Pepsi, Thomas Claburn, and John Bredehoft on Pepsi's "Social Vending System"

Soda machines have been connected to the Internet for years. The first known occurrence of a soda machine-to-computer connection took place in the 1970s, when Carengie-Mellon's Computer Science Department hooked their Coke machine up to a DEC PDP-10 computer. CMU then used the UNIX "finger" command to allow people to discover the status of the Coke machine.

But this setup only allowed the users to know whether there was cold Coke in the machine. Things have progressed a lot since then, and Coca-Cola's competitor Pepsi has rolled out a new "social" machine:

Using digital technology, PepsiCo’s Social Vending System enables any user to gift a friend by selecting a beverage and entering the recipient’s name, mobile number and a personalized text message. There’s also the option to further personalize the gift with a short video recorded right at the machine. The gift is delivered with a system code and instructions to redeem it at any PepsiCo Social Vending system. When the recipient redeems his or her gift, they’re given the option of either thanking the original sender with a gift of their own or paying it forward and gifting a beverage to someone else.

So for all of you who are giving people virtual goods in Farmville and other programs, here's a way to give REAL goods to people.

What could go wrong?

InformationWeek's Thomas Claburn has some concerns:

[E]xpect this feature to be curtailed after activists figure out how to co-opt social gifting for political ends, like messages of incitement offering the local dictator a cool drink to recover from the taxing job of torturing his people. Social marketing is all fun and profit until someone starts sending "Random Acts of Insurrection."

With all due respect to Mr. Claburn, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Imagine sending Pepsi gifts to your local Coca-Cola distributor.

Imagine sending Pepsi gifts to Thomas S. Monson, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. (At least some LDS members abstain from caffeinated cola drinks for religious reasons.)

Speaking of religion, imagine sending Pepsi gifts to Apple Chairman Steve Jobs, whose quote about sugar water is legendary.

Of course, Pepsi doesn't care, because (just like stamps) income from products that are never used is still income.

Aircraft competition, and a serious comment from Kim Kardashian

[DISCLOSURE: A company that is associated to my employer was a participant in this project.]

When we think of aircraft companies, we think of Boeing and Airbus. But there are other firms:

Armenia’s Armavia Airlines took delivery Tuesday of the first Sukhoi Superjet 100 to roll off the production line. It made its maiden flights from Moscow to Yerevan’s Zvartnots Airport.

The aircraft was christened “Yuri Gagarin” in memory of the first cosmonaut. The Armenian carrier holds two firm orders plus two options.

“This is definitely a great milestone for the Russian aerospace industry, because this SSJ00 is in fact the first production aircraft of modern Russia, created in partnership with worldwide aerospace leaders,” said Armavia owner Mikhail Bagdasarov.

And Sukhoi is not the only Russian aircraft company. In fact, one person heads two Russian aircraft firms:

Chief of Russia’s Sukhoi holding company, Mikhail Pogasyan, will replace Alexei Feodorov as the CEO of the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC), according to a top Kremlin aide....

Mikhail Pogosyan's Sukhoi Holding is involved in the development of fifth generation fighter aircraft (FGFA) on the basis of PAK-FA T-50 project in which India also has a stake.

Fyodorov lost his post for failing to implement President Medvedev’s orders on drafting innovation programmes for the company, Ria Novosti reported.

UAC, a state-controlled corporation, was established in 2006 to streamline the Russian aircraft making industry.

And if you want to talk about companies being in bed together, Boeing is an advisor to the Sukhoi Superjet 100 project.

Oh, and Armenia's good friends in Turkey have selected Sikorsky for a regional project.

P.S. Sometimes personalities are dismissed for being vapid, but Kim Kardashian took a stand in April when she discovered that her picture appeared on the cover of a Turkish Cosmopolitan magazine during the same month that Genocide Remembrance Day is observed. But what will happen if Lamar Odom faces Boston or Chicago in the NBA Finals?

So, where is Abbottabad?

Before Obama gave his speech announcing the death of Osama bin Laden, initial reports were saying that he had been killed outside of Islamabad. I could not catch the name of the city that Obama named, so I went to Wikipedia. As of 9:01 PM Pacific time, this is how the Wikipedia entry for Abbottabad began:

Abbottabad (Urdu: ایبٹ آباد) is a city located in the Hazara region/division of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, formerly NWFP, of Pakistan. The city is situated in the Orash Valley, 150 km north of Islamabad and 200 km east of Peshawar at an altitude of 4,120 feet (1,260 m). The city is well-known throughout Pakistan for its pleasant weather, high standard educational institutions and military establishments. It remains a major hub for tourism of regions in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir in the summer. On May 2, 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed in Abbottabad.


View Larger Map

Lonely Planet describes the city:

Abbottabad (ab-it-uh-baad), Hazara’s headquarters and biggest town, was founded as a British garrison town in the 1850s, and the shady gardens, church bells and wide streets in the Cantonment evoke the colonial era. Beside the Cantonment is a compact and vibrant bazaar.

It would have its attractions for someone on the run, like bin Laden:

Apart from changing money for an excursion into the Kaghan Valley there’s little reason for other travellers to make a halt.]

On the other hand:

The town has a sizable Christian minority and three active churches (Presbyterian, Anglican and Catholic).

China My China

Here's a little tidbit:

China’s gross domestic product will rocket $8 trillion in the next five years to $19 trillion. The U.S. GDP will grow $3.5 trillion in the same timeframe to $18.8 trillion. And it will be in that year - 2016 - that China's slice of world output will start to edge past the United States': 18% versus 17.7%. In the years after, that gap is forecast to widen.

Not sure how the Malays feel about this.

P.S. I should explain my choice of post titles more often. This particular song was written over 35 years ago.

Methodology religion - Mark Kennaley's syncretism

Theoretically a business blog shouldn't discuss religion, but in truth business - especially the tech world - is very religious. There are religious wars over Apple vs. Linux vs. Windows. And there are religious wars over other subjects also, such as the proper development methodology to use. Mark Kennaley:

In many IT organizations, there is one true "religion" that defines how projects are undertaken and managed. The methodology of the day is faithfully adhered to and non­believers are pressured to convert. A given IT religion can last a long time, then suddenly be abandoned when people lose faith in its efficacy or its primary evangelist leaves.

When this happens, all the progress made under the prior method is often deemed of little or no value, and reinvention becomes the order of the day.

Kennaley claims that there are three major methodologies - agile, lean, and unified - and that when you create a two-dimensional space with the axes of flexibility/stability and internal/external focus, you end up with four quadrants:

Clan/Family Culture: Here you have a culture that emphasizes collaboration. Your leaders tend to be facilitators and team builders, who value commitment and communication. They think effectiveness is driven by developing people and spurring participation.

Adhocracy Culture: Your company emphasizes creativity and has leaders who are entrepreneurial innovators, who value transformation and agility, and have a high level of risk tolerance. They think that innovation and vision are the best paths to effectiveness.

Market Culture: Here the orientation is competition. Your leaders are hard-driving competitors, who emphasize goal achievement, market share, and profitability. Customer focus and aggressive competition lead to effectiveness.

Hierarchy/Bureaucracy Culture: Your company tends to focus on control, with leaders who coordinate, monitor, and organize. Efficiency, timeliness, consistency, and risk aversion are the watchwords. Control and efficiency are seen as the best path to effectiveness.

Kennaley makes the point that certain methodologies are better adapted to certain cultures. For example, a unified process practice is more suited to a hierarchy/bureaucracy culture than to an adhocracy/creative culture.

But that is not Kennaley's main point:

One approach, which I call SDLC 3.0, provides a pragmatic, experience-based approach for integrating the fragmented methodology landscape by using practices that are methodology agnostic. It focuses on yielding a useful, context-specific set of standard work advice for real product development.

Of course, to religious practitioners of the three religions, Kennaley probably sounds like a dangerous heretic to be burned at the stake.

(empo-tuulwey) @alltwtr illustrates when brevity is needed

Lauren Dugan of AllTwitter (@alltwtr) has written a post entitled Are You Extending Your Tweets? Then You’re Missing the Point.

Now Dugan wrote about this in a blog post, not a tweet, and the blog post is obviously longer than 140 characters. But even in blog form, Dugan displays succinctness. For example:

It’s called micro-blogging for a reason, folks.

Read the whole thing here. Or if you're pressed for time, read the tweet.

What's in a (language) name?

I live in the United States of America, and we refer to our main language as "English." Perhaps at one point this upset people, since we had gone through two wars with the English, but today we don't really give it a second thought.

But it's different in Malaysia.

First off, here's one important fact about Malaysia, courtesy of the U.S. State Department:

Malaysia's multi-racial society contains many ethnic groups. Malays comprise a majority of just over 50%....About a quarter of the population is ethnic Chinese, a group which historically played an important role in trade and business. Malaysians of Indian descent comprise about 7% of the population and include Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians. Non-Malay indigenous groups combine to make up approximately 11% of the population.

These multiple ethnic groups create some tensions in the country. Decades ago, I knew a Malaysian who was an ethnic Chinese. The reason that I knew her is because she went to college in Oklahoma - since (at least at the time) the number of ethnic Chinese students in Malaysian colleges and universities was restricted.

We spoke to each other in English, despite the fact that England had not ruled either of our native countries in a long, long time. And my friend obviously spoke Chinese. But before she left Malaysia to go to Oklahoma, what language did she speak to conduct official government business?

Well, it depends. The language remained constant, but the name of the language changes from time to time. Here's the story:

The forefathers of Malaysia have agreed among other things during formation of the nation, that the language of Malays, be the official language. The federal constitution guarantees this privileged status of Malay language or Bahasa Melayu in article 152.

But there was a subsequent change:

A bloody racial riot which started on May 13, 1969 prompted the Malaysian government to take remedial measures. One of the steps is to promote the official language as Bahasa Malaysia, literally the language of Malaysia, for a more universal appeal sanctioned by the National Language Act 1967.

What's the difference? If you're part of the nearly 50% of Malaysia who is not Malay, it could be a very big difference.

But not to everyone:

Says the Education Minister who eventually became deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak: "The government is not rigid about this. Although in the constitution the term Bahasa Melayu is used, in certain situations, the use of the term Bahasa Malaysia is allowed...We do not want to go into a debate on semantics. On the government's part, we are being pragmatic by accepting both. This is not an issue to be exaggerated."

Or perhaps it is, based upon this event that occurred in 1999:

Malaysia's literary agency Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka ( DBP ) refused to publish a collection of short stories. The reason? The writers used the term " Bahasa Malaysia". DBP's stance is that Bahasa Malaysia is political and it acknowledges Bahasa Melayu.

Or perhaps it isn't:

he strange part is, DBP has been publishing books using the term Bahasa Malaysia before this and continues to do so until as late as 2002.

There is a similar language spoken in Indonesia, but apparently everyone there agrees to call the language Bahasa Indonesia. The language is similar, but not identical:

In Bahasa Melayu: budak means 'children'
In Bahasa Indonesia: budak means 'slave'
So, the Indonesians can get offended if someone calls their children 'budak'.

Well, I'm glad that I don't live in southeast Asia and the name of my language is fairly simple to understand, and has no controversy whatsoever.

(ducks)

Talking about incentives

Bruce Schneier discussed a...um...growing problem that was initially reported in the New York Times:

Late last month, a gang of thieves stole six tractor-trailer loads of tomatoes and a truck full of cucumbers from Florida growers. They also stole a truckload of frozen meat. The total value of the illegal haul: about $300,000.

The thieves disappeared with the shipments just after the price of Florida tomatoes skyrocketed after freezes that badly damaged crops in Mexico. That suddenly made Florida tomatoes a tempting target...

Hey...unlike gasoline, tomatoes are not flammable.

No chips, no peace

You can find activists everywhere.

Recently the U.S. government took action against three online poker sites, pretty much shutting down their operations for U.S. customers. Dan Cypra notes the fallout:

As you might expect, online poker players -- some of whom have six and potentially even seven figures locked up in cyberspace -- are growing increasingly anxious.

Enter the Poker Players Alliance, or the PPA as we affectionately know it in our industry. The PPA is the main lobbying voice for poker players in the United States. And even though poker players are a notoriously apathetic bunch, in the wake of having funds locked away for the foreseeable future, they have become increasingly vocal through the several online channels the PPA has provided.

Well, actually, some of these channels are provided by others. Take the U.S. Department of Justice Facebook page. Well, maybe:

[NOTE: MY USUAL PRACTICE IS TO *NOT* QUOTE CONTENT POSTED ON FACEBOOK, BECAUSE THE POSTER MAY NOT REALIZE THAT THE CONTENT IS PUBLICLY AVAILABLE. HOWEVER, IN THIS CASE I DON'T THINK THE POSTER WOULD OBJECT.]

hmmmmm....... why did the DOJ remove all the posts regarding the ridiculous ban on internet poker?

Actually, they didn't - or if they did, they didn't remove all of them.

Apple's Wordplay Regarding iPhone Data

Apple has gone on the offensive regarding recent news about location tracking data being found on iPhone devices. Apple's website contains a "Q&A" regarding the issue. The Q&A begins as follows:

1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?
Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.

Or, "all of you are bozos." In question 2, Apple goes on to say

Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite.

Note the word "accurate." We'll come back to that in a minute. First, however, I'd like to reprint Apple's answer to question 3 in its entirety.

3. Why is my iPhone logging my location?
The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.

So, to repeat, "the iPhone is not logging your location." It is instead providing iPhone users "with fast and accurate location information."

Or, it's not logging your precise location - just areas around your precise location (and areas around the precise locations of others that happen to be near your precise location).

Whew, that's a relief.

And while the information is sent in encrypted form, Apple admits in question 4 that it is not stored in encrypted form.

The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes.

And question 4 again reiterates that this is not the location of the iPhone, but locations around the iPhone and other iPhones in the same area, some of which could be 100 miles away.

So because there is nothing to worry about, there's no need to modify the iPhone, right? Uh...

Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:

* reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
* ceases backing up this cache, and
* deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

So I guess that means that Apple won't be sharing the contents of Tim Cook's cache. Unless, of course, Donald Trump demands it.

I'm waiting for reaction from Pete Warden. Warden is co-author of the iPhone Tracker that started the discussion.

(empo-tymshft) Will Facebook users have to abandon Lutheranism?

When I write my "empo-tymshft" pieces, I take great delight in tying a current item, such as cloud computing, to something that existed decades ago, such as the initial CompuServe.

But what about tying a current item to something that happened centuries ago?

That's exactly what Marina Gorbis did when discussing the suit against the Huffington Post and AOL by the unpaid staff.

The suit, however, brings to the fore tensions inherent in a new kind of production that is emerging today—what we might call “social production.” This kind of work involves micro-contributions from large networks of people who often receive “payment” in the form of fun, peer recognition, and a sense of belonging—that is, in social rather than monetary currencies. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Flickr, and many other stalwarts of today’s digital economy are enablers and beneficiaries of such production....

But the Huffington case brings us face-to-face with the reality that we, as social producers, are all becoming digital peasants. By turn, we are the heroic commoners feeding revolutions in the Middle East and, at the same time, “modern serfs” working on Mark Zuckerberg’s and other digital plantations....

[T]here is a potential dark side to social production, and the way we structure such efforts is critical. This is where the lessons from manor economics become relevant. Just like digital manor economies today, the manorialism of feudal society in medieval Europe integrated many elements of commons production. In most manors, peasants and tenants were assigned rights to use the commons—pastures, forests, fisheries, soil—within each manor’s boundaries. Some of the early principles of commons production we write about today were first evident in manor economies, where inhabitants had to agree on rules for cultivation, grazing and fishing.

The dark side of manor economics, however, lay in the fact that it perpetuated huge inherited disparities in incomes. So while most of the population in these Middle Age pastoral settings survived at subsistence levels, the lords of the manor were able to live lavishly off the rent, taxes, and free labor the tenants were obligated to supply them with, as well as various fees tenants had to pay for the use of resources such as mills, bakeries, or wine-presses.

And here the similarities emerge. Digital manor economies are driven by technologies that, at their core, are commons-creating.

Read the entire post here.

In effect, Gorbis is drawing a parallel between today and the Middle Ages - before the Renaissance, before wide availability of books, before the printing press...and, in my case, before Lutheranism. So much for "Here I Stand" - Zuckerberg might put me in the stocks.

I'm mulling over this one...

Twitter and developers - the reboot?

Last month I wrote a post that concluded as follows:

(And if you don't recall the link between [Robert] Scoble and [Jesse] Stay, read this piece regarding their discussion with Twitter back in 2008. As of 2011, Stay is more well-known as a Facebook technical expert than as a Twitter technical expert, so I guess that we can conclude that Twitter hasn't exactly enamored itself to developers.)

What I neglected to say (because it was off-topic for that particular post) was that Stay had subsequently shared some concerns about Twitter's relationship with its developers. In the April 2009 post I Should Have Heeded My Own Advice About Twitter, Stay shared his concerns about what was happening to his SocialToo product:

Today Twitter pulled the rug out from under its developers once more by, with absolutely no notice, announcing that (paraphrased, in my words) since their way was the right way, they were discouraging auto-following, and would only allow a user to follow 1,000 people per day. What Twitter neglected was that, while not many, myself and others were building business plans around the users that would need this. A little notice would have been helpful, but is very consistent with the way developers have been treated over the past year or more by Twitter. Yes, I’m a big boy and we’ll survive, but that’s besides the point. You can read more about what developers are experiencing over on LouisGray. Put lightly, I’m not happy.

Well, Stay (and others) shared this news from Twitter today.

The stormy relations between Twitter Inc. and the sprawling developer community that surrounds it may have taken a big turn for the better. Longtime developer relations manager at Google and Facebook Jason Costa announced on the Twitter developers email list today that he has joined Twitter as the company's Developer Relations Manager. "I'll be 100% focused on ensuring the best possible developer experience for those looking to build on the Twitter Platform," Costa wrote.

But Marshall Kirkpatrick, who authored the ReadWriteWeb post, had some misgivings:

Hiring a developer relations manager is a good step towards preserving the viability of the platform. Hopefully it's not too late.

We'll see. I'm waiting for the views of Jesse Stay and other developers.

(empo-tymshft) The typewriter, 1867-2011

Here's something else courtesy Lisa Wilkes. I ended up surfing to the Daily Mail for this story:

Godrej and Boyce - the last company left in the world that was still manufacturing typewriters - has shut down its production plant in Mumbai, India with just a few hundred machines left in stock.

General Manager Milind Dukle said that typewriters were still a booming business until recently.

'From the early 2000s onwards, computers started dominating. All the manufacturers of office typewriters stopped production, except us.

'Till 2009, we used to produce 10,000 to 12,000 machines a year. But this might be the last chance for typewriter lovers. Now, our primary market is among the defence agencies, courts and government offices.'

Granted that the 2009 level was down from its 1990s production of 50,000 typewriters, but it's still interesting to note that there was still a booming market in the Third World for computers.

So now even fewer people will know what a Smith Corona was. And I'll miss the "ding" at the end of a line when I'm touch typing.

Safra Catz acting CFO at Oracle after Jeff Epstein's departure

IT Pro Portal reports that Oracle's CFO, Jeff Epstein, has stepped down. According to Michael Ide, former CFO Safra Catz has stepped in to fill the role:

"Safra already has the long-standing confidence of our employees, our board and our shareholders," Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison said in a statement. "There is no more logical choice for CFO."

A Wall Street Journal article made two points. First, Epstein reported to Catz, who had experience as CFO (as acting CFO before Epstein's arrival, she had more experience than anyone in the job in the post-Jeff Henley era). Second, Mark Hurd's arrival may have taken some duties away from Epstein. Granted that this is all speculation, but it could be a possible explanation.

H/T Lisa Wilkes, whom I learned of after she retweeted Eddie Awad.

Perhaps one stakeholder was missed

I run around in business circles where words like "stakeholders" are bandied about. While the terminology can be all-too-trendy at times, it does illustrate a valid point. A project, an action, or a decision has a profound effect on many different people, and it's wise to recognize who those people are and how they are affected.

As an example, take this video.



The video, called "The Power of Words," was created by a UK agency called Purplefeather, who believed that an inspiring story would illustrate to potential clients just how positive words could make a powerful impact on customers.

But how did the blind feel about it?

William Peace is not blind, but he is, in his words, a bad cripple. And he was offended by the paternalism.

Portraying people with a disability in a negative way is something i have railed against in the past. It is nothing new. This video however sets an all time new low. While I rail against ads that portray people who use a wheelchair as dependent, this video takes it even further. No pretense is made about the fact a blind man is begging. Ho hum, an every day event I suppose....

This man is dehumanized in the extreme. The poor bastard cannot not even write a sign worthy of a beggar. This is left to an able bodied woman. You know those all powerful people that can walk, hear, and see.

The power of images, perhaps.

There is a core of disabled activists who value independence over dependence, who (in the United States) fight for the rights guaranteed to them under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and who strongly object to those people who portray the disabled as incomplete humans who need our help.

People such as Jerry Lewis. This is what he said in a September 1990 article in Parade Magazine:

I know the courage it takes to get on the court with other cripples and play wheelchair basketball, but I'm not as fortunate as they are, and I bet I'm in the majority. I'd like to play basketball like normal, healthy, vital, and energetic people. I really don't want the substitute. I just can't half-do anything -- either it's all the way, or forget it. That's a rough way to think in my position. When I sit back and think a little more rationally, I realize my life is half, so I must learn to do things halfway. I just have to learn to try to be good at being a half a person ... and get on with my life.

That single paragraph in Parade, which was printed right around Labor Day, got the attention of a number of so-called "half" people, "cripples," who shared their views with "normal" people.

In Chicago, Cris Matthews and Mike Ervin, a brother and sister who both had forms of Muscular Dystrophy and had been MDA poster children in 1961 and who had been active in ADAPT actions and had started a group called AccessAbility Associates, decided to do something about it.

Two months before the 1991 Telethon, Matthews wrote to Robert Ross, Executive Director of the Association, a deceptively simple letter. "The wheels are in motion to begin the campaign to remove Jerry Lewis from your Telethon," she told him, by way of introduction. "We intend to keep at it until he is no longer associated with MDA, and the negative, degrading nature of the Telethon is changed to reflect the truth about life with muscular dystrophy and disability in general."

The Association, she charged, was "expert in exploiting the worst side of disability and, with the eager assistance of Lewis, has made us out to be nothing more than pathetic burdens to society, whose only desire is to walk. Much attention is given to the kids who may not live to adulthood, but for those of us who do live on, not one word or one dime is devoted to the concept of independence." Lewis's Parade article, "full of the condescending paternalism the Association foists on the viewing public, is an outrage and an insult," she told Ross.

"No one is negating research or the individual's desire to be cured," she wrote. What they objected to was the paternalism, "the attitude that stresses that, no matter what one does, life is meaningless in a wheelchair."

Time to start paying attention to text pirating issues?

I was checking my vanity search when I ran across a post in a blog called "China Green" that included this phrase:

My friend John Bredehoft has a post providing some background and asking the perceptive question Which do you fear more – business Big Brother, or government Big Brother?

It turns out that I am the John Bredehoft who is mentioned in the post, but I don't have any friend who has a blog called China Green.

So what happened?

China Green scraped the content of Jim Ulvog's Nonprofit Update blog. The original content is in this post.

(The citation of my post is a very minor portion of Ulvog's post, which looks at a number of privacy issues that have recently emerged - location tracking on iPhones and Android phones, the unencrypted nature of this data, and the Cellebrite technology concerns. Please read Ulvog's post and follow his links.)

Back to China Green. There are basically four ways in which someone like China Green can reference the work of someone like Jim Ulvog:

• Link to the original work without quoting.


• Link to the original work and include a brief quote.


• Reproduce the entire original work and link to it.


• Reproduce the entire original work without linking to it.

While there are differences of opinion regarding the acceptability of some of these methods, 99% of all people agree that the fourth way - the way used by China Green - is not acceptable practice.

The businesses set up by these content scrapers are not long-lasting - the "Tufts Health Insurance" blog that scraped my content no longer exists, and the profile of its author, "Think," is no longer available. Sadly, Chuck Tiber stopped updating his Bathroom Ideas" blog a month after being ripped off.

I should have put a tracking device on his phone.

(empo-tymshft) Canada Elections Act Section 329 and Twitter? That's old news.

Let's start by looking at Section 329 of the Canada Elections Act.

Prohibition – premature transmission of results

329. No person shall transmit the result or purported result of the vote in an electoral district to the public in another electoral district before the close of all of the polling stations in that other electoral district.

If you believe what you've been reading over the past couple of weeks, this Act has suddenly been affected by the rise of Twitter, The Service That Revolutionizes All Social Relations. Here's what Nicole Ferraro said:

One impediment to the rapid adoption of social media within governments has been the archaic laws that don't take modern-day communications technologies into consideration.

The US discovered this the hard way when the Obama administration took office eager to adopt all things 2.0. And now Canadians are facing a similar issue, thanks to a law that may ensure citizens are fined for discussing May 2nd election results online before all polls officially close.

This social media ban is the result of a 73-year-old law -- a provision in Section 329 of the Canada Elections Act -- which prohibits people from discussing polling results. The point of this is to avoid swaying voters' decisions in western parts of the country where the polls have not closed.

But in the age of immediate disclosure and transparency, this isn't sitting well with Facebook- and Twitter-happy Canadians.

And now, all of a sudden, this is a huge issue. And it sounds like it never was before.

Well, that is certainly understandable. Television and radio in Canada is regulated, and presumably the Canadian government could enforce regulations to prohibit the broadcast of Montreal polling data while people in the Yukon are still voting.

But the Canadian law does not use the word "broadcast." It uses the word "transmit." And there are a number of ways to transmit data. Many of these data transmission methods existed way back in the 20th century, before Twitter and Facebook. And many of these data transmission methods existed 73 years ago.

Now perhaps it's impractical for a Quebec paper to print the news and for someone to board a plane and fly it to Vancouver. But there is a transmission method that existed 73 years ago that could allow instantaneous transmissions, thus allowing you to break Canadian law.

That transmission method? The telephone.

And for those who argue that tweets and Facebook status updates could be seen by thousands, remember that in earlier years some phone connections were not one-to-one. You see, back then the party line was common.

Although I don't think that it's much of a party to scream into a phone, "Louis St. Laurent has won in Quebec!"

But political animals in any country are weird.

The point is that sometimes people assume that Twitter is changing the world. The world was changed long ago.

Be careful what you ask for - examine the goals you set

The AppsLab talks a lot about games - Jake Kuramoto returned to the topic last Friday - but when you think about it, games and quests and the like are really just engaging versions of goals. For example, take your annual performance review, with its goals for the coming year, and create a nice interface with percent complete and badges and stuff - you now have a quest.

But whether a program encourages you to reach the goals by giving you badges and virtual crops, or whether the program encourages you to reach the goals via less boring means, the "goal" of goals is to get something done. Incentives of some type are often used to complete the goal.

But before you set a goal, be sure that you examine what that goal is. You may get what you asked for.

Consider this recent post by Bruce Schneier, which links to this USA Today article. Employees at Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus received financial incentives in two separate years; teachers received $8,000 bonuses, and the principal received a $10,000 bonus. The school also received recognition from the U.S. Department of Education, and from the chancellor of the District of Columbia schools.

To receive these bonuses, they had to reach a goal; improve student test scores on standardized tests. And according to USA Today, they achieved that goal in dramatic fashion:

In 2006, only 10% of Noyes' students scored "proficient" or "advanced" in math on the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Two years later, 58% achieved that level. The school showed similar gains in reading.

In this case, the goal was measured by looking at the test scores, and the financial and other rewards started flowing in.

There was only one problem.

A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.'s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes' classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.

The details were enough to alarm some statisticians:

On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.

"This is an abnormal pattern," says Thomas Haladyna, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has studied testing for 20 years....

Haladyna notes...that when entire classrooms at schools with statistically rare erasures show fast-rising test scores, that suggests someone might have "tampered with the answer sheets," perhaps after the tests were collected from students.

There were concerns from parents and others about students who were miraculously doing well, but there wasn't a great incentive to really investigate what was going on. After all, if you've praised Noyes for being a wonderful school, you don't want to turn around the next day and admit that it was all a fake. That doesn't look good.

So what happened? There was an incentive for schools to deliver good test scores...and the good test scores magically appeared. As Schneier notes:

The point is that whatever security measures were in place to prevent teacher cheating before the financial incentives and threats of firing wasn't sufficient to prevent teacher cheating afterwards. Because Rhee significantly increased the costs of cooperation (by threatening to fire teachers of poorly performing students) and increased the benefits of defection ($8,000), she created a security risk. And she should have increased security measures to restore balance to those incentives.

This is not limited to education. Take your average Facebook game. To increase the number of uses, games offer incentives for people to recruit more players to the game from their Facebook friends. Similarly, there are incentives to make new Facebook friends solely for the purpose of advancing in the game. (I did this myself just last week.)

What is the result of this goal? Backlash:

Sure people created fan pages entitled I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia! Other people just hide those messages from friends via their live feed or worst of all they delete the friend entirely because they just do not want to deal with all those accomplishment posts.

Now most of my Facebook friends won't even see my Facebook game accomplishments. That's because I use Facebook's friend list feature to ONLY post those messages to a list of people who play Facebook games. And if you're not on that friend list, you won't see my messages.

However, if you're a Facebook friend of mine, and if you're not seeing these messages and want to see them, please message me via Facebook and I'll add you to my special "Farm City Planet" friend list.

And I'll even give you 100 virtual bacon cheeseburgers.

Headlines can have double meanings

Recently, a New York Times article turned up on my RSS feed. The title? So Far, Our New Pricing Strategy Is Working.

I figured that it was awfully bold for the New York Times to claim that its paywall was working, especially when so many people were successfully circumventing it.

Then I read the article, and I realized that it wasn't talking about the pricing strategy of the New York Times. It was talking about a restaurant that had decided to offer prix fixe service.

Next, the Huffington Post will run a story talking about a company that is allied with a tired old Internet company.

New-Fields may be persistent, but they're not as gross as Pixel Ammo

Yes, I'm still getting e-mail from New-Fields (see my December and January posts). But the phone calls have (mostly) ceased - perhaps my FTC complaint helped in that regard.

When New-Fields originally started to e-mail me, they would send large multi-megabyte PDF attachments with their e-mails. Luckily for me, the latest e-mail messages include more modest attachments.

But some people haven't learned that big attachments are not the best way to sell your product. Pity the fool who thought that this would be the best way to sell to Louis Gray:

Guess What?! I am not covering your "Waxing Salon" app. BTW, thanks for the 8.8 MB worth of PDFs and video.

Gray also posted a screen shot of part of the stuff that was mailed to him. The e-mail, from Pixel Ammo, describes a game called "Crazy Waxing." And they're not talking about cars:

You play as a waxing salon owner filled to the brim with customers who want a beautiful tan line. Wax away to see what's under that unsightly patch of hair.

And if you're a civil libertarian, you'll be happy to know that Apple approved this app. Presumably Pixel Ammo didn't e-mail their request to Steve Jobs.

This is Pixel Ammo's second game, by the way. Their first, FluOrama, allows the player to prevent a deadly bacteria outbreak.

You'll notice that they didn't say "virus" - if reviewers were to get 9 megabyte e-mails talking about a virus, NO ONE would review Pixel Ammo's apps.

Their next game, by the way, is a simple UFO abduction game. I'm not sure when the herpes and botulism games will be released...