Observations

Interview Questions

admin — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:29:30 -0700

In the news is Obama’s top-level administration application questions, e.g.

Please furnish copies of all resumes and biographical statements issued by you or any other entity at your discretion or with your consent within the past 10 years.

and while some others seemed to have histrionics about it, I happen to agree with the asking of the questions. At least, based on the assumption that the emphasis is on transparency and a complete as possible picture of the applicant, i.e, these are weeding questions to determine an applicant’s veracity and seriousness in applying, not that any particular item would automatically disqualify someone (at least, I assume this based upon my experience as a hirer and constructor of applications)

This led to some discussion with peers, and I was happy to hear that the first question people ask of interviewees is

How did you prepare for this interview?

Being Wrong is Right, but not in the education system

ben — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:39:48 -0700

I listened to the TED talk of Sir Ken Robinson on education from the tweet of Chris Brogan.

The short quote:

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

But there is a lot more there about how the education system is built to get people into college as an end in and of itself.

Sir Robinson also mentioned Picasso’s quote:

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

When "good" is better than "best"

ben — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:18:00 -0700

I ran across this interesting quote from Bruce Schneier on a competition for choosing a new general secure hash function:

NIST has stated that the goal of this process is not to choose the best standard but to choose a good standard. I think that’s smart of them; in this process, “best” is the enemy of “good.” My advice is this: immediately sort them based on performance and features. Ask the cryptographic community to focus its attention on the top dozen, rather than spread its attention across all 80 — although I also expect that most of the amateur submissions will be rejected by NIST for not being “complete and proper.” Otherwise, people will break the easy ones and the better ones will go unanalyzed.

I think it’s such an interesting statement because it so succinctly encapsulates the intrinsic dearth of time and resources that would be required to actually determine which is best.

With some lazy googling, I also came across this article about purchasing wine:

…consumers irrationally (at least from a wine lover’s perspective) chase after bottles that critics have awarded 90 points or more, but shun those in the 85 to 89 range, even though the lower-rated wines may be cheaper, more flexible with food and readier to drink.

…

Vintage ratings, like wine ratings in general, have a powerful psychological effect on consumers. The higher the number, the greater the desirability of the wine, which feeds into the myriad reasons people make their buying decisions. It should be no surprise that, as with cars, clothes, handbags and other consumer goods, status seeking, showing off and fear of embarrassment all play important roles.

Community Organizer = Community Outreach Minister

ben — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:19:03 -0600

While wasting time on the political blogs, I ran across this interesting comment in the comments of an anti-community organizing article: Community Organizers are the same thing as Community Outreach Ministers:

The problem with the title “community organizer” is that most Americans are not familiar with it because it is an inner city position/term.

HOWEVER,people are familiar with the title of someone who does exactly the same job in the rural areas of America: the Community Outreach Minister.

This person is employed by a church to find and then help people who need it. Example: the poor elderly lady who needs a new roof; the family who has holes in their floor; the population pocket (community) that has no street lights or a recreation area with a hoop and with a baseball diamond; the extremely rural area that needs a paved road so that the school bus can pick up the children that live along the road.

I hope that this clarifies the job “community organizer.”

I tried googling: +”Community Organizer” +”Community Outreach Minister” and only got one hit, which makes it a North/South split, rather than an Urban/Rural one (though it could be the same commenter since its essentially the same set of examples—or I’m just adding to the echo chamber):

You all don’t know your lingo. A community organizer is the same thing as an community outreach minister in a church. The former is yankee and the latter is southern. The last church I belonged to did exactly what a community organizer does: got the (church) community to put a roof on an elderly (poor) lady’s house, put a floor in a poor man’s trailer, clothed a family whose home had burned down, and organized a group of families who lived on a dirt road to petition their senator for C-funds to pave the road so that the school bus could come up it and get their children. So what is your problem? Ignorance?

Buyer's Remorse Hacking

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 06:46:27 -0600

I love reading Mac vs. PC pissing contests. The fact is, a computer, for most consumers (not workplace ROI), is a commodity device (though I admit the pissing usually takes place between niche users). That all being said, I enjoyed this thread on a recent Slashdot posting entitled “Doing the Math On the New MacBook“:

Macs are design items. Some people don’t mind paying a higher price for something which appeals to them.

Price is what you pay, value is what you get. If you subjectively feel that the value of the product matches the price paid then an objective comparison is not significant.

Exactly ! That’s why there isn’t much point in trying to squeeze Macs in an objective comparison : you buy a Mac to get pleasure from purchasing a nice item, whereas you buy the winner of an objective comparison to get pleasure from being a smart customer.

We’re not talking about subjective value-feelings here; we’re talking about intentional manipulation by a sleak advertising campaign that turns people into drones who really do believe that there is something magical in a Mac that other computers don’t have.

Tell me, what is the marginal utility of that special Mac aura?

You’ve been had my friend.

For the record, in my current personal buying habits, I happen to subscribe to the middle quote: do what is within your budget and makes you feel good—even it that’s not buying anything at all. I’ve also come to realize, watching my coworker go through crazy rationalistic machinations about purchasing a new MacBook, it’s the process of making the decision to buy something that’s way more fulfilling than the possession itself. Cue Ze Frank on Choice.

Small Government / Small Paper

ben — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:31:35 -0600

The story of the slightly smaller Government-Letter sized paper (from Wikipedia):

There is an additional paper size, to which the name “government-letter” was given by the IEEE Printer Working Group: the 8 in × 10½ in (203.2 mm × 266.7 mm) paper that is used in the United States for children’s writing. It was prescribed by Herbert Hoover when he was Secretary of Commerce to be used for U.S. government forms, apparently to enable discounts from the purchase of paper for schools. In later years, as photocopy machines proliferated, citizens wanted to make photocopies of the forms, but the machines did not generally have this size paper in their bins. Ronald Reagan therefore had the U.S. government switch to regular letter size (8½ in × 11 in). The 8 in × 10½ in size is still commonly used in spiral-bound notebooks and the like.

An alternative explanation in the past for the difference between “government size” (as government-letter size was referred to at the time) and letter size paper was that the slightly smaller sheet used less paper, and therefore saved the government money in both paper and filing space. However, when Reagan prescribed the change to letter size, it was commonly stated that U.S. paper manufacturers had standardized their production lines for letter size, and were meeting government orders by trimming ½” each from two sides of letter-size stock; thus the government was allegedly paying more for its smaller paper size before Reagan abolished it. The different paper size also reportedly restricted the government’s ability to take advantage of modular office furniture designs, common in the 1980s, whose cabinets were designed for letter size paper.

Graphical Organization of the Talmud

admin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:30:49 -0600

Interesting explanation about the traditional layout of the Talmud. From Andrew on the Marks and Meaning mailing list

I’m reminded as you discuss this of the arrangement of texts in a traditional manuscript copy of the Talmud. Most printed copies are a bit different, but originally a Talmud page was divided into nine squares like a tic-tac-toe grid. Sometimes the central box was further subdivided, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The central box served as the location of the primary text to be analyzed in the original Hebrew — usually it was a Torah or Haftorah portion. The boxes to the left and right were explanations of the vowel-pointing for this piece of text; in other words, they were commentaries on what the Hebrew ./meant./ — what actual words were in play here, along with a brief definition of unusual or rare words. The boxes above and below the main text were set up to act as containers for alternate versions of the story, or stories that played off of elements in the center box.

The four corner pieces were commentaries on the main text from Rabbis Hillel, Gamaliel, and the other two — eminent masters riffing jazz- like off of the core beat at the center, or arguing the left-right interpretations, or further explicating the up-down side-stories.

All of the boxes — ALL — would shift size on the page to accommodate all the various elements. If there was a long commentary from one of the rabbis but little else, that box would expand, and the Torah portion would shrink until it was only the verse, or even the word, relevant to that commentary. Conversely, (though it didn’t happen often), if there were a long story in the Torah with little commentary, several verses would get squeezed into one large box, with eight small and almost empty boxes circling it.

The point was, there were nine books crammed into one. Hillel always occupied the same square on the page. The Babylonian Haggadah (stories) was always above the Torah, the Palestinian Haggadah always below. You could read one commentator exclusively, or read the Torah or Haftorah exclusively, or try to read all the commentaries on all of Torah simultaneously.

Ed also posted some more visual links:

An annotated page:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/TalmudPage.html

Talmud style layout in HTML (with fixed size boxes, so not precisely)
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/TalmudMap/Samples.html

Making ReCAPTCHA not suck

ben — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 19:36:49 -0600

I really like using the Drupal CAPTCHA system with ReCAPTCHA (the one that helps scan in books). Both of them suck in the standard “Drupal makes everything ugly and hard to use by default, but it’s still easier than building something from scratch”.

One of ReCaptcha’s problems is that the words are sometimes hard to read. To deal with that, I used this tip from a Stumbleupon developer in the comments of this post entitled ReCAPTCHA’s quality is going down? : putting a link to reload—Recaptcha.reload()—the CAPTCHA in the explanation. To do that, I pasted this into the Challenge Description setting on the CAPTCHA admin page:

To prevent spam, please type the two words you see below separated by a space. <a href="javascript:Recaptcha.reload();" title="Get a new set of words">Can’t read the words?</a>

I also used CSS to hide the fieldset border box and title from the comments to cut down on the cruft too.

Questions for external brand interviews

admin — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 08:26:06 -0600

I just received a great set of questions to ask people when conducting Brand Interviews: if you’re trying to lock-down who you are and how to communicate that, it helps to ask people who know you and what they think. These are those questions.

What do you personally value most about [YOUR ORGANIZATION]? Why is it important to you?
What do you need/expect from an organization like [YOUR ORGANIZATION]? What other organizations could you/do you expect to meet those needs?
How would you describe [YOUR ORGANIZATION] to someone who does not know it well? What words/phrases would you use? Why?
How would you describe the personality of [YOUR ORGANIZATION]? What is it like to interact with the organization?
In your mind, what does [YOUR ORGANIZATION] do well? What does it do better than any other, similar organization? Where is there room for improvement?
What are your hopes and goals for the organization? If you were running the organization, what would you change (if anything). What should absolutely not change…what do you consider to be sacred?
How do you get most of your information about what’s going on [YOUR ORGANIZATION]? How else could we effectively communicate with you?
Do you visit the [YOUR ORGANIZATION] web site? What are you looking for there? What do you wish were included? How else could the web site be more useful to you?
Is there anything else you want to tell me? Anything you wish I had asked you?

PopCo Cake Recipe

admin — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:25:02 -0600

featured in “PopCo” by Alice Butler (via Angelina):

Ingredients:
2 oz ground almonds
6 oz self-raising flour
2 tsp baking powder
4 oz light muscovado sugar
150 ml corn oil
200-250 ml soy milk
zest of 2 unwaxed lemons
juice of 2 lemons
1 tbsp orange flower water . . . not sure what this is
1 tsp vanilla/ natural vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees (given that this is a British book, I’m guessing convert to F — maybe 325ish?), or less if it’s a fan oven.

Grease a cake tin. A deep 6 inch tin is good but any will do.

Sift the flour and baking powder into a bowl and then add the sugar. Mix in the ground almonds and lemon zest. Add the oil and soymilk.
Use slightly less liquid to make the end result more of a cake and less of a pudding. You don’t have to be 100 per cent precise with
the liquids in this cake.

Now add the lemon juice and mix in thoroughly. Add the flower water and the vanilla and mix again. The result
should look like a thick batter.

Pour into the cake tin and bake for about 40 min. The outside should be brown and inside very soft. Turn out, cool and decorate
with fresh mint leaves and strawberries.

Search is not Serendipitous

ben — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:30:11 -0600

Erin McKean makes the point in a TED talk that, unlike paper dictionaries, online dictionary searches do not provide serendipity: finding something you didn’t know you were looking for.

I take this many ways:

True, but…
How many people regularly flip a dictionary?
How exact is search?
How many people just type the word into Google (which, because internet search sucks, is quite serendipitous).

(via Daring Fireball

Get a Government Job

admin — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:21:11 -0600

I’ve been thoroughly amused by the vetting process for political (and supposedly un-political) government positions.

Recently there was the vetting for Sarah Palin, VP for McCain’s Republican ticket:

Defending his choice and the team that helped pick her, McCain said Tuesday that “the vetting process was completely thorough.” Advisers said Palin went through a rigorous process that included a three-hour interview and a survey with some 70 questions, including: Have you ever paid for sex? Have you been faithful in your marriage? Have you ever used or purchased drugs? Have you ever downloaded pornography?

Those 5 questions are good to juxtapose against the Nexis search string Monica Goodling used to research applicants to the Bush Attorney General’s office:

[First name of a candidate]! and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!

Failure of confidence

admin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 06:02:27 -0600

Diebold (now Premier Election Systems), admits voting machines have had critical software bug for the last 10 years that can result in votes being lost.

Nonsensical comments from election officials:

DuPage County election officials were upset to learn their election equipment vendor has acknowledged a programming error that could cause votes not to be tallied, but they said last week that they are confident local elections were not affected.

…

DuPage has used Premier equipment since 2001. Still, Saar [executive director of the DuPage County Election Commission] said he is confident there were no problems in previous elections.

Saar said DuPage has a rigorous pre-election testing regimen, and its election results are audited by a bipartisan committee.

Where does this confidence stem from? Obviously the pre-election testing and bipartisan committee failed to catch this critical flaw. Not to mention that the lab that certified voting machines was shut down for not actually doing their job.

The first NY Times article says that they have systems in place to audit and catch inconsistencies. But shouldn’t that have set off alarm bells that something in the system was broken?

Caring on the Internet

admin — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:47:10 -0600

I really liked this series of comments on a BoingBoing post

#3 posted by pAULbOWEN , August 17, 2008 12:48 PM

I should care because?

#4 posted by zarl , August 17, 2008 12:53 PM

Nobody cares that you don’t care.

Are you Ahw or Arr?

admin — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:00:36 -0600

Via some fun copy on BoingBoing Gadgets (”These “Toastabags” (phonemologically Bostonian, apparently…”)and someone’s analytical comment, I came across a way to cleave English speakers: those that pronounce R’s (rhotic), and those that don’t(non-rhotic). From the wikipedia page on Rhotic and non-rhotic accents:

English pronunciation is divided into two main accent groups, the rhotic (pronounced /ˈroʊtɪk/) and non-rhotic, depending on when the sound typically represented in spelling with the letter R is pronounced. Rhotic speakers pronounce written /r/ in all positions, while non-rhotic speakers pronounce /r/ only if it is followed by a vowel sound (see “linking and intrusive R”), and not always even then.

Cleaving Running Reds from Jaybiking

admin — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:32:44 -0600

Great article on why drivers call the kettle black when they complain about bicyclists break road-laws. I found interesting the distinction between running a red light and jaywalking/riding:

Let’s talk about red-light running. There are two types of red-light running. “Catching an orange” - or running the start of a red light - which every class of users does. And jaywalking or jaybiking - waiting for the intersection to clear and then crossing against the light - which only pedestrians and cyclists do.

Also, covers interesting analysis of why there isn’t such a thing as jaydriving. Though, as I commented, in my hometown it was pretty common to drive through a red light, late at night.

What to ask before building a website

admin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:42:06 -0600

I’m always curious to see what people spec out for consulting (since I have my own template as well). Found this great listing (pasted below) from SitePoint via one of our VISTAs’s personal website UI and Me.

Background

* Goals. What are your specific goals? Consider:
o company/brand awareness,
o product/services awareness,
o product/services sales,
o community building,
o entertainment,
o knowledge sharing, and
o internal communications.

* Promotional Fit. How should your Website fit with current promotional and marketing strategies and materials?

* Deadlines. What are the schedule or deadline requirements?

* Funding. What are the budgetary constraints?

* Measurement. How will you measure the success of the site?

Next Steps:

1. Develop a ranked (from most- to least-important) Goals Master List.
2. Create a mission statement for the site.
3. Identify how the mission and goals of the site might change from short-term to long-term, given the direction of your organization and industry.

Audience

* External. Who is your EXTERNAL audience? Consider:
o current customers,
o potential customers,
o suppliers,
o professional/trade organizations,
o investors,
o competitors,
o children,
o schools/educators, and
o the sight-impaired.

* Internal. Who is your INTERNAL audience? Consider:
o all employees,
o management,
o marketing/sales,
o operations, and
o IT.

* Sub-groups. Determine all subgroups within the audiences identified above.

* Define. Identify the interests, technical skills and special issues for each audience group and subgroup.

Next Steps:

1. Create a ranked Audience Master List.
2. Develop an Aligned Master List by matching the Audience Master List to the Goals Master List.
3. Create usage scenarios based on Aligned Master List.

Resources

* Project Roles. Who are the resources that will be responsible for content management and technical support (include their names, titles, roles, and contact info)?
* Team Skills. What are the technical and content management skills of each resource?

Next Steps:
For each resource, identify any training, software, hardware, scheduling and budgetary issues.

Competition

* Identify Competitors. Identify the sites of competitors and others that may provide direction for your site.
* Important Elements. Identify the important elements of each competitor site:
o functional features,
o technologies used,
o breadth of content and
o look-and-feel.

Content

* Functionality. Which functional features should your site offer? Consider:
o ecommerce/shopping cart,
o site search,
o customer service/support,
o tech support,
o discussion forums,
o newsletter,
o catalog/information
o order forms,
o feedback form,
o member logon,
o password protected areas, and
o SSL-encrypted areas.

* Information. Which informational elements should your site contain? Consider:
o About Us page,
o Contact Us page,
o copyright notice, and
o privacy statement.

* Structure. What is your site’s hierarchy? For each of the 4-7 (though you can have more or less) main areas of the site, identify:
o each main menu item,
o all submenu items, and
o additional content.

Think of a tree-style hierarchy with the home page at the top.

Next Steps:

1. Describe in detail each functional feature. What exactly will it do?
2. Identify the resources required, and any technical and budgetary issues associated with each functional feature.
3. Provide detail for each informational element.
4. Assign content responsibilities to the resources identified above.

Digital Media Forensics

admin — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 20:05:27 -0600

2nd rate band’s new single appears on bittorrent sites, band releases press release decrying leak, sleuthing ensues…turns out the band’s manager leaked the track himself. Damning on its own, but the interesting part is the forensic sleuthing that led to outing the guilty party:

With some help of a user in the community, we tracked down some of the initial seeders of the torrent. A BitTorrent site insider was kind enough to help us out, because BitTorrent is not supposed to be “abused” like this, and confirmed that the IP of one of the early seeders did indeed belong to the person who uploaded the torrent file.

It turns out that the uploader, a New York resident, had only uploaded one torrent, the BuckCherry track. When we entered the IP-address into the Wiki-scanner, we found out that the person in question had edited the BuckCherry wikipedia entry, and added the name of the band manager to another page.

This confirmed our suspicions, but it was not quite enough, since it could be an overly obsessed fan (if they have fans). So, we decided to send the band manager, Josh Klemme - who happens to live in New York - an email to ask for his opinion on our findings. Klemme, replied to our email within a few hours, and surprisingly enough his IP-address was the same as the uploader.

Job qualification: Not a jerk

ben — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 07:06:55 -0600

Having gone through an institutional hiring process—both as the hirer and the hiree—I am well aware of the intricacies of non-discriminatory practices. Essentially: you can’t base your decision on anything outside of the approved job description and qualifications. Regardless, I got a hoot out of the following qualification on a job my friend sent me:

Employee must be able to relate to other people beyond giving and receiving instructions: works well with co-workers or peers without exhibiting behavioral extremes; perform work activities requiring negotiating, instructing, supervising, persuading or speaking with others; and respond appropriately to criticism from a supervisor.

Political News Coverage

ben — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:52:07 -0600

Looks like the FCC has “demonstrate[d], once again, that at present it is difficult, if not impossible to apply public interest pressure to TV stations via the Commission’s license renewal process.”

A Chicago/Milwaukee appeal was made to the FCC over a lack of local and regional political coverage from area broadcasters: less than 1% went to non-federal election coverage in the month prior to the election.

Also interesting how they cut up the types of coverage:

As for the style of the stories, or “frame,” as the CMPA study put it, most went to “horse race” stories (guesstimating a candidates’ electoral chances at the moment) and “strategic” stories (”how the candidate was using an event to reach particular groups of voters”). Strategy and horse race items dominated coverage. Issues-oriented features counted for less than a fifth of air time.