Except that everyone else is asking people to call their Congressperson. Instead, Google is asking you to sign an online petition. This is a huge letdown.
Online petitions do not affect national political discourse. Maybe Change.org is helping local campaigns get traction, I don't know, but their and everyone else's national campaigns are for show. They're building organizations' email lists.
In fact, a study by the Congressional Management Foundation that surveyed Congressional staff found that over 50% of them thought that "most advocacy campaigns of identical form messages are sent without constituents' knowledge or approval". Not just that they don't have much impact - the majority of Congressional staff assume form messages from citizens are meaningless lies.
Calls, on the other hand, get through to offices in a way that emails, contact forms, and even letters do not. The only thing better you can do as a citizen is visit your Congressperson's office in person. Calling and visiting are hard. They're uncomfortable. Fewer people will do them.
And that is why they are effective. By doing it, you convince your Congressperson's office that you mean business, that your vote is in the balance, and that you're probably the sort who'll convince a bunch of other people to hang their votes in the balance too. You're making yourself a representative to your representative.
Email lists can have value - but now is not the moment for making them. This is the moment where, if you've already got one, you use them to get people to make calls.
Google's been a powerful advocate to date in opposing SOPA and PIPA. Today, they should go the distance, and melt some phone lines.
Google's apparently itching to get sued. Yesterday, they announced that they're integrating Google+ into Google search results for everyone who's logged in while they search. It's not open to any other social networks: just Google+ results.
As for the merits of the feature, this is just another way that Google is favoring the 90-whatever% of people who use Google to surf around and talk with people, and making it harder for the people who are out there trying to Get Things Done with it. Whatever.
Danny Sullivan had a surprisingly awesome interview with Eric Schmidt, and though short on details of specific negotiations, Schmidt lays out Google's attitude extremely clearly. The video is below, and Sullivan wrote up an accompanying summary on MarketingLand.
It's a short video, but the gist of it is that Eric Schmidt is quite defensive of Google's decision. He seems to recognize that the move is not exactly advancing the "open web", and if you had a beer with him he might even admit that it's unfair: but he very clearly finds Facebook and Twitter's own behavior to be more unfair and a justification.
Sullivan is no fool, and presses Schmidt on the fact that Twitter and Facebook have robots.txt files that do not disallow scraping of their content. Schmidt says that that's Sullivan's interpretation, and that it's better to have conversations with "companies like that". Robots.txt isn't exactly a legal contract, after all, and this implies to me that Facebook and Twitter have made it clear in private channels, or at least strongly hinted, that they would be hostile to such a move.
It's worth noting that Google's currently scraping Yelp without Yelp's permission, to provide their data as part of Google Maps' Places pages. In doing so, Google has made an enemy of Yelp, and one that is happy to testify in Congress about it.
If they were trying to avoid making enemies, jamming Google+ into search results wasn't the way to do it. Twitter released a statement saying they're "concerned" about the deal right after Google's announcement, prompting
Google to respond, saying Twitter was the one that decided to terminate their agreement last year.
Ugly all around. Maybe Google is just doing this to scare Twitter and Facebook into making a deal. Either way, Google had better be bracing for an anti-trust lawsuit. It's just a matter of time.
Wired has an excellent profile of Chris Soghoian today. I hadn't realized exactly how many battles he's waged and won, and how many successful activist moments he's had. I'd heard of most of them, but didn't know they were all the same guy. It's an incredible variety of work, targeting the TSA, Google, Sprint, Dropbox, Facebook, and AT&T.
I've been following Chris on Twitter since earlier this year, and feel much better informed on the crazy world of online security as a result. Recommended.
What I admire most from the article is that, despite his well-earned adversarial relationship with the government, and his obvious distrust of institutions and their motives, Chris is not a "burn down the system" kind of guy. He worked for the FTC for a while, which is how he got access to record the Sprint exec bragging about handing off information to law enforcement 8 million times -- which cost him his contract renewal. In spite of that:
Soghoian says that under the right circumstances he’d consider another government job—ideally for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which advises the White House on matters of individual privacy. It has been inactive since 2008.
“I don’t want security clearance,” he says. “I don’t need a staff. I just want to be an ombudsman, with an office and letterhead and access to lawyers and a fax machine. I know it’ll never happen. They’re not going to want someone who has a track record of speaking truth to power using their soapbox to point out their flaws. But that would be an ideal gig.”
An article on the decline in science majors in the New York Times yesterday paints a pretty gloomy picture of the state of undergraduate science programs in US universities.
But it ends on a very positive note -- by discussing my alma mater, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Everything it says about WPI is exactly how I've evangelized the school to friends and strangers for years. Emphasis mine:
[WPI] has taken the idea of projects to heart. While it still expects students to push their way through standard engineering and science classes, it ripped up its traditional curriculum in the 1970s to make room for extensive research, design and social-service projects by juniors and seniors, including many conducted on trips with professors overseas. In 2007, it added optional first-year projects — which a quarter of its freshmen do — focused on world problems like hunger or disease.
“That kind of early engagement, and letting them see they can work on something that is interesting and important, is a big deal,” says Arthur C. Heinricher, the dean of undergraduate studies. “That hooks students.”
There's more to it than this: everything about WPI's system is designed to bring out the best in people.
It's a tech school, but instead of requiring students to take a wide smattering of liberal arts courses, it asks every student to take classes in the area they love most, and come up with a capstone project of their own design and work on it in place of a normal class. By the end of your second year at WPI, you've found a professor, developed a relationship with them, and discovered that you're capable of producing something of substance, something no one else would have done. Mine was a combo philosophy/music paper on whether or not computer-aided composition reduces human expression (it doesn't). My friend Adam's was a music concert.
This experience is amplified in the years to follow - every student must do a project with an intentionally broad mandate to help society with technology (takes the place of 3 classes, either self- or professor-directed), and then finally do a large self-directed project in one's major. For the first one, I went to Venice and studied how to improve the structural integrity of its bell towers, and for the last one, my friend Travis and I built an AI system to help people create sound patches on synthesizers without knowing anything about how to program sound.
I wish I'd been around to do a project on world problems in my freshman year. Maybe I would have done something that I could use in my current work.
WPI does more than just not calculate GPA. In order to graduate with "high honors" from WPI, you need to get an A on each of the 3 projects above, and score 19 A's in your normal courses. Achieve three out of those four criteria, and you graduate with "honors". It's not easy! No one ever talks about averaging your grades. As the article mentions, your first three failed courses don't even appear on your transcript, just to give you some added incentive to take some risks during your time there.
Despite WPI's wonderful project system, their courses suffer from the same problems so many universities have: their curriculum is far divorced from the real world, and they weed people out.
I took all of one class at WPI that even peripherally relates to the professional work I've done over the past 6 years. It was a class called "Webware", and it was about the Internet. It was run by an adjunct professor, wasn't given many resources, and was the only class that helped you understand and contribute to the most important technological invention in connecting humans to other humans.
After taking it, I was filled with energy, and promptly made my first ever blog, from scratch. It had no database, and ran entirely on regular expressions, insane deer language. Since WPI at no time ever taught you to work with a real database, only how to draw cylinders on chalkboards and muse on their frosty materialistic relationships, that was all I had. When I graduated WPI, I felt wildly underprepared and uncompetitive for the kind of work I wanted. I taught myself some PHP and MySQL in a rush, after graduation, and eventually landed some work doing just that.
That was 2004 -- maybe(?) they could be forgiven. But 7 years later: there is still only "Webware", meant to encompass all things Web. The course catalog for 2011-2012 describes a set of 20 "educational outcomes", none of which mention the Internet or the Web at all. I do not understand this. While there are many worlds of working with computers that don't involve the Internet specifically, offering a single class is ... not proportional to its importance to the field. Why don't they allow students who adore the Web to use that adoration to catapult themselves through their studies?
More recently, they changed their freshman curriculum so that the first language students must work with is Scheme, an academic variant of Lisp, a dead language designed for computers and not people. It was the most unpleasant class I took in my second year (if eventually rewarding), and the work bears no resemblance to one's experience after college.
In the real world, tremendous importance is placed on computer languages that map naturally to the human brain, and reduce cognitive dissonance. This is supposed to be fun, because when it is, work gets done a lot faster, and enterprises succeed. When so many freshmen come in not knowing any of this, leaving them with the impression that computer science work consists of unnatural drudgery abandons talent.
It's the crystallization of the problem described early on in the same article:
The National Science Board, a public advisory body, warned in the mid-1980s that students were losing sight of why they wanted to be scientists and engineers in the first place. Research confirmed in the 1990s that students learn more by grappling with open-ended problems, like creating a computer game or designing an alternative energy system, than listening to lectures. While the National Science Foundation went on to finance pilot courses that employed interactive projects, when the money dried up, so did most of the courses. Lecture classes are far cheaper to produce, and top professors are focused on bringing in research grants, not teaching undergraduates.
In 2005, the National Academy of Engineering concluded that “scattered interventions” had not resulted in widespread change. “Treating the freshman year as a ‘sink or swim’ experience and accepting attrition as inevitable,” it said, “is both unfair to students and wasteful of resources and faculty time.”
Universities have ignored this advice for 30 years because the professors simply don't believe most people are cut out for the work, that there's nothing that can be done to change it, and that discovering early on who they are is a good thing. The curriculum is specifically designed to target the students who may begin with only casual interest, or who have certain cognitive weaknesses, and convince those students to go find something more their speed. This is real and devastating elitism.
What I think WPI as an institution understands, but which many of its professors (and department heads) do not, is that students' emotional connection to their work is as important as their intellectual compatibility with it. Strength in one can make up for weakness in the other. You can't succeed without at least some of both.
WPI does better than any other school I'm aware of in incubating students' passions, and giving them that all-important hook. I'm proud to see the New York Times share that in their reporting. Though WPI is not an exception to the nation's science education ills, it's walking in the right direction -- a direction more of our schools should share.
Listened to about 10 times a day for the last 10 days. Guy says he did the album in a week after working hours and calls it "absolute bullshit". Respectfully, sir, I disagree.
Maybe (definitely) I'm easily touched, but I sure found the NYT's description of Jobs' last days pretty stirring. And, like a lot of kids my age, I came across Jobs' commencement speech to Stanford years ago and have tried to take its lessons to heart. It's a powerful speech, and I really do bear his words in mind. I also can remember watching Pirates of Silicon Valley on TBS twice in a row back in high school, lying for four solid hours on my mom's couch. More recently, I was hypnotized by a 20 minute presentation on zoning plans he gave to a town council, and the gorgeous vision he showed there.
I'm an admirer of Steve Jobs.
I've been railing on Apple's closed ecosystem for years now, but nothing they've done with iOS or their Store policies has been wrong somehow, ethically or legally. They can always do what they want with the things that they build.
My problem has been with two things: what a world would look like where Apple has no competition, and the absolute conflation of control and design that they inspire in others. Maybe, by virtue of sheer polarization (I'm not immune), my frustration has sometimes strayed from those channels, but I think that they're just about the only valid ways I could critique Apple from the outside, as someone who doesn't use Macs or iOS.
Another way is the Mike Daisey way, by going to Foxconn an Apple fan and coming back with a moving show about the ethics of manufacturing, and the courage to write a critical op-ed in the New York Times the day after Jobs' death. It's a good op-ed.
Jobs, through Apple, has expanded the imagination of the entire worlds of technology and human interactivity. Because these are vast worlds whose intersection will dictate massive portions of the future of the human condition, including the vast not-West of Asia and Africa, we should all take Jobs' influence on this extremely seriously.
Because I do take it seriously, I think it perfectly legitimate to be extremely grateful for Jobs' persuasion of the industry that simple, human technology is possible, and to be extremely frustrated at the persuasion of consumers that that kind of technology is only possible when you give up all control over it to a single entity.
The dearth of wildly successful counter-examples makes combatting this view difficult. Android and Ubuntu are the closest out there. Sadly, I think Android's success is based more on market forces and an intelligent business model than on its design, or on people like me who love the hell out of its principles. They've worked well with the oligopoly we have. Ubuntu's message, beautiful as it is, hasn't sunk in yet.
But the flaw in arguing that elegant design requires proprietary control is that there really aren't any successful other examples of that at all! We've had decades of companies all workingfeverishly at getting people to jump on their closed platforms, and, video games excepted, Apple is the only company with one that's both successful and a joy to partake in. Apple's success is because of Steve Jobs and the culture of beauty that they project and attract, not their locked down devices.
I don't think I there's any denying that we'd all be better off if we could have another 20 years of Steve Jobs being around. He created the market for digital music, made it okay to wear jeans at work, defined what a modern phone is, defanged Flash, made it profitable for small shops to make apps, and let more independent game developers have their dream job. Everyone else is to some extent a follower, and we on this side of the digital divide owe him big for all of that.
And as you appreciate all that, remember that it didn't have to be the package deal like Steve told you it did. Everyone's got their flaws, and he had his too. Let's learn from them, and each be the kind of visionary for our own ideals that Steve Jobs was for his.
Sid Gurung, 22, a student at the New School who enlisted because he said he was “extremely disappointed and angry that I have no future,” would agree to no timetable. “Our task is important,” he said. “We could be here for months. Our opponents are giants.”
I realize that the Occupy Wall St movement isn't very happy with their media treatment, but here's their about statement from the movement's own web page:
Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.
Good to hear they have a tactic! And a goal? A friend checked in on the livestream last night in time to see them expressing their solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal.
I do respect the marchers, I share its underlying emotions, and I have friends who have participated in them, but collectively, the message I'm getting from the protests is something like this:
Life in Chile has been unexpected. Immediately after arriving and setting up, I spent 12 hours with friends and members of the Fundacion, from 2pm to 2am, eating endless delicious meat and drinking endless delicious drinks at an endless string of dance-filled parties. It was terrifically fun, and a perfect introduction to Chile in its biggest national holiday.
The horrible downside of all of this is that I missed my chance to stock up on groceries while stores were open, and with the entire city shut down on Sunday and Monday for holiday, I spent two days alone, walking around my nearby environs, scavenging on awkwardly purchased McDonald's, Starbucks, and Dunkin Donuts, rationing out what miserable portions I could to last me until society reawakened. Whatever emotional reaction you may have to such a fate, I assure you that my digestive tract's emotions on Tuesday outstrip it. I did use the time to take some nice (if eerily lonely) walks, and I made some good progress on my math quilt.
Tuesday (today) was my first day working at the Fundacion Cuidadano Inteligente, and it was really cool. Their office is in an old probably-used-to-be-a-rich-person's house, where every door has been painted a bright solid color that is just shy of jarring, and together make for a charming scene. Their team and I took turns explaining our organizations' work to each other. I was really wowed by some of their current and not-yet-revealed projects, and by the end of the day I found a few different ways in which I can be of help to the Fundacion.
I've moved into a nicer place near Manuel Montt, and am now the proud owner of groceries. After the holidays' dietary adventures, I associate this with independence the way a teenager does her first car. I have two balconies offering both amazing views and chill work ledges, in what I think is the best weather Chile has to offer all year. Altogether I really couldn't be happier. I'm incredibly grateful to Sunlight for offering me the chance to come here, and in general am feeling thankful for my place in the world. I'm not sure I've earned it, but if I'd known at 20, my most self-demanding, that this is what I'd be doing at 27, I think I'd have approved.
In a few hours, I'm off to Chile, for a three week trip. I've never stepped foot in all of Latin America before, not even Mexico. It's for work - I'll be participating in a staff exchange with a Chilean NGO named Cuidadano Inteligente. My employer, the Sunlight Foundation, hosted one of their web designers for a few weeks earlier this year, and somehow I've become the other half of the trade. It should be a really fun trip, and since my friend Bert is living there, I'll have someone to show me around a bit. I'm landing right in the middle of a huge Chilean holiday, the Fiestas Patrias, it'll make for an exciting beginning.
I've been working myself really hard the last couple months, and plan on continuing that pace when I get back. It'll be nice to take a few weeks to break up my routines (which are calcifying dangerously) and operate at a slightly slower pace. When I get back, I'm going to move to a different part of DC, just to try to keep the ground shifting under me a bit. Living in Dupont Circle in my own place has been enjoyable, but not very exciting. I could use a bit more chaos, and even a bit of anxiety. I can think of more than a few areas of DC that can [over]deliver on both of those.
