Braking news: the Toyota feeding frenzy

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I’ve had two Toyota Prius cars so far and they’re easily the best cars I’ve ever owned (and I’ve had a lot of reputable automobiles in my time, including a Jaguar MK II, several Volkswagens and about five of those oh-so-sensible Swedish makes), so I’m a bit puzzled by the media firestorm about the recalls. Of course it’s a PR disaster for the company — and I’m sure they’ve handled it badly. (They could learn a thing or two from the way Amazon handled the Orwell-deletions on the Kindle, for example.)

As far as the sticky-accelerator problem is concerned, I can’t see why it should be much of a threat to any competent driver. As an 18-year-old learner-driver said to me the other day, “why don’t people just put the car into neutral, switch off the engine and coast to a halt?” So is this firestorm a symptom of headless-chicken hysteria, or am I missing something?

The Guardian has made a valiant attempt to explain the Prius braking ‘problem’ in today’s issue. Having run the animation it occurs to me that some of the scandalised Prius owners who’ve been talking to the media may not have used an ABS system before. At any rate, the ABS on my Prius behaves exactly as the ABS on the Saabs I owned before switching to Toyota — and I remember being disconcerted when I first braked in an ABS-enabled car.

Thanks to Kevin Cryan for the Guardian link.

Back to the future: the US Sejm

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Nice Krugman column.

We’ve always known that America’s reign as the world’s greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic.

What we’re getting instead is less a tragedy than a deadly farce. Instead of fraying under the strain of imperial overstretch, we’re paralyzed by procedure. Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland.

A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.

Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison.

Last week, after nine months, the Senate finally approved Martha Johnson to head the General Services Administration, which runs government buildings and purchases supplies. It’s an essentially nonpolitical position, and nobody questioned Ms. Johnson’s qualifications: she was approved by a vote of 94 to 2. But Senator Christopher Bond, Republican of Missouri, had put a “hold” on her appointment to pressure the government into approving a building project in Kansas City.

This dubious achievement may have inspired Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama. In any case, Mr. Shelby has now placed a hold on all outstanding Obama administration nominations — about 70 high-level government positions — until his state gets a tanker contract and a counterterrorism center.

What gives individual senators this kind of power? Much of the Senate’s business relies on unanimous consent: it’s difficult to get anything done unless everyone agrees on procedure. And a tradition has grown up under which senators, in return for not gumming up everything, get the right to block nominees they don’t like.

In the past, holds were used sparingly. That’s because, as a Congressional Research Service report on the practice says, the Senate used to be ruled by “traditions of comity, courtesy, reciprocity, and accommodation.” But that was then. Rules that used to be workable have become crippling now that one of the nation’s major political parties has descended into nihilism, seeing no harm — in fact, political dividends — in making the nation ungovernable.

How bad is it? It’s so bad that I miss Newt Gingrich.

NYT readers are more highbrow than expected, survey finds

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Well, up to a point. Interesting piece, though.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.

The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”

But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

ACPO makes £18m from criminal records checks

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Until this moment, I had naively assumed that the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) was an official body, funded by the Home Office to co-ordinate policing policy. Well, guess what? It’s a nice little privatised earner, as this Telegraph report suggests.

Concerns have been raised that the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is being run as a private company and as such escapes many of the rules that ensure public bodies are accountable.

Nevertheless it has been taking on an increasing role in advising the government on strategies to fight terrorism and organised crime.

The ‘not for profit’ company does not pay dividends to shareholders but its accounts show ACPO has built up £15.8m in assets, including £9.2m cash in the bank on a turnover of £18m.

It has emerged that the association is charging between £35 and £70 for criminal record checks for US visas which used to cost £10.

It also markets a service to endorse crime prevention measures which made £225,000 profit.

The money comes on top of £15m received from the Home Office for the “co-ordination of the national police response to terrorism, organised crime [and] large operations such as the Suffolk prostitute murders” according to its accounts and payments for its involvement in arranging the “use of police cells across the country to house prisoners”.

Its president, Sir Ken Jones, the former Sussex Chief Constable, earns £138,702 a year along with £30,000 pension contributions on top of his police pensions.

Other former chief constables head up different subsidiaries and the overall wage bill comes to £1.4m for 21 employees, although that also includes outside consultants.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil liberties group Liberty, has called for a “fundamental review”, claiming that the functions of ACPO need to be determined by Parliament.

She said: “ACPO is many things. It advises Government, it sets policing policy, it campaigns for increased police powers, and now we learn it is engaged in commercial activities – all with a lack of accountability”.

Twitterature

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Smart thinking by two University of Chicago undergraduates. Some of the twittered books are really witty. I particularly liked their translation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Bloggers: queue here for bus passes

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Interesting insight from the Pew Project into the way the media ecosystem is evolving.

Since 2006, blogging has dropped among teens and young adults while simultaneously rising among older adults. As the tools and technology embedded in social networking sites change, and use of the sites continues to grow, youth may be exchanging ‘macro-blogging’ for microblogging with status updates.

Blogging has declined in popularity among both teens and young adults since 2006. Blog commenting has also dropped among teens.

* 14% of online teens now say they blog, down from 28% of teen internet users in 2006.

* This decline is also reflected in the lower incidence of teen commenting on blogs within social networking websites; 52% of teen social network users report commenting on friends’ blogs, down from the 76% who did so in 2006.

* By comparison, the prevalence of blogging within the overall adult internet population has remained steady in recent years. Pew Internet surveys since 2005 have consistently found that roughly one in ten online adults maintain a personal online journal or blog.

While blogging among adults as a whole has remained steady, the prevalence of blogging within specific age groups has changed dramatically in recent years. Specifically, a sharp decline in blogging by young adults has been tempered by a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults.

Why Google needs to fix the Android Apps market

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Yep. My experience of it is that it’s unsatisfactory, so I agree with much of this complaint.

The Android Market (droid’s equivalent to the iPhone App Store) is fundamentally broken. It’s a poor experience from start to finish, and exemplifies the grace with which Apple builds hardware and software products.

The post focusses on three main areas that need improvement.

1. Finding Apps

Like most sites/services, finding apps works via Search and Browse. You can Search for something by word/term, and see apps that match – it works “ok” but not super impressive. Browse, on the other hand, is weak. The world is divided into Applications and Games. Games has the following categories: “All”, “Arcade & Action”, “Brain & Puzzle”, “Cards & Casino”, and “Casual” – no sports, racing, music, RPG, strategy, or pretty much anything after the letter C. Once browsing, you must sort, either by Most Popular or Newest. This means that once popular, something will stay popular. There’s no way to sort, or filter, or even view simple things like “most popular this week”, or “highest rated” or anything else. This dramatically impacts a user’s ability to find new good apps, since there’s just no view for that. And this is from Google, the uber-kings of data.

Once you find an app that seems interesting, the next step is trying to decide if you want it / it will work. Every app has a name, publisher, # of ratings, # of downloads, description, and comments. NO SCREENSHOTS or anything, but a description. The comments are sometimes useful, but typically not, as you’ll often see “crashed on my droid” or “new version seems unstable” or some other complaint. The problem with these kinds of complaints is because of all the different Droid configurations, there’s no way to tell if the comments/ratings apply to your own device.

2. Installing & Updating Apps

The installation process itself is fairly straightforward, once you find an app, you click the big Install button, then you are shown a cryptic screen with a bunch of warnings that you rapidly learn to ignore, then click OK. My big complaint on this process is the aforementioned “car alarm” warnings. I make the car alarm analogy because, much like the loud annoying car alarms we hear on random streets at random times, we pay them absolutely no attention anymore. Which is inherently the opposite objective of a warning! But with phrases like “Your personal information – read contact data” and “Phone calls – modify phone state”, there’s just no sense behind it. It might as well show “PC Load Letter” and have the same amount of effectiveness.

My other gripe is on updating apps. Since we’re still in the early stage of Droid application development, a lot of programmers are pushing frequent updates to their apps. This is great from a “shiny new toy” perspective, but getting annoying from a “stop showing me lots of alerts” perspective. Also, there’s no way to update multiple apps simultaneously, nor auto-update an app. And, since most developers at present are not displaying changelogs it’s hard to figure out if the update is worthwhile or not. Further, it’s very unclear as to whether or not the comments/rating on an app are relative to the most current version or not. Lastly, and most dominant in the category of “how I know this is a Droid and not an iPhone experience,” every time I update an app, I see the warnings about that app. Every. Time.

3. Buying, Rating, and Uninstalling Apps

Rating applications is easy, but … needs more criteria. My rating should get tied to the specific version of the app, and the platform I’m using as well. Overall the rating/comment system is fairly thin, and could use improvement.

Uninstalling applications from an Android device is one of the more awkward experiences of the system. There’s no “uninstaller”, instead you navigate back into the Market, find the app in My Downloads, then uninstall from there. This is mostly awkward because everything else in Droid is either a click-and-drag or a long-click – so the navigation/usage paradigm you learn by using the system all of a sudden doesn’t come into play. Now in reality I’m being a little dramatic, as once you’ve learned it, it’s easy, but it’s just another example of the kluge-like nature of the marketplace. Then again, if it’s so easy why does it take 9 steps on an eHow page (they don’t show the same path I use, but that’s also kind of the point)?

Some of the most irritating things are probably a consequence of having the OS run on a number of different devices. For example, I can’t get a barcode reader to work on my Pulse phone — each one failes to engage the camera. I suspect that they work fine on, say the HTC handset, or the Motorola Droid. Because Apple has an iron grip on their hardware, iPhone Apps don’t have this problem.

On the other hand, Jon Crowcroft — who is not an easy man to please — seems to like his HTC handset.