The Wii. Popular, in demand – and out of stock

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This morning’s Observer column

Although there is nothing new about ‘must-have’ gizmos being in short supply, there is a novel twist this year. It is that the elusive object of desire was also last Christmas’s most desired object – the Nintendo Wii, the most innovative games console since the (Nintendo) GameBoy in 1989…

Desperate measures are afoot. For example, this source reports that

To deal with frustration among holiday shoppers hunting for its Wii game console, Nintendo Co. and retailer GameStop Corp. are launching a rain check program.

”We expect this to be a great way for consumers who desperately want a Wii to have something to put under the tree,” Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said Friday.

The rain checks will be available at the regular Wii system price, $249.99, on Dec. 20 and 21, and will entitle buyers to get the Nintendo console before Jan. 29. Fils-Aime said ”many tens of thousands of rain checks” would be available.

Harvard changes tack

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Interesting FT.com column by Christopher Caldwell about Harvard’s change of strategy on student support.

This week, Harvard announced a new financial aid system that will revolutionise the economics of American undergraduate education. Henceforth, students whose families earn up to $180,000 a year will pay no more than 10 per cent of that income to Harvard. Loans will be eliminated from financial aid packages and replaced with outright grants. Home equity will not be taken into account in determining contribution levels. It is a great step forward from the Harvard I attended in the 1980s. Whether it is a step forward for American society is harder to gauge.

The money needed to get this new programme up and running – about $22m – is a drop in the bucket for Harvard. Its $35bn endowment makes it (if we compare Harvard’s assets with various gross domestic products) a mightier economic force than Syria or Bulgaria or the Dominican Republic. Last year, the Harvard portfolio earned a 23 per cent return overall. At those rates Harvard’s largesse can be paid for with about four days’ worth of interest on the interest.

Classic images

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This shot of a cheeky lad snapped in the Rue Mouffetard in 1954 by Henri Cartier-Bresson is my favourite picture. Now I discover that it was the photographer’s least favourite picture! At any rate, this is what John Banville writes in his review of Magnum Magnum, the anniversary collection of work by Magnum photographers:

Taste is a strange thing, and again and again throughout Magnum Magnum one is surprised by what seem not so much contrasts as head-on collisions. In a brief introductory essay Gerry Badger wonders what might be the quintessential Magnum image. He decides on Henri Cartier-Bresson’s picture of ”that wonderfully cheeky Parisian urchin cradling two bottles of wine”. It is ironic, therefore, to recall that when, a couple of years before his death, I mentioned this very snapshot to HCB, he threw his hands in the air and cried out as if in pain: ”Terrible! Terrible! I should destroy the negative!”

Just goes to show: great minds seldom think alike.

The best medicine

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My mother used to say that ‘laughter is the best medicine’. This picture of a good friend in jovial mood confirms that. It was taken with my trusty old Leica M4. It’s astonishing how unobtrusive this ancient machine is: people genuinely don’t seem to notice it.

Review of the day

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From Matt Williams’s review of the Bic Crystal ballpoint pen that he purchased from Amazon.co.uk…

Since taking delivery of my pen I have been very happy with the quality of ink deposition on the various types of paper that I have used. On the first day when I excitedly unwrapped my pen (thanks for the high quality packaging Amazon!) I just couldn’t contain my excitement and went around finding things to write on, like the shopping list on the notice board in our kitchen, the Post-it notes next to the phone, and on my favourite lined A4 pad at the side of my desk.

My pen is the transparent type with a blue lid. I selected this one in preference to the orange type because I like to be able to see how much ink I have left so that I can put in another order before I finally run out.

When the initial excitement of taking delivery of my new pen started to wear off I realised that I shouldn’t just write for the fun of it, this should be a serious enterprise, so by the second day of ownership I started to take a little more care of what I wrote. I used it to sign three letters, and in each case was perfectly happy with the neatness of handwriting that I was able to achieve.

I have a helpful tip for you that you might not know about – if you let the ink dry for a few seconds you can avoid the smudging that sometimes happens if you rub the ink immediately after writing. Fortunately the ink used in this particular Bic pen seems to dry very quickly.

On the third day of ownership I went on a trip to London and took my pen carefully packed away in my brief case, but I needn’t have worried, this isn’t some temperamental ink pen that leaks when you store it at the wrong angle. I sat at my meeting and confidently removed the cap from my pen and it wrote flawlessly, almost immediately…

Interestingly, “1,408 of 1,417 people” found his review “helpful”. Who said irony was dead?

Google: Knol thyself

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Google is taking aim at Wikipedia…

Google Knol is designed to allow anyone to create a page on any topic, which others can comment on, rate, and contribute to if the primary author allows. The service is in a private test beta. You can’t apply to be part of it, nor can the pubic [sic] see the pages that have been made. Google also stressed to me that what’s shown in the screenshots it provided might change and that the service might not launch at all…

If they do launch it, then the emerging comparisons with Wikipedia will be intriguing. GMSV has a thoughtful take on it.

Now you may be thinking, “Don’t we already have a collaborative, grass-roots, online encyclopedia … Wiki-something?” Indeed we do, as the Google guys are well aware, since Wikipedia entries tend to show up in that coveted area near the top of many, many pages of Google search results. But Google’s plan is based on a model that highlights individual expertise rather than collective knowledge. Unlike Wikipedia, where the contributors and editors remain in the background, each knol represents the view of a single author, who is featured prominently on the page. Readers can add comments, reviews, rankings, and alternative knols on the subject, but cannot directly edit the work of others, as in Wikipedia. And Google is offering another incentive — knol authors can choose to include ads with their offering and collect a cut of the revenue.

Some see this as a dagger in Wikipedia’s heart, but from a user perspective, I think they look more complementary than competitive, both with their weak and strong points. Search a topic on Wikipedia and you’ll get a single page of information, the contents of which could be the result of a lot of backroom back-and-forth, but which, when approached with a reasonable degree of skepticism, offers some quick answers and a good jumping off point to additional research. Search a topic in Google’s book of knowledge and it sounds like you’ll get your choice of competing knols all annotated with the comments of other users, and if there are disagreements or differing interpretations, they’ll be argued out in the open. So it’s the wisdom of crowds as created by readers vs. the wisdom of experts (or whoever is interested enough in glory and revenue to stake that claim) as ranked by readers. I can see the usefulness and drawbacks of both.

Where this does represent a threat to Wikipedia is in traffic, if Google knols start rising to the top of the search results and Wikipedia’s are pushed down. Google says it won’t be giving the knols any special rankings juice to make that happen, but the more Google puts its own hosted content in competition with what it indexes, the more people are going to be suspicious.

All kinds of interesting scenarios present themselves. It’s not just the wisdom of crowds vs. the wisdom of ‘experts’. It’s also the Jerffersonian ‘marketplace in ideas’ on steroids. Just imagine, for example, competing Knols on the Holocaust written by David Irving (and I’m sure he will submit one) vs. one written by Richard Evans or Deborah Lipstadt.

Editorial dependence

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Spotted on the desk of the colleague who is currently editing my stuff. Surely it can’t be that bad? According to Wikipedia, strychnine is a very toxic, colorless crystalline alkaloid used as a pesticide, particularly for killing small vertebrates such as rodents.