Ruminations, Haunts, and Errors

U of I ugies troll through the camputown bars. One decided to relieve himself on a frat house bush. Campus cops give tickets. Why does such a mundane item rate a story in the Tribune? Apparently because one of the yahoos was tracked down via the current fashionable boogeyman, MySpace.

I suppose the reporter and editors thought it might be a nice cautionary tale to remind people that the internet really is a public place where people who you’d rather not have your information can readily find it. That’s fine…but this one quickly degenerates into a mess of ‘wha?’

First off: did the incident really rate signficant police involvement?

Second: isn’t taking the kid’s phone pushing the limits a bit?

Third:  was this such a dastardly crime that it required extensive police work to hunt down and nab this fugitive from justice?  I suppose that’s a good sign that the campus is a nice safe place, but I wonder if the extra $195 in fines was really worth the use of time and resources.

Finally, what a doozy:

Gartner, a U. of I. junior studying crop sciences, admits he lied but said he was shocked to learn that he was booked by Facebook.”I had no idea that old people were wise to Facebook. I thought they referred to it as a doohickey that kids play with,” he said. “I got bone-crushed.”

Truly, the next great criminal mastermind.   ‘Doohickey’?  ‘Bone-crushed’?  Way to make the old alma mater, a true bastion of higher learning, seem like a haven for hicks!  Further, when I was in college–which was still my late teens–as much as I may have felt there was a cultural/generational gap from the powers that be, I don’t recall ever thinking of University officials or police officers as ‘old people’; moreover, I certainly don’t think I ever thought they were somehow incapable of understanding something like the world wide web (which was vastly more unknown to the wider public at the time!).

Ugh!  Someone please tell me I’m objectively entitled to gripe about such things and not simply getting old…

Even before we packed up and moved, I had been finding it increasingly difficult to keep the commentary flowing here due to an ever-growing backlog of items that might be worthy of comment. Various time pressures over the last two months have only made that backlog bigger, and thus even more daunting to attack. Previously I looked to del.icio.us, Flock, various Firefox extensions, and Google Reader in attempts to tame the tide, and more recently I’ve taken Google Notebook and NewsGator for spins. Yet still I find that each has some significant flaw that prevents me from bending the tools, individually or collectively, to my will.

Last night, in one of those just-before-sleep epiphanies, it occurred to me that I can lay a good portion of the blame on the trends of the last few years. It may sound as if I’m pawning off my lack of tool wizardry (or writing discipline) off on the coders, but in fact I’m actually absolving them somewhat for their failure to meet my expectations.

What I’ve been seeking is a way to take various links, shove them off into a nice semi-private corner somewhere with notes (or not) and tags (or not), and then export it all to a format for final editing and posting once a critical mass of ideas has formed from those tidbits and my wandering thoughts. Seems simple enough, right: that’s essentially how essays, lectures, dissertations, and novels have been developed for centuries. Trouble is that this workflow seems to run counter to the prevailing wisdom that the most important things are to get everything out there now and completely in the open. Now, I’m all for transparency, openness, and discussion in various realms, but most people would consider it rude (at best) to simply blurt out every single half-baked thought as soon as it comes to mind; it is far better (not to mention quieter and easier to handle!) to release to public scrutiny thoughts that have been developed and strengthened after some review and comparisons with other facts and ideas. Yet this seems anathema to many of the blogozealots who are driving the technology forward, as they ridicule the ‘quaint’ traditional-media types who–gasp–wish to collect and analyze facts and opinions off in a quiet corner before publishing stories, insisting instead that it’s far better to just get it all out there right away and let the ensuing fracas sort things out.

So, against this backdrop it’s no wonder that the current tools to scour and repopulate the web, for all their Atom/CSS-compliant, pretty AJAX goodness, are much better at generating information than insight. I think the problem has been a focus on links (and labels, more recently) as vital entities at the expense of the conceptual and temporal connections between them, which is sad really because the true power of what Berners-Lee begat was not the hyperlink itself but the ability to connect ideas more quickly easiliy than had been available before. Would that the developers crafting the next revisions of all these tools I’m trying to figure out take to heart the idea that people are looking for a way to collect stories and images not merely to craft a collection but to see new meaning emerge from that collection.

It’s now been a month since I switched over to Google Reader, and as could probabaly be expected I’ve found various behaviors annoying once the novelty wore off. I suppose a lot can simply be chalked up to its beta status, and certainly there have been new and nifty features added (like the scriptlet that now shows the last few starred items in the RHE sidebar at left).

However, as I struggled to wade through a backlog (nearly 800 from just two days!) of items last weekend, while still ruminating on an article on tagging from SXSW, I found myself mildly irritated that these two salient components of the web-as-platform wave are still so sorely lacking in perhaps the most useful measure from the human perspective: semantics. Some examples of where the current common tools are appallingly lacking:

• The meaning of ‘updated’. Every newsreader seems to have some concept of an update. Yet they seem to be lacking the fundamental concept that an update means the previous version of the item is obsolete. Perhaps 10% of the aforementioned backlog in my newsstream could have been zapped if only the tool were smart enough to clear the cache of the obsoleted items. Okay, perhaps the real fault here lies in either 1) the RSS spec, which doesn’t really define any temporal or informatic relationships between items, or 2) news sources that simply spew out new items without establishing relationships among them. Yet the web has had a long history of toolmakers programming around deficiencies in specifications and content providers, why not this one too?
• Cross-posting duplications. Another 10% of my recent backlog appeared to be duplicate postings of items from different but related feeds, e.g. the general-news and sports feeds of the Tribune. I lay this annoyance squarely at the feed of the newsreader providers. All aggregators cache the feed data, so scrubbing an item from the ‘unread’ category in one stream when the same item has been read in another should be a no-brainer. Hel-lo…hash table, anyone??!?
• Tag relationships. The primary brilliance of tags vs. categories is the ability to generate (and update) metadata on the fly without having to first go define a schema for it. The secondary brilliance is the natural way that they can be searched in a logical way (a la SQL). However, I wish there had been some more forethought about tag relationships, particularly ways to formalize relationships among tags than just between tags and items. Anyone using del.icio.us or Flickr for a few weeks probably comes to learn that managing the tags becomes a project unto itself; some will no doubt tout the tag cloud, but I find this next to useless–merely eye candy for novices–since it provides no information about the semantic connections between the tags. I have always been one to categorize ideas and look for the connections–indeed, often the insight gained from the relationships is more important than any of the underlying information individually–so I find the inability to manage tagged relationships in what I would consider an effective manner to be stifling.

Hmm, I suppose such gripes might be better directed on sites monitored by people developing the various tools. But these items would seem so fundamental to the whole web-as-platform, involve-the-users ethos that I can’t believe I’d be contributing anything novel. Has no one considered them before? Are they really that difficult to implement?

Ugh, when’s the paperless society gonna be here again? I know they need to be thorough given the amounts of money involved, but the size of the stack of paper that makes up a loan application is astounding–especially since most of the pages boil down to “make sure you pay” and “if something goes wrong, we’re not responsible for anything”. I suppose I shouldn’t gripe too much: a generation ago (or maybe even just a decade?) the whole thing would have required actually spending a couple hours in someone’s office, while we’re able to do it all via telephone and fax and courier.

And yet we’ll probably have to sign and initial nearly as many pages come closing day.

Oh, well, at least the end result should be worth all the effort.

Over the past couple months I’ve been keeping tabs on revelations surrounding the administration’s shady domestic surveillance efforts, and while I’m glad to see the story didn’t fade away under pressure from the right-wing noise machine and pop-culture fluff, I can’t help but be irritated that the establishment Fourth Estate hasn’t done it’s duty to call bullshit more forcefully on several aspects…

• Some like Laura Bush try the soft sell while cretins like Karl Rove take the road that anyone who opposes the program must hate America and want to aid the terrorists, but such sophistry can’t disguise that “It’s only aimed at the Bad Guys” is a canard and fallacious. Only an anarchist would argue that protecting the public from terrorists isn’t a legitimate government role, and only a far-fringe libertarian would argue that it’s impossible for the government to present probable cause for clandestine surveillance. But history has shown that governments can’t be trusted to keep it that way, hence our long, proud history of requiring agencies not just to know their suspicions are true but to prove to an independent authority that they are well-founded. That, more than anything about our flag or land or culture or whatever else a jingoist might want to claim, is what truly makes Us better than Them.
• Dubya and his minions keep talking about the ‘war’ we’re in, as if repetition will make it true and thus justify our ceding of various liberties in the name of The Cause. But is it true? Certainly there are factions out there that despise our government and society, and groups of them are working to cause us harm. But is that war or just an aspect of how humans have dealt with each other over the past several millenia? If it’s as different a struggle as they claim, then do they deserve the full set of ‘war powers’ designed to cope with previous types of wars? Maybe changes in communications, travel, and munitions technology have altered the risk equation enough so that the cumbersome machinations envisioned by the Framers need reexamination, but such debate is the prerogative of the Congress and people of the several states, not the edit of the President. Moreover, I think the principle will remain that in times of clear, specific, imminent danger the public does not abandon its collective liberties but instead grants (via ‘war powers’) a sort of pre-emptive pardon to those who cross the traditional lines of the state’s police powers in the course of good-faith efforts to protect the public–but such leeway is not without limits.

Perhaps the upcoming Senate hearings on these matters will help nudge the press into doing their jobs more forcefully, although I doubt it.

With the Alito confirmation hearings in full swing this week, seems a good excuse to finally clear out some ruminations on the laws and judiciary of our fine republic…

• Over the past not-quite-year I think I’ve gained a better understanding of how the judiciary fits into the American system than I have at any time since learning the basics back in junior high school. From musings on the style and legacy of late Chief Justice Rehnquist to considerations of recent rulings to the circus created by not one but two open seats in the same year, what it means to interpret the law has become more clear. The courts must be active (yes, maybe even activist!) in trying to mediate among the interests of not only an ever-changing society but also statutes and treaties that, as the products of people (committees of people, at that!), inevitably end up with conflicts and ambiguities. In many ways the courts take whatever schemes the other two branches attempt to put on the public and try to make something sensible and workable out in the real world; their work is thus far more political and less clear-cut than that of haughty and remote arbiters of punishment and arcane legal technicalities presented in grade-school textbooks.

  The political nature is most apparent at the Supreme Court. A number of commentators have noted that the Framers, probably deliberately, put the staffing of the Court in the hands of the two more overtly political branches. However, the Court’s political nature is more inherent; cases easily decided by clear facts and existing law are handled at the district court level, and the appellate level catches the major errors, so the Supreme Court is left with cases that involve areas where the law is conflicting, vague, or nonexistent. Hence, the justices must make decisions with little more than their own ideas on the nature of society and government…politics in a nutshell.

• Perhaps we’d be a lot better off if we just openly admitted the political nature of SCOTUS, rather than continuing the public farce of senators pretending that such concerns aren’t germane to confirmation (kinda sad when the extreme activists on both sides are more honest about the situation than the great political Center). One good way would be to amend the Consitution to place term limits on justices. Eighteen years would be good, as it would allow justices the security to take the long view yet also ensure that every president gets at least two chances per term to tussle with the Senate over the Court’s makeup. Such measured turnover would keep the justiced buffered from short-term politics but still keep the court responsive to generational shift. Yet I think the greatest benefit might simply be that eliminating the fate-of-a-generation political theatrics would spare the nation some angst.
• From patent and IP laws divorced from a realistic sense of how people develop and use ideas to
  security laws and regulations nowhere near as effective as they are intrusive, the U.S. government is proving right the many pundits who are fond of pointing out that stupid laws aren’t necessarily unconstitutional. How about we remedy that? Let’s add an amendment that allows a court to deem unenforcable any statute or regulation that can be shown to be trivial to circumvent by other legal means, strongly unlikely to achieve any practical benefit, or just generally ludicrous. This amendment would also slyly establish judicial review as a part of the Constitituion rather than merely a super-duper precedent.

At last the holidays have finished and it was time for the decorations to come down…and remove the tree before it becomes nothing but kindling. Good thing that Christmas trees are so light (especially when dry weather has made them thinner) when one must navigate a narrow winding stairwell to the alley; that I no longer cared if branches were crushed or broken also helped. What didn’t help was spending ten minutes lashing the tree to the car roof only to discover that my handywork resulted in my tying all four car doors shut! Brilliant, eh? Fortunately no one was around to document my stupidity as I climbed into the car through the driver’s side window.

Kudos to the city for adjusting the assortment of tree-recycling locations, as I was happy to avoid a repeat of last year. After a traffic snarl on Roscoe at Lincoln, it was amazingly quick and easy, as the new location in the DeVry Institute parking lot resulted in no line of cars and no backups onto a busy street. And of course, being Chicago, the Streets and San people handing out the blue bags were some political minions reminding everyone that this service was brought to us in part by Ald. Gene Shulter. Ah, well.

(Okay, with the holidays complete and things officially back to normal, it’s about time I tackled that big list of links I’ve meant to expound upon…)

• Holiday-week vacation, I Love the 80s: 3D on VH1…can’t…stop…watching…ahh! It’s like frickin’ crack for the Gen-X set!! Whoever came up with the I Love… series is a genius. Quoth Liz at 1:11am: “Finally, a commercial! Quick, get the remote so we can finally turn it off!”
• Oh, no! First Field’s, now the Berghoff is closing. I thought Chicago was rising, what’s with the long-time institutions going by the wayside? Where shall we go now for schnitzel and haughty service??
• Figuring that a pre-qualification letter would be a good thing to have at this point in the house-hunting process, I filled out the forms at LendingTree this morning. Wowzers, within 30 minutes I had eight emails and a phone call! I suppose it’s better than trudging around from bank to bank, awaiting to see what rates they deign to give out, but the response it a bit overwhelming. Didn’t they see where I marked that we don’t have an actual property under consideration yet?
• Can’t there be some better standards for writing up descriptions of houses on the market? Hitting place after place only to find that the meaning of ‘yard’, ‘3 bedrooms’, or ‘needs some TLC’ can vary by orders of magnitude is making the process a bit more like a chore than it needs to be. We’ll have enough of that once we have to maintain a place, thank you very much.
• I figured the Prior-for-Tejada rumors that surfaced last week were just so much hot-stove-league rumor mongering to spice up the holiday lull, yet they’re still showing up on the Trib and ESPN. Seriously, I hope there’s nothing to them; the trade simply doesn’t make sense, and not just because he’s a popular Cub–or even the starting-pitching-wins-championships mantra. It’s simply that a 25-year-old pitcher has his best years ahead of him, while a 30-year-old hitter is either at or past his peak. Maybe Prior is injury-prone or exhibits flaws in his mechanics, but there’s plenty of time to mold that; Tejada’s bat (or glove) isn’t the difference between last year and the World Series, and both skills will almost certainly start declining soon.

Yesterday the NCAA released their ruling on U of I’s appeal of the initial ruling against their use of the Fighting Illini name and Chief Illiniwek. While I’m glad to see part of the issue resolved, it looks to me that controversy will still rage on for a while. So the school won on the no-brainer part of the appeal relating to its teams’ nicknames

Based on its own research, discussions with relevant Native American groups and information provided by the university, the staff committee concurs with Illinois that the term ‘Illini’ is closely related to the name of the state and not directly associated with Native Americans. The nicknames ‘Illini’ or ‘Fighting Illini’ are not reasons for including the university in the August 2005 policy, and the review committee accepts the university’s appeal on this point.

but, uh…hmm, the name of our fair state derives from the loose confederation of tribes that use to live here yet their collective name isn’t associated with those people? The university made this argument, and the the NCAA accepted it, with straight faces? Well, I suppose at heart this is an argument over bylaws among money-making corporate entities, even if they are academic institutions.

Anyway, methinks this bit of sophistry is only going to muddy the waters rather than forge resolution. Hence, this ruling would seem to confirm that there is no particular group that can claim support for, or opposition to, Chief Illiniwek due to any direct connection (if the elimination of the Illini as a distinct ethnic/cultural group in the 1800s wasn’t enough already). Yet the press release also states

However, because the term ‘Illini’ has become associated with Native Americans through its use in conjunction with Chief Illiniwek, the committee strongly recommends that the university undertake an educational effort to help those among its constituents and in the general public understand the origin of the term and the lack of any direct association with Native Americans.

What, lawyer got your backbone? The NCAA seems here to dance around a more explicit statement that their continued call to retire Chief Illiniwek is a desire to be politically correct and to extricate themselves from a controversy. Whatever has transpired during the course his development, Chief Illiniwek has become an amalgam of attributes and traditions unique to the Illinois athletic department–a work of impressionism, as it were. Some might feel that the school and community simply have no right for drawing upon those traditions no matter how well-intentioned they believe they are being, and given the general history of the contact between Europeans and Native Americans that belief is certainly reasonable. However, if the NCAA simply cannot handle that a vocal minority feel that way, then they should just come right out and say so. Either this is a weighty and obvious social injustice that must be eliminated–immediately and uniformly, no appeals or special dispensations–or it’s a point-of-view dispute that needs to be adjudicated by aggrieved parties on a case-by-case basis. The NCAA should stop trying to have it both ways.

(Oh, by the way, given how the various committees are taking great pains to make this whole issue into a case requiring solemn, detailed, legalistic consideration, how is it that they got the official institutional name of the school wrong–it’s the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, not the University of Illinois, Champaign–not once but four times in a one-page press release??)