Daily Archives: December 14, 2005

The Net and the future of newspapers

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Typically thoughtful post by Scott Rosenberg on the way the Internet is affecting newspapers. Excerpt:

The newspapers I grew up loving and that I worked for during the first half of my career represent a model that we’ve taken for granted because it’s had such longevity. But there’s nothing god-given or force-of-nature-like to the shape of their product or business; it’s simply an artifact of history that you could roll together a bundle of disparate information — news reports, stock prices, sports scores, display ads, reviews, classified ads, crossword puzzles and so on — sell it to readers, and make money.

Today that bundle has already fallen apart on the content side: there’s simply no reason for newspapers to publish stock prices, for instance; it’s a practice that will simply disappear over the next few years — it’s sheer tree slaughter. On the business side, it is beginning to fall apart, too. It just makes way more sense to do classified advertising online. And it’s cheaper, too, thanks to Craigslist, the little community (I am proud to have been a subscriber to Craig Newmark’s original mailing list on the Well back in 1994 or 1995 or whenever it was) that turned into a big deal.

Wikilaw launched

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Main page here. Its goal is “to build the largest open-content legal resource in the world”. It claims there are “roughly 1,000,000 lawyers in the United States”. Pardon me while I lie down in a darkened room. It’s the thought of all those lawyers laid end to end.

I love the story about Sam Johnson and James Boswell walking together down a street behind another chap. The great Doctor pulled Boswell aside and whispered, “I don’t wish to speak ill of any other person, but I believe that man is an attorney”.

The Uses of Play-Doh

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Er, so much for fingerprint scanning. According to this report from Clarkson University,

Fingerprint scanning devices often use basic technology, such as an optical camera that take pictures of fingerprints which are then “read” by a computer. In order to assess how vulnerable the scanners are to spoofing, Schuckers and her research team made casts from live fingers using dental materials and used Play-Doh to create molds. They also assembled a collection of cadaver fingers.In the laboratory, the researchers then systematically tested more than 60 of the faked samples. The results were a 90 percent false verification rate.

But do not despair, Homeland Security Spokespersons. Help is at hand. The Clarkson researchers found that if you scan for sweat, then the detection of fakes improves.

Which only goes to prove that, as someone once said, “genius is five percent inspiration and 95% perspiration”.

(Sorry — couldn’t resist that.) Thanks to the Guardian Online Blog for the link.

The problem with ‘problem’

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I’ve just been listening to the CEO of the drinks company Britvic (which is being launched on the UK Stock Market) dealing with journalistic questions about the company’s flat sales in the last year. Did he acknowledge that they had a problem? Of course not. He talked about ‘challenges’ instead. This is par for the course nowadays — nobody wants to be caught acknowledging that they have a problem, with the result that it has become a pariah word in political and governmental circles.

This is daft, because problems are what we really need. I first learned this many years ago from Donald Schon, who taught architecture at MIT and wrote a wonderful book about professionalism entitled The Reflective Practitioner. In it, he challenged the prevailing view that professionals (lawyers, doctors, architects, etc.) are “problem solvers”. They’re not, argued Schon: they’re problem creators. A problem is a perceived discrepancy between a current state and a desired one. ‘Solving’ a problem means devising a means of getting from one to the other. So if you have a ‘problem’ then you’re half-way there: at least you know where you stand.

But most of the time in life we aren’t sure about one or other or both states — where we are now, or where we want to get to. So what happens is that people with hazily-defined difficulties come to professionals for help. The professionals then do some work on those difficulties to convert them into problems, after which they can identify possible solutions. Thus a father who wants to ensure that children of several marriages (each with its own property entailments) are equally treated in his will goes to a lawyer for advice. The lawyer (if she is a good one) will convert that general desire into a problem or problems for which legal solutions are available.

So let’s have more problems, not fewer.