If the website has community-written reviews, you can destroy it by soliciting bribes from the reviewed businesses:
With the Web site Yelp still responding to allegations by San Francisco businesses that it manipulates the prominence of positive and negative reviews, some Chicago merchants are adding to the heat.
They allege that Yelp representatives have offered to rearrange positive and negative reviews for companies that advertise on the site or sponsor Yelp Elite parties.
Yelp's CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has been taking his side of the story in this controversy to the Web, the media and even Twitter.
In a conversation with the Tribune, Stoppelman denied the allegations, saying, "I guarantee that there is no link between" review placement and advertising. He said that the people selling the ads have no access to the architecture of the site and so cannot influence placement or review content."
This bears investigating. Check out the original story in the East Bay Express, too.
That's how Douglas Adams described the effect of a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. I feel like I've just drunk two, after a phone call I recevied an hour ago from North Carolina.
Long-time readers of this blog who know me personally have noticed I actually maintain a certain sense of reserve in my public writings. The actual word is "privacy," but so few people remember what that word means in the context of the Internet that I avoid using it. These long-suffering people (called "friends" and "family") have had to deal with me fretting about an application to the Fuqua School of Business Cross-Continent MBA for the last 15 months. I admire them; many of them even helped me with the application; and each of them who told me to "just $%@*&!! apply already" was completely justified in saying so.
To everyone's relief, I transmitted my application on January 31. Apparently I did something right, because Duke have admitted me into the December 2010 class.
This will have certain practical effects on my life, mainly having to do with paying for it, but also around this blog. First, for example, I'm going to slow down on the 30-Ballpark Geas as both time and money argue against going to another 16 baseball parks before September 2010. As I expect to live another 50 or 60 years, I have plenty of time to see them; I don't have to do it before turning 40. (And my cousin and I still have 13 Cubs games to go to this year.)
Also, the residencies required by the program will have me out of touch for 10 to 14 days at a time, which will be hardest on Parker. The longest he's ever been boarded is 8 days; the first residency, in London starting August 15th, will require 16 or 17 days of boarding, and I don't know how he's going to react. (Taking him overseas is not an option.) I suspect he'll be pretty resilient, but I also suspect he'll be pretty mad at me.
Anyway, those are surmountable problems. I have until the end of March to commit, but my gut says "go."
Some readers, I know, will find this as interesting as I am: the GPS track (in Google Earth format) of my very long walk around Sint Maarten.
Other readers will just figure I'm waaaay too geeky.
Both sets will be correct.
Now that Illinois has started the long process of removing our ex-governor's name from tollway signs, this essay from the New York Times' Freakonomics blog extolling the virtues of congestion tolling is worth a read:
[I]t can be hard to convey this because the theory behind tolling is somewhat complex and counterintuitive. This is too bad, because variable tolling is an excellent public policy. Here's why: the basic economic theory is that when you give out something valuable — in this case, road space — for less than its true value, shortages result.
Ultimately, there’s no free lunch; instead of paying with money, you pay with the effort and time needed to acquire the good. Think of Soviet shoppers spending their lives in endless queues to purchase artificially low-priced but exceedingly scarce goods. Then think of Americans who can fulfill nearly any consumerist fantasy quickly but at a monetary cost. Free but congested roads have left us shivering on the streets of Moscow.
(In an odd bit of timing, the concepts of "shortage" and "free goods" will be on my Intro to Microeconomics exam next Thursday.)
Now, living as I do only a 20-minute bus ride from the Chicago Loop, and dreading any time I have to use one of our area's expressways, I think congestion pricing makes perfect sense. Especially when you see, for example, the traffic loads on the Kennedy Expressway during the week. Check this out:
This shows the average travel times from the Circle (downtown Chicago) to O'Hare, a distance of about 27 km. The blue line shows inbound traffic, the red line, outbound. At 40 minutes, the average speed is 40 km/h; normal expressway speeds (90 km/h) get you to O'Hare in under 20 minutes.
Ah, but see this week's chart:
Yes. This week, on average, the trip from O'Hare to downtown took almost an hour during the morning rush period. (For the record, the El takes 35 minutes, you can spend the time reading, the odds of dying are much lower, and it only costs $2.25, as opposed to typical Loop parking lots which cast $28.00.)
Now imagine you had the option of paying $5 to use the reversible lanes, knowing the trip would take 20 minutes. Is 40 minutes worth $5 to you? Forty extra minutes of sleep, 40 minutes with the kids, 40 minutes doing something other than stop-and-go traffic moving slower than a bicycle?
The first, from the Poynter Institute, concerns how Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm's staff made Twitter into journalism:
I tuned in an Internet broadcast of ... Granholm's annual state of the state speech because it was expected to be laden with energy and environment issues. On impulse I logged into Twitter and asked my followers if there had been a hashtag established for the speech. There was: MiSOTS (Mich. State of the State).
To my amazement, the hashtag had been established by the governor's staff—who were tweeting major points of Granholm's speech as she made them.
Meanwhile, many, many, many other people used this hashtag to challenge points, support points, do some partisan sniping, question assumptions, add perspective, speculate about what was going on, and provide links to supporting information—including a transcript of the speech and the opposite (Republican) party's response.
(Emphasis in original.)
The second, Mark Morford musing about technology in general:
To paraphrase a renowned philosopher, we just keep making the pie higher. This is the nature of us. It is, in turns, both wonderful and terrifying.
It seems there are only two real options, two end results of our civilization's grand experiment. Either the stack becomes so high -- with our sense of wonder and integrity rising right along with it -- that it finally lifts us off the ground and transports us to some new realm of understanding and evolution, or it ultimately topples over, crashes and mauls everything that came before, because we just didn't care enough to stop and smell the astonishment.
You have but to remember: How many ancient, advanced civilizations have collapsed under the weight of their own unchecked growth, their own technological advances, their own inability to stay nimble and attuned to the crushing marvel of it all? Answer: all of them.
Both are worth reading in full.
Via The Atlantic's James Fallows, a report that Microsoft's latest round of layoffs means the end of Flight Simulator:
[A]s of yesterday, it's the end of development for the venerable FS franchise (and probably the associated Microsoft ESP, the new commercial simulation platform based on FS), one of the longest-running titles in the history of the PC.
Sigh.
Two examples of totally ineffective security responses in today's news. First, in suburban Chicago, a commuter-rail ticket agent called police about a man with a gun boarding a train, causing a two-hour delay as heavily-armed cops evacuated and searched the train. They found the man with the gun when the man in question saw the commotion and identified himself as a Secret Service agent, not realizing he was himself the target of the search:
Metra spokeswoman Judy Pardonnet said the incident began when a plainclothes Secret Service agent asked a Naperville ticket agent whether there were metal detectors aboard the BNSF Line train and indicated he was carrying a gun.
Kristina Schmidt of the Secret Service office in Chicago said a preliminary review showed the agent had acted properly and identified himself to the ticketing staff.
Schmidt said the agent noticed the Metra employees eyes go to his waist and look at his service weapon as he was taking out his wallet to buy a ticket.
"He verbally identified himself as law enforcement and said that he was armed," Schmidt said. "That was pretty much the extent of their conversation."
Assuming all was fine, the agent boarded the train, she said.
It was a few minutes later that police boarded the train. The agent again identified himself, Schmidt said, not realizing his interaction with the Metra employee had led to the train being stopped.
The ticket agent had told police a suspicious man was asking "unusual questions that were security-based" at the Naperville Metra station, Naperville Police Cmdr. Dave Hoffman had said. Officers were unsure if the man got on the train so authorities decided to stop it near Lisle to search for him, he said.
Farther afield, in the U.K., a official for a prision lost an encrypted memory stick containing personal health information about prisoners. The problem? The password was taped to the stick (via Bruce Schneier):
Health bosses have apologised after a memory stick containing patient information was lost at Preston Prison.
An urgent investigation was launched after the USB data stick – with the password attached to it on a memo note – went missing on Tuesday, December 30.
The stick may have contained information of up to 6,360 patients.
Kudos to everyone involved for using your heads and keeping us all safe!
Developers generally don't like third-party UI controls because they're generally frustrating to use. Case in point: in the Infragistics Windows Forms controls package, the UltraGridColumn has sucked a substantial portion of my day away.
If you don't write software, you still appreciate it when it works simply and intuitively. You want to search for something, you go to Google and type in a search term. Brilliant. When you go to some company's website because you want to call the company, you look for something called "contact us" and click it. If you don't get the address and phone number of the company after clicking that link, you get irritated: the simple, intuitive thing didn't work. Jakob Nielsen is all over that stuff.
So. I have a simple problem, which is how to make a column in a grid grey out so my users don't inadvertently edit something they shouldn't. What I expect to write is something like this—or I would, if the member existed:
theReadOnlyColumn.Enabled = false;
Sadly, there is no "Enabled" member. So how about using a member that actually does exist?
theReadOnlyColumn.IsReadOnly = true;
Interesting. That member doesn't allow you to change its value. In fairness, the particle "Is" suggested it was a read-only member (ironic, that), but still, it looked like the right thing to do.
But no, here's the intuitive, simple, gosh-how-didn't-I-see-that-right-away thing to do:
theReadOnlyColumn.CellActivation = Activation.Disabled;
<rant>
This sort of thing happens when developers create software based on how it works, rather than what it does. It's sloppy, it reflects an inability to think like the person using the product, and it's compounded by a criminal lack of clear "how-to" documentation. (The Infragistics documentation site appears to have no way to search for concepts, requiring you to figure out how Infragistics developers organize things on your own.) This really, really annoys me, and is why I avoid using their products.
</rant>
The weather has cooled off a bit in the interior of Alaska:
Friday marked day six of the worst cold snap to hit Fairbanks in several years and there is no relief in sight for residents who live in Alaska’s second-largest city — or the business owners they call to bail them out when their cars, pipes and septic tanks freeze.
The temperature in North Pole dipped to 55 degrees below zero on Wednesday night, the lowest temperature recorded in the greater Fairbanks area during what has been six days of severe cold. It was “only” 46 below at 4 p.m. Friday in North Pole, but the temperature was “dropping by the hour,” meteorologist Austin Cross at the National Weather Service in Fairbanks said.
Friday marked the fifth day in the last six the temperature at Fairbanks International Airport hit 40 below or colder; it was only 38 below at the airport on New Year’s Day.
Forecasters expect temperatures in Fairbanks this weekend will likely touch 50 below and there is no indication the cold wave will dissipate anytime soon.
Since I don't read Alaskan newspapers often, and I'm used to seeing cold Alaskan temperatures on the Weather Now extremes page, I actually first heard this when ten people emailed me to complain about a bug in Weather Now. It turns out, the news story above linked to Weather Now and drove 2,400 unique visitors to the site in six hours.
I should know better. Fortunately my servers easily handle 10,000 page views per hour, but still, seeing a traffic spike like that caught me a little off-guard.
Via Bruce Schneier, a woman brought clearly-labeled gunpowder through a TSA checkpoint, in the regulation size baggies:
Mind you, I had packed the stuff safely. It was in three separate jars: one of charcoal, one of sulphur, and one of saltpetre (potassium nitrate). Each jar was labeled: Charcoal, Sulphur, Saltpetre. I had also thoroughly wet down each powder with tap water. No ignition was possible. As a good citizen, I had packed the resulting pastes into a quart-sized "3-1-1" plastic bag, along with my shampoo and hand cream. This bag I took out of my messenger bag and put on top of my bin of belongings, turned so that the labels were easy for the TSA inspector to read.
I expect she'll get noticed the next time she flies...