First it was all those Best Buy/Circuit City/whatever adds touting PCs for $1,200, but when you read the fine print it turned out to be a $3,000 computer with $1,800 in rebates. Then AMD decided to up the ante by labelling processor that ran at, say 2.25 ghz, as XP 2800+ processors. Now Fuji has decided to screw with the definition of a megapixel.

Flipping through the August 2003 issue of Wired, there is a blurb touting the Fujifilm Finepix F700 as a 6 megapixel camera. The reality, however, is that the F700 has a 3 megapixel Super CCD which Fuji touts in the fine print as offering “6.2 million effective pixels to capture images with quality approaching that of film.” Here’s how Fuji described the technology back in January,

With three million photodiode pairs in three million photosites on the entire sensor, the camera’s LSI algorithms then calculate the intermediary values, giving a file output of six million pixels***. With six million photodiodes and a six million output file, resolution will improve beyond current 3G Super CCD technology, however Fujifilm is keen to stress that it is not a ‘true’ six million pixel CCD.

Yes the pictures are likely superior to a 3 megapixel CCD that doesn’t have the extra photodiodes, but a 6 megapixel camera it is not.

Sources:

Fujifilm Finepix F700 – SuperCCD SR. DPReview.Com, Feb 19, 2003.

Fujifilm announce SuperCCD SR. DPReview.Com, January 22, 2003.

Normally I don’t bother to read Paul Krugman, for much the same reason I don’t read Bob Novak — dullard political hacks just aren’t that interesting. But I couldn’t help but notice Krugman’s latest, Toward One Party Rule, which was posted on some extreme Left wing e-mail lists I subscribe to. One of these folks, for example, posted a link to this and noted that with the tied it in with the deaths of Sens. Wellstone and Carnihan (murdered by the Republicans, of course).

Like all the best conspiracy theories, Krugman is specific enough to imply a lot, while vague enough to leave a lot of room for whatever interpretation the reader wants to take away. This paragraph, for example, shows a mastery of the conspiracy form,

As a result, campaign finance is only the tip of the iceberg. Next year, George W. Bush will spend two or three times as much money as his opponent; but he will also benefit hugely from the indirect support that corporate interests — very much including media companies — will provide for his political message.

The media’s in cahoots with Bush, but of course Krugman never quite tells us how. In fact, this is so vague that indirect support from media companies could be anything as innocuous as the fact that the media will cover the pointless staged conventions to some nutball theory about Roger Ailes pulling all the strings behind the scenes.

Similarly, Krugman is also very good at introducing plausible deniability into his prose,

Mr. Confessore suggests that we may be heading for a replay of the McKinley era, in which the nation was governed by and for big business. I think he’s actually understating his case: like Mr. DeLay, Republican leaders often talk of “revolution,” and we should take them at their word.

Did he just accuse Republicans of planning a revolution to install a one-party state at the behest of big business? Yes, but the language leaves Krugman plenty of wiggle room to say “oh, I never meant that.”

I’ve read plenty of Lyndon LaRouche screeds on the Internet alleging that Bush plans to install a fascist dictatorship — I just never expected the Times to reprint them.

I thought the flurry of Supreme Court decisions over the past few days were well-decided, but I had to laugh out loud at Knight Ridder’s characterization of the Court which reads almost like an intentional parody,

The Supreme Court on Thursday defied its stridently conservative image by issuing two important rulings that, along with several others in its current term, embraced tolerance, inclusion and even compassion in their interpretations of federal law.

Ah, so the opposite of conservative is tolerant, inclusive and compassionate. Yep, no liberal media bias at all there.

But the truly bizarre thing is that I do not remember the job of the Supreme Court being to demonstrate tolerance, inclusion and compassion. I though its job was to be the ultimate interpreters of the Constitution.

Silly me.

Source:

Recent decisions counter view of Rehnquist court. Stephen Henderson, Mercury News, June 26, 2003.

This Salon.Com article is pretty much the same “can we really trust Google” article that every other newspaper and tech journal seemed to run a couple weeks ago. Well at least it was pretty standard fare until this howler comparing Inktomi favorably to Google,

Asked about this possibility, Tim Cadogan, Yahoo’s vice president of search, was noncommittal. “The best way to think about that is, we’re focused on our goal,” he said. “And we’re going to use whatever components technologies there are to get to that goal. To date Google has been a very good partner to us. We’ve been very happy to use them.” But Cadogan also said that Yahoo plans to invest in Inktomi’s technology, and, when asked if he thought that Inktomi’s results were as good as Google’s, Cadogan said that “a couple of third-party studies show that Inktomi is slightly better than Google.” (This study — which was commissioned by Inktomi but appears quite free of bias — found that Inktomi came up with slightly more “relevant” results for a given list of queries.)

To put it plainly, Inktomi sucks and its search results are next to useless compared to Google.

For example, suppose we go to Inktomi and search on “animal rights.” Now it really does not bother me that my site, which is usually returned in the #3 or #4 slot by Google, does not show up in the top 100 results returned by Inktomi.

No, what indicates to me that Inktomi is a complete waste of time is that this About.Com page is returned in the #6 slot by Inktomi. This page has absolutely nothing at all to do with animal rights. It is simply About.Com’s top level directory. The word “animal” doesn’t even appear on the page, and “rights” only appears in the “all rights reserved” copyright notice.

Yet Inktomi’s search engine thinks this is the sixth most relevant page for a search on “animal rights.” That is simply pathetic and shows the advantage of Google’s scheme of ranking pages in part based on the extent of inbound links.

Source:

The Google Backlash. Farhad Manjoo, Salon.Com, June 25, 2003.

This is an egregious example of police and prosecutors being more interested in arresting someone for a crime than taking the time to actually look at the evidence.

Prince Georges police arrested Virginia Shelton, 46; her daughter, Shirley, 16; and one of Shirley’s friends, Jennifer Starkey, 17, and charged all three with first degree murder. The only evidence police had was video footage from an ATM that showed the three withdrawing $200 with a debit card taken from a murdered woman. It took 22 days for an outsider to point out the obvious,

The biggest mistake in the case, which came to light after the three Arizona residents were arrested April 22, was the faulty assumption that the bank’s transaction computer and the ATM camera kept synchronized time. As it turns out, they did not. Although the Sheltons and Starkey, on the videotape, seemed to be standing at the teller machine at the same time $200 was withdrawn from Mansfield’s account, the three actually got money from the ATM several minutes earlier, with legitimate cards, a prosecutor has determined.

Clearly the police didn’t exactly perform due diligence in looking at the ATM transaction records (which they had) to see if the women’s story about withdrawing money using a legitimate ATM card was true. Hey, they were in a hurry to arrest someone — who has time to check things like that?

In fact, according to the Post,

The murder charges were dropped only after Starkey’s father took it upon himself to gather his own copy of the records, then fly from Arizona to Maryland and ask a Prince George’s prosecutor to review the records.

The families involved are contemplating a lawsuit and at the very least someone should be seriously reprimanded and demoted for such incompetency.

Source:

Mistaken Arrests Leave Pr. George’s Murder Unsolved. Washington Post, Ruben Castaneda, Washington Post, June 22, 2003.

Nathan Cochrane has a post today summarizing and selectively quoting a study of the costs of avatars on Everquest by economist Edward Castronova.

Castronova finds that female avatars experience about a 20 percent discount compared to male avatars offered for sale on auction sites. Bilskirnir selectively quotes Castronova as saying that this might be a case of sexism from the real world making its way into the online world.

But Cochrane leaves out the obvious, simplest explanation that Castronova does, to his credit mention,

Alternatively, it may simply be the case that the EverQuest player base, which is primarily single, male, and aged 18-29, prefers to have a male external appearance rather than a female external appearance.

According to Castronova, the player base for Everquest is almost 93 percent male. It isn’t exactly shocking that in a MMORPG with is almost entirely male that there is more demand for male avatars than for female avatars.