From the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology‘s Berkeley Consumer Privacy Survey, we learn that most Americans think their mobile phone data is at least as private as their home computer (especially if they’re young):

A plurality of Americans think their mobile carrier shouldn’t keep their location data at all:

From Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) (via GigaOM and the New York Times, other coverage by MSNBC, TPM, and emptywheel), we learn that cell carriers received at least one million requests (via court orders and subpoenas) for subscriber information in 2011: AT&T (PDF) and Verizon (PDF) each received approximately 260,000 requests each, while Sprint (PDF) estimates it received 500,000 subpoenas (does not include court orders). Consumers might be surprised to know that if each AT&T request were for a different customer, one in every 400 AT&T customers would have had their mobile information requested by law enforcement in 2011.

It’s easy to assume a mobile device is private, and more than 75% of Americans wouldn’t let an acquaintance or work colleague borrow their phone (Table 3, Berkeley study). One paper on Social Implications of Mobile Technology (PDF) says “personal communication technologies are distinctive from other network technologies (e.g. the computer) in that they are often worn on body, highly individualized, and regarded as extensions of the self.” Consumers haven’t internalized the fact that this extension of themselves is also an extension of technological tracking. That’s not always negative (consider 911 calls from mobile phones), but ignoring it while law enforcement requests increase and include “cell tower ‘dump[s]‘ for data on subscribers who were near a tower during a certain period of time” means unaware consumers will have their information disclosed more and more often.

Consumers might also want to know the law enforcement request data when they choose a network provider: T-Mobile “does not disclose the number of requests we receive from law enforcement annually” (PDF), so don’t choose them if you’re curious about these numbers. Sprint appears to receive disproportionately more subpoenas and far more subpoenas overall: AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile all report half the request are subpoenas – so AT&T and Verizon each have 130,000 per year – while Sprint reports 325,000 court orders over five years and an estimate of 500,000 subpoenas in 2011. This may be because of Sprint’s pay-as-you-go sub-brands.

All data from 2011 unless otherwise noted:

the Greek ideal of “thumos”, which is the lust not for money or success (in the conventional sense) but the lust for glory
we want glory through our ideas-we want to know we matter
(10:33) the cold truth is that not all of us are brilliant
we are not all big thinkers. Not everyone’s TED talks will change the world
some of us will just dissipate into the ether
(10:34) but it is the digital connectivity, that proximity to these people, that makes us think that perhaps we will succeed as well
(10:35) ok, i’m done
(10:36) no i’m not
here’s why the recession is so devastating to us
we grew up, all the way through college, with everything seeming so ripe and possible
(10:37) we had a PC education—people tried to hide from us as long as possible that not everyone is equal
we were told we all have a fair chance of making it
that’s just not so
and we’re starting to realize that
(10:39) are you even listening to me anymore?
(10:41) ME: hi sorry
(10:42) i was writing an email
i am filing your comments
in my file.
(10:43) i think
your cover letter is good!
CLARE: i thought it was ok
(10:47) but I am, to be honest, expecting a rejection.

For Central Banking in particular, I feel like I’m running as fast as I can to keep up with what I should understand. I wasn’t an investment banker before school, and my economics classes from ten years ago were long-forgotten. So what’s going to let me survive the class?

1. Historical backbone: I read the Washington Post (which bothers to cover international news) daily and have for 20 years, plus lots of other online news. I’m still trying to get in the habit of reading the Wall Street Journal consistently.
2. Economic policy: I read Ezra Klein. If you believe in data and graphs, and that government and business interact in unpredictable ways, Wonkblog is your friend. The daily Wonkbook post/email links to the most thoughtful economic discussion from papers, blogs, and think tanks. This year Ezra has a team of reporters to expand their coverage – very different from when I started reading his blog while he was still in college.
3. Macroeconomic theory: I read my old Macroeconomics textbook from college during the month before classes started. Its preoccupations are Japan’s Lost Decade and the Clinton budget surpluses rather than the current financial crisis, but that means I can see how much of the discussion sounds the same.

And then there are my current reference posts, the best explanations I’ve found of what’s happened and intervention options. I’m planning to add to this list, so I don’t just keep these tabs open in Firefox all term.

• Rortybomb: A Topological Mapping of Explanations and Policy Solutions to our Weak Economy.
• Added WSJ: Gary S. Becker, Steven J. Davis, and Kevin M. Murphy: Uncertainty and the Slow Recovery
• Added WSJ: European Disunion: Split Over ECB Reflects Europe’s Divisions
• Added Matthew Yglesias: €conomia, The Game Of Terrible Monetary Policy
• Added Nouriel Roubini: Eurozone Crisis: Here Are the Options, Now Choose
• Added What Really Caused the Eurozone Crisis? and TNR: Why Greece, Spain, and Ireland Aren’t to Blame for Europe’s Woes
• Economist: Reserve currencies
• Added Spiegel: The Ticking Euro Bomb parts 1, 2, and 3 and 4
• Added IMF: Regional Economic Outlook: Europe, October 2011
• Wonkblog: Everything you need to know about the European debt crisis in one post
• Wonkblog: Introducing the EuroMess series – other good links in the comments
• Added Fed Beige Book (Commentary on Current Economic Conditions), October 2011
• Wonkblog: Did the stimulus work? A review of the nine best studies on the subject
• Added ProPublica: Cheat Sheet: What’s Happened to the Big Players in the Financial Crisis
• Added Wonkblog: Could this time have been different? The interaction of policy, politics, and the recession
• This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money
• Added Minneapolis Fed: June 2007 Interview with Christopher Sims (2011 Nobel winner) on Monetary Policy

And the people like to publish the next reference post:

• Washington Post: Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog
• The Economist: Free Exchange
• Reuters: Felix Salmon
• Economist: Euro-zone crisis coverage

Let me know if you have a favorite reference to add….

• Lincoln, an existing advertiser with The New York Times, has targeted 200,000 heavy readers of the newspaper’s website with an offer to sponsor their digital subscription for 2011. – I almost didn’t read this offer. It came up as an interstitial, between the homepage and the article I wanted to read, so the first two times I clicked by without actually seeing it. Then I belatedly noticed it had said something about the NYTimes paywall, went back and looked at the banner version on the NYTimes homepage, and clicked through to accept a gift from a brand that is basically irrelevant to me.

  It’s not that I’m not a good target demographically – MBA students fit “‘thought leaders’ in a younger-age bracket” and “the kind of consumers who are interested in the newer Lincolns” pretty much perfectly, I’d guess – but personally I don’t expect to buy a car in the next five years, and if I did it would be chosen for function not luxury. I feel a little weird about accepting the offer, and now feel some obligation to find out something about Lincoln to be sure I’m not dismissing it unreasonably. Reciprocity is a powerful trick (“techniques used in advertising and other propaganda whereby a small gift of some kind is proffered with the expectation of producing a desire on the part of the recipient to reciprocate in some way”).

• Chuck vs the delicious Subway sandwich – Chuck has been my favorite TV show for the past several years (funny, geeky, and the geeky stuff sometimes saves the day). It has repeatedly been almost-canceled, and one of the things that saved it was a relationship with Subway – aggressive product placement led to a fan campaign in which the show’s star participated (demonstrating to Subway that its sponsorship led to sales), which then led to more aggressive product placement.

  But they deliberately make the product placement stand out (not like the “oh, hey, it’s Windows Phone 7 and we’re going to linger on the phone for a really long time for no reason” placement I saw elsewhere this week), and they make it a joke all the fans are in on. One review commented, “I don’t know who is ever against product placement because every time the people at Chuck mention the greatness of Subway, I find it hilarious.” I’m aware I’m being sold, and yes, the next time I see a Subway around breakfast time I’ll try to go buy the relevant product, because I appreciate their sponsoring content I love.

• The Washington Post redesign – I’ve been reading the Post almost every day for 19 years, 13 of those online. I’m not a fan of the redesign. The links are black, making it harder for me to scan for things I can click on to get more information. They used all-caps for a long headline. It took me several days to pick out where they’d put the sections of news I care about and what parts of the page I could safely ignore. But most of all, that first day made it very clear what one thing I was supposed to do when I arrived on the homepage: click on the ads. This on a day when the main headline was about nuclear catastrophe.

  

  They’ve since added back photos to the top content area, so it’s not quite so much “there’s some boring black and white stuff and – ooh, shiny, a brightly colored ad! and another!” but it still looks visually like the right column, with ads and links, is the dark-colored important area. I’ve taught myself to be pretty ad-blind (see above about not reading the Lincoln offer), and the design makes it harder to ignore the ads in favor of the content that brought me to the site. The ads aren’t helping provide the content I want: they’re getting in the way of it. I’m the product being sold, and the Post isn’t even winking at me as they sell me. This isn’t the way I want to see sponsorship go.

There are plenty of issues with patronage models. Editorial independence is a big deal. But while selling lots of little ads preserves independence better, it’s much more demanding for the reader/watcher in terms of cognitive load. I’d rather have one sponsor; then I know whose influence I might have to discount – I’m used to that model from white papers, stadium names, and opinion columnists. With one sponsor, I know who I’m selling my attention to, and I can decide without too much difficulty how much weight I want to give their coin.

1. What functions are you recruiting for on campus? Off campus? Do you sponsor international students?
2. What problems do you solve? What progress have you made? How is the company organized (functions, product groups, US and international offices – top level org chart and world map)?
3. What areas of your business are growing? What are the big issues you expect to have in the next five years?
4. What’s the career path or what are a few examples of how mid-level executives have moved around? What do employees do in the first and second years after getting their MBAs? What’s the team composition?
5. What do interns do (how are projects assigned, project examples)? What else is included in the internship program (networking, mentoring)? What’s the recruiting calendar?

Our group eventually asked most of these questions whenever they weren’t in the presentations. Any more basics I missed?

This book isn’t very good, right? Even distribution of ratings from one to five stars:

Except no, the two one-star reviews are both protest rankings because of the Kindle price:

Publishers might see bad ratings for their books and change the ebook prices. So Amazon does have an incentive to leave those ratings up and include them in its overall averages.

But the ratings now aren’t very helpful to consumers. If you’re buying the hardback, your questions are about the book’s content (and maybe format), not about the pricing of the ebook edition. Unlike seeing comments on the hardback when buying the paperback, the only purpose of the Kindle-specific protest reviews is to skew the star rating downward. I’ve seen a few reviews in the past complaining about the speed of third-party sellers’ shipping, which also cause ratings problems, but nothing as pervasive as the Kindle pricing issue.

So what could Amazon do?

• Only allow people to review a book if they purchased it from Amazon, instead of allowing them to “review” a book they refused to purchase because of price: probably a bad idea, since many helpful reviews presumably are written by people who bought at bookstores, etc.
• Try to filter reviews based on review content, and don’t count protest reviews in star ratings: too hard an artificial intelligence problem.
• Filter based on “helpful”/”unhelpful” votes, and only count reviews with a certain proportion of “helpful” votes (plus new reviews that don’t have many votes yet): would be fairly easy to set up and to justify to users, though it would require some kind of explanation by the star summary.
• Segregate Kindle reviews from paper reviews: it would be a bad idea to make them completely separate, since Kindle edition reviewers also comment on content, but probably a good idea to give separate ratings summaries. This would allow someone to say “great content, but the formatting is awful” and have their downgraded star rating only affect the Kindle summary.
• Other options?

As Kindle and other ebook sales grow, consumers are still going to look for reviews. It’s time Amazon figured out how to keep them reliable.

If you’re a fan of good design and of Apple products in particular, you might well have heard of Daring Fireball. Even if you haven’t, you’ll want to find someone like DF’s proprietor, John Gruber, and get them in your corner.

Today’s example of Gruber’s outsize influence on his tribe of readers is a Kickstarter project creating an iPhone tripod mount and stand: it took about an hour (according to Eric Hastings on the project comments page) to go from $6000 needed to fully funded once Gruber posted

Count me in for this Kickstarter project: Dan “The Russians Used a Pencil” Provost and Thomas Gerhardt have designed a combination stand/tripod mount for the iPhone 4.

That was it: no “go buy it”, no “get them funded”, just bringing an interesting project to his readers’ attention. The project is now $8000 $12,000 overfunded, and I fully expect the meter to keep running upward the rest of the day and beyond.

What gave Gruber such influence?

• His audience knows they’ll like the things he likes. He’s been blogging for a long time. He points people to multiple interesting things a day. He has a track record. He’s a perfectionist about design, so anything with his seal of approval is likely to be good.
• People enjoy supporting the little guy. Kickstarter is all about getting funding to do the project you always wanted to do. People like funding the projects whose authors are passionate about them. Something customized for a small audience will gain raving fans within that audience. And the Internet has made it easy to run small-scale, highly targeted projects.

Where do you find a Gruber to point people to your own project?

That’s both the easy and the hard part. Easy, because if they already exist, you find them, and your project is exciting to them, they’ll happily point people your way. Hard, because the commitment needed to build a following like Gruber’s is very high – it takes a lot of time and energy – and not many people have invested so much in their audience. And hard because your project has to be pretty exciting to deserve their attention.

So think carefully as you design your project about who’s going to care about it. Who’s going to care enough to talk about you to all the people they know? If you don’t know, then your project needs to be more awesome. Aim higher.

Should you follow the (small and passionate) crowd?

I supported the Kickstarter project. It looks like a great product – and if it’s not, I spent $20 encouraging people trying to build innovative new toys. If that’s something you want to see more of, go ante up and join me.

In the post I included the video from a more public goodbye, my talk at Debbie Weil’s Sweets and Tweets about linchpins, documentation, and growing into new roles:

One of the best things about my time in DC (aside from my work and seeing my family regularly) has been all the lunchtime and after-work event series from the politics/technology/social media community. Sweets and Tweets is the one with delicious cupcakes as well as interesting content.