October 2007 - Posts

• The Age of High (Tech) Anxiety

  We live in times that some are calling The Age of Anxiety. This isn't surprising because the increase in the average person's anxiety levels over the past few decades is well documented. (One recent study found that anxiety levels today are higher than those of psychiatric patients from the 1950s.) It might be blasphemous to say it here on the back page of IEEE Spectrum, but a big chunk of our stress portfolios is taken up by modern technologies. As proof, consider the many new words that people and professionals are using to describe this modern state of mind. One common term is techno-stress (or IT stress), feelings of frustration and stress caused by having to deal with the changes brought on by computers and other technologies. For example, people used to leave the office and that was that. Now, with cell phones, pagers, and e-mail all part of many employees' toolkits, these workers are stressing because they're always connected and have no "down time." Another phrase I'm seeing is techno-angst, feelings of dread and anxiety caused by technology. A recent Business Week article discussed the "national wave of techno-angst" that has been brought on by fears that our privacy is rapidly eroding. Computer problems can lead to what psychologists are calling technology-related anxiety (TRA). In a recent study reported in The Washington Post, 14 percent of respondents said computer problems interrupted their work more than once a day and 21 percent said they had missed work deadlines in the previous three months because of hardware or software problems. Devices have long been a source of frustration and anger. One of my favorite words is resistentialism, the belief that inanimate objects have a natural antipathy toward human beings. Over the past five years or so, many people have rediscovered resistentialism and realized that its central idea - les choses sont contre nous: "things are against us" - perfectly describes our bug-ridden and glitch-filled interactions with modern machines. If you've ever begged a computer to please, please give back the file containing the draft of your first novel, or pleaded with a toaster to, you know, actually toast the bread this time, then you are ripe for the resistential worldview. Computers are perhaps the ultimate resistentialist devices, so they generate more than their fair share of anger. Why? Because against all the evidence, people expect technology to work perfectly all the time, and when it doesn't, they get anxious, stressed out, and very, very, mad. This anger has many names (proof of its pervasiveness): computer rage, PC rage, tech rage, IT rage, and e-rage. But it's not just recalcitrant hardware and software that causes our stress levels to soar. Our stress portfolios are also bulging at the seams with way too much data. Our "information overload" is caused by the books, magazines, newspapers, documentaries, contracts, licenses, by-laws, and manuals that we must take in each day to get through our lives. Eventually, we just get tired of dealing with the onslaught and we develop what the psychological community has called information fatigue syndrome (IFS). Symptoms include exhaustion, anxiety, memory failures, and a shortened attention span. Many psychologists believe that our brains are simply not wired to handle the deluge of information that washes over us each day. The information tsunami hasn't been helped one bit by the Internet. Now there are Web sites to surf, newsgroups to read, instant messages to handle, and the worst offender of them all, e-mail messages to read and respond to. A recent Gartner, Inc. survey found that the average employee spends nearly an hour a day handling e-mail chores. For managers, e-mail tasks usurp closer to two hours each day. It's no wonder that people are complaining about e-mail fatigue. One of the big factors that make e-mail so tiresome is spam, those unsolicited commercial messages hawking everything from pre-approved credit cards to printer toner cartridges to pictures of people doing things nature never intended. But anyone who has spent even a short time using a corporate e-mail system will be quite familiar with a different kind of unsolicited message called occupational spam: unwanted or unnecessary messages sent over a corporate e-mail system. In the Gartner survey, respondents reported that an eyebrow-raising 34 percent of the internal business e-mail they receive is unnecessary. This scourge also goes by the names workplace spam and office spam, although "spam" doesn't seem like the right term for this kind of e-mail nuisance. That's because spam traditionally refers to commercial messages, but occupational spam is usually noncommercial. So some people have opted for a different term: meatloaf (because it is, in a sense, "home made"). Is there a way to ease technological anxiety? I'm not sure, but I'm apt to take the advice offered by Clifford Stoll in his book Silicon Snake Oil: From time to time put yourself on a strict data fast where you turn everything off and leave it off for a while. It might be a nice change. This post appeared originally as my Technically Speaking column in the June 2003 issue of IEEE Spectrum. Posted Oct 26 2007, 04:03 PM by Paul with no comments Filed under: Neologisms, Technology, Technically speaking, Spam

• The Internet Ecology

  Foraging for food seems to be a straightforward proposition: if you're a hunter, you hunt; if you're a gatherer, you gather; then you eat. What could be simpler? Well, plenty of things, because, as it turns out, foraging is a complex business. In fact, there's a whole foraging theory that was developed in the 70s to explain animal foraging patterns and strategies. At its core is the idea of a cost-benefit analysis where an animal examines the available food (the benefit) and weighs the amount of energy required to obtain it (the cost). For example, a lion would derive enormous benefit from taking down an adult water buffalo, but the cost is just too high. It's better to pick off a young buffalo or two (lower benefit, but very low cost). Foraging theory also tells us that animals will move to a new foraging area as soon as the costs of foraging in the current area become too high relative to the remaining benefits. Of course, none of these are conscious strategies on the animal's part. These techniques are hard-wired into animal brains, having been selected for by evolution over millennia. We humans have these foraging mechanisms installed in our own brains, and that fact was the inspiration for the theory of information foraging. In the early 1990s, Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center observed that tracking down information was analogous to foraging for food, so they tried applying foraging theory to information hunting and gathering. Their results showed that information seekers do use the same strategies as food foragers. That is, they use a cost-benefit analysis, just like a food forager, where the benefit is the information they seek and the cost is the time it takes to find it. And once the costs of the current information patch outweigh its remaining benefits, they move on to a different Web site or database. Also, like food foragers, information foragers rely on "cues" that tell them whether a particular patch contains the data they seek. When animals are foraging for food, they often use scent to determine whether a particular area is worth investigating. Hunters, for example, will sniff around for evidence that prey has been in the area. Web searchers do something similar by examining a site's information scent: the visual and linguistic cues - researchers call this the residue - that enable a searcher to determine whether a source has the information they seek, as well as to navigate to the desired data. When they first arrive at a site, searchers examine the images and text to determine whether the site has what they're looking for. Someone looking for device drivers, for example, will hunt for a link labeled "Downloads" or, even better, "Device Drivers." Labels such as "Products" and "Purchase" aren't as promising - that is, they don't give off a good information scent. Another foraging cue is the existence of footprints, which are traces left behind by other foragers who have traversed the same virtual path. In the Amazon.com niche, for example, there are footprints all over the place: reader reviews, ratings, lists of other books purchased by people who purchased the current book, and so on. This research is part of a larger idea called the Internet ecology, the relationships and interactions between people and the online environment, particularly the Web. In the Internet ecology, people aren't "users," they're informavores, consumers of information, who have particular information diets. They satisfice (satisfy and suffice) their information needs by foraging within the information food chain. Automatic Neologisms Neologisms are created by a variety of means: existing words are blended together or shortened, foreign words emigrate to English, and new words are sometimes made up out of thin linguistic air (see "Google" in the February 2003 Technically Speaking). Over the past few months we've seen the birth of a new neological generator: the computer. This first happened in the summer of 2002 when Yahoo! began automatically editing discussion board messages and HTML e-mail messages to replace certain scripting keywords that could be used for nefarious purposes. For example, the keyword eval was replaced by review; mocha was replaced by espresso; and expression was replaced by statement. The programming that accomplished this editing wasn't particularly elegant, so the replacements occurred even in words that included these verboten terms. So medieval became medireview and evaluate became reviewuate. Google these nonsense words and you'll get hundreds of hits: some talking about these "new words," but many just "using" them, unbeknownst to the site operator. Another automatic neologism making the rounds is risumi. This one is generated when the word résumé is sent through a mailer that drops the high bit in each character. This turns é into i, so résumé becomes risumi. Blogger Cory Doctorow has called these automatically generated neologisms, autocoinages. Tris chic, no? This post appeared originally as my Technically Speaking column in the April 2003 issue of IEEE Spectrum. Posted Oct 26 2007, 03:23 PM by Paul with no comments Filed under: Neologisms, Technically speaking, Internet

• Google This

  The cartoons in The New Yorker are at least as famous as the magazine's celebrated prose, and for good reason. They're pithy, one-panel portraits of our times; socially observant and dripping with irony, but always amusing in a charmingly odd way. A perfect example appeared in a recent issue. It was a simply drawn cartoon that showed two men sitting at a bar. The caption read, "I can't explain it—it's just a funny feeling that I'm being Googled." Whoa. Not only was a New Yorker cartoon referencing Google, every geek's favorite search engine, but it was using Google as a verb. For a low-tech literary magazine, this was language on the bleeding edge. Not that the verb form of Google is all that new. It starting appearing on Usenet in the fall of 1999 (about a year after Google first revved up its search engine for public consumption; technology types are always quick to "verb" a noun), and the first media references starting showing up in 2000. On January 15, 2001, the New York Observer ran a story about a specific form of Googling: using Google to look for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend. (The article was titled, "Don't Be Shy, Ladies — Google Him!") This is also called Google dating. Since then, we've seen a gaggle of new Google words and phrases. (In case you didn't know, the word "Google" itself is a play on googol —same pronunciation—which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. It which was coined in 1938 by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, after his uncle, mathematician Edward Kasner, asked him for a word to describe a really big number.) For example, those looking to waste a few hours can play the online sport of Googlewhacking, which involves entering two-word search terms into Google until you find only a single matching site. (One of the first Googlewhacks was ambidextrous scallywags; here's a winner: IEEE flibbertigibbet.) Then there's Google cooking, where you enter two or more ingredients, specify one or more recipe URLs (using Google's "site" keyword), and away you go. Here's an example: "red pepper" "black beans" (site:allrecipes.com OR site:cooking.com OR site:epicurious.com OR site:recipesource.com) Egosurfers will often use Google to search for their own names. This can even get competitive as rivals duel to see whose name gets the most Google matches. This is called a Google fight. Then there's Googlism, which is what Google "thinks" of you. You can find out by using the Google-based search engine at Googlism.com. Ego stroking aside, getting a good ranking in a Google search can make or break a site, so some not-quite-ethical Webmesiters resort to Google bombing, setting up a large number of Web pages with links that point to a specific Web site so that the site will appear near the top of a Google search when users enter the link text. Finally there's elgoog, a search engine that accepts reversed search words and returns matching pages with their layout and text reversed. The Need for Speed In the 1950s and 1960s, the world's tinkerers and gearheads often spent their spare time and money working on cars, souping them up to maximize their performance. These cars were called hot rods and the grease monkeys who built them were called hot rodders. This breed survives today only in isolated pockets, but it has been largely supplanted by a new set of speed seekers: those who modify their computer's configuration to maximize performance. In 2001, a new word emerged to describe these high-tech speed freaks: modders, which appears to be a blend of modify and hot rodders. What they do to their computers is called modding and the performance tweaks are called mods. Your typical PC modder starts by overclocking the computer's processor (that is, tweaking the processor to run faster than the speed for which it was designed). That creates major heat problems, of course, so inevitably the modder's next task is to add extra cooling fans, or even to install a water-based cooling system. Case modders want a machine that looks fast, so they apply custom paint jobs, install internal neon lights, and cut out holes and fill them with stained glass or tinted windows. For the lazy or less adventurous customizer, mod kits are available for the most popular mods, and there are pre-modded computer cases that come already "tricked out." Finally there are the game modders, fans of certain commercial computer games who customize the look and sounds—the eye and ear candy—of the game. These mods run the gamut from simple background adjustments to what the modders call a total conversion: a completely redesigned game. My favorite example of a total conversion was something called Castle Smurfenstein, a mod of the classic game Castle Wolfenstein where the original spies, soldiers, and other characters were replaced by Smurfs. Google it and see for yourself. This post appeared originally as my Technically Speaking column in the February 2003 issue of IEEE Spectrum. Posted Oct 18 2007, 06:44 AM by Paul with no comments Filed under: Neologisms, Google, Technically speaking

• Tall Poppy Syndrome Dot Com

  Success is a strange bit of business. Wear it well and you'll be respected and admired by most people. But if you let your success go to your head, if you get too high and mighty, then you'll no doubt encounter the tall poppy syndrome: the tendency to ridicule or scoff at a person who gets too big for his or her britches. The ruthless calculus of the tall poppy syndrome was evident during the dot-com mania of the late 90s and early 2000s. When the boom was in full swing, young startup upstarts who reeked of arrogance and self-importance were written off as dot snots. In fact the whole demographic was dismissed as a collection of yetties (young, entrepreneurial twenty-somethings). This is a play on yuppie (Young, Urban Professional), but it also contains deliberate echoes of yeti, a hypothetical ape-like creature that's supposed to inhabit the Himalayan Mountains. The yeti is a close cousin of North America's abominable snowman, so you often see the adjective "abominable" and the noun "yettie" in the same sentence (or else shooting's-too-good-for-'em puns such as "the abominable showman"). The nouveau riche dot-commers were mere sneaker millionaires, MOPs (millionaires on paper), and optionaires (people with millions of dollars in stock options). The older managers who were often brought in to help with the business side of things were called gray matter, as though they were the real brains behind these operations. When the Long Boom (as Wired magazine so optimistically called it in 1997) went bust, dot-com rage exploded. It was time to gather the global villagers, light the torches and storm the castle to kill the dot-com monster who was created not by a single deranged Dr. Frankenstein, but a whole army of them, from Jolt-fuelled geeks to irrationally exuberant venture capitalists to dollar-sign-eyeballed investors. Instead of sticks and guns, the angry mob hurled epithets and insults: The dot-communists had received their dotcom-uppance and would soon be dot-goners. The dot-carnage in 2000 created a feeling of dot-gloom as companies slipped into dot-comas and the dot-com deathwatches began. At the end of the vigil, the dead dot-coms—the dot-bombs—were flushed down the dot-commode, and became dot-compost, food for the daisies in the dot-com graveyard. B2B no longer stood for "business-to-business." Now it meant back-to-banking, back-to-basics, or back-to-business school. B2C had became back-to-consulting; B2M morphed into back-to-Mom's, while B2P stood for back-to-parents; B2R was really back-to-reality, and B2S now meant back-to-school Schadenfreude—the malicious enjoyment of the misfortune of others—was the order of the day, so the dot-dead were gleefully described as having gone sneakers-up, a play on the idiom belly-up. And if a startup shelved its plans to file an IPO and, instead, filed for bankruptcy, then it was better (read: more fun) to call it a startdown, instead. If a company didn't go sneakers-up during the dot-com Dark Ages, chances are good that at least its stock price tanked during those dire days. And since most technology companies are listed on the Nasdaq exchange, the value of the Nasdaq Composite Index suffered correspondingly. (In the period from early 2000 to fall 2002, the index value fell over 75 percent.) This led people to start using Nasdaq as a verb that meant, roughly, to decline sharply in value or quantity. (For example, in their October 28, 2001 edition, The Denver Post said that a football quarterback's rating had "Nasdaqed.") The tech wreck's stock price meltdown also meant that if an employee's options hadn't come due (that is, if the employee wasn't vested), then they were stuck with a bunch of underwater options, stock options in which the strike price (the price at which the employee is contracted to buy the shares) is higher than the current stock price. Those employees with even less luck ended up being laid off or fired (or, to use the preferred tech company euphemism, uninstalled). By 2002, tens of thousands of knowledge workers had become knowledge job-seekers. With so many kindred souls wandering the streets, someone started organizing pink-slip parties, gatherings where each attendee is a person who has recently lost his or her job, particularly because of a failed or downsized dot-com. Did anything good come out of the dot-com debacle? Some folks believe that it served to cut down a huge number of tall-poppy companies that probably shouldn't have been in business in the first place. (I could list dozens, but consider the case of Flooz.com, which spent over $50 million in real money trying—and failing—to convince people to use the company's fake money. The idea was that otherwise-sane people were supposed to purchase Flooz and then spend it at the pitifully small number of vendors who signed up to accept Flooz as a payment method. It's heartening to know that few people were dumb enough to do this.) In other words, the tech sector became a little more rational and a little more realistic, leading the optimistic among us to hope for a revived tech industry that takes to heart the new phrase that's making the rounds: post-crash realism. This post appeared originally as my Technically Speaking column in the December 2002 issue of IEEE Spectrum. Posted Oct 12 2007, 06:30 AM by Paul with no comments Filed under: Neologisms, Technically speaking

• DWFR

  Quite a few years ago, I complained to my wife about how busy I was at the time. Karen, who is wiser in the ways of the world than I can ever imagine to be, told me something that's stuck with me to this day: "Paul everybody is busy." So now, no matter how many deadlines are looming large, no matter that my "To-Do List" has become my "Yeah, Right List," I don't complain. Unfortunately, not everyone has a wise spouse, so people these days constantly gripe about how busy they are. Of course, it's one thing to say "I'm so busy," and it's quite another to back it up with some numbers. The tried-and-true busy-ness stat is the number of hours one works per week. If one guy says he works 50 hours a week, the next guy will say he does 60, and the lawyer will trump them all with her 80-hour week. More recent busy badges are of the electronic variety. The most popular of these is the number of emails one gets per day (not counting spam messages, of course, the number of which people receive being an entirely different — but still interesting — metric). Think your 100 messages a day make you busy? How about the guy who gets 200? Or 400? Or insert-unfathomable-number-of-messages-here? Can't compete with the world's email titans? Okay, what about a more recent busy number: the number of RSS feeds you read each day. Most people heavily into technology seem to read at least a few dozen feeds, and "catching up on my feeds" seems to be what everyone's doing these days. And, thanks to mobile technologies such as cell phones and Pocket PCs, we're increasingly doing our catching up in all those in-between times where we used to do nothing but sit (or stand) and stare: in the bank lineup; on hold; waiting for a friend at a restaurant. Or in the car. You've heard of DWI (driving while intoxicated) and perhaps DWY (driving while yakking), but how about DWFR: driving while feed-reading? Okay, I just made that up, but it seems inevitable. Not reading feeds while actually driving, of course; that would be cross the stupid line. No, I'm talking about car-related in-between times: stuck in traffic; stopped at a long light; waiting for your passenger to complete an errand. I do this all the time now, and it's a great way to plow through RSS headlines. Just remember though: when it's time to start driving again, put the phone down and back away from the feeds. Posted Oct 11 2007, 02:11 PM by Paul with no comments Filed under: RSS

• All Thumbs

  While perusing one of my many dictionaries recently, I came across a definition of the word man that began as follows: Zoology A member of the genus Homo, family Hominidae, order Primates, class Mammalia, characterized by erect posture and an opposable thumb... What turned this into an eyebrow-raiser was the exalted place that it gave the humble thumb as a quintessentially human physical characteristic. That cannily positioned, two-jointed stranger in the house of fingers that soothes toddlers and enables us to hitchhike and rate movies is a symbol for humanity. (What about language? That's important, too, and perhaps MIT's Michael Hawley said it best: "Language is the mind's opposable thumb.") So perhaps it's not surprising that the thumb is the digital age digit-of-choice. This newfound popularity is a result of a newfangled use for the thumb's opposability: Operating the teensy keypads and buttons that are standard equipment on modern cell phones, pagers, and PDAs. In fact, the word thumb has morphed into a new verb that means "to enter data into a cell phone or other device using one's thumb or thumbs." (Thumb as a verb has been used in other contexts for quite a while. For example, the sense of "to play a musical instrument with the thumbs" is over 400 years old; the sense "to skim through a book using the thumb" is about 70 years old.) In Japan and other locales where text messaging (or just texting) is all the rage, the young people who spend inordinate amounts of time hunched over tiny screens, thumbs a-blazing, comprise what's known as the thumb culture. We now describe devices that can be thumbed as thumbable, and the abilities required to manipulate such devices in that way as thumb skills. To save time and effort, some devices offer the welcome ability to program a button with a sequence of words, which is called a thumb phrase. The thumb also plays a big role in certain computer games, and any game that emphasizes hand-eye coordination over strategy is called thumb candy. Watch out, though, if you're thumbing becomes overzealous or you'll end up with a repetitive stress (or should that be repetitive press?) malady known as Nintendo thumb (also called Nintendinitis or text message injury). Cell Rage Speaking of phones, which term do you use: cell phone or mobile phone? Chances are that if you live in North America, you prefer cell phone. A search through some online media databases revealed that cell phone is used in North American media about six times as often as mobile phone. For non-North American media, mobile phone outpolls cell phone by about seven to one. Whichever moniker you use, there's no doubt we're in the midst of a backlash as people rail against the sheer ubiquity of cell (or mobile) phones and the frequent rudeness of those who use them. The big problem is what some punsters are calling cellfish behavior. This includes a variety of secondhand speech called the cell yell — excessively loud cell phone (or yell phone) talking, and DWY — driving while yakking. Another problem that causes eyes to roll up into their heads is what British researcher Sadie Plant calls stage-phoning: Attempting to impress nearby people by talking on a cell phone in an animated, theatrical manner. Also fueling this cell backlash are those annoying ringtones that come with mobile phones. Do we really need to hear the first eight bars of the Brandenburg Concerto #5 every few minutes in an airport waiting lounge? (Which reminds me of a cartoon that shows two businessmen in a restaurant checking their ringing cell phones; the caption: "Is that your 'God Bless America' or mine?") And to make matters worse, now there are companies offering MIDI files as ringers. That's right, the single most annoying thing about the Web is now poised to become the single most annoying thing on Earth. (And with ringers from the likes of Metallica and Michael Jackson being downloaded, how long before this becomes another Napster?) Those unfortunates who must put up with this cell hell have been driven to rebellious actions, which range from an intense cell glare to outright cell rage. Books and Web sites have sprung up like mushrooms after a spring rain to teach people celliquette, an ugly shortening of cell etiquette. In some jurisdictions, the mad-as-heck-and-we're-not-going-to-take-it-anymore crowd has even banned drivers from talking while driving, and there have been rumblings that mobiles will be sent packing from office buildings and other public areas, which are to be designated as cell-free zones. We're already seeing signs outside of some establishments that show a cell phone crossed with a diagonal red slash (that now-universal "don't even think about it" symbol). Clearly it's only a matter of time before cell phone users and smokers, elbows akimbo, will be battling for space outside of buildings. File that under "Scenes I'd Like to See." This post appeared originally as my Technically Speaking column in the October 2002 issue of IEEE Spectrum. Posted Oct 05 2007, 12:07 PM by Paul with no comments Filed under: Neologisms, Technically speaking