I get a fair amount of spam and a lot of the messages have what seem to be randomly generated subject lines, perhaps in an attempt to get by spam filters. Today I received a spam with the subject line Pepper Tunnel Pyramid Pants. I just found that amusing and thought I’d share. That’s all….

Some time ago, I saw Harry Shearer on some late night talk show talking about the Partnership for a Poll-Free America that he and Arianna Huffington thought up. At the time I though it seemed like a great idea and it mostly still does. But this Tuesday on the day of the New Hampshire primaries, I came to a realization. Polls are actually a very important part of the political process. In fact they’re essential. I’m not talking about the kind you hear about prior to the election, although I’ll get back to those. I’m talking about the actual process of voting. They don’t call it the polling place for nothing.

The truth of the matter is that our election process is based on a polling process, it’s just a different one. And if you think back to your statistics class for a minute, you’ll realize why it’s flawed and why there are probably differences between pre-election polls and election outcomes: elections are biased. Now I can’t pretend to know a lot about how political polls are performed (apart from exit polling, which is pretty straight forward), but assuming that randomization is employed, the results of pre-election polls are probably a better indication of the will of the people if done right. As such, it’s disappointing in a way when they two don’t match. It likely means that our democracy isn’t working as well as it ought to.

All that said, I still think that the place of pre-election polls in influencing election outcomes is troubling. I would hope that everyone would do their own research, but I know that’s just not going to happen.

And now they’ve decided to stop selling cigarettes even though they know it’ll cut into their profits. This simply reinforces their recent addition to the worlds most ethical companies list. Way to go Wegmans!

So I’m excited to be moving on to something a little more to my liking. I’ll be focusing primarily on systems and network theory, not anything quite so concrete as one might assume from the popular notion of what academic com programs usually are. In fact, UB’s is a bit off the wall regardless of your assumptions of the academic studies of communication — just what I’m looking for, actually. I’ll be blogging more about this as it unfolds.

Via Grist Magazine, Honda will be releasing a new hybrid-only model for the 2009 model year. Besides the fact that a car designed for fuel efficiency from the ground up will do better in that category, their goal is to produce a car that people who care about the environment will want to be seen in. Seems their marketing folks have decided that part of the reason their hybrid sales are lagging behind Toyota is that people who want to buy a hybrid want people to know they’re driving a hybrid. The Prius is actually outselling Honda’s entire line of hybrids five to one and Honda is recognizing the brand value of the car, with one Honda veep quoted as calling the Prius “the Kleenex of hybrids”.

More details at MSNBC.

A recent Apple Insider post discusses the comments of Capital Group senior VP Ashok Kumar, who uses the colorful metaphor of a squib to suggest the shortcomings of the iPhone.

While I admit that I have wondered exactly who their target market is, I can’t imagine that they are actually expecting to primarily compete with the general smart phone market. The truth of the matter is that, while the iPhone is branded primarily as a phone, I doubt that the majority of those who are buying them are necessarily weighing their purchase of an iPhone against Blackberries and Treos. In other words, people who are buying iPhones are probably not thinking of them primarily as phones and productivity devices as users of other smart phones are. Or, rather, they’re thinking of them as all of those things.

It seems to me that the iPhone is the closest thing to a successful convergence device primarily because it has a usable interface for the different tools. Generally when you have one thing that is supposed to do the job of more than one thing, it doesn’t do the job of the others particularly well. For example, a swiss army knife isn’t nearly so good a knife or can opener or scissors that any of these items individually would be. I think the iPhone may actually be the first convergence device that actually acts well as a phone and acts well as a Web browser / Email device and acts well as a music player.

Apple must brand this as a phone because of the marketplace and expectations of consumers as to the primary purpose of the device. But at some point, as user interfaces continue to improve, I expect that this distinction won’t be as important to marketers or consumers. In fact, I reckon Apple will drop the iPhone moniker at some point and rebrand it simple as an iPod with phone capabilities. If rumors of an upcoming generation of full screen iPods with WiFi access come true, it would be silly to continue with the such a distinction.

Regardless, Mr. Cringley talks only about the infrastructure itself, which avoids the discussion of the implications of the issue. The upshot is that, in a society that relies heavily on the delivery of information, what will the impact of lower than average bandwidth be on our economy, security and society as a whole? I believe that information is one of our countries major competative advantages and will be even more important as our natural resources deminish. How can we hope to compete if we don’t have an effective means of sharing that information?

At the office recently, our business casual dress code policy has been more strictly enforced, leading to grumbling amongst some staff who had grown accustomed to wearing jeans to work on a daily basis. Several years ago I probably would have been concerned or disappointed, but these days, it’s just not a big deal to me.

It was with some amusement, however, that I heard about the fight going on between air traffic controllers and the FAA over dress codes. The fight began after:

An air-traffic controller in Oberlin was reprimanded because his aquamarine pants were “not gender appropriate.”

In response, some male air traffic controllers are coming to work in dresses. I say, more power to ‘em. These people have one of the most difficult jobs. If they need to wear shorts or jeans or aquamarine pants, let them do it.

I find this unbelievable but not surprising (I really don’t think I’m contradicting myself here). Hal Licino blogs about a recent performance comparison he ran on a 1986 Mac Plus and a 2007 AMD Dual Core. The results? The twenty-one year old computer won!

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the souped up interfaces we have these days and the additional functionality that our basic productivity tools offer today certainly come in handy, but with 600-times the processing power and 250-times the memory, don’t you think we would have made some performance improvements by now?

In every year that has ended in a seven that an NHL Stanley Cup championship series was played, the cup was either won by Detroit or a team from Canada… until last night when the Anaheim Ducks won the cup.

I’m no Ducks fan, although I was happy to see them trounce the Senators worse than they trounced our Sabres. But I’m also happy to see another useless statistic put to bed. Somehow such statistics always get us thinking there’s some causation involved, or at least some supernatural force with a hand in things. Good riddance

Google recently introduced Google Gears a toolkit aimed at allowing developers of RIA’s to make their applications accessible offline. This has obviously applications for some of Google’s applications like Docs and Spreadsheets, Gmail and Google Calendar. But the open toolkit aims to allow developers outside of Google to take their applications offline as well.

Standard questions: Is Google taking on MS desktop applications? What’s in it for Google to offer this for free? If this toolkit is broadly adopted it would be yet another big step towards the notion of “web as platform”, one of the planks in the notion of Web 2.0.

Read more at Information Week…

Just ran across Microsoft Surface (thanks Jon!). It’s an impressive new computing platform / interface from MS that is reminiscent of Jeff Han’s Multitouch System and the touch interface of Apple’s iPhone. But it also includes something that I haven’t seen before: device interaction. Lay your cell phone / pda / camera / smart card on the surface and it becomes an active object that can interact with the rest of the interface. Welcome to real object-oriented interface design! I’m actually impressed with something coming out of Microsoft for the first time in a while.

Supposedly these will be available towards the end of this year, but I don’t imagine that they’ll be all that accessible for some time. I’m also not sure about the ergonomic implications of extended use.

Here’s the thing, Wikipedia is extremely useful, not because it’s accurate (because it’s not), but because it’s so easily accessible and offers a good starting point for research. I did my first research project in fourth grade and even then we were taught that encyclopedias were just where you look to get an idea of the lay of the land of a topic. Then we went to the card catalog (RIP) or the Reader’s Guide (new and improved!) to find source for more details, credible information.

So if kids in college are using information from Wikipedia and citing it, poo poo on them. If they’re using it an not citing it, even worse. If they’re using Wikipedia to get started on writing a paper or an exam and find other useful, credible sources as a result, then hurray for Wikipedia!

The upshot is that the problem is not with Wikipedia, it is with our education system’s unwillingness to spend the time to teach its students how to perform credible research.

Here’s an excerpt for your reading enjoyment:

The System/Subsystem Specification (SSS) specifies the requirements for a system or subsystem and the methods to be used to ensure that each requirement has been met. Requirements pertaining to the system or subsystem’s external interfaces may be presented in the SSS or in one or more Interface Requirements Specifications (IRSs) (DI-IPSC-81434) referenced from the SSS.

The SSS, possibly supplemented by IRSs, is used as the basis for design and qualification testing of a system or subsystem. Throughout this DID, the term ’system’ may be interpreted to mean ’subsystem’ as applicable. The resulting document should be titled System Specification or Subsystem Specification (SSS).

It’s a wonder they actually get anything done!

But I think there’s a pretty obvious solution: XSLT.

Instead of getting everyone together in an attempt to develop a single standard, we just need to get everyone on board to developing XML-based I/O for their applications. Define your tools XML schema, publish the DTD, keep it up to date and let the XSLT development begin. If you aren’t familiar with it, XSLT as an XML translation language; it basically lets you convert one XML format into an other. Hence, through XSLT, the XML output of one tool could be converted into the XML input format of another. Ideally there wouldn’t even need to be a manual export/import process, but the process could occur real-time. The main downside I see is the weight of transferring large XML files containing formatted data, particularly if it is traveling across the Internet, but I don’t think it’s a show stopper.

I haven’t been all that involved in non-profit technology since I moved back to Buffalo and went back to work for higher ed (non-profit lite, I like to call it) and I don’t have a ton of time. But I have asked to be added to the email list to discuss solutions for this problem. I hope I can be of assistance.