation, the official journal of that section of the American Bar Association.  The Litigation Section’s chair, Lorna G. Schofield, dedicated her essay to an observation of how, like so many industries, the legal profession is being challenged by the rapid innovation of the information age.

As a future lawyer (side note: I sent 12 of 15 law school applications last weekend!), it reassures me that at least the ABA’s leadership has recognized that lawyers, firms, and their clients need to adapt in order to survive.  But I found it even more encouraging that Schofield highlighted the need for the entire justice system — especially the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which were last updated in 1938 — to be refreshed for the present times.  I’d like to highlight a couple of her points and add my own thoughts as well.

The first area that Schofield specifically targets is the billable hour.  The billable hour system rewards firms and attorneys for the time spent working on a project.  While the rate can vary depending on the type of work performed, the rates typically do not reflect the value added by the work performed.  And it doesn’t even really make logical sense, as Evan Chesler noted in Forbes back in January: “If you are successful and win a case early on, you put yourself out of work. If you get bogged down in a land war in Asia, you make more money. That is frankly nuts.”  He went on to propose a system more similar to how a construction contractor operates:

For reasonable periods of time during the life of a lawsuit, say three months at a time, I should do what [a contractor] does: identify the client’s objectives, measure, calculate, build in a contingency and come back with a price. Once the price has been agreed upon, the billable hour should be irrelevant. The client will no longer be surprised by a whopper bill and met by the standard (albeit true) explanation that “litigation is unpredictable.”

Whether this is the approach that wins the day is up for question but, as Schofield concludes, “sooner or later, something has to give.”

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