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The WaPo headline reads “The DATA Act just passed the Senate” but it doesn’t look right to me. The Senate is the legislative body, which voted to pass the legislation. Not the other way around. Editorial picking of nits? Yes. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an improvement. ↩
Budgets and egos
Mark Headd, Philly’s first Chief Data Officer, who quit in spring of 2013, talking to Juliana Reyes of Technically Philly about why he resigned the post:
“A self-certifying website is a 20th century answer to the problem of tax deadbeats,” he wrote in an email. “An open data API is a 21st century answer to the problem. And that was my single biggest frustration during my time at the city — we were constantly using 20th century answers to problems that required a 21st century solution.”
I know from personal experience and talking with friends that this is a common complaint of tech-savvy government employees, especially leaders ostensibly authorized to do something about it but never truly empowered.
Budgets and egos slow technological (and many other forms of) progress to a glacial pace in many government settings.
I once spent valuable time collecting requirements for a piece of vital software, researching and recommending a reasonably priced and effective off-the-shelf solution.
Instead, someone decided to shoehorn the new use case into an aging enterprise software suite that had never seemed anything more than an ugly utilitarian GUI on top of a fancy backend of connected spreadsheets.
There was no line-item cost to the shoehorn solution, so it naturally looked like a winner when it came to budgeting. But the person-hours wasted reinventing the wheel easily outweighed the out-of-pocket cost of the solution I had proposed.
And aside from cost, persons in positions of power are often averse to being educated by twenty-somethings. That is especially true when it comes to technology, which most leaders know is important but few truly understand.
Budgets and egos.
Anyway, go read the rest of the article. It looks like Mr. Headd replies to comments, so it’s worth asking him any questions you might have.
Avoid Facebook's all-seeing eye
Avoid Facebook’s all-seeing eye
Violet Blue, reporting at ZDNet:
Facebook also announced Thursday it will begin tracking its users’ browsing and activities on websites and apps outside Facebook, starting within a few weeks
Her article is full of great advice for people who want to minimize Facebook’s tracking ability across desktop and mobile browsers. Be sure to have a look if the recent changes freak you out.
Journalism and tomatoes
From a May 2013 editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review:
Perhaps journalism can learn from the mistakes of the food industry, which bred a perfectly red, flawless-looking tomato, giving the edge to looks over taste, since that’s what consumers were buying.
Redesigns focusing on side door web traffic will all be for naught if the product in that shiny new package languishes under clickbait headlines and SEO-heavy ledes.
AT&T, acquiring DirectTV, "vows" to stick to FCC's Open Internet rules for 3 years
AT&T, acquiring DirectTV, “vows” to stick to FCC’s Open Internet rules for 3 years
Nathan Mattise, reporting at Ars Technica:
The two companies will demonstrate “continued commitment for three years after closing to the FCC’s Open Internet protections established in 2010, irrespective of whether the FCC re-establishes such protections for other industry participants following the DC Circuit Court of Appeals vacating those rules.”
My first draft of this post was cynical and incredulous, as I am wont to be. But on second thought, it would behoove AT&T to stick to it’s “vow,” if for no other reason than to grease the skids for regulatory approval of the deal. Like I said about Moves and Facebook, it’s hard to blame a company for seeking growth.
While the FCC’s Open Internet rules have been struck down since they were first imposed in 2010, Comcast still abides by those rules pursuant to requirements imposed by the FCC on its purchase of NBCUniversal.
Now that those rules have been struck down, and we’re in limbo while a new rules proposal goes through its comment period, AT&T committing to the Comcast restrictions presumes the FCC will have similar concerns about their purchase of DirecTV. So the worst case scenario for AT&T is that the FCC achieves similar restrictions via the new rules, in which case AT&T is already prepared. And the best case scenario is that the new rules are more lenient than the 2010 rules, and AT&T is even happier.
In fact, the only losers here are consumers. While there is some question about whether this consolidation in the connectivity/content space will cause immediate market overlap and thus a significant reduction in local competition, it’s hard to see how things will get better for consumers as a result of this vertical integration over time.
Mark Zuckerberg on survival of the most passionate
Mark Zuckerberg on survival of the most passionate
I actually think a lot of the reason why great stuff gets built is because it’s kind of irrational at the time, so it kind of selects for the people that care most about doing it.
A great point. That young man is going places.
The true Julian Assange
Andrew O’Hagan reads his essay Ghosting, about the failed ghostwriting project during which he got to know WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange as few do. The full text is also available at the link.
Condoleezza Rice backs out of Rutgers commencement
Condoleezza Rice backs out of Rutgers commencement
The Associated Press reports:
The school’s board of governors had voted to pay $35,000 to the former secretary of state under President George W. Bush and national security adviser for her appearance at the May 18 ceremony.
Any question involving money, and therefore just about any question at all, boils down at some point to supply and demand. I understand schools want to attract high-profile commencement speakers. But the fact that Rutgers would offer, and Rice would accept, $35,000, to speak for less than an hour, is shameful.
Schools should not be willing to supply so much money, and speakers, often wealthy, should not demand it. For a more thorough treatment of this topic, read the excellent 2011 essay “Commencement Cash Cow” by Pablo Eisenberg at InsideHigherEd.
Internet Privacy and What Happens When You Try to Opt Out
Internet Privacy and What Happens When You Try to Opt Out
Janet Vertesi tried to hide her pregnancy from the internet:
The myth that users will “vote with their feet” is simply wrong if opting out comes at such a high price. With social, financial and even potentially legal repercussions involved, the barriers for exit are high. This leaves users and consumers with no real choice nor a voice to express our concerns.
It’s a fascinating article.
Philadelphia School District releases budget data
Philadelphia School District releases budget data
Public entities don’t often have the budget needed to attract top talent from the private sector. But exposing data to public manipulation and scrutiny, aside from fulfilling a duty of transparency too often ignored, allows anyone interested in displaying and improving their skills to bring their talents to bear on that data.
Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne's blog
Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne’s blog
Joel Gascoigne is a co-founder and the CEO of Buffer, the most powerful tool for sharing and scheduling stuff across multiple social networks. It’s a great service and one I use almost daily. But more importantly, Joel’s thoughtful blog is a great way to read about how he and his co-founder, Leo Widrich, run a successful startup.
Gabriel García Márquez on life as literature
Gabriel García Márquez on life as literature
The recently deceased García Márquez, in an interview published in the winter 1981 issue of The Paris Review:
My mother asked me to accompany her to Aracataca, where I was born, and to sell the house where I spent my first years. When I got there it was at first quite shocking because I was now twenty-two and hadn’t been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading.
I have never read his work (a sin of literary omission I will soon remedy), but in this story García Márquez perfectly described a sensation I have at least once a week. It’s why I started writing fiction again recently after a long drought.
Go read the rest of the interview, it’s great.
Om Malik on digital advertising
Om Malik on digital advertising
Is a page being auto-refreshed on an open tab in your browser really useful “attention?” I don’t think so.
I saw this first-hand in a previous job. Here is a pro tip: You can be sure much of your traffic is open-and-forget (and therefore useless to advertisers) if you have an auto-refresh (as many news sites do) and your average session duration is equal or nearly equal to that refresh interval.
Anyway, Mr. Malik always has safe advice for business owners and writers alike, so go read the rest of his article.
Plagiarism in Legal Briefs
Gerard Magliocca, writing at Concurring Opinions:
If I cited [someone else’s] brief in an attempt to fairly attribute the source when I made the same point, then I’d look like an uncreative doofus. If I did not cite the brief, though, then that would (or could) be plagiarism.
It would be an interesting bit of research to determine how many sentences are copied without attribution from the briefs of other attorneys. I suspect it happens often.
I don’t think it’s uncreative to cite another lawyer’s brief. Legal writing is a game of cites. If anything, an uncited thought may raise questions rather than project creativity.
The real creativity in legal advocacy, as far as I have learned in law school, working as a litigation paralegal and reading far too much legal writing for “pleasure,” is in the optimal juxtaposition, creatively, of the cited facts and the thoughts of your forbears.
No one wants to see a newly minted physics professor work out the proof for E = MC2. The formula is there as a shortcut so others can build, creatively, upon the concepts for which it provides a shorthand.
After all, what judge prefers your lengthy version of an angle you could just as easily refer to with a short quote and a cite to a previous brief?
Whatever you think of this, a quick search turned up a bit of further reading on the issue and I’ve included a few links below. The question certainly isn’t settled, so I’m as interested as Mr. Magliocca in hearing other opinions.
Further Reading
Government agency NTIS charges for docs you can get online for free, loses money doing it
Government agency NTIS charges for docs you can get online for free, loses money doing it
Good thing a bipartisan bill aims to end that embarrassing situation.
The things the National Technology Information Service does which don’t involve charging hundreds of dollars for free stuff and bleeding money doing it will be absorbed by the Commerce Department under the proposed bill.
But why does Obama want to add $19M to the failed agency’s budget in 2015? I don’t mean to sound like a melodramatic RNC ad, but it seems like a bad idea.
The DATA Act and legislative definitions
The DATA Act and legislative definitions
Andrea Peterson reports1 at The Washington Post the Senate has passed a bill, the DATA Act, which would require federal financial data be published in a common format. It sounds like a great idea and something those nerdy data journalists are going to love. The bill is likely to pass in the House as well, and the President is expected to autograph it.
However, a part of the bill Peterson pointed out makes me nervous.
The version passed by the Senate doesn’t set a specific format for the data standard but does require it to be “a widely-accepted, nonproprietary, searchable, platform-independent computer readable format”
Now, to be clear, it’s probably better not to name a specific file format because those may come and go. But I’m hoping the final version of the law defines every word in that quoted bit, excepting “a” and “format” because if it doesn’t, implementation is going to be even slower than usual and enabling high-volume computerized public scrutiny of federal spending is really a the-sooner-the-better sort of topic.
Margaret Sullivan takes her NYT colleagues to task like it's her job, because it is
Margaret Sullivan takes her NYT colleagues to task like it’s her job, because it is
Margaret Sullivan is Public Editor at the New York Times. She is tasked with taking the Times to task when it falls short, overreaches or otherwise misses the mark.
And sometimes it does miss the mark, like when it failed to mention successful litigation by the Wall Street Journal which resulted in publication of Medicare data the Times used in crafting a recent feature story.
Sullivan’s candor and diligence are a service to the paper’s readers and reporters alike. Subscribe to her RSS feed here.
Heartbleed: When no encryption is better than bad encryption
Heartbleed: When no encryption is better than bad encryption
Alex Hern reports for The Guardian this disturbing fact about the recently disclosed OpenSSL bug, now two years old and pervasive:
servers vulnerable to Heartbleed are less secure than they would be if they simply had no encryption at all.
How? The bug allows access even to information the encryption wasn’t protecting.