Tim McCormick

grey 2010 Jetta S

I have to say, going to California, Silicon Valley, new job, all important; but buying a first car: pivotal.

Although, a lot of cars seem to me quite competently designed but undistinguished, or only subtly so. Older Jettas had a more distinct, angular style, but current ones like my grey 2010 Jetta S are quite similar to a swathe of other models from Detroit, Japan, even to many more expensive cars like Benzes and those often-tame Japanese luxury sedans.

On the other hand, for me, as an honorary Brit and expert introvert, avoiding distinction and statement is a key criteria. Self-expression via my car?  That, for me, veers perilously close to arriviste, even gauche.

Volkwagen was originally called the KdF-Wagen” (German: Kraft durch Freude – “strength through joy”)

Therefore, subtle elements like brand penumbra, history, personal association, and detailing matter a lot.  This is why, for all that this depends on great engineers, marketers are in the drivers seat.  In the developed world now, cars are so ubiquitous, so generally well-engineered and based on extremely mature core technologies — are so functionally equivalent for most people — that, I think, most money over $10,000 that anyone spends on a new car is almost purely to be won by marketing and identity.  Subtle and repressed identity, perhaps masked by practical sentiments (“we need it for the kids”… “safety and reliability are key features to me”…) but identity nonetheless.

If you also consider the evidence showing that most people buy cars soon after deciding to enter the market, with very little research, then you realize that cars, while being high engineering at base, are in fact mainly a huge and lucrative field of identity expression.  In fact, the more the brand talks about engineering (BMW, e.g.), the more it’s likely to be about identity.

Taking me, for example, let’s take a tour of that fertile field the marketers, not the engineers, have to plough.  My father once owned a Model A Ford, which along with the Model T was the American “people’s car” designed to be affordable to all workers.  This was precisely the same goal of the (*cough* Nazi) German Labour Front, starting in 1937, for what was originally called the KdF-Wagen” (German: Kraft durch Freude – “strength through joy” — the name of the giant state-controlled leisure organization in Nazi Germany) and then Volkswagen, “people’s car.” (a term used in Germany as far back as the 1920s).

When the VW operation was about to be dismantled after WWII under the “pastoralization” policy, pre-Marshall Plan, VW was saved by an enterprising British Army overseer who arranged to start selling VW trucks to the occuping forces and the German postal service, and some returning UK soldiers were allowed to bring their VW Beetles back to England after the war, thus seeding the market.

BMW 2002, dark green like our one

My father subsequently owned a Beetle, and my parents a VW hatchback, and further on the German front, in England I grew up riding around in our wonderful, classic BMW 2002. (a practical, good-quality car in Europe, not so much the status symbol that BMW is in the US, I’ve often told people).

All this no doubt is part of why I tend to like German cars.  For a design and book devotee like me, Germany is also importantly the homeland of Gutenberg, the Bauhaus and Modern design / typography, and the Frankfurt Book Fair.  So too, I’m pleased to learn — as someone who flatters himself as a trans-Atlantic type, and is a dual U.S. / E.U. citizen — that the name “Jetta” comes from the German term for the Atlantic jet stream, as in the “winds of freedom blow” (Martin Luther’s Die Luft der Freiheit weht, Stanford’s motto) between Europe and America.

It can’t hurt, either, that Volkswagen group also includes Audi, Porsche, and Lamborghini, some of my favorite other marqees.  (if I were the type to reach, as the British say condemningly, I might even say that I think of my Jetta as really an entry-level Audi.  In sheep’s clothing — or more sheepish clothing, as the case may be).  Bearing in mind that in my new environs of Silicon Valley, a nearly-new Jetta (which I think of as fabulous, unimaginable and nearly embarrassing luxury, any moment to be found out, confiscated, and me thrown back in jail) — here counts as practically a junker, a just-out-of-college throwaway car, or something you drive to impress upon your investors that you’re truly a bare bones, “skin-in-the-game” startup type.  A 2010 Jetta is far cheaper than the average car on the road here, as my car-insurance broker told me, with a sympathetic and perhaps pitying nod, while selling me collision insurance.

The Volkswagen campaign for my sentiments really took off in the 1950s, however, when VW began its extraordinary run of game-changing, highly effective counter-cultural U.S. marketing,  with the print campaigns designed by Doyle Dane Burnbach.

The 1959 Think Small series of advertisements, a famous example of which is at left, were revolutionary for their compelling graphic modesty, counter-intuitive message, and sometimes leaving off brand, logo, and product description entirely. It was voted the No. 1 campaign of all time in Advertising Age’s 1999 The Century of Advertising.^[3

Apple "Think different" ads

Never mind that a 2010 Jetta is hardly small by world standards, and if you look at it in the context of the whole VW range you see it’s a “family sedan”, far up the list above the smaller-footprint categories of City Car, Super Mini, Mini, small sedan, etc.  Volkswagen reached out to those uncomfortable with “Big” America, chafing at that Whitman-esque “barbaric yawp” and raw power, and invited us in to the Think clubhouse.  (connecting to the original IBM “Think” slogan dating from the 1910s, but even more importantly, to Apple’s later “Think different,” which derived from “Think small” all the way down to the lower-case capitalization of “different”).  VW was a pre-Steve Jobs version of Apple.

VW "VDub" parody ad, 2006 - click to play

A more recent example of counter-cultural marketing by Volkswagen that totally worked for me is their VDub advertising campaign from 2006, three TV ads parodying MTV’s auto show Pimp My Ride.  Each stars an effete German engineer named Wolfgang, and German model Zonja Wöstendiek as his assistant Miss Helga, who mock the hip-hop wannabees’ absurdly vain hot-rods, and gleefully destroy them, to introduce a gleaming and trim VW GTI.  Awesome!  Those pimp-my-ride jerks who used to push us around on the playground, now we get to destroy their wide-boy blaring-exhaust tail-finned customized abominations! (those which Tom Wolfe satirized in his landmark 1963 Esquire “New Journalism” essay, “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm)…”, title essay of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby).

But counter-cultural politics aside, the true ace-in-the-hole and deal-clincher for the 2010 Jetta, its Unique Selling Proposition (thank you, friends in Marketing) is, for sure, the hubcap typography.

VW was already way out ahead with its general logo, which cleverly stacks the V and W into a the type of old-style center-crossed “W” beloved to typography buffs everywhere, and joins the power of a circle to dynamic zagging diagonals.  (Benz, the trinity? Lexus?  yawn).  Note the center-crossed “W” in the icon of one of our most potent New Economy symbols, Wikipedia:

2010 Jetta hubcaps (right): win for best typography

Now notice the play of “V”s and “W”s contained in the hubcap specific to (as far as I’ve seen) the 2010 Jetta, at left.  Genius.  Natural.  Totally unnnoted by most people, but also highly distinctive when you finally see it.  (like me! I’m just kidding.  That’s just what what most people feel).

In sum, I may be a shameless capitalist tool and a pawn of advertising masterminds.  But, so far as I could see, in the brief time I had to research my purchase, there were a dozen manufacturers out there in a fiercely competitive market, making quite well-designed, quite similar cars at a similar price, similar fuel economy and safety rating etc, using highly mature technologies.  Time is short, research is hard, they all seem satisfactory.  What am I going to do?  I’m going to enjoy myself by swimming in the fertile sea of emotional / cultural associations around cars, because that’s what I’m really buying, not a car itself — that’s the real value in it for me.  I’m going make some little statement, subtle — but for me all-important — about the Model A Ford that was my father’s first car, and the value I place on, say, good typography.

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Addendum (1/15/12 9pm):
My father observes that, not only did I ride around in that BMW 2002 when growing up, but I worked hard and lovingly to maintain it, as shown in this picture he sent, from circa 1979.

My two sisters, on the other hand, the soul of indifference as seen in background skipping rope or something, now drive a Subaru and a Toyota. Coincidence?  I don’t think so.

Parents, you have a solemn responsibility:  instill good brand preferences in your children by age five, or it could be game over.

Thanks pops.  Super Dad and, clearly, German auto industry brand ambassador #1.

Comments?  email tim (at) tjm.org, or Twitter @mccormicktim.  Due to spam problems, comments entered below will be delayed for approval.

I look at the “fact checking” movement and recent partisan / political disputes over it, and suggest a need to go beyond principles of objectivity, and to embrace political strategy, learning theory, and empirical evidence about how to have impact.  As recently commented by political organizer Biko Biker, the first rule of effectiveness is:  meet people where they are.

It’s been a not-so-quiet few weeks in Lake Wobegon — the world of journalistic fact-checking, that is: the practice of examining news stories, politicians’ statements, etc., for factual accuracy.  It’s familiar to many from the syndicated newspaper columns of Politifact, launched in 2007 (their Web site shown at left).  It’s also done by other organizations such as AIM and FAIR, and TV news programs, and is joined by many related Web projects such as Hypothes.is, a proposed “peer review layer for the Internet,” and “Truth Goggles” from Dan Schultz at MIT.

The other week a major shot across the bow was fired by conservative magazine The Weekly Standard’s with its cover story,  “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking’: The liberal media’s latest attempt to control the discourse” by Mark Hemingway.  The title sums it up quite well, but basically Hemingway reviews the rise of fact-checking, rips apart a few choice Politifact and Associated Press fact-check pieces, and observes an overall liberal-Democratic agenda in the enterprise.

Over at NYU School of Journalism, however, wizened sage Jay Rosen had long seen it coming:

Told you to keep an eye on this for 2012. It’s here. The politicized attack on fact checking as–guess what?–politicized jr.ly/927s

— Jay Rosen(@jayrosen_nyu) December 11, 2011

Conversation ensued, around Rosen’s much-followed Twitter feed, including a followup from John McQuaid at Forbes: “How to Fix Fact Checking.” McQuaid argues that the Standard legitimately pointed out some definitely sloppy, biased Politifact and AP fact-checking, but the answer is just to do the job right:

[The Weekly Standard's piece] is basically an argument for endless epistemological war….In this scenario, nobody will ever know the “truth” because it cannot meaningfully exist until one side has defeated the other….
“The problem is that fact-checking – like everything – is sometimes a lazy, half-assed business. If fact-checking is as important as it claims, its practitioners need to acknowledge its problems and fix them.”

“Fix the problems,” McQuaid explains, means: “hard-nosed reporting and independent evaluation.”

Along similar lines, my friend Alec Macgillis writing in the The New Republic argues that  “fact-checkers wouldn’t be needed if all of us journalists were more able, willing and empowered to do our jobs: to vet and explain political claims as they were being made.” I can’t help but feel this is essentially nostalgic:  wishing for a day when there was (if there ever was) an ample supply of well-trained, well-resourced, well-respected professional reporters to give every topic its thorough, balanced, due.  Here, I would have to to agree with Clay Shirky’s recent volley in the CJR “future of journalism” fray,  “Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis” and say that this just isn’t a choice any more, that such a system is economically and technologically and politically past tense.

Even if there were an economic climate to support such a professional journalistic cadre deployed on every story, I think that today, it wouldn’t even assure success.

Why?  Because man is a political animal, ours is a political world, and journalistic fact-checking must, like it or not, have a political strategy if it is to escape political neutralization.

So I claim.

Madison, Wisconsin, 2011 protests

This does not mean that fact-checking must have a political position. Rather, I think that proponents of fact-checking must recognize that if you want to influence public opinion, you have to prosecute the cause through the mechanisms of public opinion, and this IS fighting the good fight.  Taking refuge in high principles of neutrality and independence may be dignified, but if it’s ineffectual, if you lose the war, it’s cold comfort.  To be fair, fact-checking projects are doing much to increase their appeal and effectiveness, e.g. the humor of Politifact’s “pants on fire!” negative rating, or annual “worst liars” awards. But I’m not sure that many partisan boundaries are yet being crossed.

Do Politifact columns disproportionately critique Republicans?  Perhaps your objective method objectively found greater incidence of falsehoods in Republican speeches, according to rigorous truth goggles software or peer review.  It doesn’t really matter. If prevailing media, and most of the audience, might easily dismiss you by the fact that Politifact gives more lower grades to Republicans, say, then figure out a new angle that will be more effective in the war.  Even patterns of who reads and cites your findings can be used as evidence of bias. [3].  Protesting your objectivity may do nothing to reach the unconverted.

A model for analyzing fact-checking projects — for impact, interaction, and topical foci — was recently shown by John Kelly of Morningside Analytics.  His research, summarized by Ethan Zuckerman, shows that fact-checking sites differ significantly in what communities they reach, and how much they reach into different political territory.  See also his fascinating visualization of the blog network Global Voices Online, with auto-classification of sources by topic focus, dot size to represent traffic volume, and graph of linking patterns between sites.

This is intriguing, but we might go a step further, and investigate how much fact-check information actually affects, or might affect, people’s understanding.  Here we could look to cognitive science and learning theory’s findings/methods regarding how people revise/improve their understandings. These approaches might be entirely counter-intuitive, from the standpoint of traditional journalistic: e.g. might suggest giving less information or fewer source choices; or creating certain types of temporary confusion or dissonance or “meaning threat” (see Psychological Science paper PDF, or summary).  Personally, I have a hunch that the greatest hope for building media that will change minds lies in personalized media, e.g. that would look for deficits in your reading matter / social graph and try to address them.  There is some interesting research showing that many, if not necessarily a majority, of news readers actually express interest in and report higher satisfaction with such “balancing news,” but more on this point in later installments.

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A play-book for fact-checking

I think it’s virtually impossible to depoliticize political media with pure fact-checking. The treachery of politics and public opinion will relentlessly undermine a too-idealistic enterprise, and merely presenting critiques doesn’t necessarily reach people or change their minds.

So, I’m starting a fact-checking play book. It embraces and extends what Rosen, McQuaid, and other experts have said:

1. Don’t be sloppy, in any way, ever. It’s fatal.
2. Continual self- and process examination. Never trust trust (see note #1 below).
3. Realize that it’s not just about “facts”, it’s also about narratives and mythic/cognitive frames.  One’s framing concepts of “factual” or “truthful” may not be the same as everyone’s.  That doesn’t mean there is no objective reality, just that people understand reality through quite different frames, and you must think about how to communicate through those frames.
4. “Meet people where they are.”
   Fulfilling our own ideals and impressing people who think like us is seductive but insufficient. Perhaps focus might be shifted towards hard evidence of how much we are changing minds and crossing partisan / concept-cluster boundaries.  For example, a) quantitative media analysis such as that cited by John Kelly, or b) cognitive science, learning theory, and personalization.
5. Accept that it’s a political project, even if, ironically, the point is to get “truth” out from under the politics.  Ultimately, we’re not above it, and that’s ok.  That’s our world.

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NOTES

1. I originally titled this post “Reflections on Fact-checking and Depoliticizing Politics”, alluding to a famous 1984 computer science paper, “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” by Ken Thompson.  He demonstrates how even a simple computer program can be almost indetectably hiding a fatal bug, because a truly devious attacker can invisibly embed the bug or attack into the very tools used by the programmer.  See the  Wikipedia summary or the original paper. Ultimately, he suggests, security is a social process, of understanding and assessing the trust-worthiness of every party and tool you interact with, including yourself.

2. Overview of fact-checking.  A history of the practice is under way by Lucas Graves, journalist and PhD student at Columbia.

3. Citation as evidence of bias.
What if some fact-check source is cited more often by liberal/Democratic members of Congress than by conservatives?  Then it might easily be proved to be liberally biased, according to the methodology of the best-known scholar of news bias, UCLA’s Tim Groseclose, as explicated in the leading peer-reviewed journal Quarterly of Economics (PDF).

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Agree?  Missed something? Please send comments, suggestions to me at tim (at) tjm.org, or post on Twitter mentioning @mccormicktim, or comment on Facebook.

follow me on twitter: @mccormicktim

The Information Diet, by Clay Johnson, forthcoming January 2012 from O'Reilly.

One of the most interesting recent developments in media discussions is Clay Johnson’s work and forthcoming book on “The Information Diet.”

Overall, I think “information diet” is in interesting and powerful concept. Yes, let’s take charge of our lives, in this as in other ways, to innovate and design and choose.

However, before adoping this metaphor too deeply, I’d like to suggest a few objections to consider.

1) We’ve mostly learned not to simply “blame” the obese (or the poor, or disabled), recognizing that this often blames the victim, or doesn’t help. Let’s not “blame our habits” and forget that they are bound up with environment, inheritance, society, and technology.

2) In many areas, end-users don’t control their information intake in the way one can control eating. For example, at school or at work.

3) Food is quantifiable in most important ways, such as calories, fat / carb / protein content, nutrients, etc. Information, however, is not meaningfully quantifiable so, even though the mathematical theory of information misleads us to think so. Information does not, technically, necessarily contain any meaning; a higher-res version of a video doesn’t usually convey much more information or meaning to us. A striking anecdote or 10-word epigram may produce a huge cognitive effect, while watching a terabyte movie file may have little effect at all.

Even quantifying information by time spent is problematic, because much of the time we multitask and take in different sort s of information at once. If I write email while watching a Netflix movie for an hour, is that one or two hours of information consumption?

4) The effect of information upon people is not nearly so determinate as that of food. If someone eats a Big Mac, you can accurate predict the nutritional outcome, but if they watch a political ad or a read a short story, their reaction may be almost anything.

5) More generally, the term “information” is a recently arisen term with many implications that aren’t necessarily articulated when it’s used. For example it implies quantifiability; the equivalence of different media objects with the same number of bits (“equivalent to X times the Library of Congress..”); the “content” residing objectively in the information and not in the receiver or cultural context or the social act of communication, etc. What about just looking at the natural environment, or listening to our own thoughts?: this is not usually considered information intake, but surely it’s cognitively significant.

Unless one wants to uncritically or unconsciously follow these significant suppositions, it may be helpful to take any statements about “information diet” and consider them with “information” replaced with other terms such as “meaning”, “perception”, “media”, “knowledge,” or “communication.” Is it still true, or does the assertion not seem to fit as well?

What do you think, are these valid objections, do you have any others?

follow me on Twitter:  @mccormicktim

comment submitted to TechCrunch article  “True Or False? Automatic Fact-Checking Coming To The Web – Complications Follow” by Devin Coldewey, 11/28/2011.

> “the layering of reference and context onto the information you read”.

This exists generally in the well-tested paradigm of citation and reputation, as it functions for example in peer-reviewed literature.  It seems that Daniel Schultz’s “truth goggles” could be seen as a particular version of this, in which the annotation of the base layer is automated rather than authored, and the citation framework is specifically the fact-check databases Politifact and NewsTrust (for now).

If the citation framework were generalized to allow many annotators and reference sources, then I believe we’d be close to the http://Hypothes.is project’s model.

Pure algorithmic assessment of “fact” and reasoning and valid judgment is at minimum an extremely complex, long-term problem, and is quite possibly unsolvable in ways. In a human, distributed trust system such as present peer review, we trust that communicators are incented by reputation to uphold agreed-upon standards of evidence and judgment. Writers, journal editors, research funders, research institutions, etc. collectively build a system which, ideally, systematically rewards adherence to the shared objective standards and ethics. In this model, we don’t necessarily try or have to understand how each link in the system performs its complex evaluations; we rely on the fact that they are well incented to do it correctly, and are sufficiently cross-monitored to be trusted.

Regardless of peer-review mechanism, we have thorny questions of what constitutes “true,” or “factual,” and how people are affected by information. Coldewy says “facts are facts and fiction is fiction,” and I keep hearing versions of this in discussion of fact-checking systems and civic media; but to me it is a rather vast and optimistic supposition. What theories of language, of propaganda, of politics, of media effects, of cognitive science, support the view that people get truthful, and rationally deliberate together, if we just put more “factually” true “information” out there? It seems based more on traditional faith in Enlightenment rather than on hard evidence of how communication works.

I would like to see more, and am doing some work on, media analytics / environments based on empirical evidence and cognitive science models — what actually causes what effect on readers.

anyway, I think Schultz’s work is interesting and valuable, especially the distributed / API aspect, and I’m glad to see it covered and see the rapidly developing conversation around these issues.

Tim McCormick

follow me on Twitter: @mccormicktim

Image credit:  TechCrunch

This was a comment I wrote to Maria Popova, curator of the popular Brain Pickings blog / Twitter feed, on her article “Free Ride: Digital Parasites and the Fight for the Business of Culture” (November 16, 2011).   That article reviewed Robert Levine’s “Free Ride:  How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back.”

Maria, I appreciate what you do and often read interesting items pointed to by your Twitter feed.

However, I am having difficulty following how you can sharply distinguish between creators and “aggregators”.  To me, what you do is primarily aggregation — you curate and point me to other content — and it has value.  Barely ever do I read something that you fully “created”, say wrote word for word without referencing or summarizing anything else;  and of course, hardly anything is created ex nihilo like that.

You give Huffington Post’s item about the Victorian map of woman’s heart, which you say was lifted from your article, as an example of “parasite” practices, whereby  “editorial and curatorial merit are being hijacked…not benefitting the original creator or curator in any way.”

So, I compared your piece, HuffPo’s, and the original source, and come to a different conclusion.  Your piece features a map exhibited by the American Antiquarian Society’s current exhibit, “Beauty, Virtue & Vice.”  The AAS is the currently relevant “creator”, by having collected the materials, mounted the show, and put online the map images.   However, your article text doesn’t mention the AAS or the exhibit, merely linking in one place to an AAS web page from which one might possibly infer and navigate to info about the show.

By comparison, HuffPo’s article explicitly credits the exhibition, gives the AAS’s full name and show name, and fully encourages readers to view the show:  “check out the whole exhibit here — it’s worth it”.   You say this was HuffPo “reposting a reworded article,” but as I compare them, the text is entirely different, and it’s not self-evident that they took the item from you.  Presumably a lot of other people saw and passed around references to the exhibition, it’s at least possible they had another source.

I would hardly say that, looking around the internet or at media in general, it’s pervasive practice for people to cite exactly how they first came across sources — this would often be impractical, could cause legal issues, expose working methods, etc.  Few of your Twitter posts, or those of Read Write Web or any other major source, for example, say how the cited item was found.  HuffPo may have found the subject from your blog / Twitter feed, but they obviously went and and looked at it themselves and wrote it up;  didn’t they just find it via you, just as you find things via other sources all the time?

I don’t mean to explain or defend Huffington Post’s practices in general, I just use this as an illustrative case.  My point is there doesn’t seems to be a huge distinction between the “creator” curating you say you do, which is often just a pointer to another source, and the “parasite” aggregation of the HuffPo example you cite.

I’d say it’s theoretically and practically very difficult to clearly distinguish between creating, curating, assembling, and “aggregating.”  Authors assemble, editors create, filmmakers “direct”.  The “assemblage” that I, Twitter, Google Reader, etc. do in pulling together my daily online reading has great cultural value to me.   I see a big continuum of combinatorial activities, a bounty which we can both use and add to;  not the sharply delinated creators/parasites you suggest.  There may be a case for the “parasite” view, but I don’t see that you’ve made it here.

Anyway, thanks for Brainpickings, I’m a supporter.

geography of power:  I love the visual of this SV hill town.  If you follow Sand Hill Road, past the world’s top tech venture-capital firms, at the end it winds up here, crossing over the outer-ring golf-course defenses, through the condo ring, past the inner ring of VC compounds, and finally at the center, Harvard Business School.  Click on image to enlarge, or view in Google Maps.

Protester in Madison, Wisconsin, 2011

Are teachers paid poorly, or well?   How much does it cost the city to employ one policeman?  Is that a good salary offer, or is it better to be a plumber?

These are basic questions we encounter all the time, personally and in political debate.

But it seems that people vary widely in their estimations and perceptions of who is paid what.  For example, U.S. opinion appears to be highly polarized regarding the compensation of public-sector workers, and there doesn’t seem to even be much factual common ground in the discussion (as with other many another policy issue).

So, in the typical wonk / librarian / nerd hope that better information will address the problem, and the lions will lie down with the lambs, I propose making an online tool to help this discussions.  To be neutral, let’s just call it a Compensation/Cost Calculator, Public, or CCCP.

I suspect that even a fairly simple calculator could be much more truthy than the vague, spurious claims that are tossed around in most political discussions.  Just imagine a straightforward Web site, at which you can plug in values for a few or many variables describing a job or job field, and get an adjusted total-compensation figure.  The point is that it can be a neutral, transparent model, so that anyone could analyze a job, or see and compare to others’ analyses of other jobs, using explicitly defined assumptions and formulae.  Any calculation can be preserved and cited;  someone could go back to it, challenge or tweak its assumptions.  A particular configuration of the model can be applied to any new or prior set of inputs, so you could for example see how jobs compare when you make different assumptions about health-care costs or pension-fund rates of return.  As compared to, say, comparing press releases from duelling lobbying, err advocacy groups, which are probably worse than useless.

The basic idea here is taken from the “total compensation” estimates or calculators offered by many larger employers, which attempt to quantify the total value of employees’ wages/salary, benefits, vacation time, etc.  A non-monetary benefit such as vacation time, for example, may be quantified by a device such as taking annual salary, dividing by paid work days, then multiplying this by number of vacation days — i.e. they are “paying” you for these days.   (Contrived as that may be, it provides a way to quantify our common-sense intuition that, say, a job with twelve weeks of vacation is better than one with two weeks).

However, unlike a employer’s calculator, our CCCP would be a general model, publicly available, with all inputs and assumptions transparent and modifiable.  Also, it could offer reputable data to use for many of the inputs, such as typical salaries, health-care costs, inflation estimates.  It could conceivably be linked to any relevant public data store such as public-sector salary records and Federal economic statistics, using Semantic Web / “linked data” methods (see http://linkeddata.org/).

There might also be a database of prior analyses of real jobs, if you were curious to look at or model on, say, actual UAW contract terms from Detroit, or what we pay members of Congress.  Perhaps if enough people got interested, you’d develop something of a global salary database, a more sophisticated version of the salary surveys that exist now.

So, of course you’d have basic variables such as:

• Salary / wages / overtime
• Current benefits, such as health care (absolute cost, or as percentage of salary.  As default, use a HR rule of thumb such as 35%)
• Retirement benefits
• The present-day annual cost, or compensation, for such deferred retirement benefits would be the amount that an employer would have to invest this year to sufficiently contribute to future total retirement costs.  This is a complicated calculation, but that’s why we have actuarials.

This model could have further and further levels of refinement:  for example, incorporating

• Typical or promised pay raises
• Trends in benefit costs.  (e.g. health care cost increases)
• Job stability (e.g. as expressed by % annual turnover of employees in this field).   Most people value this, and you could propose a way to quantify it into total compensation.
• Long-term risks, e.g. of corporate or governmental bankruptcy curtailing promised retirement benefits.
• Estimate cost / years of required post-secondary education
• taxation factors

Our CCCP tool could be extensible so that anyone could add new factors to refine the model, for optional use by anyone else.

Note, you could possibly use such a compensation calculator in two ways:
a)  compensation value to ME (factors such as your particular age may change calculations of, e.g. retirement benefits).
b)  compensation/cost on *average*, using inputs such as average worker age and salary.

Incidentally, the implications of this may be various.  For example, if teachers are shown to have relatively good compensation, then this might encourage more high-achieving students to pursue careers in teaching, which would be good for education.  If teacher compensation is shown to be low, this might encourage increased funding, which might also be good for education.  Some job fields, public or private, might be shown to have remarkable high or remarkably low compensation, and corrective action of any sort might ensue.  Those beleaguered financiers and executives, for example — maybe they’d at last get some respect.

But the CCCP takes no position.  We merely favor truth.

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As usual, to this post I add the disclaimer that, this may have been already proposed and done, I’m not sure because this is a blog post and I haven’t, of course, done exhaustive research or even half the relevant reading from the “field”, whichever field that would be.  It’s the Web, you know?

(and, what assumptions are inside those terms?)

In America, access to health care is usually described in terms of having “health insurance”. At the doctor’s office or pharmacy you’re likely to be asked for your “insurance card”, and the crisis in access to medical care is generally discussed in terms of the [fifty million or so] “uninsured Americans”.   However, insurance (meaning, private insurance) is just one of the various ways that health care is provisioned in the U.S., as in other countries.  (See Wikipedia overview of world health-care systems and types).  We also have publicly funded Medicare, care provided directly by employers, direct fee-for-service, indigent care, etc.

So, why do we usually say “insurance” instead of, say, “health care”?  Isn’t care what we’re actually interested in, not the way it happens to be paid for?  But my main point is, might the implications of the term “insurance” implicitly shape how people think about health care in this country, when this is the term that’s constantly used?

It’s true that in technical discussions, there is a concept of “social health insurance” which cover everyone, e.g. Medicare.  However, for most people, the term “health insurance” probably associates with other forms of insurance they’re likely to have,  such as car or home insurance.  What are the characteristics of “insurance”, inferred from these ordinary examples?:

1. insurance is individual — an insurance policy is a contract between me and a private company.  Me having this policy implies nothing about whether my neighbor has one, or what its terms might be.
2. insurance offsets future, unpredictable losses — not routine expenses.
3. insurance is underwritten / actuarial:  policy issuers decide whether to grant a policy, and they set prices and policies based on their assessment of the customer’s risk level.

Now consider the implications for one’s implicit model of how health care works, based on these characteristics:

1. [health insurance] is individual: access to health care is something that I, individually, negotiate or purchase.  It is not something I have in common with my neighbor, community, or even family member, necessarily.   It is a private asset, not a public good, and there is no community or societal norm describing what, if anything, I should have.
2. [health insurance] offsets future, unpredictable losses:   health care will be covered for me primarily in the case of a future, unexpected, unlikely occurrence such as an injury or new illness.  Any condition existing at the time the insurance contract is signed will *not* be covered — so, if you are pregnant, have a blood disease, already take a medication for some illness, have a permanent genetic condition, this will not be covered.   Preventive care may not be covered, because it is not unanticipated.
3. [health insurance] is underwritten / actuarial:  you have no right to health care — you will get it only if a health insurer decides it can cover you profitably.  If you have any existing illness, you most likely will not be “insurable”.  If you do get care, the price you pay for it will reflect your age, location, health history, gender, and any other risk factor the insurer chooses to consider (except for some legally prohibited ones).  If you are unlucky enough to have, say, a congenital condition, or live in a high-health-risk community, or be advanced in years, you may pay far higher premiums to get coverage.

So, by implication “health insurance” connotes a private, atomized, incomplete, non-preventive, discriminatory system that disclaims any notion of social equity or a human right to health, and excludes or financially punishes those with the greatest needs.

I’m just saying.

I am puzzled by Facebook’s comparative lack of way to filter and organize your FB experience, specifically the central News Feed feature.  It essentially uses opaque, automatic methods to construct a quite filtered News Feed for you, out of many sources.  There are just a few, on/off user controls such as choosing to block particular apps or completely defriend people.   In the past they tried things like Lists (groups), and  “less of this” controls, but these features are either dead or largely unused.

The non-uptake of those past features may suggest that users generally don’t want or can’t be bothered to do “filtering” and such management tasks.  (much like how, as the software-design maxim says, at least 95% of people never change any default settings).

On other hand, perhaps FB just didn’t figure out the right way to give users filtering powers, and so it’s failing to serve many people who are tired of the unfilterable mess, or who don’t even consider using the service for that reason.  (long before FB reaches its goal of signing up everyone on earth, they’ll have to convince some billions of skeptical middle-adopters, i.e. most people, that it’s not just an unending stream of trivial tidbits which they don’t have time or interest for).

Personally, I think that better, user-controlled filtering can and must be achieved.  You often hear that Facebook “got it right”, i.e. social networking, after Friendster, Myspace, etc. failed.  But to me that shows a limited imagination, or historical sense.  I believe Facebook’s grand social experiment, fascinating as it been, has hardly mapped or mastered the potentials of social networking.  Google’s grand entrance into the space, Google+, will put a spotlight on that.

In fact, it seems to me this is a gaping wide opportunity for a competitor such as Google+.  Consider, there is a FB group, “Facebook, give us a ‘dislike’ button”, that’s existed for years and currently has 495,290 members.   (https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=50153652583).  A half million users both annoyed and geeky enough to protest for a filtering feature!

It seems an obvious feature, yet various theories abound as to why Facebook won’t ever do it.   Some think that networking is inherently positive, i.e. is always link *building* rather than narrowing.  Others say the big FB would never allow such a capacity for public, negative feedback to afflict the corporations and brands upon which its monetization ambitions depend.

As to whether “Dislike” could get adopted by a mass user base, one problem is that although it the term is an obvious inversion of the existing “Like”, the meaning is ambiguous.   If a wall post reports that, e.g. New Jersey has voted to limit public employee’s collective bargaining, does a “Dislike” vote mean that you don’t like what New Jersey did, or that you think the FB user’s post was uninteresting / inappropriate?  Some people understand “Dislike” to mean comiseration with the post, some disapproval of the post.

Personally, I would suggest not only a “dislike” button (anonymous), but a user-set option to allow anonymous commenting.  (anonymous limited to those in your friend network).   Therefore, those users who wish to improve their Facebook posting manners, and learn what their friends actually find uninteresting or in poor taste etc., could do so.  This could be a quite socially educational, even *genteel* influence upon the chaos that Facebook can be today — a curious mixture of interesting, diverting, salacious, braggardly, irrelevant, tiresome, proselytizing, and oblivious (e.g. auto-posting your every pointless and contextless Tweet remark, or location check-in).

Facebook experience today.. a party to which not quite the right people showed up, with a few too many shouters and drunks, just not quite bad enough to leave?  yet.

the “Walkstation”, from Steelcase.  starting at $4,399.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how to unplug, particularly from desktop computer use.  I’m long inured to epic computer sessions — many-houred trance states, almost. Some people can go for 24 hours or more at this with just snack breaks, which can’t be good.

For many reasons, especially health in all forms.  As discussed in the recent NY Times article “Is Sitting a Lethal Activity”, new research suggests there may be a huge health issue caused by pervasive unhealthy sitting postures, and computer-use postures, and just the fact of pervasive *sitting* at all;  it may be a prime factor in the incidence of obesity in our society.  The article focuses on obesity and related issues, but in addition there’s the millions of cases of repetitive-stress injury, and who knows what in eyestrain, general stress, back problems, and general unhappiness.

I have a pet analogy:  in earlier times, scientists and technicians working on atomic energy projects would walk around carrying unshielded radioactive materials;  factory workers painting watch faces with radioactive luminous paint would routinely lick their brushes to sharpen them;  nobody knew, or knew for sure, that these were deadly activities, until the workers began to die of cancer at epidemic rates.

Likewise, I imagine that decades from now, people will look back at our time and be horrified that once, hundreds of millions of people in (mainly the rich) world would sit in a chair for 10-15 hours a day, directly in front of a monitor, typing or using a mouse.   They’ll say, but how could they have gone so long and not seen the correlation to ….  cancer rates. or perhaps epidemic obesity and metabolic disorders, or pervasive developmental and mental disorders like ADHD,  etc.   I know the bulk of humanity aren’t office drones, and may have other, more prosaic concerns such as lack of clean water, or AIDS,  but let’s focus on the leading-edge first world for now.

The obesity and developmental-disorders problems mentioned might more likely correlate to television watching.. but maybe the office computer is like a workplace version of television, from a health standpoint:  a great vegetating, obesity-generating, mind-numbing force.

Anyway so here are just some ideas, mine and others’, of ways large and small, symbolic and real, to reconnect virtual (inside your computer) with real world.

1) Weather webcam:  bring the weather / street to your desktop
Set up webcam at your office building, pointing outwards to show weather, daylight level, and street life.  (if you hopefully have street life, and haven’t been virtualized away to a lifeless office park or campus).  Then, on employees’ computers, set the default wallpaper  (desktop background) to be an regularly-updating view from the webcam — there are various free programs to do this. The reason is obvious:  in a lot of offices, a lot of people are getting very little natural light, or cue as to what’s going on outside.   I’ve thought about this one for year and years, since way back when I first worked in a cubicle in the ’70s.  But I haven’t heard of it being done anywhere.

2) Social webcam:  bring the lobby / atrium / cafe / bar to your desktop (a social variation on #1):
Set up or designate some communal social space — e.g. a break room or lobby area or part of the cafeteria — and designate it “live”.  Set up webcam onto this space.  Feed webcam stream into default employees’ computer wallpaper.  So, you can have some remote connection to who is hanging out, you can perhaps join your friends if you see them there, and you can go there yourself and have more chance of running into your friends.

A more public version of this is the bar or cafe that sets up a webcam and puts it on the Web, so presumably you can check out who’s there before coming down.  This used to be done occasionally, back in the day when webcams were relatively new.   Obviously, privacy concerns arise, so I think the practice faded.  I don’t know if anyone tried what I was thinking of, visibly designating just part of the venue as “live”.

3) Standing meetings
Borrowing a technique from agile software development, do meetings standing up when possible. Not only does it help keep meetings quick and focused, but it keeps people’s bodies in motion, and works against the relapsing into Blackberry / smartphone or even laptop use that can happen during a sit-down meeting.

4) Treadmill workstations
Actually quite simple:  mount a desktop over a treadmill, walk while you work.  These exist, are in production from leading office-furniture company Steelcase: the “Walkstation”, from Steelcase.  starting at $4,399.  (see photo at top of post).  The ones that exist are made for office environments, thus presumably walking, but I’ve been thinking I could really enjoy something like this at the gym.  Rather than five TV channels of trash that I have to choose from now, I’d be most happy if I could carry on my preferred news-reading, Web video-watching, Wikipedia-reading, and general Web foraying, while running or bicycling.  I see an opportunity for high-end, professionals-oriented gyms here.

The treadmill workstation (right, the vendors don’t call them “treadmills”, but I will) is greatly ironic:  it’s like a comically absurd symbolization of the modern office worker as poorhouse drone;  but in fact, might be a great gift to the employee.  Yes, and gift of employer to itself, by reducing health-care costs and health-related productivity loss.

5) Office computers that make you take breaks
Set up office computers so that every so often, say every two hours, the system will gently log you out for ten minutes or so.  It will be unavailable for that time, so you may as well take a power nap, do you calisthenics routine, or walk around the block once or twice.

Ok, there are some practical issues like not interrupting you if you’re on a conference call or Webinar, etc., but it can be worked out.  Perhaps, you can get a button to override for one hour, or the logout won’t happen during scheduled critical times.

6) Office computers that make you take musical chairs breaks
In offices where workstations and seating positions are relatively interchangeable, and people use thin terminals (i.e. their files and programs are on the network drive, not local), periodically the computers log everyone off for a period (as in #5).  However, in this version, the twist is that after ten minutes, your session with your open files and programs will become reavailable on a different workstation somewhere in the office. After doing your power nap or coffee break, you have to find out where in the office you’ve been transferred, which involves a fun game of everyone roaming around shouting out who’s where.  Then, you have to adjust your body to the chair settings, monitor position, different lamp, etc., of the workstation’s prior user.  Hilarious!  Alright this isn’t quite serious but the point here is to make us think people.

7) Shifty office furniture
The recent Mayo Clinic research from that NY Times article tells us that unchanging, sedentary body positions greatly impact our metabolisms.  Common sense and experience tells us that an unchanging position in a chair, or craning at a screen, is uncomfortable.  Yet, unchange and crane we do, as the research shows.  Concentration apparently immobilizes people, and so we really ought to keep changing our positions.  But why rely on us to remember to move, when we have machines to be clever like that?

So, the monitor:  mine, for example, sits on a little platform I made that rolls easily in all directions and fits the keyboard in underneath.  It would be quite simple to make a monitor stand (hello, Steelcase!) that was like this but had a few little motors attached to the rollers and randomly timed such that once in a while, it would gently slide left or right or forward six inches.

More sophisticated applications of this idea would be monitor arms that changed positions, or adjustable-height desks that changed.  You could also put your lamp on a timer so it would periodically conk out, and you’d be forced to get up to reset it.  (I know, neither your cubicle / table segment nor mine are big enough to require any “getting up” to change the lamp;  or, also bad, there is no lamp that you have any control over, just totalitarian ceiling fluorescents or whatever.  So plug something in whose outage will cause a reaction.  We’re just trying to get metabolism into the work environment, however how).

Change up the form factor:  smartphone, tablet, wallscreen
Different computing devices pull people into different physical positions and activities; and the more mobile a device, obviously the more it can be used embedded in the world
When people started using and got used to smartphones, especially the iPhone, often they were and are surprised to learn how many formerly “computer” tasks can actually be done with it.  Particularly with a beautifully-designed implement like the iPhone, people become attached to it in a way that they don’t generally feel about a desktop PC, and they want to use it instead of the PC, even perhaps for, say, tasks that seem to be large-screen oriented.

I find that I’ll walk over to my desk to check email, and pick up my iPhone to check on it rather than looking at the desktop PC.  The phone, I pick up and hold in just the position most comfortable to how I’m standing;  the PC demands that I stoop to it.  It’s like the old distinction between “lean forward” technology such as the PC and “lean back” technology such as the television.

Likewise, a common experience with the new tablet computers (led by Apple’s iPad) is to feel released from the desktop, or even a desk/table (i.e. as laptops are typically used on), and find oneself using it on the couch, in bed, or in new places on the go.

More speculatively, I also imagine devices / interfaces becoming widely available that are wall- or room-sized.  As perhaps most famously imagined in the 2002 movie Minority Report, in which the detective played by Tom Cruise uses a special room filled with panels of transparent LED displays, controlled by laser mice in his gloves, to rapidly explore ream of image and database data about his suspect.

(See Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler demoing his current version of this at a 2010 TED event).  Note, in both cases, the user is standing up, and making significant body motions (arms) to work the display;  also, there is a social component, because the operator’s activity is displayed large enough for colleagues or an audience to watch and participate.

Yes, many of these design ideas have been villified by other interface designers as unusable, clueless fantasies.  Yet I can imagine the room-as-interface (what Underkoffler calls the “luminous room” concept) having important applications.  For example, in collaborative meetings and videoconferences, where groups of people must gather a lot of visual materials, brainstorm, decide, perhaps working from far-separated geographic locations.  Or, educational software (including training materials, in the corporate context) that employs large-scale interfaces — and perhaps gamification (use of game-play mechanics) — for a more effective and healthy whole-body experience.

Some of the above techniques assume that computer immersion is a problem requiring interruption.  Others propose integrating motion into immersive computer activity.  Ultimately I think the latter has more potential, because obviously it’s not disrupting the user’s concentration.  It suggests a new definition of unplugging:  being plugged in to the computer while still thoroughly plugged in to your body and the physical world.