Izzy Stone: A pre-blogging blogger

Posted on by

Christopher Hitchens has written a thoughtful review of Myra MacPherson’s biography of I.F. Stone. Hitch signs off like this:

I possess a fairly full set of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, as well as all his books and several anthologies of his essays, and rereading them lately has made me morose as well as exhilarated. Some of the old battles now seem prehistoric: as it happens, Izzy never believed that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were innocent, and as it happens he was as right about that as he was wrong about the Hitler-Stalin pact. I recognized my own middle age in his confession of angst about the writer’s life: “The perpetual gap between what one would have liked to get down on paper and what finally did get itself written and printed, the constant feeling of inadequacy.” (His italics.) I also moaned with shame at the current state of the profession. Even the slightest piece written by Izzy was composed with a decent respect for the King’s English and usually contained at least one apt allusion to the literature and poetry and history that undergirded it: an allusion that he would expect his readers to recognize. Who now dares to do that? Who would now dare to say, as he did as an excited eyewitness, that there was still something “saccharine” about Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” oration? The rule of saccharine rhetoric and bland prose is now near absolute, and one could almost envy Izzy the sad deafness and myopia that allowed him to tune out the constant bawling from electronic media. I once had the honor of being the I. F. Stone fellow at Berkeley (where his old typewriter is enclosed in a glass case: probably the most hagiography he could have stood), and I told my students to read him and reread him to get an idea of the relationship between clean and muscular prose and moral and intellectual honesty. Perhaps I could invite you to do the same, if only to get an idea of what we have so casually decided to do without.

Paul Berman’s New York Times review says, en passant:

He was especially shrewd at explaining how the government, by playing to the vanity of individual journalists, was able to manipulate the news. MacPherson, who used to work at The Washington Post (and has written a book on the Vietnam War), quotes him saying, “Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you’re sunk” — which may not be true of every reporter who ever lived, but does point to a recognizable human frailty.

And the relevance to our own time is hard to escape, given our own recent experiences with disastrous policies, official mendacities and a sometimes error-prone and manipulated press. To read Stone’s description of clueless Americans wandering around Saigon in 1966, reprinted in “The Best of I. F. Stone,” is to plunge into glum reflections on the Green Zone of Baghdad, 40 years later…

The Google/YouTube deal

Posted on by

As Good Morning Silicon Valley observes, Google’s acquisition of YouTube is sucking all the air out of the blogosphere. The GMSV boys are speculating whether the two parties celebrated the deal “with a round of Coke and Mentos”. But here’s the most interesting twist:

The happiest people in the deal aside from Hurley and Chen [co-founders of YouTube] are the folks at Sequoia Capital, the VC outfit that backed them and is looking at better than a 40x return on a year-old investment.

Doc Searls: ten rules for newspapers in a digital age

Posted on by

An insightful list. I particularly like the rules excoriating papers which put their archives behind paywalls.

First, stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Okay, give away the news, if you have to, on your website. There’s advertising money there. But please, open up the archives. Stop putting tomorrow’s fishwrap behind paywalls. Writers hate it. Readers hate it. Worst of all, Google and Yahoo and Technorati and Icerocket and all your other search engines ignore it. Today we see the networked world through search engines. Hiding your archives behind a paywall makes your part of the world completely invisilble. If you open the archives, and make them crawlable by search engine spiders, your authority in your commmunity will increase immeasurably. Plus, you’ll open all that inventory to advertising possibilities. And I’ll betcha you’ll make more money with advertising than you ever made selling stale editorial to readers who hate paying for it. (And please, let’s not talk about Times Select. Your paper’s not the NY Times, and the jury is waaay out on that thing.)

Second, start featuring archived stuff on the paper’s website. Link back to as many of your archives as you can. Get writers in the habit of sourcing and linking to archival editorial. This will provide paths for search engine spiders to follow back in those archives as well. Result: more readers, more authority, more respect, higher PageRank and higher-level results in searches. In fact, it would be a good idea to have one page on the paper’s website that has links (or links to links, in an outline) back to every archived item…

Debugging Vista and Office

Posted on by

John Markoff has an interesting piece in the New York Times about the frenzied efforts within Microsoft to get Vista ready to ship. The article has some interesting statistics. For example, it quotes the Gartner Group as claiming that Windows runs on 845 million computers worldwide and Office on more than 450 million.

Markoff claims that

it was the vast scale of the Windows testing program that saved the software development projects. Over the summer, the company began an extraordinary bug-tracking effort, abetted by volunteers and corporate partners who ran free copies of both Windows and Office designed to send data detailing each crash back to Microsoft computers.

The Office package, for example, has been tested by more than 3.5 million users; last month alone, more than 700,000 PC’s were running the software, generating more than 46 million separate work sessions. At Microsoft, 53,000 employee computers are running test versions.

Vista has also been tested extensively. More than half a million computer users have installed Vista test software, and 450,000 of the systems have sent crash data back to Microsoft.

One interesting question is how Microsoft manages to cope with the torrent of data that comes back from all these test versions. Markoff says that The test data from the second beta release of Vista alone generated 5.5 petabytes of information — “the equivalent of the storage capacity of 690,000 home PC’s”.

Later… James Miller points out that the last calculation — which is the work of the New York Times, not me — implies that the average home PC has a hard disk of 8GB capacity, which seems implausible. If we assume that the average PC now has 80GB of hard disk space, then 5.5 petabytes equates to 68,500 PCs. Looks like a decimal point went missing somewhere.

Ofcom’s turbulent future

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column…

So Ed Richards has inherited the earth, and all the media beasts therein. On the face of it, the new chief executive of Ofcom has an imposing remit. He is charged by the 2003 Communications Act (of which, as the Prime Minister’s chief policy wonk on such matters, he was undoubtedly the prime author) ‘to further the interests of citizens in relation to communications matters’, and ‘to further the interests of consumers in relevant markets, where appropriate by promoting competition’. This means he is the regulator of the electromagnetic spectrum, telecoms companies, internet service providers – and TV and radio broadcasters (except the BBC).

…Looks impressive, doesn’t it? My advice to Richards is to enjoy it while it lasts. His Ofcom empire is built on sand, and the tide is coming in…

Later… Bill Thompson wrote a nice pseudo-retrospective essay about OFCOM’s dim future.

Random thoughts

Posted on by

Lovely piece by Steven Levy about the randomness of the iPod shuffle algorithm.

My first iPod loved Steely Dan. So do I. But not as much as my iPod did. By 2003, among the 3,000 or so songs in my iTunes library, I had about 50 Steely Dan tracks. Yet every time I shuffled my music collection “randomly” to mix the tunes, it seemed that the Dan was weirdly over-represented. Only two or three songs after Rikki Don’t Lose That Number, I’d hear Kid Charlemagne. Then, 20 minutes later, there would be Pretzel Logic. Where was the logic in this? I didn’t keep track of every song that played every time I shuffled my tunes, but after a while I would keep a sharp ear out for what I came to call the LTBSD (Length of Time Before Steely Dan) Factor. The LTBSD Factor was always perplexingly short…

This is one of those maddening articles in which someone writes about a topic that one had thought of covering, but didn’t. I use the shuffle facility on my iPod a lot, and often wondered if it was giving truly random results. But I didn’t take the logical next step and do some digging. Levy did, which is what makes him such a good journalist.

It turns out that this is an excerpt from his forthcoming book about the iPod phenomenon (Ebury Press, November 2, according to the Guardian). If it’s anything like as good as his book on the history of the Apple Mac, it’ll be worth queueing for.

Algorithmic ‘integrity’

Posted on by

From Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog…

Last week, CNET’s Elinor Mills reported on how a web search for “Martin Luther King” returns, as its first result on Google and as its second result on Windows Live Search, a web site (martinlutherking.org) operated by a white supremacist organization named Stormfront. The site, titled “Martin Luther King Jr.: A True Historical Examination,” refers to King as “The Beast” and says he was “just a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own people.” The site also features an essay on “Jews & Civil Rights” by former Ku Klux Klan official David Duke.

What’s remarkable, though, is not that a search algorithm might be gamed by extremists but that the owners of the algorithm might themselves defend the offensive result – and reject any attempt to override it as an assault on the “integrity” of their system….

Carr goes on to quote Google’s response to the CNET story:

At Google, a Web site’s ranking is determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to any given query, a company representative said. The company can’t tweak the results because of that automation and the need to maintain the integrity of the results, she said. “In this particular example, the page is relevant to the query and many people have linked to it, giving it more PageRank than some of the other pages. These two factors contribute to its ranking.”

Microsoft’s response was even more robust:

The results on Microsoft’s search engine are “not an endorsement, in any way, of the viewpoints held by the owners of that content,” said Justin Osmer, senior product manager for Windows Live Search. “The ranking of our results is done in an automated manner through our algorithm which can sometimes lead to unexpected results,” he said. “We always work to maintain the integrity of our results to ensure that they are not editorialized.”

To which Carr tartly responds:

By “editorialized” he seems to mean “subjected to the exercise of human judgment.” And human judgment, it seems, is an unfit substitute for the mindless, automated calculations of an algorithm. We are not worthy to question the machine we have made. It is so pure that even its corruption is a sign of its integrity.

Googleplex working overtime?

Posted on by

From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

What kind of a sweatshop are they running over there at Google? Just this week, the elves in the trenches have made Google Gadgets available for addition to any site, launched its Literacy Project in conjunction with LitCam and UNESCO, were apparently caught teaming up with Apple on a possible hookup of Google Maps with iPhoto, added another new batch of imagery to Google Earth, and now have released Code Search, a tool for programmers to dig through publicly available source code. (From the Unintended Consequences Department, the search engine also lets you find things like serial number generating algorithms.) That’s just this week, and it still has a day to go. Gee, I hope they’re paying those folks enough.

But, later, there’s this

The L.A. Times reports company execs have launched an initiative called “Features, Not Products,” telling engineers to stop launching so many services and focus on making the existing ones work together better. Co-founder Sergey Brin said it occurred to him this summer as he scanned the 50 or so products available across the company’s Web sites that users were probably getting overwhelmed. “It’s worse than that,” he said. “It’s that I was getting lost in the sheer volume of the products that we were releasing.” Simplicity was among the things that made Google so popular, and its success led it to snap up hundreds of smart, ambitious software engineers. “The result occurred precisely because we told these incredible engineering teams to run as fast as possible to solve new problems,” said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt. “But then that created this other problem.” Analyst Rob Enderle puts it another way: “They created a bunch of crap that they have no idea what to do with. What a huge waste of resources.” Schmidt says the plan is to make Google products easier to use by packaging services, citing plans to combine the company’s spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications. “That is a big change in the way we run the company,” Schmidt said, describing Google’s previous attitude as, “Just get this stuff built and get it out — don’t worry about the integration.”