James Fallows

I'm not referring to Edward Snowden (nor to the man* above) but instead to someone who resisted in a different, very quiet way, more than a decade ago. The account below comes from a person I have known for a long time, and it describes someone I also know. It's worth reading both for the observations in the first half and for the personal story in the second. This reader writes:

I've been thinking about the recent leak investigations.  I'm usually very sympathetic to my  dad's [ca. age 80] very liberal take on these sorts of things.  But I've been having a hard time getting too excited about it. To me, this is the inevitable result of the way that technology has developed. 

Sadly, the tech visionaries who predicted that the internet would be revolutionary were correct, but not in the way that they expected.  We all want to be able to seamlessly move our work and online lives from desktop to laptop to smartphone to ipads.  Tech companies have given us this, and in the process have created vast warehouses of our digital lives that are assumed to have great value and you can bet that there is a constant effort at these companies to figure out how to monetize this digital storehouse.  So the NSA is simply getting a copy of the information that already is being saved to be mined for possible profit.

The companies, like Obama, assure us that they strip out identifying information.  The companies, like Obama, are asking us to trust them.  To me, the only way to change this threat to our individual liberties would be to make it illegal for any collection of our digital footprints by anyone.  And I don't see this happening.

This brings to mind a story about XX [our mutual acquaintance] not long after 9/11.  He was head of the technical team at YY [one of the former Baby Bell companies] and he was getting pressured to set up digital taps based on secret government warrants shown to the company's executives by government representatives where the company could only look at the secret warrant, but not make a copy or take any notes.  XX was bothered by the fact that once YY set up these digital taps, they were never turned off.  He also was concerned that there was no way even to validate whether these requests even came from legitimate government representatives.   And yet he wanted to keep his job. 

So he told his bosses that he would be more than happy to have his team of engineers comply, but just needed to have the exact procedures written down so that they could keep accurate records because, "at YY, we are trained to document everything we do in writing very carefully to protect ourselves and the company." 

This didn't make the government or the YY executives happy, so they flew him out to headquarters in [city ZZ] and basically tried to strong arm him into just doing it without asking any questions.   He stuck to his "I am very happy to do this, but  just want to protect my team and the company and make sure that we set up the same procedures here that we have for everything else we do" mantra.  When he went back home he sent an email to company lawyers who had called him in laying out what his understanding of what they wanted him to do and how he should document the work.

And that's the last he heard and YY was one of the only phone companies that didn't comply with secret government digital tapping requests that came to light during the Bush presidency.  Sadly, it seems that there are very few people like XX out there, so there you go...

If we finally are beginning the security-state "debate" that is many years overdue, one crucial element to examine is the interaction among technological possibilities, institutional imperatives, and the pressure on individuals to say Yes or No. It is too much to expect everyone, or even most people, to do what this telecom-company employee did. Yet his quiet example should be noted.

..when everything is so secret, how can one be sure that one is following orders (even a Court order -- ever heard of forgeries?)  from legitimate authority?

   ("He also was concerned that there was no way even to validate whether these requests even came from legitimate government representatives. " -- from your latest post a few minutes ago)

I think that the danger of PRISM etc Is misuse of the data bases by people who are clearly operating _outside the law_... Snowden (for example and by his own claim) could have been using his data resources for insider trading...just go look into the email of the honchos at Morgan Stnley. They've made an information monoculture -- and you know how risky monocultures in agriculture.

I know this is a useless cry into the void.  I'm sure that Google has the numbers to show that people just weren't using SMS search.  But both my wife and I used it A LOT.  And we are both really feeling it now that it's gone.  At least when they pulled the plug on Google Reader there were ample alternatives to turn to.  But for people without a web-enabled phone, SMS search was a critical tool. (You could even get turn by turn directions using SMS search.) And there really is no alternative. Not even a phone book.  Seriously. Stop by your nearest shop- pick one- and ask if you can use their phone book.

The problem with letting capitalism hold such dramatic sway over society is that there's no one looking out for the fewer of us.  Imagine what the landscape would have looked like had phone companies been allowed to build out only the profitable areas of the country.

Positive, again with niche impact. A very nice though still-in-development mapping app to help you choose your ideal beer and discover new ones you will like. More from Flowing Data and Fast Company, and thanks to reader DP.

As I mentioned a few minutes ago, our new issue (subscribe!) includes a Q-and-A I did with Linda Stone, coiner of the term "continuous partial attention," on how to maintain sanity and focus in an insane and unfocused world.

Here is the promised extended-play bonus version, beyond what we could work into two pages of the magazine:
___
JAMES FALLOWS: You're well known for the idea of continuous partial attention. Why is this a bad thing?

LINDA STONE: Continuous partial attention is neither good nor bad. We need different attention strategies in different contexts. The way you use your attention when you're writing a story may vary from the way you use your attention when you're driving a car, serving a meal to dinner guests, making love, or riding a bicycle. The important thing for us as humans is to have the capacity to tap the attention strategy that will best serve us in any given moment.

JF: What do you mean by "attention strategy"?

LS: From the time we're born, we're learning and modeling a variety of attention and communication strategies. For example, one parent might put one toy after another in front of the baby until the baby stops crying. Another parent might work with the baby to demonstrate a new way to play with the same toy. These are very different strategies, and they set up a very different way of relating to the world for those children. Adults model attention and communication strategies, and children imitate. In some cases, through sports or crafts or performing arts, children are taught attention strategies. Some of the training might involve managing the breath and emotions---bringing one's body and mind to the same place at the same time.

Self-directed play allows both children and adults to develop a powerful attention strategy, a strategy that I call "relaxed presence." How did you play as a child?

JF: I have two younger siblings very close in age, so I spent time with them. I also just did things on my own, reading and building things and throwing balls and so on.

LS: Let's talk about reading or building things. When you did those things, nobody was giving you an assignment, nobody was telling you what to do--there wasn't any stress around it. You did these things for your own pleasure and joy. As you played, you developed a capacity for attention and for a type of curiosity and experimentation that can happen when you play. You were in the moment, and the moment was unfolding in a natural way.

You were in a state of relaxed presence as you explored your world. At one point, I interviewed a handful of Nobel laureates about their childhood play patterns. They talked about how they expressed their curiosity through experimentation. They enthusiastically described things they built, and how one play experience naturally led into another. In most cases, by the end of the interview, the scientist would say, "This is exactly what I do in my lab today! I'm still playing!"

An unintended and tragic consequence of our metrics for schools is that what we measure causes us to remove self-directed play from the school day. Children's lives are completely programmed, filled with homework, lessons, and other activities.. There is less and less space for the kind of self-directed play that can be a fantastically fertile way for us to develop resilience and a broad set of attention strategies, not to mention a sense of who we are, and what questions captivate us. We have narrowed ourselves in service to the gods of productivity, a type of productivity that is about output and not about results.

JF: When people talk about attention problems in modern society, they usually mean the distractive potential of smartphones and so on. Is that connected to what you're talking about in early-childhood development?

LS: We learn by imitation, from the very start. That's how we're wired. Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl, professors at the University of Washington I-LABS, show videos of babies at 42 minutes old, imitating adults. The adult sticks his tongue out. The baby sticks his tongue out, mirroring the adult's behavior. Children are also cued by where a parent focuses attention. The child's gaze follows the mother's gaze. Not long ago, I had brunch with friends who are doctors, and both of them were on call. They were constantly pulling out their smartphones. The focus of their 1-year-old turned to the smartphone: Mommy's got it, Daddy's got it. I want it.

We may think that kids have a natural fascination with phones. Really, children have a fascination with what-ever Mom and Dad find fascinating. If they are fascinated by the flowers coming up in the yard, that's what the children are going to find fascinating. And if Mom and Dad can't put down the device with the screen, the child is going to think, That's where it's all at, that's where I need to be! I interviewed kids between the ages of 7 and 12 about this. They said things like "My mom should make eye contact with me when she talks to me" and "I used to watch TV with my dad, but now he has his iPad, and I watch by myself."

Kids learn empathy in part through eye contact and gaze. If kids are learning empathy through eye contact, and our eye contact is with devices, they will miss out on empathy.

JF: What you're describing sounds like a society-wide autism.

LS: In my opinion, it's more serious than autism. Many autistic kids are profoundly sensitive, and look away [from people] because full stimulation overwhelms them. What we're doing now is modeling a primary relationship with screens, and a lack of eye contact with people. It ultimately can feed the development of a kind of sociopathy and psychopathy.

JF: I'm afraid to ask, but is this just going to get worse?

LS: I don't think so. You and I, as we grew up, experienced our parents operating in certain ways, and may have created a mental checklist: Okay, my mom and dad do that, and that's cool. I'll do that with my kids, too. Or: My mom and dad do this, and it's less cool, so I'm not going to do that when I'm a grown-up.

The generation that has been tethered to devices serves as a cautionary example to the next generation, which may decide this is not a satisfying way to live. A couple years ago, after a fire in my house, I had a couple students coming to help me. One of them was Gen X and one was a Millennial. If the Gen Xer's phone rang or if she got a text, she would say "I'm going to take this, I'll be back in a minute." With the Millennial, she would just text back "L8r." When I talked to the Millennial about it, she said, "When I'm with someone, I want to be with that person." I am reminded of this new thing they're doing in Silicon Valley where every-one sticks their phone in the middle of the table, and whoever grabs their phone first has to treat to the meal.

JF: So people may yet find ways to "disconnect"?

LS: There is an increasingly heated conversation around "disconnecting."  I'm not sure this is a helpful conversation . When we discuss disconnecting, it puts the machines at the center of everything.  What if, instead, we put humans at the center of the conversation, and talk about with what or whom we want to connect?

Talking about what we want to connect with gives us a direction and something positive to do.  Talking about disconnecting leaves us feeling shamed and stressed. Instead of going toward something, the language is all about going away from something that we feel we don't adequately control.  It's like a dieter constantly saying to him or herself, "I can't eat the cookie.  I can't eat the cookie," instead of saying, "That apple looks delicious."

JF: You say that people can create a sense of relaxed presence for themselves. How?

LS: When we learn how to play a sport or an instrument; how to dance or sing; or even how to fly a plane, we learn how to breathe and how to sit or stand in a way that supports a state of relaxed presence. My hunch is that when you're flying, you're aware of everything around you, and yet you're also relaxed. When you're water-skiing, you're paying attention, and if you're too tense, you'll fall. All of these activities help us cultivate our capacity for relaxed presence. Mind and body in the same place at the same time.

People have become increasingly drawn to meditation and yoga as a way to cultivate relaxed presence.   Any of these activities, from self-directed play to sports and performing arts, to meditation and yoga, can contribute cultivating relaxed presence.

In this state of relaxed presence, our minds and bodies are in the same place at the same time and we have a more open relationship with the world around us.

Another bonus comes with this state of relaxed presence.  It's where we rendezvous with luck.  A U.K. psychologist ran experiments in which he divided self-described lucky and unlucky people into different groups and had each group execute the same task.   In one experiment, subjects were told to go to a café, order coffee, return and report on their experience. 

The self-described lucky person found money on the ground on the way into the café, had a pleasant conversation with the person they sat next to at the counter, and left with a connection and potential business deal.  The self-described unlucky person missed the money - it was left in the same place for all experimental subjects to find, ordered coffee, didn't speak to a soul, and left the café.  One of these subjects was focused in a more stressed way on the task at hand.  The other was in a state of relaxed presence, executing the assignment. 

We all have a capacity for relaxed presence, empathy, and luck.   We stress about being distracted, needing to focus, and needing to disconnect.  What if, instead, we cultivated our capacity for relaxed presence and actually, really connected, to each moment and to each other?

As the years wear on, my esteem grows for the writing program Scrivener as the single best bargain ever offered in the software world. And I mean: ever. It was originally for the Mac but now comes in a Windows version; it costs all of $45; and it is a program that seems ideally tailored for the way that many writers, including me, would like to approach their work. You can see its (quite impressive) list of testimonials here; read a detailed description of its power from a U Chicago student, Noah Ennis, here; and consider some previous discussion here and here. I've now written two books, two or three dozen Atlantic articles, and many other reports and presentations with Scrivener. I was pleased that its creator, Keith Blount of Cornwall, England, appeared in this space as a guest blogger two years ago.

 

To get a sample of the discourse, you could skip to time 38:20. There you'll hear an admirably direct question from an audience member: Why, exactly, is manned space flight sensible? And two interesting answers -- first Walker's on the history of national exploration ventures in general, then Pace's emphasis that a successful manned mission requires a broader range of competencies and achievements than almost anything else human beings try to do, and therefore is valuable in a skill-advancing sense. Pace also goes into that point starting at time 27:40 -- and much earlier, around 12:40, talks about how our plans for space exploration differ, depending on whether we see outer space as more similar to Mt. Everest or Antarctica. You can go to that section for fuller explanation.

If you find this engaging, there's a lot more in the hour of discussion. Groggy as I was, I was glad to hear it myself.

Three years ago I mentioned an intriguing, easy, collaborative cloud-based outliner named Thinklinkr. It doesn't seem to be around any more, and its official blogsite doesn't appear to have any entries since 2011, so ... the wheel turns. Following today's earlier note about memento mori, this is probably a useful reminder that the concept applies in the tech world too, and even to cloud products that aren't made by Google.

Thus we have a natural intro to "Little Outliner," shown above. It is an extremely simple online outlining tool designed by Dave Winer, creator of a long string of influential programs and applications (including those wonderful early outliners ThinkTank and MORE). Here Winer has collaborated with a young developer named Kyle Shank. A difference between Little Outliner and, say, the seemingly departed Thinklinkr is that Winer's and Shank's new product stores its info locally on your own computer, so it wouldn't vanish if the program or company does.

You can read a nice Gigaom interview with Winer about the program here. While we're at it, Workflowy is another interesting, light, cloud-based outliner that unlike Thinklinkr is still around. And you can never go wrong with a look at Dave Winer's history of great outliners, at Outliners.com. I also examined this historical theme a while back, in my homage to the greatest outliner of them all, the late and lamented GrandView.

I figure I might as well go all-in on this topic. Previous entries here and here. Today, two more reader dispatches concerning which parts of your data you can and can't retrieve if a cloud service you'd relied on is turned off -- as Google has recently done with Reader and many of its other services.

1) Making backups of Gmail. I mentioned yesterday that, to Google's credit, "It has been a leader in making sure you could make your own copies, or extract, any of your info that was in its part of the cloud." A reader writes:

There is a notable exception: Gmail. You can download all your mail via POP3 or IMAP but Google throttles the download speed:

http://www.dataliberation.org/google/gmail

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1071518

I decided to create a local backup of my mails at Gmail a few weeks ago and have managed to download around 100,000 mails so far, i.e., the throttling is probably more restrictive than Google mentions. In the best case according to the information provided by Google, it would still take me around a week to download all my mail from Gmail via IMAP. There is therefore no efficient way to migrate your Gmail account to another mail provider. And if you want to keep all your mails and all your labels, you get each mail at least twice ('all mails' or 'sent' plus label).

I am still happy that the Google Data Liberation Front shows new signs of life after it had looked abandoned for years. At least for Gmail, however, it is not that useful. And I hope in any case that I do not have to migrate away from Gmail (or Google Apps for Business in my case)

I have made piecemeal IMAP archives of my Gmail cloud archives over the years (via Thunderbird and also Apple Mail), rather than trying to do it at one go, so I had not noticed the restrictions the reader mentions. But they're worth bearing in mind. Of course, Gmail is so central a part of Google's offerings, and of its burgeoning for-pay business apps, that it is hard to imagine Gmail ever being turned off as a conscious business decision. Still, I feel better having my own backups, just in case.

2. 'BOOOOOOOO!' for Downstream Effects. A reader in the tech biz writes:

I think the move to paid services is ultimately probably wise for all of us info junkies, except that the inclusion of RSS functionality on any given site may be hampered by the lack of Google's huge availability. Why code for it, or more to the point, provide it at all if even the dismissing eyeballs that reader provided are no longer there?

One other side effect that has been under-discussed but that tails off of the google data liberation front (what a stellar name, it should be a not-quite-ready-for-prime time Brooklyn band name):  the history of pages you've already read is stored in reader but I don't believe it exports with your feeds.

I can, today, search in reader for a lifehacker article about a shelving system that I thought about building during a bout of DIYness. That resource will be gone to me. Or a homegrown revolution post about a wild-cherry growing system that is self-sustaining. Or a Sullivan post that I have been meaning to email him about for two plus years. Or a Fallows post on civil aviation and comparisons to ask the pilot posts from four years ago before salon ruined their RSS feed system and I stopped reading salon.

Come to think of it, that's the biggest fear. When salon ruined their RSS feeds I went from 9 individual feeds i cleared daily to zero (RIP How the World Works, one of my favorite blogs of all time). Ditto for wonkette recently when they went to teaser RSS posts instead of full entries - I can't open posts calling John McCain "walnuts" and accusing him of senility at work! This angle is the Iran-news-access-by-proxy service google was providing through reader (not to compare my circumstances to those of the oppressed in Iran).

As we say in App Dev, the downstream effects and the lack of even a frozen "legacy system" for historical purposes are severe and, worse, not clear.

BOOOOOOOOOOO!

I'm not going to bother with a paraphrasing of these posts for readers not involved in the computer world, since people most affected by these changes are likely to understand the arguments as presented above. I will say that what must have seemed to Google a simple, clear-cut business choice -- let's stop messing around with the "interesting" little diversions and concentrate on our mainstream products -- is having more complex "downstream effects" than most people might have foreseen.

Early yesterday I mentioned that while Google's new Keep application, a nascent all-purpose notetaker, looked very interesting, I wasn't going to waste time getting used to it. That is because of the company's now-established track record of killing off products that prove to have niche rather than sufficiently mass appeal.

This could be a sane business strategy for Google -- network TV, for instance, is also in the mass rather than niche business. But since my own software tastes often lead in the early-adopter niche direction, I've decided I should stick with companies whose business model is aimed at users like me. When it comes to TV, this means that I watch a lot more things on cable than on the main networks (except sports). When it comes to note-taking software, it means sticking with Evernote, rather than risking that what Google did to Reader, Notebook, Desktop, Health, and other services I used and liked it would eventually do to Keep.

I raise the point again because, since the time I wrote that item (and after I spent all day today in transit), I have seen a quite surprising critical mass of comments in a similar vein. For instance:

• Ezra Klein in the Washington Post, on the dawning awareness that niche enthusiasts like him (and me) have tastes that really don't match Google's business model, as we're now coming to understand it. Eg, "Together, the Gmail experience, the death of Google Reader, and the closure of Picnik all have me questioning whether I want to keep investing time and energy in 'free' Google products or whether I need to start looking for paid services that are explicitly making money off the thing I am paying them to do."
  
  
• Kevin Drum, in Mother Jones, on why the inability to rely on Google services is more disruptive than the familiar pre-cloud experience of having favorite programs get orphaned. My example is Lotus Agenda: it has officially been dead for nearly 20 years, but I can still use it (if I want, in a DOS session under the VMware Fusion Windows emulator on my Macs. Talk about layered legacy systems!). When a cloud program goes away, as Google Reader has done, it's gone. There is no way you can keep using your own "legacy" copy, as you could with previous orphaned software.
  
  
• An Economist item that offers an even harsher judgment. Eg, "Translated into economese, Google has failed to consider the Lucas Critique: adoption behaviour for newly offered services will change in response to Google's observed penchant for cancelling beloved products.... If a particular Google experiment isn't cutting it in that category, then Google may feel justified in axing it.
  
  "But that makes it increasingly difficult for Google to have success with new services. Why commit to using and coming to rely on something new if it might be yanked away at some future date? This is especially problematic for 'social' apps that rely on network effects."
  
  
• A note from Brian Glucroft, a veteran of UX (user experience) work at Microsoft and elsewhere:
  "I've been pondering about broader UX implications and whether Google has hurt its reputation as 'organizer of all the worlds information.' The latter is part of what I have found so appealing about Google. But, I think the shutdown of Google Reader changes it to 'organizer of all the world's information, if it can be sufficiently profitable".
  
  "Of course Google is a business, but I think people expected it to 'error' in terms of being the best organizer even if it might make a tiny cut in profits. If nothing else, that rep of being the ultimate organizer has a value. And it's been hurt.
  
  "I feel bad for the folks on the Google Keep team. That's life and all, but geez, I'd be banging my head against the wall."
  
  
• A statistical analysis from the Guardian, estimating (half-seriously) that based on past performance we can expect Google Keep to survive until 2017.
  

I am about as pro-Google a person as you're going to find in the media. I've had friends at all levels of the company since its founding, and still do now. I've admired what Google has done in China; I live my info-life within the Gmail / Google Drive universe; and I am predisposed to take Google's side in most controversies, whether against Microsoft or the French. Including when it comes to its influence on the battered journalistic business model it has helped to overturn! But even I think it has done something brand-damaging.

Now, two notes on the positive side -- each of which is a reminder of what we have liked about Google.

1) Google has often orphaned services, but it has never "disappeared" data. (I am using "to disappear" in the transitive-verb sense familiar from Latin American politics.) It has been a leader in making sure you could make your own copies, or extract, any of your info that was in its part of the cloud. A reader writes:

One bit of the risk analysis of using Keep or any other new Google product is their commitment to letting you get back your data. As you know, the Google Data Liberation Front is dedicated to helping people get their data out of Google in a standard format. Over time, it's been clear that this is an initiative Google takes seriously.

So while it's a bummer that Reader is closing down, I can export my list of feeds in a standard format and use any of a hundred other RSS products. The same is true of all the other Google products I use.

Like you, I'm cautiously evaluating Keep. Whether I continue using it will depend on what the Drive integration looks like, specifically how easily I can export my Keep notes. [JF note: Also, whether there would be an iOS version, so I could sync it to my iPad. A plus of Evernote is that you can use it on just about any device or system.]

This is a key component of trusting cloud services, Google gets it at a ever deep level, and it's worth a mention.

2) I have relentlessly beat the drum for Google's "two-step" authentication systems for Gmail and other services, which radically reduce the likelihood that your account can be hacked from afar. Apple is only now playing catch-up with this feature.

To wrap this up: I am intrigued by Keep but unfortunately am not going to risk trying it. I admire and rely on Google and hope this recent stretch ultimately proves to have been a chastening rough patch rather than what we look back on as the beginning of a trend.

This animated graphic by T-Mobile is surprisingly interesting. What you see below is a static screen shot; the site itself says it offers a depiction of ongoing cyber-attacksUPDATE There is of course a reason why Chinese hacking has gotten more attention than intrusions from Russia, Nigeria, etc: of the intrusions from China appear to be government- or military-directed than from most other countries.

I trust the statistics are for attacks wherein there has been at least one complete exchange of packets with the purported source.  Eg the attacker has sent a packet, the destination has sent a packet in response, and something based on that response bas come from the purported attacker - such as happens with the TCP connection establishment handshake.   If it is based solely on the source IP address of a single inbound datagram it will be very vulnerable to IP address spoofing.  In that case, for all we know it could be the Duchy of Grand Fenwick spoofing IP addresses in their quest for Internet Domination (™).

Turn to me for your seasonal Magyar/Hibernian connections. I mention the item below purely because I love it. But if you imagine the dancing figures in the video not as folk dancers from Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, performing a Hungarian dance, but rather as Irish country cloggers, you can make this seem wholly relevant to St. Patrick's Day. I also love this comment on the YouTube version: "It would have been cool if it was multithreaded." That's true -- you would have had dancers on both sides doing simultaneous "pivot" tests after the first partition --  but it's a full success as is. My admiration goes to whoever had the weird imagination to think this was worth the effort. It was.

Routine personal disclosure: many of my friends work at Google, as does one of my sons.
Here's the bug: that time selection is for some reason not "sticky." Sooner or later, it inevitably re-sets itself to the minimum setting, which is mail from the past week only. Time and again I've had the experience of setting the choice to "past month"; getting on a plane or train a few days later; opening up Offline Gmail; and seeing the screen below, showing the the program in fact only has mail from the past week:

If you haven't come across it yet, please do see the open letter published yesterday on our Politics Channel from the directors of three of the U.S. National Labs. These places are famous around the world, and are rightly seen as symbols of American scientific excellence and bulwarks of long-term American strength. The three authors are Paul Alivisatos, Eric Isaacs, and Thom Mason, from, respectively, the Lawrence Berkeley, Argonne, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

The title of their essay gets the point across: "The Sequester Is Going to Devastate U.S. Science Research for Decades." That may sound extreme, but here is the heart of their case:

It's not yet clear how much funding the National Labs will lose, but it will total tens of millions of dollars. Interrupting -- or worse, halting -- basic research in the physical, biological, and computational sciences would be devastating, both for science and for the many U.S. industries that rely on our national laboratory system to power their research and development efforts.

Instead, this drop in funding will force us to cancel all new programs and research initiatives, probably for at least two years. This sudden halt on new starts will freeze American science in place while the rest of the word races forward, and it will knock a generation of young scientists off their stride, ultimately costing billions in missed future opportunities.

My sense from afar is that an "oh, it's not really that bad" attitude is setting in about America's permanent-emergency approach to public funding. This is a reminder that it really could be that bad. And on that point, a scientist I know in California has written:

When I was a kid, in the 1970s, there were about 2000 'operational' weather balloon sites that released balloons synchronized to be in the middle of the troposphere at 00 and 12 UTZ daily.

When I did a survey of how many there were in 2000, there were about 800. There are myriad reasons, the relative poverty of many countries that can't afford to pay for the programs and geopolitics among them.

The number is about to drop precipitously due to a contrived crisis by a rich nation.

I am deeply ashamed for my country.

I won't try to explain this but will just suggest that you give it a try. It's Search Visualizer, a web-based system that processes search results from Google and other search engines and displays them in visual form. Here's an idea of how the results look, based on a sample search for data about the 787 Dreamliner's battery problems. 

From the inbox -- actually, my wife's email inbox. Fortunately we live in a community-property state.

From: <datdave@centurylink.net>
Date: Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 10:38 AM
Subject: MGH
To: Dxxx

The Microsoft is glad to pronounce you as the lucky winner of Eight crores Thirty Four lahks and Thirty Two Thousand INR,send us the following details for claims.

Sex:
Full Address:
Full Name:
Age:
Telephone Number:

Thank you.
Dave Robinson.

To be precise, we live in a taxation-without-representation District rather than a state of any sort, and here the marital-property principle is called "equitable distribution" rather than community property. Either way, I'm looking forward to my share of the loot, knowing that one crore is equal to ten million rupees, which in turn is worth about $200,000. 

More »

I've mentioned over the years the difficulty official Chinese spokesmen frequently have in engaging outside-world opinion. The heart of the difficulty is that it is too easy to confuse a real, hyper-earnest government response with what the Onion would say. 

Following this item last night on the latest Chinese-hacking reports, readers discuss a fundamental question about Chinese "policy." That question is how we balance the contradictory, but simultaneously true, realities of coordination and chaos in interpreting actions of the Chinese state. Some things the Chinese government does are very carefully planned and controlled. Many others arise from confusion, insubordination, laissez-faire, mistake, and plain old Brownian motion. This tension applies to many things in life but, to me, is especially dramatic in China. For a reminder,* compare recent news about focused Chinese-military spying efforts with this feature from the People's Daily:



One reader who has experience in American politics and in China policy writes in response to my mention that the U.S. military is no slouch when it comes to cyber-war capabilities (cf STUXNET):

Of course we are very capable in the cyber area, and do apply our tools to collect against more traditional intelligence targets.

However what the Beijing is doing, brazen intrusions into corporations, media, legal offices, etc is far beyond the scope of our activities.  The Chinese State is involved in outright systematic theft of our IP, technology, M & A plans, and so forth.  And yes historically this has always been part of industrialization process, think of America vis-a-vis the UK during the late 18th early 19th century but that was spontaneous, this is top down state led and on a totally different scale.

What I like about this note is the reminder that many troublesome aspects of China now -- environmental ruin, dangerous factories, government bribery, and intellectual-property theft -- have their counterparts in the rapid-development phases of America, England, and many other countries. But the difference in scale, speed, and degree in China's case put it in a different category. (Plus, the other stuff was then; this is now.)

Another reader stresses the opposite reality:

Is the Chinese military a monolithic perfectly formed hierarchically controlled entity?

My last stroll by the base on Xixi Rd. in Hangzhou was the usual blasting in and out by neon-camo paint job-pimped out Range Rovers of the top brass.  Army personnel blasting around in camo pimpmobiles probably do lots of stuff the ruling faction doesn't know or like.  I suppose there are are multiple factions involved with hacking.  China could have a few Jack D. Ripper types.

Or, more than a few.  I kinda think the hacking could be all sorts of stuff that's only slightly understood.

And what I like about this note is the reminder that even the PLA is full of several million Chinese people many of whom are pursuing their own dreams and schemes. Both perspectives are true, which makes the PLA hard enough for people in China to figure out, let alone outsiders.

If you've been wondering what our friends at Next Media Animation, in Taiwan, would make of the situation, here is your answer:


 
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* I go into many other examples in my book. For instance: before the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese Foreign Ministry successfully lobbied for the creation of an "authorized protest zone," where people could air their grievances before the world press. This would show China's mature openness. But the whole scheme backfired, since the security ministries turned down requests for "authorized" protests and arrested many people who applied. You could read this as a super-cynical scheme to locate dissidents all the more easily. But I think the more likely explanation is simple disagreement, chaos, and internal bureaucratic struggle.

** Any Chinese readers or others confused by the headline can check here.

I don't know anything about Jack Baty, listed as "Director of Unspecified Services" at his eponymous site. Mascot photo from his site at right; I have no idea whether that's actually him. But I think we have some things in common, based on his recent post about the main problem has had with software for organizing info, tasks, and other digital junk. As Baty puts it, emphasis added:

Keeping track of All the Things(™) isn't that difficult. Or at least it shouldn't be, but I find it nearly impossible.

The problem for me isn't a lack of software, it's the abundance of great software. Here is a list of software I've used to keep track of all the digital detritus in my life:

... and he goes on to list nearly a dozen programs, most of which I've used -- along with many others! He doesn't even get into such timeless classics as Lotus Agenda, the still-evolving Zoot, TheBrain, MindManager, OmniFocus, Scapple, Thinking Rock, and .... Wisest not to get me started.

In practical terms, what Baty says is where I've also ended up:

While I love them all, I've whittled it down to 3 apps: Tinderbox, Evernote, and DEVONthink.

Tinderbox is my notebook. Evernote is my junk drawer. DEVONthink is my filing cabinet.

He goes on to explain what those analogies mean. For the record, Tinderbox and DEVONthink are Mac-only; Evernote is trans-platform; plucky Zoot is Window-only; and Lotus Agenda runs on DOS! Of course, stay on the lookout for whatever David Allen and Intentional Software are cooking up.

For decades now it's been a careful balance, between the time I "save" through new "productive" software, and the time I "waste" trying out each new release. I am somehow relieved to know that I'm not the only one contemplating this balance.

Continuing the "who's to blame for no mail on Saturday" discussion, previously here and here, we have these new entries from readers.

Heroes of the Anthrax Age. From a reader who, like me, was once on the postal payroll:

I, too, have worked at USPS and am now an executive in a Fortune 50 company.  USPS had a speedy, efficient structure compared to the corporate bureaucracy I now experience.  It's funny, the reactions I receive when I say I once worked at USPS.  Most frequently, I receive condolences.  I quickly object to that sentiment.  Some of the smartest, most hardworking people I have ever met work for USPS in both management and craft jobs.
 
Congress is the real villain here, but it's not surprising.  A perfect example is the anthrax-crisis of 2001.  In the midst of those terrible days when no one knew where or  when the next deadly letter would arrive, the Congress of the United States ran out of DC for weeks.  Postal workers came to work every day.  Within 90 days of the crisis, USPS engineers were testing a new processing machine that would detect bio-hazards in the mailstream and wouldn't disburse deadly contaminents into the air at postal facilities every time the machine was cleaned.  Four months later, USPS began delivering these new machines to processing centers.

The Vol de Nuit factor. Literary allusions from a reader:

I don't have any original thoughts of my own to add to the discussion about the postal service except to add that when it comes to romance and literary inspiration, post office beats electronic hands down.  Just two piece of evidence will suffice:
 
(1)     W.H. Auden's poem for the British post office in the 1930s, "Night Mail". [JF note: seriously, you won't regret clicking on the video below.]
 


(2)     Antoine de Saint-Exupery's novels Courrier Sud (Southern Mail) and Night Flight about the dangers of delivering the air mail in the 1930s...which adds the romance of flight as well.
 
If anyone has written a great poem or novel about sending an email or text message...let me know.

The Sneakernet Factor. Thanks to many readers who sent links to yet another great Randall Munroe xkcd entry, this one about the relative throughput capacities of the internet and physical transport systems.

'Superior in almost every way that matters.' A reader whose business depends on both virtual and physical networks writes:

I work at a small eCommerce company in Redlands, California and know from experience that the federal mail is superior to private couriers in almost every way that matters. They offer the best product at the best rate nine times out of ten. Compromising this service would be devastating to domestic commerce - particularly during the all-important Christmas season/fourth quarter....

As a Constitutionally mandated service aren't talks of why we need the post office just a little bit moot or at the least self-serving (said with all respect) punditry? We're not even talking about an amendment. The original document tells Congress to make post offices and post roads. So isn't this more of a question of: do we have a good post system or a crappy one?

The security factor. A reader makes this basic point:

One great feature of "snail mail"..... privacy!!!   No matter  how much or what is done on computers, safety and privacy are not guaranteed!!.

Right -- security can't be guaranteed in either medium. But it certainly is quicker, faster, easier, and more insidious to follow an electronic rather than a physical "paper trail."

The road not taken. A reader looks back:

I've long thought that the great opportunity for the USPS was to be the primary progenitor of the world-wide-web in the US.  That is to say, the primary ISP and Email service provider; the roles now fulfilled by Comcast, Verizon, and Google.  In the mid 90's, when home web access was all dial-up, the post office could have been as instrumental in bringing local web access to rural America as they did with postal access.  And of course then, very few envisioned cloud storage / transfer services.   USPS could have offered (at a time when no others were in the homeowner / retail space): Security, encryption, delivery confirmation, and SPAM / virus protection.  The existing distributed nature of the USPS would have been perfect in terms of support and transition from 'snail' to electronic media. 

This goes against the notion of smaller less intrusive government, but the alternative notions of real web neutrality and widely available web access would have been the kinds of things that would have helped America in the global technology challenges.  (Of course there would have been the prickly concern over how to handle the enormous amounts of porn...).  And finally, since 9/11 & Google, we must assume that all email and web traffic is subject to monitoring and recording; so they could have had a head start on all that. 

To me, this all goes along with the already deep levels of integration and regulatory relationships between the US Government and Broadcasters, Telecoms, and other public forms of media.  Quite possibly the USPS would not have been a direct service provider but, rather, a facilitator, regulator, and equalizer to ensure all America had access to reasonable service levels at reasonable cost and that various public services were integrated into the web early on.

Too late now, I suppose.  I wonder (and doubt) if Al Gore would have had the vision to pursue this approach had he been elected in 2000. 

That's enough for now. Maybe this crisis will have the silver-lining effect of nudging people away from the reflexive denigration of postal employees, postal efficiency, and "snail mail." Not sure what we can do about "going postal," though.

Last week I mentioned Mark Bernstein's essay on the surprisingly complex sequence of decisions, trade-offs, and design choices that went into creating even the most routine-seeming aspects of the electronic environment that surrounds us.

I'm a software engineer by education (CSC) and have been in the software world for 30 years now, 98% of the time working for companies that develop and sell software products (as opposed to consulting or IT)...I've been a CTO for the last 12 years.

On the specifics of the author's example of "writing software today", the example he uses is really no different than software design 30 years ago, meaning that the simplest of capabilities has many details that must be addressed in order to make it function correctly in all situations as well as to provide the "quality" expected by its users.  His specific example of UI design is stuff commonly dealt with since the advent of GUIs [Graphical User Interfaces, like Windows or MacOS]....

The portion of the article (and part of Mark's bigger point) that is interesting to me and is definitely a change in the larger software market is that of the "App" (small, specialized applications generally targeted at the mobile computing market; typically either free or at extreme low cost (i.e. $0.99)).  One of Mark's points is that there is so much cost to deliver even the smallest of features (even those which are minor/secondary) that it can make it extremely difficult to build a profitable business.

So is this a good or bad thing?  Someone could argue that this is "bad" and that Apple and gang have ruined things for the software market, even perhaps arguing that there will now be a whole set of software that will never be built and delivered because it can't be done profitably.  

However, the flipside can also be argued in several ways.  There is of course the obvious advantage of now having a centralized delivery system connected with a huge potential set of buyers, enabling a company of any size (1 and above) to sell in large volume immediately with virtually no capital outlay. The accompanying downside of this is the challenge of having your offerings be discovered among the endless set of apps available. But beyond this basic level of the marketplace dynamics is the pressure it puts onto software organizations to build the right products.

Ultimately, software products survive and thrive based on the real value that they provide their users.  That "value" is wrapped up in many things, both obvious and subtle. Products with no real value come and go very quickly, or never really make it ever.  Products which start well, but then go off track (either through bad vision or bad execution/engineering) fail as well, and the marketplace is very quick to choose, very unforgiving, and long on memory.

I think that this is actually a good thing for the software business for these reasons:  (1) product managers and software designers must be much more thoughtful in what they build and how they build it, being keenly focused on end user value, and (2) software engineers must be much more careful on the design and implementation of the system.  In a sense, it drives software back to being "crafted" rather than just built.  Ultimately it's a win/win: (1) the software community (individuals as well as teams) is forced to be much better at what it does; and (2) the value of software is pushed higher and higher, providing great impact on peoples lives.

I can think of examples that both support and work against this "overall things are better" thesis. What's striking about the goods and bads of these new pressures on the software world is how they resemble what is happening to publishing, academia, journalism, and discourse in general. For now, offered as one more data point for the record.