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Fwiw, I'd found an insanely positive review for a book I was considering buying, and the review didn't seem to include the sorts of specifics someone who'd really read the book would've used. I looked over the Midwest Book Review's history, and -- I'm doing this on memory; could be off a little -- the reviews were all very high, with the gross majority 5's. Turned out they took review solicitations.
There was a dude who wouldn't quit editing out some flavor of the following passage:
Jordan Lapp, an author, asked Mr. Cox [Midwest Book Review's Editor in
Chief] why Mr. Cox felt that Amazon's rating system was flawed, and why
"all of the books [Midwest Book Review] rate merit a 5 star rating."
Mr. Cox answered by saying, "So I instructed our webmaster (who does
all the posting for reviews generated 'in-house' by the Midwest Book
Review editorial staff) to use 5 if the book was given a positive
recommendation." Mr. Cox continued by explaining that, "for a book to
make it all the way through the Midwest Book Review process... it
merited the highest recommendation available under the Amazon rating
system. Inferior books, flawed books, substandard books are assumed to
have been weeded out and never made it to the 'finish line' of
publication in one of our book review magazines."
They do realize those less than 5 star "reviews" would be just as more useful than the ones they let out, right? That is, I'm going out on a limb and say that those sub-5 reviews don't exist. Or at least the "in-house" team isn't paid for writing them.
"I don't think you do. If you did, I'd have a clue about the book. See,
you know how to write the review, you just don't know how to put
critique in there. And that's really the most important part of
the review. The reading and critiquing. Anybody can just write them..."
Sure, that's my take on the quote, but do note I didn't include anything from Seinfeld in my Wikipedia edit. You're welcome to make your own conclusions. ;^)
And the controversial source for this potentially damning material from Mr. Cox? The Midwest Book Review's website. The page with that quote is still there.
Anyhow, I think once you googled Cirt, the anti-editor who kept taking out my changes, enough, you found a connection. If true, this flag would've really helped.
sigh I've probably detailed that here before. The strange thing to me is how much of what's on Wikipedia can be control by those with the most endurance for making edits. Not exactly a merit-based environment at its edges (core?).
Of course what's most interesting is that it'd be possible to algorithmically track places where folks used this tool to influence Wikipedia's contents, and see if there are any obvious categories of COI usages.
Scott Hanselman: Yeah. Iโm looking at Jason Gormanโs Twitter feed and he has a wonderful re- tweet from R. Tyler Croy who says โLet's all argue about whether Haskell or Clojure is better while someone else ships a product with PHP and duct tape.โ
Though that's a pretty funny (and wise) tweet, much of the rest of the podcast it comes from is pretty far from the mark. Ironic, as it's talking about how the irony that programmers are far from the [management] mark.
If AMD and Intel can agree to build processors to the same spec, why can't coders agree on CRUD? RLY? That's a valid parallel? Look, we know how to rebuild Microsoft Word, don't we? In fact, nothing rebuilds as well as code. Folks run EXACTLY the same thing everywhere the code's deployed.
Look, medical devices with software don't crash not [exclusively] because the programmers are wonderful, but because they know how to test. You don't need accredited programmers. You need accredited testing plans.
Scott Hanselman: I wonder if, you know, there's been books on software architecture that have drawn long and extended analogies with software design, with building design, and they do... I think that buildings and how you put up a building and these kinds of things, how do you put up a building without it collapsing, are pretty well understood. Is that because we've got 2,000 years of practice, and with software we've really only got maybe 50 to 100 years?
Oh, please. Construction workers can build buildings that don't fall down because little mistakes in my house don't stop it from compiling. Nobody was building my house the way they do it now 2000, 1000, even 400 years ago. That's a clown statement, bro.
Have these guys ever not built but owned a house? It's a mess of screw-ups and bugs. The hot water doesn't reach the kitchen sink quickly. One window is a different size than the rest. The commode leaks after two months. Light switches are unintuitive. Wiring is faulty and comes lose. The dryer duct is blocked. Years later, the exterior walls gain too much moisture.
The problem, of course, is what I hinted at earlier: Copying software is so easy software development teams forget it happens. Look in some cookie cutter neighborhood that has 5 plans built over and over. Now go into each of those houses and ask their owners (well, knock first if you're overly literal) how quickly the master constructors made each. Find out from the foreman what mistakes were made on each house, and how different those problems were from house to house.
And these guys were working from explicit plans. If I gave you the code to The Gimp and had you type it in all Compute! Gazette style, even if you weren't a programmer at all, it could work. Unlike construction, you need exactly zero experience to reproduce code beyond understanding how to read, type, and hit save a lot.
Every new app requires making new plans. Get it? Every new program, every new library, every new plugin is a brand new plan. And a brand new construction effort. And something that builds a new commode essentially from scratch. Programmers are architects, R&D workers, construction workers, and housing inspectors.
That's the reason every programmer feels more like an artist than a laborer. It's all new. They're not reproducing somebody else's clear plan, even when they amazingly have great mock-ups and test plans. If they had plans, anyone could hit copy & paste.
Houses require constant upkeep. So does code. Drop the metaphor. Or, better yet, get it right.
Decision-makers increasingly face computer-generated information and analyses that could be collected and analyzed in no other way. Precisely for that reason, going behind that output is out of the question, even if one has good cause to be suspicious. In short, the computer analysis becomes the gospel.[4]
Why the increased errors [in the Washington Post]? Clearly, reduced staffing plays some role. A decade ago, at its peak, The Post's newsroom had more than 900 FTES (full-time equivalent employees)... Today, the now-integrated print and online staffs total about 650 FTEs...
The answer may be less about staffing levels and more about the changing duties of copy editors. Gone are the days when they primarily detected errors and smoothed prose for the next day's newspaper. Now they must also operate in an online environment where "search-engine optimization" is a key goal. That requires new skills and time-consuming additional duties. Separate online headlines must be written in a way that attracts attention on the Web. ... Some relief may be coming for beleaguered copy editors. This week, The Post will begin search-engine optimization training for the entire newsroom. Front-end help from reporters and other staff should ease the burden on copy editors. [emboldened emphasis mine]
I don't know about you, but I'm not happy to hear that journalists are writing for the computers to the exclusion of their human readers. I realize there has always been a pressure on writing to the technology. I've done a review of newspapers from the 18th century, and realize the way that length was constrained by the sheets you could afford to print and sell, or how headline lengths are influenced by column and font size, and how inserting pictures are exceptionally difficult. I've seen papers run out of a font and start printing in, eg, italics to finish up a page to save time. I know that content is influenced by technology directly.
Still, what the Washington Post is doing marks a significant change for the press. Now, people are writing content for, say, Google News rather than to point out the most newsworthy events of the day. Like a gamer figuring out the secrets of the algorithm for Mike Tyson's Punch Out ("When he makes the noise, dodge right, and then upppercut"), newspaper reporters, the front line folk, are being asked to learn, anticipate, and integrate the algorithms of the news search engines ("When we're talking about someone in the movies, try to tie Angelina Jolie in there somehow" or "Make sure 'failed Obamacare' is in the title of three of today's stories somehow").
I've noticed the WaPo's declining editorial attention. To redefine what "editing" meanings is to take the lazy fellow's way out. What's happening isn't that you're doing a more complicated job. It's that you're no longer doing your old job. We're more worried about hits than grammar. And what bothers me the most is the degree to which an American institution is pushing onto the front ranks of the free press the onus for making our news match whatever Google's programmers feel is newsworthy.
In the briefest terms, then, I'm exceptionally disappointed that Google's programmers have become the editors of the Washington Post.
I enjoyed thinking through Should we fight for Ogg Vorbis?, a contribution to the Linux Journal by Glyn Moody back in 2007. The most problematic statement in the piece, I think, is this one.
So my doubts about this campaign have nothing to do with any weaknesses in Ogg. It's just that I wonder whether this is really something the free software world should be expending much energy on when there are other more pressing problems. Whereas DRM and software patents, for example, are manifestly and unequivocally bad for free software (and indeed for everyone), that doesn't seem to be true for the MP3 format.
Is there a reason to have an open and free format when patent holders don't seem to care much about the folks who are making free software and aren't paying royalties/license fees? Rather, aren't there more pressing places where license holders are worried about enforcing patents where someone could be turning their OSS coding resources?
I'm not sure how to feel about this one. I know that I'm getting to the point that I prefer PDF over any other file format for printed works. I'm so freakin' tired of dealing with the way doc, docx, rtf, etc keep fookin' slightly whenever I open them in the wrong application. I used to make do with Microsoft Word, 1998 and 2000, and as long as those apps kept working I figured I'd make do. They don't work so well any more. Now that Word 2100 or whatever it's at now can save in pdf, I'd rather just see pdf files. It's harder for me to edit a pdf than even a wacky docx at times, but there are a wealth of fairly reasonably priced apps that'll allow one to mess with pdfs. At worst, I just print them out and scrawl.
Perhaps ODF is the best alternative, but PDF is the practically open format that seems to be doing best, and I don't even have to Google LAME to display it on most OSes.
Does this disinclination to support ODF more directly comprise my politics? Yes, I believe it does. We need a standard that will display well outside of its contemporary platform, and display that way for the foreseeable future and beyond. That seems to be pdf to me (and yes, I realize pdf can sometimes be no more descriptive than avi; you really don't know what's in the wrapper. Again, egg + face).
Still, is there "practically free" that should be good enough? I'm not sure. I don't like the mp3 reasoning any more than I did for gifs years earlier or pdfs, even after they've been declared an open standard (thanks wikipedia) in 2008. OOXML is open too, you know. Yet there's a certainly practicality to using these formats not designed to be open to humans and machines at the same time.
I'd always had a sneaking suspicious that we could mark the start of modernism by the date that we've held in the US as a constant for copyright protection for nearly a century now, c1924, iirc. Anything earlier was a product of a sort of naive, pre-collectively conscious state. Anything afterwards was developed within a culture that understood and desired to exploit and appropriate the worth of the creations or artifacts.
Why, then, did it take me so long to realize that 1924 marks exactly the period when psychotherapy and psychiatry went from cultural unknown to cultural given? The mark of the moment when US society became collectively conscious (whether it realized it or not, ironically enough) was exactly when psychiatry ontologically created the consciousness itself. Heck, if you believe wikipedia, Freud's "The Ego and the Id" was written/pubbed in 1923.
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