The big strip search hoax

I can't believe this needs to be said but apparently it does:

If you're managing a restaurant and you get a phone call from someone claiming to be police officer, ordering you to strip search an employee or customer looking for stolen property -- don't do it!

One, real police don't do that. Two, it's probably illegal and could get you arrested or sued (both have happened).

Nonetheless, this hoax has been perpetrated on restaurants in seven states since 1999, the Wall Street Journal reports. Investigators believe all the cases are the work of a single person.

Piracy might be painless

Two college professors made a shocking discovery: online downloads have no effect on CD sales, the Boston Globe reports.

What makes this study interesting is the methodology employed by researchers Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf:

Most studies of music downloading have surveyed people who use file-swapping services, asking them whether they buy copies of the recordings they download. But Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf feared that some people wouldn't provide honest answers and claim that they bought recordings when they didn't.

So in the fall of 2002, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf got permission to plug into two ''supernode" servers on the file-swapping network called OpenNap to track the files being downloaded. Over a 17-week period, they watched users download about 1.75 million files, of which 261,000 were downloaded by Americans.

Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf also drew up a list of 680 popular CDs, in a variety of musical styles. They tracked the Nielsen SoundScan charts to measure US sales of these albums over the 17-week period, comparing this to the number of times people downloaded songs from the albums.

Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf figured that if music downloads were cutting into record sales, there would be a decline in sales of a CD whenever there was an increase in downloads from that disk. To their surprise, it didn't work that way. ''Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero," the study concluded.

So, why are CD sales falling, if piracy's not to blame? According to New Scientist, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf suggest that a weak U.S. economy and increasing CD prices may be factors.

Highest-paid officials

Seattle's city librarian, police chief, transportation director, and power and utilities directors are all paid more than the mayor. One of many interesting tidbits to be found in a P-I survey of public employee salaries in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.

Fishing for fools

A public-service announcement from Wired News:

This week, as news sites, blogs and Net merchants gear up for April Fools' Day tricks, hoax watchers warn susceptible readers to be on the lookout for more online trickery.

So, who wants a Desktop Zero-Point Infinite Power Generator for their birthday?

Tyranny and the Net

Dictatorship.com is a piece by The New Republic foreign editor Joshua Kurlantzick attacking the premise that the Internet will inevitably foster democratic, open societies by exposing people to new ideas and undermining authoritarian regimes.

But world leaders, journalists, and political scientists who tout the Internet as a powerful force for political change are just as wrong as the dot-com enthusiasts who not so long ago believed the Web would completely transform business. While it's true that the Internet has proved itself able to disseminate pop culture in authoritarian nations ... to date, its political impact has been decidedly limited. It has yet to topple -- or even seriously undermine -- its first tyrannical regime. In fact, in some repressive countries the spread of the Internet actually may be helping dictatorships remain in power. 

Kurlantzick argues that the Web is "in many ways ill-suited for expressing and organizing dissent." Specifically, it can't make up for a lack of organized opposition offline, the cybercafe setting doesn't encourage people to gather and talk politics, the Net can't reach the less educated as well as TV or radio, and the anarchy bred by giving everyone a voice undermines organized resistance.

But an even bigger problem, he writes, is "the ease with which authoritarian regimes have controlled and, in some cases, subverted" the Internet. They shut down opposition Web sites and aggressively censor where their citizens can go online -- often aided by Web-filtering and Web-monitoring technology sold by companies in the democratic West -- thereby creating an environment of willing self-censorship. In fact, such control of Internet access actually makes it easier for authoritarian governments to monitor opposition voices who foolishly communicate online.

Kurlantzick's piece has prompted some interesting, thoughtful responses across the blogosphere. Among them:

BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis savages Kurlantzick's argument with a withering rebuttal:

Well, how long did it take radio to topple a regime? Did radio ever topple a regime? Did TV? ... And besides, who set that as the pass-or-fail test of a medium as a catalyst of change: start a revolution or give up? ...

There's some strange, jealous agenda coming out of TNR: an old, fuddy-duddy activist viewpoint that says this new-fangled Internet thang can't be as good as old-fashioned pamphleteering and armed insurrection.

Matthew Cowie at Baodinger offers this elegant summation:

People have often said the Internet is a great tool for democracy. That's true in a democracy. In authoritarian countries the Internet just becomes a tool of oppression.

(Via Smart Mobs.)

Rate your writing

How readable is your writing? Readability.info can score any Web page or Word document according to several standard forumlas.

Buzzworthy, incidentally, apparently requires a fairly high reading level.

(From Eubie's Notes.)

On hiatus

I'm taking a leave of absence until late May so updates will be sporadic for the next few weeks.

If you'd like to receive an e-mail notification when there's a new post, e-mail me; you'll get an "out of office" reply but I'll get the message. Or, you can track new posts via Buzzworthy's RSS feeds (versions 0.91 and 1.0 available.)

Getting unstuck

"You're going nowhere fast in your job. But it doesn't have to be that way." That's the intro to an interesting story in today's Wall Street Journal about How to Get Unstuck, career-wise, against the backdrop of a jobless recovery.

The first pecking order

Sure, Mom and Dad may say they love all the kids equally but the foundations for inequality in later life begin at home, says sociologist Dalton Conley.

Because, says Conley, families develop pecking orders that are shaped by larger social forces and their own changing circumstances. Economic ups and downs, wars, tax policies, access to health care -- even the timing of a divorce -- create ripples that may carry a family's children in different directions.

That's especially true in lower-income families, he says in his new book, "The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why" (Pantheon, 309 pages, $24), because parents often invest the bulk of their limited resources in one promising child.

Which leads to Conley's most startling claim -- that 75 percent of the income inequality in the United States is within families, not between them. Learning how siblings diverge, he says, could shed light on why some of us are poor, others rich.

Read more of P-I reporter Cecelia Goodnow's exploration of Conley's book. Other sociologists tell Goodnow that they're skeptical of his thesis -- but admit they haven't read his book.

Recovering from clutter

Being a packrat isn't just a sign of poor housekeeping; it could be "a very real problem," writes the Sacramento Bee's Alison apRoberts, recounting her visit to a self-help group for clutterers.

(From Jim Romenesko's Obscure Store and reading Room.)

Games to fine art

Are video games art? Or, rather, should they be exhibited in museums and studied by academics like Degas sculptures? The Los Angeles Times ponders the question.

Vigilance on the frontier

The New York Times looks at the phenomenon of online vigilantism and finds that frontier justice in cyberspace may not be such a good thing.

Part of this do-it-yourself approach to justice flows directly from the same quality of online life that makes bad behavior so easy to pull off: anonymity. That's something that Internet advocates on both sides of the law jealously guard from regulation. "Historically and currently, anonymity is part of how constitutional democracies are supposed to operate," said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, "and it would be bizarre to say, 'Oops! Can't do that any more.' "

But even more broadly, the appeal of online vigilantism stems from the persistent sense that the Internet remains a very Wild West kind of place.

And from a general belief that existing law enforcement agencies and key corporate players (i.e., Microsoft) aren't doing enough to keep hackers, spammers, scammers and pedophiles -- the main targets of cyber-vigilantes -- under control.

The Scooby factor

"Scooby-Doo 2" topped the box office for its opening weekend, raking in an estimated $30.7 million, yet another testament to the cartoon canine's enduring popularity.

I'm personally baffled by Scooby's long-term appeal -- and Slate's Chris Suellentrop apparently is, too, despite making a respectable effort to explain it:

Acknowledging Scooby's durability is easier than explaining it. Scooby-Doo wormed its way into the culture through years of drip-drip accretion. It's the Cal Ripken of cartoons: Not the best, though certainly not the worst, it just shows up day after day after day, and you end up loving it for it.

Casting 'real' people

How do they find those people who appear on reality TV shows? The process is a lot more complicated than it used to be, the New York Times reports.

The casting of reality shows, once an intuitive, on-the-fly endeavor, has become much more of a science, with its own growing set of protocols and rituals. Several producers have hired psychologists to help them with the vetting process. And to avoid the unscripted scandals that could run afoul of the decency standards of an increasingly agitated public and the Federal Communications Commission, both producers and networks are investing more time and money into systematically investigating their contestants' backgrounds.

For example, "Apprentice" wannabes must survive "six rounds of cuts, two extensive questionnaires, a medical exam, an intelligence test and the kind of background check usually reserved for secret agents."

Happy birthday, Melissa

Good grief, has it really been five years since the Melissa worm exploded onto the scene? Yes, according to this article from the SeattlePI.com archives.

Melissa was the first really "mainstream" worm to spread over the Internet, exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft software to infect 1 million computers in North America; and, consequently, perhaps the first "star" virus of the modern age.

To commemorate the anniversary, Wired News' Michelle Delio interviews various security experts to get their views on how far we've come in the years since.

Alas, not very: we're still bedeviled by worms that spread via e-mail, exploiting Windows security holes, poorly administered networks and/or end-user gullibility. Even worse, we've come to accept this as "the new normal." One expert interviewed by Delio points out just how big an adjustment we've all had to make:

"Melissa was Paleolithic times by today's standards," said George Smith, a senior fellow with GlobalSecurity.org. "You'd think five years is enough time to get something done about viruses?

"Imagine a world in which everything is done with the diligence exhibited by those who are developing network architectures and software," said Smith. "It would be a world where teenage boys seated at computers can contaminate everything simply by bringing to bear the intellectual power necessary to read a comic book.

"You'd have to grow your own food. Going outside the house would be impossible because you'd be continuously hit by paintballs and rolls of sodden toilet paper. Your car would have its wiring disappear, eaten by cybernetic rats. Your grass would die because someone would constantly be spraying dog piss on it and the police would decline to intervene. You wouldn't be able to hold a phone conversation because strangers would always be shouting 'undeliverable mail,' 'hi,' 'your bill,' 'your account,' 'see attached document,' 'thanks,' 'look at this,' 'here is the information you requested,' 'you have sent a virus,' and so on."

Costco's costly largesse

Happy employees make for happy customers, goes the old adage; but what if it makes for unhappy shareholders? That's the dilemma facing Costco, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Costco Wholesale Corp. often is held up as a retailer that does it right, paying well and offering generous benefits.

But Costco's kind-hearted philosophy toward its 100,000 cashiers, shelf-stockers and other workers is drawing criticism from Wall Street. Some analysts and investors contend that the Issaquah, Wash., warehouse-club operator actually is too good to employees, with Costco shareholders suffering as a result.

Update: P-I reporter Christine Frey looks at this issue from the Costco perspective -- and finds that the company is quite comfortable with its philosophy for compensaitng employees.

Simputer ships

The Simputer, my favorite example of socially responsible vaporware, has finally become a hard reality, the Associated Press reports.

It's a low-cost, Linux-powered handheld computer designed by Indian scientists in 2001 to introduce computing to populations too poor to afford regular computers. Simputers aren't designed for use by individuals or single households but entire villages. Wired News outlined the developers' ambitious goals, and the ingenious ways they use technology to circumvent problems such as illiteracy, three years ago (although the specs of the finished device have been upgraded from what's detailed in the article).

Will the Simputer have as great an impact as Freeplay's wind-up radios have? We'll have to wait and see (although people are already hashing out the issues on Slashdot, naturally.)

Taiwan this weekend

Hundreds of thousands of supporters of defeated presidential candidate Lien Chan protested in the streets of Taipei today, demanding a recount of the contested election. Reuters has a good, scene-setting account.

Rounding up other news organizations' coverage:

• CNN notes that Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian, re-elected by an original margin of 30,000 votes, has agreed to a recount -- but notes that the country lacks any legal mechanism for holding one. Meanwhile, he announced he would meet with Lien on Monday.
• Nonetheless, Channel News Asia (Singapore) reports that Chen was "defiant" and took "a tough line" with the protesters, calling the civil unrest a test of his leadership.
• As The Age (Melbourne, Australia) puts it oh-so-succinctly, "The rivalry between Mr Chen and Mr Lien threatens a prolonged crisis that could paralyse policymaking in one of Asia's most vibrant economies."
• Washington Post focuses on what Chen's re-election, the public unrest and the Bush administration's apparent endorsement mean for China. No, Beijing isn't happy at all.
• Reuters points out that "Taiwan hit back, telling Beijing to mind its own business."
• On a related front, the Post reports that the election crisis in Taiwan could affect chances for democratic reform and direct elections in Hong Kong.

The everlasting e-book

Librié, the first portable reader using E Ink's "electronic ink" technology, is scheduled to go on sale in Japan in late April, BBC News reports.

If you're not familiar with it, E Ink displays are basically reprogrammable paper with "ink" particles that can be reshaped to display different text and graphics. They're legible even in bright sunlight and don't need a constant power source. I've heard some people muse that they could be the future of the printed newspaper or magazine.

Librié will be able to store "500 texts" in its rewritable onboard memory and can render about 10,000 pages on four AAA batteries.

(Full disclosure: Hearst Corp., which owns the Post-Intelligencer, is an investor in E Ink.)

Go East, tech edge

Is America losing its technological edge?

BusinessWeek pooh-poohs the idea. After all, it points out, we've seen just this sort of hand-wringing before, when Asian manufacturers started dominating consumer electronics a decade ago. And our economy survived that one, didn't it (and we got cheaper stuff, to boot)?

Indeed, Manjeet Kripalani, also writing in BusinessWeek, argues that banning offshoring of jobs to India could ultimately be bad for the U.S. Why? India's traditionally protectionist economy is finally opening up as leaders see the benefits of free trade -- but with elections coming up this spring, that could stop dead, closing off a huge potential market for American business.

On a related note, Wired News highlights a new report from the high-tech trade group AeA says America's schools are to blame for the offshoring trend. Companies aren't just looking for cheap labor abroad; "they are also looking for skilled technology workers that they increasingly can't find in the U.S."

Wartime = re-election?

Slate history columnist David Greenberg addresses a topical question: Does war help presidents get re-elected?

When we recall Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War or Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, we impart to them a heroic aura, imagining Americans muting political rivalries and rallying behind the president and the war at hand. Few citizens, we suppose, could have opposed these valiant leaders.

But serving as president during wartime has in fact been a mixed blessing and certainly no guarantee of re-election. Lincoln and FDR, who led the nation through cataclysmic wars, were indeed re-elected, but not without difficulty. Presidents who waged more remote and less popular wars, such as Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson, found incumbency a liability.

Dangerous assumptions

Assumptions can be very dangerous. Case in point: Today's top story on SeattlePI.com, about how a level three sex offender who killed a woman last week had been employed as a custodian at a YWCA women's shelter.

The Y didn't know. He had been placed through a temp agency and a Y spokesperson said they believed the agency performed criminal background checks on all employees, which it doesn't. From now on, however, it will be a requirement of any temp agency doing business with the Y.

Win wars with iTunes

Does Apple's iTunes Music Store hold lessons for how to prevail in the war on terror?

That's essentially what Lawrence Lessig argues in a thoughtful essay for Wired magazine. He ponders how advancing technology will make self-replicating weapons of mass destruction (e.g., really deadly viruses) possible, and how we might protect ourselves against them.

It is impossibly hard to build an atomic bomb; when you build one, you've built just one. But the equivalent evil implanted in a malevolent virus will become easier to build, and if built, could become self-replicating. This is P2P (peer-to-peer) meets WMD (weapons of mass destruction), producing IDDs (insanely destructive devices).

Lessig sees a lesson in how the war against file sharing has been waged that suggests how we could keep such terrible weapons contained. But, we need to play our cards right:

There's a logic to P2P threats that we as a society don't yet get. Like the record companies against the Internet, our first response is war. But like the record companies, that response will be either futile or self-destructive. If you can't control the supply of IDDs, then the right response is to reduce the demand for IDDs. Yet ... we've done precisely the opposite. Our present course of unilateral cowboyism will continue to produce generations of angry souls seeking revenge on us.

iPod mini's big allure

On the face of it, there's no logical reason for most people to buy an iPod mini. It costs $249 and stores a mere 4GB of music files; the low-end, full-size iPod costs just $50 more and stores 15GB. Plus, it lacks the connector to work with many iPod accessories.

Bottom line: It's not a good deal.

But try telling that to the scads of people who've bought the iPod's colorful little cousin since it was released Feb. 20 (the company even had 100,000 pre-orders). So many that Apple has pushed back plans to introduce iPod mini to other countries.

Wired News' Leander Kahney put it best:

The mini is the perfect iPod: sleek, easy to use and easy to carry around. And it plays music -- beautiful, beautiful music -- what could be better?

... Customers are buying it for its merits, and they couldn't give a damn about its relative demerits. ... That's why competing players like Dell's DJ, Archos' Jukebox or Creative's MuVo2 stand little chance of unseating the iPod as the top player on the market: None is as cool, as slick, as pleasurable to hold, use or listen to as the iPod mini.

Kahney notes that iPods and iPod minis have become culturally significant objects of affection, too.

Finding jobs with legs

Two days ago, I listed some job categories that experts believe are in danger of shifting overseas in the near future. But what types of jobs are likely to stay here in the United States in the long term?

IBM researcher Jim Spohrer is trying to figure that out as part of a broader goal: identifying the "half-life of a job," according to the San Francisco Chronicle:

Spohrer and his colleagues, who study the business operations of IBM's corporate clients, have found that while certain types of jobs come and go in less than a decade ... other professions persist as higher-tech versions of themselves.

Jobs that endure, such as nurse or news reporter, share certain traits regardless of the industry they serve, according to Spohrer.

Some of those traits are obvious. Jobs that involve face-to-face contact with customers, such as emergency room doctor, or intimate knowledge of a market, such as a salesperson with a specific territory, tend to stick around for a long time.

Other long-term job traits are harder to define.

"Jobs that persist are dynamic and creative and require the ability to team with others," Spohrer said. "At its heart, a company is simply a group of teams that come together to create" products and services, he said.

Not suprisingly, Spohrer's team discovered that jobs that can be automated are less likely to survive.

Robots reflect us

Robot gladiators reflect the societies that build them, if the competitors in the first international Robolympics are anything to go by, BBC News notes.

The competitions seemed to break down along cultural lines. The Japanese robots reigned supreme when it came to sumo-wrestling, while the European teams showed off their skills on the football pitch.

As for the American machines, they specialised in demolishing the living hell out of each other in one-on-one robot combat.

Game with AIM

Andy Baio has set up a bot that lets people play old Infocom text-adventure games over AOL Instant Messenger, Wired News reports. The repertoire includes all the classics -- the "Zork" trilogy, "Leather Goddesses of Phobos," "Enchanter," "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

"Instant messaging and text adventures go together like peanut butter and jelly," he says.

The system works by having an AIM user send a message to either InfocomBot or InfocomBot2. The bots then prompt the user to type the name of the game they want to play. ...

Once the game has started, players enter their commands as if they were carrying on a regular instant-message conversation.

"You type commands like 'go north' or 'examine sword' and (a) parser responds with a description," explains Baio. "In essence, you're having an ongoing dialogue with the game."

Call me a diehard (and aging) geek, but this is just too cool. And surprisingly fun.

Now, if I can just remember how to get the Babel fish ...

E-mail is the mind killer

Something else you can add to the list of reasons to hate e-mail, writes Wall Street Journal columnist Carol Hymowitz:

Managers complain that the relentless flow of computer messages disrupts thought processes and kills creativity. There is no quiet time available during the workday, or even after office hours, to digest information, to ponder fresh ideas, to concentrate wholeheartedly on a difficult problem, or even to daydream. Instead, the expectation that messages from colleagues, bosses, customers and suppliers will be answered promptly requires that employees think only in short bursts, moving quickly from one topic to another.

Currying favor

A quick glimpse at what people are worked up over elsewhere in the world:

Inspectors in Surrey, England, discovered that many curry restaurants were putting illegally high levels of some food colorings in chicken tikka masala -- "the nation's favourite dish"-- to achieve the bright reddish color British diners expect, the Guardian reports.

The additives in question: tartrazine (E102), sunset yellow (E110) and ponceau 4R (E124).

The Independent fleshes out the list with some background:

While the colourings are only dangerous if consumed in large quantities, other countries have been sufficiently concerned to ban their use altogether. All three are claimed to be linked to hyperactivity in children.

Tartrazine, a dye made from coal tar, is banned in Norway, Finland and Austria because of concerns that it can cause blurred vision, purple skin patches and is hazardous for asthmatics and anyone allergic to aspirin. It is used in cakes, soft drinks and sauces, while some egg manufacturers feed it to their chickens to make their yolks extra yellow. Sunset yellow is also banned in Norway and Finland but elsewhere is used in juices, sweets and sauces. Scientists have linked it with chromosome damage and kidney tumours as well as abdominal pain, hives, nausea and vomiting. Ponceau 4R, which is illegal in the US and Norway, is believed to cause cancer in animals.

Oh, what exactly makes this Indian-inspired dish the favorite of Britons? The Telegraph explains.

Ultimate e-mail address?

Would you like an e-mail address that's so long that:

• E-mail programs and Web forms can't deal with it;
• People can't remember it;
• Companies you deal with think it has to be a fake.

Those are some of the "features" you get if you sign up for a free e-mail account with
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com.

Convergence confusion

Computers, toys and consumer electronics are different things, right? Not necessarily and not anymore, Frank Catalano writes in a thoughtful essay examining convergence.

Manufacturers are increasingly blurring the lines between once distinct product categories and, in the long run, this could be good for consumers. Provided, he notes, that companies don't fall into the trap of trying to make products that are all things to all people.

In the world of consumer electronics, consumers don’t want to think hard to figure out why a product is important to them, or work hard to get at the benefit. Smart companies stay focused on a single, tangible benefit and let the other features come along for the ride.

Who's offshorable now?

"The list of jobs being affected by the movement of U.S. work to lower-cost countries around the world is growing," the Wall Street Journal reports.

Among the occupations already seeing jobs shift abroad:

• Medical transcriptionists.
• Accountants and tax professionals.
• Technical writers.
• Architects and drafters.
• Legal and investment researchers.
• Computer animators.
• Print designers and layout artists.
• Insurance claims processors.

On the plus side, the Journal notes that some fields which appear vulnerable to offshoring really aren't, because they're so tightly regulated. Radiologists, for example, could interpret X-rays and medical images anywhere, in theory, but federal laws mandate that any working for a U.S. hospital be trained and licensed here.

If you're looking for actual numbers of U.S. jobs lost, the Journal quotes a Forrester Research vice president's estimate that 580,000 white-collar jobs will be offshored by 2005, and 1.6 million by 2010. To put that in perspective, there were 138.3 million U.S. workers at the end of February 2004.

Update on Yee

After dropping criminal charges against him, the Army reprimanded Capt. James Yee, formerly a Muslim chaplin at Guantanamo Bay, for two minor infractions under military law: adultery and downloading pornography onto his government-issued computer.

That's quite a drop from original accusations of espionage and sedition. P-I columnist Robert L. Jamieson Jr. argues that the Army owes Yee an apology for its "modern-day witch hunt." In an unscientific, online poll, a majority of readers agreed.

The San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board takes a similar stand, writing: "No democratic government should be able to ruin a person's life in this way."

In an opinion piece published at CounterPunch and Al Jazeerah, Mike Whitney takes a less measured tone, calling the Yee case "just the most recent perversion [of] justice under the Bush Administration."

Meanwhile, San Jose Mercury News columnist L.A. Chung laments how most media outlets underplayed the low-key end of the Yee case, especially given its explosive beginning: "Take care of the conclusions you reach on the initial reports. You might miss an exoneration later."

IBM: where the jobs aren't

Recent articles on offshoring have duly noted that IBM plans on creating 5,000 jobs domestically this year. Sounds good but the Wall Street Journal does some digging and points out that, overall, Big Blue "may actually wind up extinguishing more U.S. jobs in the economy at large than it creates this year -- even while adding a little to its own payroll."

The anomaly springs from one of IBM's most important businesses, a more traditional form of "outsourcing." Other companies hire IBM to take over their payroll, IT and other non-core, back-end operations to reduce costs.

As part of these agreements, IBM usually hires the employees of the client company -- sometimes thousands of them -- who handle the work being transferred. Such outsourcing now brings in about $15 billion a year for IBM, representing 17% of its revenue and much of its growth prospects.

Only a small part of this kind of outsourcing typically results in jobs being exported to other countries -- a trend known as "offshoring." But it does result in another kind of job loss: Often, IBM ends up laying off some of the workers it hires from outsourcing clients as it makes the acquired operations more efficient. Meanwhile, the workers from the client companies who remain on the IBM payroll often suffer cuts in pay and benefits.

The pattern worries many IBM workers, both longtime employees and those who joined Big Blue as part of an outsourcing agreement. And it helps explain, in part, why U.S. hiring has been anemic even as the economy expands by other measures.

And yes, the Journal notes, the jobs of some of those outsourced workers laid off by IBM are offshored.

Trial challenges

Ironically, all that gavel-to-gavel coverage of high-profile trials may actually make the courts less open, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Increasingly, the Times notes, sealed documents and gag orders are being used in big cases to prevent news coverage from influencing potential jurors and damaging prospects for a fair trial. In Martha Stewart's stock fraud trial, the judge even took the extraordinary step of closing jury selection to the public.

The curtain-lowering trend has stung 1st Amendment advocates, who trace it to an anti-media backlash after the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1995. They say that secrecy might have contributed to jury problems in high-profile trials, and that numerous appellate court decisions have reaffirmed openness in prosecutions not involving national security.

Those precedents hold that a watchful public is crucial to the competent and impartial administration of justice. But the precedents are being tested again and again in lower courts caught in the spotlight's glare — high-interest cases like those involving [Michael] Jackson, Martha Stewart, Kobe Bryant and the suddenly famous Scott Peterson, the Modesto fertilizer salesman charged with killing his wife, Laci, and the unborn son she was carrying.

Judges are also more likely to ban cameras from the courtroom now, the Times says, albeit for a somewhat less noble reason: no one wants to repeat the mistake of O.J. Simpson murder trial judge Lance Ito, whose lackluster management of the proceedings was visible to all.

Eyes on Paul Allen

We already reported on Paul Allen's latest contribution ($13.5 million) to the search for extraterrestrial life. However, the BBC News version has the cutest accompanying photo.

'Witty' no laughing matter

Another week, another worm.

The latest unwanted visitor hit tens of thousands of PCs worldwide over the weekend, overwriting data on infected hard disks to eventually render them unbootable. Ironically, "Witty" -- named for a comment embedded in its code -- exploited a vulnerability in Internet Security Systems' BlackICE and RealSecure firewalls to do its dirty work.

Fortunately, because Witty brings down infected computers, it died off quickly, CNet News.com reports.

The Washington Post surveys the scope of the damage while TechWeb goes into more technical details of how "Witty" works.

If you're running BlackICE or RealSecure, ISS has patches available for download.

TiVo the budget slasher

TiVo as a cure for kids' consumerism? That's one example of how the popular DVR has
changed the lives of users, according to the New York Times:

For some TiVo users, household expenses have actually decreased since they forked over the cash to buy the box and pay for the monthly subscription. Ann Silberman of Sacramento, Calif., buys fewer toys for her 7-year-old son, Matt Kempster, than she did for his 17-year-old brother at that age because Matt never sees TV commercials.

"He doesn't know about the popular toys or junk food, because he doesn't watch live TV," Ms. Silberman said. "We record the wholesome shows that we want him to see, and that is what is available for him."

Yet another reason to hope that PC Magazine columnist Jim Louderbeck is wrong in his analysis of why TiVo Will Die -- although he does make some excellent points.

Saving Hubble

The Hubble Space Telescope will not go gently into that dark night, it seems. The Washington Post reports on the groundswell of popular support for saving it despite NASA's announced plans to put it to rest:

Hubble's distress touched a national nerve. It has become the people's telescope, its fate of vital interest to everyone from the scientists who use it and minister to its needs to amateur astronomers to breakfast-table enthusiasts who marvel at Hubble's spectacular images.

Impractical peripherals

The Universal Serial Bus connector is proving to be, well, more universal than anyone dreamed. Reuters reports that a truly astonishing array of devices has been built to use the powered peripheral port.

Among the more outré: a glowing, duck-shaped flash drive and a noodle cooker.

Real prospects

Is RealNetworks the next Netscape, doomed to be crushed under Microsoft's heel?

The parallels are many: both were industry pioneers, carving out new software categories that they dominated until Microsoft decided to compete by building rival technologies into Windows. Shrinking market shares and high-profile antitrust cases followed.

But the New York Times says Real may yet escape Netscape's fate. Analysts the Times interviewed agree that Real can build a future by moving away from software and toward content-distribution ventures such as its Rhapsody music-streaming service. Founder and CEO Rob Glaser, meanwhile, thinks it's still too early to leave software development behind and tells the Times that he has high hopes for RealOne Player on cell phones and other mobile platforms, where Microsoft isn't a significant player (and may never be so long as its Media Player is tightly bound to its operating systems).

On a (kind of) related note, Wired News reports on a South by Southwest panel that discussed whether independent, offline music stores have a future. Consensus: They do -- at least in the bigger cities.

Top stories of the week

More overlap than usual among the two lists for the week of March 15-20, 2004:

Top clicks (most read articles)

1. Agency initiates steps for selective draft
2. Late-model car codes frustrate mechanics
3. Iraq a year later: Criticism about Bush, Iraq war won't stand over time
4. Jones near Seahawks deadline
5. Vigilantes dispense cyberjustice on eBay
6. Tampa Bay's Lynch visits Seahawks
7. Boy shoots himself in 8th-grade classroom
8. M's 'next wave' demoted
9. Booze flash! Tests confirm that beer bubbles do fall
10. You might have a beef with these vegetarians

Top picks (most e-mailed articles)

1. Agency initiates steps for selective draft
2. Iraq a year later: Criticism about Bush, Iraq war won't stand over time
3. Late-model car codes frustrate mechanics
4. You might have a beef with these vegetarians
5. New treatment center helps fill autistic children's growing need
6. Boy shoots himself in 8th-grade classroom
7. Old label Pabst beckons new drinkers
8. Methodists begin trial of gay minister
9. Move over, burgers, fish and chips: Pubs are raising the bar on food
10. Booze flash! Tests confirm that beer bubbles do fall

Dire straits in Taiwan

Was Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian lucky to dodge an assassin's bullet on Friday, or was he lucky -- too lucky -- to have it happen just one day before an election that he narrowly won? In other words, was it all a conspiracy?

That's the buzz in Taiwan today, AFP reports, after Chen was re-elected by a razor-thin margin of just 0.2 percent. Observers had predicted he could lose by a margin of up to 5 percent, according to Newsweek.

The Associated Press offers a quick recap of the unanswered questions and suspicious details surrounding the apparent assassination attempt. Meanwhile, The Straits Times points out that on the eve of the apparent assassination, Lien's party, the long-dominant Kuomintang, had warned that Chen's Democratic Progressive Party might resort to last-minute "dirty tricks."

Taiwan's high court has ordered ballot boxes sealed amid escalating protests from supporters of Chen's defeated opponent, Lien Chan, demanding a recount, according to Reuters.

Whatever happens, the ramifications for Taiwan's political culture will be long-lasting, Newsweek also notes, drawing parallels with the 2000 U.S. election: Chen would be a president with no clear public mandate whose legitimacy had been challenged in the courts.

Bloomberg, meanwhile, touches on the potential economic fallout.

On a related note, the election's outcome may also be a setback for Taiwanese independence, the San Francisco Chronicle notes, with a separate ballot referendum failing because not enough voters turned out. Even so, "an overwhelming number of those who did -- 92 percent -- said 'yes' to the question of whether Taiwan should seek talks with the mainland on a 'peace and stability framework,' and the same number supported the idea of strengthening the island's defenses if China refuses to redeploy hundreds of missiles pointed at it."

Marge Simpson, super-mom

Perhaps missed amid all the hoopla this past week about new planet(oid)s and year-old wars -- well, I missed it anyway -- was the news that Britons had voted Marge Simpson the best celebrity mother in a poll run by The Mothers' Union, an international Christian charity founded in 1876.

It's not as outrageous as you might think. The Telegraph's editorial writers detail Marge's virtues as wife and mother -- and find them inseparable from the family values that are, ironically, at the heart of "The Simpsons":

In the guise of subversion, The Simpsons was an affirmation of the core values of family, community and, as the Archbishop puts it, faithfulness. ...

Never an easy business, motherhood, in the age of working wives, failing schools, divorce-on-demand, dumbed-down television and the proliferation of the kiddie "rights" industry, needs all the worthwhile role models it can find.

And it found a true star in The Simpsons. Marge may have her failings. She washes her hair twice a day, and isn't beyond temptation, but if it is true that the mother's heart is the child's classroom then, at least, between shampoos, there is no one better to learn from than Marge.

The case for head space

Web hosting company C I Host paid a guy to walk around with its logo tattooed on his shaved head for five years.

I'm trying to decide how much this disturbs me.

Answer: Less than the fact that someone else is trying to start a
business built around a similar idea, renting out the otherwise vacant
forehead space of needy college students.

(Spotted on Viral Marketing Blog.)

(Note: For the sake of full disclosure, I'm a C I Host customer.)

Trump trademarks

Billionaire and reality TV icon Donald Trump has filed papers to trademark his "Apprentice" catchphrase "You're fired," The Smoking Gun reports.

Well, if there's one thing the show's made clear, it's that the Donald doesn't pass up business opportunities.

FCC as language police

Salon's Eric Boehlert examines the Federal Communications Commission's new role as an "indecency hanging judge."

"They're on a roll," says Arthur Belendiuk, a Washington communications attorney who has helped file indecency complaints against radio broadcasters in recent years. "Indecency is clearly the flavor of the month at the FCC. How long it will last nobody knows."

Update: The Associated Press issued a handy Q&A on just what constitutes indecency when it comes to broadcasting.

Different takes on Yee

There are a lot of ways to tell the latest story of U.S. Army Capt. James Yee, a Fort Lewis-based soldier who served as a chaplain to detainees at Guantanamo Bay before being arrested on suspicion of espionage. That accusation didn't pan out and the Army dropped all remaining charges against Yee yesterday.

• The Associated Press offers a basic, just-the-facts account.
• The Newark Star-Ledger also takes a fairly straightforward approach that emphasizes the official explanation about national security concerns driving the decision.
• The New York Times, meanwhile, takes a more critical look at a case that had become "a lingering embarrassment for the Pentagon." The Times points up Lee's lawyer's contention that a trial could have been conducted without any sensitive information being made public, and suggests that the numerous delays in prosecution "provided an opportunity to negotiate a settlement."
• The Washington Post gets a military law expert's take on the merits, or lack thereof, of the government's case against Yee.
• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer raises the question of whether the Pentagon's prosecution (and persecution?) of Yee were motivated by his race (he's an Asian American) and religion (he's Muslim).

Viral profit engines

Is the greed of companies that make anti-virus software the real reason why we're plagued by a never-ending onslaught of viruses and worms? That's the jumping-off point for a Wired News story that considers alternative approaches to the standard anti-virus approach.

Happy at work?

Should you expect happiness at work? Wall Street Journal columnist Barbara Moses explores that deceptively simple question, looking at the myriad reasons why so many people would answer "no," and suggesting strategies to make things better.

Looking to history

In an interesting news analysis, the New York Times considers whether the history of laws banning interracial marriage in this country might shed some light on how the courts and states will deal with the issue of same-sex marriages:

Indeed, in the context of interracial marriages, courts in states that banned such unions routinely declined to recognize those performed in states where they were legal.

But the decisions were not uniform. Indeed, the way courts treated interracial marriages illuminates how gay marriages are likely to be treated.

The decisions fall into broad categories, generally turning on whether the couple in question intended to evade their home state's laws. That principle, legal experts say, is likely to govern many disputes about gay marriages performed in Massachusetts.

Safeguarding kids with AI

A British programmer is using artificial intelligence to make the world -- or, at least, the Internet -- a safer place for children. Jim Wightman has written ChatNannies, software that unleashes "nanniebots" to identify potential pedophiles in online chat rooms, New Scientist reports.

Wightman's nanniebots look for classic signs of pedophiles "grooming" children for offline meetings and alerts him when they find suspicious activity. He says that in conversations with 2,000 (presumably) human chatroom users, no one has been able to tell that the nanniebots were software. The 'bots can simulate distinct personalities and even keep up with pop culture, he claims.

Sounds like they'd pass the Turing Test.

Booze news

Proving that no field of inquiry is safe from modern science, researchers have confirmed that yes, indeed, beer bubbles do fall -- and it doesn't violate the laws of physics.

Why the jobs aren't there

The latest state unemployment numbers aren't encouraging: Washington generated just 1,000 net jobs last month. Job growth here is as anemic as it is in the rest of the country.

So, what's going on? Salon economics correspondent James K. Galbraith addressed that earlier this week in a sobering analysis of why the Bush administration's seemingly optimistic forecasts on job growth haven't panned out:

... the failure of the jobs forecast did not occur because economic recovery forecasts were abnormal. They were not. So far as we can tell, it did not occur because someone cooked the books, under instruction or otherwise. No. The true reason is worse than that.

Bush's jobs forecast failed because a jobs recovery never began at all. ...

The conditions for this disaster were set by the tech debacle, by the enormous and unsustainable accumulation of household debt, by the decline in our trade competitiveness and trade balance (under the "high dollar policy"), and by the unsustainability of regressive and opportunistic state and local tax structures. Not since the 1920s had growth been so dependent on speculative investment and mortgage finance. Not in history has our trade position been so weak.

Sedna spotlight

Big space news of the week was, of course, the discovery of the most distant object yet found in the solar system, a planetoid dubbed Sedna by those who found it.

There are lots of angles on this much-reported story. Here are a few that caught my eye:

• Sedna has been designated a planetoid. But should it be called a planet instead? The Daily Pantagraph, of Bloomington, Ill., delves into the question of just what's in a name.
• Whatever its planetary status, the St. Louis Post Dispatch says that Sedna's mere existence can teach us a lot about the solar system's early history and present workings.
• Also on the topic of names, BBC News Online explains just how they pick names for new planets (and planetoids) anyway -- and goes into detail on just why this one was selected. (And no, it's not official yet.)
• Some astronomers believe that Sedna's highly elliptic orbit -- which brings it anywhere from 76 AUs to 1,000 AUs from the sun -- may have been caused by the gravitational influence of an as-yet-undiscovered, Earth-size planet, Space.com reports.
• What do astrologers think about having a new celestial object to deal with? The Sun, from Britain, offers one perspective.

How Google matters

The New York Times delivers a status report on
how far Google has insinuated itself into our culture, for better or worse.

It's also a critical reality check, reminding us of the search engine's limitations and just why the Librarian of Congress thinks that "far too often, it is a gateway to illiterate chatter, propaganda and blasts of unintelligible material."

With an estimated 200 million searches logged daily, Google, the most popular Internet search engine, "has a near-religious quality in the minds of many users," said Joseph Janes, an associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle who taught a graduate seminar on Google this semester. "A few years ago, you would have talked to a trusted friend about arthritis or where to send your kids to college or where to go on vacation. Now we turn to Google."

The Web site that has become a verb is many things to many people, and to some, perhaps too much: a dictionary, a detective service, a matchmaker, a recipe generator, an ego massager, a spiffy new add-on for the brain. Behind the rainbow logo, Google is changing culture and consciousness. Or maybe not — maybe it's the world's biggest time-waster, a vacuous rabbit hole where, in January, 60 million Americans, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, foraged for long-lost prom dates and the theme from "Doogie Howser, M.D."

Simplifying Arabic

What do you do when your 6-year-old refuses to learn the language of her ancestors? Saad D. Abulhab, an Iraqi American librarian, responded by inventing a simplified alphabet for Arabic, the New York Times reports:

The hurdles of learning Arabic as a second language are daunting. Arabic is written right to left, and each letter can take one of four forms, depending on where it appears in a word. Finally, Arabic is printed and written only in flowing script, never as individual letters. ...

Mr. Abulhab created an Arabic alphabet that replicated some of the simpler principles of written English. He designed letters that took one form wherever they appeared in a word, could be printed in block style, and could appear as separate letters instead of connected in cursive form. That alphabet could then be written from left to right for those more comfortable with the pattern of English, or from right to left in the traditional Arabic manner.

Abulhab has patented his invention.

The week that was

A week ago, our top story was Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels' controversial decision to recognize city employees' same-sex marriages. By week's end, the headlines had shifted toward the terrorist attack in Spain and its political fallout and, locally, the news that a nuclear missile may have been damaged at Bangor.

Here are the stories that caught readers' fancy for the week of March 8-13, 2004:

Top clicks (most read):

1. Nuclear missile allegedly damaged
2. Missile incident rattles Canada
3. Agency initiates steps for selective draft
4. New bat in Mariners cleanup spot
5. Seahawks Notebook: Hawks remain Taylor's top choice
6. Taylor checks out Seahawks
7. Seahawks re-sign Jackson to six-year, $25 million contract
8. Zits can be the pits -- for adults, too
9. Throttle on Northwest power use wide open
10. People in the News: Is Paris warming up for sex tape part two?

Top picks (most e-mailed):

1. Nuclear missile allegedly damaged
2. Human remains from pig farm may have gotten in meat
3. Missile incident rattles Canada
4. Around the world in 389 days
5. Police: Woman tried to pass fake $1M bill
6. Outsourcing's long-term effects on U.S. jobs at issue
7. Nickels helps out same-sex marriage
8. Belltown park goes to the dogs
9. Shimomura explores racism in all its guises -- from the racist's POV
10. Sea lion grabs fisherman off boat

Gilligan meets Led Zep

Ever wonder what the theme song from "Gilligan's Island" would sound like if it were set to the tune of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven"?

Well, wonder no more.

(From the Viral Marketing Blog.)

Too grand a challenge

No one took home the $1 million prize in DARPA's Grand Challenge robot road race. In fact, none of the entries even finished -- the most durable autonomous vehicle broke down just 7.4 miles into the 142-mile course.

But the Pentagon program backing the contest deemed it a success nonetheless, MSNBC.com's Alan Boyle reports:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has already gotten a fourfold or fivefold return on its $13 million investment in the yearlong process, said Anthony Tether, DARPA’s director. He said the innovations demonstrated over the past week would help the U.S. military push toward its goal of having a third of its vehicles operate autonomously by 2015.

In other DARPA news, Wired News reports on the agency's even more ambitious plans for space.

Laughs in translation

A while back, I wrote about the potential pitfalls of online translation engines. But sometimes, you want a program to mangle your prose.

For example, check out these fun sites:

• The Dialectizer can "translate" any given Web page or text block into the lingo of rednecks, Cockneys, Elmer Fudd and the Swedish Chef, among others. (Hm, stories about nuclear missile accidents take on an entirely different feel when in the voice of the Swedish Chef.)
• Tha Shizzolator, on the other hand, only renders Web pages in the distinctive speech of rapper Snoop Dogg (complete with occasional profanity). Running NYTimes.com's home page through it generated, among other things, this memorable news update: "Spain has arrested five muthas in connection wit terrorist train bombings that capped 200 muthas 'n injured 1,400 others."

(Links from MacAddict.)

A big corpse story

There's a character on the USA series "Monk," set in San Francisco, called Dale the Whale -- an 800-pound, bedridden criminal mastermind.

I couldn't help thinking about that, or how truth is stranger than fiction, while reading this story from the San Francisco Chronicle: 700-pound dead man proves hard to handle.

A crisis of chicken feet

Horrors! Millions of Chinese diners could be deprived of their chicken feet by outbreaks of bird flu in Delaware and other states. Turns out that the United States is the top supplier of the delicacy to China. Or, it was, before China banned imports of U.S. poultry products last month.

The Chinese market was a perfect complement to the U.S.: where Americans craved breasts and thighs, many Chinese diners preferred legs, wingtips and, of course, feet. "They don't eat 'em in Alabama; they throw 'em away," says Brant Locklier, the Shanghai-based president of Perdue China, who is from Alabama. The Chinese, he says, eat chicken feet "like onion rings."

The U.S. poultry industry also holds advantages over China's: American chickens are generally raised to a larger size, making for a bigger, fattier paw. And whereas Chinese chickens are traditionally sold live to restaurants and consumers, America's system of centralized slaughtering is far more efficient: A typical processing line can amputate 240 pairs of chicken feet per minute.

Best of all, the craze for chicken feet has spread over the past two decades, from southern Cantonese kitchens to all corners of the country.

More insight into global trade from the fine folks at the Wall Street Journal.

Google: A spy's best friend

It's easier than ever to put your documents on the Web, whether it's a journal, a spreadsheet or a database. But, with today's increasingly sophisticated search engines, it's also easier than ever to create inadvertent security risks by doing so, Scott Granneman writes at The Register:

... the fact that it is actually quite easy to find dangerous information using just a search engine and some intelligent guesses is not exactly news to people who think about security professionally. But I'm afraid that there are many uneducated folks putting content onto Web servers that they think is hidden to the world, when it is in reality anything but.

Granneman also gives some disturbingly easy examples using Google's advanced search features.

Placebo power

Is the placebo effect all in a patient's head? Brain scans suggest that might literally be true, Wired News reports in an interesting look at how doctors have tried to explain away the amazing curative powers of sugar pills.

If you're intrigued, check out this good backgrounder at the Skeptics Dictionary.