Lies, damn lies and Internet statistics

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Robert Scoble has an interesting post about the unreliability of Web stats.

Almost every entrepreneur I talk to lately whines privately about the stats they see on places like Compete.com, Comscore, and Alexa. Today Tom Conrad of Pandora told me that they are extremely low. He says his service requires registration, so he has very accurate stats of who’s signed into Pandora and he can’t figure out why the stats services are so far off of the real stats.

Lots more in the post. It’s also attracted some very thoughtful comments.

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Fancy a bit of digital, er, enablement?

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From Ed Felten…

People have had lots of objections to Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology — centering mainly on its clumsiness and the futility of its anti-infringement rationale — but until recently nobody had complained that the term “Digital Rights Management” was insufficiently Orwellian.

That changed on Tuesday, when HBO’s Chief Technology Officer, Bob Zitter, suggested at an industry conference that DRM needs a name change. Zitter’s suggested name: Digital Consumer Enablement, or DCE.

The irony here is that “rights management” is itself an industry-sponsored euphemism for what would more straightforwardly be
called “restrictions”. But somehow the public got the idea that DRM is restrictive, hence the need for a name change.

Zitter went on to discuss HBO’s strategy. HBO wants to sell shows in HighDef, but the problem is that many consumers are watching HD content using the analog outputs on their set-top boxes — often because their fancy new HD televisions don’t implement HBO’s favorite form of DRM. So what HBO wants is to disable the analog outputs on the set-top box, so consumers have no choice but to adopt HBO’s favored DRM.

Which makes the nature of the “enablement” clear. By enabling your set-top box to be incompatible with your TV, HBO will enable you to buy an expensive new TV…

Astonishing new research finding

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Well, blow me down! The Daily Torygraph reports that:

Men find photos of the opposite sex much more “rewarding” than women, new research claims today.

According to the study men take the same pleasure out of looking at an attractive female form as they do from having a curry or making money whereas women do not take any significant reward from looking at pictures of men.

The survey published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B said that brain scan studies show that “reward centres” are triggered in men when they gaze at a woman’s face or body whereas they are not in females…

Reward centres, eh? Now that’s what I call leading-edge research. (Or should that read ‘world class’? I’m always getting the two mixed up.)

Blog forking

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Code forking is something that often happens in Open Source software development. Perhaps it will also become common in blogging. At any rate, I know of several people who maintain different blogs for different purposes. For example, Ed Felten, in addition to his impressive Freedom to Tinker maintains a Links blog. And the amazing Jon Crowcroft maintains no fewer than four — and manages to have interesting stuff in each one. But then he’s a law unto himself.

(Aside: Quentin used Yahoo! Pipes to funnel the entire Crowcroft output into a single channel.)

Following some conversations with my OU colleagues Tony Hirst and Martin Weller, I’ve decided to spin off a blog where I can post stuff likely to be of interest only to edu-geeks. There will be some duplication between it and Memex, but the two will gradually diverge over time. It has the stunningly unoriginal title Thinking aloud.

Memex 1.1 will continue on its traditional eclectic (i.e. scatty) way.

Incidentally, Ed Felten uses Dashlog for his Links Blog.

For serious masochists I’ve rigged up a combined feed (via Yahoo Pipes). Find it here.

Attaboy!

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I never thought I’d find myself agreeing agreeing with John Howard, but in this case I’ll make an exception.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard has ordered the country’s cricket team to pull out of a planned tour of Zimbabwe later this year.

He said the tour would be an “enormous propaganda boost” to Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe.

My only complaint is that his description of Robert Mugabe as a “grubby dictator” was too mild.

Wonder what my colleague Ray Ison thinks about it. He’s no admirer of Howard either.

Still no sign of a triple alliance to take on Google

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This morning’s Observer column…

The strange business of the ‘takeover’ that never was – that of Yahoo by Microsoft – raises some interesting questions. First, who benefited? The story originated in an unexpected place – the New York Post, a lively tabloid publication owned since 1993 by Rupert Murdoch, where one would rarely look for a big technology story…

Clunkiness is the new black

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There’s been quite a lot of chat on photography sites about the Canon G7. Why? Because of its ‘clunky’ feel. It reminds people, apparently, of ‘real’ cameras. The top view, for example, is supposedly reminiscent of a Contax or even an M-Leica.

A guy in the Financial Times even claimed it was a ‘rangefinder camera’. Odd that this doesn’t appear in the technical specs.

Stand by for a new trend in ‘retro’ digital cameras.

Lazy journalism

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Lovely rant by Jon Crowcroft.

Someone had left a copy of yesterday’s Daily Mail on the train open to an article by their “Science Correspondent”, Fiona Macrae, about the “possible health risk for pupils” of WiFi in the class room.

The article quoted several pressure groups, and some unnamed “scientists”, and asserted that sitting in a room with a WiFi station could be like being in the direct beam of a GSM Cellular tower at 300meters. This, it was claimed, could lead to ADHD, Cancer and premature senility.

Firstly, the guilt by association simply by being “radio” annoyed me – WiFi uses the ISM (Medical and Scientific Instrument band) around 2.4GHz, not the GSM Cellular bands which means even the vaguest idea that it might resonate with certain common energy levels in certain molecular links common in biological systems (one of the pet theories about how GSM might be a problem) is wrong, because its a completely different frequency/wavelength. Secondly, its a completely different power level that the user is exposed to:
you don’t hold the laptop to your head, and the laptop’s WiFi card and the WiFi Access Point (AP) are roughly symmetric in power terms, whereas a GSM cell tower is much more powerful than a handset.

Thirdly, there are on the order of 100M such systems in the world, and if there was a significant problem it would have shown up (the article points to increasing levels of ADHD – this predates WiFi in any case, and is strongly associated with people using computers whether they have wireless nets or not, and is far more likely to be a symptom of the type of kids that use computers too much,
not of the idea that the computer (or the network) directly cause attention deficit disorders.

I get very annoyed by this sort of article, particularly because the author has failed to seek any balancing view from an actual, named scientist which simply smacks of lazy journalism, especially when a few seconds with Google and Wikipedia would find plenty of information rather than hearsay and superstition, and might elicit a quote from a neutral person who has a clue.

By all means, have a further investigation (although there have, contrary to the article’s assertion, been checks on the problems with 802.11/ISM band health risks)….but unsupported allegations are not really “science” journalism.

Sometimes, I get the impression that people who write these columns in those types of newspapers are like the PE teachers who used to (in the bad old days) end up being landed with taking the geography O-level class.