Daily Archives: May 3, 2009

Encarta RIP — the NYT’s belated obit

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This is odd — weeks after Microsoft announced that it was abandoning Encarta, the NYT publishes a piece by Randall Stross.

IN 1985, when Microsoft was turned down by Britannica, the conventional wisdom in the encyclopedia business held that a sales force that knocked on doors was indispensable, that encyclopedias were “sold, not bought.” Encarta showed that with a low-enough price — it was selling for $99 when Britannica introduced its own CD-ROM encyclopedia in 1994 for $995 — it could become the best-selling encyclopedia.

But the triumph was short-lived. Microsoft soon learned that the public would no longer pay for information once it was available free. Other information businesses, of course, are now confronting the same fact, but without the Windows and Office franchises to fall back upon.

Randall Stross is a good reporter, so my hunch is that this is a piece that’s been lying on the shelf for a while until a quiet news day arrived.

The World of To and For

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A few months ago I went into the local branch of my bank (Lloyds TSB) to do a non-routine transaction involving transferring a significant amount of cash. I’ve been a regular customer at the branch since 1985 and several of the staff know me by sight. All of my personal accounts and those of one of my companies are managed by the branch. But when it came to do the transaction, the cashier requested evidence of my ID. “Eh?” I replied. “What kind of ID?” Back came the reply: “A passport or driving licence will do”. Why did she need this, I inquired? “So that we know who you are.”

At this point I became rather, er, annoyed. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does it isn’t a pretty sight. So eventually the ‘manager’ was called and in due course the transaction was carried out without production of any further documents. Of course this branch ‘manager’ didn’t know me personally. It’s not his job to know people. That function is now delegated to my “personal customer relationship manager” — i.e. the chap who writes to me at irregular intervals to say that he’s just taken up this interesting new post and would like to get to know me better. Needless to say, I’ve never met any of the holders of this important post.

Given this background — which I’m sure is entirely unexceptional — you can see why I have been struck by Charlie Leadbeater’s lovely essay for Cornerhouse. Here’s a taster:

Often in the name of doing things for people traditional, hierarchical organisations end up doing things to people. Companies say they work for consumers but often treat them like targets to be aimed at, wallets to be emptied, desires to be excited and manipulated. The person who calls himself my ‘personal relationship manager’ at a leading high street bank does not know me from Adam but in the cause of trying to sell me some savings products I do not want pretends that we are lifelong friends. In the name of doing something for me, actually he wanted to do something to me: relieve me of some money. Many experiences of public services are often little different. Social services departments were created to help people in need. Yet those on the receiving end of services often complain they feel they are being done to, processed by a bureaucratic machine.

How Google does it

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If you came on US Patent #7508978 you might stifle a yawn. Certainly you’d never suspect that it might be a design for radically changing our communications environment. Here’s what the Abstract says:

Detection of grooves in scanned images

A system and method locate a central groove in a document such as a book, magazine, or catalog. In one implementation, scores are generated for points in a three-dimensional image that defines a surface of the document. The scores quantify a likelihood that a particular point is in the groove. The groove is then detected based on the scores. For example, lines may be fitted through the points and a value calculated for the lines based on the scores. The line corresponding to the highest calculated value may be selected as the line that defines the groove.

Eh? And yet it turns out that this is the basis for Google’s amazingly efficient book-scanning technology.
In a lovely blog post, Maureen Clements explains how:

Turns out, Google created some seriously nifty infrared camera technology that detects the three-dimensional shape and angle of book pages when the book is placed in the scanner. This information is transmitted to the OCR software, which adjusts for the distortions and allows the OCR software to read text more accurately. No more broken bindings, no more inefficient glass plates. Google has finally figured out a way to digitize books en masse. For all those who’ve pondered “How’d They Do That?” you finally have an answer.

LATER: How the Internet Archive scans books. As you can see from the movie, it’s pretty labour-intensive, despite the robotics.

The Two Cultures: fifty years on

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This morning’s Observer column.

…Over the years, Snow’s meme has been subjected to criticism and abuse, but the idea of mutually uncomprehending cultures still seems relevant to understanding why important segments of our society are struggling to come to terms with a networked world. In our case, the gap is not between the humanities and the sciences but those who are obsessed with lock-down and control, on the one hand, and those who celebrate openness and unfettered creativity on the other. The odd thing is that one finds arts and scientific types on both sides of this divide….