f/k/a archives . . . real opinions & real haiku

San Jose University business professor Randall Stross raises an important warning in today’s New York Times, with a column titled “Caution: Driver May Be Surfing the Web” (Aug. 24, 2008). You see, Chrysler is about to make its 2009 model cars into internet hot-spots, capable of accessing the web while you enjoy your “living room on wheels” — with a feature it calls UConnect Web. We’ve been railing about the dangers of Driving While Phoning for years (most recently in June, over California’s phony new cellphone safety law). Stross points out the added danger of laptop surfing while driving:

The signals won’t be confined to the Nintendos in the rear seat; front-seat occupants will be able to stay online, too. Bad idea. As drivers, we have done poorly resisting the temptation to move our eyes away from the road to check e-mail or send text messages with our cellphones. Now add laptops.

Here’s how Chrysler described the new product in a Press Release last April (emphases added; via AutoBlog):

In-vehicle wireless Internet connectivity

Chrysler is diligently working on an advanced, in-vehicle wireless system to provide increased security and convenience far beyond anything available today. The system will provide high-speed data transfer and convenience, combining WiFi and 4G connectivity for a new level of wireless technology.

This system will transform the vehicle into a “hot spot” to deliver Internet and e-mail access, and movie and music download capability directly to the vehicle.

While Chrysler will offer this technology in future model-year vehicles, an aftermarket in-vehicle “hot-spot” wireless Internet capability is planned through Mopar® in 2008.

PCMag.com reports that “the hotspot range will extend approximately 50 feet from the vehicle in all directions, and will combine both WiFi and 3G cellular connectivity.” That means we can also expect tailgaters (and SideGaters?) cruising close to steal the WiFi signal from a moving Chrysler, Dodge or Jeep vehicle

According to Endgadget, UConnect Web will cost $499. Chrysler shows back-seat usage of UConnect Web, but check out this photo from Endgaget (Aug. 13, 2008):

Stross quotes Tom Vanderbilt, the author of “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)”:

“We’ve already seen fatalities from people looking at their laptops while driving. It seems absolutely surprising that Chrysler would open the door for a full-blown distraction like Internet access.”

After writing that book, Tom Vanderbilt shouldn’t be the least bit surprised that there is a market for this device and someone will make it and make a profit from it

Prof. Stross makes many additional points worth considering. Here are two:

• As Mr. Vanderbilt says in his book, many people have been willing to accept curtailed civil liberties as a response to terrorist threats, but many of the same people “have routinely resisted traffic measures designed to reduce the annual death toll,” like curbing cellphone use while driving.
• The decline in the total number of deaths [shown by official statistics] obscures a more complicated story. While we have made large gains curbing alcohol-impaired driving and instilling the habit of buckling up, we have wasted most of the gains by using cellphones while driving.

Stross ends his piece by asking:

“Which occupants in the car will most avidly use UConnect? Is it the children in the back with game consoles that provide plenty of self-contained entertainment without the Internet? Or is it the adults in the front seat, whose ability — never strong — to voluntarily remain unconnected is now disappearing?

“Will we notice if our living room on wheels, fully loaded with every amenity, sails off the road?”

I’m tired of having irresponsible, tech-happy drivers — and greedy manufacturers — who make the roads of America even more dangerous than they have to be. And, I’m even more tired of cowardly politicians who won’t help rid our roads of these devices. It seems clear that we cannot rely on either common sense or civic duty. As things get worse, we only have ourselves to blame for not demanding laws to control undisciplined, selfish drivers, who — like Chrysler — simply don’t care about the risks they take with all of our lives.

afterwords (Aug. 25, 2008): Scott Greenfield of Simple Justice — the only notable blawger willing to speak out against techno-insanity — has posted “Begging for a crash,” in sympathy with this post. Among other Scott-ish insights, he notes that “People can’t drive worth a lick now” and wonders why groups like MADD “will do nothing about a novelty like this that will impact far more people than drunk drivers.”

. . . Uncool.

So far, the f/k/a Gang is not warming up to the new search engine cuil [pronounced “cool”], which went public on Monday. See “Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine” (New York Times, July 28, 2008) Cuil says it is far more comprehensive than Google (indexing “all the internet” not just part of it), and that they’ll both protect the privacy of users and help you find more relevant results — by looking at the context of the searched term rather than just the popularity of the page where it is found, by giving you longer excerpts from the pages found, and by providing images to assist in your culling through the results.

Saul Hansell, of the NYT “Bits” weblog, had about the same reaction that I did on Monday:

I played with the site a fair bit when it turned on this morning. So far it doesn’t do much for me. My test of Ms. Patterson’s claim about the size of its search index was to type in the names of some not-so-famous high school and college friends. In half a dozen tries, Google consistently found more pages and put the more general and authoritative pages higher.

Many across the internet have had similar reactions in their reviews, including Tim Beyers of The Motley Fool, who wrote “Google is Cooler than Cuil” (July 29, 2008). The Guardian quotes a Techcrunch commentator: “If this wasn’t started by some ex-Googlers, nobody would give a hoot.” [update (Aug. 2, 2008) S. E. Kramer at Popular Mechanics has a lengthy review and says: “it’s hard to see why anyone would use it as a backup engine, never mind as a primary one.”]

Meanwhile, linguists have looked into Cuil’s claim that their name is derived from an old Irish word for “knowledge” and found it lacking. See Language Log and Language Hat. Language Log’s Mark Liberman notes: “There are two words `cuil’ that I know. One means `enmity’ or `bad attitude’ or `resentment’, . . . The other means `fly’.”

Others, such as Hanno Kaiser at the Antitrust Review weblog (see here and there) and Phillipp at Google Blogoscoped are having fun with the frequently misplaced photos that Cuil includes with their listings. (e.g., George Pataki for Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King, Jr., for Mahatma Gandhi) Some of the linked photos are rather bizarre and definitely funny. Don’t go asking for a date based on the image alone!

I’ve also noticed that if you right-click on a Cuil image, you don’t get referred to the original image Cuil has culled from the internet. Instead, you find the image on a cuilimg.com webpage. If you left-click on the result image, you are most often brought to a page that doesn’t even contain that image.

Thus, this photo of the street signs at the Schenectady intersection of Church and State Sts. (which I snapped myself) is included with many of the results when you Cuil-search “David Giacalone.”. But, the way Cuil has things arranged, you’d be hard-pressed to know that it originated here at f/k/a.

Monday night, like most first-time Cuil users, I did the vanity search of my own name, “David Giacalone.” The results were depressing. It took 14 pages before there was a direct link to this weblog, which is — let’s face it — the thing I’m best known for in cyberspace. On Tuesday, there was a link to f/k/a on the first Cuil page, but it gave no title for the posting, and showed mostly nonsense font for the text — not exactly likely to lead to a click-through. You then had to go many pages deeper into Cuil to find another link to f/k/a. Both Google and Yahoo! start right off with links to my homepage, when someone searches for “David Giacalone,” and Yahoo!’s second link is to our informative About page. A prominent Cuil result was to a site that said “No Profile has been submitted by David Giacalone.”

As the proprietor and author of this weblog, however, my concern with Cuil results goes much deeper than quibbling about misplaced and unidentifiable images, or over what happens when you search my name. If you come here often, you know that I have long been most amazed and grateful over our placement in Google and Yahoo! search results. (e.g., way back in May 2005, and just last May) For a wide variety of topics that mean the most to me, f/k/a lands at or near the top of the search results of the major search engines. As a result, my Stats Page tells me that this little weblog has had well over 100,000 visitors referred by Google in the past two years.

However, my browsing of topics at Cuil suggests that the flow of visitors will be greatly reduced if too many people switch from Google and Yahoo! to Cuil. And, because we often have quite detailed (and, yes, thoughtful and entertaining) pieces on topics that catch our fancy or our conscience, Prof. Yabut and Mama G. have concluded that the searching public will be the losers, if they switch from Googling to Cuil-ing.

For example:

• Baseball Haiku: Nowhere else on the web will you find as many “real” haiku about baseball as we’ve got here at f/k/a. Our baseball haiku page went up in April 2005 with dozens of haiku and senryu on the subject. We’ve also been telling you about the wonderful Baseball Haiku book for a year and a half — and posting much more of its contents than any other website (because so many of our Honored Guests are included in the book). If you Google “Baseball Haiku”, our baseball haiku page is the first result, and our first major post about the book is the second result. In contrast, if you Cuil-it, you will find page after page of links to vendors selling the Baseball Haiku book, but no link to f/k/a until page 9. And, that link doesn’t even go to any of the many pages with the term “baseball haiku” in the title, which focus solely on the topic.

sides chosen
the boy not chosen
lends me his glove

…….. by Ed Markowski – Baseball Haiku (2007); bottle rockets (7:1, 2005)

• “got breastmilk?” As we noted yesterday, the story of the “Got Milk?” folks going after the Alaskan breastfeeding advocate Barbara Holmes, who made a few “got breastmilk?” t-shirts, for trademark infringement has received a lot of blogispheric attention over the past week. If you Google /”got breastmilk?” alaska/ you’ll find nothing but links to relevant weblog posts (including ours) on the first page, and then many more after that. However, if you Cuil it, you will be steeped in links to WIC programs and advocacy groups, but not one of the measly 48 responses is about the trademark controversy. (One bonus from Cuil, however, was finding Barbara Holmes’ website.)

• Speed Limits and Gas Efficiency: This important and timely topic only pulls up four results at Cuil, none of which discusses the science or politics of the issue. On the other hand, Googling /speed limits and gas efficiency/ garners over 200.000 results, with the national policy discussion monopolizing the first page, which includes a link to a major post here at f/k/a.

• Obama Satire: Our post on The New Yorker cover is the 4th result today (it’s been higher) when you Google /Obama satire/. When I Cuil it, that posting does not appear on the first twelve pages of results (and I have no patience to keep clicking to see if it appears there at all). “Nuff said.

I could go on and on, but there would be little to gain from it. My biggest concern about the Cuil results I’ve seen so far is that it will be very hard for haiku fans to find the treasure trove of poems by each of our Honored Guest Poets. With Google or Yahoo!, searching the name of one of our poets will almost always bring their f/k/a Archives Page as one of the first few results (or at least on the first page). I tried lots of their names with Cuil, and could not find our archives pages listed at Cuil (although each of those pages has the poet’s name in its title), even when looking through a dozen pages of Cuil results. When there was an early link to f/k/a, it was often to a post that had no poetry and merely listed all 26 of our Honored Guests.

Like many others who have experimented this week with Cuil, I’m not sure what would draw me back. Rather than finding more relevant results than with Google or Yahoo!, I kept finding merchandisers and links to non-substantive mention of the issue searched, or to blog aggregators and not the posting in question. I’m going to spend my limited time with Mssrs. Google and Yahoo, and maybe head over to Cuil — with low expectations — if I strike out with the other two. Feel free to join me sticking with what works.

afterwords: (Aug. 2, 2008) Google says it has over 100,000 results for the query /Cuil responses/ and the post you are now reading has been #1 the past couple of days. The same query at Cuil has 26 results, only five of which are actually presented — none of which is this posting.

using his nose
the dog searches
the violets

… by Kobayashi Issa, translated by David G. Lanoue

one glass of wine
Google keeps asking
“Did you mean ____?”

stone sober
Cuil keeps saying
“no results were found”

.. by dagosan

Twice this past week, an otherwise-thoughtful person sent an email to me and dozens of other people, putting all of our names in the “To” field. Like many of you reading this now, neither Sender stopped to think that they were invading the privacy of recipients who did not want to share their email addresses with one or more of the other addressees — and who rightly want to make that choice for themselves. Even worse, because the Senders requested or expected the messages to be forwarded to many others, they set the stage for much broader privacy invasion and unwanted spamming. (In addition, they created a great risk of swamped In-Boxes by asking recipients to “Reply to All” and not just to the sender).

After trying to diplomatically explain this problem to many correspondents over the past decade using return email, I’ve finally remembered that I have this little soapbox for exposing and explaining (kvetching and correcting).

Summary: (explanations and instructions below):

• Sending Original Email: Do not send an email message to a group of persons by putting their names in the “To” field unless you are certain that each recipient has already shared his or her email address with every other recipient and will not forward their addresses to others. Instead, use the Bcc field [from “background/blind carbon copy”]. Each recipient will receive a personally-addressed Bcc copy, with the email address shielded from the other recipients.
• Forwarding: If you are going to forward an email that has the addresses of prior recipients in it (the address is there, even if you only see the name on the To or Cc line), first remove all prior email addresses. [Yes, you can delete anything that you see in your email window, the same way you delete any text in a document.]

– share this email with this short URL: http://tinyurl.com/BccGroups

.

Lucky for all of us, Judith Kallos has thought about this netiquette problem, and hundreds thousands of others, and shares her knowledge with clear and lively prose, at NetManners.com, plus two weblogs [E-mail Etiquette Matters and the Business Etiquette Blog], as well as in several books. Her goal: “Using Technology to Communicate with Knowledge, Understanding and Courtesy!”

Therefore, rather than my turgidly judgmental preaching, here are some of Judith Kallos’s lessons for those who answer “yes” to the question: Do you send or forward emails with everyone’s email address in the To: field?

“Email Etiquette Info Courtesy of NetManners.com”

Her Essay “Courtesy #1” offers the minimal online basics you need to know “in order to be taken seriously in your online communications,” and advises:

(more…)

Sen. John Warner (R-VA) . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL)

If you’ve read our Efficient Driving Pledge back in April, you know the f/k/a Gang is celebrating the news that influential Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia “suggested Thursday that Congress might want to consider reimposing a national speed limit to save gasoline and possibly ease fuel prices.” See “Senator asks if nation’s drivers should slow down” (Washington Post/AP, July 4, 2008) The AP story continues:

“Sen. John Warner, R-Va., asked Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman to look into what speed limit would provide optimum gasoline efficiency given current technology. He said he wants to know if the administration might support efforts in Congress to require a lower speed limit.”

“. . . ‘The department’s Web site says that fuel efficiency decreases rapidly when traveling faster than 60 mph. Every additional 5 mph over that threshold is estimated to cost motorists “essentially an additional 30 cents per gallon in fuel costs,’ Warner said in his letter, citing the DOE data.”

On the other hand/thumb, if you’re a regular reader here, you must know that we are bemoaning and regretting the reaction of “our candidate” Barack Obama to Sen. Warner’s suggestion. As reported in the Detroit Free Press, “Speed limit idea said to save gas” (July 3, 2008):

“Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s spokesman said the Democrat would leave setting speed limits to the states and focus instead on renewable energy and improved efficiency.”

Barack took the correct and courageous stand against the summer gas-tax holiday during the Democratic primaries (see our prior post). But, his alleged cop-out on speed limits has left me with whiplash, wondering how many more of Sen. Obama’s principles will be sacrificed in his bid to win “blue collar” voters. Speed limits are no more an issue to be left for the states to decide than the Iraq war was an issue solely for federal politicians back when Barack was a State Senator speaking out on the war.

Michigan state Rep. Aldo Vagnozzi of Farmington Hills, recognizes the national scope of the problem. According to yesterday’s Free Press, he “introduced a resolution calling on Congress to reinstitute the national 55-m.p.h. speed limit implemented during the 1970s oil crisis.” At his website, Vagnozzi argues that:

“At a time when Michigan residents are stretching their dollars as far as they can to make ends meet, skyrocketing gas prices are only making matters worse,” Vagnozzi said. “By simply lowering the speed limit and slowing down on the road, we can increase fuel efficiency, decrease our gas consumption and provide consumers some relief at the pump.”

Most of today’s vehicles reach optimum fuel efficiency between 45 mph and 55 mph. For every mile-per-hour faster than 55 that a vehicle travels, fuel efficiency drops by about 1 percent. Efficiency drops off at a faster rate above 65 mph.

Lowering the national speed limit to 55 mph would:

* Save consumers money at the pump by increasing fuel efficiency, requiring them to buy less gas;
* Save lives by reducing the incidence and severity of traffic accidents;
* Reduce our dependence on foreign oil by reducing demand;
* Cut vehicle emissions by 10 percent.

Our fuel-savings post in April reiterated the lament:

“I hate to be cynical, but I don’t think there’s any chance that the American public — or their courageous leaders — will go along with lowering speed limits to 55 mph in order to save billions of gallons of oil a year.” This is another time when I would love to see one of my predictions proven wrong.

Perhaps leaders like Warner and Vagnozzi will indeed prove me wrong. But, they will need lots of support from other legislators and government officials to make fuel-efficient speed limits a reality. You still have time, Barack, to explain what your spokesperson really meant.

In April we opined: If politicians and the public were serious about achieving fuel economy — in order to save money and save Earth from greenhouse gases — they would start enforcing our speed limit laws and rollback the highway speed limit to 55 mph.

We continue to believe that the most effective, and surely the quickest, way to reduce our nation’s fuel consumption is to enforce the laws already on the books. For those who rather not click through, here are excerpts from our discussion on that topic:

A 2005 survey by the Governors Highway Safety Association confirmed what we already knew: almost every state allows drivers to regularly and significantly exceed the speed limit before they are stopped — and “Nearly all respondents reported a public perception that there exists a cushion above a posted speed limit in which officers will not cite offenders.

The range most often reported was 5-10 miles per hour above the posted limit. “(NewsMax.com, AP, “Survey: Most States Allow Speed Cushion,” June 13, 2005; Survey Executive Summary). One news report noted:

“Authorities patrolling U.S. highways tend to give motorists a cushion of up to 10 miles per hour above the speed limit before pulling them over, says a survey by a group of state traffic safety officials. The group found that 42 states allow drivers to regularly exceed the speed limit before they are stopped. [Editor’s Note: only 47 states responded to this survey; at least one of the non-responders — New York — clearly also has the speed cushion.]

. . . “Law enforcement needs to be given the political will to enforce speed limits and the public must get the message that speeding will not be tolerated,” said [Jim Champagne, chairman of the Governors Highway Safety Association].

“[And, yes, speed both costs and kills:] A study released in 1999 by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimated an increase in deaths on interstates and freeways of about 15 percent in the 24 states that had raised their speed limit in late 1995 and 1996.”

 

A pledge from our political leaders to achieve energy independence from foreign oil barons and monarchs (despite the personal sacrifice required of all Americans) would be particularly appropriate today, July 4th. I’m listening, Sen. Obama — please renew my faith in your idealism and commitment to do (and say) the right thing. Join with Sen. Warner and let us see some of your across-the-aisle cooperation and leadership.

more resources (May 3, 2008): For a lot of information and inspiration (and some great bumper stickers) zoom over to iDrive55.org – the Drive 55 Conservation Project.

By the way: With the help of the Cruise Control lever, I kept my promise to abide by the 65-mpg speed limit on the New York State Thruway last week, while traveling over 700 miles to and from the Chautauqua Institution. Yes, I was passed a lot. More important, I achieved my best fuel efficiency ever. In fact, for a 200-mile all-Thruway segment of the return trip, my 2000 Mazda Protege, which was rated by the government at 30 mpg for highway travel, averaged over 35 miles per gallon. [And, yes, I would be happy to drive 55, if that becomes the law of the land or of our state.]

update (July 21, 2008): The lead editorial in today’s Schenectady Daily Gazette is headlined: “Large gas discounts available for motorists’ taking.” It points out the instant large “discounts” drivers can achieve merely by slowing down, and opines: “Unfortunately, even with gas selling at over $4 per gallon, they won’t do it; and few politicians have been willing to stick their necks out and say the obvious: that government should reduce the national speed limit, the way it did when there were gas shortages and skyrocketing prices in the 1970s, and enforce it.”