A little abuse of the language:

From a website about scanners:

What do you want to scan?
Only photos: If you only want to scan photos, go for a flat bed scanner that does not provide features for transparent media such as slides and negatives. This will put you in the sub $200 range.

Photos and negatives/slides: Flat bed scanners that have the capability to scan transparent media (slides/negatives) are more expensive since they usually have two detectors (top and bottom). We recommend the EPSON 4490 or the EPSON 4990 for photos, but we recommend the Nikon 5000 ED and Nikon 9000 ED for slide scanning and negative scanning.

"Photo" is not a synonym for print. I had to read that first sentence three times to make sense of it.

There used to be badges to put on websites to signal that one supports free speech, etc. (I think there still are.) We should have a badge saying "I will not participate in the further dumbing-down of America" for websites that refuse to butcher usage in ways like the above.

Hack or leak?--information emerges about Climategate

Visit this thread and scroll down to number 13. Gavin Schmidt--a fairly reliable source on the matter--says that his information is that the files were not leaked but taken by a black-hat hack of the backup mailserver.

In other words, not a leak, let alone the "whistleblower" fairytale that emerged in the denialosphere.

Hmm...if anyone did that to Morano, Michaels, and Macintyre, we'd probably learn who was responsible. Not that I advocate black-hat hacking or anything!

Silly web-writer tricks.

Having been a DMOZ editor for over ten years, I've seen plenty of silly schemes webmasters put together in attempts to increase traffic. Mirror sites, "informative" webpages that are pitches for online pet shops (etc), and the like, submitted thinking that someone editing the Open Directory would be stupid enough to take them for "real" webpages, list them, and boost the search engine page rank for whatever listing counts for these days.

Web writers are picking up some of the same habits. Today I rejected for inclusion something apparently put together by Examiner.com's "Raleigh Libertarian Examiner": a "'blog" consisting of nothing except the first couple of hundred words of each of his Examiner articles, followed by a link to the page.

Maybe it'll fool Google, but it's obvious to a human.

A series of tubes, leading to Lake Wobegon

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, on a five-star scale, the average rating given by a reviewer on the World Wide Web is 4.3. Despite the Web's reputation for rudeness and hostility, the average rating given to goods and services is above average.

Thinking to my experiences as an Epinions.com contributor and ChefMoz editor, 4.3 sounds about right. If people like something, they tend to give it maximum or near maximum rating.

That there's a filtering step keeping most truly lousy products out of the hands of Web reviewers would seem at first to explain this, but it isn't compelling. Yes, consumers--unlike newspaper and magazine writers--tend only to review products they buy, and that they have thus already researched, but this should drive expectations down, certainly not up. Consider that the filtering-by-research means that the average product a savvy customer sees is better than the average product being sold. If we knock all of the one-star products out, the scale we're left with centers on 3.5 stars. If we expect product ratings to follow a Gaussian ("normal") distribution up to the limits posed by the discretization and boundaries, this will bias slightly to the left of 3.5, but the point still stands. Filtering can't explain pervasive overrating.

The U.S. school grading custom, in which scores between 70 and 80 points out of 100 are supposed to be the average, may have something to do with it. Products may start out in people's minds with 5-star ratings, with stars being knocked off for lousiness. That's quite a different thought process than considering 3 stars as average, 2 stars as below average, one star as lousy, etc. Perhaps, as is speculated at the end of the WSJ, the ability to be meaningfully negative--or just to shed Lake Wobegon Syndrome--may come with experience; willingness to give five-star ratings to mediocre goods and services could be simple naivety.

Before adjusting a few Epinions ratings (downward, very slightly), I computed my average rating: 3.18 on a scale from 1-5. That's above 3, probably statistically significantly so, but not by much, and I've been reviewing "great stuff" lately. That the number is close to 3 is reassuring. Then again, when clicking the Haloscan stars on 'blogs, I'm so consistently a downrater that I didn't need much reassurance at all.

If you don't mean to say that something is great--not good, not "great!" like "pizza tonight?--Great!, I want anchovies...", but better than good, one of the best in its area, a real standout, please don't give it five stars.



HT: Mark Stevens

Empty-head syndrome and Facebook memes.

Stupid is as stupid does, but what's obnoxious is intelligent people, people one knows to be capable of analytic, critical thought, being willfully stupid, or at least glib, their head emptying out unpredictably when certain topics come up. Given the current public discussion of health care and health insurance reform, it's an everyday occurrence. This isn't the "why are these people ignorant of free market reform proposals to the point where they think people who oppose their scheme support the status quo" gripe. This is worse.

Circulating on Facebook today as a veritable "Internet Meme" is what seems to be a sort of credo in unum deum for supporters of a broadly leftist agenda for health care reform. (Let's get something straight right now: Virtually nobody is "anti-reform"; most opponents of the "public option" plan support fixing the market.) As follows:

No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.

This sounds nice, but let's think about it for a moment.

1. "No one should die because they cannot afford health care" ("one...they" is grating to the eyes, but that's not the trouble.) The trouble is that this is unattainable unless we go down really nasty paths. There are a few ways to interpret this statement.
   
   One is as an expression of dissatisfaction with living in a world of finite abundance. Our grandparents are older than molecular biology. Things are getting better and less expensive, but we would always wish them to be better still. This doesn't have any policy implications for health care reform aside from preventing government from thwarting progress by breaking the mechanisms which drive it. It's more of a pro-market than an anti-market sentiment.
   
   The other way to interpret it is as a call for market abolitionism. I'm not saying that the people posting this this are old-time socialists. It's more slouching toward market abolitionism. Everyone should be entitled to all lifesaving treatments. There should be no way of obtaining lifesaving treatment by paying, because that means that some will go without lifesaving treatment because they cannot pay. This entails a ban on paying for new and better care. Rationing, in other words.
   
   And don't be so glib to say "but insurance companies ration already." They don't. An insurance company cannot forbid one from paying for treatment. (I support very drastic insurance reform, which would have us shopping around for policies with less uncertainty in what is covered, but that's neither here nor there. I say it because some jerk will say something stupid, nasty, and bizarre if I do not. Times are strange and ideology clouds minds!)
   
   If you do not support a ban on paying for care, you should not have posted this statement.
   
   
2. "No one should go broke because they get sick." "Fewer people should go broke because they get sick" is something I could sign on to. Get rid of every silly mandate that makes it difficult to purchase cheap health insurance. Mandatory purchase of insurance is something I'm ambivalent about. On the one hand, if someone chooses to not purchase something and assume risk himself, that should be taken seriously. On the other hand, Americans are not going to let people go without basic treatment even if they chose to not hedge against risk, so mandatory purchase may be better than free riders.
   
   But here's something to consider: What if I get sick and I choose to go broke to purchase the newest, best treatment? Should I be forbid from doing that? Should the State step in and subsidize my choice, transferring from others to me to support a luxury?
   

The lesson? Think hard before making statements about "no one". More often than not they are far too strong and have you committed to things you probably don't support.

My posted response:

No one should die because redistributionism prevented development of care that could have saved his life. Nobody should go without treatment due to rationing intended to prevent bankruptcy of a government monopsony. Nobody should go bankrupt becaus...e the government prevented purchase of affordable insurance. If you understand this--even if you disagree--you are approaching health care reform intelligently.

Not as catchy, but at least one other person picked up on it.

An Epinions shout-out for Kiva.org

Epinions's promotion next month will be contributions to a charity to be selected by member voting. I put in a good word for Kiva.org, managing to name-check Julian Simon, Peter Bauer, Milton Friedman, and Manmohan Singh in the process.

If you write for Epinions, it wouldn't hurt for you, too, to write a review in support of Kiva. If you don't write for Epinions, it wouldn't hurt for you so sign up, write a few beer reviews, and then put in a good word for Kiva, either.

The Noncyclical Asset

Spending and thrift may come in cycles, but people will turn to product reviews either way and perhaps more when they're pinching pennies; are Epinions reviews a noncyclical asset?

The strangest thing I've ever been paid to write on the Internet.

Christmas Gifts for Libertarians, Free-Marketeers, an article for Associated Content. It wasn't even a wildcat submission, either, but rather a response to a request for content, albeit one I didn't expect actually to be accepted: the call was for "Christmas Gifts for _______ Lovers" articles!

Bad Netizenship

Rule number aleph-null: If you would like to unsubscribe from an e-mail list to which you have opted in, follow the instructions you were sent when you subscribed and which are mailed to you periodically, often at the bottom of each message. Do not click "This is spam" in a webmail client, especially if your e-mail service provider is Yahoo, Gmail, or some similar broadly-subscribed national service.

One too many boorish dummkopfs (yahoos?) using Yahoo mail told their client that Randy Cassingham's This Is True was spam instead of unsubscribing properly. As a result, tens of thousands of subscribers--many of them subscribers to the paid "premium" version--did not receive their newsletter for several weeks.

In the last newsletter, Cassingham reported that after a lot of back-and-forth with Yahoo support, his e-mails are now reaching subscribers and customers. However, there's no doubt that losing 15% of his subscribers for several weeks hurt Cassingham's business.

The lessons: Internet users should take spam reporting seriously, and service providers should ask "are you sure this isn't an opt-in list?" before accepting the user's click. This sort of thing has happened before. I was webmaster for an aquarium club, using the free Crosswinds service as host, when the site was blackholed because a spammer faked a Crosswinds origin for the e-mail, meaning members couldn't access the site for weeks. If the reporters had checked the headers, as is good practice, they'd have found that it was sent from an open relay elsewhere.