Author: mklang

What a marketer should know

Right now I am sitting in what is probably one of the most expensive (and therefore inhospitable?) airports in the world. Copenhagen Airport (CPH). Ok so I am sure there are worse airports but Copenhagen seems to be uniquely situated to annoy this traveler. And I have been annoyed here many times before.

Its not their fault the Danish krona is strong and you cannot blame one airport for being expensive – they all take advantage of their monopoly situations.

And I am not really annoyed that they still charge for internet access – only US airports seem to believe that this is something that should be offered at no cost… like bathrooms, toilet paper, heat, air conditioning, lighting and a whole other pile of services.

No, what really begins to annoy me is the pricing. Again with the local monopoly!

Internet Access, 30 minutes (DKK 40)
Internet Access, 1 hour (DKK 60)
Internet Access, 4 hours (DKK 80)

I am naturally averse to paying for Internet connection but when companies charge as much for the hour as these do it is cheaper to buy a month worth of pre-paid mobile Internet. But wait, they don’t sell such things at the airport – it would ruin the monopoly.

But what really gets me pissed off – that which really adds insult to injury is the wonderfully out of touch text about the airport:

“Copenhagen Airport is a living organism that never rests. It is much more than just a traffic hub; it is an excursion spot in itself.”

WTF?? You cannot be serious? Nobody but the feeble-minded make trips to airports as excursions – and none of these are trapped within the monopolistic terminals! So here is a message to Mr & Mrs Marketing: We are here because we have to be. We do not want to be here. Your words show a lack of connection with the real world on par with Egypt’s President Mubarak.

If I am thirsty I will drink your overpriced beer
If I am hungry I will eat your dry overpriced sandwiches
If I am tired I will try to rest on your uncomfortable chairs
If I am bored I will shop in your overpriced stores
But no way in hell will I swallow your crappy marketing.

We don’t believe you,
We cannot be bothered to argue with you
But your monopoly on defining the world does not create the world.
It insults us, it demeans you.

Posted from another country where the Internet is free. In more ways than one.

Posted on by mklang

Ranking Web of Universities

The Cybermetrics Lab released today the 12th edition of its Ranking Web of Universities. This is the world broadest coverage ranking of Universities showing the performance of 12,000 higher education institutions worldwide.

Focusing not only on the research dimension, but considering also other academic missions like teaching, community engagement and knowledge and
technological transfer, the Ranking Web is offering a series of truly global indicators that reveal the outstanding performers, the excellence in education and the international impact and visibility of the universities.

The main results from the current edition are:

  • US dominance: The Ranking is headed by MIT and Harvard University, followed by Stanford and California Berkeley. There are 115 North American universities among the Top 200, including 16 Canadian ones.
  • Academic Digital Divide. The concerning gap between US and the Developed World Universities is not being closed. Only 59 European institutions are cited in the Top 200, including 10 UK ones, mostly in the leading group (Cambridge and University College of London are the EU best ones)
  • Language barriers. The globalization of the Web penalized the international visibility of French, Japanese or Korean universities.
  • Australian, Scandinavian, Singapore and surprisingly Taiwanese institutions show a performance close to the Canadian universities.
  • Size is a relevant factor in the emerging countries. Sao Paulo in Brazil, UNAM in México and Peking and Tsinghua in China are examples to be considered. No Indian university appears in top 500.
  • Open Access policies. The scores show that many universities are launching big efforts to populate their repositories, greatly expanding the availability of academic papers. On the contrary, there are still a few hundred institutions with two or more web domains, a bad practice that penalizes not only their rank but their overall visibility in search engines.

“In this edition a new indicator has been applied for reflecting more accurately the academic impact of the web contents” said Isidro F. Aguillo, Head of the Cybermetrics Lab. “The goal is to provide a complete overview of the academia worldwide, without using subjective criteria or excluding universities solely by technical reasons and guaranteeing no economical or political interests affect the scores”. “We are very surprised by the use of incomplete or flawed rankings for recognition of foreign university degrees. The current report constitutes a robust evaluation resource that can useful worldwide” said Isidro Aguillo.

Posted on by mklang

The law is an ass

Need more proof that the law is not as relevant as it should be? Via Slashdot comes a link to a report in the Times of India about a recent case in the High Court of Bombay. The court had received a complaint filed by an NGO, Janhit Manch that sought action against ‘fake’ astrologers, tantriks, practitioners of Vastu shastra etc.

The outcome was probably a lot more surprising than most would expect. Instead of confirming that astrology lacked any scientific foundation they came to the conclusion that:

“So far as prayer related to astrology is concerned, the Supreme Court has already considered the issue and ruled that astrology is science. The court had in 2004 also directed the universities to consider if astrology science can be added to the syllabus. The decision of the apex court is binding on this court,” observed the judges.

Decisions such as these could hardly prove to be negative on the reality of science – even if the perception of science may be dented in some quarters, but any people who chose to be affected by this are hardly the most scientifically rooted. On the other hand scientists, and thankfully a whole bunch of lawyers, can only shake their heads in despair.

All we can do is agree with Mr Bumble: “the law is an ass”

Posted on by mklang

Almost bankrupt

This blog was behaving erratically and reacting slowly. It needed to be fixed. So without enough knowledge I went into the back end of the database and experimented. I shouldnt have done that. Also I really should not have done it without first creating a proper backup. And boy did I make a mess.

I managed to delete not only the bad stuff but I also permanently deleted my whole history. Six years of blogging all gone. I swore and tore my hair but still it was all gone. I was almost coming around to the fact that I was blog bankrupt.

Thankfully the good people at my web hotel were smarter than me and managed to rescue me from my own incompetence. They sent me a backup of my database and I have now been able to recreate this blog to where I was only four days ago.

Its good to be back.

Posted on by mklang

Questionable New Renaissance

On the 10 January 2011 the Comité des Sages (give me a break, what a title) delivered their report ‘The New Renaissance’ (again with the big titles). But seriously, the Comité was set up by the European Commission in April last year with the purpose of making recommendations for bringing Europe’s cultural heritage online. The reports main headings cover areas like:

  1. Ensuring wide access to and use of digitised public domain material
  2. Stimulating the digitisation and online accessibility of in-copyright material
  3. Reinforcing Europeana as the reference point for European culture online
  4. Guaranteeing the sustainability of digitised resources
  5. Finding sustainable financing for digitisation and Europeana
  6. Complementing public funding through public private partnerships for digitisation

Also they have some interesting & innovative ideas (compared to others) for resolving the orphaned work issue and preventing it from re-occurring by introducing a registration for copyright. This would also help works which are not orphaned but just ignored.

On the question of digitalization the sages (LOL, again I can’t ignore the title) suggest that  if right owners don’t want to exploit then digitization should be paid for with public money in collaboration with the private sector. Also in the case of non-copyrighted, ignored or orphaned works digitalization should grant the digitalizor up to 7 years preferential use by private partners.

My main beef – and it seems to be shared by the 1709 blog – is the conflict between the reports title and the reports content: The New Renaissance will only be digital. Now don’t get me wrong I like digital. But in an age when we are closing museums and libraries, or cannot afford to display the contents of our archives digitalization is an alternative. However it is also an excuse not to maintain the physical – and that would not be a renaissance.

Posted on by mklang

How a bail-out works

Loved this from Memex 1.1: From today’s Financial Times…

The rain beats down on a small Irish town. The streets are deserted. Times are tough. Everyone is in debt and living on credit. A rich German arrives at the local hotel, asks to view its rooms, and puts on the desk a €100 note. The owner gives him a bunch of keys and he goes off for an inspection.

As soon as he has gone upstairs, the hotelier grabs the note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher hurries down the street to pay what he owes to his feed merchant. The merchant heads for the pub and uses the note to pay his bar bill. The publican slips the note to the local hooker who’s been offering her services on credit. She rushes to the hotel to pay what she owes for room hire. As she puts the €100 note on the counter, the German appears, says the rooms are unsuitable, picks up his €100 note and leaves town.

No one did any work. No one earned anything. Everyone is out of debt. Everyone is feeling better. And that is how a bail-out works.

Posted on by mklang

Free Software Foundation Fundraiser

Its a worthy cause and you use more Free Software than you know…

The nonprofit 501(c)3 Free Software Foundation is running its annual fundraiser. The FSF publishes, maintains and updates the GPL free software licenses, maintains and publishes several critical free software projects, and performs advocacy, lobbying and litigation in support of the idea of user-modifiable, freely copyable software. I’ve been an annual donor to the FSF for many years and I’ve worked alongside of them at various policy bodies, from the UN to regional governments, to shape treaties, standards and laws.

Join with over 3,000 active members in 48 countries, representing a diverse membership of computer users, software engineers, hackers, students, and freedom activists.When you sign up as a member, you join an informed society working together to make a better world: one respectful of individual freedoms, rights, and privacy, built on free software.

Welcome to a society for free software advocates, supporting the ethical cause of computer user freedom!

Posted on by mklang

Privacy and plancenta

Judging from the number of cases where medical staff have been fired for posting images on Facebook it seems obvious that Facebook somehow manages to confuse professionals into forgetting the basic principles of privacy. Internet Cases reports on the interesting case where a student nurse was expelled for posting a picture of herself with a placenta. She has now sued the college and won.

Plaintiff nursing student and some of her classmates attended a clinical OB/GYN course at the local hospital in Olathe, Kansas last November. They got permission from their instructor to photograph themselves with a placenta. Plaintiff posted the photo on Facebook. She got expelled from school. Yes, I know you want to see the photo. Here it is. Byrnes v. Johnson County Community College, 2011 WL 166715 (D. Kan., January 19, 2011).

It is difficult to see how a picture of a placenta can be viewed as a privacy violation even if photographing body parts may be less than professional. The placenta has no rights in itself and identifying the owner of the placenta from an image of the organ seems impossible.

Posted on by mklang

Cybersecurity and bad science

Via Bruce Schneier comes a link to an OECD report “Reducing Systemic Cybersecurity Risk” written by Peter Sommer & Ian Brown stating that the threat of cyberwar has been grossly exaggerated. Bruce has written about this before. He links to an interesting article “…on cyberwar hype and how it isn’t serving our national interests, with some good policy guidelines.”

From the executive summary of the Sommer & Brown report:

Analysis of cybsersecurity issues has been weakened by the lack of agreement on terminology and the use of exaggerated language. An “attack” or an “incident” can include anything from an easily-identified “phishing” attempt to obtain password details, a readily detected virus or a failed log-in to a highly sophisticated multi-stranded stealth onslaught. Rolling all these activities into a single statistic leads to grossly misleading conclusions. There is even greater confusion in the ways in which losses are estimated. Cyberespionage is not a “few keystrokes away from cyberwar”, it is one technical method of spying. A true cyberwar is an event with the characteristics of conventional war but fought exclusively in cyberspace.

Basically cyberwar/cybersecurity is plagued by bad science. For more on bad science I warmly recommend Ben Goldacre’s book.

Posted on by mklang