WebWriting.com

If two thirds of Americans do not know the original lyrics to their National Anthem maybe singing it in Spanish will help them learn.

Hobbes: What’s the point of attaching a number to everything you do?
Calvin: If your numbers go up, it means you’re having fun.

I can think of a number of people who are be better off not subscribing to Calvin’s philosophy.

There’s a quotation from a NY Times article that highlights how the GOP has infused the American conscious with fear.

For one factor, Sept. 11 put the entire nation on edge about the threat of terrorism. By contrast, the hurricane catastrophe was confined to one region. As a symbol, it may be powerful, but perhaps not as enduringly powerful as what occurred in New York and at the Pentagon.

In reality, the hurricanes were no less confined nor the the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 more widespread. The effects of each rippled throughout the country just as powerfully and the recovery will take just as long. So is Spearfish, South Dakota more in danger of a a hurricane or a dozen suicidal plane hijackers? They are probably more likely to be invaded by Wyoming. Politicians can only play the blame game for so long. Eventually the electorate stops living on edge and gets back to the issues: health care, education and jobs.

I went out to see V for Vendetta tonight. I rarely go out to see movies, mostly because I have a great entertainment room at home where I can watch DVDs in my pajamas with hot cocoa. V was well worth the trip. Despite less than stellar reviews, I would heartily recommend it to any comic book fans looking for a bit of extremism to escape to. I’ll be buying on DVD when it comes out so that I can enjoy it again with my hot cocoa.

Which is worse?

a) Vomiting in your host’s (who happens to be the Prime Minister of Japan) lap.
or
b) Introducing your guest as the president of that small group of islands that so vexes his government.

Tom Schatz from Citizens Against Government Waste thinks that spending Homeland Security money on clowns and gyms is a waste. I couldn’t disagree more. If the goal of the DHS is to prevent a terrorist attack then we should disband it and focus on reforming the CIA and FBI to better do their jobs. On the other hand, if the goal of the DHS is to save lives, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend money then on fitness and fire safety education. “Why is that?” you may ask. Recent statistics claim that nearly 80% of Americans are not physically active enough to stay healthy. While fire is not as large a danger as poor health, the same number of Americans died from fires in 2004 as did due to terrorist attacks in 2001 (and significantly more every other year) while there were over 17,000 fire related injuries. If we’re going to be spending money on the homeland it should be for health and personal safety as well as emergency response.

Following a link from Bruce Schneier reveals an excellent rebuttal by Daniel J. Solove of William Stuntz’s Misguided Theory of Privacy and Transparency. To summarize Mr. Solove’s argument: Mr. Stuntz would feel more at home in puritan New England than in the unbearably free and insecure world we live in today.

I can imagine the conversation over staff replacements:

Sr. Aide: Mr. President, our numbers are getting lower every day. We need some new staff.
Mr. Bush: How about getting some of those guys over in Budget - their numbers are going up all the time.

With the heated debate surrounding Rumsfeld it is becoming clear that Bush could get a fresh start with Iraq and probably get a boost in the polls by replacing him . What was once just a cry from war critics has now become a common platform for both war supporters and Republicans seeking reelection. Rumsfeld has come to epitomize the all the mistakes (be they strategic or tactical) of the Iraq war and war supporters reason that a fresh face would allow the administration to put past mistakes behind them and push forward. There is growing concern amongst the pro-war crowd that with Rumsfeld at the helm, public support will wane and if low polls do not force Bush to withdraw public opposition may prompt Congress to act. This is why the GOP find themselves in a tough spot. The Democrats are reasonably close to taking back the House and if Bush’s loyalist politics are the center of criticism it can only help their case. If the Democrats win (and find some gumption along the way) that could mean increased difficulty for the administration, just as it did for Clinton during his last two years. Some say Bush now wants to be remembered as the savior of Iran. I suspect history will look back at the Bush administration and conclude that Bush’s greatest strength - that which won him the Presidency - and the ultimate reason for his failures as a President is his loyalty to his friends over his country.

The first two panels of Shoe this morning are funny:

Pollster: “Would you care to join the war on global warming?”
Shoe: “I don’t know…we haven’t even tried diplomacy yet.”

If it hasn’t dawned on the Bush Administration that the best possible outcome for the Iran is us bombing them then, in the words of “President” Bartlet:

“We weren’t prepared for someone to try to outfox us with a stratagem so sophisticated it’s an entire generation beyond ‘Hey look, your shoelaces are untied’!? “

Fred Wilson (who rarely blogs politics), nails it on why the GOP is clueless about the significance of closing our borders. Fred even achieves relative consensus with his political opponent Steve Kane. We are all immigrants and that’s what makes America unique; it is how we became the leaders of the free world. Maybe it’s because Fred lives in New York, not in Washington.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

While Congress has shifted to botching to the latest “problem” griping the nation, the EFF is pursuing the previous one: the Bush administration’s wire-tapping program. You can pick any number of fundamental problems with large scale wire-tapping but the most serious by far is the lack of oversight. Bruce Schneier says, “when it comes to government, trust is based on transparency.” If we cannot trust our government then we should not give them these powers and we must punish them if they abuse the powers we do give them.

Isaac Garcia explores the Good in E-mail. I am going to dig a little deeper to try and understand why people consistently choose to use e-mail. Taking a hint from Greg Raiz I will take a cognitive load approach to under sanding what’s so good about e-mail. I don’t have the bandwidth to compare these use cases using the many different collaborative suits that are out there but I would encourage their developers to do so.

Persona Alex: para-legal
Use case: Write a memo
Steps to write a memo:
1) Click New
2) Type recipient’s name
3) Type subject
4) Type memo
5) Click Send

Overhead: Steps 1 and 5

Persona Jamie: lawyer
Use case: Read and reply to memo
Steps to read and reply to memo:
1) Click on bold subject
2) Read memo
3) Click Reply
4) Edit response
5) Click Send

Overhead Steps 3 and 5.

Even if there’s no room to remove any steps collaboration software should take no more that five per person to carry on a conversation. Any software that takes more than five steps has complexity working against it. With this use case in mind it is clear that Alex is focused on step 4 while Jamie is focused on steps 2 and 4. The faster they can get there and finish, the more attractive the software is from a cognitive load perspective. The original Palm Pilot managed to skip step 1 in the calendaring application by allowing you to just click on the time you wanted to start an activity and just start writing. An e-mail program might have an empty e-mail ready to go at the top or bottom of the screen. When you start typing it expands and lets to proceed directly to steps 2-4. I am not aware of an easy way to get rid of step 5.

It is important to note that Alex chose to initiate the process. If some collaborative suite could reduce just Alex’s load he might be more inclined to use an alternative to e-mail. This thinking goes directly against systems that require tagging or filing new documents. Shifting the burden of organizing content to the creator is a sure way to guarantee that no one uses the software. Barring corporate mandate Alex will take the path of least resistance and send Jamie an e-mail.

Also note that, as Isaac puts it, “Email is in your face.” Jamie will probably respond using whatever mechanism is easiest. If Alex sends an e-mail with a link to a document on a website or a wiki page, Jamie might be more inclined to respond in that manner. And a wiki, for example, may only take four steps if the link Alex sends is to an editing page: click, read, edit, save.

Although ninety percent of collaboration is between Alex and Jamie many collaboration suites focus on the ability to find information. So for completeness sake here is a look at search. Typically there are two types of e-mail organization: folders and the in-box. People who are very organized spend time moving their incoming mail into folders based on various topics: sender’s affiliation, project, customer, etc. People who don’t organize are forced to search: sort by sender, sort by subject, sort by date or keyword search.

Persona Zack: client
Use case: Review documents from lawyers
Steps to review documents sent by e-mail
1) Click on “Documents from Lawyers” folder
2) Scan subjects
3) Click to read e-mail
4) Click again to read attachment

Overhead: Step 4

or
1) Sort by sender
2) Scan subject
3) Click to read e-mail
4) Click again to read attachment

Overhead: Step 4

or
1) Click Find
2) Type keywords
3) Click Search
4) Scan subjects
5) Click to read e-mail
6) Click again to read attachment

Overhead: Steps 1, 3 and 6

To use organized search the user has to indicate some method of search such as a folder or an attribute. Clicking to read the attachment is a hassle - especially programs that prompt you after you’ve clicked the attachment as to whether you really want to open this attachment. The reasoning is that you may accidentally click on spyware but you’re just as likely to get in the habit of clicking OK and launch it anyways. Personally I’d like to see attachment displayed in-line wherever possible so I can skip step 4 completely.

In the last case is simpler in Apple Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird. Both have a search box into which you can start typing and it will automatically search for matching messages. Neither searches attachments thought and Thunderbird requires that you hit enter after typing in your search phrase.

A quotation from a former defense official via the The New Yorker:

“a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.”

These kinds of assumptions are the same as those that led the Bush administration to believe that people would welcome them with leis and hookahs. Instead of relying on the self fulfilling beliefs of the loyally appointed mission planners, perhaps we might want to do some research as to how people will react. This with the full understanding that until you actually dropping bombs on them, you really have no idea whatsoever how a people will react. The article continues:

“While one goal was to have ‘eyes on the ground’, the broader aim was to ‘encourage ethnic tensions’ and undermine the regime.”

Just going by one recent example (Iraq), it took three years to encourage ethnic tensions and that’s assuming the administration, which has been vehemently denying civil war, is wrong in its assessment. Finally, the only sensible quotation from the article:

“What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?”

And that is really the crux of the matter; especially when you consider that most Muslims live in countries with state controlled media. Their exposure to world events is typically 100% propaganda.

A wonderful discovery by Joseph W. Thornton at the University of Oregon shows how a specific stress hormone receptor evolved. Hormone receptors have previously been thought by some to be an irreducible system. Such systems, naysayers argue, provide no function when one component is taken away and thus cannot be created by evolution. This counter argument states that if a system has no beneficial function then it cannot be selected for and will not mutate into the beneficial form. Of course the key that people like Michael J. Behe are missing is that evolution is not a guiding force, rather it describes a observed progression of nature - a mechanism by which genes change over time. Mutations are random and neutral mutations are just as likely to survive as not. One might posit from Thorton’s findings that redundancy can also beneficial and therefore can lead to mutations of the form he discovered: when an accidental replication (perhaps beneficial because of redundancy - Omer) mutates it creates a new function. Genetic Replication may provide the stepping stone that, while too complex for people like Dr. Behe to reduce is completely natural.

I subscribe to Investors Business Daily because they have very good stock tools and a balanced approach to investing (fundamentals plus market tracking). When it comes to their editorials they are an extremely conservative and I rarely agree with their opinions. Their criticisms of Democratic leaders who have been taking up the Republican culture of corruption is an exception. If you can’t read the article I’ll give you the tag line which sums it up nicely: “The culture of corruption,’ apparently, is bipartisan.” I don’t agree with much of IBDs politics but we’re in the same boat that there needs to be a lot of change in Congress on both sides of the aisle.

Choose between continuing to live here illegally as you have so far, or pay the US government lots of money and then continue to pay the US government lots of money and probably lose the cash only job you have in hopes of finding a higher paying legal job. Gee, I can only imagine what people in this position are thinking.

Here are the main categories according to the NYT:

• Those who have lived in the country at least five years would be put on a path toward guaranteed citizenship, provided that they remained employed, paid fines and back taxes, and learned English, a senior Republican aide said. The aide said this group accounted for about 7 million of the roughly 11 million illegal immigrants believed to be living here.
• Those who have lived here for two to five years, said to number about three million, would have to leave the country briefly before reporting to an American port of entry, where they would be classified as temporary workers. They would be allowed to apply for citizenship but would have no guarantee of obtaining it. Those who did not would have to leave after participating in the temporary worker program for six years.
• The remaining one million or so, those who have lived in the country less than two years, would be required to leave. They could apply for temporary worker status but would not be guaranteed it.

Thank the GOP for striking a last minute compromise on immigration reform. I cannot fathom one more day of 11 million people who are smarter than the INS going unpunished for their illegal immigration.

Tonight On Point’s Tom Ashbrook talks about the future of television news - specifically focusing on Katie Couric’s move to the CBS evening news. Charles Bierbauer notes that news audiences are getting older and dwindling. I wonder if anyone from the X, Y or Z generations watches the news on TV (Naked News doesn’t count). I’m imagining sitting with my kids after dinner telling them stories about how when I was their age we used to go watch the news on TV after dinner.