An I.B.M.'er Learns the Joys of Forgetting Email
Luis Suarez is a "social computing evangelist" for I.B.M. that in the New York Times
about cutting back on email. Instead? He largely used social networks, the telephone, and even occasional trips to someone else's desk. Sorry, but it sounds as though he largely substituted other forms of electronic communication, each with its own strengths and limitations. But I guess you have to consider the atmosphere in which he works and lives:
I started this experiment by announcing my intention on a couple of blogs, like my personal one and blogs inside I.B.M.’s firewall. The postings in response were overwhelmingly positive — but I also encountered some skepticism. Many people wondered how I would manage to communicate and collaborate with my peers without using e-mail.
Good gravy, Gretel, how ever do you think he's know what we're saying if he doesn't click Reply? Pardon my cynicism, but to me this is a pretty lightweight piece. Either try completely foregoing email or not, but this is the "email lite" program, and not terribly interesting.
Labels: business, email, social networking
The Thoughtful Side of Cassanova
The Guardian has an article on a
new biography of Cassanova. Some newly reopened archives in Prague are providing food for literal thought. Aside from Cassanova's legendary amorous adventures (which included a few men as well as women, supposedly), he was an otherwise busy man:
In addition to the vast History of My Life, he wrote a total of 42 books and plays, including a translation of the Iliad, a five-volume science-fiction novel, mathematical treatises and opera libretti. He was also a committed follower of the Kabbalah, the mystical Jewish cult holding a deep fascination for him to the extent that he attributed his life's successes to its power.
Labels: authors, books, history, literature
Some Great Photographer Interviews
When I was looking at the
A Photo Editor blog yesterday, I noticed a link to another site that I thought I'd pass along. PixChannel is a site that has
video interviews with great photographers, and is a way of learning more about the craft, art, and business.
Labels: interviews, photographers
A Picture Is Worth All the Words on the Covers (and Between Them)
There's a great piece on the
blog of Rob Haggart, a photography director, about how magazines now go about choosing what goes on the cover, from the headlines and come-ons to the almost inevitable celebrity. Here's a taste that shows you how insane the editorial process has become:
I look forward to the day when magazines can return to serving their audience and not the newsstand. Until then you’re stuck with 109, free, biggest, hot, ultimate, travel, toys, secrets, great, perfect, best, sex, abs, weight-loss, getaway, new, insider, easy, delicious, shortcuts, paired with a celebrity you keep seeing over and over on the covers of magazines.
Perhaps it's time for people to write (alright, email) editors and demand an end to the tripe, because I really wonder how well they sell, and whether the magazines even try to see if they can understand their readers, or if they just assume that they already know, so there's little reason to experiment or - gasp! - talk to the great mass of us unwashed.
Labels: editors, magazine
The New Photo Book Market
Traditional photo book publishers have been screaming about the change in their market and how it's so tough to make a buck anymore. But in
this interview that photo director and blogger Rob Haggert does with Radius Books publisher Darius Himes, you get the sense that while the market has changed, it's opened doors for a lot of new, smaller publishers. The problem, I suspect, is that it now becomes next to impossible for photographers to make a buck directly off their books, which means they have to change
their business models. Unfortunately, such are life and its version of black comedy, economics.
Labels: blog, book
Journalists Outsourcing Their Own Work
There are days I end up scratching my head, wondering what could possibly happen next. And then I get my answer. Today, it's in the form of a newspaper columnist in Texas who has just resigned because the person who had been doing some ghostwriting for him finally asked the editor for a byline. Here's a bit form the
story that ran in the Guardian:
On his own blog, Burr tried to write the scandal off as a case of his being "a little overzealous"- which is an interesting way of describing getting someone else to do your work for you.
This, to me, is like becoming a shoemaker, and then hiring someone else to make the shoes for you because you get tired of doing so. Why bother to keep doing it?
Labels: ghostwriter, newspapers, writers
Two Freebies from O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media, a publisher of technical books and, more recently, titles on photography, has two free offerings. One is a
webcast on Thursday, June 26, 2008, with photographer Rick Sammon, who will discuss "10 Key Ingredients for Cookin' Digital Photographs." Pre-registration is necessary and space is limited.
The other is a video podcast -
101 Photoshop Tips in 5 Minutes - by Deke McClelland, who does a fast-paced short music video that literally is about Photoshop tips. Some people will do almost anything as marketing. The link is
supposed to be here, but when I tried, I got an error message that the site was "unable to forward this request at this time." Maybe their server was taking five after sweatin' to the oldies...
UPDATE: Here's a
link that works.
Labels: digital, Photoshop, podcast, webcast
Print While You Wait: Bookstores and Print-On-Demand
Blackwell's, a so-called high-street bookseller in London,
will be installing book printing machines throughout its 60 stores in the UK, according to the Guardian. The current speed is 40 pages per minute, but a new model expected later this year should double the speed. Imagine wanting any of a million books and waiting 7 to 10 minutes to get what you want. It sure beats express shipping.
Labels: books, bookstore, news, publishing
R.I.P. George Carlin
The comic who focused on social satire and a general disappointment with the species died last night of heart failure at 71. His routine "7 words you can't say on television" actually held literary legal weight. It actually became the official list of what broadcasters could not permit out over the air:
Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad.
Seeing them in print doesn't do them justice, because Carlin was a spoken word artist. It was the rhythms, the emphasis, the tones that helped make the routines so funny. Here's a
link to the text of the original routine. But if you'd like to hear him,
try this Youtube link.
Labels: comedy, obituary
Non-Art Art Photography Exhibition
The Village Voice has an
interesting article on an exhibition, at New York City's International Center of Photography, of the
work of commercial photographer Bill Wood. A Fort Worth, TX-based photographer, he did general commercial work that eventually found its way into the hands of collector Diane Keaton, who actually had them basically packed away for 20 years until she really looked at them.
What I found of particular interest was the ambivalence that Keaton and the writer have toward the photos. They aren't "art" - he's not "another overlooked or local genius on the order of Mike Disfarmer or Weegee," as writer and curator Marvin Heiferman puts it. But as the article's author Martha Schwender notes,
they are striking. Yes, there is the danger of a social equivalent of Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage, in which a scene in a movie can take on different meanings based on the context. Taken out of the original commercial context, these photos might take on the sense of commentary on values and mores:
But there's something that makes me hesitate at viewing these photos through the filter of our current standards, either for fashion or political correctness. This is not out of charity because Wood (essentially a good ol' boy who was born and died in Fort Worth) never "rose" to the level of Frank's or Winograd's distanced critique. Nor is it out of nostalgia, a longing for a time when the U.S. was at peace, and businesses (like Wood's) were owned and operated by individuals rather than conglomerates, and development, to people living in the vast American West, meant prosperity rather than destruction. Instead, it's partly because Wood's images of Americans smiling in their uniforms, offering a quick product demonstration, receiving congratulations, or finally getting sick and lying in their coffins, were taken by a fellow striver.
I'm likely to be in the New York City area at some point in the near furture, and this show at the ICP seems like one worth catching. If Bill Wood fails to interest, there are two other exhibitions that look promising:
Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan and
Arbus/Avedon/Model: Selections from the Bank of America LaSalle Collection.
Labels: black and white, commercial, exhibitions, New York
Scientific Journal Gets Hoodwinked
The journal Materials Today in its July/August issue is running an opinion piece about "evidence" that Thomas Edison was involved in the murder of a rival. But
a closer read shows that the victim was more likely Materials Today. This is a post I did a couple of days ago on my photography blog (as the topic was movie technology), but I thought that people here might find it interesting.
Labels: hoax, journalism, magazine
Indian Art Buyers Take to Photography
According to this story from IANS (Indo-Asian News Service),
art collectors in India are starting to hold photography in higher regard:
Classical art photographer Aniruddha Mukherjee feels that photography as an art stands out because it captures 'time and space' and yet transcends both at the same time through abstract touches, play of light and intelligent studies in colour.
'There are very interesting things happening in photography in India. A group of photographers (Atul Bhalla for instance) are adding experimental layers to their photographs to make it more attractive to buyers as collectors' items. They are going beyond conventional photography,' Mukherjee said.
Although most of the sources in the story are either photographers or sellers of photography - which would make them all people with axes to grind - Mukherjee is interesting because he started as a portait painter, but found that the cost of all the labor going into a portrait was "a bit too steep" for most buyers. However, a portrait photographer can still get a "classical portrait" while charging a lot less. Another source in the story, photographer Ajay Rajgharia, noted that photographs are a tenth the price of a painting. And so, photography still remains the literal poor cousin of canvas.
Labels: art, India, market
How Many Libraries Is Your Author In?
Someone on a writers' board pointed out this resource: a
site that purports to tell you in how many libraries you can find the work of a given author. I have no idea how accurate this is, but it's amusing, none the less.
Labels: authors, books, libraries
Is Edison Murder Charge a "Phone" Phoney?
Update at Bottom
A patent email list to which I subscribe (I often write about intellectual property) had mentioned an article that appeared in the magazine Materials Today
about the alleged murder of the real inventor of movies, Louis Le Prince, who was the first to record moving images on film. But on reading the "evidence," I was immediately suspicious that I had a complete fake in front of me. So blatant was the hoax that I could hardly believe that an editor didn't immediately start questioning.
Author Atreyee Gupta reports on research by a University of New York graduate student, Alexis Bedford, who supposedly claims to have found evidence in Edison's own handwriting that he at least had knowledge of LePrince's murder:
As Bedford relates it, he was turning over some papers on Thomas Edison's work with lighting methods when he stumbled across a dilapidated leatherbound book. The book would turn out to be one of many notebooks in which Edison was fond of jotting down ideas and test data. "Leafing through it," explained Bedford, "I merely thought I'd find perhaps some interesting and as yet unknown processes that Edison had tried in the laboratory. I never thought I would stumble upon this!" He had found a small entry dated September 20, 1890 by Edison's own hand which read, "Eric called me today from Dijon. It has been done. Prince is no more. This is good news, but I flinched when he told me. Murder is not my thing. I'm an inventor and my inventions for moving images can now move forward."
Supposedly Bedford was granted permission to get the document authenticated by historian Robert E. Myre at New York University, who eventually said that it was an authentic entry in Edison's own hand.
But this startling story could well be a fake. Look at the language "Eric called me today from Dijon." In 1890? The first transatlantic telephone call happened in 1918. In the parlance of the time, he might have been "cabled" or someone might have "telegraphed," but not called. Next: "Murder is not my thing." My thing? How 1960s/1970s can you get? Searching at nyu.org, I found a David Myre and a Greg Myre, but not a Robert E. I didn't find a listing for an Alexis Bedford, either.
I've got an email in to the magazine's editor and assistant editor and am interested to see if this item even ran in the publication, or whether the entire thing was faked from first to last. If by some chance it is real, I'll see if they can put me in touch with the author. But the longer I look at this, the farther I feel my leg being stretched.
Updated: 16-6-08, 1:07 pm EST
I finally reached Katerina Busuttil, assistant editor at Materials Today. Apparently the magazine had run a scientific writing contest. Here is what she said about this, the winning entry:
We cannot confirm it truth or false. But we thought it was a good piece of writing and we chose it as the winner. It was just a good piece of writing, which is why it won the competition.
Although this is a peer-reviewed journal, because they treated the piece as pure opinion, they did not investigate its veracity.
Let's recap on the truth issue (which took one reading and a few checks on the web, plus some added telephone calls for additional checking):
- The first transatlantic telephone call happened 1918. This incident supposedly happened in 1890 and referred to a phonecall between France and the US.
- At the time, people would have referred to being cabled or telegraphed, not called.
- The research supposedly happened at the New York Library - presumably the New York Public Library. Yet the archives of the Edison National Historic Site - all 5 million pages - rest at Rutgers in New Jersey. According to the NYPL's web site, there are 64 collections that have a mention of "Edison," but none are collections of his papers
- Only an idiot would have written in his journal about his involvment in a murder conspiracy. Edison was no idiot.
- I've found no evidence of a Charlene Edmonds employed at the New York Public Library.
- There is no "University of New York," although New York University and State University of New York (SUNY) both exist.
- There is no Robert E. Myre employed at New York University, according to someone in the administration who looked up the informaiton. Because of legal restrictions, the person could not say whether an Alexis Bedford was enrolled as a graduate student studying chemistry and photography.
- I went to the suny.edu web site, checked online for the name Myre, and found no search results. Checking on Google, I looked for SUNY combined with either "Robert E. Myre" or "Robert Myre". The one match I got was for someone who graduated in 1962 and was in Sigma Phi Epsilon.
- The magazine cannot pass on the author's contact information, though said they would forward an email seeking to reach her.
In short, this seems like a completely fabricated story with no more relation to the truth than a goat has to a guppy: any connection would be purely accidental.
Labels: film, movies, technology
Great American Think-Off
An Oregon man won this year's Great
American Think-Off. Craig Allen, a "retail instructor," came out first in a debate over the question: "Does immigration strengthen or threaten the United States?" The other contestants included a student from Minnesota, another from Minnesota who just got out of grad school, and a Tennessee alumni director. The statements by each of the participants can be found at the link. And just think - not a word about wearing a flag pin on your label.
Labels: debate, news
Welcoming Bloomsday with Parody
There are people who take the mickey out of the work of James Joyce. There are people who out-and-out make fun of the Dummies series of books. But never before had I heard of anyone who fused the concepts together:
Ulysses for Dummies. After you've read though the entire opus in about 73 seconds, possibly tarrying a mite for the simply animations, you can then spend your day with the real thing. Quick, the narrative started at 8:00 o'clock this morning.
Labels: Bloomsday, James Joyce, literature
Environmentally Friendly Developing
One problem with traditional photography is the toxicity of the chemicals. So I was surprised to come across
this description of making a print developer out of mint leaves and bicarbonate of soda.
Labels: chemistry, prints
New Author Signing Record
Ken Follett, a British writer who is apparently popular in Spain, set a new world's record for an author signing copies of a book at a single sitting, knocking off 2,050 in three-and-a-half hours at Madrid's book fair,
according to an AFP story. The old record of 1,600 ... was also held by Follett.
Labels: authors, books, record
Missouri Lawmakers Want to Outlaw Cyberbullying
This seems to me one of the biggest opportunities for unintended consequences and no good deed going unpunished:
Missouri lawmakers want to criminalize cyberbullying:
"It used to be that adults would pooh-pooh bullying as a phase, but we're seeing increasing violent actions resulting from it," Sanchez said in an interview.
"The problem with cyberbullying is that kids aren't even safe in their own home, because they're being harassed through the computer or cell phones 24/7 potentially," she said.
How about turning off the damned computer and taking an interest in what your kids do online? How can you possibly define "cyberbullying" in such a way as to prevent abuse without completely tossing out protected freedom of speech?
Labels: freedoms, Internet, online
Journalist Crowd Ambushes Bill O'Reilly Employee Trying to Ambush Bill Moyers
Oh, this was really amusing - a
video clip of a producer for Bill O'Reilly trying to ambush and browbeat Bill Moyers for not going on O'Reilly's show on O'Reilly's terms. The producer kept using loaded questions to color the conversation and attack Moyers while claiming to be asking something straightforward. Moyers, being no fool, didn't back down and nicely said that he'd go on O'Reilly's show if O'Reilly would first go on his - for an hour, completely unedited. That's a tough format if you like to browbeat and make yourself look right. And then the journalists who were attending the conference where this happened started following the producer and used the same techniques on him. The guy kept walking - no wonder. Whethr you agree with Moyers's politics or not, I think it's clear that you don't play word games with someone who has been using them for as long as he has.
Labels: Politics, television, video
LA Times to Turn Sunday Magazine into Ad Shill
I read a
story in the New York Times that made me sad
The Los Angeles Times has made plans to transfer control of its monthly magazine from its newsroom to its business operations and to replace the magazine’s entire editorial staff, according to two executives at the newspaper.
I've never written for the LA Times at all, let alone the magazine, but I do remember a conversation with a past editor, Martin Smith - a real gentleman who was praised by every writer I knew who worked for him and who, it was clear, had an understanding of how to focus articles for his audience.
But the LA Times has been a mess for a while, from what I've heard - and from what has appeared in the news. I'm sure this is all part of the roiling at the Tribune organization, which owns the paper. Sam Zell bought the company and is certain, I'm sure, that he knows what is best for the company. Unfortunately, many people who are primarily investors think they know how to make companies run well, and they often don't, particuarly when it comes to publishing. Some time back, I had a conversation with an editor I knew and wrote for. We were discussing the business magazine market and how badly so mny titles seemed to be doing. This highly experienced man was then editor in chief for a business magazine which had been started by someone with more money than sense, because Mr. Pockets kept second-guessing everything that the experienced editors were doing. The result was complete and total disaster.
A magazine or newspaper is an odd tye of business, because there are three communities to which it is responsible. One, absolutely, is the set of advertisers. They need to know that their financial support will translate into a return on their investment.
But that doesn't happen in a vacuum. To be useful, the publication needs a reading public. The money comes as a consequence of being well-read and well-regarded, and if owners keep under-cutting the editorial mission, they eliminate the ability to satisfy the public, and so the ability to attract advertisers.
A publication also has a responsibility to the community and to public discourse. It is by far the most hazy to accountants, but it is why many people care about a publication and why they are willing to buy it. Ignore the mission, and you might as well close shop and start the fire sale tomorrow.
The plan for the magazine was set in motion months ago. A new editor and others were hired, future issues were planned, and mock-up covers were made — all without the knowledge of anyone in the newsroom, including the top editor, Russ Stanton, the executives said. Mr. Stanton and other high-ranking editors learned of the plan last week, they said.
But the executives who described the plan cautioned that it might have changed since last week, after editors raised objections.
They said that Mr. Stanton, after hearing about the move, asked the publisher of The Times, David D. Hiller, and the president of the newspaper, Jack D. Klunder, to change the name of the publication, which is now called Los Angeles Times Magazine. He argued that to keep the name would lend the newsroom’s credibility to a product it did not control.
Can you imagine taking over a manufacturer and telling the factory workers and management that the marketing department would now run things? Just because someone can make money in real estate doesn't mean that he can necessarily do anything else. It's just that he has enough money to prove by example how bad his decisions can be. Then comes all the money trying to prove that it was the fault of everyone else. But when you're the CEO, you are responsbile. You cannot take the praise if you aren't willing to accept the blame.
Labels: Los Angeles Times, magazine, newspapers
Memory Chip Field Test in the News
A woman who had forgotten her camera only to find it stolen when she went back to look for it found that the memory chip inside phoned home. According to the Associated Press story, Alison DeLauzon was on vacation in Florida
when the camera went missing. But she had used an
Eye-Fi SD memory chip that was Wi-Fi enabled. When the thieves walked by an unencrypted Wi-Fi connection, the chip sent back the pictures she had taken - and the ones the criminal duo, both employees at the restaurant where she had left the camera, took of one another. She did get the camera back. Talk about a lucky break for her ... and an unexpected marketing boost for Eye-Fi.
Labels: equipment, news
Technique: Photos and the Rain
-728813.JPG)
Many photographers give up taking shots during inclement weather, and understandably, because they are concerned about their equipment. But you don't have to give up so easily. Keeping your camera and lenses safe is harder, yet not impossible:
- You can use an umbrella (a helper to hold it up is useful) or a tent to provide a protected spot and then shoot out of the protection. Before you start shooting, do check to see if wind is blowing the rain in toward what you think is the dry area.
Labels: technique, weather
When Broad Surveillance Changes Life
There's an interesting
entry from a German blogger about broad telecommunications surveillance in Germany and how it has changed behavior:
Since the beginning of this year, communication providers are required to record who communicated with whom and when (but not the content of the communication). This data is stored for six months and available to law enforcement in cases related to certain forms of crime.
In at least one study, close to three-quarters of people knew about the data recording, 11 percent was already avoiding phone, cell phone, or email for certain communications, and over half "said they probably would not use telecommunication for contacts like drug counselors, psychotherapists or marriage counselors because of data retention." What happens when many people won't look for help when they need it because they fear telephoning or emailing someone, possibly even to set up an appointment?
Labels: privacy, telecommunications
Gamers to Decide SciFi Show Directions
The
SciFi Channel is combining a new television series with a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) to create a hybrid entertainment that hasn't worked before, but might this time, according to an LA Times report. Instead of having people watch once a week, the channel hopes to get them involved all week long, with the way fans play the game shaping what happens on the show:
"This is the Holy Grail for us, without a doubt," said Dave Howe, president of the Sci Fi Channel, which has teamed with Trion World Network, an on-the-rise gaming company based in Redwood City, Calif. "This is groundbreaking, and I don't say that lightly."
Sci Fi Channel executives are mum about the title of the show and game and their premise, but they do hint that it will be set 80 to 100 years in the future on an Earth that looks very different from today. The team has summer 2010 as the targeted launch; more details are expected to be announced in July at Comic-Con International in San Diego.
It's an interesting concept, and one treading on ground that has and hasn't worked out in the past. The American Idol and Survivor type shows have been wildly successful, letting audience members vote on the results. But television and online gaming are quite different. One way the studios get people to come back every week is to leave the results in doubt. But in an online game, can you keep participants in the dark, the way you would with a vote, or will some of the suspense dissipate, as people must know what is going on to a significant degree to actually play?
Labels: games, online, television
George Orwell: Chinese Prophet
I might have as well written Chinese Profit, because that is the essence of a terrific Rolling Stone piece:
China's All-Seeing Eye. The country continues to build an extensive system for monitoring all citizens, all the time:
This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.
However, the reason is as economic as political. There is a massive number of migrant workers that the Chinese themselves have created by destroying villages to make way for equally massive building projects. Migratory ranks could reach 350 million by 2025. As this has happened, the country has also created a division of citizenship, where those forced to be transitory, because their homes were destroyed, are denied full benefit of the growth in the economy because they aren't living in their homes.
It's a situation that, if fiction, would have done Joseph Heller proud. Keep in mind for a moment that there have been relatively widespread but largely unreported riots in China, especially over the cost of food. The idea is that you could identify potential troublemakers that have the greatest impetus to take some sort of action, because even the dispossessed have the national identification cards that tie all the disparate information together - one giant key search term for all personal data. This is an Orwellian state that came about because of the drive for profit, which is often synonymous with the drive for power.
Much of the technology that China uses is actually American in origin - at least some of which is probably being sold against clear U.S. prohibition. Now think about all the cameras that cities and states want to set up to "fight crime," even though there is a spectacular lack of data to suggest that the devices are actually cost-effective. Add in the FCC's floating the idea of a free censored version of the Internet. Include the incomprehensible amount of information that private industries have on consumers, and the historically demonstrated readiness of the American people to tolerate heavy restrictions on their rights to battle some amorphous enemy, and you have conditions ripe for a public-private partnership in a privatized police state.
Labels: China, freedoms, law, Politics
Wisdom of the Elites
Susan Jacoby had an interesting piece on popular American dismissal of "elites." I'm ambivalent here. On one hand, I think there is a certain egalitarianism in this country that surfaces when facing rhetoric that is essentially an appeal to authority: we are experts and therefore you should listen to our arguments. Frankly, I can understand that impulse, because too often we see experts whose actions in surety are so incredibly wrong that it leaves the entire country to repent in its leisure.
But there is another problem. I think that people assume that data, information, knowledge, and understanding are the same thing. But the four concepts form a hierarchy, from lower to higher. If you don't have the information already collected and available to you by recall, you cannot start to develop knowledge, because you have to put that information into a greater context. And you cannot develop understanding until you can take various areas of knowledge and begin to see the connections among them. So not only does the university student assume that having information available is the same as knowing it even exists, but such kids assume that they can make use of what they find on the Internet.
While that may be true in some limited areas and ways, for the most part, without the necessary grounding, they are hopelessly incapable. Any little success they consider mastery, and they have no concept of how much richer and piercing their thinking and insight could be. It is the equivalent of saying that one could cook a sophisticated meal because the ingredients are at stores and recipes exist in cookbooks. Good luck with that dinner party.
Labels: knowledge, opinion
-728837.JPG)
