I was extended, and have accepted, an invitation to join Burt Likko, aka Transplanted Lawyer, at Not a Potted Plant. NaPP is a more pointedly political blog, so there will be some more directly political stuff there than here. It shouldn’t be affecting Hit Coffee too much. There will be a little cross-posting. I plan to recycle and refresh some of my posts here for over there. But mostly, my wonky thoughts there, and other commentary here.

On a sidenote, the commenting rules that apply here do not apply there. We do fall under The League’s Civility Code, however. And, I should add, the commentariat over there is not going to be more hostile to certain points of view involving immigration and multiculturalism as you might find elsewhere in our blogging region.

I was considering changing my gravatar to the old Simpsons image that I made. But when I tracked it down, I realized that I had created it before my weightloss. So I’ve updated it, putting me in front of a classroom rather than an office and changing my appearance somewhat.

Here’s my previous self.

Half-Sigma today:

For some reason, I’ve never had any desire at all to edit Wikipedia. Nerdy value-creation skills are undervalued as it is. Why should I do it for free?

Even nerdier than editing Wikipedia is working for free on Linux or some other open source project. I find it even more mystifying that people want to do that for free.

Mr. Blue a few days ago:

We want the 9-5 people. They’re not the ones killing the job sector. We are. We’re the ones who keep coming up with “free alternatives” to the stuff that people should pay for. We’re the ones that allow Mark Zuckerberg to create a bajillion dollar company, employing virtually nobody, because we’ll make the widgets that make Facebook cool. We’re the productive ones that let the IT companies reduce their staff without taking productivity hits. If more of us were like them, there’d be more jobs to go around.

So let’s kill the “geek culture”. Let’s force the women in. Let’s make it so that we want to leave at the end of an 8-hour day. Bring on the apathy that dominates virtually every other field out there. Let’s spend more time making sure that everyone feels welcome and less time getting shit done. The shit we get done just makes more of us redundant. The wisepeople have spoken (utilizing the technology that we built). They apparently know something we don’t about what’s important.

UPDATE: Dave points to this article:

But many startups today have crossed over the line into freestrapping. Pay isn’t “low”, it’s “no”. Operations aren’t lean, they are free. Revenues aren’t small, they don’t exist. That’s right — no revenue and no overhead that can be strictly assigned to the business. Workers work virtually so there’s no office. Or maybe they spend hours at the local coffee shop mooching Internet access. They work for free, sustaining themselves some other way. Maybe they work part-time, have a working spouse, still collect unemployment or have “walk-away” money from their last gig. There are no materials in the strictest sense since they are creating a web-based or mobile application. Even their tools are free. Can you say open source? Or maybe they are using a “free 30 day trial” of a development tool. (Ah, so that’s why the agile development scrums are so short!) They are creating something from nothing. (And, yes, guilty as charged. That’s how we did it. There were a few out-of-pocket expenses but so far nothing that seriously cut into my coffee habit.)

If you are an experienced bootstrapper, this all sounds familiar, right? You are used to making nothing or next to nothing. The difference, and the trouble lies in the lack of revenue or prospects for revenue and the use of free raw materials and tools. The expectation of free has become so pervasive that we are harming our economy’s ability to grow. How can we make a living if we give everything away for free? And why should we expect anyone to pay for what we produce when we don’t pay for the tools we use?

When your software takes up 50% of my CPU capacity and half a GB of RAM, it’s not going to stay on my computer very long. On the other hand, if you can come up with something that has a smaller footprint, it’s going to take a lot longer to notice and you can collect more information on me to use for your nefarious purposes. Discipline, people!

For some reason, I am no longer getting email notifications of comments. That means I will be somewhat less quick to respond or pass comments through moderation. I apologize for the inconvenience.

The Huffington Post singles out six states that are the worst about software piracy:

According to a new report released by anti-piracy organization Business Software Alliance, only six states were responsible for nearly half of all software piracy incidents reported in the United States in 2010. {…}

Which states were the biggest offenders?

BSA pointed a finger at California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois and Michigan. As much as 49.3 percent of unlicensed software is believed to have originated in these states.

Nearly fifty percent. That sounds shocking until you look at the states. With the exception of Michigan, what do the other five have in common? In fact, they’re the five largest states in the country (Michigan is 8th). And if you add up the populations of those states, you get 40% of the country. They’re also the states with the largest economies. So it’s not exactly surprising that they would have 20% outsized share of software piracy.

This cannot stand.

Another stat shows that 80 percent of babies and toddlers know how to use the internet.

OH MY GOD TODDLERS AND BABIES ARE LEARNING TO USE ONE OF THE ESSENTIAL TOOLS OUR TIME! THIS IS POSITIVELY DISASTROUS!

Okay, actually, I find that statistic more puzzling than disastrous. How is “use the internet” defined? Learning to click on a link? Playing an Adobe Flash game? However you define it, being a toddler is a time for children to develop motor skills and language skills. Assuming that they can’t read, figuring out that clicking the button thingie when the pointer thingie will consistently cause such-and-such to happen strikes me as kind of useful. Granted, the spacial skills that come with playing with blocks are moreso, but are we really worried that kids aren’t playing with blocks?

Okay, setting that one sentence and my unreasonable response to it aside, let’s go back to the beginning:

• Text messages sent per day in the U.S.: nearly 5 billion
• Number of emails sent per second in the world: 2.8 million
• Average professional/work related meetings attended per month: 61

Sounds positively ominous… or does it? The first statistical set is the United States, the second set is the world, and the third is… what? Not the world. I doubt it’s even a company. I assume it’s an individual, in which case that’s actually kind of horrifying for a different reason. Does the average person really go to almost three meetings a day? I guess since I’ve only rarely been in management, that sounds awfully high to me. But I guess while I attended only one or two a week, there are others who just go from meeting to meeting and so it balances out to that. And maybe they define meeting liberally (though not so liberally, I would assume, that any time you stop by a boss’s office, that counts).

So is this a rallying call for more meetings? Why settle something with the convenience of an email when you can disrupt everyone’s schedule and have them drop what they’re doing for more “face time”?

My response may be somewhat intemperate, but with the exception of the part about Blackberries during family time (which I agree can be problematic), I am having difficulty what I am supposed to be pulling from this article other than “Be scared” and/or “You may not realize it, but you feel isolated.”

Except… I don’t. At least not in any of the ways that the article mentions. I have historically worked in the IT sector. We are not exactly luddites when it comes to electronic communication. We’re also not known for being the most sociable people. But, if anything, the places I have worked have involved us spending too much time talking to one another face-to-face. Often just chewing the fat. It’s a product of the Cubicle Age. I’m an introvert, but even I start up conversations with the guy sitting next to me. The only time I really avoided facetime was when everyone around me spoke through heavily accented English that I had difficulty understanding. And the only times I was really anti-social to my coworkers involved heavily accented English or an office full of people that were twenty years older than me or the fundamentalist father of triplets. I mean, am I alone in this? Due to geek-cultural solidarity and employers too cheap to spring for separate offices?

And Facebook? For every friendship it has created problems with (I can think of maybe one), it’s reignited friendships with dozens of others. I went to college at the dawn of Instant Messaging. ICQ came around my second year. My best friend Clint and I barely talked that first year. The second year and beyond, he was coordinating to see me every time he came to town and I was taking trips out there to see him. And of course this doesn’t even touch on BBSes, which provided me more friends than high school ever did. I don’t mean cyberfriends. I mean people that I met. People that I am still in touch with. And, of course, it provided me a course-correcting social education that my schools did not. But this is all kind of beside the point. The point is that unless you live in Callie, Arapaho, or some place similarly small, the only way you’re not making friends from cyber-communication is if that’s what you want. And if it isn’t bolstering your friendships, you’re likely not doing it right.

Which is not to say that there aren’t pitfalls to avoid. And in fact, I may be in one of those pitfalls now. Spending too much time online and not enough time around town making local friends which I might be forced to do in an earlier era. But a lot of that is circumstantial. I had a number of ideas on ways to meet people, but they sort of fell apart. And most of the ideas that occur to me are ideas that involve making friends way out in Redstone. And really, I was lousy with meeting people before the Internet (and BBSes), so it’s not like I can blame it on the wire. You can call it a crutch, but my ankle is sort of sprained.

So yeah, on the part about being able to put the Blackberry away at the dinner table, I’m kind of sympathetic. But complaining about the Internet getting in the way of “real communication” is like complaining that bicycles are problematic because they don’t give you the same workout as running.

A little while back, the New York Times reported that, as Wikipedia contributors, women are grossly underrepresented:

In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than 250 languages? Sure.

But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

For Slate, Heather MacDonald rebuts:

For anyone who is actually interested in finding out whether sexism currently shapes participation in public discourse, Wikipedia is a dream come true. Feminists have been complaining for years about the unequal representation of females on op-ed pages and in influential book reviews, magazines, and journals. In 2005, for example, political commentator Susan Estrich prominently accused editor Michael Kinsley of excluding female writers from the Los Angeles Times’ opinion section. Estrich’s only evidence for Kinsley’s alleged animosity to women was the lack of gender proportionality among Times contributors, which a posse of Estrich’s female students at the University of Southern California law school had been tracking. A New York outfit called the OpEd Project performs the same bean-counting more widely, running a regularly updated gender breakdown of opinion pieces at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, and Salon. And last week, Meghan O’Rourke (writing in Slate) and Robin Romm (writing for the Double X blog) reported the results of yet another such tally, this one by the women’s literary group VIDA, which counted bylines at 14 influential magazines, book reviews, and literary journals over the course of 2010. Pointing to VIDA’s findings—namely, that male bylines outnumbered female ones—O’Rourke concluded that “decisions about who and what gets published” must not be “the result of merit alone.” Romm, meanwhile, used the occasion to observe portentously that “the gatekeepers of literary culture—at least at magazines—are still primarily male.” Neither felt the need to determine the underlying ratio of male to female writers before decrying the byline imbalance.

The idea that these gender imbalances represent gatekeeper bias was demonstrably false even before the Wiki reality check. Any female writer or speaker who is not painfully aware of the many instances in which she has been included in a forum because of her sex is self-deluded. Far from being indifferent—much less hostile—to female representation, every remotely mainstream organization today assiduously seeks to include as many females as possible in its ranks. Nevertheless, the idea that someone or something is inhibiting women’s intellectual and political involvement remains robust, which is where Wikipedia comes in. Famously, Wikipedia has no gatekeepers. Anyone can write or edit an entry, either anonymously or under his or her own name. All that is required is a zeal for knowledge and accuracy. (The desire to share knowledge and the drive to correct errors are the top motivations of contributors, the Wikimedia study found.) Wikipedia provides a naturally occurring control group to test the theory that females’ low participation rate in various public forums is the result of exclusion.

It’s not impossible that an atmosphere dominated by men would be inhospitable to women even if there aren’t any formal gatekeepers. Web has commented on Wikipedia in the past as being very clannish (and biased). Given the number of male contributors, this would inevitably have a gender dimension. There are a lot of organizations that don’t formally exclude anyone but that people outside certain demographics would be uncomfortable. However, if the association or non-association is entirely voluntary, is there any damage done?

The answer to that is not necessarily “no.”

Given that Wikipedia doesn’t pay the vast majority of its contributors (if it pays any), that Wikipedia contributions are anonymous and therefore not a launching pad to a writing career, and apparently the contentious atmosphere of the sausage factory (errr, in more ways than one I suppose), it’s arguably the case that women are being done a favor here. It’s not their time being wasted. However, if you read past the first couple sentences of the New York Times article, you get to this:

Her effort is not diversity for diversity’s sake, she says. “This is about wanting to ensure that the encyclopedia is as good as it could be,” Ms. Gardner said in an interview on Thursday. “The difference between Wikipedia and other editorially created products is that Wikipedians are not professionals, they are only asked to bring what they know.”

“Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table,” she said. “If they are not at the table, we don’t benefit from their crumb.”

With so many subjects represented — most everything has an article on Wikipedia — the gender disparity often shows up in terms of emphasis. A topic generally restricted to teenage girls, like friendship bracelets, can seem short at four paragraphs when compared with lengthy articles on something boys might favor, like, toy soldiers or baseball cards, whose voluminous entry includes a detailed chronological history of the subject.

Even the most famous fashion designers — Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo — get but a handful of paragraphs. And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on “Sex and the City” includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on “The Sopranos” includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode.

These strike me as quite legitimate concerns. MacDonald is so buys knocking down feminist tackle dummies that she doesn’t even address these points. I am not inclined to believe that a lack of diversity is inherently a problem. In the past, I have pushed back against forcing men to take down Incredible Hulk posters cause women might think that they are guilty and choose to work somewhere else. A lot of the time, I ask… “so what if they do? Is the job getting done?”

But a project like Wikipedia is different. It could really stand to be improved with greater diversity. If the contributing population more closely matched that of the reading population, it would put out a product more useful to a larger number of people, which is Wikipedia’s stated purpose.

Google claims Bing copies its search results

The story began with Google’s team for correcting typographical errors in search terms, which monitors its own and rivals’ performance closely. Typos that Google could correct would lead to search results based on the correction, but the team noticed Bing would also lead to those search results without saying it had corrected the typo.

Next came the sting, setting up a “honeypot” to catch the operation in action. Google created “one-time code that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term,” then wired those results for particular, highly obscure search terms such as “hiybbprqag” and “ndoswiftjobinproduction,” Sullivan said. With the hand coding, typing those search terms would produce recognizable Web pages in Google results that wouldn’t show in search results otherwise.

Next, Google had employees type in those search terms from home using Internet Explorer with both Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar enabled, clicking the top results as they went. Before the experiment, neither Bing or Google returned the hand-coded results, but two weeks later, Bing showed the Google results that had been hand-coded.

Does anyone remember (or still use) Metacrawler? Before Google, that was my search engine of choice. It used to swipe from Yahoo, Webcrawler, AltaVista and others. Back then, the problem was as frequently “no results returned” and so it was really helpful to be able to search all in one. These days, though, the issue is relevance. Google, Yahoo, and all of the others return more links than you can possible peruse for all but the most unusual names. I started using Google when it demonstrated the ability to put the most relevant stuff on top.

Some time before I started using Google, Metacrawler became useless. I think that the other search engines were putting something in their code that made Metacrawler stop working for them. Or maybe they threatened to sue. I’m not sure what the IP-repercussions are for something like that, or this Bing-Google thing. But since Metacrawler is back and explicitly advertises that it’s using Yahoo/Google/etc, I would guess either it’s perfectly legal or they’ve come to an agreement.

As a general rule, I try to respond to most comments and all comments that ask me a question. I missed a comment by Nanani and I’ve been missing a few lately due to increased posting volume. Any time I have not responded to your comment and it’s a couple days old, you’re welcome to follow up and point out that I missed something. I do not take offense.