Category Archives: Asides

Four years on

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It’s four years today since my lovely Sue died. This is one of my favourite photographs of her. She’s feigning astonishment at one of Tom’s tall stories, narrated with the all the wonderful exuberance of a four year old. It was taken in a restaurant after a happy Sunday morning spent browsing through the market at Camden Lock in London, until I had put my foot down and loudly demanded lunch.

A few weeks ago, sitting on a beach in Donegal while the kids fooled about in the waves, I fell into conversation with a woman who was also watching her children, similarly engaged. “So”, she said, after a time, “you have sole custody of the children?” — and was mortified when I explained that their mother had died. The poor woman felt that she had committed an unforgivable gaffe and it took a while to reassure her that it was ok.

Brooding on the exchange afterwards, it occurred to me that, in a way, she had hit the nail on the head. The thing that most agonised Sue about dying was that she was leaving her children. She felt that she was failing them, letting them down, abandoning them. The only way I could comfort her was by promising her that, for as long as they needed me, nothing would come between me and them.

It was the most solemn promise I’ve ever made and, as I unearthed the towels that they had forgotten (and I had remembered) to pack for the beach, I persuaded myself that I’m doing my best to honour it. But I also started thinking about the etymology of ‘custody’. In law, it has negative (“detention: a state of being confined”) as well as positive connotations. I like the US legal system’s definition: “the right to or responsibility for a child’s care and control, carrying with it the duty of providing food, shelter, medical care, education and discipline”. In that sense, the woman on the beach was right. I’m not sure about the discipline, but I can tick all the other boxes on that list.

One unambiguously positive thing about the last four years is that the children have always been able to talk openly about their mother — something I attribute in part to the fact that they explicitly gave her their permission to die. In the car on the way back from visiting their grandparents last Sunday, they told me about how they make decisions as to whether to explain to new friends why they have only one parent. It transpires that they operate a “need to know” principle; only good friends need to know; everyone else is left to infer that, somehow, their dad made a mess of his marriage!

In his thoughtful little book, A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis says somewhere that you never stop being married to a spouse who has died. What I’ve learned from the last four years is that he was right.

Cheney thinks US economy’s going down

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Well, well. Interesting report…

According to Kiplinger’s, the Cheneys, who may be worth close to $100 million, have invested the vast majority of their wealth overseas, in markets that do not fluctuate based on the U.S. dollar: Vice President Cheney’s financial advisers are apparently betting on a rise in inflation and interest rates and on a decline in the value of the dollar against foreign currencies. That’s the conclusion we draw after scouring the financial disclosure form released by Cheney this week.

The Cheneys’ money is not in a blind trust but, according to his advisers: “the vice president pays no attention to his investments.”…

Oh yeah?

Slivers of time

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Now here’s a really good idea.

Slivers-of-Time is a new way of working. You list the hours you would like to work and local employers buy them.

New web sites are making this way of working easy to organise and less likely to go wrong. They remove all the overheads of booking top-up workers at short notice, for short periods. The web technology to achieve this is only now viable.

The Slivers-of-Time programme is funded jointly by the UK government and private companies. It’s low profile at the moment but working with far sighted government agencies, employers and recruitment agencies to launch a new way of working for the UK.

The interesting thing is that it’s funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. So that’s one thing John Prescott is good for, then.

Guitar bands strike a chord

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Hmmmm…. Could this explain why there are four — or is it five — guitars in the Naughton household?

The rise of skinny-tied guitar bands such as Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser Chiefs has fuelled the popularity of the instrument, with UK sales at an all-time high.Figures released yesterday show that musicians spent £110m on electric, bass and acoustic instruments last year. This was up from £102m in 2004. Sales may have also increased through the success of once little-known artists such as 19-year-old Paolo Nutini, who has been playing the guitar for just a few years and whose album has recently gone gold…

Stock spamming works

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Sophos, a Massachusetts-based supplier of software for protecting companies and consumers from online threats, reported in July that 15 percent of all junk e-mail messages are now stock spam, up dramatically from less than 1 percent 18 months ago. Here’s a Technology Revew piece about some interesting research conducted by Jonathan Zittrain and a colleague. Excerpt:

Stock spam uses the classic “pump-and-dump” scheme. A spammer sends out a mass e-mail message touting a penny stock with low trading volume in hopes of convincing a handful of people to buy shares of it. If the spammer succeeds, the limited buying activity boosts the stock’s price and liquidity just long enough for the spammer to sell his own shares (or the shares of his client) at a profit. The stock subsequently plunges and those who bought it are usually hit with a loss.

In their study, Zittrain and co-author Laura Frieder, an assistant professor of finance at Purdue University in Indiana, sought to quantify the effectiveness of such campaigns. To do so, they analyzed more than 75,000 stock “touts” appearing in Zittrain’s e-mail inbox and a Usenet spam-sighting newsgroup between January 2004 and July 2005. The date and estimated size of each spam campaign was compared with the price and trading volume of the company shares being promoted over several days, including the day immediately preceding the campaign.

The researchers discovered that if a spammer bought a stock a day before beginning heavy touting, then sold the morning after the first day of touting, the average return on investment was 4.9 percent. And more effective spammers saw a 6 percent return.

On the other hand, if a victim were to invest $1,000 in a stock on the day of heaviest touting, that investment would be worth, on average, $947.50 in the two days following the spamming campaign. For the most heavily touted stocks, the same investment would fall by 7 percent, to $930. The study also confirmed that the volume of touted stocks responded “positively and significantly” to touting campaigns, meaning that trading activity increased.

“Our analysis shows that [stock] spam works,” wrote Zittrain and Frieder. “Among its millions of recipients are not only those who read it, but who also act upon it, suggesting a value to spamming that will create a powerful counterbalance to regulatory and technical efforts to contain it.”

UK bans Segway

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The Times reports that:

The Government has declared that the Segway Human Transporter — a £3,000 self-balancing scooter — cannot be used in any public place. […]
In Britain the Department for Transport has welcomed the scooter with a double- whammy, invoking the Highway Act of 1835 to ban it from pavements and EU vehicle certification rules to keep it off roads.

In a document, Regulations for self-balancing scooters, the department says: “You can only ride an unregistered selfbalancing scooter on land which is private property and with the landowner’s permission.” It rejects proposals that the Segway should be treated like the faster electric bicycle.

It says: “A self-balancing scooter does not meet requirements [for electric bicycles] as it cannot be pedalled.”

So that’s that, then.

Quote of the day

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“Why — in the age of the Internet — [does] the FBI [restrict] itself to a dead-tree source with a considerable time lag between death and publication, with limited utility for the FBI’s purpose, and with entries restricted to a small fraction of even the ‘prominent and noteworthy’? Why, in short, doesn’t the FBI just Google the two names? Surely, in the Internet age, a ‘reasonable alternative’ for finding out whether a prominent person is dead is to use Google (or any other search engine) to find a report of that person’s death. Moreover, while finding a death notice for the second speaker — the informant — may be harder (assuming that he was not prominent), Googling also provides ready access to hundreds of websites collecting obituaries from all over the country, any one of which might resolve that speaker’s status as well.”

D.C. Circuit Judge Merrick B. Garland introducing the FBI to a wonderful new investigative tool.

The judge was deciding a case involving four audiotapes recorded more than twenty-five years ago during an FBI corruption investigation in Louisiana. The plaintiff, an author, had sought release of the tapes under the Freedom of Information Act . There are two speakers on the tapes, one a “prominent individual” who was a subject of the FBI’s investigation, and the other an “undercover informant” in that investigation. The nub of the appeal was whether the FBI had undertaken reasonable steps to determine whether the speakers are now dead, in which event the privacy interests weighing against release would be diminished.

The FBI claimed that it had not been able to determine whether either speaker is dead or alive. It said further that it could not determine whether the speakers were over 100 years old (and thus presumed dead under FBI practice), because neither mentioned his birth date during the conversations that were surreptitiously recorded. It said that it could not determine whether the speakers were dead by referring to a Social Security database, because neither announced his social security number during the conversations. And it declined to search its own files for the speakers’ birth dates or social security numbers, because that is not its practice. “The Bureau”, said the judge acidly, “does not appear to have contemplated other ways of determining whether the speakers are dead, such as Googling them.”

And in a footnote, he helpfully points to the OED definition of “googling”.

Thanks to GMSV for the link.

YouTube’s business plan emerges from mist

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Acute observations from Good Morning Silicon Valley.

This morning YouTube lit up its “Paris Hilton Channel,” a collection of videos, interviews and other detritus offered in promotion of “Paris,” Hilton’s first effort as a recording artist — and along with it an ad for Fox’s TV show “Prison Break,” revenue from which will presumably underwrite some of the site’s bandwidth costs. “So will Paris Hilton and other stars counteract YouTube’s ludicrous bandwidth expenses,” asks Mashable’s Pete Cashmore. “I actually think they might — despite all the anti-hype around YouTube and the recurring question ‘Where’s the Business Model,’ I think it’s pretty clear that YouTube is a powerful branding platform — and not just for stars like Paris Hilton. MySpace has totally changed the nature of advertising — users now make friends with brands (see MySpace Marketing and Dasani’s custom MySpace layouts), and advertising is no longer about pushing content to people when they don’t want it. The Paris Hilton channel is just the start, and I expect to see hundreds more of these things springing up — why shouldn’t every media company have their own YouTube channel and MySpace page?”

Planned pay-for-placement channels are just one part of YouTube’s new advertising strategy. The video-sharing site has begun displaying commercials on its homepage as well. Interestingly, the site treats these ads just like any other video it hosts — allowing users to rate them, comment on them, or even embed them in their own Web sites. “These days, consumers are like walking TiVos, filtering out so much of what they see and hear in advertising,” said Mark Kingdon, chief executive of digital ad agency Organic, which produced the “Prison Break” spots appearing on the Paris Hilton Channel. “To reach this media-savvy demographic, advertisers have to ‘give to get.’ In other words, they have to give viewers something special, something unique, in exchange for their attention.”

Later… More useful reporting on TechCrunch.