Month: September 2009

… apparently, to track you down.

In 2006, the New York Times tracked down a woman in Georgia using only her search history. AOL, as part of a research project, had placed online a 3-month search history for 650,000 users without user names or any other identifiable information – or so they thought:

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from ”numb fingers” to ”60 single men” to ”dog that urinates on everything.”

And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for ”landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” several people with the last name Arnold and ”homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia.”

It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. ”Those are my searches,” she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her.

William Safire, the former Nixon speechwriter famous for providing Vice President Spiro Agnew with gems such as ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history’, died yesterday. I looked forward to his NYT column “On Language“, links to whose posts I shared on several occasions with friends over email.

If you must read anything by Safire, let it be his last Op-Ed column “How to Read a Column” for the NYT in 2005, full of self-directed jibes:

7. Watch for repayment of favors. Stewart Alsop jocularly advised a novice columnist: “Never compromise your journalistic integrity – except for a revealing anecdote.” Example: a Nixon speechwriter told columnists that the president, at Camp David, boasted “I just shot 120,” to which Henry Kissinger said brightly “Your golf game is improving, Mr. President,” causing Nixon to growl “I was bowling, Henry.” After columnists gobbled that up, the manipulative writer collected in the coin of friendlier treatment.

The Economist describes how Indian mobile operators innovated their way to the world’s cheapest services.

Outsourcing network management, ‘lifetime’ prepaid schemes, ‘micro-call-centers’, ‘green’ technologies for base stations, and my favourite – infrastructure sharing, where two or more operators agree to share their network towers in an area just before going at each others’ throats to grab subscriber share:

Network-sharing is not new, says Mr Colao, “but the confidence to do it at scale, and with a fierce competitor, came from India. Once you see how it works in that kind of environment, you become much more confident that you can do it in Barcelona or Venice.”

The Economist’s lucid style makes this a must-read.

From a comment on a blog post about whether a landline is worth it anymore:

Many folks here in San Diego ditched their landlines and it almost cost them their lives back in October of 2007 when we had the firestorm. In San Diego county we have a reverse 911 system and it dialed thousands of people at 4AM to let them know the fire was approaching. Folks without a landline had no idea the fire was coming. When I went to bed at around 10am it was 30 miles away and by morning was I was being evacuated.

Hilarious, eminently readable and ultimately heartbreaking spoof. How Americans would book a flight ticket if airline companies worked like their healthcare counterparts. Hard to pick an excerpt.

… is one particular person whose Gmail account has been deactivated after a court order for absolutely no fault of his/hers.

The ruling stems from a monumental error by the Wilson, Wyo.-based Rocky Mountain Bank. On Aug. 12, the bank mistakenly sent names, addresses, social security numbers and loan information of more than 1,300 customers to a Gmail address. When the bank realized the problem, it sent a message to that same address asking the recipient to contact the bank and destroy the file without opening it. No one responded, so the bank contacted Google to ask for information about the account holder.

Google told the bank to go to court. The bank filed a petition to get Google to disclose information about the user and to deactivate the account.

The court complied.

British schoolteachers are having a rather hard time grading essays with sentences such as

“i noe u dnt noee mii,i donno huu u r” (I know you do not know me, I do not know who you are) and “ma m8s wnt ova” (my mates went over)

And you have to sympathize when

More than half of staff failed to recognise that “phat” meant “great”, almost 50 per cent did not understand that “klingon” was used for a younger brother or sister and a quarter did not know “vanilla checks” was slang for “boring clothes”.

(by the way, I think those percentages are encouragingly high.)

Recipe for thousands of awkward situations:

There are certain misconceptions regarding the jargon people use in drafting such ads. Many are still unaware that a “homely” girl doesn’t mean she happily does the household chores. ‘Homely’ means ‘unattractive’. Look up the dictionary.

Sure enough, Dictionary.com defines ‘homely’ as:

lacking in physical attractiveness; not beautiful; unattractive: a homely child.

The steel city of Pittsburgh, where G20 leaders are meeting, ironically, to talk climate change, has a Past:

Its air heavy with smoke and smog from hundreds of factories, Pittsburgh used to be once described by a local writer as “hell with the lid off”. And that was in 1860. Eighty years later, the situation had actually become worse. The local university library has an excellent archive of photographs of the city the way it was in 1940, its economic heyday. Consider the following exhibit, a street level photograph of the corner of Liberty and Fifth Avenues in downtown, not far from the David Lawrence Convention Center where world leaders will meet on September 25 to discuss the world financial crisis and the need to fight climate change. A street clock tells us the time is 10:55 a.m. but the image reminds us of night time film noir, the city’s smoky darkness punctuated by bright lights from the street and its surrounding buildings.

Anyone with a portfolio of “3 or more stocks, ETFs, or mutual funds” is eligible to apply. The worst performers over the past 2 years will receive:

1st Place: All expenses paid dream vacation for 2 to Rome, Italy, “the last great empire to collapse under a mountain of debt, a devalued currency, and out of control spending.”

2nd Place: Trip for 2 to beautiful Iceland, “the world’s worst performing stock market.”

3rd Place: Trip for 2 to Las Vegas, “the foreclosure capital of America.”