From Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox…

Between the ages of 25 and 60, people’s ability to use websites declines by 0.8% per year — mostly because they spend more time per page, but also because of navigation difficulties.

Now, where did I put that ‘delete’ button?

My favourite movie title of all time is Things To Do in Denver When You’re Dead. I’ve been there only once, and the nicest thing about it seemed to be the distant view of the Rockies. But then again I’m not the adventurous sort of urban explorer. Anyway, it seems that the city is more interesting than I had supposed. Forbes magazine has compiled indices of which US cities score highest on each of the seven Deadly Sins. The survey of “America’s Most Sinful Cities” concludes that Denver scores highest for lust. The metric, however, is rather unimaginative: it seems to be per capita sales of contraceptives. Phooey.

Galway is my favourite Irish town, and for decades an essential part of every trip was to walk down Shop Street and turn left into High Street to visit Kennys Bookshop. Inside, one would spot an imposing matron sitting alertly behind a till and watching everything that went on, talking to customers and keeping staff in order. This was Maureen Kenny, co-founder of the business (in 1940) and the woman Seamus Heaney described as “the Madonna of the Manuscripts”.

The word ‘formidable’ might have been coined for her. She built the business into one of the world’s great independent bookshops (and successfully took it online long before most independents perceived the threat of the Internet). It made sense because Kennys had built up an impressive mail-order business. In the 1980s the Library of Congress appointed Kennys as their Irish suppliers and the business now supplies three hundred other libraries throughout North America. When my book on the history of the Net was about to come out in 1999, I sent her a copy and in the ensuing telephone conversation she made it clear to me in the nicest possible way that for her this Internet stuff was quite old hat! This was indeed true: the shop’s first web site was launched in 1994, and the family has always maintained that only one other bookshop in the world beat them to it. In 2005, the Kennys took the next logical step, closed the shop and took the entire business online.

Which of course is a shame in one way because Kennys was a lovely shop, with a stupendous collection of Irish literature, and jumbles of literary treasures in every corner. I never came out of the place without having bought something, and always tried to snatch a word with its presiding genius.

There was a nice obit in the Irish Times. Excerpt:

Maureen was born in Glebe Street, Mohill, Co. Leitrim, the eldest of three children. Her father died suddenly when she was four years old, leaving her mother with three young children and a business she knew nothing about.

Next door was a Royal Irish Constabulary barracks which was taken over by the Black and Tans. On a couple of occasions they took the infant Maureen and used her as a human shield on top of their truck while driving round Mohill, randomly shooting in through windows.

She went on to win a scholarship to University College, Galway in 1936 and on her first day there met Des Kenny. As Des often said later, “that was that”.

Kennys was — and remains — a real family business, employing 40 people — including most of her children. This photograph (from the company web site) shows Mrs K flanked by her offspring.

She is survived by six children, 21 grandchildren and 13 great-grand-children.

Clipped from this week’s Connacht Tribune.

She was buried on Thursday. I bet it was some funeral.

Most of my American friends are solidly behind Barack Obama. In an interesting LRB piece, Jonathan Raban explains why…

Even when Obama’s at his most public, firing up an audience at a rally, one notices about him a detachment, a distinct aloofness, as if part of him remains a sceptical and laconic watcher in the wings, keeping his own counsel, as he appears to have been doing since infancy. In more intimate and less artificial circumstances, his capacity for empathy and his innate reserve work in consort. He’s hungry for the details of other people’s lives. He conducts each meeting with his trademark ambassadorial good manners, sussing out his companions and playing his own hand cautiously close to his chest (when he was a state senator in Illinois, he was a leading member of a cross-party poker school). In the heat of a fierce election, he could be mistaken for a writer doing research for a book.

Hillary Clinton, armed with a relentlessly detailed, bullet-pointed position paper for every human eventuality, is a classic technocrat and rationalist; Obama is that exotic political animal, a left-of-centre empiricist. The great strength of his writing is his determination to incorporate into the narrative what he calls ‘unwelcome details’, and you can see the same principle at work in the small print of his policy proposals. Abroad, he accepts the world as it is and, on that basis, is ready to parlay with Presidents Ahmadinejad, Assad and Castro, while Clinton requires the world to conform to her preconditions before she’ll talk directly to such dangerous types. At home, Obama refuses to compel every American to sign up to his healthcare plan (as Clinton would), on the grounds that penalising those who lack the wherewithal to do so will only compound their problems. Where Clinton promises to abolish the Bush education programme known as No Child Left Behind, he wants ‘to make some adjustments’ to it (like moving the standardised tests from late in the school year to the beginning, so that they are neutral measures of attainment, and don’t dictate the syllabus like an impending guillotine).

Raban points to an intriguing video of Obama having dinner with four of his constituents. You can see why people take to him.

From this week’s Economist…

CAPITALISM without bankruptcy, it is said, is like Christianity without hell. With recession looming, the air in America’s bankruptcy courts is thick with brimstone and the coals are being heated in readiness for the many sad souls whose sin was to borrow too much. After several heavenly years, in which bankruptcies fell to record lows, going bust is back. How bad will things get?

If the debt markets are to be believed, companies could be in at least as much trouble as they were in the previous two downturns, in the early 1990s and at the start of this decade, after the dotcom bubble burst. A leading indicator is the spread between yields on speculative “junk” bonds and American Treasury bonds. A year ago, the spread was only about 280 basis points; the long-term average is around 500 points. This month the spread exceeded 800 points for the first time since March 2003, reaching 862 on March 17th…

It’s a deliciously incomprehensible article. At one point, for example, it explains that

the difference between corporate-bond spreads and actual default rates is unusual and hard to explain: on the previous occasions when spreads have exceeded 800 points, the default rate was already 9.43% in 1990 and 5.44% in 2000. That said, the huge amounts of “covenant lite” debt issued in the credit boom of 2005-07, which gives lenders much less power to demand their money back than in the past, may have delayed the moment of default for many underperforming firms. So FridsonVision looked at the ten firms in which spreads exceeded 1,000 points by the smallest amounts. If these were merely victims of irrational pessimism in the market, they ought to be in relatively good shape. In fact, the analysts found plenty of reasons to worry. The companies included household names such as Beazer Homes, Ford and Rite Aid, all of which are “exhibiting classically distressed behaviour of downsizing amid recurring losses.”

And as for the mischief that hedge funds might get up to in the present crisis, well…

In a bankruptcy, a hedge fund could use the voting rights attached to different securities to maximise the overall value of its holdings in the firm at the expense of other investors.

Imagine, for instance, a hedge fund that owns debt secured against a company asset. It may prefer to force the firm into liquidation in order to win that asset rather than engage in a restructuring negotiation that will keep the firm alive. Meanwhile, it can boost its returns by short selling its unsecured debt and its equity. Or suppose that a hedge fund owns credit-default swaps as well as a firm’s debt. If the fund makes enough money from the pay-out of the credit-default swaps, it may prefer to use the voting rights on its debt to ensure that the firm goes bust rather than negotiate a way to avoid bankruptcy.

Got that? Good. Neither have I.