Day: January 27, 2005

Dave Winer, Derek Powazek, and Search

This post in combination with this post certainly should win Dave Winer some sort of award. I’m thinking, though, that it would be the Internet equivalent of the razzies.

Derek Powazek mentioned on his weblog that in 2000 Winer referred to him as “brain dead.” Winer took umbrage at that on Scripting.Com, saying,

Anyway, I’d love to see the pointer to where I supposedly said he was brain-dead. If I said it, I apologize, that would be a really mean thing to say, and obviously not true. On the other hand, I probably said his design was brain-dead, which is an opinion, a way of saying it could stand a lot of improvement. I’ve done tons of brain-dead design myself, and lived to tell the story. And here are all the citations for Powazek on this blog. You can see there’s a good mix of praise and criticism.

One of the brain dead things Dave does, IMO, is rely on Google for searching his own weblog. So the citations link above uses Google to provide a list of all the blog posts he’s done which mention Powazek.

The kicker is that the “brain dead” comment occurred on Scripting.Com right here, but because of the way he’s configured the Google search’s output, it doesn’t show up unless you actually visit the archive page. In fact, even if you search for the exact text, “brain damaged” (not brain dead — Winer apparently edited the post), the post still doesn’t show up in the results.

And for this, Winer (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) thinks he deserves an award,

Anyway, I don’t get awards, but I wish I did. Given a chance I would certainly nominate this site for best technology in a weblog, if only for the cool Google-powered search, illustrated above in the post about Powazek. Did you know it uses the Google API in conjunction with the local content database to only give you the bits you’re looking for. It’s a big thing, and as far as I know, of all the millions of weblogs they’re tracking at Technorati (thanks to weblogs.com, by the way), this is the only one that has such a cool search command.

Yeah, it really helped him drill down to “only give you the bits you’re looking for” in this case. There’s a reason millions of weblogs aren’t using “such a cool search command.”

And still, Winer will never understand why people treat him with such hostility when he greets them with sentences like, “Your site [Powazek’s] is the most brain-damaged weblog I’ve ever seen.”

Gee, it’s so surprising that negative bickering sucks up all the energy among folks concentrating on syndication.

Are Computers Ruining Chess?

The New York Times had a story earlier this month about the problems faced by high level players in the computer age. This story wasn’t about computers beating humans at chess, however, but rather about whether or not lesser human players are obtaining unfair advantages because of the proliferation of databases of chess games that make it possible to study their play with computers and occasionally beat them by finding obscure flaws in their game.

The Times opens with the case of international chess master Jay Bonin. According to the Times,

Mr. Bonin is more active than most elite players, but he is doing what most serious players have long thought is necessary: playing frequently to stay in peak form. Now, however, because of the widespread availability of databases of games and the growing strength of chess software, such activity may actually be making it easier to beat him.

Mr. Bonin said that he recently lost a tournament game to a weaker player who had not competed in years, but who had sprung a surprise move on him in one of Mr. Bonin’s favorite openings.

“The line he played reeked of preparation,” he said.

This is obviously not cheating, but quite a few people including Gary Kasparov and international chess master Gregory Shahade tell the New York Times they think it has made chess openings less fun and creative. As The Times reports,

Before people started using databases, a player who came up with a new move in an opening might be able to use it several times before enough people found out about it to start preparing for it. Now innovations are known almost as soon as they are played. “The profit maybe is very small,” Mr. Kasparov said. “You can only use it one game.”

Of course, as The Times points out, it was in large part due to the urging/suggestion of Kasparov that the preeminent chess database, Chessbase, added sophisticated searching so people can easily find all the games where Kasparov or any other players ends up in some specific position and then analyze how the player reacts, making preparation that much easier.

There are some contrarians. Estonian grandmaster Jaan Ehlvest contends that rather than allowing weak players to beat stronger players, the major effect of computers has been to accelerate the speed at which players realize their potential. According to The Times,

Mr. Ehlvest added that in any case he did not believe that computers made people better than they otherwise would be. Instead, they can help them reach their potential sooner.

“Now you see 14-year-old grandmasters because they accumulate information much faster than in my day,” he said.

Source:

Chess players give ‘check’ a new meaning. Dylan Loeb McClain, The New York Times, January 13, 2005.

The Difference Between Iran and U.S. on Human Rights

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami recently took umbrage at the U.S. State Department’s complaints about Iran’s persecution of Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi. Ebadi won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. She was recently issued a summons to appear in court, but the Iranian government refused to tell her what sort of charges she was facing.

This prompted the State Department to express “grave concern” over the court proceedings. Khatami struck back, citing the poor U.S. record on human rights at Abu Ghraib prison,

Now they [the United States] must respond to the crimes committed in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and their relentless killing of people in all parts of the world in the name of freedom and democracy and the support they provide to the brutalities and atrocities committed against the Palestinian people.

Abu Ghraib provides a nice counterpoint between how Iran and the United States handle human rights abuses that occur in prisons.

One of the ring leaders of the Abu Ghraib abuses, Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr., was recently convicted by a military court and sentenced to 10 years in jail.

Contrast this with what happened to the murderers of Zahra Kazemi, a female reporter with both Canadian and Iranian citizenship. Kazemi was arrested on June 23, 2003 after taking photographs of a prison in Tehran. Kazemi was assaulted in prison, apparently by a prison official, and died of her injuries a couple weeks later.

Iranian officials first tried to claim that she had suffered a “stroke,” but later conceded that she had died as a result of a blow to the head which caused brain hemorrhaging.

Iran charged a security official with beating Kazemi to death, but he was acquitted. Iran’s official story today is that Kazemi was standing when she inexplicably fell to the ground, hit her head, and sustained the fatal blow that fractured her skull.

Source:

Iran’s Khatami raps US on rights. The BBC, January 15, 2005.

What Is Conversant?

Seth Dillingham recently created a nice, long summary in outline form to answer the question he hears from clients — What Is Conversant? Its pretty exhaustive, and I don’t really have anything to add to the specifics.

To Seth, Conversant is groupware. To me its a sophisticated toolbox for categorizing, arranging, ordering and indexing information that really is realtively easy to use.

There are some very nice, very easy-to-use blogging software platforms out there like Movable Type. They’re very good and very powerful for what they do, but its difficult to do things outside the blogging model with them.

On the other hand, there are extremely powerful but also extremely difficult-to-use (at least for non-experts) content mangament systems like Mambo. I don’t have time to take a course in PHP to administer my web site.

Conversant lives in the happy middle with all the power of a system like Mambo but with a much shorter learning curve. If you need a site that goes beyond the blogging basics, but don’t want to deal with learning programming or hiring someone to install and code the specifics (as I would have to do if I were going with something like Mambo), Conversant hits the sweet spot in the power vs. convenience tradeoffs.

Should A Paternity Test Require the Mother’s Permission?

In a position that defies all common sense, the ruling Social Democrats in Germany want to make it illegal for men, including married men, to carry out a paternity test on a child without the written consent of the mother. Under the proposal, the man and the lab that conducted the test would both be liable for criminal prosecution.

The German Federal Court of Justice earlier this month ruled that paternity tests carried out in secret are inadmissible in a lawsuit, strengthening the case of the SDP to ban such paternity tests outright.

Deutsche Welle quoted Dr. Karin Jackel puncturing the idiocy in this position,

It cannot be that, as a woman, I have the right to make my husband pay to support a child that is not his own, or to deny children the right to know who their real father is. Men are, in every respect, held responsible for their children under our laws, which is why they have the right to know who their children are.

Wolfgang Zeitlmann of the Christian Social Union told Agence-France Presse in January,

A man must be able to find out whether he is the father or not. Making this right dependent on the agreement of the woman is not fair.

And, make no mistake, the express legislation of this goal is to prevent men from carrying out paternity tests without having to go through the courts. German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries originally proposed this legislation in 2003, complaining that men were seeking secret paternity tests and then divorcing their wives when they discovered that they were not, in fact, the father of the child they had thought was their’s. It being better, presumably, for German marriages to rest on a foundation of lies and deceit.

Zypries said at that time,

Secret paternity tests violate the rights of the child and the mother. They also violate data protection laws.

Sources:

Proposal to ban secret paternity tests divides German government. Agence-France Presse, January 7, 2005.

Who’s Your Daddy?. Deutsche Welle, September 12, 2004.

Father’s rights suffer setback. Deutsche Welle, January 13, 2005.