blog.yoyoel.com

Remembering the conservatism of Steve Jobs

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 13:28:00 -0400

A year ago today, Steve Jobs died.

I remember the sudden outpouring of grief. I remember the Post-It note tributes on the glass of the Walnut Street Apple Store in Philadelphia — snowballing from one to ten to a multitude. I remember seeing Walter Isaacson’s book in the hands of, seemingly, everyone. I remember the consternation of a million tech bloggers simultaneously lamenting the demise of Apple as we knew it. I remember talking to my therapist about whether, as a former Apple employee and a passionate Apple consumer, it was strange that I wasn’t crying, or really feeling much of anything at all (though I’ll admit to tearing up when I read Brian Lam’s “Steve Jobs was a kind man: My regrets about burning him” in The Atlantic).

In the following year, I bought an iPhone 4S, then a new iPad, then a MacBook Pro with Retina Display, then an iPhone 5. I spent just shy of $5000 on Apple products, even as, with each release, I read the collective yawn of technology journalists fed up with what they perceived as incremental improvements. I saw AAPL cross the 700 mark for the first time.

Today’s tribute video on the Apple homepage highlighted products: the iMac (“The whole thing is translucent!”), the iPod (“…and it goes right in my pocket”), and the iPhone (“Are you getting it?”). But, in Tim Cook’s letter, the message was a little different. Apple’s DNA, as Steve liked to describe it, is a question of corporate culture: “No company has ever inspired such creativity or set such high standards for itself.”

We’ve been hearing the technology + liberal arts line a lot from Apple lately. But, actually, I think that standards are the issue at the core of the company. It’s why the MobileMe and Maps fiascos are so deeply embarrassing. It’s why I’m infuriated by Phil Schiller’s asinine response to “Scuffgate”: that scratches on the bezels of black iPhone 5s out of the box are “normal.” It’s why, in my four years as a Mac Genius, I routinely ignored AppleCare’s guidelines about stuck and dead pixels in LCD panels. A millimeter scuff mark or one bad pixel out of 1,296,000 in a display is mathematically insignificant; but, on a human scale, it’s annoying as hell. It’s a violation of the standards Apple’s customers have come to expect — and, more importantly, the standards Apple enforces for itself. Those standards are what Steve Jobs embedded in Apple’s culture: from his over-engineering of the Macintosh assembly line to the savage design process Walter Isaacson chronicles so well in his biography.

Speaking of Isaacson: I resisted reading his book for about six months after Steve’s death. But, when I finally picked it up, I found it to be a remarkably artful weaving of the story of Steve Jobs (as an asshole; as a visionary; as a father and husband; as a perfectionist) with the story of Apple writ large. Apple’s products were a vehicle for Isaacson to tell the story of Steve, in a slightly megalomaniacal way that, I suspect, Jobs would approve of.

Absent from Isaacson’s thousand-page tome was a treatment of one of the earliest statements of Apple’s DNA: the Human Interface Guidelines first written by Bruce Tognazzini (employee #66) in 1978. The HIG are, at their core, an articulation of what makes Apple products feel Apple-like. Some of this has to do with the mechanical things that emerge from hours of user experience studies: things like the size of touch targets that are easy for people to interact with (44x44 pixels). But a bigger part is philosophical. The HIG for Mac and iOS today read like the source texts that Apple product keynotes are cribbed from: “People use computers to create and experience the content they care about.” “The display encourages people to forget about the device and to focus on their content or task.” These are the same lines we’ve been hearing in the iPad, Mac, and iPhone announcements for the past few years, with slightly different language. And this is developer documentation, not ad copy.

The Human Interface Guidelines represent the belief that Apple has figured out how to make, as Tim Cook put it in his letter today, “products that our customers love.” It’s why Apple goes to such lengths to tell developers how to make better applications. It’s why Apple puts out a 48-page document detailing the minimum amount of blank space that should be used around its logo in print. (It should be “equal to the height of the Apple logo, measured from dimple to dimple.”)

This isn’t just about Steve Jobs’s neurotic attention to detail; it’s about believing that Apple has found the answer to the product design problem. And this is a deeply conservative position. I don’t mean “conservative” in the gay-hating, small-government, Michele Bachmann sense — but in the older, Aristotelian meaning of the word. There is an objectively, universally right way to do things. And Apple’s products are about the pursuit and attainment of this kind of perfection, as applied to computing.

We’ve been misled, in a way, by years of rehashing the “1984” and “Think Different” ads. Certainly, there’s something fun and revolutionary about Apple’s self-presentation. But nothing — nothing — about the Macintosh represented a round peg in a square hole. Using a Macintosh is supposed to feel like putting on a well-worn pair of jeans: effortless, comfortable, familiar. “New” isn’t a part of the equation, except insofar as new products sometimes represent iteratively better solutions to the problems of design.

This might be why we’ve been so bored by Apple’s product releases lately. There’s nothing dramatically different about the iPhone 5, as compared to the iPhone 4S — it’s just better. And that better-ness isn’t the accidental result of throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks: it’s the product of careful engineering refinements. Is this boring for tech journalists? Sure. But the result is a lineup of products that are each, without question, best-in-class. That’s a concept that’s hard to sell to consumers in the abstract, but anyone who holds an iPhone 5 in their hands gets it intuitively. This phone is the best, full stop.

More than anything else, the relentless pursuit of human-scale perfection through engineering is the legacy of Steve Jobs at Apple. It’s something that, as best I can see, Tim Cook has managed to maintain. The iPhone 5 is exactly what I wanted it to be, and I have no doubt that, if Steve Jobs had been on stage on September 12, I’d still be holding the same device in my hands. We’ve entered an age of boring devices. But nowhere is the new normal of consumer electronics embodied more perfectly than at Apple. That’s the life work of Steve Jobs. He’ll be missed, but the paradigm of design he helped create ensures he won’t be forgotten.

Transcript of my internal spiral of despair following any form of academic rejection

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 13:48:48 -0400

Ugh. Fuck.

Why does nobody take me seriously? That really wasn’t an idea that you could just dismiss out of hand like that. Maybe it’s because I’m wearing shorts to the office today. I knew these shorts were a bad idea. Nothing says “dilettante” like not wearing pants.

Everyone around me is doing such interesting things. How do I get there? Why does my CV seem so utterly desolate relative to everyone else’s? Shouldn’t I be getting grants or fellowships or fucking anything to indicate that anyone other than my advisor values the work I’m doing? Oh god, what if my advisor doesn’t value my work, either? I’m so fucked.

Why is my therapist out of town this week? No, I can’t talk to her about work. Our whole model of therapy is based on the fact that my academic life is under control, and it’s just my personal life that needs sorting out. Maybe I need two therapists.

You know what, fuck this shit. It’s after noon. Time to drink. No, dammit, Yoel, that’s your problem. No one takes you seriously because you’re the kind of person who thinks it’s okay to drink at 12:30 on a Thursday. Are bars even open at 12:30? There’s beer in the fridge at home. No. No drinking.

Maybe I’ll feel better if I eat an entire pizza. Yeah, that seems like a good idea right now.

After eating an entire pizza: I should just drop out. I’m not cut out for academia. The only problem is, I don’t really have any marketable skills. Well, I can fix Macs. That counts for something. Maybe I should work for Apple again. That was the only job I was actually good at. Ugh. No, I can’t go back to the Genius Bar. Fuck.

Why do I keep saying “fuck” so much in my head? Maybe I have Tourette’s.

Did you really think someone was just going to hand things to you for showing up? Are you actually that naive? Well, yeah, maybe a little. It’s the problem with getting constant positive reinforcement since elementary school — you’ve been deluded into thinking that you’re so fucking smart that you deserve success just because you had a half-decent idea this one time.

I haven’t written anything good in the last two months. Maybe that’s my problem. Maybe no one takes me seriously because I haven’t published anything lately. Or at all. Fuck, I haven’t published anything. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I’m never going to get tenure.

I should update my CV. I should go on LinkedIn. I don’t even know how to use LinkedIn. What the fuck is the point of that site? I kind of want another pizza.

Maybe I should take a nap. I’d feel better after a nap. Actually, no, I’ll feel like I just slept for three hours with my contacts in, which will ensure that I get absolutely nothing done for the rest of the day. Which is kind of my problem. Why am I so profoundly unproductive all the time? It’s the fucking internet’s fault.

nature1188, leonlovesddr, and other legacies of my digital past

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 13:27:00 -0400

A few weeks ago, I made it a project one evening to log back into my long-dormant ICQ account. It isn’t because I feel like ICQ has anything in particular to offer to my instant messaging experience — I’ve stopped using the service ICQ turned into, AOL Instant Messenger — but instead as an exercise in what parts, if any, of my early digital identity I could actually regain access to in 2012.

ICQ turned out to be the easiest service of the night. A quick search for my first and last name in ICQ’s still-operational people directory turned up four results. Because ICQ UINs were issued sequentially, the lowest number was my earliest account: 1807000, which, apparently, is a hugely desirable number. I’d forgotten, of course, that lucrative 6- or 7-digit ICQ numbers used to be a huge industry in the heyday of pointless shit people paid for on the internet. (In retrospect, I’m surprised that my enterprising elementary school self didn’t try to sell my number back when I could have found someone stupid enough to pay for it.)

I’d also forgotten my password. The ICQ password reset process required me to log back into one of my early e-mail accounts, on Hotmail, which presented yet another hurdle because, of course, I’d also forgotten that password. Fortunately, my personality hasn’t changed very much since middle school, because my intuitive answers to my challenge-and-response security questions still worked (Q: “What is your favorite TV show that is no longer on the air?” A: Daria.) Along with 10,000 or so spam messages and a small handful of personal messages I hadn’t deleted (this was back in the days that e-mail storage limits were still relevant), I found the ICQ password reset e-mail and, a few clicks later, had access to an instant messaging service no one I know still uses.

I wasn’t so lucky with my absolute earliest e-mail account. My first AOL screen name, nature1188 (a riff on an elementary school friend’s nature385; evidently, we were both very into nature), still existed, but the password reset process required access to another long-gone address: nature1188@adelphia.net. And therein, the trail ended. Adelphia, South Florida’s first cable broadband provider, was acquired by Comcast after going bankrupt in 2002. And, according to Comcast, I missed the migration deadline for my Adelphia address some time in 2003.

There’s no telling what I might have unearthed if I had logged into my old AOL account. Most likely, as with Hotmail, it would have been a lot of spam, and possibly one or two hints of what I was up to on the internet in elementary school. And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of my various digital presences: old blogs, long forgotten or deleted (including my first LiveJournal account, leonlovesddr, later abbreviated to leon); forums I used to post on; now-defunct news sites like Plastic.com (which apparently closed up shop in 2011) where I used to lie about my age and post under the username Mok; and on and on.

Plenty of people have been preoccupied with these sorts of questions before. GOOD mused about the “eternal shame” of your first online handle, never pausing to wonder if those handles are still accessible or what actually came of them. The New York Times and the Atlantic have both mused about the “problem” of on- and offline death in the digital age, and how to deal with the trail of Facebook profiles and e-mail accounts that persist once we die. One of the biggest issues, both articles agree, is that we’re generating so much digital content that it’s hard to imagine future generations being able to sort through it. As the Times puts it,

Bit-based personal effects are different. Survivors may not be aware of the deceased’s full digital hoard, or they may not have the passwords to access the caches they do know about. They may be uncertain to the point of inaction about how to approach the problem at all. Any given e-mail account, for instance, can include communication as trivial as an “I’m running late” phone call or as thoughtful as a written letter — all jumbled together, by the hundreds or thousands.

The living aren’t exempt from these issues, either. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, in Delete (2009), writes about the humanistic problems of an information environment in which we’ve forgotten how to forget. Reputation and identity have become indelible, in a way that Mayer-Schönberger suggests they weren’t previously. The archival of blog posts and tweets and Facebook status updates creates a digital trail of personal information that short-circuits the human processes of forgetting and evolving. Maybe that’s true, although Mayer-Schönberger’s solutions — most significantly, an artificial system of information expiration after a period of time — is hardly an adequate response.

But what about all the information we don’t remember or can’t regain access to? As one of the first waves of so-called “digital natives,” most of my life is archived, in some form, online — essentially from birth, in a series of e-mail accounts and social network handles. So is it a problem that I can’t access the first 15 or so years? I don’t flatter myself to think that I will ever have a biographer interested in piecing together the life of Yoel Roth from my digital detritus, but as a point of personal interest, I’m slightly concerned that a significant chunk of my past is totally out of reach. Far from Mayer-Schönberger’s claim that, socially, we can’t forget, I’m confronted with the experience of being utterly unable to remember.

Trusted traveler, redux

Sun, 27 May 2012 02:04:00 -0400

Since my last post about the TSA’s Pre-Check program, it seems like most of the internet discovered that elite frequent flyers are being whisked through airport security. The LA Times ran a piece noting that the TSA passed 1 million passengers screened through Pre-Check in the program’s first eight months of operation (of the 1.8 million passengers screened daily at American airports). Even the New York Times chimed in, outing the not-so-secret way to short-circuit the Pre-Check roll-out process — namely, getting a Global Entry membership (like I did).

And, meanwhile, I did a fair amount of flying (to Boston, San Francisco, and, most recently, Fort Lauderdale), both with and without Pre-Check. I’d like to share two travel-related stories, and then point out a possible epistemological contradiction in my wholehearted embrace of Pre-Check as the savior of the modern travel experience.

Case 1: San Francisco to New York, aka “travel for the rest of us”

Flying business class carries some perks; namely, access to the expedited security line that, more than anything else, is faster because it contains people who actually know how to travel like human beings and are less likely than average to have squalling infants and collapsible strollers that require secondary and tertiary screenings. Nonetheless, the second I reached the backscatter x-ray machine in SFO’s Terminal 2, my “priority” experience ground to a complete halt.

I want to pause here and note that I’m by no means a tin-foil-hat Luddite conspiracy theorist. Nevertheless, there’s something I find inherently unsettling about the pornoscanners. Part of my concern is, obviously, for the privacy of my genitals. But, more to the point, I don’t think it’s reasonable to install machines in airports with largely unknown health effects and marginal security benefits and parade millions of travelers through them. So, since the scanners first started showing up, I’ve opted out, which entails standing around trying to look non-threatening while my laptop sits unattended on the other side of the metal detector, waiting for a male TSA employee to become available to feel me up.

Anyway, in SFO, the TSA employee working the priority line seemed more confused than anything else by my request to opt-out. As I stood to her right, watching her wave passengers into the x-ray machine, she looked at me and said, with a puzzled expression (as if she couldn’t believe that anyone would be so foolish as to object to the scanners), “There’s nothing wrong with the machine. No radiation, no nothing!”

Not quite.

A few minutes later, a male employee gave me the requisite pat-down (including touching what a TSA employee in Philadelphia later called my “groinal meat”) and I was on my way. The TSA confirmed, by leaving no part of my body un-patted-down, the same things they already learned from my Pre-Check profile: namely, that I’m not a terrorist. By contrast:

Case 2: New York to San Francisco, now with added stereotyping

The problem with having Pre-Check is that there’s no outward signs of it (other than the demographic properties that, I suspect, make you statistically more likely to be accepted into the Pre-Check program). So, upon presenting my boarding pass to an airport employee at JFK guarding the entrance to the Pre-Check and priority security lines, I was given a silent one-finger point to the security line for the hoi poloi a few yards over. “No, I have Pre-Check,” I insisted. The woman gave me a once-over and asked, “What, you? Pre-Check?” Yes, me, Pre-Check. And, after scanning my boarding pass, she confirmed that I wasn’t merely economy class cattle trying to bust into the walled garden of premium security and waved me through.

No more than 30 seconds later, I was on the other side of the metal detector, still wearing my shoes, picking up my fully-packed carry-on and walking away from the checkpoint.

It’s easy to argue that Pre-Check is the better of these two options; and, from the perspective of a traveler looking to get through security without being groped or having to totally disassemble my suitcase, it is. But there’s a slightly uncomfortable tension between my attitude towards Pre-Check and my intellectual predilections more generally.

When discussing airport security with my mother (who, for the record, is a huge proponent of the Israeli method: namely, racial profiling), I found myself arguing in favor of Pre-Check on the grounds that algorithms mining risk from vast quantities of personal information are better at identifying potential terrorists than even the best-trained humans. Things like my frequent flyer or employment history are reasonable indicators of how much of a security risk I might be, and those aren’t readily apparent to someone working a lengthy security line at an airport.

But isn’t this exactly the kind of logic that makes qualitatively-minded scholars, myself included, scream bloody murder? As Manovich (2011) (PDF) and boyd and Crawford (2011) (PDF) have pointed out (among many others), there are some glaring problems with the assumption that big data is capable of algorithmically deriving analytically useful or accurate representations of human phenomena. Less radically, it’s at the very least fair to say that big data methods rely on different epistemological approaches by writ of deploying a whole new class of data. As Manovich puts it,

Ethnographers and computer scientists have access to different kinds of data. Therefore they are likely to ask different questions, notice different patterns, and arrive at different insights. This does not mean that the new computer-captured “deep surface” of data is less “deep” than the data obtained through long-term personal contact. In terms of the sheer number of “data points” it is likely to be much deeper. However, many of these data points are quite different than the data points available to ethnographers.

And as governments have gotten into the big data game, the waters have become yet murkier. For one, as The Economist puts it, the task of wading through the relevant data sets to assess security risks has become nearly impossible. And the shining beacon of hope for air travel, Pre-Check, relies on a mix of big data (like the pages and pages of personal details I submitted with my Global Entry application) and salient bits of small data, like someone’s elite frequent flyer status or having an American Express Platinum Card. This mix is puzzling for a number of reasons; most significantly, that terrorists aren’t stupid, and that if a screening measure is calibrated around any predictable set of manipulable properties (like frequent flyer status), it becomes relatively easier to circumvent that measure.

In the case of airport security, it’s hard to know what approach is the best. Israeli airports represent, in a way, the most humanistic approach, relying on heuristics and intuition to discern meaningful trends in passenger behavior. (Andrew Sullivan has culled most of the interesting perspectives on this debate here.) Pre-Check nods in the direction of big data, but remains too selectively deployed to really gauge how effective its algorithms are at profiling large swaths of the American population.

Or you could always just take your shoes off, put your liquids in a bin by themselves, and embrace invasive security measures at their finest. In short: brute force, TSA-style.

Trusted traveler

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:42:00 -0400

A few weeks ago, I took a break from procrastinating by blogging and, instead, procrastinated by surrendering all my personal information to the Department of Homeland Security. As an American Airlines elite frequent flyer, Brett received an invitation to opt-in to the TSA’s Pre-Check “risk-based security initiative” — which, essentially, means that the Department of Homeland Security will take the radical step of allowing air travelers to keep most of their civil liberties, in exchange for divulging enough information for the DHS’s computers to ascertain that you’re not a terrorist. In practice, this means not having to remove your belt or shoes when passing through security.

While the frequent flyer opt-in process is random, you can short-circuit the procedure by being a member of Global Entry, an entirely separate program through Customs and Border Protection designed to speed up the process of going through passport control when entering the United States from abroad. And, conveniently, American Express will happily refund me the $100 Global Entry application fee — so, why not?

The initial application, which took me about half an hour, mostly was concerned with my employment and residence history. The employment history question is problematic because I’ve been a student since age 5, and the Global Entry process isn’t calibrated for people who intend never to leave academia. That said, I suspect that CBP isn’t particularly interested in where I went to middle school, so I got to make up some dates that provided the minimum five year continuous history while bridging the gaps between high school, college, grad school, and my four years at Apple.

At one point in the application, CBP asked me to identify any countries I had visited in the last five years. And herein the whole process started to show its age. Even as Global Entry and Pre-Check are designed to bring airport security and immigration into the 21st century by systematically and intelligently separating low-risk travelers from high-risk ones, the system is clearly built by recycling outdated bureaucratic routines. As in the case of the list of countries I could select for my travel history:

It would be funny that the USSR is still an option for a five-year travel history in 2012 if it weren’t so frightening that the IT behind this system is making the determination of whether or not I’m a low-risk traveler and therefore exempt from most airport security measures.

The in-person interview was similarly confusing. After waiting in a stark office in the international arrivals terminal at the Philadelphia airport for about ten minutes, a CBP employee ushered me to a back room, where he looked over my application, scanned my passports, and then, candidly, asked me what I was doing applying for Global Entry. Apparently, my age and employment as a grad student put me in a confusing — if not threatening — demographic category. My answer — “American Express gives me this as a benefit” — apparently was a sufficient justification, and in short order, my fingerprints were taken and I was hustled out of the office and back into the airport terminal. No questions about why I had changed addresses so frequently; no suspicions about my Israeli citizenship making me a Mossad agent.

A few weeks later, on my way back to Philadelphia from visiting my parents in Florida, I got the opportunity to actually use a Pre-Check lane in the Miami airport. The TSA employees guarding the priority security lanes seemed utterly confused by my presence: what would a disheveled 20-something be doing with Pre-Check? But, after they scanned my boarding pass, I was directed to the Pre-Check metal detector (much to the chagrin of the various American Airlines passengers taking off their shoes one lane over) and passed through security in a total of, at most, 30 seconds.

The real beauty of Pre-Check is that it exempts you not only from taking off your shoes and segregating your liquids, but also from the genital-photographing backscatter X-ray machines. The message here is clear: airport security is best served by intelligently identifying the risk level of particular passengers and screening them in accordance with their perceived risk, rather than subjecting everyone to time-consuming and invasive security procedures.

In practice, as someone with a Trusted Traveler number, this is hugely convenient. The long-run implication, though, is that the TSA subscribes to the same two-tiered logic as airlines more generally: the frequent-flying elite is a class with inherently greater rights than the air travel proletariat to which most of us belong. In principle, anyone can get a Global Entry membership; but, in practice, the process favors people with jobs that require them to travel frequently (or, in my case, people with American Express cards). The class dynamics are clear, and troubling. But it increasingly seems like this is the only realistic way forward.

Potentially evil therapists

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 11:52:00 -0400

Me: I just met a second candidate for the role of Yoel's Therapist. Everything was great, until he got to his billing strategy, which is utterly unsettling and frankly would cause me more stress than the things I'm seeking therapy for. In a nutshell: he charges $180 a session, bills my insurance out of network, receives $90 from them, and then asks me to "pay what I can" for the balance. The problem is, he keeps a running record of how much I owe him and "expects payment" of the remainder if my financial circumstances change dramatically. And given the form I signed today, which gives him the right to sue me for money he feels he's owed, this kind of seems like I'm racking up an infinite tab with no statute of limitations and that I have no control over. Am I totally wrong about how scary that is?
Ezra: So basically — you can pay what you can right now — but in the future you owe him the rest?
Me: That's what it sounds like.
Ezra: He is either really kind and genial or a vindictive son of a bitch, basically.

Computer literacy; or, I am too stupid to learn LaTeX

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 12:33:00 -0400

The Times ran an article yesterday suggesting that “computational thinking” (whatever that means) should be added to reading, writing, and arithmetic as the core skills that should be part of a complete education. The problem, it turns out, is that no one knows what that actually means:

There is little agreement within the field, however, about what exactly are the core elements of computational thinking. Nor is there agreement about how much programming students must do, if any, in order to understand it.

Coming from a family of engineers, it was taken for granted that, in college, I’d study something practical — like chemistry, physics, or computer science. When I went to Swarthmore (strike one) and decided to major in political science (strike two) with a minor in film and media studies (…and you’re out!), my parents still insisted that I take at least one computer science class, if only to see what I’d be missing.

My class was fairly code-heavy. From the first meeting on, we learned how to program in Python (a relatively standard and common language). And while I spent a good deal of the class reconfiguring the Linux desktop environment on my lab computer and looking at pictures of exotic animals on Wikipedia, by the end of the semester, I had under my belt all the basic principles of programming — loops, conditionals, object-oriented programming, recursion, graphics, and so on. I even put them to use creating, variously, programs that could “simulate a fire,” draw a house, and use genetic algorithms to evolve an image with vertical symmetry. Pretty cool.

This is all to say that I think the computer scientists are right when they say that people need to learn “computational thinking” from a young age. The epistemology of computer programming is applicable to way more than just the task of writing code. The problem is: what happens to all that knowledge once we no longer need to formally apply it? How durable is programming as a cognitive routine?

In my case, I discovered that my programming aptitude went out the window as soon as I set it aside for a few years to focus on more qualitatively-oriented work.

A few weeks ago, when I started thinking about how to make my writing more attractive, I turned to LaTeX as a way to both write more flexibly and turn that writing into some seriously aesthetically pleasing documents. The appeal of LaTeX is clear: as with Markdown (the markup language I use to write these blog posts), LaTeX separates form from function. Style is imposed after the fact, and the conventions of making your text “do things” (italicized letters, superscripts, footnotes, etc) aren’t dependent on how you choose to make those things look in post-production.

Unlike Markdown, which takes about ten seconds to learn, LaTeX is clearly a language from another decade. After downloading a 200MB PDF starter guide, along with a 2GB LaTeX for Mac distribution, I set about trying to create my first document. It wasn’t pretty:

\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper,oneside,draft]{article}

\begin{document}

\title{What can interpretation theory learn from Constitutional law?}
\author{Yoel Roth\\Annenberg School for Communication}
\maketitle

I want to begin...

What really got me, in the end, was having to use a combination of actual quotes (") and backticks (`) to enclose quotes in a way that LaTeX understands. Likewise with dashes, which have to be encoded in some totally arcane way (one dash for a hyphen, unless it’s a line break; two dashes for a dash, unless it’s three dashes, which only sometimes generates an even longer dash). The idea of writing in an environment free of the visual doodads that litter most modern word processing programs is appealing, but, seriously, this is 2012. A word processor — even one obsessed with universality — should be able to translate normal keyboard quotes into pretty smart-quotes.

Moreover, there’s a degree of cognitive dissonance involved with the notion of needing to compile your documents. This, perhaps, is where I’ve gotten rusty with the computer science style of thinking. Programming, generally, is based on two steps between impulse and outcome: translate impulse to code, and execute code to achieve outcome. An error could emerge at either step, thereby keeping you from getting your desired outcome. Writing, though, only has one step: translate impulse to outcome. Then, of course, you edit and revise that outcome; but there’s no intermediary syntactic step that could introduce new problems into the process of getting your ideas onto the screen. Most people, I’d guess, are unable to accept that documents should work like computer programs. And, in the end, that’s why I gave up on LaTeX.

I don’t know whether the problem is that I’m rusty with the logical style of programming, or if LaTeX is simply an out of date way to write. To be fair, the alternative — a WYSIWYG tool like Microsoft Word or (in my case) Apple’s Pages — isn’t always better. Document styles are painfully platform-dependent, and there’s a better chance something won’t work on another computer than that it will. But, seriously, why is no one investing the time in making tools to fix these problems? Surely, in 2012, we can do better than LaTeX on one hand, and the clusterfuck that is Microsoft Word on the other.

The absurd politics of defrienestration

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 09:01:00 -0400

Pretty much everyone is freaking out about the “discovery” that people are removing each other as friends on Facebook:

The percentage of people unfriending other Facebook members rose from 56 percent in 2009 to 63 percent in 2011. In gross terms, 158 million people were unfriended in 2009, and more than a half a billion in 2011. Experts predict the trend will only increase in coming years, and they see it as a potential problem for Facebook’s business model, which relies on leveraging information gained from a user’s profile and personal networks.

We have, first and foremost, a problem of terms. Not only can we not decide whether “defriend” or “unfriend” is the correct way to describe what’s going on, but neither really captures the absurdity of the situation. As an alternative, I propose “defrienestration,” with the snappy verb form, “defrienestrate.” Throwing one’s Facebook Friends out a window seems like an appropriate metaphor to capture the emotional gravitas of the occasion.

More to the point, I’m kind of perplexed as to why anyone is taking this stuff seriously. People have managed their social circles for as long as social circles have been a thing. Friendships begin and end, group boundaries shift as people move from place to place, and marriages and relationships can forge together (or break apart) groups in unexpected ways. None of this has ever been of serious concern to marketers — even word-of-mouth marketers — because it’s acknowledged as a part of how people interact with each other.

But there’s something intrinsically stupid in the mindset of social media marketing that leads people down the path of worrying about whether Facebook is doomed because people have started culling each other as friends. Social marketing has, in a sense, lost sight of the idea of a “market.” An undifferentiated mass of people who are tenuously connected to each other does not constitute a cohesive base for advertising any more than selecting 100 people at random from a train station would. That kind of broadly undifferentiated marketing is certainly one strategy: people riding the same Subway line (or who are gay and live in the same city and are connected on Facebook) probably have some things in common, but they’re not the things that intelligent social marketing ought to be concerned with.

Marketing aside, no one is really asking the human question here. Human networks aren’t new; but computer-mediated social networks are. In a sense, there has been a profound disequilibrium in how we manage the size and nature of our social networks since the advent of Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. danah boyd has written intelligently about this exact issue, and the recent resurgence of interest in Dunbar’s number suggests that we’re still uneasy about how many connections we can or should effectively manage in the digital age.

From where I’m standing, it seems like the uptick in the number of unfriendings or defriendings or defrienestrations or whatever in the last few years can be attributed, most straightforwardly, to people figuring out how to negotiate the human limits of a relatively new medium. Part of that has to do with Dunbar’s number-type analyses of how many connections we can keep straight in our brains; but another part of it is how many connections a social network’s interface allows us to comfortably juggle, given the limits of the human psyche.

The various iterative changes in the Facebook News Feed aside, the last five years haven’t seen a dramatic change in how our social connections are presented to us online. Slowly, in our own ways, we’re coming to terms with what we have. For some people, that means culling peripheral connections; for others, simply hiding them is enough. And there are, undoubtedly, people who are happy to maintain networks of several thousand Friends. We shouldn’t expect the metaphor of the digital Friend to map perfectly onto its meatspace equivalent, and we shouldn’t expect people to have already figured out how everything works. The point isn’t that a social media friendship bubble has suddenly burst, as the Wall Street Journal put it; it’s that it takes time for people to reach a human equilibrium with changing technologies.

Outgrowing the little black book

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 22:26:06 -0400

In the process of publicly shaming a West Hollywood restaurant for having broken WiFi (a goal I wholeheartedly endorse), Ezra Butler recently gave the internet some of the more interesting sexual statistics this side of OkTrends. The Fucking Statistics, as he calls them, are based on (anonymized) data gathered from the Little Black Book iPhone application. Among the insights gleaned from mankind’s never-ending need to confide sexual secrets in technology are:

The most frequent day Little Black Book users have sex is Saturday.
More people than you’d expect are having sex in alleys behind bars, which, more than anything else, seems uncomfortable.
23 percent of Little Black Book users are dissatisfied with the sexual encounters they record in the app.
People are, generally speaking, horny.

As is the case with the various infographics OkCupid churns out from time to time, there are a handful of methodological problems. The most significant one is that the population of Little Black Book users in no sense corresponds with the general population of people having sex. As someone who generally keeps abreast of interesting new iPhone applications, I’d never even heard of LBB until Ezra’s article. The sample size is small — only about 2000 hook-ups; but, more than that, it’s a tiny slice of a very particular population: people who are able and willing to document their various sexual encounters on a smartphone application.

A few years ago, Bedpost made the rounds as the latest in a series of products designed to track your sex life. As Safari reminded me when I opened the site tonight, I had (and, I guess, still have) an account. It’s unclear what the purpose of a service like Bedpost actually is. The site bills itself as a way to generate “a rolling history of your sex life on which to reflect,” but stops short of explaining how people are meant to deploy the data the Bedpost service has to offer. Knowing more about the numeric nature of our sex life is, presumably, valuable prima facie.

Foucault tells us, in The History of Sexuality, that contemporary man did not invent the idea of speaking frankly and publicly about sex. The supposed prudishness of the Victorians masked a fundamental prurience. And, more to the point, in true economist fashion, John Maynard Keynes kept rather detailed diaries of the ins and outs of his sex life. Talking about sex — and quantifying that talk — is noting new.

But we have, in important ways, renegotiated how we think of and manage our sex lives through the use of technology. In interesting and problematic ways, we’ve digitized the gay bar with Manhunt, Grindr, and their ilk. With Craigslist personals, we’ve made the process of finding a sexual partner as close to anonymous and transactional as possible. (The link for “men seeking men” is, after all, only a few pixels away from used cars, apartments for rent, and a listing of part-time jobs.) And, with Bedpost and Little Black Book, we’re deploying technology to obviate the need to work to remember the people we have sex with. None of these phenomena are unprecedented; but, together, they constitute a real change in how sex works in American society.

Little Black Book is designed to make the task of managing one’s sexual partners easier. The names of former hook-ups no longer need to be interspersed with one’s “real” contacts in an address book. The app advertises that its users can rate, categorize, and otherwise provide metadata for their various encounters, all of which is hidden behind a numeric passcode.

The message is a little confused. On one hand, Little Black Book seems to suggest that, as a society, we’ve reached a point where we want to confide our intimate information to technology — and that our complicated sex lives require us to be diligent in managing that information. But, by locking everything behind a passcode — by maintaining the metaphor of the discreet “little black book” — we still insist that these data are things to hide. We remain, as Foucault wrote about the Victorians, paradoxically repressed and bursting at the seams with the incitement to publicly reveal our sexual secrets.

I am too stupid to bake bread

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:53:38 -0400

When I launched this incarnation of my blog, I promised myself that I would try to keep things “more professional.” And, in a relative sense, I have: the quantity of OkCupid-overthinking taking place on my blog has decreased dramatically, given I spend most of my evenings watching Battlestar Galactica for the millionth time on Netflix with the boy. We even bought a KitchenAid stand mixer together, which, for gays, is kind of a big deal.

Anyway, Brett is out of town for the week, which has left me with a tremendous amount of free time (that I’m clearly not going to fill with work). So, I’m baking. A lot. Baking has always been one of my hobbies, and is typically a great form of stress relief. The fact that everything is measured precisely and that, usually, I end up with delicious and aesthetically pleasing baked goods scratches my various obsessive-compulsive itches.

Tonight, I decided to bake pita bread. Despite never having made bread from scratch before and being kind of freaked out by the whole idea of yeast, I found a solid-looking recipe and was, broadly, optimistic about the whole process.

Bread recipes use all sorts of phrases like “forms a ball” and “smooth and elastic” to describe the state your dough needs to be in when it’s done kneading. The phrases seem obvious enough on their own, so no one really bothers to define what “smooth and elastic” means in this context. By my expectations and a not altogether unreasonable interpretation of the words, if I did things right, the dough should have coalesced into something more or less spherical, be springy to the touch, and appear smooth. After twenty minutes of kneading in the mixer, my dough looked absolutely nothing like a ball. Ten minutes after that, nothing had changed. And ten minutes after that.

Presently, I have a Pyrex bowl full of kind of sad looking dough sitting across from me on the counter, “rising.” I put “rising” in scare quotes because it’s done nothing of the sort in the two hours since I managed to extract it from the bowl of the mixer. The blob (née ball) of dough should have doubled in volume by now, though it seems to have just spread out in a rather defeated-looking way. The sleek, professional dough in the Crepes of Wrath photo is nowhere to be found.

Not only am I now stuck with a huge, sticky mess, but I also, for the sake of my pride, need to figure out where I went so wrong. The problem is, I don’t even know where to begin. Making bread successfully involves deploying terms like “glutens” in a scientifically-sophisticated way and thinking about how the humidity will affect the process. Despite nearly 18 years of education to date, I can’t do anything of the sort. No one prepares you for these kinds of real-world problems. Even with the assistance of a $350 stand mixer, I am utterly helpless when it comes to successfully making some fucking bread.

In the end, it’s just further evidence that, in the event of a post-apocalyptic resource shortage, I fully expect to be eaten first. I have the fewest useful skills.

The addiction question

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:23:15 -0400

Last week, my mother was in the unfortunate position of needing to get a new cell phone. I found this out in the form of an e-mail from her asking for advice on selecting a phone with “no internet, no SMS, nothing” — in other words, a bona fide dumbphone (though, as I told her, it’s simply impossible to find a phone in 2012 that doesn’t support SMS; even Jitterbug, the only slightly condescending cell phone service for the elderly, is on board with texting).

There are a lot of really good reasons not to get a dumbphone right now, including the fact that AT&T is in the process of shutting down its 2G network, which most of those phones still use. Also, setting aside Carrie Bradshaw-esque posturing about how those newfangled smart telephones are really hard to use, in most instances, dumbphones are at least as challenging to operate as their iOS or Android counterparts. No one is investing a great deal of time in creating a fantastic user experience for dumbphones anymore, because it’s obviously a dying market. Every non-smartphone I’ve used since the release of the iPhone feels increasingly like a Zach Morris phone.

Anyway, in the process of persuading my mother to get an iPhone, she raised the objection that she’s “addicted” to the internet as it is, and that getting an iPhone will only exacerbate that.

My mother has been deploying the term “addiction” in reference to the internet for years, ever since that fateful 2005 New York Times article about treatment centers for internet addiction. Back in my EverQuest (and, later, World of Warcraft) playing days, she was particularly vocal in insisting that spending that amount of time immersed in a video game world de facto constituted addiction.

The problem with addiction as a diagnostic category, writes Cyborgology, is that it’s based on a set of problematic assumptions about how the internet is uniquely pathological as a communication technology:

If we understand the internet as an integral part of social life, however, then a diagnosis of IA makes little sense. If we understand the internet as a means of sociality, a venue for business communications, an outlet for creativity, a source of news gathering and a space of recreation, then indeed, an addiction to internet technologies would be an addiction everyday life.

Maybe there is something pathological in some of the ways we use the internet. Confronted with last week’s release of Sparrow for iPhone, by far the best mobile e-mail experience on the market today, I found myself unable to use the app because it currently lacks push notifications. My idea of how e-mail works requires instant notification that I have new messages, whether or not those messages are important or urgent. (Most of the time, they’re not.)

The pathology there, if there is one, isn’t addiction — it’s impatience. And if we’ve seen any kind of large-scale change in how people interface with communication technologies with the rise of smartphones and always-on internet connections, it’s the attitudinal shift to being unwilling to wait for communication to happen.

And we’ve seen this shift happen before. The term “snail mail” didn’t emerge as an opposition to the instantaneous pace of e-mail — it was first used in 1840, to contrast postal mail to the newfangled telegraph. The need for speed in communication is not a new development, and our distrust of that need — our impulse to pathologize it — has emerged at every turn.

The prospective student ritual

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 11:13:00 -0400

This past week bore witness to the annual Annenberg prospective student visit. Through a combination of being busy and intermittently antisocial, I managed to meet a grand total of two admitted students: namely, the two who were sitting at my table at the meet-the-grad-students lunch, an hour-long affair wherein my only function was to serve as an object for ridicule by my advisor, a hazing ritual I gather is a customary way of showing the admitted students that, at Annenberg, we’re so wacky and fun that even our advisors can make fun of us — in our presence, no less!

There’s definitely an element of performance involved in the whole admitted student visit process. My own travels as an admitted grad student included, variously: baking a bunch of vegan coconut-lime cupcakes; discovering that my old blog had been widely read by both the faculty involved in admitting me and the grad students I met; collecting a rather shocking quantity of free stuff from different schools, most of which I still use on a daily basis; and running into someone — at my current school, actually — who I had gone on a singularly unsuccessful date with who was then forced to be almost cloyingly nice to me because of my liminal status as a prospective student.

Moreover, even as everyone is making an effort to seem “cool” and “honest” and “down-to-earth” and “helpful” and “approachable” and whatever other buzzwords the people in charge of admissions wish the grad students would be during the prospective student visit, there’s a sense in which we’re strictly prohibited from being honest about the realities of grad school. I have enough faith in the admissions process to believe that, in grad school, there are no mistakes; but I’m evidence that the admissions process occasionally results in totally bizarre choices. No one at UPenn Annenberg really does what I do, my advisor included, and the only obvious gender/sexuality-focused faculty member left last semester. While I still think I made the correct decision in electing to forge my own path, it’s harder than I thought it would be, and I genuinely wish more people would have told me that.

Instead, we talk about “resources” and “community” and “freedom,” which, let’s face it, are the same fucking words everyone uses at every grad school to do their part in persuading the prospective students, even as those words, fundamentally, do not mean anything. Meanwhile, most of the admitted students are scared shitless and just want all the forced socialization to stop for like fifteen minutes so they can get their head in order and even figure out what are the right questions to ask.

It’s brutal. But, in the end, it’s effective. Not really because the information you gather during the visit is, most of the time, all that important; rather, by virtue of being so profoundly confused, it gets easier to separate figure from ground and begin to understand what life at a given school would be like. And, unexpectedly, you make a decision.

The part no one prepares you for is when, a year later, you’re still questioning that choice. All part of the process, I guess.

"What is it like to be a bat?" redux

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:14:00 -0400

"What is it like to be a bat?" redux:

Science is one step closer to resolving the mind-body problem once and for all, at least for birds.

A study in the Biophysical Journal with the catchy title “A new type of radical-pair-based model for magnetoreception”¹ suggests that some types of birds can actually see a compass as a form of magnetic guidance:

According to the new model, when a photon of light from the Sun is absorbed by a special molecule in the bird’s eye, it can cause an electron to be kicked from its normal state into an alternative location a few nanometres away. Until the electron eventually relaxes back, it creates an ‘electric dipole field’ which can augment the bird’s vision - for example altering colours or brightness.

Crucially, the alignment of the molecule compared to the Earth’s magnetic field controls the time it takes for the electron to relax back, and so controls the strength of the effect on the bird’s vision.

There are many such molecules spread throughout the eye, with different orientations. So from the patterns on top of its vision, and the change of these patterns as it moves its head, the bird learns about the direction of Earth’s magnetic field.

Neato.

Philosophy has been grappling with this one for a while now. Thomas Nagel’s classic “What is it like to be a bat?” engages with the problem directly:

Bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat: We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.²

In other words, it should be impossible for us to suggest that we know anything about what it’s really like to be a bat. Or, for that matter, a European Robin.

But the form of the heads-up display is something we’re beginning to become accustomed to as an actual part of human experience. Neuromancer — and, more aptly, Snow Crash — have engaged with the question of what it would actually be like to move between these sorts of interfaces. The tentative steps we’re taking towards augmented reality with smartphone applications, however awkward and clumsy they might presently be, suggest that, despite the colossal failure of 90s attempts at “virtual reality,” people are still taking this whole project seriously.

Which brings us back around to the metaphysics of asking what it’s like to be a European Robin. The more accustomed we become to pervasive interfaces — the marginalia of HDTV news tickers and sidebars; the passive notifications of Growl and the Dashboard; the possibility of augmented reality and interpolating meatspace and cyberspace — the more it looks like we as a species might have to revisit Thomas Nagel. Because it’s no longer totally outside of the realm of possibility that we perceive, based on first-hand sensory experience, what it’s like to be a bat.

Stoneham, A.M., E.M. Gauger, K. Porfyrakis, S.C. Benjamin, and B.W. Lovett (2012). “A new type of radical-pair-based model for magnetoreception,” Biophysical Journal 102:5 (961-968). ↩
Nagel, T. (1974). “What is it like to be a bat?” Philosophical Review 83:4 (435-450). ↩

Advice given to me on the occasion of my first office NCAA tournament pool

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:23:54 -0400

One of my well-intentioned classmates sent out a NCAA tournament bracket to all the Annenberg first-year PhD students. My first reaction — “Wait, NCAA is the basketball one, right?” — was followed by the sinking feeling that despite not knowing jack shit about college basketball, I’m obligated to fork over $10 and participate in this office pool or I run the risk of being labeled a Poor Sport.

When I expressed some confusion at the whole prospect, I was offered the following pieces of advice on how to successfully complete a tournament bracket:

Read: B.T. West (2006), “A simple and flexible rating method for predicting success in the NCAA basketball tournament,” from the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports.
Pick teams based on their “regular season” performance.
Pick teams randomly.
Pick teams by shamanic ritual.
Pick teams by best uniform.
Pick teams by most appealing school colors.
Pick teams by favorite mascot.
Pick teams by which school would win if their mascots fought each other.
Pick teams by the lyrical sound of the school’s name.

Suggestions of other semi-arbitrary selection criteria would be appreciated. Because, even though I haven’t watched a full basketball game since I was 10 years old and probably couldn’t outline any of the rules other than “a ball and hoop are involved,” I’ve decided that I’m going to win this shit.

Networked intuition

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:58:00 -0400

An acquaintance I’m connected to on Facebook posted the following the other week as preparation for a social-networking-themed standup comedy routine:

If we only have two mutual friends, you’re probably not interesting and you are definitely not gay.

At the time of writing, this person and I had exactly two friends in common. Which, given I’m gay, calls into question his whole thesis. When I raised this objection, he (tactfully) skipped over the obvious response (namely, “Well, you’re not interesting, which means I’m at least half-right”) and offered,

Yoel, you went to Swarthmore i.e. the status quo will never be able to be applied to you.

Okay, fair enough.

There’s more depth to his argument than simply being the punchline of a joke. The identity-by-mutual-friends hypothesis is one of the central tenets of social media (and, particularly, of targeted advertising using social media). You can figure out a lot about a person by systematically tracking who they know, and mapping out how clusters of people correspond with general characteristics. This kind of network-informed inference takes place around us all the time, and is probably why Facebook shows me a lot of gay-targeted advertising despite the fact that I no longer publicly list my sexual orientation on my profile.

More generally, we’ve reached a point as a society where these kinds of inferences take place automatically and largely unconsciously. We tacitly ascribe value to metrics like the number of mutual friends we have with someone, on the basis that our existing pool of connections is somehow revealing about the identity of our future connections. And this all happens instantly and intuitively.

But, as was the case with me, the logic breaks down sometimes. Despite having around 700 Facebook connections (well over Dunbar’s number), my connections apparently aren’t the right ones to link me to the Philadelphia gay community. I can pretty easily identify a few clusters of people who show up in my list of Facebook connections: South Florida Apple employees, Philadelphia area Apple employees, Swarthmore students, people who grew up in Palm Beach County in the 90s, and Annenberg doctoral students, to name a handful. But while those groups tell a lot about where I came from and what work I’ve done, they’re not revealing about my identity in a particularly human-readable way. A sophisticated data-mining operation could probably still figure out a lot about me, but my social network doesn’t map onto groups like “gay men in Philadelphia” particularly readily.

Or, put another way: based on my various tracking cookies, Google is convinced that I’m a middle-aged woman. I can only imagine what my list of Facebook connections says about me.

Form and function

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 13:35:12 -0400

As part of a regime of quasi-productive procrastination intended to put off writing an article about linguistic history and Constitutional law that’s been in the works for a little while, I decided to devote some time this spring break to thinking about the paratextual form of my writing.

Most student writing — or, I’d wager, unpublished academic writing generally — is painfully ugly. My own work is no exception: almost everything I’ve written since high school has been in 12-point, single-spaced Times. And it’s never really been a problem. While my college professors were sometimes persnickety about things like citation style, none of them ever expressed an interest in the appearance of a paper beyond, “Use a 12-point font, double-spaced. No more than 15 pages.” Their message was clear enough: We are concerned with what you write, not how you write it.

Regardless, over time I’ve developed a pretty consistent style for my papers. I’ve never had a professor comment that my paper was a stand-out because of its typography or elegant management of headings, but I like to think that, even on a subconscious level, they appreciate it. And, more to the point, if I like looking at my own work, I’m more likely to actually work on it.

My latest document style brought a switch to the Gentium typeface and better management of my own revision process (through easily revertible highlighting of draft changes). I also, finally, sat down and codified all my paragraph styles in Pages, enabling me to format blocks of text with one click. I like to think that the product is reasonably attractive:

Even as I’m pleased with the outcome, I’m haunted by the thought that this is all just a tremendous waste of time. The number of people who routinely see my writing as I format it — rather than how a journal formats it — can be counted on, at most, two hands. What, in the end, is the point?

How (not) to sell electronics online

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 11:00:05 -0500

As was probably clear from my last iPad-related post, I preordered the new iPad as soon as the Apple Store website became stable enough to actually take my money.¹

This, of course, leaves me with a now-obsolete iPad 2 and nothing to do with it. The issue of how to profitably sell off old Apple products is written about pretty extensively on various tech blogs whenever a new gadget is announced, but the process is still, without a doubt, unpleasant. The sites that offer to buy your product outright — Gazelle, for example — offer prices that are, frankly, insulting; $265 for a mint condition 32GB 3G iPad 2 in the original box is ridiculous. eBay, Craigslist and the like are potentially more lucrative, but involve dealing with the less savory (read: bargain-hunting) elements of humanity more directly.

After an unsuccessful first attempt at eBay — the buyer backed out at the last second, claiming that she had accidentally bid on the wrong item — I tried listing my iPad on Craigslist. Which resulted in someone offering to trade me a pomeranian puppy for my iPad:

Needless to say, I didn’t take her up on the offer. But I’m increasingly feeling like I’m going to be stuck selling my iPad at a bargain-basement price, if only to avoid the indignity of having strangers offer me cuddly animals in exchange for consumer electronics.

In other news, is anyone interested in buying an iPad?

Relatedly, I’m convinced that the server “problems” on the Apple website when preorders for a new product go live are intentional. Manufacturing scarcity and drumming up buzz are classic Apple marketing techniques; and what better way to make early adopters feel like they really, really want a new product than frustrate them with an hour or two of a crashing website? ↩

"Books on paper fight analog distractions"

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:00:05 -0500

"Books on paper fight analog distractions":

It’s The Atlantic versus The New York Times in what would have to be the most contrived debate of all time.

First volley from the Times, on why people are too stupid and/or easily distractible to actually read books on tablets:

Can you concentrate on Flaubert when Facebook is only a swipe away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy while Twitter beckons?

The Atlantic fires back with:

People who read books on paper are realizing that while they really want to be reading Dostoyevsky, the real world around them is pretty distracting with all of its opportunities for interacting with people, buying things in stores, and drinking coffee.

Snap. I love it when effete New England liberals get bitchy with each other.

But there’s a real issue somewhere in here. I started grad school with the commitment to be paperless, to the greatest extent possible. Academics, it turns out, use a huge amount of paper, when given free printing. In November 2011, for example, the relatively small pool of 174 people using the Annenberg printers churned out 213,243 pages — or, on average, 1,178 pages per person. In a single month. The median number of pages was 810. This is insane.

So, in an effort to kill fewer trees (and to keep myself as organized as possible in preparation for comprehensive exams in my third year), I bought an iPad with the intention of using it as my primary reading and annotation tool. And, by and large, I’ve been successful: Almost all of the printing I’ve done has been either to submit assignments or as part of my research fellowship (that is to say, printing things for other people). In November 2011, I printed a grand total of 29 pages, or about 2 percent of the school-wide average.

This isn’t to say that using an iPad for academic reading is always easy. Having spent at least $50 on various PDF reading/annotation applications, I’ve found that none of them are adequate, especially if you spend a lot of time reading scanned documents. The best I’ve found — a beta version of the PDF Highlighter app I’ve been fortunate enough to test for the last few months — is only okay. Marking up text is still clumsy, and in most instances, slower than it would have been for me to write margin notes on a print copy. Interface shortcomings, ultimately, make a fairly simple task into a cumbersome one.

There is one killer feature of PDF Highlighter that sets it apart from its competition: the ability to pull out your highlights and annotations and display only those portions of the text. The ability to quickly scan only my annotations is great when, for instance, I’m in class and have completely forgotten what a particular article was about.

The fact that there’s only one app that implemented this feature, and that it does so in a fairly clumsy way, indicates that, at the end of the day, no one is investing the time or effort in making serious tools for academics who want to leverage technology to change how they work. Applications like Papers and Scrivener each approach separate parts of the academic process — cataloging content and writing, respectively — but there’s no unified workflow. There’s no magic bullet of organizing, reading, annotating, and writing.

At the end of the day, it’s unlikely that I’ll make the switch back to analog reading; books are expensive, and having my entire library as searchable PDFs is invaluable. But where the Times gets it right is that, right now, the electronic reading process “offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.” The problem is that those distractions are, in my case, an essential part of the reading process itself.

Technological disappointment

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:28:00 -0500

It’s been less than 24 hours since the new iPad was announced, and everyone’s already disappointed. Unsurprisingly, this is the same reaction people have had to every other iPad announcement (not to mention the iPhone 4S), which makes me believe that being disappointed about Apple’s product announcements has absolutely nothing to do with the actual hardware being released and everything to do with the irrational psychological routines people go through when considering new technology.

One view is that the new iPad somehow lacks the “aura” of more successful elements of the Apple brand, including previous iPads.

In an ideal Apple-based technological experience, the mediating device disappears from consciousness, allowing you to concentrate on what you’re doing, rather than the thing you’re doing it with. … But such analyses leave out the powerful effect of the brand that surrounds those moments of “flow.” The iPad, like so many Apple innovations, is a potent and almost magical object in terms of the self-identifications it provides, and in off-screen moments I am always highly conscious of being an iPad user.

There’s no way to refute that argument. Feeling let down by a brand’s development is inherently individual — and, more to the point, internal. It’s hard to know what technologies will resonate in that almost transcendent way. And, despite the undeniable panache with which Tim Cook has led Apple since the death of Steve Jobs, it’s fair to say that most people seem convinced that the je ne sais quoi that made Apple so special has vanished, possibly forever.

But, both pragmatically and philosophically, I don’t think Apple could or should have released a radically different iPad. Realistically, what could have made the iPad 2 better, other than the changes that Apple in fact included in the new iPad? Changing the form factor or including a handful of new doodads simply for the sake of making changes wouldn’t make a better product — just a different one.

More to the point, making hardware changes where they don’t actually improve the experience of using an Apple product runs contrary to the philosophy of restraint and refinement that, to me, is the defining characteristic of Apple as Steve Jobs created it. It’s harder for a company to make subtle tweaks in an existing product and be confident that it’s still the best in the industry than it is to release a constant deluge of new hardware in the hopes that something isn’t totally awful. (Android phone manufacturers, I’m looking at you.)

The beauty of an innovative company like Apple is that it’s genuinely difficult to predict what will come next. With or without Steve Jobs, though, I’m confident that when Apple radically alters the iPhone or iPad or Mac, it won’t simply be because people expect it to; it’ll be because Apple has found a way to improve upon an already transformative experience.

"Wireless fundamentals"

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 23:10:00 -0500

"Wireless fundamentals":

After installing the iOS 5.1 update tonight, my AT&T iPhone 4S indicated that I should start thinking of it as a 4G device. This is nothing new — AT&T has been lobbying Apple to call its HSPA+ network “4G” for a while now — but it is a sign that their campaign of disingenuous marketing is gaining traction.

There are two fundamental problems:

First, most people have no idea how cell phone networks actually work. The Economist does a reasonable job explaining the basics of the technology in the above piece, but it still leaves a significant gap between what most people know and what’s needed to dissect the marketing mumbo-jumbo most carriers engage in. Talking competently about cell phone service requires juggling a dozen acronyms like EV-DO, UMTS, LTE, or DC-HSDPA (a new one from today’s iPad announcement that even I had never heard before). This is profoundly stupid.

More significantly, though, there’s the problem of deliberate misinformation. Between AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, the distinction between 3G (HSPA/EV-DO), quasi-“4G” (HSPA+), and actual 4G (LTE) has been sufficiently blurred that no one’s quite sure what’s what anymore. AT&T and Verizon each, to some extent legitimately, tout having the nation’s largest 4G network — even as neither admits that they’re using totally different definitions of 4G. Worse yet, T-Mobile’s been calling its HSPA+ network “4G” for years and hasn’t even attempted a significant LTE roll-out. And Sprint’s been touting the dead-end WiMax standard as its own version of 4G, bringing yet another obscure technology into the mix.

This word salad is deliberate. Cell phone carriers can profit if they can convince consumers that they’re getting something newer, better, and faster, whether or not their network’s technology is, in fact, newer, better, or faster.

The difference now is that Apple has become complicit in the act. The iPhone 4S never was and never will be a 4G phone. The fact that my phone switched from saying “3G” to “4G” in the top bar won’t make it drop fewer calls in my apartment, nor will it improve data speeds. It also, to be clear, doesn’t make it a better phone than the boy’s Verizon iPhone sitting on the table next to me. The switch is misleading and manipulative, and it both capitalizes on and reinforces consumer ignorance to sell AT&T’s service. As a company that’s always at least made cursory efforts at consumer education, Apple should be ashamed to be party to this whole mess.