Compare and contrast.

(via Yglesias & Annie)

Excuse me for this fanboy moment.

I’m not in much of a blogging mood, but I wanted to get this down now, with a timestamp, so I can say “I told you so” in 9 months: app is going to become a dirty word.

At work I’ve been fielding a number of calls from tech companies who would like us to develop a version of one of our offerings customized to their upcoming platform — whether mobile, or web-based, or (most ridiculously) centered around a particularly power-efficient x86 processor.  This enthusiasm is a testament to the quality of the work my colleagues do and to the excitement currently surrounding the open gov space.  Both of those are wonderful things!  And to be clear, I intend to take advantage of some of these opportunities.  There is publicity to be had. In some cases I think that saying “yes” is the rational, self-interested thing to do.

But only insofar as it allows us to take advantage of an essentially irrational trend.  It is increasingly clear to me that, in the fall and winter, exclusive” app stores will begin proliferating at a pace that is unjustifiable, and which will likely lead, appropriately, to the concept of “apps” and “app stores” being denigrated and then stigmatized.

Companies have looked at the runaway success of Apple’s mobile application distribution model and found themselves slavering.  Nevermind that the mobile space, and Apple, and their first-mover advantage are all unique.  These copycats are going to try to recreate that success.  Everyone can have their own walled garden!  Every platform will be exclusive and revolutionary!  An no, of course we’re not trying to lock anybody in to anything. Why would you even think such a thing?

It’s heinous, it’s stupid, and it’s contrary to the norms that have made the internet as great and powerful as it is.

To get philosophical for a moment, all this is an iteration of one of a handful of archetypal technology debates — in this case, open versus closed.  The thing is, this is a very boring debate: we know that the answer is “almost always open”, and we’ve known it for a while.  I’d much prefer to go back to fat client versus thin client (aka “the cloud will change everything forever and I have the powerpoint to prove it”).  That debate is at least deservedly cyclical, driven by the ebb and flow of processing power, storage, technology’s social ubiquity and, more recently, battery life and wireless bandwidth.  We’ll probably arrive at an answer there, too, but not before we get a bit closer to the fundamental physical limits constraining our technologies and/or nervous systems.

Tim is one of the very few people I know of who can product posts like this one: posts which, when I’m finished reading them, seem so perfectly clear, cogent and direct that it’s hard to find a single word I’d care to quibble with.  Not that I agree with him all the time, of course.  But this time I do (actually, I’m probably willing to go somewhat further out on this limb than Tim).

This makes me wonder, though, about the compensation structure of top-tier professional writers.  I have a hard time believing that Charles Murray is feeling the financial pinch of the collapsing media industry, his complaints about Times op-ed rates notwithstanding.  It seems a lot more likely to me that his compensation has shifted away from writing-for-hire and toward various cushy sinecures.  Rich people tend to have friends who’ll help them stay rich, after all.  I have a feeling that the way things went down at the Chicago Tribune is fairly typical.  Or maybe I just took that last season of The Wire a bit too much to heart.

Anyway, rich get richer, proletariat squeezed, dog bites man, Fox News Edge at 11.

So!  At work we’ve been spending a couple of days working on off-the-wall projects — it’s a change of pace, a chance to work with folks not on our usual teams, an opportunity to try out new ideas, and a venue for some friendly competition.

One of the projects that my team considered but ultimately discarded was some sentiment analysis on on press statements made by legislators about the BP oil spill.  I figured we could pull some press releases, scan them for their level of aggression (or whatever) and compare the results to the level of oil industry support enjoyed by that legislator (thanks, Transparency Data!).  The result probably wouldn’t have set the world aflame, but if it turned out the way I expected it might’ve made for a fun and topical visualization.

As I said, we didn’t end up pursuing that idea.  But I did get far enough in researching sentiment analysis to realize that I’d like to use the ANEW dataset — a spatial model of various emotionally-charged words that would help me classify arbitrary texts.  Now, Emily says that she thinks sentiment analysis is “kind of bullshit”, and I’m not sure I disagree.  But I think it might still be interesting to run the numbers and see what comes up.

Unfortunately, the folks who created ANEW don’t want to give their data away.  Well, that’s not quite right: they’ll give it away, for free, if you’re a researcher.  A researcher who has a .edu email address.  And who isn’t a student.

This seems a little silly to me.  And it seems really silly when you consider that their widely-available 1999 paper introducing ANEW contains a complete data set.

You can probably see where this is going.

Here’s the data in CSV format.  Here’s the code used to generate it. Here’s a paper that shows how to use ANEW.

Given the age of the paper its widespread availability, I can’t imagine there’ll be any objections to transforming its contents slightly into a more useful format. If there are, I’d be happy to hear them in comments — and if any are made by the folks responsible for ANEW, I’ll be happy to remove the link to everything here that contains even a whiff of their copyright.

And of course this is pretty old data.  I’m sure that ANEW’s gotten better in the last decade (this page, for example, refers to ANEW as containing 2000 words; my copy has just over a thousand).  But it’s something to start with.  It’d be great if its creators decided to remove some of the hoops surrounding their list — there are lots of research efforts that exist outside of the .edu TLD.

• Interesting article from Foreign Policy.
• Haystack still hasn’t released any code or binaries.

Alright, a quick poll for those of you who love this album: what have you been listening to it on?  The last time I really checked these guys out was when they were being tweeted about endlessly during SXSW.  I headed to the Hype Machine and listened to what had been released or leaked.

It was physically unpleasant. I mean, not painful, exactly. That would be going too far.  But my old man ears really, really recoiled from it.

But that was all on headphones (sealed-back headphones at that). Today I’m giving the album a chance over speakers, and I have no complaints.  I actually like it!  And am adding it to my still-extremely-tenuous “2010 = summer of anthemic rock” thesis (Fang Island being the other major data point).

Maybe I’m an outlier here.  I still think the clipping is a gimmick, and one that really, really doesn’t work without a room full of air to mellow it out.  But I’m excited at the prospect of being less of a pain in the ass about this record.

(And yes, I realize that this post constitutes an inevitable but still detestable descent into explicit audiophile pain-in-the-assery.  But if you know me you’ve known for a while that this was only a matter of time.)

People seem to really be upset with Facebook this time!  Naturally, I think this is great.  I’m on record as a Facebook curmudgeon, having almost entirely displaced my anger over the flight of my friends from social blogging — a change that was probably inevitable thanks to the progression of age and career — onto the service that so many of them fled to.

But I feel some ambivalence, too.  I’m increasingly convinced that it’s fruitless to consider social networking products in terms of their absolute, instantaneous attributes.  A changed privacy policy is just one small force in a vast landscape of shifting demographics and trends.  Considering the situation as if the market is settling down, converging on some stable attractor — (“blogs and Twitter are the answer and always have been — now they can take their rightful place!”) — that’s a shallow way of thinking about it.

I’m convinced that online society has a rhythm.  A while ago, I proposed a lifecycle for social networks.  I’m pretty sure that that latter hypothesis will prove to be hopeless, that those considering the question won’t be able to draw any firmer conclusions about the fall of Friendster than historians have about the fall of the Roman Empire.  But there’s no doubt in my mind that these systems are fundamentally dynamic, and subject to entropic forces even beyond their maintainers’ sinister efforts at profit-maximization.

This Politico story finishes solidly, but man does it ever start off badly.  I suppose I shouldn’t expect anything different, but the newspapers’ obsession with an imagined era of dispassionate objectivity is now less charmingly eccentric than it is indicative of a distressing disconnection from the fundamental nature of reality.  Anyway, Ezra’s take is both smarter and, hopefully, will allow those truth-and-justice-believin-in newspapermen a way to mentally sidestep the dreaded question of partisanship.

In other MSM-bashing news: man, I had a hard time writing the morning roundup today.  The latest details from the UVA lacrosse player murder were clearly one of the day’s most prominent stories, and I found myself trying to thread the slim gap between condemning the coverage and failing to condemn the murderer.

To be clear: Huguely, having reportedly confessed to the crime, can’t be considered anything other than a monster.  But I can’t help but recoil at the way the Post’s editors handled this story.  I mean, take a look at this.  It’s cartoonish.  If you read the story it’s clear that the reporters were unable to turn up any really damning quotes about Huguely from anyone who actually knew him or his victim.  So instead they hang their case for his obvious villainy on a drunken run-in with the cops where he seems to have mouthed off, then engaged in some violent behavior before or in the course of getting tasered.  That’s not the mark of a model citizen by any measure, but it’s also not an outrageously unusual thing to find on a fraternity member and varsity athlete’s resume.

The story goes to even more ridiculous lengths, actually underscoring in the text the disparity between the victim’s lovely class photo and Huguely’s bedraggled mug shot.

I’m not at all anxious to rehabilitate the image of a murderer.  But I do think the Post is doing everyone a disservice by playing up this guy as some sort of transparent villain, skulking through the UVA campus until his dark and brutal nature finally, inevitably, claimed a victim.  That sort of laughable oversimplification doesn’t help anyone except those who enjoy clucking their tongues and patting themselves on the back — as if they don’t know anyone who could ever perpetrate or fall victim to domestic abuse.

Far more useful would  have been an effort to tell the story that seems to be implied by the scant quotes people who actually knew the couple: that all too often people fail to anticipate these tragedies before they occur. Unfortunately, even monstrous human beings rarely appear to be the sort of villainous caricatures that sell newspapers.  It’s worth taking that idea seriously more seriously than the Post did.

This is entirely correct.

Also, if any of you accidentally upgraded or have a newish device that couldn’t be jailbroken, you might be interest in this, which was released yesterday.  From there you might be interested in adding this repo to Cydia, then using it to enable tethering on your device — it works almost magically well.