Most of the essays/papers I’ve saved regarding Net Neutrality are from around 2006 (I was convinced for the need for it by then).   Many are still relevant, but for a more up-to-date view, Thomas Gideon’s The Command Line is my go-to tech policy / news blog these days.  His recent articles on net neutrality mostly just point to good reading on the topic by other folks, but occasionally he throws in some commentary of his own, and sometimes he writes longer pieces (as in the bandwidth hog myth link above).

How could you introduce Quetelet without mentioning his corresponding companion, the Lovelace to his Babbage, Florence Nightingale?

I know, everybody thinks of her as a sort of nurse, but she was actually the first woman to be elected a Fellow of the Statistical Society. She was the Al Gore of her day, traveling around the country lecturing on the statistics of army attrition. Her Uncomfortable Truth was that most soldiers died, not in glorious battle, but of diarrhoea, and that a proper attention to health care in the field would result in a bigger, fitter fighting force.

She kept the big books of dry statistics for her fellow stats geeks, and instead used fancy graphs (her famous sector area diagram of deaths in the Crimean War was Quetelet’s invention). She put the colorful pie charts and bar charts into small pamphlets she called ‘coxcombs’; “I’m going to give a talk in Manchester,” she’d write to her printers, “so I need another two hundred coxcombs to distribute.

So there you have it.  Florence Nightingale, who knew?   She knew the importance of information analysis AND presentation of the results to politicians, to effect reform.  I hadn’t ever heard of Quetelet before, but I remembered from a children’s book long ago that Nightingale was a nurse who fought to reform medical practices (especially wartime hospitals) in her day (the 19th century).  I hadn’t known what an awesome geek she was on top of that.  See the Wikipedia article on Florence Nightingale for links to more information.  So here’s to you, Florence Nightingale!

Early in 2009, though, I’m going to post a Top 10 Creative Hacks entry — nothing to do with vandalism or theft, but instead about creative engineering coding/alternate engineering by individuals or small groups. I have 9 … want to suggest one for the #10 slot?

After my Garmin i5 developed problems, I took it back to Costco (full refund, pleasant service!) and started looking at current offerings. I couldn’t find any GPS that had *everything* I wanted (didn’t like the map displays on some, usability on others, and so on), so I decided to get the cheapest car GPS unit currently available at Costco, the Magellan Maestro 3225. I figured any shortcomings would be soothed by the thought that at least I’d only paid $162 for it. I got it on Friday, and it worked right out of the box (well, out of the plastic packaging — I stuffed everything in a bag in case I ever have to return this one to Costco).

I’ve been pretty satisfied with the Maestro 3225 so far. It’s about the size of my Palm Zire, so it fits in that case (I keep my Zire in my old flip-out IIIx case). Touchscreen UI. The lithium-ion battery holds about 3 hours’ charge.

Map display: about 3 by 2 inches, plenty big and bright (automatically changes to night vision based on the time, and I like that the route I’m taking shows up as green, with white turn arrows. Sometimes it goes into a split screen display when approaching a turn. I’m not crazy about this, but it’s ok.

Address Entry: My favorite thing about the Maestro! Uses predictive texting when spelling city/street names, and house numbers (e.g., all houses on my street start with “17″, so it filled that in for me when I was putting in my home address).

Usability: OK in most respects. I like its path to the address book (multiple ways to add entries). I wish it had a path back to “Show Map” (from anywhere) as quick and easy as it was on my i5. There’s an instructional CD I haven’t looked at yet. Still, I was able to figure out most functions pretty easily. The one that took me the longest was how to pull up a route review to do a sanity check on where the Maestro was taking me — unlike on my old i5’s menu approach, this navigation function is reached by clicking on an arrow on the touchscreen map.

POI: Comes with 1.3 million pre-programmed locations. It found one of my favorite Indian restaurants and a movie theater in Virginia pretty easily, but not a particular clothes store I was looking for. There’s a way to add more POIs, but I need to pick up another SD flash drive to try it.

Performance: Seems faster than my i5 was. Works inside malls, houses (to show to my friends).

Voice/pronunciation: One voice, seems clear but pronounces some streetnames oddly, and not just the obscure ones (Maryland=”May-ree-land”?).

Accessories: Comes with a instructional CD, a car charger, a USB-data cable (plus a house charger I’m not using, and a mount disk and a highly-adjustable but big and clunky mount I’m not using).

1.  An SUV crashed into a Starbucks near me today.  OVER a brick planter! (so much for that physical security attempt).  From the news, only minor injuries occurred.   I was elsewhere, waitng for a phone interview.
2. There’s a case mod contest at a Microcenter in town tomorrow.  I’d love to go (with my XO), if I weren’t headed to a friend’s birthday party then. I love seeing the creative ideas people come up with to personalize their systems.  All I’ve done so far to distinguish my XO from others at OLPCLCDC meetups is tie a green cloth belt/shoulder strap onto mine.
3. Art exhibit coming up April 6:  Interpretations:  A Collaborative Exhibit. Brushed steel and other sculptural arrangements.  Looks good!  That same day, there’ll be a tour and lecture about the exhibit space, Glenview Mansion, now on the National Register of Historic Places. I’ve visited a number of exhibits there  over the years and like the mansion and the grounds and gardens.  It will be interesting to see what they mean by ”collaborative” at the exhibit, and learn a bit more local history.

1. Folks should be able to post and see comments immediately, without having to leave their name/emails (though they’re welcome to provide such information). Akismet should hold off the spam.
2. I changed the permalinks to use dates and entry titles — it only took a bit of fiddling to get the older entries (and their comments) working with it.
3. I switched to the PopBlue theme which shows Recent Comments, but I need to customize so it shows my blog name at the top.
4. I added the Bookmarkify plugin to assist in social bookmarking (not really for comments, but all part of making this site more sociable).

I was happy to read that my city now offers free wifi in its Town Square, though less enchanted to find out, upon trying it, that it required setting up Yet Another Account. I suppose someone advised the city it would make it slightly easier to track down any miscreants, or maybe it was the easiest way to get people to read their Terms of Service. However, if running an open, password-free wifi network is good enough for security guru Bruce Schneier, one would think that might have been good enough for them. Ah well! Having set up the account, on warm sunny days, I might take advantage of their generousity and sit on a bench to surf outside. On the other hand, the library is right off the town square, and their open wifi just works.

I was trying to take a look at the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, because that word “Unported” had caught my eye — apparently I was out-of-date on Creative Commons terms.  Even after I was finally able to pull the page up, though, I didn’t see an explanation of this new term.  Poking around the site for a couple of minutes didn’t answer the question, either.  Google found the CC explanation, an explanation of how to make your CC-licensed stuff findable via advanced Google searches filtering by usage rights, and a lawyer’s explanation with a segue into data (as in database) commons.

Some men, in order to prevent the supposed intentions of their adversaries, have committed the most enormous cruelties — Clearchus, in Xenophon

Also, I know I like linking to entries that have actual words in them, not like links to my entries that have ?p=12.  They just don’t look long-lasting, even if I know they’ll stick around.  Yet, some people have already come across my journal here (before any publicity pushes; I think it was mostly because of comments I’d made on their journals) and even linked back to it — yay, I’m glad, but it does mean I have to think carefully about any changes I make now. 

Which worries me, because what if I make mistakes and don’t notice them?  Still, I have to cut back somehow.

In his write-up of CHI 2006, Sebastien Paquet passes along this nugget from Jared Spool:  The best links are 7-12 words (long).

It makes sense to me.  I’m sure I’ve missed shorter links before.  I’ve seen longer links that worked (especially as commentary on the linked-to item), but too often they just seem … unselective.

It seems like home page pollution to put a useless distracting graphic near the top.  Poor design wastes time and attention.  At least they didn’t add pointless animation.

It’s great that they’re doing a beta first and have a nice online form for feedback, though, and I did fill it out with some specific constructive suggestions (and applause for the parts I did like).

From the Introduction to Knowledge Management book I reviewed earlier:  Attention is the currency of the Information Age, and trust is the bandwidth.

 If spam is attention theft, where does one draw the lines in the physical world between so-called guerrilla marketing (whether modified Lite-Brites or less disruptive forms), vandalism (flyers pasted onto public property, logo graffiti on buildings), littering, … and theft?