A Letter in Scarlet*

Amazing but scary

I was in love with the Panasonic DMC-FZ35 digital camera long before I plunked down my credit card. I would go regularly the Digital Photography Review site and drool over the sample images (all those wonderful shots of London Bridge, the city skyline, and colorful shopping plazas within). And I would periodically visit Best Buy, Amazon and J&R Music World to check pricing. And behind me ─ bet on it! ─ was a robot salesman, watching my clicks, recording my interests, sending me advertising and ultimately, a year after my first explorations, closing the sale.

To say I got a $400-camera for $220 would be a bit factious. Panasonic had brought out an update to the FZ35, the FZ40 (for about $300, street price), though user reviews suggested that the FZ35 was still the better choice. But in an effort to clear inventory on the older model, Amazon and the like dropped their prices, and sales approaching Christmas were infectious. I had to make a judgment call as to how low the price would drop before inventory was depleted, and I think I called it right. The day after I made my purchase, the robot-driven side panels next to my AOL email messages were showing the FZ35 and saying things like, “Act now! Only 5 left at this price.”

For those who haven’t quite caught on as why their gmail, AOL, Yahoo, or Hot Mail services are free, let me remind you that it’s paid for by advertising. And thanks to spiders, software robots and other scanning mechanisms, that advertising is very precisely targeted. The spiders will root through your emails, keep track of the websites you’ve visited, and likely compile a profile. If you have a special hobby, are interested in buying something, the machinery knows about it. Check the side-panel advertising to the right of your Facebook profile: How do these people know you’re cyclist? A cancer patient? Or getting married?

I took a survey about my movie preferences on Netflix, knowing my preferences would help them make recommendations to me. They gave me a not-overly-long list of movie types and titles, and asked me to rate them on emotional impact. I tend to think foreign films are more interesting than American films; I like science fiction (concept films, at least), but I have a limited tolerance for movie violence. (The "Millennium Series," which I wrote about last time, was a stretch for me, not because of the subtitles, but because of the sadism toward women. Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “Psycho” was similarly a stretch for me, though Hitchcock intended it to be a stretch for everyone.) I think there were 15 films the Netflix survey asked me to rate.

The outcome of the survey is that, now, Netflix totally “gets me.” Every time I go to the site, looking for a DVD to watch, Netflix’s recommendations are 100%. Every film title they recommend is either something I’ve already seen and enjoyed, or one which has been high up on my list of things I’d like to see.

But Netflix solicited my cooperation. It’s a little disconcerting when AOL or Yahoo comes down unbidden on your consumer preferences, making you wonder whether they know more about you than your spouse does. As one listener protested in a radio perspective piece, “this is amazing... but scary.”

Most call it stalking

Oddly enough, few people are screaming about invasions of privacy. I might have mixed feelings about the ad service that tracked my camera preferences, but then I’m also on record seconding Scott McNealy’s conjecture that privacy on the Internet is a pipedream

In an article about software ad servers, a CNET reporter claimed ads posted by advertising service Specific Media didn’t offend her enough. As a reporter with a byline and a following, she had expected the spiders to have collected a lot of information about her. To say she was interested in technology, the Internet and digital cameras describes a lot of us, but she had no idea why the ad server said she was interested in “heavy construction. ”I must have hit on some housing or building site to trigger that one,” the reporter, Elinor Mills, concluded.

“Behavioral targeting tracks and analyzes your online behavior, tracking what you search for, what websites you visit and what services you use. This could be used to determine what ads are shown to you and where, even having the same ad follow you from site to site, a practice known as retargeting (or remarketing),” Mills wrote. “Outside the advertising industry, most call it stalking.”

The Huffington Post offered some pointers for getting these robots off your tail, but acknowledged it maybe a losing battle. “The most straightforward approach to combating targeted web ads is via the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), a cooperative of online marketing and analytics companies. The NAI offers some “opt out” tools for killing cookies and other tracking markers. The Huffington Post also points to the PrivacyChoice.org for a larger assortment of tracking killers and smoke screens.

As a reporter with a very public profile, I admit to having mixed feelings about this exposure. I cannot change hats (literally) without somebody noticing. As far back as 1998 and 1999, when my then employer, CMP Media, began setting up its web portals, Internet jocks in the company imagined how USEFUL the websites could become to our visitors if only we knew more about who these visitors were and what they were interested in. Engineering readers were resistant to register to obtain access to the websites, but following someone’s click patterns could tell you a lot about what content you should be providing to keep that visitor coming back to your site. If visitors keep coming back to (say) your microcontroller pages, maybe you could invigorate your site with more architecture and software subroutine choices – and get a programming tools advertiser to sponsor this.

Jump ahead 12 years: pattern recognition, along with the impact of social media is high up among Gartner research agendas for 2011. We see this not as a threat, but as a mechanism to help IT system administrators detect and rapidly respond to indicants of change. Think of the possibilities: If you’re music critic at the increasingly unmanageable South-by-Southwest music festival in Austin, you just follow the real-time text message streams to find the best musical acts and venues. If you’re a stock trader, you can make enormous amounts of money on penny swings of a particular stock – if you can catch them fast enough. (I used to wonder why all these $500-million fund managers  I was presenting to were all 26- and 28-year-olds, until I realized these young geniuses – fresh out of Wharton or Harvard Business School – wrote the complex mathematical models that would help them capture these patterns.) Conversely, early pattern recognition could help prevent fraud and deceit.

Fast on the trigger

Still, I cringe at the speed with which ad servers can react (and am steeling myself for the ads this blog will bring). We should be grateful, perhaps, it’s a robot reading your email, and not a real person. A lady friend of mine uses the online dating service, match-dot-com, as a vehicle for meeting available men in her age group. I think it would not unfair to say that most people advertising for social connections this way do not live up to their promotion; the men are generally older, heavier and less financially solvent than their pictures and online profiles seem to suggest. Sometimes people live up to their profiles, my friend tells me, but beyond a handshake and/or a peck on the cheek, it’s often hard to get a romantic relationship going.

Still, my friend – a former actress, model and press agent -- has a great sense humor and irony. She takes a you-need-to-sort-through-a-lot-frogs-before-you-find-the-handsome-prince attitude, and has some marvelous stories to tell. However you interpret her online profile, there is no doubt she is looking for someone handsome, intelligent, and successful in his career.

Thus, it was with great interest that I read a recent email from her, saying she had made the breakthrough connection: Prince Charming himself. They were exchanging lengthy emails, and getting set to meet. She was so thrilled. He was a world-famous economist, she wrote me, widely published, an advisor to corporations and congressional subcommittees, a frequent guest on the McNeal Lehrer News Hour and other NPR interview programs.

I gave my friend the benefit of my doubt: highly successful professional people do indeed show up periodically in online dating sites. “Maybe I ought to meet him,” I wrote back, partially jesting and partially thinking this guy would make for interesting conversation, if not become a keynoter for one of the conferences I wind up supporting.

I’d like think that what happened next was a coincidence; that there wasn’t a spider reading my mail.

The side-panel advertising on the very next email I received said this: “Meet available singles in your area, on match-dot-com.” And the pictures accompanying the ad were head-and-shoulder shots of handsome young men.[ ]

 

Why I need a Kindle

On impulse, I picked a bookplate off the sidewalk near my house. It was the title page for something called “The Future of the Book,” edited by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg and published in 1996. It was sopped with rain, but I thought to carry it home, dry it out and have it framed. It struck such a nerve.

Like a lot of educated people, I’ve been in love with books. Hardbounds. Paperbacks. Fiction. Non-fiction. Coffee table art books. I love not just to read them and absorb their contents, think about what their authors went through to create them, but also to keep them around me, as if they were old friends (or new ones). I certainly couldn’t ride a MUNI bus without spending some time with a book. (“Oh: You’re one of these guys who reads for fun,” a disillusioned school teacher once teased me. But she spent her days with kids for whom cracking a book was a torture, and I could see how my hobby bemused her.)

I dumped 2/3 of my books ─ just left them on the street ─ when I moved from Long Island to San Francisco ten years ago. They were mostly college texts and cheesy paperbacks (including some Peter Drucker and Ayn Rand titles) which I don’t particularly miss. Still, I love the image of myself surrounded by books, floor-to-ceiling, as in the typical book jacket author’s photo. I love places like Bell’s Books in Palo Alto and Powell’s Books in Portland, where they group books by authors and don’t make too many distinctions (except in price) between what’s new and what’s used or Kramerbooks and Afterwords in Washington DC, where they might even feed you. San Francisco’s Green Apple Books is just around the corner from me, but I have to be judicious about dropping in there: It could be a $200-bill.

Though not quite floor-to-ceiling, I have books in pretty much every room of my house. Living room, bedroom, and front hall ─ even the kitchen and bathroom. But as much as I like having books around me, it occurs to me I won’t be able to take these with me when I move. Even if I don’t wind up in a London studio, with children and home ownership behind me, it’s time to think about downsizing. As much as I love my books, I’m just not going to be able to take them with me.

 

Love and Death above the Arctic Circle

I wasn’t thinking about relocation on my last trip to Europe. (Okay, maybe I was, but that wasn’t what got me thinking about a Kindle.) The 10-hour flight was a great time to catch up on some reading. I had three books with me, and as I’d finish one, and move onto the next, I’d wonder, “Okay, what do I do with this?” My briefcase was pretty heavy.

I’m ordinarily not a mystery fan. I know people who gobble them up like barreled peanuts, cracking the shells, crunch-crunch-crunching briefly on the seeds, tossing the shell, and reaching quickly for another. It’s a genre I needed to learn. (I would hesitantly identify science fiction as my “junk reading,” though few fans of William Gibson would identify likely put his books and the same consume-and-toss category as peanuts.)

Rather, following the incredible popularity of the Stieg Larsson Millennium series (beginning with "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"), I discovered a whole library of somewhat bleak detective fiction set in Scandinavia ─ Sweden, Norway and Denmark ─ as well as Finland and Iceland. Wisconsin Public Radio underlined this genre in a radio program called "The Scandinavian Death Trip." The Nordic Noir novels were easy to consume (fast reading), compelling in their own way (you want to know who the killer is), but I couldn’t help wondering what do they say about life ─ modern life ─ in these cold and dark places.

In all the Nordic Noir novels I read, the cold and dark of the place (especially in the winter, where the sun sets one day and doesn’t come up for six months) is a character, a palpable presence, dark and foreboding. In the Finland depicted by James Thompson in “Snow Angels,” for example, people gage the temperature according to the speed with which their nostril hairs freeze. Ski resorts with luxury condos have sprung up in northern Finland (far from Helsinki). On weekends, the icy roads are clogged with German-made SUVs. But the working-class people who live there year round often turn to drinking when the winter sun sets; it makes them surly and sets the stage for violence.

The changing demographics of these northern countries (the place of ethnic minorities, for example) seems to be a common theme in the mystery novels I read. In Thompson’s “Snow Angels,” the first person murdered is a Somalian immigrant, leading the detective-hero to ask whether this was an act of racial/ethnic prejudice ─ especially as politicos race to keep the crime away from the news media. In Arnaldur Indridason’s “Arctic Chill,” set in modern Reykjavik, the murder victim is a Thai immigrant, and the first suspects make public noises about “Iceland for Icelanders.”In Karin Fossum’s “The Water’s Edge,” the prime suspect is a pederast, but the hunt for the child killer forces the detective-hero to ask how Norwegians actually feel about homosexuals, “people on benefits” and other minorities.

The woman who took me to see the film version of “Girl with The Dragon Tattoo,” and the Finnish woman who took me to see the sequel, “The Girl who Played with Fire” had a lot in common with their admiration for Lisbeth Salander, the main character of Larsson’s series. She was more than an expert computer hacker. She was the victim sexual abuse, depicted in often uncomfortable detail in the films. But she doesn’t wimp away; she extracts a carefully-choreographed revenge, and the movie audiences cheer when she succeeds. I don’t know what this says about the status of women in modern Sweden, though it strikes me as a long way off from the painful psychological introspection depicted by Ingmar Bergman in (say) “Scenes from a Marriage.”

I lent Thompson’s novel, “Snow Angels,” to my Finnish friend, who spent her early years in Lapland, above the Arctic Circle. She had to read in fits-and-starts, she said; Thompson’s descriptions made her homesick. She remembered with nostalgia the Finnish custom of removing your shoes when you entered someone’s home. She cringed at the Finnish curses Thomson repeated, and remembered seeing the Northern Lights in Finland’s star-filled winter sky ─ “which is why,” Thompson’s detective hero reflects, “I believe in God.”

But my friend had to wrestle with the notion of Finland as destination for Somalian immigrants. The whole notion seemed strange. The native people, like the Swedes, were predominantly blonde-haired and blue-eyed. She never even SAW a black person up close, she confessed, until she emigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s.

The Thompson novel would make a great movie, I think, gauging by current standards. The detective hero gets shot in the face at the end, but survives, probably to make his way to the inevitable sequel. (I can’t help thinking of Bruce Willis who plays roughnecks who survive bloody beatings film after film, though the part of a world-weary Finn might be something of a stretch.)

In the end, mystery writing seems governed by formulas: Begin with a horrific crime (the murder of a child or the mutilation of beautiful movie star). Throw in an aging, cynical (seen it all before) detective, one who may drink a lot and have some personal involvement with the suspects. Mix in a bunch of clues, including red herrings, often earnest theories about what the forensics of the crime suggest, and expand the number of suspects. End with the murderer, explaining or lamenting his crime, in elaborate detail, even as he threatens the life of the detective hero.

I faithfully lugged these books to and from Europe, and added them to my floor-to-ceiling collection when I returned home. But I had in fact absorbed the formula.

 

The Future of the Book

Freescale, whose iMX processor forms the heart of the Kindle, claims the largest penetration among eBook readers. This is area to watch closely, not just as bookworms like me convert to electronic media, but as permutations of the tablet computer intrude on eBook territory. Analysts looking at the Apple iPad had earlier concluded its color screen and multimedia playback capability could cannibalize eBooks ─ especially as the tablets' form factors morphed toward 7-inch screens. Strap hanging commuters, for example, could hold this kind of reader in one hand on the bus or train to work. But this does not portend a shrinking of the iMX market. iMX-based tablets, using the Android operating system, are starting to appear in Asia.

Two trends will affect the future of the eBook and Amazon promises to play a role in both cases. On one hand, the pricing on eBooks (as expected) is plummeting. Amazon reduced its pricing down to an accessible $139 before Christmas, in an effort to stimulate sales. By all estimates they were successful. One rumor has Amazon moving as many as 3 million Kindles just in the month of December. Wall Street analysts had projected that Amazon will have sold between 4 and 5 million Kindles in 2010, but that number could be as high as 8 million. But it looks as if 2011 will be an even better year for the Kindle.

The other effort, announced just before Christmas, enables Kindle books to be displayed on other platforms, such as portable computers (and tablets), and iPhones. This totally reduces dependence of the media on an eBook hardware, which many analysts believe will turn into a giveaway in any case. The business case for eBooks starts to look like cell phones, in which you pay for the subscription, while the service provider offers the hardware for free.

I can certainly see myself reading books from my Blackberry in an airport lounge or on a standing-room-only commute downtown. I’ve actually become quite ecumenical about my book consuming habits. As one example, I’ve downloaded some non-fiction titles from Audible.com. Randall Lane’s expose on the financial excesses of the last decade "The Zeroes," and Douglas Frantz’ accusation of America’s somnambulance with regard to Pakistan’s theft-and-resale of nuclear weapons secrets, “The Nuclear Jihadist.” Though the stories are disturbing, only a single earpiece is necessary to keep up with the narration, which keeps me company as I prepare a gourmet meal for friends, or cycle weekends through Marin. []

The Great American Disaster Movie

There is a ridiculous scene in the 1996 movie, "The Rock" which made me want to throw rotten tomatoes at the screen (though I had watched it at home with my, then, teenaged daughter). As I’ve written elsewhere, I have a great tolerance for movie hokum. The Rock — which is said to have single-handedly reinvigorated the Alcatraz tourist trade here in San Francisco — doesn’t necessarily bend the laws of physics, but it does stretch the limits of plausibility. The hero, an FBI agent played by Nicolas Cage, gets kicked, shot by a gun, thrown out of a helicopter, exposed to poison gas, stabbed in the heart, and shot by a missile launched from a fighter jet… and he not only survives but goes on to win the fight with the Bad Guys. If you ever enjoyed a James Bond movie, you learn to live with such inanities.

But one scene in “The Rock” truly rubbed my engineering sensibilities the wrong way, and got my hackles up. In the scene, an international fugitive, played by Sean Connery, who proves to be a Nicolas Cage ally, has a fist-fight aboard an out-of-control San Francisco cable car. At the climax of the scene, the cable car slips off its track, rolls down a steep hill, and bursts into fiery flame at the bottom. Grrr!!! says the engineer in me. The cable car has no engine, and no gas tank. What in hell’s name (besides Hollywood stupidity) would cause the thing to explode?

I was reminded of this last weekend during a screening of "2012," an amusing depiction of the end of the world. I was up to my throat then in year-end Gartner reports (including a very-visible 2009 semiconductor industry wrap up) but was in the right mood for some Saturday night escapist entertainment.The movie was promoted in much the same way as the 2^nd “Terminator" movie - a funhouse ride — and, in that sense, it did not disappoint. We got to see the whole city of Los Angeles sink into the Pacific Ocean, a consequence of a shifting of the earth’s crust — a 10-point-something movement on the Richter scale. We got see the Bellagio in Las Vegas similarly crumble into a crack in the earth, Yellowstone National Park turn into a fiery volcano, the Washington Monument topple, and the Sistine Chapel in Rome come down on the heads of the faithful. Baby Huey at his worse… What a guilty pleasure!

But all this mayhem (accompanied by a noisy, headache-provoking soundtrack) felt tedious after a while, and encouraged me to pick out flaws in the computer animated scenes. Does a smoked glass tower crumble as it falls? Would two adjacent towers, responding to a rough jolt in their foundations, topple in opposite directions? And what would cause a burst of flame from the upper floors? Yeah: there is some moral soul-searching toward the end, but, for all practical purposes, this could be a Disney Cartoon. (I mean that in the full “la-la-la” sense of the term: In Disney’s rendering of “The Little Mermaid” for example, she lives happily ever after. In the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, she dies, sacrificing herself for her lover.)

But I was grateful for “2012 “to get me away from my desk for a couple of hours, and away from the news headlines which described death and destruction from terrorist bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan, the depressing US unemployment picture, and the refusal of national governments to take responsibility for climate change.

The sound of disaster

I was in deep trouble my senior year at engineering school. I spent most of my school days (and nights) running the college paper, and my grades were a mess. I needed to ace my term papers in order to bring my grade point average up well enough for me to graduate on time. The girlfriend, I was living with then, typed up the term papers for me, sitting up with me night-after-night, 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning, typing the hand-written sheets I’d hand her. We’d use the TV to keep us company during the process, a black-and-white movie series on New York's CBS TV, then called “The Late Late Show.”

One week, they played a series of Warner Brothers’ disaster movies. They scared the living daylights out of us. Two, I remember, would haunt me for many years afterward. One was called “Abandon Ship,” a British-made film with Tyron Power, Mai Zetterling, and Steven Boyd. The plotline was iconic (based on a true story, I believe): A ship, an ocean liner, goes down in the mid-Atlantic. Some 20 people are clinging to a life raft that, under the best of circumstances, might support 8 or 10… and a storm is coming up. The captain (Tyrone Power) has to jettison some people, so the rest can survive, and the plot line revolves around his decision-making process. I was reminded of this, years later, when — as the chief editor of a failing electronics trade magazine — I had to let go of 1/3 of my staff.

The other movie, “The Crowded Sky,” was about a mid-air collision between two aircraft. Sure: Dana Andrews, the pilot of a commercial prop plane, brings the all-star cast — Anne Francis, Keenan Wynn, Ava Gartner, Joe E. Ross — to a dramatic but otherwise safe landing on a foamed runway. But the images from that movie stay with me to this day: I would be lying to you if I said I didn’t calculate the odds of this happening on every flight I take. Remember the Air France flight that disappeared off the coast of Brazil? Think about this: How many times have YOU flown into rough turbulence? Does it scare you? Be honest.

There are, to be sure, exceptions I take to disaster movies like The Towering Inferno,” Earthquake,” or "Airport,“ based on an Arthur Hailey novel. In the latter movie, the pilot (played by Dean Martin) announces a problem. Immediately, people — mostly women — start screaming. The disaster movie I just saw, “2012,” was no different: a lot of screaming on the soundtrack. It made me want to plug my ears.

Think about this: You’re on a cross country flight, and one of the engines starts dripping oil. The FAA requirement is to shut it down. The pilot comes on, and tells you, “Folks, I think we have problem…” What do think you’ll hear among the passengers? Guaranteed (bet money on it): Dead silence.

The end of the world… revisited

So what do you think would happen in the midst of a 10-point-something earthquake? Buildings crumbling and women screaming? I don’t think so. I project, in fact, there’ll be some wise acres cracking jokes…

In a 1972 short story, Robert Silverberg did his own take on a doomed humanity. In his science fiction story, "When we went to see the end of the world" inventors of a time travel machine, market it through a proliferation of theme parks. “Time tripping will be the next growth industry,” they tell television interviewers. And theme park visitors report they’ve seen the end of the world earth as a dark, near barren wasteland populated by plodding crustacean-like creatures.

 

One family, visiting the end of the world, can’t wait to rush home, and throw a dinner party to tell their friends what they’ve seen. Enamored with the crab-like creatures they’ve seen, they barely pay attention to the television headlines: A mysterious flesh-eroding virus has infected Lake Michigan and officials are projecting a pandemic. Everyone is urged to boil drinking water. The automotive workers union has obtained a nuclear weapon, and is threatening to take out Detroit if the car companies don’t concede to its demands. And a major earthquake has leveled Los Angeles.q