Every DC Metro rider owes Michael Perkins a debt of gratitude. For a while now he’s been not only covering WMATA [UPDATE: link fixed], but jumping through the hoops necessary to uncover details of their contracts, budgets and other documents (and working on tech projects besides!).

Over the weekend he published his latest acquisition: the WMATA/Nextbus contract. As you might imagine, it takes the reader on a harrowing emotional rollercoaster. But before we get to that, let’s build some dramatic tension.

PREVIOUSLY, ON “LICENSING QUESTIONS RELATED TO NEXTBUS DATA”

After pulling the service due to concerns about its reliability, WMATA finally redeployed Nextbus last year. This happened not too long after the release of WMATA’s scheduling information in the open GTFS format — combined, the two excited a lot of interest in transit-enthusiast developers like myself.

But under what circumstances could the Nextbus data be used? The answer was not at all clear. Fortunately, Nextbus representatives began to pop up in relevant comment threads. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that there are two companies called Nextbus — one of them is “Nextbus, Inc.” (which I’ll call Nextbus) and one is “Nextbus Information Systems” (which I’ll call NIS). I emailed back and forth with representatives from both. First, my emails with Alex Orloff from NIS:

Me:

Alex, another question for you: there’s a lot of online confusion surrounding the relationship between Nextbus, Inc. and Nextbus Information Systems. Can you clarify the relationship between the two? Do you both have contracts with WMATA? And am I right in thinking that you’re the company responsible for the Washington, DC-centric Nextbus app in the iPhone store? I’m seeing folks show up in blog comment sections who claim to be affiliated with these two companies, and who are asserting contradictory things.

Alex:

When the transaction that created NextBus Inc. as a wholly owned subsidiary of Grey Island Systems occurred, NextBus Information Systems kept what is called the “distribution business” piece of NextBus, which includes all the things you would associate with distribution of data – licensing to third parties, delivery to cell phones, etc. The NextBus DC app on the App Store is indeed ours. We understand that there is some confusion about the relationship and we have encouraged NextBus Inc. to put a web page on nextbus.com helping people to understand our role. We think that that would be the simplest way to clear up any confusion – don’t you think ?

Me:

Much of the conversation is occurring at the Greater Greater Washington blog. And yes, I agree that it would be helpful if Nextbus clarified its relationship to your organization and the bounds of its arrangement with WMATA.

Am I right in thinking that Nextbus Information Systems has no formal arrangement with WMATA, but rather possesses the rights to license the distribution of some of the data emerging from the Nextbus/WMATA agreement?

Sorry if this is muddying the waters — just trying to get to the bottom of where I and other DC-area devs stand.

Me:

Aha I see the discussion now, I had seen that post a few days ago but Mike Smith’s comment was not up then. Did he send you any information directly ? I’m curious as to what he said if you have contacted him directly. We are definitely trying to get NextBus to be more open about our relationship with them and our rights. Many developers are asking the same questions, and like you, many are confused about what’s what.

We do not have an agreement with WMATA directly, our rights come from the agreement that was part of the sale to Grey Island, which reserved exclusive rights to distribution of the predictions, in particular to cell phones but also advertising, licensing, etc. in the United States (and UK). So our agreement covers any transit agency that NextBus tracks here in the US.

Next, my correspondence with Mike Smith of Nextbus.

Me:

Thank you for contributing to the comment thread at Greater Greater Washington. I hope you won’t mind clarifying the distinction between your organization and Nextbus Information Systems (NIS). I’ve been in touch with Alex Orloff of NIS, and from my discussions with him have developer the understanding that Nextbus Inc. is contracted with WMATA, but that Nextbus Information Systems — a wholly distinct entity — retains the rights to distribute the resulting data to mobile devices, via an API, and perhaps in other ways.

I and others in the DC developer/transit community find all this quite confusing. I have a number of questions that I hope you won’t mind answering. I think they’ll go a long way toward clarifying the situation:

1. Is the relationship between Nextbus Inc. and Nextbus Information Services that I have described correct?

2. If NIS has the right to distribute the data, am I correct in assuming they have access to your servers? Mr. Orloff indicated a desire to have Nextbus Inc. clarify the relationship between the two firms at nextbus.com, leading me to believe that you have control over the domain; but surely he has *some* access to your systems if he is able to offer an API view of the data, as he indicated.

3. If NIS owns the rights to distribute the data but does not control the servers, what steps is Nextbus Inc. obligated to take in order to restrict third parties’ access to the publicly available data at e.g. wmata.nextbus.com?

4. Does Nextbus assert ownership over non-predictive data produced as part of its contract with WMATA (e.g. routeconfig files)? What is its position on noncommercial use of such data?

Thanks very much for your help in clarifying these issues.

Mike:

It would be inappropriate for me to weigh in on what distribution rights that NextBus Information Systems (NBIS) does or does not have, since they are indeed a separate entity. But I can tell you that the transit agencies own the data and have legal control over it.

Sorry I cannot be of more help.

Mike

I wasn’t able to get more out of either of them. So here’s my understanding of the situation: at some point, Nextbus sold the main part of its business to Grey Island Systems. An independent portion remained, however, called Nextbus Information Systems, and it retained the rights to license prediction information generated by past — and future! — deals with the part now owned by Grey Island. The Grey Island/Nextbus folks say that the transit agencies they contract with own full rights to the data, same as NIS, but they’re understandably hesitant to step on the NIS folks’ toes (lest they get sued, presumably). Mr. Orloff was very helpful, but made it clear that I’d need to purchase a license before distributing any Nextbus-based application. Mr. Smith was also helpful, but not really empowered to speak about the licensing situation.

WHICH BRINGS US TO THE CONTRACT

First: Grey Island Systems is listed as the parent company of the Nextbus that did business with WMATA. So far so good. But then things take a discouraging turn:

But wait! There’s reason for hope: (WMATA is “the Authority” in this excerpt):

And finally, vindication (CIS = Customer Information System, i.e. Nextbus):

It’s possible that I’m missing something, but at this point I think my pre-contract understanding has been validated: WMATA has full rights to the data, which means it can give the data away if it wants to. Now we just need WMATA to give the all-clear! We may also need them to mirror the data or otherwise ensure that Nextbus can’t complain that we’re unfairly hammering their servers. I’ve got some ideas about how to proceed, and I’ve got a serendipitous meeting happening in the next few days — more soon, I hope!

ONE: The beginning of the end of the Registered Traveler program. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the idea behind this program — allowing the rich a means of escape from a vexing and arguably arbitrary set of collectively-self-imposed strictures has something of a history, and it’s not a noble one. Props to TSA, though, if the WSJ writeup really can be believed: the article cites the agency’s unwillingness to relax security standards as one of the things that made CLEAR/Registered Traveler not worth the price of admission for many would-be line skippers.

TWO: Via Caralyn, Christopher Weingarten on the present and future fortunes of the music critic. Points for his entirely appropriate level of occupational hopelessness; deductions for failing to make much of a case for the professional music critic’s necessity. With modern publishing and search technologies, the too-many-voices argument becomes a difficult one to make, and, I think, a basically incoherent one when talking about something as inessential and universally accessible as pop music.

This isn’t something I’m happy about. I have friends who are great music critics, and I’d love for them to be able to support themselves by writing record reviews. But this is sort of like saying that I’d love to see the market compensate my friends for playing Halo with me. It’s clear that the costs associated with producing music criticism have fallen to the point where it’s essentially a leisure activity. In a perfect world, this would be great: the resources expended to produce music criticism could be reallocated to more productive ends, and we could still be assured a steady stream of deep thinking about music (now with less market distortion!). In practice, those resources are likely to wind up allocated less efficiently — say, put toward debt service on a loan that financed the unnecessary sale of an alt-weekly to a clueless owner who will preside over its demise. (Woo markets!)

But we’ll still have plenty of music criticism, and plenty of other good writing. I won’t say something pretentious about writers writing because of some irresistible artistic compulsion. But writers will keep writing because they think writing is fun, so they’ll do it when they can. And that’ll be enough for the rest of us, because these days much of the writing they do will inevitably be free, our supply unrestricted. Just look at The Awl, a site run by people who perfected the blogosphere, then watched it blossom, pullulate, and choke itself to death. Now they’re doing it all over again, because hell, it was pretty fun for a while there, wasn’t it?

For the last week or so, I’ve had this post of Matt’s flagged in my RSS reader, waiting for a response. In it, he castigates the advertising market for failing to competently embrace the web. Today the conversation continues: Ezra responds to Clay Shirky, and says that, contrary to what Shirky implies, the newspaper’s death became inevitable the instant digital technology was invented. Matt responds, noting, among other things, that newspaper brands will survive (which seems right — if Nuprin can do it, so can the New York Times), and that the papers’ failure to hang on to their classifieds business was a major mistake. I think that brings us up to date (whew!).

I’m with Ezra on this one, and apologize for the amount of overlap that this post will likely have with his own. But I think Matt is seriously understating the crisis facing the advertising industry. Narrowly, there’s the question of Craigslist. It’s a weird one, in that its creators have quite obviously avoided implementing features that would maximize revenue, or even just reported user satisfaction. They could have a slick-looking site, and a huge staff, and a big office in the Mission with polished concrete floors and free snacks in the break room. But they’ve decided not to, and that’s their genius: they realized that classifieds were going to be a race to the bottom, so they decided to get to the bottom first. This is a crucial realization — one that a lot of people involved in similar races just can’t accept.

I don’t think Matt’s right that this could have been stopped, but it probably could have been slowed. Competing on the basis of having fewer features rarely works, and it probably wouldn’t have for Craigslist, either, had the newspapers rolled out competent online options quickly. CL was allowed to build marketshare in an unusual and, in hindsight, inexcusable way. Also, we haven’t collectively reached that proverbial bottom, making CL’s success seem that much stranger. But we’ll get there; if the papers had responded quickly, we just would’ve gotten there at a more languid pace.

But classifieds aren’t the only doomed form of advertising. I think there are reasons to doubt advertising’s viability in a broader sense, too. More of it will inevitably have to be done online as people continue to spend more of their time on the net, but so far that hasn’t been working out very well. For one thing, there are technological ways to avoid online advertising. For another, although various form factors have been tried, the online medium still hasn’t been figured out how to capture viewers’ attention in the way that print and broadcast have — personally, I think the media may simply be innately immune to commoditization, thanks to the aforementioned ability of computers to avoid displaying unwanted information. Third, and probably most troublingly for the industry, online advertisers seem to have made a serious mistake when they offered concrete metrics to their customers. This action was perfectly understandable — the web makes it simple to collect objective data, and it’s easy to see why an advertising client might find the prospect of better stats alluring. The problem is that doing this reveals that advertising just doesn’t work very well.

In retrospect, it should be obvious: to whatever extent the advertising industry is capable of shaping the public’s sense of how to gauge value, naturally they will apply that talent to their own products first. The other advertising media smartly developed captive metrics agencies like Nielsen and Arbitron. But online advertising charlatanism is still in its infancy, and continues to be dominated by primitively objective concepts like “page views”, “click throughs” and “purchases”.

Right now the practitioners of online advertising have not yet succeeded in artificially inflating the perceived value of their product in the way that advertisers working in other media have. Perhaps this will change. I think it might not. It’s easy to forget how quickly advertising has evolved, and how quickly the public has evolved along with it. Although I admit that it’s probably an overly antagonistic framing, I tend to think of the relationship between the public and advertising as being analogous to the one that exists between humans and bacterial pathogens. In both cases the pace of evolution is staggering, but I’m left optimistic that humanity will come out on top.

For one thing, we’re awfully plucky. For another, there are fewer constraints on us. As viewers of advertising, we’re subject to various hindrances that seem to be biologically determined — among others, we’re susceptible to the concept of brands, and we’re keen to see sexy dames, and plenty of em (so to speak). But we’re free to come up with whatever compensatory intellectual constructs we need to help us maintain our senses of iconoclasm and connoisseurship, and our ability to maximize the value we receive for our money. Advertisers face many more restrictions: time, space, cost, reproducibility, risk aversion, various regulations, and, last but by no means least, the simple necessity of crafting messages that are both interesting and at least somewhat coherent from a commercial perspective.

I admit it: I’ve always been an advertising millenarianist. But I still feel a bit bad for them. None of this is to say that advertising will ever go away, but as the pool of novel advertising techniques shrinks and purchasers become more aware of its limited utility, the industry will naturally contract. And that brings us back to newspapers.

Ezra lays it out pretty well; let me do the same with a tedious half-analogy. Once upon a time the cost of distributing information was high. Then technology improved, and if you were able to make a big up-front investment, economies of scale allowed you to drastically lower the cost of getting data out. If you sold information-distribution services at a price in between the old one and your own, newly-discovered cost, you could make a lot of money. Firms flourished, and added premium features to differentiate themselves from their competitors, just like those little sticks of gum that come with baseball cards. The paid information distribution business continued to be lucrative — to get more lucrative, even! — to the point where the quality of the gum could be drastically upgraded. Sometimes even non-gum ingredients were bought up and converted into gum (it just seemed like the most efficient way to distribute them, frankly — look how much gum people were buying!).

But technology kept getting better, and that up-front investment kept getting smaller, and although by now everyone had pretty well fooled themselves into thinking it was the high-quality gum that moved units, that wasn’t actually the case. In fact, a lot of that gum was downright revolting¹.

These days distributing information costs very little, and there’s no minimum order. And people still chew gum, but not nearly so much of it. Hopefully the quality of gum available to them is better than it was, but I think the jury’s still out on that one.

ALSO: I hadn’t read Tim’s post before I wrote this, but he makes a number of excellent points. One thing that’s maybe worth adding: when he says “…the only way to avoid this grim fate is to spin off an independent subsidiary that can pursue new markets without worrying about fat profit margins or cannibalization of existing product lines… I’m not aware of any high-profile newspaper firms that attempted this”, I think the Washington Post may be a counterexample — the Post and their online operations are entirely distinct, and separated by a river. Typically they’re castigated for this decision, and to be fair I’m not sure to what extent the decision (which is now being undone) was made with Christensen’s principles in mind versus more immediate concerns (there wasn’t any more space in their downtown building). Either way, I don’t think WaPo.com was sufficiently independent to really embody Christensen’s model (as I understand it based on Tim’s account — I haven’t read the man’s work), but it’s the closest noteworthy example I’m aware of. Doubtless there were other, truly-independent ventures backed by major news organizations, which are now lost to memory thanks to “making money on the internet” being a very tough proposition in general.

¹ Bazooka Joe Scarborough (discarded gag for alternate metaphor: Kristol Pepsi)

But I am in possession of not one but six chances at winning an entire pig thanks to the good people at the Montgomery County Fair 4-H Raffle. If I seem overly excited, I apologize. But I feel this is the rare sort of thing that justifies using multiple forms of textual emphasis in a single sentence.

The thing is billed as coming “ready to go in the fridge” but I have to confess I don’t know what that means. Am I entitled to hooves? The snout? What if I’m in need of sausage casing?

Well, the drawing’s not until the 16th. I’ll figure it out then, no doubt.

Y’know, the program that lets you skip through lines at airports? Well, the database of registered travelers’ personal information has just been stolen. And no, of course it wasn’t encrypted. What, you think a company empowered to decide who bypasses airport screening should know something about security? Sheesh.

Via al3x

Iraq has been banned from the Olympics. But take heart!

War and hardship, though, have not destroyed all of Iraq’s dreams for international competition. The country, which has been in three wars in two decades, has a robust Paralympic team.


“As a country that participated in many wars since 1980, we have many disabled people,” said Ahmed Abid Hassan, a wheelchair fencing coach. “Our Paralympic team is better than our Olympic team.”

That’s via last month’s New York Times (original source: the perpetual crushing horror of this world).

Tim, characteristically, has written the most reasonable thing I’ve read during today’s Very Special Gun Control Edition of the internet:

[L]iberals and conservatives both confidently assert that the evidence is incontrovertible that gun control {increases, decreases} crime. I haven’t studied the data closely enough to have a strong opinion one way or the other, and frankly I suspect most of the other people with opinions on the question don’t know what they’re talking about either. But both sides seem able to marshall at least plausible arguments in their favor, which means that while I’m not confident of the sign, I am reasonably sure that the magnitude of the harm (or benefit) is small.


And therefore, as a liberal, my general attitude is that in the absence of compelling evidence of harm we should have a bias toward letting people do as they please. Owning a gun may not, on net, improve your safety, but it’s certainly no more dangerous than smoking, drinking, having unprotected sex, or many other activities that people are free to do in the privacy of their own homes. A lot of liberals seem to have a strange blind spot about this; liberals generally have a strong presumption in favor of letting people do as they please in the privacy of their homes, but that seems to get forgotten when the subject is owning guns.

He’s right: I don’t really know what I’m talking about when it comes to guns’ costs and benefits. Nobody seems to, as Megan explained. Everyone’s just got a hunch — a strongly-held hunch.

Thinking about it some more, I’m actually much more bothered by the idea of people buying firearms for self-defense than for sport. I try to put myself in their shoes: why would someone want to buy a gun? If it’s to hunt or shoot or collect, that seems fine. All that NRA bullshit about instilling a culture of respectful, safety-oriented gun ownership isn’t actually bullshit at all. I’ve seen it myself on NRA-funded ranges at Boy Scout camps. People who know guns know what they’re going to do with their guns, and how to do it, and when they start to do it it isn’t hard for them to get it done.

But when someone buys a gun for protection the situation is more speculative. Avoiding crime isn’t really a hobby, per se. So what are they thinking about? I doubt it has anything to do with statistics. It seems much more likely that a buyer has an imagined scenario in mind — possibly vague but definitely present — that justifies the purchase. I’m sure these scenarios vary quite a lot, but if they have one unifying characteristic I’d bet it’s that they’re all completely ridiculous. Maybe I’m being uncharitable, but I imagine these narratives reflect Batman comics more than they do the realities of being scared, surprised or unskilled. This is the fantasy, the tautological trap that makes me view aspiration as disqualification: the idea that in that crucial moment you are likely to somehow be more than a laughable hairless ape — that somehow it will be helpful to add lethality to a moment of bewilderment — betrays a foolishness that shouldn’t be trusted with a firearm.

In the abstract I don’t begrudge anyone the right to defend themselves. But the experience in that adrenaline-filled moment is so alien and disorienting that it’s a bit hard to take very seriously the cool-headed explication of an aspiring gun owner’s anti-crime calculus. Of the fortunately few times when I’ve felt my life was in danger, the truth uniting the experiences has been that they’ve been nothing like I imagined. Plans would have been hilariously irrelevant.

Besides, to carry a gun for protection from crime means you’ll need to have that device on or near you a lot of the time. You, the girl who spills tampons all over her shoes whenever she roots through her purse. You, the guy who can’t stop dropping his cellphone in the toilet. I know you. You tivo Grey’s Anatomy, for god’s sake. I’m somehow supposed to be happy that your latest personal effect can kill me?

Of course, I don’t mean to say I don’t trust you. If you’re reading this the odds that you’re a friend or loved one are high. But y’know, I was standing only a few feet from a friend-or-loved-one when she accidentally discharged a firearm. This was a smart person! One whom I respect! Somebody that I would gladly hire to do any number of things requiring brains and responsibility and minimal bloodlust. But, y’know, whoops. It was really fucking scary, and I would rather not face that possibility on a daily basis and a city-wide scale. It seems like a bad idea.

Still, Tim’s right. Philosophically, I can’t reconcile this unscientific uneasiness with what I believe about others’ rights. But I also can’t help wondering if those seeking safety couldn’t just try to forget about the inevitably-cited unstoppable PCP-fueled edge case, and instead invest in some pepper spray or a stun gun. Or a whistle. It seems like we might all be better off. But then, that’s just another hunch.

Photo by Flickr user Shermeee

Well, the gun ban is over. Unlike a lot of my friends, I’m not particularly enthusiastic about this. Guns are amazing tools, fun to use recreationally and capable of instilling such an awesome sense of power that I don’t think people are very good at rationally considering the questions surrounding them. Certainly that’s been my experience whenever I shoot one — for about six hours immediately thereafter gun ownership seems like a really, really great idea. Woo guns!

I think Yglesias is (sort of) right when he says:

From a policy perspective, what DC [was] trying to accomplish is just futile — as long as the District is a very small patch of land adjacent to Virginia, there’s no way gun regulations of this sort will prevent criminals from acquiring weapons.

This is true, but probably misses the utility of a handgun ban from a police perspective. The ban was an enforcement tool: find some probable cause, search a suspect and if you find a gun they’re an automatic criminal. Handy!

Of course, the MPD used to employ the “no unlicensed bikes” law toward approximately the same ends, which I thought was stupid and unjust. So maybe I’m a hypocrite. On the other hand, suspects with bikes are probably less nefarious, on average, than suspects with guns (recent comment threads notwithstanding).

At any rate, I think Matt is right to imply that this decision will have little effect on the level of gun violence in the city. And the Fenty administration says it’s ready to respond, presumably with laws about triggerlocks and a draconian concealed carry permitting process. If the upshot is that DC residents can keep ready-to-use guns in their homes but not their cars or persons, I’ll be happy enough, I suppose.

Oh! But let me reiterate Charles’ previously-stated rule: no guns in our apartment, please. This includes parties! The knife fights are quite enough already, thanks.

UPDATE: Hmm. That excerpt of the decision quoted at DCist sure makes it sound like the court is calling triggerlock requirements unconstitutional. But hey, I’m no lawyer, and I don’t recall the specifics of DC’s triggerlock law. Hopefully there’s some middle ground to be found, like requiring their use in any household with children.

UPDATE 2: Ryan==smart. I agree completely, with the previously-expressed caveat to his second point.

Has anyone written up the l33t hax0r implications of the Petraeus Report? I’ve been patiently waiting for someone take up the gauntlet ever since the general included this line in his prepared statement before congress:

Finally, in recognition of the fact that this war is not only being fought
on the ground in Iraq but also in cyberspace, [my recommendations to the Join Chiefs note] the need to contest the enemy’s
growing use of that important medium to spread extremism.

I first heard this on the radio, and it seemed a little weird to me. Not because I doubt the existence of insurgent-run websites filled with flash video of roadside bombs, LOLcatted stills from A Mighty Heart and comment threads filled with “INSURGENCY FTW!!”, “ANBAR SUX0Rz” and unflattering analogizing of Sunni Islam to the Playstation 3. I’m sure those sites are out there. I can even believe that they serve a significant recruiting function for people who do genuinely bad, genuinely non-virtual things.

But it was a bit odd to hear a military commander say that, in addition to the attention we’re paying to people getting shot and blown up, we also need to spend more time dicking around on the internet, presumably countering the nasty internet trouble made by our enemies. For one thing, suppressing online content does not have a particularly storied history. Given that, it seems like the intelligence value of these sites would probably outweigh the utility to be gained by shutting them down. DMCAing the Mahdi Army’s MySpace page would just shut down a marginal source of propaganda. Why bother? It’d be far better to just quietly keep an eye on their top 8 (who is this shady “CamGirl69″ character, anyway?).

For another thing, I have a hard time believing that the issue requires more attention. As far as I can tell there’s no shortage of government funds for boondoggles aimed at preventing Kim Jong-Il from interfering with Americans’ Facebook feeds. I trust that there are already people paying close attention to these issues.

But who knows? The internet refuses to tell me anything, so I’m left to wonder why General Petraeus thought that cyber-warfare deserved relatively prominent billing. You’ve failed me yet again, mainstream media! Was there some analysis of this initiative that I missed, or did the entire punditocracy inexplicably decide that there were more important aspects of Petraeuspalooza for them to attend to?

Just seen on NBC Nightly News: a piece on the President’s sliding popularity among Republicans featured a clip of Tim Russert asking Congressman Jim Talent, “Do you believe that President Bush is a great president?” His reply: “Certainly he’s going to end up better than Jimmy Carter, probably not better than Ronald Reagan.”
My close personal friend David Gregory then tried to spin this into proof of a lack of enthusiasm on the right for the commander in chief. But of course that’s unreasonable. Remember the rule of thumb: whenever a conservative says “Jimmy Carter”, you can swap in “Don Knotts” (or possibly “Bob Denver”) without significantly altering the speaker’s intent. The same trick works for “Ronald Reagan” and “Jesus Christ”.