Monthly Archives: July 2008

A handbag?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Regardless of what happens on appeal, these lawsuits, and others like them, are bad news for eBay. It now seems likely that at least some of the jurisdictions in which the company operates will insist that it becomes much more rigorous in policing activity on its site. And that spells trouble for the company’s business model because policing is expensive, and eBay relies on skimming modest fees from billions of transactions run entirely by software with no human intervention. The key to its success is scale – it has 84 million active users, handles more than 500 million auctions every quarter and last year the total value of everything sold on its sites approached $60bn.

Policing is a labour-intensive business, so eBay’s profitability would be drastically impaired if it were compelled to do it on any realistic scale…

Curvature of space

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A view of the new Stephen Hawking building in Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. And here’s the view looking the other way.

Given who it’s named after, it is perhaps appropriate that there doesn’t appear to be a straight line in the entire building.

2b or not 2b?

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I once had the good fortune to sit opposite David Crystal at dinner (it was the night before Cambridge University gave him an honorary degree), and it was fascinating to talk to the greatest living expert on the English language. Now he’s written a splendid essay on SMS messaging which explodes some of the moral-panic myths about the subject. Excerpt:

There are several distinctive features of the way texts are written that combine to give the impression of novelty, but none of them is, in fact, linguistically novel. Many of them were being used in chatroom interactions that predated the arrival of mobile phones. Some can be found in pre-computer informal writing, dating back a hundred years or more.

The most noticeable feature is the use of single letters, numerals, and symbols to represent words or parts of words, as with b “be” and 2 “to”. They are called rebuses, and they go back centuries. Adults who condemn a “c u” in a young person’s texting have forgotten that they once did the same thing themselves (though not on a mobile phone). In countless Christmas annuals, they solved puzzles like this one:

YY U R YY U B I C U R YY 4 ME

(“Too wise you are . . .”)

Similarly, the use of initial letters for whole words (n for “no”, gf for “girlfriend”, cmb “call me back”) is not at all new. People have been initialising common phrases for ages. IOU is known from 1618. There is no difference, apart from the medium of communication, between a modern kid’s “lol” (“laughing out loud”) and an earlier generation’s “Swalk” (“sealed with a loving kiss”).

In texts we find such forms as msg (“message”) and xlnt (“excellent”). Almst any wrd cn be abbrvted in ths wy – though there is no consistency between texters. But this isn’t new either. Eric Partridge published his Dictionary of Abbreviations in 1942. It contained dozens of SMS-looking examples, such as agn “again”, mth “month”, and gd “good” – 50 years before texting was born.

English has had abbreviated words ever since it began to be written down. Words such as exam, vet, fridge, cox and bus are so familiar that they have effectively become new words. When some of these abbreviated forms first came into use, they also attracted criticism. In 1711, for example, Joseph Addison complained about the way words were being “miserably curtailed” – he mentioned pos (itive) and incog (nito). And Jonathan Swift thought that abbreviating words was a “barbarous custom”…

Great stuff. Worth reading in full.

Reality dawns in the Googleplex

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From this morning’s NYTimes…

Two months ago, Google held a series of secret focus groups with employees who have children in Google’s day care facilities. The purpose was to gauge their reaction to the company’s plan to raise the amount it charged for in-house day care by 75 percent.

Parents who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs rise to nearly $2,500 — well above the market rate. For parents with toddlers and preschoolers, who were charged less, the price increases were equally eye-popping. Under the new plan, parents with two kids in Google day care would most likely see their annual day care bill grow to more than $57,000 from around $33,000.

At the first of the three focus groups, parents wept openly. As word leaked out about the company’s plan, the Google parents began to fight back. They came up with ideas to save money, used the company’s T.G.I.F. sessions — a weekly meeting for anyone who wanted to ask questions of Google’s top executives — to plead their case, and conducted surveys showing that most parents with children in Google day care would have to leave Google’s facilities and find less expensive child care.

Now we know how this story ends, don’t we? Google famously doesn’t do evil. But guess what?

Although Google is rolling back its price increase slightly and is phasing in the higher price over five quarters, the outline of the original decision remains largely unchanged. At a T.G.I.F. in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.) On Monday, Google began the first phase of its new day care plan, letting go of the outside day care firm it had been using.

Another straw in the wind. Google may be extraordinary in some ways, but basically it’s a public company, not a campaigning, do-gooding, non-profit. That’s why it caved in to the Chinese over censoring search results. That’s why it’s handing over all those YouTube access details to Viacom. And that’s why it’s beginning to pare back employee perks.

Word puzzles

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The Naughton household is deep into a discussion about the positive side of certain words. For example, one often comes across the word ‘disgruntled’; but where — outside of PG Wodehouse — will you find ‘gruntled’? (It’s the kind of thing Bertie Wooster might say, I suppose.) And what about ‘consolate’? And when was the last time you saw anyone nicely ‘shevelled’? Eh?

Men in white hats

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Spotted at Nicci’s birthday party — Julian Barnes on the left, deep in conversation with Francis Wheen (who is wearing his MCC hat). I’d forgotten to bring headgear (bad news for a guy who’s lost most of his hair) and so was reduced to wearing one of Sean’s gardening hats, which made me indistinguishable from a tramp. Sigh.