the tweney review

Content management system. n. A device for moving information from one computer to another computer by means of human manual labor.

(My current working definition.)

Damn you, Google. As if my email addiction weren’t bad enough already, you have to go and create Google Mobile, a Java app for my cellphone that lets me read my Gmail messages, even on my crappy but stylish Razr V3. Message threading, easy scanning, and most importantly, quick message deletion–all the features I look for in a mail client are there. Too bad the app crashes my phone almost daily, and has a hard time hanging on to a data connection when I’m using it on the train, and is probably running me up a fortune in data transfer charges from Cingular. I just can’t help returning to it time and again, like a junkie returning for a fix of smack even though his needles are rusty and the junk is mixed with too much rat poison.

That’s what my inbox contained on my first day of work at Wired News. My inbox had been open for less than 2 weeks prior to my start date, so that represents about 10 days’ worth of mail, of which only one message was directed at me specifically (that I know of — I didn’t read them all). I’ve never worked in an environment where I received so much mail: story pitches, press releases, feedback on published stories, subscription requests, spam. Needless to say, my approach to email will be changing somewhat. I’ll no longer be responding to every story idea, or even most. Here’s how I’m dealing with email now:

• If something is important, relevant, and requires my response, I’ll respond quickly.
• If you are initiating an email conversation (ie sending a story idea, pitch, press release, or invitation) and you don’t hear back from me in a day or two, you can assume I’m not interested.
• If we’ve been in conversation and you don’t hear back from me, I probably overlooked, lost, or forgot about your message. Give me a couple days and then, if it’s still important, send me another message.

Wondering how to reach me, by email, phone, or snail? Here’s my contact info.

Someone has made a documentary about Helvetica. Yes, the font. In its honor they’re holding a haiku contest. Two of my favorite things — haiku and fonts — wrapped up in a third favorite thing — a contest. Ooh! I can hardly contain myself.

Helvetica documentary world premier haiku contest

OK, forgive the cheesy 80’s TV show reference, but I couldn’t resist using it to announce that not one, but two of the online events I produced while at PC Magazine have won FAME awards from Folio Magazine. As the announcement states, “10 gold winners were chosen from more than 150 entries from consumer, b-to-b, association, and city and regional magazines that have created innovative, revenue-generating and brand-building events” in 2007. PCMagCast walked away with one gold award, for best online event (for the August 2006 Virtual Tradeshow on Security & Mobility we produced) and one bronze, in the same category, for the “How to Select and Set up an HDTV” event from last November. These awards should be a great kickoff for PCMagCast’s second year. And they’re a testament to the hard work and talent of the PCMagCast team I (sadly) left behind last week.

UPDATE: Here’s a quote from Jason Young, president of the consumer and small business division of Ziff Davis: “PCMagCasts have quickly become one of Ziff Davis’s most successful initiatives.” PC Magazine’s PCMagCasts Win Two Folio: FAME Awards for Best Online Events

I started a new job this week, as business editor at Wired News, the online arm of Wired magazine. I couldn’t be more thrilled about this new assignment. I’ll be responsible for the web site’s business and gadgets coverage, including overseeing the blogs Gadget Lab and Epicenter.

Wired News doesn’t really have any business coverage per se yet, so I have some scope to define that beat. The way I see it, Wired already covers the essentials of business — innovation, smart people, trends in infotech, biotech, nanotech, space — and it’s simply my job to continue and expand that mission. So you won’t see us trying to clone Business Week’s, or CNet’s biz tech coverage — instead, we’ll be pursuing business coverage in a uniquely Wired way. The front line of that coverage will be the Epicenter blog.

And, of course, there’s the gadgets–I get to play with and write about lots of toys again. As an added bonus, I get to do this with some of my buddies from Mobile PC, including Wired’s products editor Mark McClusky, Danny Dumas, and Chris Imlay.
Wired’s parent, Conde Nast, is in the process of launching a new business magazine called Portfolio. I’m not involved with that at all and I know nothing about it. But this article from last week nicely summarizes why I’m psyched to be doing business news for Wired:

Why Wired is (already) the best biz magazine

One way to make science more interesting is to make it more relevant. Rocket scientists and astrophysicists have gotten pretty good at this lately: For instance, when they land a spacecraft on Mars they toss off a carefully crafted folksy analogy, such as “it’s like hitting the back of someone’s head in Los Angeles with a spitwad launched in San Francisco.”

Another way to grab people’s attention is to make it more exciting. Wired Science suggests, following Nature’s editor, that more scientists and science writers should write science fiction:

…here’s a good way to bring people back into the fold of scientificism and away from what Sagan rightly derided as The Demon-Haunted World: Build good science into a ripping yarn full of ray guns and bug-eyed monsters.

This is roughly what the first generation of great science fiction writers, led by Asimov and Clarke, were doing. Both of these writers started out with very solid, hard-science backgrounds and then spun their knowledge of cutting-edge science into yarns full of rayguns and monsters. For them, the “science” in science fiction was preeminent, and for writers like these, I suspect a major role of science fiction was the popularization of science itself. (That, plus having fun.)

Now, some fifty years later (or eighty, depending on when you’re counting from), the most successful SF writers are anchored less in science, and more in social commentary of one sort or another. Whether it’s Cory Doctorow railing against DRM and extolling nerd culture, or Neal Stephenson exploring the ramifications of cryptography, or David Mitchell (author of the amazing Cloud Atlas) using a science fiction-like framework to explore the ways in which history is shot through with repetition, distortion, and cruelty–all of these writers are not centering their work on science per se. Or if they are using science, it’s psychology, sociology, economics — the soft sciences, not the physics and rocketry that characterized mid 20th century SF.

Time for a change? Not really. I love these writers’ works. But there is something to be said for popularizing science more effectively, and that is perhaps the job of a new crop of science fiction writers.

On a related note, a recent NPR science story had an element I’d never heard before in science journalism. The interviewer was talking to a scientist about how his research had shown absolutely no health benefits to eating raw garlic. The scientist admitted he was “crushed” by the results, because he really wanted some confirmation of this popular and likeable belief. Hey, that’s cool! It’s not often that scientists admit to having some personal stake in their research. The admission can be dangerous, if it suggests bias. It can also be very effective, because it shows that science–even the hardest of science–is done by humans.

Some librarian got her knickers in a twist about the word “scrotum” appearing in the latest Newbery award-winning children’s novel:

“The Higher Power of Lucky” is the story of a 10-year-old girl in rural California and her quest for “Higher Power.” The opening chapter includes a passage about a man “who had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked ‘62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.”

Librarians have been debating whether “scrotum” was an appropriate word for young readers, especially from a book with the Newbery seal.

Librarians Debate Award-Winning Novel

What’s funny is that people were not shocked by the appearance, in a children’s book, of a passage about a man drinking half a gallon of rum while listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his Cadillac. Instead, they are shocked by the very last word.

So I propose a challenge. Try writing a really shocking sentence that could appear in a children’s book, and cap it off with an ordinary English word, but do it in such a way that ignorant people will get outraged about the final word and completely ignore the sentence preceding it.

Some examples to get you started:

“My kid sister Veronica used to hang out by the train tracks, letting the hoboes feel her up in exchange for swigs of whiskey from their canteens, but stopped after one of them died of angina.”

“I spent the morning of my junior high school graduation binging on Ho-Hos and puking them back up by sticking my finger down my throat and tickling my uvula.”

“My fifth grade teacher, Mr. Festerhazen, was a drunk, couldn’t spell, taught Creationism in class, and when it came to giving out grades, he was really niggardly.”

I’m sure you can do better. In fact, let’s make this a contest. Post your examples in the comments here. I’ll give a copy of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator — a rollicking, entertaining, flawed, and quite politically incorrect sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — to the best entry posted here before midnight on February 28, 2007. As a bonus: If you are a writer and get a similarly offensive sentence into a published children’s book, send me a copy and I’ll buy you a half gallon of fine rum plus a Johnny Cash CD.

Richard Branson has set up a $25 million prize for the first person who can come up with a workable way of removing a billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year.

It’s a clever idea, offering a big prize as an incentive to spur innovative research. Big purses like this (or the X-Prize, which offered $10 million for the first private suborbital space flight) attract a much wider range of innovators than most R&D projects do, for the simple fact that the barrier to entry is lower. To get a $500K DARPA research grant requires serious credentials and a solid academic or industrial R&D track record. But if you’ve got a great idea for how to build a new kind of rocket, the only barriers are your own abilities and resources.

What’s more, it probably costs Branson far less than $25 million to set up this prize. He’ll probably have put up a nominal amount, with the balance to be covered by an insurance policy from an underwriter who is betting that no one will be able to solve the challenge by the deadline. So there’s another incentive for the winner: You’ll be taking money from a rich bastard and an insurance company that bet against humanity’s ability to solve global warming.

Branson’s prize will probably attract all kinds of wild-eyed inventors and innovators, some of whom may actually have interesting ideas. And it will undoubtedly also draw heavyweight competitors who might even spend more than they’re likely to make from the prize, just for the prestige of having won it — and because an innovation like that could be very, very valuable economically. If you’ve got a system for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, you could make far more than Branson’s $25M by selling it to governments or to companies that want to (or need to, depending on government regulations) reduce their carbon emissions.

Incidentally, my personal favorite solution to global warming — nuclear winter — is not going to qualify, because although it would offset the warming, it doesn’t do anything about CO2. Alas. Neither would the proposal to put up giant orbiting space mirrors in order to block out some of the sun’s light. To win Branson’s prize, you actually have to remove some of the CO2 that his jets belch into the air.

The deadline for entries is 2010, although it could be extended to 2012 if no one comes up with a solution by then. So put on your thinking caps, people!

Doing some research into the global PC industry, I discovered that 82.6% of notebooks are made by Taiwanese companies. By 2010, it will be 92.5%, according to a mid-2006 press release from iSuppli. These Taiwanese companies, known as original design manufacturers, don’t just build notebooks–they design them. In fact, about 85% of the ODMs have outsourced the actual manufacturing to China.

So that American notebook you’ve been using? It was almost certainly designed in Taiwan and built in China. With tech support in India, of course. The only thing left for the Americans to do is choose the color of the case (Apple=white, IBM=black), advertise the product, and bill the customers.