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 Wednesday, January 14, 2004
CBS - Content Banishment Syndicate. Advertising Age writes: Anti-Bush Ad Contest Submits Super Bowl Commercial. A spokesman for CBS said the Viacom-owned network has received the request from MoveOn to run the ad in the Super Bowl, but added that the ad has to go through standards and practices before CBS will say if it can run an advocacy ad during the game. The spokesman said he didn't think it was likely that the spot would pass standards and practices. Have you seen the ad, the one that won MoveOn.org's contest? What possible standard or practice does it violate? Is our country stronger because... [Joho the Blog]
Well, as expected. CBS will find a reason this ad does not meet its standards and practices. We are allowed to have scatily-clad woman drool over beer-swilling men, but can not have anything important, unless it is how smoking marijuana helps terrorists. 11:57:29 PM 
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Bush Seeks $1B for Moon, Mars Missions [AP Science]
Great. His father, 15 years ago, dropped this because it cost $500 billion. New Bush said it will cost $12 billion over five years and gives them 1. A product of the new, new math, I guess.[He gets the rest by cannabilizing the rest of NASA's budget. What a great idea.] Big ideas with no money to pay for them. Hey, I can do that. 11:53:16 PM
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Take your pick. I suggested a while ago that politicians ought to be more willing to change their views in the face of new evidence, and should be more frank about having done so. A reader comments with an aphorism I wish I'd... [Mark A. R. Kleiman]
A great aphorism. Stupid, dishonest or insane. What do we get when they are all three? 11:50:13 PM
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Clark was wrong .... ... to say that Iraq was a "sideshow" in the war against terror. It was actually a "detour," according to a study coming out of the Army War College. Study abstract here. Of particular concern has been the conflation of... [Mark A. R. Kleiman]
I guess using the style that have been used so much on the Internet: Why does the Army War College hate America so much? Anyway, this is pretty much what Dean and Clark have been saying. The war on Iraq was not a war on terrorists, it deverted our attention and provided a focal point for more terrorism. This is the problem with their need to attack Saddam. This administration was not really interested in doing what was really required to make us secure in the shortest period of time. Saddam was no imminent threat. We should have taken out bin Laden, Al-Queda and everyone involved. We had the resources, the tools and the will to beat the Saudis and stop the main source at its roots, like the money needed to finance it. Without hundreds of thousands of dollars, it is awfully hard to train enough terrorists to get to America.
THEN we could have gone after Saddam, as the neocons wanted (and Bush, I guess to avenge his father.) we could have made an example, not because he had WMD bt beause he was a tyrant. This would have sent a better message, one that more people could have gotten behind. But this Adminstration but the cart before the horse and it is too late to even try to close the barn doors. (I love mixed metapors.) 11:42:43 PM
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Move On picks a winner. Here it is. It makes the right issue in the right way, and might actually move some swing voters. Run it on the Super Bowl? Seems right to me.... [Mark A. R. Kleiman]
Ahh. But the Superbowl is on CBS, the weakest kneed of the weak kneed broadcasters. I am sure it will find some way to include drug ads that are political but not allow this one. 11:23:09 PM
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Laws of Explanation.
Tim Bray: When you’re explaining something to
somebody and they don’t get it, that’s not their
problem, it’s your problem; When someone’s explaining
something to you and you’re not getting it, it’s not
your problem, it’s their problem
Instant classic. Added to my favorites. [Sam Ruby]
This should be engraved on the forearms of every manager. Great law. 11:19:58 PM
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Apple's Intelligent Pricing. The first reaction of most people to Apple's decision to price its mini-iPod at USD 249 came as a suprise. For USD 50 more, one can get the regular iPod with 15 GB storage instead of the 4 GB in the mini. So, has Apple gone crazy? An assessment by WSJ (Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry) points that it is as simple as market segmentation:
For every buyer of an MP3 player who cares about capacity, there's another one who cares about size. Or style. Or both. While a wonderful device, the original iPod is still a substantial presence on one's arm or waistband, particularly if you're running with it. Not everybody was wowed by the original iPod's choice of colors, which made Mr. Jobs Henry Ford in reverse. ("You can have any color you like, as long as it's white.") And for plenty of music fans there's no real difference between 1,000 CDs and 3,750 -- they're both "enough." As one Slashdotter who saw the light wrote, some people "can't justify $299 just for space, but might justify $249 for style."
By the way, if you haven't thought of this a few paragraphs back: It's smaller, light enough to jog with, and comes in pink. Anybody see a target audience there? We thought so -- and we were relieved to see a few female Slashdotters stand up and demand to be counted. We also see a valuable lesson that a lot of MP3 geeks missed, ourselves included: Different strokes for different folks -- particularly when their money's equally green.
So, far all who think that maybe Steve Jobs had lost his mind, think again. After all, as others fight out in the 88-99 cents a tune market, Apple's got the digital music player that everyone wants - they sold 2 million last year. And that is where the profits are. [E M E R G I C . o r g]
Some really good points. WIll the minipod become a fashion accessory on Alias? Will HP be corrupted by Apple? Could be interesting. 11:18:04 PM
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Apple posts $63M profit. Apple on Wednesday reported its results for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2004, which ended December 27, 2003. The company reported a net profit of US$63 million, or $0.17 per diluted share. The company noted that revenue for the quarter jumped 36 percent year over year, to $2.006 billion -- a four year high. [MacCentral]
Great news. I guess happy days are here again. Probably means its stock will go down. 11:09:07 PM
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"BQDealing With Grad Spam. Apparently, HR directors are getting increasingly tired of grad spam - where soon to graduate college students start firing off emailed resumes to every online job posting they can find. These usually aren't targeted, and they do little to distinguish themselves from the thousands of other grad spam resumes that are showing up at the same time. In fact, many are poorly written and filled with typos (or "txt" speech). In many cases, HR folks are simply (properly) junking the resumes as spam. Sometimes, the person applying for a job didn't even bother to send the message individually, so the recipient could see the twenty other companies the applicant had fired their resume off to.
[Techdirt]
Just like so many things, the way this will work in the future will not come through blind spamming of resumes. I actually did this to get my job at Immunex almost 20 years ago. I made of a list of companies and used a program to create cover letters for each one. I sent off about 40 resumes, most without targeting a specific job. And guess what? I got the interview not because I used this approach. I got the interview because someone I knew was working at Immunex and remembered me.
Similarly, it will not be through spaming that this will work. It will be through your personal network. The way to put this into superdrive is to use the technologies to enhance your network, so that HR can see that you are a FOAF, etc. Social Networks will help HR overcome the deluge of information they are now getting and to help make useful decisions. 11:07:40 PM
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Trademarks And Search Ads Return To Court Over Playboy Issue. We've discussed this before, related to how Google decides whether or not to block keywords people are using, but a court has now overturned an earlier summary judgment on the topic of buying ads on trademarked search terms - and a very interesting trial should follow. The case involved Playboy suing Netscape for selling advertisements on keyword search terms that Playboy owned a trademark for. The court had originally said this was fine, but now the case will return to court. Hopefully the court will once again rule that there's nothing wrong with this. The point of trademark is to avoid confusing people into thinking a good or service is offered by a different company. In other words, you can't sell Bob's Soda and label it Coca-Cola. However, you certainly can do your best to make sure that Bob's Soda gets placed on the shelves near Coca-Cola, so that anyone looking for Coca-Cola will also see Bob's Soda. That's marketing - it's not trademark infringement, and hopefully the courts will agree.
[Techdirt]
Well, I'm afraid that it will take some time for the courts, as well as all aspects of the government, to make the transition and actually understand the new technologies, to create the proper analogies. Until then, it will not be pretty. 11:03:27 PM
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Daily Outrage: 'We Improved!'. A case study in the Administration's manipulation of science. [The Nation Weblogs]
This really upsets me as a scientist. Changing the words of the scientists to completely change their message, ignoring the fatcs. This is not the first time this has happened with this adminstration. Last, week, when the Mars/moon mission was first brought up, the Chairman of the House subcommittee said: Setting up operations on the moon is affordable, as long as it is taken as a primary goal for the American space program and not larded onto all of the other things that Nasa does,' said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, Republican-California, chairman of the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics.
As an example, he cited Nasa's efforts to assess global warming, saying: 'Over the years, we have spent tens of billions of dollars of Nasa money proving global warming is occurring, which I think is suspect and debatable.
Great. Get rid of all the good stuff that NASA has done over the last 20 years because we don't like the results of the research. Maybe we will get crushed by an asteroid that we did not see until too late because we got rid of that lard that NASA spread?
Henry Waxman has a great site keeping track of the effect this Administration has had on science and the scientific agencies it controls. When politics solely drive the scientific decisions we make, we will for sure be in decline. As this continues, the good people, the ones who want to make a difference will leave. They will be replaced by drones who want to use science purely for their political gain, in ways that will not help the people at all.
Much of the great work the US has done scientifically has come from researcher instigated work. The government does not tell the scientists what the results are to be. Only one major power ever did that. The Soviet Union destroyed its biological sciences by Stalin's attraction to Lysenko. I am worried that we have begun to make that slide. If so, it will mark a huge break with our past.
Read Waxman's information. If even a tenth of it reflects an Adminstration committed to only pursuing science that feeds its political ends, we are in deep trouble. 10:47:00 PM
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