Day: May 30, 2001

Rambling Thoughts About Conversant and “Knowledge Management”

This essay is a collection of semi-coherent thoughts I wrote down over a couple of days while thinking of how to review Conversant for FindApps.Com (I wandered far away from my original topic).

I’ve written a lot of words here about how wonderful Conversant is for managing a web site, and if anything I am even more convinced today that it is the best solution for anyone wanting to maintain a medium to large web site with a minimal staff.

Let me just put things in concrete terms. At the beginning of 1999, when I was managing my web site with DreamWeaver, I set a goal of adding 100 pages that year. In just the first five months of this year, I added something like 800 pages. The difference is due almost entirely to Conversant’s intelligent automation of web management tasks.

But enough about the web management aspects of the software. What I’d really like to talk about is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. Namely the knowledge management aspects of the system.

All of the web sites I run have one thing in common. Although some of them are semi-commercial ventures now, they started out as basically online notebooks of topics that I was interested in. Sometimes it’s amusing because I’ll have a reporter e-mail me asking if I really put together all the information on Overpopulation.Com as a hobby.

And the answer is yes. That site grew out of a Usenet debate back in 1996 when I was frustrated at not having an easy-to-find source for various demographic and other data. It started out as a basic FAQ and completely mushroomed out of control.

That became a problem in itself. I was very glad that the site turned out to be very popular, but in the old site I had, it was very difficult to find information on the site even for me. The whole thing was extremely disorganized.

Now the organization of the site is still not completed, but it’s magnitudes of order more useful than the old site. Before I switched to Conversant, there was no simple way just to see all of the articles I’d written about China, but now the main China page automatically includes every article on the site about China.

There were times in the past where I knew a certain fact or piece of data was on one of my sites, but it was actually quicker to search for the data via a search engine. Now it’s just the opposite — I can instantly find information on my web site. In fact, with just a few minutes of surfing (if that) I can pull up a half a dozen ways of looking at the pages on the site and drill down to find exactly what I want. That’s cool.

For me, at least, the system really makes it relatively easy to deliver on a lot of the hype that was out there a few years ago about how hypertext would revolutionize the way we manage information. I jokingly tell my wife that my web site has become the front end to my mind, but it’s actually not too far from the truth.

Is Fancast.Com the Next Napster?

No, it’s not a file trading service but Fancast.Com is likely to face similar legal scrutiny if it ever takes off. The idea is simple — hook up a microphone to your PC and give your own play-by-play of an ongoing sporting event. Personally, the low quality audio of such sites makes them unattractive, but some people might enjoy this.

Of course, the lawyers for the sports leagues will almost certainly try to claim that this is illegal. Anyone who has ever watched or listened to any sports broadcast is familiar with the standard disclaimer: any retransmission, rebroadcast or any other us of this telecast is prohibited without the consent of the team and league.

The person behind the site, Adam Epstein, is complicating the intellectual property argument a bit by not making money directly off the audio feeds. For now they’re free, and he plans on charging a monthly fee for the people who want to use the site to broadcast, but not listen.

There has, of course, already been a famous legal case on the intellectual property status of sports-related information. Several years ago the National Basketball Assocation sued Motorola, Stats, and AOL for providing detailed real time scores from NBA games. A US appeals court judge ruled in 1997 that the NBA doesn’t actually own the scores of its games.

Whether or not a court would extend that to what is essentially a rebroadcasting of game remains to be seen.

The Drug War Is Working … At Least in Afghanistan

Libertarians and others claim that the war on drugs is unwinnable. But it turns out that they were wrong. The drug war can work. In fact, it is working in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, of course, has been the source of much of the world’s opium. According to the New York Times, last year about 75 percent of the world’s opium resin came from Afghanistan. this year, however, almost all of the opium has disappeared. The reason — an edict from the ruling Islamic fundamentalist Taliban ordering an end to opium growing.

The Times seems surprised that not only have opium farmers apparently gone along without much of a fuss. But of course when you have the reputation that the Taliban has, you don’t need to do a lot to get people to comply.

These are the same folks, after all who hang prostitutes in stadiums full of thousands of cheering people. The other day the BBC reported that a young man and woman each were given 100 lashes in a crowded stadium for the crime of having premarital sex.

This, then, is the way that the drug war can actually succeed. All it needs is a deadly fundamentalist religious movement prepared to torture anyone who gets in the way, and the drug problem will just go away.

The Taliban understands the way the drug war works. Why stop the opium trade now, when it is one of the few sources of hard currency for that nation? Because the Taliban understands what happens to other murderous regimes who crack down on drugs — they tend to receive large aid packages from the United States.

The United States recently gave $43 million to help avert famine in Afghanistan, but that’s going to be administered by the United Nations. What the Taliban really wants is direct aid. As Mullah Muhammad Hassan put it in the language of nations, “A fair reply to what we have done would have been some acknowledgment of the achievement.”

Given the insanity of the drug war, they just might get it.

Taliban ban on drug crops is working, U.S. concludes. Barry Barak, The New York Times, May 24, 2001.

Red Cross Suspends Sudan Relief Operations After Downing of Plane

In early May the International Committee of the Red Cross announced that it had suspended all of its relief efforts in Sudan pending an investigation into the downing of a Red Cross plane.

The plane had been on a routine relief flight over southern Sudan when it was attacked by as yet unknown forces on the ground and was severely damaged. Both rebel and government forces are known to be operating in the area where the plane was attacked.

Badly damaged, the pilot did manage to get the plane back to its base in Kenya, but a 26-year-old Danish co-pilot was killed instantly by the attack.

Source:

Red Cross halts flights over Sudan. The BBC, May 9, 2001.

Dateline Covers the Howard Baker Controversy

Last night NBC’s Dateline program featured an in-depth look at the Howard Baker controversy which is a microcosm of the way much of the animal rights movement operates.

Baker is a veterinarian in New Jersey who was accused and convicted of cruelty to animals. Nine months after his conviction, however, an appeals judge acquitted him of all charges. The central question at his original trial and during his appeal was this: can the court trust the word of a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals‘ activist?

The activist in question was Michelle Rokke who has made a part-time career out of infiltrating business on behalf of PETA. Rokke was the activist who stole thousands of documents from Huntingdon Life Sciences, forcing PETA into a settlement agreement which forbids them from campaigning against HLS (which is why you haven’t heard anything from PETA about the company).

Rokke claimed she went to work for Baker to obtain experience in working with animals, but witnessed abuse her very first week on the job. Nonetheless she worked for Baker for several years, and in the process secretly recorded hundreds of hours of videotape of Baker treating animals. A 20-minute portion of one of those videotapes was the basis for the animal cruelty charge.

The video shows Baker treating a dalmatian. In the video, Baker is clearly very angry with the animal and says things like, “I hate rotten dogs! Stop biting me or I’ll choke you to death!” He also strikes the animal at least once. Baker testified the dog tried to bite him and he took necessary and proper actions to protect himself and his staff. Rokke testified that Baker savagely hit the dog over the head — off camera — and that she saw him repeatedly abuse other animals in his care. Other people who worked with Baker in his office testified that although Baker used appropriate force to restrain animals that presented a potential threat, they never saw him engage in any sort of abuse.

The bottom line in the trial was whether or not Rokke made a credible witness in her testimony that, off camera, Baker violently attacked the dalmatian and her accusations that this was part of a pattern of behavior she had witnessed for years.

The trial judge, Emory Toth, convicted Baker on 14 counts of animal cruelty saying that he found Rokke an extremely credible witness and didn’t think that the fact that she was a PETA activist who admitted on the stand that she had lied repeatedly in the past in any way diminished the credibility of her testimony. The appeals court judge, Joyce Munkacsi, made a surprising ruling when she ruled that Rokke lacked credibility. This is surprising since generally a trial court’s decision about such evidentiary matters is considered the last word unless the appeals court finds that the trial court made a serious error. In her comments announcing her decision to acquit Baker of all charges, Munkacsi said,

The court below chose to accept wholeheartedly all of the accounts of these events as perceived by Rokke. This court respectfully disagrees with the assessment of credibility by the court below, and I cannot find Michelle Rokke to be a credible witness such as to be the reed on which the state has built this case.

After seeing some of Rokke’s testimony, it’s difficult to fathom why Toth found Rokke so credible. Consider this exchange between Rokke and Baker’s attorney,

Attorney: Nowhere in this [employment] application did you tell or did you put down on this sheet that you were a PETA employee at the very time you were seeking employment from Dr. Baker. Is that correct? Yes or no?

Rokke: Yes

Attorney: So you lied on this application?

Rokke: I did not list that PETA was my employer.

Attorney: You lied on this application.

Rokke: I–I didn’t list PETA on the employment, correct.

[Later Rokke is shown a picture from a PETA magazine accompanying an article about Rokke’s investigation of pregnant mares used to producer premarin. The photo is cropped closely so that the reader is not aware that he’s looking at a picture of a male horse rather than a mare.]

Attorney: Do you think that was all misleading, the use of that photograph, carefully cropped so you couldn’t see whether it was a pregnant mare or a male stallion?

Rokke: I don’t think it was, because if you have a lot of pregnant mares, you obviously have male horses, so their care and treatment came into play as well.

Later, bringing up her undercover work at HLS, the attorney for Baker asks Rokke whether or not she broke the law in stealing documents from them,

Attorney: Do you think you’re a criminal because you broke the laws at Huntingdon?

Rokke: Well, I’m not certain that I’ve broken the law, to be perfectly honest with you. You know, I’ve not been held up on trial in a court of law as a criminal, so no, I don’t think I’m a criminal.

Attorney: Stealing company records? Stealing client lists? Stealing trade secrets? Disseminating that information?

Rokke: Well, I–I certainly don’t think of myself as a criminal, no.

Attorney: Because the end justifies the means?

Rokke: I just think the public has a right to know what’s going on behind those locked doors.

It is bizarre that Toth considered her credible after those exchanges, since whatever else Rokke is, she clearly is adept at interpreting events in the most self-serving manner possible. As the judge who would have heard the HLS case had it not been settled put it, in her testimony in depositions for that case Rokke had “misrepresented” and “rationalized” her actions to fulfill her mission.

Thankfully Munkacsi saw through the facade. Baker is currently suing Rokke and PETA for defamation and malicious prosecution.

German Animal Rights Leader on Trial for Fraud

At the beginning of April the former head of a German animal rights foundation, the German and European Animal Relief Organization, was arrested and charged with embezzling more than $45 million in donations which they allegedly laundered through a series of dummy corporations. The alleged fraud took place from 1994-1999.

Wolfgang Ullrich, 57, fled to Thailand when authorities were on his trail, and was extradited back to Germany in February of this year. He had been imprisoned in Thailand for refusing to pay a $1.8 million fine for illegally importing a yacht into that country.

Source:

Former animal rights foundation head goes on trial for alleged fraud. Associated Press, April 2, 2001.