[ Virtual Armchair ]

Thanks goodness! There is a Sonshi.com or else some of us will spending most of our time at www.ittoolbox.com

9

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/17/t...its/17shun.html April 17, 2003
Eluding the Web's Snare By KATIE HAFNER


VICKI LEWIS, a 57-year-old former television producer who lives in Bethesda, Md., inhabits a household filled with Internet users. Her children are on the Internet constantly, as is her husband.

But in spite of the electrons flying all around her, she resists the pull to go online.

A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project has found that 42 percent of American adults say they are not connected to the Internet, and a surprising number are like Ms. Lewis. That is, they live in a household where other relatives are regular Internet users, or they have close friends who regularly go online. Yet they refuse to join the crowd.

Of those who do not use the Internet, the study found, 74 percent have relatives or close friends who do. And 20 percent of the nonusers are what the study calls Net evaders: people living in Internet-connected homes where other relatives go online.

The Net evaders have their reasons for remaining offline. Some are short on free time and fear that it will take over their lives - that once they take the plunge, they will never resurface. Others simply prefer to send and receive handwritten correspondence. Still others lament the loss of face-to-face contact associated with the rise of the Web. A few confess to ignorance and intimidation. And there are those who manage, through wired surrogates, to take advantage of the Internet indirectly for research or communication.

In resisting the tide, the Net evaders are increasingly chastised. Ms. Lewis said that her friends constantly tease her and that her husband and children are beginning to lose patience. "I can tell they're getting kind of disgusted," said Ms. Lewis, who took a course on how to use the Internet two years ago but has since forgotten what she learned.

Furthermore, she said, she worries about what will happen if she goes online and the habit sticks. "I'm afraid that once I get on, I will come up only to eat," she said. "I read these scare stories about people who once they get on can't get off."

But in fact, once online, many people do get off - enough that they form a category of their own that the Pew study calls Net dropouts, representing 17 percent of the nonusers.

"Some grew disillusioned with the online world," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project, based in Washington. "They decided it was just a time swamp, or they never found what they wanted."

Such is the case with Jerilou Hammett, 59, who, with her husband, Kingsley, 58, publishes Designer/Builder, a bimonthly magazine based in Santa Fe, N.M.

Ms. Hammett said she and her husband were on the Web back in 1996, but soon dropped it. "We began to see that it took an enormous amount of time," she said. "And often the quality of information we found was very superficial."

E-mail is so commonplace that those who do not have electronic addresses to hand out in addition to their phone numbers, or in lieu of them, are considered outcasts who must justify themselves.

Writers for Ms. Hammett's magazine are often taken aback when she tells them not to submit articles by e-mail, but to send a disk instead, or put the article in the regular mail.

"I believe on a business level the same thing I believe on a personal level," Ms. Hammett said. "Communication between people is more effective face to face. Or, if you can't do that, then on the phone."

It is not so much philosophical conviction as raw fear, however, that keeps Peter O'Grady, 60, of Chapel Hill, N.C., a former television news editor and retired research librarian, away from the Net. "I'm what you would call Internet scared," he said. "I'm intimidated by the technology."

Mr. O'Grady's wife, Grace, and his children, both adults in their 20's, are avid users.

Mr. O'Grady said he had himself to blame, at least in part, for not being online. "I know I'm missing out on things," he said. "It's just inertia holding me back. I think once I got the knack of it, you probably wouldn't be able to drag me off."

Even some members of the Web generation are not embracing the online world entirely, the Pew study found. Lee Serafini, a recent college graduate working as a personal trainer, is at best lukewarm on the subject of the Internet. He checks his e-mail once a week, perhaps twice, and then only if someone has told him to expect a message. He uses the Web only to place an occasional order for a vitamin supplement he cannot find anywhere else.

Every day, he is confronted by his alter ego: his 66-year-old grandmother, Barbara Serafini. Mr. Serafini, 22, lives with his grandparents in Doylestown, Pa., and Mrs. Serafini is a Web devotee. She is online five hours a day exchanging e-mail and instant messages with far-flung grandchildren; she uses the Web to sell mineral supplements.

Her live-in grandson remains unmoved by her enthusiasm. "She uses it for anything and everything," said Mr. Serafini, who majored in communications at Elon University in North Carolina. "Me, I'd much rather talk to somebody on the phone."

Mr. Rainie said that he and his staff were surprised to find so many people in close proximity to the Internet but indifferent to it. The wide assumption has been that those who do not go online are elderly, constrained by finances or seldom exposed to the Net.

The first time the survey came back, Mr. Rainie thought the findings were a fluke. So the question was asked repeatedly: Does anyone in your household go online from home? "We asked it eventually six different times during surveys in 2002 and got the same result," Mr. Rainie said. Ultimately the surveys, conducted in March and May of last year, examined the habits of 1,294 nonusers of the Internet.

Even people for whom the Internet should be an obvious solution are turning away from it. Catherine Sears, 49, a chiropractor in Portsmouth, Va., carries on her proud isolation in a world seething with bandwidth. Dr. Sears once had a Net connection at her small practice, but she and her staff used it so seldom that the Internet provider canceled the account.

More surprising, however, is her decision to stay offline given her marital situation. Dr. Sears and her husband, Lewis Walker, who teaches English almost 300 miles away at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, have been married for about nine years. But the relationship has always been a long-distance one.

And while her husband uses e-mail constantly, Dr. Sears prefers the telephone as the chief means of checking in with each other. When she writes letters, she sticks with paper and pen.

"I suppose I have a romantic attachment to handwritten letters and the United States Postal Service and commemorative stamps, and what I feel to be a very strong connection between handwriting and the person," she said.

Like some other Net evaders, Liz Manville, 48, who lives in Los Angeles and owns a placement agency for those in the fashion industry, has an AOL e-mail address. But when she checks her mail once a month or so by using her 17-year-old daughter's computer, "there are 600 million messages, and it's overwhelming," she said.

Now friends and relatives know to extend special dispensation to her when sending electronic messages. A friend recently sent a party invitation out by e-mail, but Ms. Manville never saw it. If the friend had not followed up with a phone call, Ms. Manville would have missed the party.

Yet those who avoid using the Web still occasionally want to harvest some of its fruits.

Dr. Sears, for one, said she had no qualms about asking others to do online searches for her. She recently called her sister, who lives in Maryland, to ask her to gather some information about a used car that Dr. Sears was considering buying.

And for all her adamancy, even Ms. Hammett occasionally makes use of the Web. In fact, she found the telephone number of someone who has become one of her most important professional contacts by having a friend look it up on a Web site.

Edward Tenner, the author of "Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences" (Vintage Books, 1997), likens people who appoint Web proxies to those who choose not to drive cars because they can always hitch a ride with friends.

Dr. Tenner said that assigning the label "evaders" to those who appoint Web stand-ins might be a bit harsh. " 'Circumventers' might be better," he said, adding that he tended to admire people who have called upon him to do their pointing and clicking for them. "My time helping others with Web queries is like taking the scenic route while driving a friend to the airport," he said.

Such vicarious partaking of the Web's fruits does not stop Ms. Hammett, the magazine publisher, from taking the high ground.

Ms. Hammett said that when she tells people she has no e-mail address, she sees fewer raised eyebrows these days. "Now people say, 'Hey, that's really interesting; that must be great,' " she said. "I think they're overwhelmed with it themselves."

Other holdouts recognize that sooner or later, practicality will erode their resolve. Mr. Serafini, who is looking for a job as a sportswriter, checks for e-mail from prospective employers on his grandmother's computer.

And now that Ms. Manville has started Manville Connections, a small business in need of its own Web site, she knows she will finally be cornered. She plans to enroll in a course to learn her way around cyberspace. What's more, she said, she is less ignorant than her circle of friends and family might think.

"I know what Yahoo is," she said. "I really do."

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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Google.

Best srch egn in cybrspc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/w...cfc496616e65176

As Google Goes, So Goes the Nation
May 18, 2003
By GEOFFREY NUNBERG

You don't get to be a verb unless you're doing something
right. Do a Google search on "ford," for example, and the
first batch of results includes the pages for the Ford
Motor Company, the Ford Foundation, the Betty Ford Center,
Harrison Ford and Gerald R. Ford - all good guesses at what
a user would be looking for, particularly considering that
Google estimates its index holds more than 16 million pages
including the word.

Google now conducts 55 percent of all searches on the World
Wide Web. People have come to trust the service to act as a
digital bloodhound. Give it a search term to sniff, and it
disappears into the cyber wilderness, returning a fraction
of a second later with the site you were looking for in its
mouth.

A high place in Google's rankings can have a considerable
value for commercial sites. Some go so far as to pay other
sites to link to them to raise their standing.

And a high Google ranking can also have a lot of clout in
the marketplace of ideas. It seems to confer "ownership" on
a particular word or phrase - deciding, in effect, who gets
to define it. It's easy to read these results as reflecting
the consensus of an extended Internet community, with the
power to shape opinion and events. As James F. Moore, a
fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at
Harvard Law School, wrote in an article on his blog posted
March 31, the Internet has become a "shared collective
mind" that is coming to figure as a "second superpower."

Sometimes, though, the deliberations of the collective mind
seem to come up short. Take Mr. Moore's use of "second
superpower" to refer to the Internet community. Not long
ago, an article on the British technology site The Register
(theregister.com) accused Mr. Moore of "googlewashing" that
expression - in effect, hijacking the the expression and
giving it a new meaning.

It had actually originated in a Feb. 17 article by Patrick
E. Tyler in The New York Times that referred to the United
States and world public opinion as the "two superpowers on
the planet." Shortly after that, the phrase "second
superpower" was adopted by organizations like Greenpeace
and was used by Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary
general, to refer to antiwar opinion. But Mr. Moore's
article was linked to by a number of bloggers sympathetic
to his ideas, and quickly became the first hit returned
when someone searches Google for "second superpower."

There was nothing underhanded in Mr. Moore's ability to
co-opt ownership of the phrase in the rankings; it follows
from the way Google works. Its algorithms rank results both
by looking at how prominently the search terms figure in
the pages that include them and by taking advantage of what
Google calls "the uniquely democratic nature of the Web" to
estimate the popularity of a site. It gives a higher rank
to pages that are linked to by a number of other pages,
particularly if the referring pages themselves are
frequently linked to. (The other major search engines have
adopted similar techniques.)

When you search for a common item like "ford" or
"baseball," the engines naturally give the highest rankings
to major sites that are linked to by hundreds or thousands
of other pages. But when searches are more specific -
whether "second superpower" or "Sinatra arrangers" - the
rankings will mirror the interests of the groups that
aggregate around particular topics: the bloggers, experts,
hobbyists and, often, the crackpots.

Not long ago a German friend of mine went to Google for
help in refuting a colleague who maintained that American
authorities engineered the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
citing as evidence, among other things, the delay in
sending American fighter jets aloft that morning. My friend
did searches on a number of obvious strings, like "9/11
scramble jets intercept." But almost all the pages that
came up were the work of conspiracy theorists, with titles
like "Guilty for 9-11: Bush, Rumsfeld, Myers" and "Pentagon
surveillance videos - where are the missing frames?"

"To judge from the Google results, there's plenty of
evidence for a conspiracy and little to the contrary," my
friend said.

That's the sort of result that often leads people to
complain that the Web is full of junk or that the search
engines aren't working as they should. From the standpoint
of the search engines, however, this is all as it should
be. The beauty of the Web, after all, is that it enables us
to draw on the expertise of people who take a particular
interest in a topic and are willing to take the trouble to
set down what they think about it. In that sense, the Web
is a tool that enables people who have a life to benefit
from the efforts of those who don't.

But given the "uniquely democratic" nature of the Web, it
shouldn't be surprising that the votes reported by the
search engines have many of the deficiencies of plebiscites
in the democracies on the other side of the screen. On
topics of general interest, the rankings tend to favor the
major sites and marginalize the smaller or newer ones;
here, as elsewhere, money and power talk.

And when it comes to more specialized topics, the rankings
give disproportionate weight to opinions of the activists
and enthusiasts that may be at odds with the views of the
larger public. It's as if the United Nations General
Assembly made all its decisions by referring the question
to whichever nation cares most about the issue: the Swiss
get to rule on watchmaking, the Japanese on whaling.

THE outcomes of Google's popularity contests can be useful
to know, but it's a mistake to believe they reflect the
consensus of the "Internet community," whatever that might
be, or to think of the Web as a single vast colloquy - the
picture that's implicit in all the talk of the Internet as
a "digital commons" or "collective mind."

Seen from a Google's eye view, in fact, the Web is less
like a piazza than a souk - a jumble of separate spaces,
each with its own isolated chatter. The search engines
cruise the alleyways to listen in on all of these
conversations, locate the people who are talking about the
subject we're interested in, and tell us which of them has
earned the most nods from the other confabulators in the
room. But just because someone is regarded as a savant in
the barbershop doesn't mean he'll pass for wise with the
people in the other stalls.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford linguist, is heard regularly
on NPR's "Fresh Air" and is the author of "The Way We Talk
Now."

/// ***

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/jav...ooglehacks.html

For those who need to play the "safari" game on google

Why Try to Out-Google Google?
by Tara Calishain, coauthor of Google Hacks
05/16/2003

For a long time, the search engine wars were stagnant, but they appear to be heating up again. AskJeeves has launched a redesign, Overture bought AltaVista and the web-search portion of FAST, and MSN is starting to make rumblings about a search overhaul.

And what am I seeing every time I read one of these stories? "Challenge Google," "Rival Google," "Out-Google Google." And every time I hear about new initiatives like these my response is the same:

Why?

Why is every search engine out there so revved up to out-Google Google? The Google they aim at today won't be the Google they have to compete against tomorrow. The search tools they offer have a different set of strengths and weaknesses than Google's. Why compete on Google's terms?

When I think about this (and I find myself thinking about this a lot) it strikes me that the things that made Google successful initially were not technical. Yes, Google has great search technology, great algorithms, and so forth. But the average searcher does not care about these.

The average searcher is going to be attracted by a friendly interface and an easy-to-use site. Yes, the average searcher will be thrilled with Google's very relevant results. They may or may not tell their friends about that. It's more likely that they'll get a good laugh out of Google's PigeonRank joke and pass that on to their friends, who in turn can try Google for themselves.

I am very geeky. I do not like dwelling on "touchy-feely" aspects of business. But I am convinced that there are four very important things that have made Google successful, which have little to do with actual technology. Further, as long as we're talking about search engines wanting to "out-Google Google," I also wanted to take a look at ways in which Google could out-Google itself. It's got to evolve sometime, right?

Yes, the search technology is excellent, and the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is a stroke of genius. But that's not all there is to search engine success. If it were just the search syntax, AltaVista would still be number one. If it were just the sheer number of pages indexed, wouldn't AlltheWeb and Google be running neck and neck right now with market share? In addition to its technology, Google had several intangibles in its favor.

Good Timing
Google happened on the scene almost at the height of the portal craze. You remember the portal craze, right? That's when practically every search engine out there was offering weather, horoscopes, sports scores, and any other snippets of information that could be tied to a zip code. If you weren't actually focused on getting search results, I suppose these bits of information might have been of interest. But if you actually wanted to get your search and get on with your life, these drags on a page load could be distracting. And I won't even get into the banner ads.

Google's simple front page -- search box, two buttons, and logo -- were a big breath of fresh air. And not a banner ad to be found! It was almost too good to be true! When companies are thinking about out-Googling Google, do you think they're thinking about how to make the interface even faster-loading, even more streamlined, and even more friendly? Or do you think they're thinking about how to look exactly like Google?

A Sense of the Internet's Culture
It's been a source of much frustration to Google watchers everywhere that Google remains a private company. But it's been very good for Google, in my opinion. As a private company, Google can concentrate on its search engine and its associated properties. They don't have to publicly discuss the idea of profit and loss. To all external appearances, they can be just a happy-go-lucky company that really loves Internet searching.

Of course, there are grownups at Google whose job it is to make sure the search engine turns a profit. But since Google is a private company, it doesn't have to present that side of itself. They don't have to go on CNBC and explain their quarterly earnings. They can focus on what they do, and not how much they're earning or what their business model is.

On the other hand, if Google did not have a sense of the Internet's culture, this advantage wouldn't be an advantage. If Google didn't have its corporate culture to talk about, the former chef for the Grateful Dead, the odd logos on holidays, the April Fool's jokes, and so forth, it wouldn't have the mystique, the coolness, that it does. Google, as a whole, has a sense of the culture of the Internet, and its culture blends right in and looks really appealing. Being an east-coaster, I have never visited the Google office, but despite common sense, I imagine it as a 24-hour programming fest with buffet, foosball, and a piped-in soundtrack from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

I can't remember another search engine that has inspired such admiration on a cultural level, except perhaps AltaVista when it was still http://altavista.digital.com. That isn't to say that there weren't good search engines; there was a time when I adored Looksmart (I think it was around 1998), but I never thought, "Wow, Looksmart is cool. It must be really neat to work there." Most other major search engines and up-and-comers are publicly owned; what can they do to compete against the private- company-coolness of Google?

A Willingness to Share
It seems weird to include "A Willingness to Share" as one of Google's traits o' success, because they've been so aggressive about asking users not to scrape their search engine and not to access their index through automated processes.

But look at it another way: Google has been very good about releasing its new services in beta, or even the stuff that its programmers are just fooling around with (via Google Labs). Google's services tend to push toward the end of what's expected in a search engine. And finally, they released the Google API. No, it's not perfect, since it does access a very limited amount of the Google services. It's not finished, either, since it too is in beta. But it is available, and it's a tool that Google enthusiasts can use to build their own tool sets using Google's data, going in all different directions (witness the strange array of materials covered in Google Hacks).

Other search engines have not been as loud in their denunciation of scrapers, but at the same time, they've done little to make their indexes easily accessible to programmers and power users. It's like they developed the search engine for one audience -- a Web surfer -- and had no desire to go further, to see what services could be offered to a power user, a programmer, or a search enthusiast.

A Sense of Humor
If you've ever visited Google on April Fool's Day, you're aware of their sense of humor. There's also been the occasional odd logos that turn up, as well as some of the things in the Google store (a lava lamp? A bean bag chair?).

Now, of course, part of the advantage of the humor is that it fits in easily with the culture of the Internet, as has been mentioned before. But another advantage is that it gives new visitors something to pass along. It's not often that you run a routine search and get a set of search results that make you say, "Wow! I want to pass this set of search results on to all my friends!" On the other hand, when you come across a good online joke you tend to want to share it with other people. Google found a great way to spread memes and attract people to its site.

While other search engines have not been humorless, neither have they often been deliberately funny. I suspect that's more because it's hard to evolve a public sense of humor for a large organization -- things are developed and created by so many people that it's hard for them to maintain the unique voice that a sense of humor requires. AlltheWeb has probably come closest, with its skins contest and the way it presents its search engine.

Giving a large Internet property like one of the major search engines a humorous bent is also something that's very difficult to do -- when a company steps up and says, "From now on we're going to be ZANY and MADCAP and FILLED WITH SMILES!" it usually ends up embarrassing everybody. But if it evolves, and it's allowed to evolve, great.

So I've spent 1,400 words or so looking at the non-technical aspects of what Google did right. Some of the intangible reasons they got to the top. And now that they've got to the top, that's it, right? The Google experience is the pinnacle of everything and cannot be improved upon, right?

Shyeah. C'mon. This is the Internet.

How Google Could Out-Step Itself (Or How Other Search Engines Could Go Beyond What They're Offering Now)
On one hand, looking at the potential of Internet search is frustrating because of the limiting factors that aren't in your control. If only XML was widely adopted. If only everybody used title tags. If only domain names were more descriptive. Etcetera, etcetera. But on the other hand, other technology is developing that does make powerful and more extensive searching and crawling possible. Google could expand what they've got and become even cooler than they already are. How? Here are five ways, off the top of my head.

RSS feeds of all its properties.

The RSS format is a very handy way to read a lot of different Web sites without spending a lot of time waiting for pages to load. I'd sure love an RSS feed of Google News searches on the keyword of my choice.

It's weird about RSS. Lesser-known search engines like Daypop are making great use of it. But none of the major general search engines are. Why? If the concern is losing ad revenue, why not include an ad in the RSS feed?

A customizable "all-in-one" search.

I know, I know; an all-in-one search is veering dangerously close to Portalville. But I think in this case, it's warranted. Google has so many properties that would provide complementary resources -- Froogle and Google Catalogs, for example, or Google's web search paired with results from Google News. I'd love an interface where I could say, "Give me the results from this query and use Google News, Google Web Search, and Google Blogs (that last one is only if the rumors floating around are true), and then present all the results on one page." Can't Google (or any other search engine, really) aggregate its own search sources without it being portalitis?

Expand its API to other Google properties.

Last summer will forever be burned into my mind as the summer that I ate, drank, slept, and breathed the Google API to write Google Hacks. Even now a small part of my brain patiently grinds away, coming up with neat things to do with Google and the Google API (and until this part of my brain gives up and goes away you can see its results at www.buzztoolbox.com/google/).

But even though I rapidly discovered the tons of possibilities enabled by Google's API (and I'm very grateful to them for releasing it), I just as quickly found the limitations. No access to Google News or Google Images or most of the other collections. Only 1,000 queries per day, with only 10 results per query. Not all the special syntaxes (such as the phonebook: syntax) work. The API would be even more exciting if access to the other Google properties were available through it.

Reach out to information-collection publishers.

Google is often reluctant to discuss how the guts of its indexing technology work, and I can't say that I blame them. If too much were understood about how Google indexed and ranked its contents, people would spend too much time playing "Let's try to fool Google," instead of "Let's try to fill Google up with excellent content."

The downside of this is that there's a group of content publishers who are caught in the middle. I'm referring to librarians and other information professionals who are often in charge of putting large collections of information online. Usually, those kinds of content publishers have far better things to do than spend extensive amounts of time trying to make sure their content gets indexed. This is a pity because it is exactly these kind of information collections (extensive, unique, often not available online) that are so valuable to search engines.

It would be great if Google (or any other search engine) took some of its resources and made an effort to reach out to those groups (librarians, information professionals, government officials, and so forth) who are regularly publishing large information collections, and assist them in getting their content indexed as regularly and completely as possible. How should they be using title tags? Is their database-driven site restricting their chances of being indexed? How can they use Google tools to offer search on their own sites, perhaps with some specialty forms for sub-collection searching?

Pay attention to successful uses of its API.

I saved this one for last because I suspect that Google's already doing it, but it wouldn't hurt for it to be mentioned. It would be great if Google looked around at what folks are doing with the Google API and incorporated it into their offerings. No, I don't think they ought to have a "Goocookin'" section on their site, but what about Google Alert at www.googlealert.com? That site must have thousands of users. Isn't that an audience that Google wants to cultivate?

Like I said, I suspect Google is already doing this. I wonder if the other search engines are watching what's being created with the Google API and coming up with some ideas of their own?

Trying to "out-Google Google" is a bad idea in the fast-moving timestream of the Internet. By the time you think you've out-Googled Google, they've out-Googled themselves and you're still behind. But if search engines took at close look at the cultural factors that led to some of Google's success, and then considered how they could leapfrog what Google's doing now -- we'd have some search engine competition that I'd really look forward to!

Tara Calishain is the creator of the site, ResearchBuzz. She is an expert on Internet search engines and how they can be used effectively in business situations.

/ / / * * *


/ / / * * *
This's a great book for those who wants to customize their search on the web.

Google Hacks
100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tricks
By Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest
February 2003
Series: Hacks
0-596-00447-8, Order Number: 4478


http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/goog...html?CMP=IL7015

/ / / * * *

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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My Pov

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/b...f562b20c1deb19d

How much data does a strategist really need?


The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive?
July 6, 2003
By MATT RICHTEL



THIS is Charles Lax's brain on speed.

Mr. Lax, a 44-year-old venture capitalist, is sitting in a
conference for telecommunications executives at a hotel
near Los Angeles, but he is not all here. Out of one ear,
he listens to a live presentation about cable television
technology; simultaneously, he surfs the Net on a laptop
with a wireless connection, while occasionally checking his
mobile device - part phone, part pager and part Internet
gadget - for e-mail.

Mr. Lax flew from Boston and paid $2,000 to attend the
conference, called Vortex. But he cannot unwire himself
long enough to give the presenters his complete focus. If
he did, he would face a fate worse than lack of
productivity: he would become bored.

"It's hard to concentrate on one thing," he said, adding:
"I think I have a condition."

The ubiquity of technology in the lives of executives,
other businesspeople and consumers has created a subculture
of the Always On - and a brewing tension between
productivity and freneticism. For all the efficiency gains
that it seemingly provides, the constant stream of data can
interrupt not just dinner and family time, but also
meetings and creative time, and it can prove very tough to
turn off.

Some people who are persistently wired say it is not
uncommon for them to be sitting in a meeting and using a
hand-held device to exchange instant messages
surreptitiously - with someone in the same meeting. Others
may be sitting at a desk and engaging in conversation on
two phones, one at each ear. At social events, or in the
grandstand at their children's soccer games, they read news
feeds on mobile devices instead of chatting with actual
human beings.

These speed demons say they will fall behind if they
disconnect, but they also acknowledge feeling something
much more powerful: they are compulsively drawn to the
constant stimulation provided by incoming data. Call it
O.C.D. - online compulsive disorder.

"It's magnetic," said Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatry
instructor at Harvard. "It's like a tar baby: the more you
touch it, the more you have to."

Dr. Hallowell and John Ratey, an associate professor at
Harvard and a psychiatrist with an expertise in attention
deficit disorder, are among a growing number of physicians
and sociologists who are assessing how technology affects
attention span, creativity and focus. Though many people
regard multitasking as a social annoyance, these two and
others are asking whether it is counterproductive, and even
addicting.

The pair have their own term for this condition:
pseudo-attention deficit disorder. Its sufferers do not
have actual A.D.D., but, influenced by technology and the
pace of modern life, have developed shorter attention
spans. They become frustrated with long-term projects,
thrive on the stress of constant fixes of information, and
physically crave the bursts of stimulation from checking
e-mail or voice mail or answering the phone.

"It's like a dopamine squirt to be connected," said Dr.
Ratey, who compares the sensations created by constantly
being wired to those of narcotics - a hit of pleasure,
stimulation and escape. "It takes the same pathway as our
drugs of abuse and pleasure."

"It's an addiction," he said, adding that some people
cannot deal with down time or quiet moments. "Without it,
we are in withdrawal."


ACCORDING to research compiled by David E. Meyer, a
psychology professor at the University of Michigan,
multitaskers actually hinder their productivity by trying
to accomplish two things at once. Mr. Meyer has found that
people who switch back and forth between two tasks, like
exchanging e-mail and writing a report, may spend 50
percent more time on those tasks than if they work on them
separately, completing one before starting the other.

As a result, Mr. Meyer said, businesspeople who multitask
"are making themselves worse businesspeople."

He says little research has been done into why some people
are compulsively drawn to multitasking. But he theorizes
that the allure has several layers. Multitasking offers a
guise of productivity, a "macho" show of accomplishment,
and similarities to a quick amphetamine rush.

"It's related to what happens to skydivers or jet pilots,"
he said. "They put themselves in situations where, if they
don't perform at peak efficiency, they'll crash and burn.
In the aftermath there is a rush of chemicals."

Patrick P. Gelsinger, the chief technology officer at
Intel, says it is clear that the overall time spent in
front of screens - whether desktop computers or hand-held
devices - is rising. "Time spent watching television is
down," he said. "But over all you see a discretionary
increase in the amount of time people are connected to
technology."

The presence of such devices, as well as their power, will
only grow. Networks that provide wireless Internet access
are in their early stages. Intel has put the full force of
its science and marketing effort behind wireless devices
and the superfast miniature microprocessors that power
them.

Intel portrays computers as pushing productivity, and Mr.
Gelsinger scoffs at the idea that digital devices have a
compulsive or physically addictive draw. "We don't make
drugs," he said. "We make technology building blocks that
move the world forward in all ways."

But he concedes that there can be a point at which the
constant accessibility of information is hard to escape.

In one meeting at Intel, Mr. Gelsinger said he found
himself sending an instant message to his boss across the
room - a potential distraction, though he argued that by
doing so, he did not have to engage in "disruptive
whispering." At other times, Mr. Gelsinger has had to
remind himself not to use e-mail on his laptop during a
meeting because it can send the message that he is not
paying full attention.


SOMETIMES, discipline must be imposed from the outside. At
a recent technology conference organized by The Wall Street
Journal and attended by industry heavyweights like Bill
Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and
Stephen M. Case of AOL Time Warner, people were discouraged
from using their wireless Internet access during
presentations.

Bucking the recent tradition at trade shows and technology
conferences, the organizers decided not to provide wireless
Internet access inside the conference.

"We wanted people to absorb what the speakers were saying,"
said Walt Mossberg, a technology columnist at The Journal.

"We decided that if you have Wi-Fi, it would be
destructive," he added. "If you have the Internet, it will
win out. People imagine they can multitask, but sometimes
people overestimate the extent to which they can do it."

If multitasking creates a problem for people, the cause is
not the gadget makers themselves, said Jeff Hallock, the
senior director for consumer products at Sprint PCS, the
mobile telephone carrier. The company has been selling the
manna of multitasking: phones that can also take digital
pictures, send e-mail and instant messages and download
music. But Mr. Hallock says those functions help people
stay organized, not make them frenetic.

"We're enhancing people's lives so they can have more
control of the flurry of activity that's seemingly coming
in," he said.

"You don't have to check your voice mail," he added. "We're
giving you the chance to do so."

The notion that using all these devices creates a harmful
addiction is absurd to Bruce P. Mehlman, assistant commerce
secretary for technology policy and a former executive at
Cisco Systems. Mr. Mehlman said the presence of many
gadgets in people's lives created not a cacophony, but
harmony and balance.

Mobile phones, wireless Internet devices and laptops have
liberated executives, he said, allowing them to leave the
office and to spend more time at home. The users of these
technologies are constantly wired, he said, but to a very
positive goal.

"Ten years ago, you had to be in the office 12 hours," said
Mr. Mehlman, who said he now spent 10 hours a day at work,
giving him more time with his wife and three children,
while also making use of his wireless-enabled laptop,
BlackBerry and mobile phone.

"I get to help my kids get dressed, feed them breakfast,
give them a bath and read them stories at night," he said.
He can also have Lego air fights - a game in which he and
his 5-year-old son have imaginary dogfights with Lego
airplanes.

Both love the game, and it has an added benefit for Dad: he
can play with one hand while using the other to talk on the
phone or check e-mail. The multitasking maneuver
occasionally requires a trick: although Mr. Mehlman usually
lets his son win the Lego air battles, he sometimes allows
himself to win, which forces his son to spend a few minutes
putting his plane back together.

"While he rebuilds his plane, I check my e-mail on the
BlackBerry," Mr. Mehlman explained.

Mr. Lax, too, cannot pass up the chance to use every bit of
technology that comes his way. A graduate of Boston
University who lives outside Boston, he is managing general
partner at GrandBanks Capital, a venture investment firm.
He serves on the boards of three companies, working to turn
them into successful ventures. "I build companies one
customer at a time," he said, adding that his investments
are up against other well-financed competitors. "It's a
race against time."

Mr. Lax uses technology to keep up. He is, by his own
admission, "Always On."

On his office desk is a land-line telephone, a mobile
phone, a laptop computer connected to several printers, and
a television, often tuned to CNN or CNBC. At his side is
the aptly named Sidekick, a mobile device that serves as
camera, calendar, address book, instant-messaging gadget
and fallback phone. It can browse the Internet and receive
e-mail. He has been known to pick it up whenever it chirps
at him - and he acknowledges having used it to check e-mail
while in the men's restroom.

There is no down time in the car, either. "I talk on the
phone, but I have a headset," Mr. Lax said. Does he do
anything else, like using his Sidekick to read e-mail? "I
won't be quoted as saying what else I do because it could
get me arrested," he said, laughing.

Mr. Lax said he loved the constant stimulation. "It's
instant gratification," he said, and it staves off boredom.
"I use it when I'm in a waiting situation - if I'm standing
in line, waiting to be served for lunch, or getting takeout
coffee at Starbucks. And, my God, at the airport it's
disastrous to have to wait there.

"Being able to send an e-mail in real time is just - " Mr.
Lax paused. "Can you hold for a second? My other line is
ringing."

When he returned, he said he shared this way of working
with many venture capitalists. "We all suffer a kind of
A.D.D," he said. "It's a bit of a joke, but it's true. We
are easily bored. We have lots of things going on at the
same time."

The technology gives him a way to direct his excess energy.
"It is a kind of Ritalin," he said, referring to the drug
commonly taken by people with attention deficit disorder.


BUT he said technology dependence could have its down
side. "I'm in meetings all the time with people who are
focused on what they're doing on their computers, not on
the presentation," he said.

During the Vortex telecommunications conference, held in
May in Dana Point, Calif., he and dozens of others were
using wireless Internet access. He said that he was paying
attention to the speaker, using his Internet connection to
look up information about the cable industry.

"I was supporting the effort of the speaker by figuring the
elements he was talking about," Mr. Lax said. He paused. "I
was also doing e-mail so I guess I wasn't giving 100
percent," he added. "I was 40 percent supporting the
effort, and 60 percent doing other things."

Indeed, he said, the technology can be a bit distracting.
"But it's not a problem," he said. "Being able to process
lots of data allows me to be more efficient and
productive."

"It allows me to accelerate success."
---------------------------------

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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Rsrc for the Armchair QB

A resource every smart strategist should have ...

/// ***
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/21/t...f19a7ee5387d120

Fishing for Information? Try Better Bait
August 21, 2003
By LISA GUERNSEY


THE notion of a user's manual for search engines might seem
counterintuitive. Give people an empty search box and a
button to click on and somehow they know exactly what to
do.

But as the Web gets larger and more complicated,
encompassing PDF documents, movies and audio files, product databases and ever-changing pages, it can help to know a few tricks that are not so obvious.

A new book, "Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and
Tools," by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest (O'Reilly &
Associates), is the latest resource in a growing industry
to help people become better online searchers. It catalogs
ways to uncover nuggets of information. Although a large
part of the book is intended for programmers who adapt
Google's search services for their own Web sites, there is
much in it for everyday users.

Other rich sources include Gary Price's
resourceshelf.freepint.com (a favorite Web site among
reference librarians), Greg R. Notess's
searchengineshowdown.com (chock full of reviews and
comparisons) and Danny Sullivan's searchenginewatch .com
(the place to be mentioned if you are affiliated with the
search-engine market). Ms. Calishain maintains a site with
updated trade tricks at www.researchbuzz.com.

In a perfect world, people would have time to keep up with
these masters of information retrieval. But those who are
simply looking for a way to avoid the tedium of trying one
keyword after another can benefit from a few of their basic
tips.

Special Commands

If you are looking for a phrase or other words that always
appear together, you probably know you should enclose the
words within quotation marks. Search for "Death by
Chocolate" at www.google.com and every entry on the first
page of results includes that phrase, allowing you to steer
clear of unappetizing pages with the words "death" and
"chocolate" somewhere on them.

But many people do not know that the same search without
quotation marks will turn up the same set of results. That
is because Google considers a page on which the search
words occur as a phrase to be of higher relevance.
AltaVista (www.altavista.com), AlltheWeb
(www.alltheweb.com), Teoma (www.teoma.com) and other search
engines follow the same rule.

That does not mean that quotation marks are useless. Run a
search for "the ultimate chocolate cake" and you will get a
different result than you would by simply plugging in the
words without quotation marks. In this case, the difference
is the word "the," which is so common that Google will
typically ignore it unless it is part of a phrase that you
have delimited.

All major search engines allow you to limit searches by
ruling out pages that might contain specific words. To do
so, put a minus sign directly in front of the word you do
not want to see. A search for "chocolate fudge recipe
-marshmallows" will enable you to dodge the Rocky Road.

If you want to widen your search instead, you have the OR
command at your disposal. Be sure to type it in capital
letters. A search for "fudgy (icing OR frosting)" on Google
doubles the caloric options. You can also use the tilde
shortcut that Google unveiled earlier this month. If you
put the tilde symbol in front of your keyword (try "fudge ~
icing"), Google will search for icing and its common
synonyms.

As popular as Google is, it does not measure up when it
comes to two other strategies beloved by expert information
retrievers. One is truncation - the ability to chop off a
word and put an asterisk in place of whatever was chopped,
thereby searching for all variations of that word with one
search query.

To many experts, AltaVista wins at this game. Plug "fudg*
brownie recipe" into the search box and you will find fudge
brownies, fudgy brownies and fudge-nut brownie cake.

The other trick is called proximity searching, in which you
can search for two words in close proximity, instead of
simply on the same page or within the same phrase.
AltaVista has this licked, using the NEAR command. Type in
"substitution NEAR chocolate" or better yet, "substitut*
NEAR chocolate" and you get advice on substituting bars of
unsweetened chocolate with semi-sweet, or how to use
chocolate substitutes like cocoa powder.

Most search engines give you a break when you cannot
remember every single word in a phrase or name that you are
seeking. They allow you to use a wild card, an asterisk in
place of the word that escapes you. Type " Nestle *
cookies" as a phrase and Tollhouse appears (along with
Rolo, Quik and Raisinet goodies, too).

Domain Limits and Links

Sometimes it seems like overkill
to search the entire Web when all you really want is an
academic or noncommercial take on a topic. Say you only
want results from the .edu domain. Try using the syntax
tool called "site:" and restrict the results to those in
the .edu domain. (This works with Google, AlltheWeb.com and
Teoma, among other engines.)

A search like "Chocolate addiction treatment site:edu"
pulls up only those pages posted at university sites. (Of
course, there are still plenty of .com options in the
advertisements on the right-hand side of the results page.)


When using a syntax like "site:" be sure that there is no
space between the colon and the next word. If you
accidentally put a space there, the search engines will
think that "site:" is a word you're looking for.

If you are digging deeply into a topic, it may help to know
which sites are linking to the page that you are reading.
Knowing those connections can bring you a step closer to
understanding the community that has coalesced around your
subject.

For example, by typing "link:www .chocoholic.com" into
Google's search box, you'll find other sites like the
Chocolate Corner and a list of "Choco-Links."

But Google is not the easiest means for conducting searches
for links (technically known as Uniform Resource Locators,
or URL's), and many search experts avoid it, preferring the
AlltheWeb engine. At AlltheWeb, you do not need to remember
to use "link:" syntax. Simply plug the URL into the search
window and you will get a link to a list of the 391 pages
that link to Chocoholics. But you will also be pointed to
sites that contain the URL in their text, pages that are
indexed under that URL, information on who owns the URL and
an image of how the page used to look. That last option is
a link that takes you straight to the WayBack Machine, a
service of the Internet Archive, where you can view pages
as they were rendered as far back as 1996.

News, Numbers or File Types

AltaVista and Google News
(news.google.com) offer the ability to search for news
articles by time and date, whether your range is the past
hour, the past day, the past week or the past month. Google
News has more sources (4,000-plus), but while AltaVista has
fewer (3,000-plus), its database is deeper, with more than
a year's worth of material available. Other options are
AlltheWeb, which carries multilingual newspapers; DayPop
(www.daypop.com), which logs blogs; and NewsNow
(www.newsnow.com), which offers a live feed - the closest
thing to watching the wires free.

News articles can be searched with the same tricks that
apply to Web pages. (And if you think chocolate does not
rise to the level of news, think again. How else would you
locate the latest commentary on the chocolate-chip cookie
industry from the financial site The Motley Fool?)

If you are simply looking for a phone number, Google offers
a shortcut, but you need to understand its quirks. To find
the number (or address) for a Bread & Chocolate bakery in
Virginia, type "phonebook:bread & chocolate va" (note the
lack of space between "phonebook" and "bread"). Remember to
put a state abbreviation after the query; otherwise, Google
will give up.

Now that Google and other engines have started indexing PDF
files, PowerPoint presentations and Word documents (among
other file types), it can be useful to narrow a search to
those alone. This requires use of another syntax term,
"filetype:" (again, no space after the colon).

A search for "stomach ache remedies filetypedf" retrieves
some timely advice.

*** eof

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom
October 16, 2003
By LISA GUERNSEY

MICHAEL N. LIEBMAN knows his limitations. Even with a Ph.D.
and a long career in medical research, he cannot keep up
with all the developments in his area of interest, breast
cancer. Medline, the database that already houses more than
10 million abstracts for journal articles, is adding 7,000
to 8,000 abstracts per week. Only a fraction of these are
about cancer, but the volume of information is daunting
nonetheless.

"There is just too much literature to be able to go through
it all," said Dr. Liebman, the director of biomedical
informatics at the Abramson Family Cancer Research
Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.

Yet Dr. Liebman is convinced that new cures could someday
emerge for breast cancer if only someone could read all the
literature and synthesize it. So he has found a solution:
enlisting a computer program to read the articles for him.

"The software is not going to get tired," he said. It also
happens to be a speed reader: The product he is using, from
a Chicago-based software company called SPSS, can zip
through 250,000 pages an hour. Another product, from the
text-mining company ClearForest, boasts a speed of 15,000
pages an hour, still far surpassing the human rate of a
mere 60 pages.

Of course, no one, Dr. Liebman included, is arguing that
these products are actually reading anything. What they are
engaged in is "text mining,'' a technique that academics
have been experimenting with for years but for which tools
have only recently become commercially available. The
prospect of rapidly scanning through reams of documents is
stirring interest among researchers and analysts faced with
more material than they can handle.

To the uninitiated, it may seem that Google and other Web
search engines do something similar, since they also pore
through reams of documents in split-second intervals. But,
as experts note, search engines are merely retrieving
information, displaying lists of documents that contain
certain keywords.

Text-mining programs go further, categorizing information,
making links between otherwise unconnected documents and
providing visual maps (some look like tree branches or
spokes on a wheel) to lead users down new pathways that
they might not have been aware of.

Currently these programs are used by academic researchers
and companies, but information scientists expect that to
change. Lower-cost text-mining tools eventually will be
offered to ordinary people who want to dig into medical or
political issues using public documents. Madan Pandit, an
expert in text analysis in Bangalore, India, who runs a Web
site called K-Praxis (k-praxis.com), has suggested that
text mining could help people make sense of voluminous
documents that are already on the Web, like the 858-page
report on the congressional inquiry into intelligence
failures regarding the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"There is a need to make these technologies available for
publicly available information," he wrote at his site.

In most cases, text-mining software is built upon the
foundations of data mining, which uses statistical analysis
to pull information out of structured databases like
product inventories and customer demographics. But text
mining starts with information that doesn't come in neat
rows and columns. It works on unstructured data - e-mail
messages, news articles, internal reports, transcripts of
phone calls and the like.

To make sense of what it is reading, the software uses
algorithms to examine the context behind words. If someone
is doing research on computer modeling, for example, it not
only knows to discard documents about fashion models but
can also extract important phrases, terms, names and
locations. It can then categorize them and draw connections
among the categories.

How well computers truly make sense of what they are
reading is, of course, highly questionable, and most of
those who use text-mining software say that it works best
when guided by smart people with knowledge of the
particular subject.

"I was an F.B.I. agent for 20 years," said Randall S.
Murch, now a researcher at the Institute for Defense
Analyses, which works for the Office of the Defense
Secretary and other government agencies. "And I have yet to
see anyone who is able to model the way an agent thinks and
works through an investigation."

Text-mining software also can stumble when trying to parse
the nuances of language. In other words, hold the sarcasm:
If you send an e-mail complaint with references to
"oh-so-helpful salesmen who clearly know their customers,"
text-mining software might eventually categorize your note
as a compliment.

But advocates say that when the software is used on niche
sets of text, it can make a difference. Intelligence
agencies, for example, can start to find connections
between seemingly unconnected individuals and
organizations. People responsible for keeping up with
developments in an industry can use the software to scan,
categorize and even summarize thousands of articles at a
time. Computer makers can better analyze the masses of
e-mail messages that pour into technical support centers.

As much as 80 percent of a company's knowledge base may
reside in documents that might have been considered
unusable, industry analysts say. With text mining, they
say, that text can become part of the stream of data
flowing through a company's analytic systems.

"Now it's not just about what is easily encoded in a
medical claim record," said Dan Sullivan, president of the
Ballston Group, an information-management consulting firm.
"Words matter, and words will become accessible again."

So what exactly has text mining discovered already?

Take
the Fireman's Fund Insurance Company, which in 1999 started
seeking a way to spot fraud without always having to rely
on its staff to pick up on suspicious activity.

The company had already tried to solve the problem by
crunching just the hard data, like the coded numbers
signifying types of claims. But the computers kept flagging
so many false positives that Marty Ellingsworth, director
of operations research, decided to take a look at how the
company's human investigators did their work. He found that
they gleaned a lot from the free-form notes typed in by
claims adjusters - about a client's behavior, say, or
offhand comments.

An adjuster examining an accident between two vehicles, for
example, may have noted that the front driver slammed on
his brakes in light traffic, a potential tipoff to a staged
rear-ender. "When we looked over their shoulders and saw
them reading the text, we saw that we had to do that too,"
he said. Now the company uses software to process those
notes along with hard data.

The company uses similar methods to determine which
insurance cases might be fruitful for subrogation, the
practice of extracting payments from other insurance
agencies for damages that appear to be caused by the other
agency's clients. Since it started mining for that purpose,
it has collected $1.4 million that it would have otherwise
missed.

The best-known anecdote about text mining involves Don R.
Swanson, a professor emeritus of information science at the
University of Chicago who in the 1980's decided to take a
deep look at medical literature on migraines. Starting only
with the word "migraine," he downloaded abstracts from
2,500 articles from Medline and looked closely at the
titles. When certain concepts caught his eye, he conducted
new searches to see whether that concept existed in the
full texts of other articles related to migraines.

In one instance, a reference to a neural phenomenon called
"spreading depression" caused him to look for articles with
that term in their titles. Reading those pieces, he found
that magnesium was often mentioned as preventing this
spreading depression. Other connections to magnesium
deficiencies started to appear, so he dug further. In a
1988 paper on his research, he wrote, "One is led to the
conjecture that magnesium deficiency might be a causal
factor in migraine."

Today, Dr. Swanson's work is considered significant both
for migraine studies and for text mining. The link between
the headaches and magnesium deficiency was soon backed up
by actual experiments.

Information scientists say his 1988 discovery is a perfect
example of the unexpected connections that can reveal
themselves among scattered text fragments - revelations
that may surface even more quickly with the help of
powerful software scanning thousands of pages an hour.

Dr. Swanson produced that work before the days of the Web,
with the help of very rudimentary programs that organize
data, and did most of the connecting of concepts and terms
himself. But even today's more sophisticated text-mining
programs - which can cost corporate clients thousands of
dollars clients - are not yet designed for Web searches.

And even the most ardent fans of text mining warn that the
software is useless without human brain power.

Marti Hearst, an associate professor of information systems
at the University of California at Berkeley, said that
text-mining analysts can suffer from overload. The visual
maps that present unexpected links in data "can turn into
spaghetti," Dr. Hearst said. "You have a million links.
Which one is important?"

Before the software goes to work, it requires a human's
expert input. To prepare for his text-mining project on
breast cancer articles, for example, Dr. Liebman spent
months building a framework of knowledge on the disease so
that the software could categorize articles and concepts in
a meaningful way. Over the summer he began to feed that
framework into the software, along with the reams of
articles that publishers made available.

At his desktop, he can now pull up the fruits of the
software's work: a visual map of extracted concepts all
tied together in sometimes unexpected ways. Terms like
breast cancer are linked to others like obesity or puberty,
which when clicked on call up details about the articles
that mention such concepts, even if they are deep within
their texts.

"If you collect weak observations over a large number of
journals, they become strong," Dr. Liebman said. "We're
using text mining to take advantage of what other people
have seen but may not necessarily have felt to be
significant observations."

After the software has yielded its stunning map, he
develops hunches about which connections are worth
exploring further. That takes him down paths requiring more
computer analysis and more brain power.

Dr. Liebman said that while it was too early to know if he
has uncovered anything extraordinary, he and his staff had
become intrigued with the connections - or, rather, the
lack of them - that appear about diseases like cancer, and
women who deliver babies later in life.

"There have been studies that show there is no impact on
the pregnancy or the child," he said, "but one of the
things we're trying to pull out is, does late pregnancy
have an impact on postmenopausal disease?" The question is
not one that they had ever studied, he said.

Still, the question was not posed by the software. It
sprang from the minds of the researchers, people with human
curiosity and years of personal experience. "This is about
identifying the right question, not just synthesizing
data," Dr. Liebman said. "If you don't have the right
question, it doesn't matter how much data you are looking
at."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/t...cd955c9873a2dc7

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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A Matter of [ Data Overload ]

http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,60936,00.html

Tech Addicts Need Textual Healing
By Elizabeth Biddlecombe |
02:00 AM Oct. 25, 2003 PT

Dr. Mark Collins of The Priory clinic in London found
himself catapulted into the world's press early this
month when he was reported as saying that patients at
the well-known addiction clinic were increasingly
displaying compulsive behavior toward their mobile
phones.

Collins, head of the addictions unit at the clinic,
said that some patients spend up to seven hours a day
sending text or SMS messages (as well as hanging out
in Internet chat rooms), which in one case even
resulted in repetitive strain injury.

Unfortunately, Collins was not available to provide
further explanation.

A spokeswoman at a leading substance abuse clinic in
Southern California reported that no patient had yet
been admitted
for an addiction to mobile phones. She did note,
however, that it was the clinic's policy to require
patients to check their devices in upon admission.
"People literally detox from their phones," she said.
"Text messaging, games -- these are all sources of
isolation, a way to zone out."

This statement reflects the fact that treatment in
such clinics aims to remove a dependence that is used
by the patient to escape. But does it signal the
entrance of the mobile phone into the arsenal of
addictions? Are the Priory patients exhibiting genuine
signs of addiction to their cell phones, or is it
merely that the thought of being locked up with more
run-of-the-mill addicts makes text-messaging friends
on the outside a welcome consolation?

It isn't necessary to be a cocaine addict to concede
that communication devices are compulsive. We can
surely all recall moments when we have been unable to
resist sending that extra e-mail, instant message or
SMS, or hold back from making one more phone call.
This "compulsion" to communicate remotely has driven
the telecom industry for its entire 100-year existence
and fueled the development of the Internet. Every
graph depicting traffic volumes over time is the same
shape: an upward curve. And that's whether the traffic
tracked is text messages, mobile minutes or
international voice calls.

Nor is this only because the user base is growing.
Happily for telecoms, usage appears to beget usage.
After all, 10 years ago people didn't stop at pay
phones every hour to make a call. New ways of
communication also beget new kinds of interaction.

"I am in touch with more people now than ever before
because of my ability to communicate spontaneously
with them. Even if I don't want to get into a full
conversation, I can drop them a short message," said
Toby Robson, a senior press officer for Vodafone and a
marketer of text messaging since the mid-'90s.

He also said more casual text conversations involve a
string of messages since, unlike a voice call, each
response requires a new text message. Europe is also
seeing an increase in the amount of person-to-machine
text messaging as TV and radio shows invite people to
vote using text, and competitions on the back of snack
chip bags entice entrants to text-in for free
vacations.

But even without such enticements, Bruce Bimber, a
professor at the Center for Information Technology and
Society at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, is not surprised that communication
technologies are so popular. "Communications are a
fundamental human interest," he stated. "It is not a
surprising story."

But neither is it necessarily a story about addiction,
he countered. A parallel argument might be that
washing one's hands is not intrinsically addictive,
even if some obsessive-compulsive individuals can't
resist doing so repeatedly.

How to define addiction? Larry Reid, professor of
psychology and neuroscience at the Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in
Troy, New York, shied away from the task, claiming
that the word has become so widely used that "the
scientific community has decided to drop it
altogether."

Reid did suggest that the determining factor in
addiction is whether harmful consequences are
involved. "If you do cocaine for two or three years,
it is pretty clear that you will get brain damage," he
said. He implied that no such harmful consequences
have yet been correlated with excessive mobile-phone
use.

Or have they? One interviewee cited the negative
impacts on relationships and health that can result
from allowing your phone to ring during a romantic
dinner or talking while driving. Your finances are
also affected, she said, if the size of your phone
bill means that your children are eating McDonald's
dollar meals on a regular basis.

The New York Times published an article this summer
headlined "The Lure of Data: Is it Addictive?" that
chronicled a condition pervading the business class
that might be termed compulsive multitasking.
Professionals with this affliction are unable to
listen to a presentation without checking e-mail,
attend a meeting without IMing other participants or
play with their children without simultaneously
consulting their "crackberry" RIM device. The Harvard
psychiatrists quoted in the story -- Drs. Edward
Hallowell and John Ratey -- call this pattern
"Pseudo-attention deficit disorder."

No one is yet suggesting that these businesspeople
should check themselves into a clinic, but it does
seem intuitive that their engagement with their
communications devices is perhaps unhealthily
frenetic, or overly compulsive.

Virgin Mobile has taken this debate to heart. Not that
it is offering free counseling to text addicts, but
rather it has heeded a warning from the British
Chiropractic Association, which detailed the risk of
straining hands and fingers when using tiny keypads
for prolonged periods of time. The operator has
published (PDF) British Chiropractic Association
Textercises on its website for "Practicing Safe Text."


No other operator is yet known to have followed suit.

--- eof

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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[ F. Amazon Usrs ]

/// ***
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/06/t...7a06088c105f732
In Amazon’s Text-Search, a Field Day for Book Browsers

November 6, 2003
By LISA GUERNSEY



DAVID SMITH, a product manager in Seattle, knows of the
hubbub surrounding Amazon.com's new feature, Search Inside
the Book. The service, introduced two weeks ago, allows
people to do keyword searches within the text of books
before buying them. Predictions about the future of books
have been swirling in the air ever since.

Will people stop buying books, since they are now able to
view and print the pages they want without paying for them?
Will they buy more books, because they will be better able
to find what they need? What will happen to that
time-honored tradition of standing for hours in the library
or bookstore, thumbing through page after page?

Interesting questions, Mr. Smith agreed. But something else
prompted him to Search Inside the Book. He had spent futile
hours trying to recall the title or author of a pulp novel
that he had read more than 10 years ago. All he could
remember, he said, was that it was an action adventure set
in Antarctica. He had tried Google. He had browsed catalogs
of titles and authors. He had nearly given up.

"But today," he wrote in an entry on his blog
(www.nonfamous.com) two weeks ago, "I searched for
'antarctica seal marines invisibility' (yes, the book did
touch on all these plot points!) and found 'Ice Station' as
the sixth search result. Brilliant!"

He clicked to his Amazon "wish list," filled it with other
books by the same author (an Australian writer named
Matthew J. Reilly) and told his friends to go there before
Christmas.

The impact of Amazon's new service may well mean profound
changes for the book industry. Or it may lead to nothing
more than a blip in buying behavior. But for now, if you
are a book lover or researcher, you may, like Mr. Smith, be
having a field day just trying out the service.

Type in your name and watch it appear in an obscure
footnote. Hunt down a familiar quotation and read it in
context. Resurrect books whose title and author long ago
escaped the memory. Or try to figure out why Jeffrey P.
Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, is so interested in
the rockets called resistojets, the example he gave in
introducing the service. (Maybe it has something to do with
another Bezos venture, a space research company; Amazon
will not say.)

So far, the full-text search applies to 120,000 books from
190 publishers. The numbers are small, given that large
research libraries, say, often house more than a million
volumes, and the list excludes some of the most popular
books, like the "Harry Potter" series published by
Scholastic. But Steve Kessel, Amazon's vice president for
media products, said the number of books was comparable to
what is available in most bookstores.

Some users are impressed. "It's a lot better than using a
search like Google," Mr. Smith, who works for a data
software company called Insightful, said in a telephone
interview. "It's just limited to books, which makes it
useful." Books, often mourned for their absence in today's
type-and-find research, may have their day in the sun
again.

Troy Johnson, a reference law librarian at Creighton
University in Omaha, plans to use the feature to impress
his patrons. He wants to see the look on their faces when
he points them to the exact pages that answer their
questions. "Should look good when I tell someone, 'On Page
45 of book xyz they talk about your subject,' " Mr. Johnson
wrote last week in an online forum. "Librarians should
think of how they can exploit this tool."

But while such a vision may lead people back to books, it
does not necessarily mean they will buy them - especially
if they are in a library a few blocks away.

Mr. Smith's wish list, for example, may make him a good
customer in the long run, but he is also using the tool in
a way that may be less palatable to publishers: he
discovered a "Dilbert" book that had been scanned in as
part of Amazon's new service. Now he fills a few minutes of
free time each week flipping through the pages online,
reading cartoons without paying for them.

In an interview, Mr. Johnson predicted that such practices
would cause some book publishers to pull out of the Search
Inside feature. Intellectual property that can fit on one
or two pages, like poetry, recipes, tips from travel books,
and encyclopedia entries, may tempt people to read them
from home without paying.

Mr. Kessel of Amazon said that no publishers had pulled out
of the program and that 37 new ones had expressed interest.
But Amazon said that 15 authors had asked to have their
books extracted from the service. In one case, reported by
The Seattle Times, Avalon Travel Publishing contacted its
140 writers to explain the program and offer to remove the
books of those declining to take part. Bill Newlin, the
publisher, said in an interview that 10 authors had asked
that their books be withdrawn and several dozen had
explicitly asked to remain in the program.

Until last week, users could print pages too, but Amazon
shut off that feature so that a printout will now show a
blank space where the book's text had been. (Of course,
people are already talking about how savvy users with
screen-grab software may get around that restriction.)
Amazon has also said that it will limit any reader to
viewing 20 percent of a book's pages in a given month,
although it is not clear how the company would prevent
people from logging in under multiple names or from
different computers; Amazon declined to discuss security
measures. "If a student just needs six to eight pages of a
law book," Mr. Johnson of Creighton said, "I could see a
student doing a screen capture and printing from that."

But Amazon does not appear to be too worried about it. It
says that sales of books with Search Inside features have
grown faster than sales of its other books.

Some have speculated that the search tool will become
useful in niche applications but no more than a novelty to
people in search of a novel that matches their mood and is
intended to be read as a whole.

Steven J. Gordon, founder of AllReaders .com, expects that
people looking for, say, a mystery set in a romantic place
will continue to go elsewhere. (He hopes his own Web site
might be one of those places. AllReaders offers a free
search service built on a database of details like
characters, plot and setting; it includes references to
more than a million books and movies.)

"When you liked a book recently, was it because it had a
certain word in it used over and over?" Mr. Gordon said.
"No. You liked it because of certain traits or themes or
characters."

But there is something tantalizing about keywords, too,
especially when they can be merrily appropriated to play
the citation game.

That's the latest fetish of Timothy Noah, a columnist at
the online magazine Slate. Mr. Noah delights in calling
Search Inside the Book the greatest time-waster since the
dawn of the Guinness Book of World Records. Twice last week
he used the service to see how many times the names of
famous people were cited in Amazon's subset of books.
"Deities score especially high," he wrote. "The somewhat
generic word 'God' gets 94,190 hits, while 'Jesus Christ'
scores 23,016 and 'Buddha' yields 11,074."

As it happens, several services similar to Amazon's already
exist. Patrons of libraries that subscribe to services like
Ebrary and netLibrary have offered free online access to
tens of thousands of scanned books for a year or more. And
users of those services can usually view and print as much
of the book as they want. With the time to waste, they
could even have embarked on the same deity hunt.

*** ///

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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[ Virtual Workspace ]

Sonshi,
Hope you do not mind this Cardinal plugging his friend's company (from Silicon Valley) on this thread- www.creatorco.com

A friend of mine runs this group that allows people to operate and manage virtual group projects & endeavors on the web.

For those who're working w/ people all over the world. This's one service that you got to check out.

http://www.creatorco.com/home.html

http://www.creatorco.com/creatorbase.html

note- This Cardinal's only an user of this service.

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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Info Access

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/12/o...d54e9da02f1a199

Editorial Observer: Trying to Measure the Amount of Information That Humans Create

November 12, 2003
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG


Do you know what an exabyte is? I didn't until I started
reading a new report, called "How Much Information? 2003,"
from the University of California at Berkeley's School of
Information Management and Systems. An exabyte turns out to
be a billion gigabytes. Most new computers, by comparison,
come with hard drives around 40 to 100 gigabytes in size.

The authors of the report estimate that in 2002 the human
species stored about five exabytes of new information on
paper, film, optical or magnetic media, a number that
doubled in the past three years. Five exabytes, as it
happens, is equivalent to all words ever spoken by humans
since the dawn of time.

To gauge how much new information humans now produce in a
given year, you have to imagine digitizing and storing all
of it, including forms of information that aren't already
digital and forms that aren't usually stored, including all
e-mail messages, all the Web pages on the entire Internet
and all telephone conversations.

As the authors point out, "The striking finding here is
that most of the total volume of new information flows is
derived from the volume of voice telephone traffic, most of
which is unique content." In 2002, that telephone traffic
added up to about 17 exabytes, more than three times all
the words ever spoken by humans until that point.

Staring at numbers and comparisons like this, which are
more than merely boggling, is enough to make you wonder
just what information is. Perhaps it seems obvious to say
that information of the kind that can be stored and counted
up is created and consumed entirely by humans. So let me
say it another way. Our idea of information is meaningless
to the rest of creation. The cocoon of data and language
that humans live in goes undetected by the rest of earth's
organisms. In all those exabytes of chatter there are
words, of course, that refer to something beyond the narrow
bounds of human experience. But vast quantities of what
gets cataloged as information are purely self-referential,
talk about the act of talking, so to speak. That is partly
what makes us human.

I find myself wondering about other kinds of information.
The precise pattern in which the autumn leaves lie in my
pasture would not be "information," according to the
analysts at Berkeley, unless I took a photograph of it,
preferably a digital one. But even without the photograph,
the pattern is information, shifting momentarily under a
cold, bright wind out of the west. If you were to ask how
much information the earth contains, as a whole, one way to
answer the question would be to assess the number of bytes
present in all the DNA on earth, once it had been
digitized. But that is too static an answer for me. It
treats each being as a museum specimen, ready to be closed
away in a dark drawer somewhere, and it rules out the
possibility that movement itself and the interaction of all
these beings is also information. If it's somehow plausible
to treat all the interrupted cellphone conversations in
2002 as a kind of information, then it should be plausible
to think of all the bird songs and insect noises uttered in
that calendar year as information, too.

It's worth pointing out that "information," in the Berkeley
sense, is a wholly biological enterprise on our part - not
that different, in a way, from the webs that spiders build.
But after reading the report all I could hear in its pages
was the silence of the rest of nature, nature's lack of
"information," its inability to yield storable data.

Yet that is not my experience. I spend part of every week
wired to the world, with an intravenous connection to the
Internet. I read and talk and listen. And yet even in my
office I am inundated with what cannot be calibrated. The
body language I witness when a politician stops by is
information to me, but not "information." The unsettled
emotions I experience as I read through my stack of
newspapers every day is information, too, but not
"information."

And when at last I go home to the country, I step out of
the pickup truck and into a world of pure information, all
of it entirely, gloriously ephemeral. The moon is low in
the southern sky. The ducks, disturbed by my headlights,
stir in their pen and make delicate, reassuring noises. The
bare tree branches cross and cross again against the stars
on the horizon. One of the pigs rolls over in his house,
and I can hear the weight of his body as he settles into
his hay. These observations are now "information," but what
they are to me cannot be measured.

--------------------------------- eof

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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[ Global Digtal Library]

quote:

---

/// ***
Where Sharing Isn't a Dirty Word By Michelle Delio
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/roadtrip/0,2640,61200,00.html

02:00 AM Nov. 15, 2003 PT

CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina -- Want to sit in on a Tibetan monks' science class?

Perhaps you're curious about how kudzu grows? Maybe you'd like to listen to some classic Southern folk music, hear a Nobel Prize-winning poet read his work, learn how to upload your mind, tend bees, speak Japanese or heal with herbs?

Or you might just want to download some free software.

Ibiblio, one of the Web's oldest and largest digital libraries, has all this and much, much more -- and all of it is completely free to visitors, thanks to backing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and technology companies like Linux distributor Red Hat.

"Making the invisible visible is what ibiblio does best," said ibiblio director Paul Jones.

Ibiblio's staff and contributors rescue documents, videos, audio and image files from dusty archives or attics where few could view them and put them on the Web, where anyone with an Internet connection can retrieve the information.

The library also gives Web space to those who can't host their own sites due to political or financial considerations.

Housed on a couple of racks of thin-client servers tucked into a corner of the University of North Carolina's huge computer room, ibiblio averages about 3 million information requests per day, and the contributor-maintained collections are expanding daily.

Visitors aren't restricted to just browsing the collections, either. They can critique or add information to an existing collection, or create and manage their own collection of information.

"Basically, if you want to share information about almost any subject, ibiblio will be happy to host you for free," said Jones. "The only rules are that whatever you want to share must be noncommercial, legal and have some value to other people."

Ibiblio began its life in 1992 under the moniker SunSITE, with funding from Sun Microsystems and a mandate "to share software and other things of interest," according to an October 1992 press release. SunSITE became MetaLab in 1997, after Sun stopped funding the project. But Jones had a problem with the new name.

"I'm dyslexic. Every time I'd type MetaLab it'd come out as 'meatball.'"

Happily, MetaLab/Meatball was re-christened ibiblio in 2002, when it received a multimillion-dollar grant from the Red Hat-affiliated Center for the Public Domain. Jones occasionally mangles the spelling, but at least it doesn't come out as a recognizably silly word.

Users still flood ibiblio when a new upgrade is released for one of the many open-source software projects that the library hosts, but ibiblio is now much more than just a download site. Jones and his staff want to create a 21st-century library based on open-source ideals.

"We'd like to demonstrate that the best way to protect and preserve so-called intellectual property is to share it freely with everyone," said Jones. "Shared information is enhanced and improved, so its value can only increase. Hoarded knowledge just stagnates."

Ibiblio's mostly part-time university student staff is as eclectic as the library's collections. Jones carefully picks people who he believes can bring interesting new perspectives to the project. The current staff includes majors in French lit, filmmaking and philosophy.

"Most of us have tech skills but aren't majoring in computer science," said ibiblio staffer Patrick Herron, a poet and philosophy student who is now majoring in information science. "Paul tends to pick staffers who are really interested in making information accessible to users, as opposed to people who are primarily interested in computers."

Jones, 52, also writes poetry and teaches journalism classes at UNC. He considered becoming a journalist, but his dyslexia made it difficult for him to write quickly. So he decided to major in computer science.

"This was back in the days of punch cards, and trust me -- dyslexia and punch cards do not mix well. Happily, my teachers didn't know enough about computers to know I was clueless, that I spindled, folded and mutilated virtually every card that I laid my hands on. But after a while I learned to compensate."

Jones started at UNC as a systems programmer in 1978. An ecumenical hippie geek at heart, he takes equal delight in fast computers and slow-cooked barbecue. But the driving force of his life is sharing information -- about anything and everything.

Over a plate of North Carolina's finest pulled pork, Jones told us about a Colorado conference on file sharing he spoke at a few years back. Music industry executive Don Grusin was also on the panel.

"Grusin kept calling music downloaders pirates," said Jones. "I thought that was just awful. I told him the people who care about music enough to download it are the people he should love the most.

"If the record companies reached out and showed some love and respect to downloaders, then everyone could work together to find a way to peacefully coexist."

It's odd to hear a college professor talking with not even a twinge of irony about showing the love, but it seems to come naturally to Jones.

"My life now is still like it was in the '60s, but without all the sex and drugs," Jones said. "I try to be happy and love everybody. Usually, I succeed."

(Michelle Delio and photographer Laszlo Pataki are midway through a four-week, geek-seeking journey along U.S. Route 1. If you know a town they should visit, a person they should meet, a weird roadside attraction they must see or a great place to fuel up on lobster rolls, barbecue, conch fritters and the like, send an e-mail to wiredroadtrip@earthlink.net.)

*** ///

---

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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[ virtual ofc ]

Was involved in the same situation (no desk ofc) when I worked f/ a telecomm company in the late 90s. All this Cardinal carried was a duffel bag and a carry case that had all of the techie manuals that were needed. (3)

Knew many traveling consultants from Anderson Consulting
and Boston Consulting Group who spend many nightly hrs
at Kinkos as a backup ofc.

At times, used Chinese eateries (noodle house & dim sum places), Starbucks, Mickey D., and Burger King as backup offices.

The lesson that was learned from that experience is carrying appropriate tools. Be light. Be lethal.

"There's nothing new under the sun" regarding to this trend.

Again, [the news media for the Mass] is one macro step behind the Curve of Changing Wave.

quote:

---

/// ***
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/7281904.htm
Posted on Mon, Nov. 17, 2003

Valley firms ditch desks to cut costs
SLOW ECONOMY, MOBILE TECHNOLOGY PROMPT TREND
By Steve Johnson
Mercury News


A Sun Microsystems sign in the iWork Cafe, which serves as a communcal office for hundreds of employees.

Freeing workers from their cubicles has been touted for at least two decades as a way to cut corporate real estate costs.

Now, spurred by the sluggish economy and new technology, some of Silicon Valley's biggest firms seem to be taking the advice seriously.

Executives at Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Intel say they have reduced their building needs by hundreds of thousands of square feet -- or expect to do so in the near future -- by eliminating offices for many of their employees.

"This is a pretty important trend,'' said Mark Golan, vice president of real estate and workplace resources for San Jose-based Cisco Systems, which occupies more than 6 million square feet in the South Bay. "We will actually be able to use significantly less space.''

Over the next three to five years, he added, the company could cut 15 percent to 20 percent from its real estate costs.

How much the local building market is being affected by having employees work at home, in shared areas or elsewhere outside the traditional workplace remains unclear. Some experts say the impact is minimal.

Nonetheless, if the trend catches on -- as many workplace specialists predict it will -- it could be bad news for Bay Area landlords. They already are struggling to fill their buildings, which are 20 percent empty on average.

"The impact it's going to have on the real estate of organizations is going to grow,'' said Eric Johnson, a consultant with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

Johnson said many companies haven't tried to eliminate
individual offices, fearing it might anger employees.

The noise of shared work spaces bothers many people,
while others regard offices as status symbols. Some can't get any work done without a regular place to sit.

Encore Technical Staffing, a headhunting firm, closed its Redwood City office about three years ago to avoid a rent increase and asked its 40-or-so employees to be mobile. But some proved unproductive and were fired.

"The downside is finding people who can work independently,'' said Dan Wooldridge, part owner of the company. "It's just a matter of self-discipline, and a lot of people don't have that.''

At Cisco, employees without offices can use computers
set up in comfy lounges and conference rooms. It's a similar story at Sun, where legions of nomadic workers use their building access badges to log onto shared computers.

Barbara Richardson, 47, a Sun human resources manager,
was working the other day at one of about two dozen shared work stations in the company cafeteria in its Menlo Park office, dubbed the iWork Cafe.

A resident of Tiburon, she gave up her office about a year and a half ago, and that's fine with her. She said she usually has no trouble finding a computer to use. And Sun lets her work twice a week out of its San Francisco quarters, which reduces her commute.

"I love it,'' she said. "It gives you a lot of flexibility.''

It's hard to say how much empty space can be attributed to abandoned offices, as opposed to other factors.

Officials at Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Cisco and Intel were unable to provide precise data on their savings, saying they don't keep track of the numbers or fear disclosure might give competitors an advantage.

The firms' reduced real estate needs are partly the result of cuts to their workforces. In addition, they make equipment that helps workers be mobile, so they have a vested interest in promoting the idea that shutting offices can save money.

Still, executives with all four companies say they have no doubt that liberating their employees from assigned work spots is a huge space saver.

Hewlett-Packard spokeswoman Brigida Bergkamp cited the
April closure of the firm's 495,000-square-foot Mayfair campus in Mountain View as an example. The Palo Alto company was able to absorb the 1,000 Mayfair workers into other buildings, she said, partly because it determined about 455 of them didn't need their own offices.

The company says it has cut its real estate holdings 19 percent in the past year or so, in part by making its workplace more flexible.

[ An old trend that is returning. ]

About 13,000 of Santa Clara-based Sun Microsystems' 35,000 employees lack offices, according to company executives. That has helped Sun trim at least 500,000 square feet of space over the past couple of years, while reducing its annual real estate bill by $71 million, said Eric Richert, vice president of Sun's iWork Solutions Group, which helps employees become mobile.

Executives with several of these firms noted that getting workers to share space fosters a team-oriented atmosphere that increases productivity.

But saving real estate costs is crucial, too, especially in this economy. That's one big reason the trend is growing, some experts say. Others point to recent technological advances.

Intel's corporate managers suspect they could realize
huge real estate savings by making their workers more
mobile through wireless "WiFi'' technology.

"If we were to go, say, 100 percent WiFi, we would take about 20 percent off the office space we have in the U.S. and turn it into shared space,'' said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy, based on an internal study. While cautioning that the impact on Intel's annual bottom line can only be guessed, he added, "we think
we could save more than $100 million.'' Web-based applications have helped accelerate the trend.

They operate across computer networks and on a variety
of gadgets -- from personal digital assist ants to Internet phones -- and make it easier to work from multiple locations.

Bill Vass, Sun's vice president of information technology, said having fewer offices hasn't just cut building costs. It's also reduced the company's annual electricity bill $2.8 million worldwide, with most of that savings in the Bay Area. In addition, he said, it used to cost Sun $1,000 to move somebody into an
office.

"Now we issue you a badge'' with the option to work anywhere, Vass said. "It's instant productivity.''
*** ///

---

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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[On-Line Search] Intel

The art of searching w.o. browsing/

/// ***
Googling Without a Browser Wired News Report
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,61236,00.html

Google has unveiled free software that lets people search the Web quickly — without launching a Web browser.

Google Deskbar appears as a search box in the Windows
toolbar. After the search words are entered, a resizable mini-viewer pops up with the results. Users can jump to the site within the mini-viewer or launch their browser.

Unless a program is filling the screen or the user has set the taskbar to automatically hide, the search box is always visible.
With a keyboard shortcut, the cursor can be moved to it without moving the mouse. Though the software is free, Google does get some exposure on the desktop: The company's logo appears faintly in the search box when words aren't being typed into it.

Beyond Google's main search, the box can be set to search Google non-U.S. sites, Google News, Google Images and others.

There are options to find stock quotes, movie reviews, word definitions and synonyms. Users can add custom sites to search, too.
/// ***

Why Google's so great.
Chk out: http://www.google.com/options/

--- eof

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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[ There's no free lunch ]

[ "In the macro state of life, there's no free lunch" ]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/b...de7649924257b80


When Free Isn’t Really Free

November 23, 2003
By JOHN SCHWARTZ


FREE.

Is there any sweeter word? Its promise of something for
nothing, and its underlying connotation of liberation, put
a spring in the step and make the world seem a better
place.

But lately, free isn't what it used to be, especially on
the Internet, whose very history and technology are based
on the notion that information and pretty much everything
else online want to be free. Web giveaways increasingly
come at a steep price, in the form of computer glitches,
frustration and loss of privacy and security - not to
mention the threat of expensive lawsuits for large-scale
music downloaders.

"You often get what you pay for," said Mitch Bainwol,
chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America.
"In the case of what is so-called free, it comes along with
challenges."

Of course, that is what you would expect him to say. Mr.
Bainwol, after all, is the chief representative of an
industry that says it has suffered grievous harm from music
downloading, and that is trying to quash the free-music
movement with lawsuits.

But now people from all sides of the Internet copyright
debate have begun to notice that freebies often mask a
multitude of possible cybersins. A report released last
week by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a
high-tech policy group in Washington, called for new
regulations, voluntary industry measures and consumer
education to combat the problem of "spyware" that often
piggybacks on programs, including the software people use
to download music.

The Federal Trade Commission has not tried to prosecute any
companies for distributing spyware, and courts have
declared the programs legal so far. But the Center for
Democracy and Technology says that more should be done to
protect consumers from sneaky software. "Spyware represents
a serious threat to users' control over their computers and
their Internet connections," the report said.

The definitions are fuzzy, but the programs fall under
three broad categories: "adware," which serves pop-up ads
and banners, including some for pornography; true "spyware,
" which monitors Web wanderings for marketing purposes; and
more insidious "snoopware," which can track everything
users do on their computers, whether or not they are
online. Some programs can even disable anti-virus software
and hijack the results of Web searches.

The list of suspect software is long. Kazaa, the most
popular program for downloading free music, comes with a
cluster of software, some created by a company called
Brilliant Digital Entertainment. One of Brilliant's
"extras," called Altnet, can even make someone's computer
part of a Brilliant-owned network that harnesses a PC
owner's excess computing power to distribute music. Derek
Broes, a vice president at Brilliant, said that the program
could be turned off by computer users and that the
company's products should not be classified as spyware.

On its Web site, the company states that revenue from
advertising and installed programs are part of what makes
Kazaa free; you can get a version of the software without
ads and other clutter, but it will set you back $29.95.
Nikki Hemming, the chief executive of Sharman Networks,
which owns Kazaa, said in an interview that the extra
programs were not a big issue for users. "I think there is
a bar not to be crossed, and we've been pretty careful to
manage that," she said. With 10 million Kazaa downloads a
month, "it's not a deterrent to consumers," she added.

The problem is that very few of those doing the downloading
know what they are getting into. That is because most
people do not bother to read the contracts that they click
through when they install Kazaa - or, for that matter, any
other programs and services they download.

"These user agreements that allow the downloading of
spyware are Trojan horses," said Representative Mary Bono,
Republican of California, at a House Energy and Commerce
subcommittee hearing last week. "The average user has no
idea that he or she is opening up their entire personal and
financial life, down to the keystroke, to an unknown, often
ill-intentioned, third party," said Ms. Bono, who
introduced a bill last summer to restrict the use of
spyware that operates without a computer owner's full
knowledge or consent.

Sharman is not the only company giving people unwanted
extras. Gator, one of the first pieces of software to be
described as spyware by security and privacy experts, is
made by a company now known as Claria. It is automatically
installed with many free programs and can track a user's
Web surfing habits - without actually identifying him or
her by name - for marketing purposes. Some versions can
keep even closer track of individuals, giving each one a
user ID, according to the report of the Center for
Democracy and Technology.

Computer games available free from sites like Shockwave.com
often carry a program called n-Case, which inundates online
shoppers with pop-up ads promoting rival offerings. On its
Web site, the company that makes the software,
180Solutions, says 16 million people have downloaded its
program, which it says offers advertisers "a 360-degree
view of the user's behavior - 24 hours a day, 7 days a
week."

People who turn to free services for songs, movies or
software may get something else they haven't bargained for:
viruses. Bruce Hughes, the director of malicious-code
research at TruSecure, a computer security company, says
that as much as 45 percent of the free software available
on Kazaa may be infected with computer viruses. A Sharman
spokesman said the company provides virus protection for
downloads.

Before long, the mounting collection of adware, spyware,
Trojans and viruses can turn a person's zippy computer into
a sludgy, slogging mess. "When their computer gets too
slow, they go off and buy another computer," Mr. Hughes
said.

Free, in other words, can end up costing a bundle. "Free's
got a price tag on it, that's for sure," said Ed English,
the chief executive of InterMute, a company based in
Braintree, Mass., that makes programs to block adware,
spyware and spam. (The latest versions of Internet security
packages from major antivirus companies like Network
Associates, Symantec and Trend Micro can also block
spyware.)

"You're paying with your privacy," Mr. English said.
"You're paying with your productivity loss. You're paying
with your computer speed."

It hasn't always been this way. Giving away samples and
selling "loss leaders" cheaply enough to attract customers
is a tradition practically as old as commerce itself. And
industries like broadcasting have long followed the
advertiser-supported business model, providing news and
programming free to consumers - or, in the case of
newspapers, at relatively low cost.

Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard and
is a director of the university's Berkman Center for
Internet and Society, said that the Internet itself
reinforced the idea that information should be free. That
is the spirit that led to the free-software and open-source
movements, in which volunteers work on software together
and make it available to others, often at no cost.

The collaborative, early stages of the online medium
encouraged sharing. Vast libraries of information appeared
on the Web. The dot-coms carried the idea further, using
soaring stock prices and venture capital money to provide
content and services to customers free or at steep
discounts. The new business models blended the old
advertising idea with a near-religious faith in growing
fast to build customer loyalty.

During the boom, one company, ZapMe, went so far as to
install free computer labs in schools across the country in
return for being able to show ads to students while they
surfed. (ZapMe, which came under fire from people who
oppose commercialism in schools and from privacy advocates,
has since changed its name to rStar and dropped the
free-computers business; it now sells high-speed Internet
access to businesses and schools.)

NO wonder, then, that when the technology became available
to download music and other digital media easily, tens of
millions of people jumped at the chance without considering
the legal implications. The nature of downloading made the
copyright issues even fuzzier in the public mind.
Downloading a song, Professor Zittrain noted, is not like
stealing a loaf of bread. "You don't see the loaf of bread
missing on the windowsill," he said. "You see the bread on
the sill and one that has magically appeared in your hand."


When the dot-com bubble burst, however, the freebie model
largely collapsed along with it, said Alan Davidson, the
associate director of the Center for Democracy and
Technology and an author of the report on spyware.

"They were business models based on hope," he said.

Some
true freebies survived the crash. Programs that allow
computer users to read the ubiquitous ".pdf" files or to
listen to sound clips still cost nothing. Their makers get
revenue by selling premium versions of the programs and
industrial-strength versions used to produce the documents
and clips. Many Web sites, from the online magazine Slate
to the Internet Movie Database, still offer their content
free and support themselves with advertising. The companies
behind popular software like Eudora, an e-mail program,
still profit by giving away copies with unobtrusive
advertising built in and selling versions that do not show
ads. And the open-source movement has produced gems like
Linux, the free operating system.

But the belief that advertising alone could finance more
than a narrow band of companies was shattered, Mr. Davidson
said. And that's when things became ugly. Companies
scrambled to find ways to make up for the money they
thought they were going to earn from advertising.

Some programs in use today "went from just obnoxious
advertising into the hacking area," said Richard M. Smith,
a software engineer and privacy expert who has done some of
the groundbreaking work that uncovered the ways of rogue
programs. On a recent weekend trip to visit his daughter at
Bard College, he spent much of his time fumigating her
computer, which she had loaded with file-sharing software.
The various programs, he said, had changed the security
setting on his daughter's machine, opening the door to
other unwanted programs that were downloaded automatically.


When he tried to use the Google search service to find
Spybot, an effective anti-spyware program, he discovered
that one of the programs had substituted a look-alike
search page that did not include a link to the program.
"There seems to be this meeting of the hacker world and the
advertising world," he said. "There clearly is a line
crossed that I hadn't seen before."

OF course, someone is almost always making money somewhere.
To download free music, for example, you need to buy a
computer and pay an Internet service provider.

"There are costs built into every step of these media
systems," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, the director of
communication studies in the department of culture and
communication at New York University. The money just does
not go to record companies and artists. "What's really at
stake here is who's going to get the money and in
what-sized pieces," he said.

But the problems with spyware and other rogue programs may
offer the music industry a way out, one that doesn't risk
alienating customers by threatening lawsuits. To avoid
messing up their computers and surrendering their privacy,
people may be more willing to pay for their music - so long
as it comes in a form they want and at a price they don't
mind paying.

"It's not rocket science, it's not new math, it's not 'new
economy,' " said Mike McGuire, director of media research
at GartnerG2, the business strategy research group of
Gartner Inc. "If people want this thing, they will pay a
reasonable price for it - if it is reasonably priced and
convenient, and it works when you hit 'play.' "

John Esposito, head of the music distribution arm of Time
Warner, noted that plenty of consumers routinely buy movies
on demand through cable systems or pay to download ring
tones to their cellphones.

"Convenience of access will be the most important
ingredient, and they will be willing to pay for it," he
said.

The idea of small payments appeals to people on all sides
of the debate. "Cheap is really the antidote to 'free with
a lot of strings attached,' " Mr. Davidson said.

Professor Zittrain agreed. "The difference between free and
5 cents can be huge" to a business, he said.

Or 99 cents. The iTunes Music Store from Apple Computer is
showing that small payment systems, which have not been
very successful in the past, can work if there is a large
audience for a compelling product, said Avivah Litan, an
analyst at Gartner.

Steve Jobs, the Apple chairman, has said that his company
does not make much from the store, which has sold millions
of songs. The real profit is in selling its wildly
successful portable music player, the iPod.

If that high-tech approach sounds like old-style marketing,
like giving away razors to sell the blades, that should
come as no surprise. The future can look a lot like the
past, when Mr. Esposito, the Warner Music executive, could
buy singles for 49 cents each at his hometown record store
in Punxsutawney, Pa.

To Mr. McGuire, blending the past and the future to give
music lovers what they want might provide the best hope for
the music industry, helping it move beyond the lingering
idea of music as a physical object to be sold.

"What we're talking about is the 20th-century record
business versus the 21st-century music industry," he said.


---------------------------------

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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It is better to have a virtual armchair or desktop than to have clutter.



/// ***
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/31/n...=1073930844&ei=
1&en=f96637cfdaf0c2c1


So Much Clutter, So Little Room: Examining the Roots of Hoarding

December 31, 2003
By NINA BERNSTEIN


The cases never cease to fascinate: reclusive people
trapped by their own accumulations, in rooms made unlivable
by floor-to-ceiling heaps of newspapers, books and saved
objects - from twist ties to grand pianos.

Some pass into legend, like the Collyer brothers, "the
hermit hoarders of Harlem," who in 1947 were buried by the
piles of urban junk that filled their four-story Harlem
brownstone. But even less extreme examples, like that of
the Bronx man rescued on Monday after being trapped for two
days under an avalanche of magazines and catalogs, haunt
the public imagination.

Such compulsive hoarding is being recognized as a
widespread behavioral disorder, one that is particularly
acute in cities like New York, where space is at a premium.
The pack rat behavior ranges from egregious cases that
endanger lives to more commonplace collecting that
resonates with anyone who has ever stacked magazines to
read later or bought more shoes than the closet will hold.

One woman, for example, found throwing out a newspaper so
unbearable that her therapist instructed her never to buy
one again. Another could not pass a newsstand without
thinking that one of the myriad periodicals on sale
contained some bit of information that could change her
life.

And a third, trying to explain why she had bought several
puppets that she did not want or need from a television
shopping channel, spoke of feeling sorry for the toys when
no one else bid on them.

The emotional investment that goes into hoarding makes it
much harder to overcome than landlords or housing court
judges often understand, said Randy O. Frost, a professor
of psychology at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and a
national authority on the disorder who helped a group of
medical, legal and social service agencies establish the
New York City Task Force on Hoarding a year ago.

Similar groups exist in a dozen places, Dr. Frost said,
including Seattle, Ottawa, Fairfax County, Va., and Dane
County, Wis.

"I don't know if it's more of a problem in the city than
elsewhere, but certainly the limited amount of space makes
it come to a head," Dr. Frost added. "Most of this new
attention is not coming from the mental health side of
things, because many people with this problem don't seek
help. It's coming from the housing side and services to the
elderly."

Landlords, and lawyers and social workers who deal with
elderly tenants, are often among the first to confront the
problem.

Toby Golick, a clinical-law professor at Cardozo Law
School, described the case of an elderly Manhattan man who
rescued broken toys, discarded toasters and dilapidated
umbrellas from the street until even his kitchen and
bathroom were too crammed for use. The situation came to
light only when the landlord could not squeeze in to fix a
leaky faucet.

"He picked up things that he thought people were throwing
away and still had life," said Ms. Golick, a founder of the
hoarding task force, which will hold its second conference
at Cardozo on Jan 21. "He was very upset that this was a
disposable society and that people were very quick to
disregard things of value."

In the end, she said, Cardozo's legal clinic prevented the
man's eviction by working patiently with him on a
compromise: the bathroom and kitchen would be cleared, and
passageways tunneled through the piles of treasured junk in
the other rooms. The turning point had been finding a
resale shop that would accept some items, so the man would
not have to throw them away.

Like the elderly tinkerer, the Bronx man, Patrice Moore,
43, saw treasure where others saw mainly trash. Interviewed
yesterday at St. Barnabas Hospital, where he was recovering
from leg injuries suffered when his collection collapsed on
him, he said he might sue the landlord over the loss of
comic books and articles from the 1980's about his favorite
entertainer, Michael Jackson.

"I had to squeeze inside my apartment," he said of his
10-by-10-foot room, which rents for $250 a month. "I don't
know how I lived that way. The problem was, I never got a
storage space."

In one sense, Dr. Frost agreed, space makes the difference
between eccentricity and pathology.

"People can collect and not throw things away without it
really being a problem if they have the space and can
organize it," he said. "It's only a pathology when it
interferes with their functioning."

Pathological hoarding can affect people of all ages, and it
seems to be related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, added
Dr. Frost, who has researched the problem for a decade and
recently received a grant to develop a model treatment to
be tested on about 40 subjects at the Institute of Living
in Hartford and at Boston University.

There are three facets to the problem, he said: enormous
emotional difficulty throwing things away; compulsive
acquisition - sometimes by buying things, but often by
picking them up for free - and a high level of
disorganization and clutter.

Many of the people afflicted seem to be unusually
intelligent, he said. "They see more connections between
things, which leads them to value those things much more
than the rest of us do. "

But they also have difficulty finding conventional
categories for the information they collect. Instead, they
tend to organize their homes by visual or spatial cues -
they might locate an electric bill, for example, on the
left-hand side of a pile six inches deep, rather than where
bills are filed.

This taxes their memory, so they tend to want to leave
everything out in plain sight, piled in the middle of the
room.

"They have to remember where everything is," explained Dr.
Frost. "The rest of us only have to remember our system."

Equally important is their tendency to attach emotional
significance to a wider variety of things. "For some it has
to do with identity," he said. "I've had people tell me,
`If I throw too much away, there'll be nothing left of me.'
Almost like a Midas touch - if something comes into my
ownership, it's part of me."

Finally, the psychologist said, "throwing something away
makes them feel unsafe." The sense of security and comfort
that most people feel in the familiar surroundings of home,
hoarders may feel only when hemmed in by a nest of debris.

But there was no room for sentiment at the two-story brick
apartment building on Morris Avenue in the Bronx from which
police, firefighters and other city emergency workers
extracted Mr. Moore. A man who would identify himself only
as the landlord's brother said that he had stuffed Mr.
Moore's trove of paper in garbage bags and stashed it in a
back room for the night.

"Tomorrow is trash day," he said.

Janon Fisher contributed reporting for this article.

--- eof

__________________
Respectfully Yours,


{* CARDINAL999 *}

"In the Field of Observation, Fortune Favors the Prepared (and the Bold)."

"The stillness in stillness is not the true stillness; only when there is stillness in motion does the universal rhythm manifest." - Old Daoist Text

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Questions and Answers

Life is all about questions and answers and all the possible combinations.

If you can ask the question; then do you not possess the way to the answer?

If you know the answer; then do you not know the question?

If you seek neither; will things not change?

If things must change which are more important the questions or the answers?

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