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Gadgets And Work-Life Balance

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On this rainy Saturday I was reading a NY Times article about work-life balance, obviously with my work email open in another tab.

The topic is somewhat interesting considering when I entered the work place it was just a few years into the 24×7 work treadmill that quickly became the new normal. On top of that, supporting a 24x7x365 news site it seems even more natural. In my eyes the days of a 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM Monday-Friday job are clearly dead and unlikely to ever return. While my primary task is day-to-day development, I also support the site, meaning when there’s a major news even (planned or unplanned), or a technical problem, that means we’re stepping up. Election nights are planned, shootings, major deaths, etc. are obviously not. Systems fail, things need to be upgraded, scheduling with a 24x7x365 newsroom who needs to always be ready to go is hardly easy. I should note that’s in addition to having a top-notch 24x7x365 operations team a phone call or email away. The repeated use of “24x7x365″ is intentional.

Throw in my extensive reading to keep up on things, constant need to hack on things, occasional desire to write about things, and I think I find myself identifying with the people profiled in the article to some small degree. Truthfully I was like this in college already, having a job just replaced the academic part.

On a side-note, while I was reading this article I did a double-take when I saw John Lilly’s name mentioned. I’ve seen his name in the press on many occasions, but never unexpectedly ;-) .

Paul Buchheit On Intrinsic/Extrinsic Motivation

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Paul Buchheit has a great post on the infamous “Tiger Mom” article that created all sorts of controversy a few weeks ago. I must say I agree with him largely and always found myself overwhelmingly running on intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation always failed miserably on me. I’d be curious to know what the breakdown is for the population in general and by age, as I suspect it shifts over time. If anyone knows of such research send it my way.

Interesting stuff.

Common Application Bugs

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There’s a curious article in the NY Times about the Common Application‘s technical glitches. The Common Application is a uniform way of filling out one application to apply to many colleges, as opposed to filling out an application for each individual college.

As a web developer, this struck me as particularly odd:

As it turns out, applicants do not have, say, 150 words to discuss their most meaningful extracurricular activities; they have something closer to 1,000 characters (Max said he eventually figured this out). And because some letters may take up more space than others, one applicant’s 145-word essay may be too long, while another’s 157-word response may come up short, Mr. Killion said.

“A capital W takes up 10 times the space of a period,” he said. “If a student writes 163 characters that include lots of Ws and m’s and g’s and capital letters, their 163 characters are going to take many more inches of space than someone who uses lots of I’s and commas and periods and spaces.”

Asked why the problem had not been fixed, Mr. Killion said, “Believe me, if there’s a way to do it, we’d do it. Maybe there’s a way out there we don’t know about.”

Sounds like the folks behind the common application need to go back to middle school and learn about variable width and fixed width fonts. If they had switched to fixed width fonts in the <textarea/> and used the same number of cols and font size it should be pretty accurate. I’m guessing some designer insisted on Helvetica or whatever they are using.

That said, are they actually printing these things out? Is there no way to do this electronically in 2010?

Back in my day (2002), I was advised to go the paper route since many still felt/feared that electronic applications weren’t being fairly considered (and in some cases not processed correctly). That was also the first year public colleges could join the Common Application as I recall. I suspect I was the last class where the majority did it on paper. I guess it’s still an improvement for a technophobic educational system.

More On The Housing Market

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Gary Shilling of A. Gary Shilling & Co believes that the housing market has another 20% to go before it will bottom out. BusinessInsider has a pretty extensive slide show explaining how he came to that conclusion.

I noted a few weeks ago that I don’t think the housing market has bottomed out. Despite what various talking heads may suggest, the numbers and historical trends suggest it still has more to drop. It still seems to expensive for there to be enough of a market to warrant the price. This is a cyclical problem. Unless housing becomes more affordable, or potential buyers become more affluent (unlikely) housing prices can’t be stable much less climb in any meaningful way. Eventually prices must drop.

I’m glad to see validation that my head scratching isn’t totally unwarranted. This has bugged me for several months. People claim it’s bottomed out, but there doesn’t seem to be any rational reason to think that other than wishful thinking, which I’d argue is optimistic, rather than rational.

The Real Cost Of Changing NYC Street Signs

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There’s outrage today over a story that NYC needs to spend $27.5 million to replace street signs because they are uppercase and federal regulations require title case. They will also now be using the font ClearviewHwy rather than what I believe is Highway Gothic (I’m no font geek).

However the headline is misleading if you read the actual article. A little common sense and a trivial knowledge of accounting (you most likely learned this in High School) will make you scratch your head.

The article even says typical sign lasts about a 10 years. They have until 2018 to make the change, which is 8 years. Assuming an even distribution that would mean 80% of the signs would have been replaced by 2018 anyway due to their age. The remaining 20% would be nearing their replacement time anyway. 20% of $27.5 million is $5.5 million. That’s the cost of the signs that will be replaced prematurely.

Even that however is not correct since the city would almost definitely use straight-line depreciation on the cost of the signage. The reasoning for this is as follows: If you have the sign for 8 of the 10 year lifespan, you got 80% of the value. Each year is worth 10% of the value.

The formula goes something like this:

annual depreciation expense = (cost of fixed asset - residual value) / useful life in years of asset

Again we’ll assume an even distribution of the remaining 20% (that’s 10% replacement per year or about $2.75 million). We’ll also assume no residual value though they are likely sold for scrap metal and have some token value.

($2.75M-0)/10 = $275,000

Now 10% of the signs are being replaced 2 years early, another 10% are being replaced 1 year early. That’s 3 years of value lost. That means:

$275,000 x 3 = $825,000

The actual cost to the city is $825,000 in lost value due to prematurely replacing signage. Not $27.5 million. I guess you can throw in a little more for labor, though I doubt you’ll get $26M and change out of that.

Coming Soon: 3D Pornography

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Apparently some enterprising director is working on 3D porn. Yes, the same technology being used in movies, but for porn. Will anyone want to actually watch porn in 3D? Will they be able to sit through it without ducking? I’m really not sure. I suspect morbid curiosity may help lift the sales for the first one. It may also make a good novelty gift when it’s on Blu-ray.

If that isn’t bad enough Gizmodo is reporting that someone is at work on an IMAX 3D porn flick. I can’t even type this without cringing and laughing. I dare anyone to watch that in an IMAX theater and not duck under their seats. This might be the worst idea I’ve read in a long time. I don’t think anyone wants to see that in 3D on such a large encompassing screen. Or maybe I’m totally wrong and it will be wildly popular.

I recall a few years ago reading about the backlash of people who found HD to be “too much”. Even worse than watching with headphones. This is going in a whole other direction.

This was to silly for me not to post.

The Myth Of The “Internet Generation”

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I’m glad to see more evidence dispelling the myth that there is a generation that is so tuned into the Internet they put others to shame. There’s no such thing as “digital natives” or an “Internet generation”. There were no “automotive natives”, “electric natives”, “movable type natives”, or any other “[insert technical revolution] natives” in human history.

I do suspect the results will be slightly different in the US where social and cultural differences tend to result in more online usage and less social interaction than in Europe, but that is still immaterial.

The idea that any skills can become almost innate is silly at best. Growing up with something doesn’t make you more functional with it. Human language is a very specialized skill. Equating language to using a search engine, managing files on your computer is hardly sensible. Language is so specialized science suggests there are parts of our brain that have evolved specifically for language. By contrast we don’t have a part of our brain for computer or internet skills.

From the article:

More surprising yet, these supposedly gifted netizens are not even particularly adept at getting the most out of the Internet. “They can play around,” says Rolf Schulmeister, an educational researcher from Hamburg who specializes in the use of digital media in the classroom. “They know how to start up programs, and they know where to get music and films. But only a minority is really good at using it.”

It’s not really surprising. People learn to do what the need and want to do. They also know how to shop in stores, and watch movies in theaters. That doesn’t mean they know how to produce products and movies. They don’t even become experts in products they buy or movies they watch. They became consumers over a new medium and nothing more. They couldn’t tell you what format the YouTube video they watched is in, and they likely don’t know what format it’s in at the theater either. They don’t know the technology behind their favorite websites, and they don’t know what goes into running a store. They just consume. That’s what consumers do.

A special segment with an interest in it will specialize in it and learn. Those people generally become Computer Science majors. Others will choose things like medicine, geology, marketing, economics and basket weaving to gain a thorough understanding of and eventually use for gainful employment. None of these fields had “natives” either despite having their own renaissance periods.

So lets stop with this “Internet Generation” stuff.

Monkey Cocaine Research

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Buried in an article on stimulus spending:

Then there is the project listed at No. 28 by the senators — $71,623 to researchers at Wake Forest University to see how monkeys react to cocaine.

Titled “Effect of Cocaine Self-Administration on Metabotropic Glutamate Systems,” the project calls for monkeys to self-administer drugs while researchers monitor and study their glutamate levels, the report said.

Emphasis mine.

Maybe I’m alone here, but the government funding monkeys that can snort cocaine on their own is pretty impressive. I’ll be really impressed if they can get one to cook meth. Even more interesting is if they can get them to understand enough about commerce to buy and sell. This is the first step towards making Planet of the Apes a reality.

More On Cell Phones And Toilets

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Last month I briefly touched upon the correlation between cell phones and toilets. My influence was coincidentally reading a story on third-world water sanitation a day or so before stumbling upon the cell phone statistics.

Now the UN is reporting in India more people have access to cell phones than toilets.

To briefly recap:

  1. I called it.
  2. I still find it disturbing.

RFID War Driving

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I’ve been a critic of RFID for the purpose of identifying people from early on because the concept is inherently flawed despite the insistence of people paid to insist otherwise. Chris Paget is in a widely circulated story regarding him driving around Fisherman’s Wharf with $190 worth of gear (likely not bought with an RFID credit card) and grabbing ID’s of strangers in the area. It should be noted for anyone wondering that he didn’t break any federal laws.

The story ignores that Chris Paget also gave a talk at ShmooCon 2009 regarding RFID cloning. Of course cloning passports is nothing new, it happened in Europe just 48 hours after the passports were first issued. Don’t worry about that though, the US government says it’s passports can only be read from about 4 inches. Although as the article notes (page 3) researches from University of Tel Aviv disagree finding it can actually be read from several feet away using hobbyist gear. A student from the University of Cambridge found it can be read from 17 feet away.

While its admittedly handy you can now clone a British passport without even opening the envelope I question if this is a necessary feature.

This reminds me of that old prank where you pull the tag off a library book and sneak it onto someones belongings so when they leave the library the detector goes off repeatedly as if they tried to steal a book. Clever misuse of a pretty easy to misuse technology. Of course the other side of this is the book can now be removed without setting off the alarm. Double fail.

Putting a RFID card in a shield isn’t really a great solution since most people will never bother in a world where still only 83 percent of Americans bother to wear seat belts [NHTSA, PDF]. Besides, if the point of including RFID is to read from a distance without exposing the card to swipe it, isn’t this redundant? You can always disable by microwaving briefly though RSA Labs claims a small fire risk. I’ve heard of hammers used too, though not sure how you’d confirm it’s dead.

Can we admit this RFID stuff is half-baked now?