People have often argued against my (educated) cynicism stating that “Hey, it’s not so bad, things are getting better! We see less poverty, less racial discrimination, more healthcare, longer life, etc.” Turns out, I was right, and now I have a better defense than merely calling them whigish liberals with a mistaken understanding of empirical reality.

An interesting article in Harvard Magazine points out that income inequality is now at 1800s levels and is only getting worse.

The United States is becoming even more unequal as income becomes more concentrated among the most affluent Americans. Income inequality has been rising since the late 1970s, and now rests at a level not seen since the Gilded Age—roughly 1870 to 1900, a period in U.S. history defined by the contrast between the excesses of the super-rich and the squalor of the poor.

Further, the United States is doing worse relative to the rest of the world, and the effects of poverty are thought to spill over into bourgeoisie life as well (in interesting and complicated ways).
Technorati Tags: poverty, history

Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” does a brilliant job of finding the historical precedence of the interconnected world wide web, and spins a convincing story about the effect of new (hyperlinked) text on knowledge. Carr may miss the changing direction of knowledge itself. He quotes Plato’s Pheadrus, where Socrates laments how writing is perverting thinking, and now an interconnected, live-streaming info-dump changes what knowledge itself is.

Plato’s Forms departed when knowledge was wrested from souls and fixed into text, and now Modernity’s Book Learning is wrested from its fixity in text as information expands, connects, and fractures into a million URIs.

Technorati Tags: text, google, knowledge

Chapter 3 of Darin L. Stewart’s book Building Enterprise Taxonomies does a fantastic job, at its apex, of communicating the conceptually very difficult notion of faceted taxonomies. The book is starting to build momentum as it gets the basics out of the way and begins to tackle some of the difficult issues facing information architecture and management. Stewart accurately describes how controlled vocabularies fit into taxonomies, and offers an interesting typology of controlled vocabularies (ranging from synonym rings, up through authority files, taxonomies, and finally thesauri). The traditional taxonomy is described and built up to include the standard thesaural relationships. At this early stage there is no mention of the lexical rules for generating these relationships, but this is excusable considering that Stewart is really trying to get the conceptual groundwork in place here, and not become bogged down with the details.

This chapter really shines with its description and explanation of faceted classification schemes. Stewart locates the origins historically but quickly moves into easily understandable examples which really help to reorient the reader. Stewart is rightfully dogmatic about drawing a line in the sand between enumerative classification schemes and faceted ones, and notes that both have their advantages and disadvantages. Stewart argues that the increased effort needed to create a faceted classification scheme is outweighed if the content is dynamic and fairly unstable. Speaking from personal experience, I would suggest that most organizations have pretty unstable information and thus should seriously consider a faceted scheme if at all possible.

Technorati Tags: Building Enterprise Taxonomies, Darin Stewart, taxonomy, book review

Continuing my review of Darin L. Stewart’s Building Enterprise Taxonomies, I will review chapter 2, “Metadata”. As the broad title suggests, like chapter 1 it is very introductory, and offers plenty of metaphors and background for those uninitiated with the idea of metadata. The chapter really shines when it describes a simple but often overlooked typology of metadata; metadata can be characterized as either descriptive, administrative, or structural. Splitting administrative and structural metadata into separate categories is a bit eclectic, but useful for dividing personnel roles in an organization. Some mention is made of Dublin Core and other ISO standards for metadata schemes, although their use is merely hinted at. The chapter finishes by analytically associating metadata with authority control.

The second chapter suffers from the same flaws as the first: it is too simple and too quick. The final part of the chapter really shows the author’s cards, when he ignores any discussion of folksonomy and its popularity. As I assume the author would suggest, folksonomies are rarely the correct choice, especially in an enterprise setting. Folksonomies, however, can have value in the right setting. Folksonomies can be useful for generating a lot of metadata in a very short time with few resources—at the expense of later fixing the (inevitable) poor quality.

Technorati Tags: Building Enterprise Taxonomies, Darin Stewart, taxonomy, book review

This is the first of many posts on my reading of Building Enterprise Taxonomies by Darin L. Stewart. Over the coming weeks I will post notes and draft reviews of the chapters as I read through the book. As a matter of full disclosure, Darin sent me a free copy of the book and asked me to write a review on it. I will eventually distill these blog posts into a fuller and more considered review, to be posted on Amazon.com (and perhaps elsewhere).

Chapter 1 is titled “Findability” and sets the goal of the entire project. Hard facts about loss of information worker productivity are presented as evidence of a worsening problem. The evidence suggests that an increasing amount of information is produced each year, and despite effort and research into solving the problem, the old fashioned techniques found in library science are recommended. The myth of search is exposed by briefly describing web search engine techniques, such as the Google PageRank algorithm, and noting that enterprise information does not enjoy the same structure, and does not meet the same needs. Within an enterprise the most popular, or most linked, information is rarely the best information, and few organizations have established links between their content. While search is popular because of web search engines, evidence is presented that demonstrates a preference for browsing. Further, it is argued that there are cognitive benefits to browsing.

In general, this first chapter is very well written, and provides an excellent primer to information retrieval, information architecture, and information behaviour. At only 22 short pages I could see value in photocopying the chapter and presenting it to executives that may be dragging their feet regarding resource purchases for information management. If you have read the Polar Bear Book then there is little new in this first chapter, although the statistics are the latest available (since the book was only very recently published). The value to executives must be tempered with reality, however, since many of the statistics presented are of dubious truth. These “facts” get bandied about in all popular discussions about information, but while they sound frightening and amazing, I seriously doubt their clear cut nature. I would have liked to see the author be a little less cavalier about their use, and offered a more critical tone about these kinds of metrics. Regarding the increasing amount of information produced each year, while it is true that more people have ready access to computers and ITC devices, it is doubtful that particularly much more information is produced. It may still hold that more of that information is now making its way on to the internet, so as to have to be filtered out, but the utility of the information on the internet has never been of a high quality. The amount of information produced within enterprises is unlikely to be much more than previously, but again, less paper, more digital documents. Finding this information is a problem as much as it always has been. But, these supposed “facts” are exactly what you need to tell your boss to invest in a new CMS, so the inclusion here is spot on.

Technorati Tags: Building Enterprise Taxonomies, Darin Stewart, taxonomy, book review

China has been villified by Americans for a long time (and by Americans I mean Canadians too). There used to be cartoons with buck-toothed goofy Asian folk (Disney, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, etc), now there is the evil Red menace and whacko-bureaucratic stumblings and caprice. The recent earthquake in China, a natural disaster, has provided the xenophobic press more opportunity to take shots at the Chinese evil.

When disasters happen the press are quick to criticize the government effort if things go wrong. This certainly happened in New Orleans, carefully researched and documented by Jay-Z:

It’s clear that President Bush “doesn’t care about Black people”, and thus was slow to issue support for a ruined New Orleans. The press rightly criticized the government’s lack of effective action.

China is far from a paragon of fair and effective rule. Most of the country is squalor in Chinese terms, and it is all backwater and ugly by my terms. The government frequently rampages, but they also take effective action where needed. Controversy over the Three Gorges Damn is and always will swell, but getting away from coal is at the very least a good thing. China has “oppressive” One Child laws that American liberals puff about, and then tip boatloads of immigrants. China does lots wrong, but even when they try to do right, they fail. China just can’t do right, and that’s because they are vilified by Americans.

Today’s Toronto Star includes a large article (editorial?) on the horror of a post-earthquake China. The headline is odd: “Quake loss deepened by China’s 1-child rule”. They have a throw-away comment or two by Chinese citizens about being “old” and having no other children (having lost his or her only child in the earthquake). The Star uses this as an opportunity to criticize an oppressive law that incentivizes families for having only one child (reminder: it’s a liberal construction to think that having full autonomy over your reproductive capacities is “natural”; there is a nuanced fine line here, but it ain’t “go nuts, procreate”). What’s so terribly odd (and offensive) about this article is the suggestion that the robot Chinese are so beastly that they would feel less pain (or none at all?) if they had another child to replace the lost one. The Star must have been thinking “one in a million“, in the way that Axl Rose did. It’s offensive to think that the loss of a child can be mitigated by having a backup, a reserve-kid, if you will.

Some context from the brainwashed Chinese (personal letter
to Brad Fidler
):

Second, people here are grateful to government’s
immediate and effective rescue activities. The major
earthquake happened at 2:28pm and Premier Wen Jiaobao
arrived in Chengdu from Beijing at 6pm to direct the
rescue mission. After hearing the briefing, he asked
PLA Central Commission to send over 100 thousand (PLA
troops and PLA Armed Police) soilders [sic] from around the
country to carry out rescue mission in Sichuan.

Surely the government wrote this letter, because this is the time to hate on the Red Menace. Maybe the Chinese caused the earthquake? Perhaps to regulate population? God knows we don’t want more Chinese in America, at least, according to Axl Rose.

Technorati Tags: earthquake, China, racism, xenophobia, Toronto Star

Still very much a work in progress, here (PDF) is a draft of an article that I originally wrote during my MLIS at the University of Western Ontario. Eventually I want to tie together some of the separate strands of thought I have been developing, and this is likely one of those strands. Original post is available here.

Abstract

In the summer of 2007 the thuggish practices of Hollywood “Big Media” were exposed when it was discovered that through secret dealings Big Media hired a lean and mean ‘anti-piracy’ company called Media Defender. Through a series of technical mistakes and illegal hacks against Media Defender the tale of Big Media’s anti-piracy unravelled, and left hitherto unanalysed source documents in the public. By analysing these primary sources I have identified anti-piracy techniques used by Big Media, but rather than couching the analysis in a narrative of antagonistic pirates against protagonist Hollywood (or vice versa), I discard dominant discourses about the functioning of capitalism. Drawing heavily on Nitzan and Bichler’s work in political economy I reject the idea that Media Defender’s actions are unusual or unprecedented, instead, they are one of many examples of aggrandizing power in capitalism. Tracing a genealogy of theoretical challenges to the dominant and subsumed neoclassical narrative, I argue that an ethical vacuum eventually birthed an alternative conception of answering economic questions (such as piracy of copyrighted material). This turn to explanation devoid of ethics, crudely described as “market forces”, is a consistent but unpersuasive description of the Media Defender situation, which stands as a case study of common practices. Instead, I develop a material theory of information that relies on the sort of strategic sabotage perpetuated by Media Defender. In this way, information ethics is reinvigorated and populated by capitalist techniques which can be evaluated in an ethical framework of information and economics.

Technorati Tags: ethics, Media Defender, piracy, Big Media, capitalism

Getting fired for freely giving out a 16 cent Timbit donut is wrong. Getting fired for freely giving out a 16 cent Timbit donut in effort to provide good customer service is evil. (Rehiring said employee to avoid public relations nightmare doesn’t change a thing) Turns out that visions of hockey players, strange Irish “rrroll” up the rim contests, and Canadian nationality don’t necessitate ethical behaviour on the part of large multinational corporations. Just to put things in perspective, I used to work at Starbucks, the “most evil” coffee corporation of them all.

Evil because they spread into new areas, bankrupt smaller businesses, pay their employees terrible wages, and profit on the backs of small coffee-producing countries. Of course, judging from the 20-plus Tim Hortons found in each small town in Ontario, it seems that the darling of Canadian consumerism does the same thing. Tim Hortons also preys on poorer income “working class folk”, typically the clientele that these “mom and pop” coffee shops in the neighbourhood also cater to. Starbucks provides health and dental coverage for full-time employees (over 30 hours/week) and engages in profit sharing through stock purchases (and has all sorts of incentive programs to “top up” employee stock purchases). Raises are small but come quickly when working at Starbucks, and they encourage staff to become low-level management. Tim Hortons pays well below subsistence level, and clearly is not enticing the most eligible employees with their benefits. Starbucks panders to the idea of Fair Trade coffee, although typically they pay fairly high prices because of their (mediocre) quality requirements (however, this discriminates against farmers who have a bad crop and cannot sell at the higher price). The coffee that Starbucks doesn’t want gets sold to Nestle, who is the #1 purchaser of coffee in the world (purchases coffee at a rate in the orders of magnitude greater than Starbucks). If Nestle doesn’t buy it, Tim Hortons probably does. Tim Hortons is no friend of the Fair Trade either, although doesn’t even bother spending the marketing dollars to pander to the idea. Tim Hortons buys the cheapest coffee out there, ensuring that the farmers are literally slaves (how else do you think they can afford to sell a cup of coffee for $1?).

What does this show? That Starbucks is less evil than Tim Hortons? Sure, but not even Stalin would fire an employee for giving out a measly 16 cent Timbit. It really shows that the entire coffee trade is toxic, and systemic “virtues” of capitalism ensure that single mothers will be fired, farmers will be enslaved, and that a clever “working class” branding campaign is sufficient to trick to stupid ignorant proletarians into thinking that ol’ wife-beating Tim Hortons is out there to help them. Consumerism: one cheap cup of coffee after the next.

[Edit: Brad wanted me to be clear that prols aren't stupid, they are just not aware of class analysis, and that there is no reason for them to be aware of it. For my part, I knew this, but sometimes it's helpful to be less careful for the sake of being incendiary.]

Technorati Tags: tim hortons, starbucks, coffee, slaves

The Limited Edition Ghosts I-IV box set has now shipped, and I just received my copy. It is exactly what I expected: high quality construction, but nothing unusually special or particularly notable.

Is it worth $300 USD (almost $400 CAD with shipping to Toronto)? Perhaps not, but it is certainly a quality piece. It is sort of like asking whether some art is worth its price—it won’t feed you, but people still buy the art. As to be expected the entire package feels classy yet dark, it says “I’m goth but I earn enough per annum to afford a $300 box set”. This is Trent’s new audience, and he understands that.

Digg it!
Lots of images below, click on the image to view a larger image. [...]

It’s not news that paragraph indentation for prose text acts to separate thoughts and give the page some room to breath.  Reading Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style (version 3.1) suggests several alternatives.  Everything from pilcrows to outdents can be used to separate paragraphs, but the most common (and possibly most elegant) is the simple paragraph indentation.  Of course, when followed by a heading the paragraph does not require indentation since the flow is already broken, but from paragraph to paragraph a little white space on the flush left side is nice.  The question then becomes, however, “how much indentation?”.  Bringhurst suggests that the most common is one em, but notes that as much as two or three ems can give a little more luxury to the page.  Perhaps the world of poor typography has tainted me, but a single em seems rather stingy.  The seperation of baseline to x-height will nearly rival that of the em for typically set type, and that whitespace seems to pull the eye away from the break in paragraphs.
Technorati Tags: typography, bringhurst, indentation