June 2008 Archives

I had a dentist appointment today, which, because of this experience, always causes me to get a little anxious. But I like my new dentist and she hasn't hurt me (yet) so my psyche wasn't in too bad of shape.

It was time for my annual X rays, so the hygienist began by dragging out the lead-lined smock and flopping it upon my torso. I realize the smock is supposed to protect me against stray X rays, but it occurred to me as I lay there clenching the sharp dental film with my teeth that, though my chest may be shielded from the dangerous radiation, there is a friggin' X ray gun aimed directly at my head!

After the hygienist was finished, I asked her about this seemingly twisted safety protocol. She laughed and said the apron was designed to protect "vital organs" but that "they" obviously don't think the head is that vital.

She then shared that a recent study by the always-awesome researchers at the University of Washington (Go Huskies!) determined that the amount of radiation leaking from dental X ray equipment is at an all-time low and that the smock was no longer technically necessary. But, she further pointed out, the dental profession is usually pretty slow to change so I should expect to keep donning the lead smock for a while.

Slow to change. Well, I, for one, am happy that they finally got around to using anesthetic.

I don't know where astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson has been all my life, but he's teh awesome! Watch "Stupid Design."

(via Metafilter)

Members of my new organization at the UW are currently spread out over five different buildings all across the campus. My boss and I are the only ones on central campus, and even we are in separate buildings. A little over 1.5 miles as the crow flies separates the furthermost endpoints of our "empire."

As a result, putting together a simple meeting of just four or five people may result in several miles of combined walking. Scheduling something also requires keeping everyone's "travel time" in mind, and trying to choose a meeting location equidistant from all attendees just to be fair. In short, it's really a pain in the ass.

One practical consequence of this ass-pain revealed itself the other day while I was trying to clean out my email inbox. Normally, I only keep emails that represent something I still have to act on. Anything that's simply informational gets immediately tagged and filed (or deleted), and I shoot for having fewer than 20 items in my inbox at any time. But after my latest purge, I still had over 60 and couldn't figure it out.

I realized that a new category of email message had evolved as a direct result of the distributed nature of my organization. Around 40 of the messages I was hanging onto represented items I needed more information about, but the issue was too complicated (or sensitive) to do over email and/or involved more than one party, so a phone call wasn't possible either. They were, in short, issues that I would normally solve by either the "casual pop-in" or by calling an impromptu meeting.

But in our environment, the casual pop-in isn't practical and meetings are never impromptu. So, the messages just sit there until I happen I run into the relevant parties in another context, or I break down and engage in the overly-complicated process of arranging a meeting.

In two months, however, everyone in my organization will be moving into a single location. I am curious to see how that move will affect my productivity. Being somewhat of a geek, I added a new tag in my email system to identify messages that fall into this "pain in the ass" category, and I will chart and monitor any changes that might occur in that category after we relocate.

Of course, there's also the question of how much simply not overanalyzing this kind of stuff would increase my productivity, but that's not how science is done, dammit!

Ladies and gentlemen, the almost-first African-American U.S. Presidential candidate (1988), the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

My leadership program group ran into him at O'Hare in Chicago and he was gracious enough to pose for a picture with my friend Tony and me.

I'm sometimes frustrated about the low comment traffic on this blog. Of course, it'd help if I actually posted relevant, interesting stuff. But then I might end up with the huge problem of information overload. Take, for example, one of my favorite lefty political blogs, Daily Kos, whereupon, just this morning, seven blog posts generated over 4,500 comments (as of about noon). I had headed over there to read the reactions to Hillary Clinton's concession speech (finally!) but I quickly gave up when I realized I didn't have two spare days to wade through all those bytes.

It's really too bad because often the comments on blog posts are more interesting and insightful than the original article. In fact, four of the seven posts on Daily Kos today were quite content-free and served merely as an open slot for the comment discourse.

I used Cut & Paste Word Count on one Daily Kos post with 654 comments and got a result of almost 75,000. If I remove the metadata (approximately 14 words per comment, or 9156) we end up with close to 66,000 words. Assuming 250 words per printed page, that single Daily Kos post is the equivalent of a 264-page book.

In scrolling through the comments, however, I find that a fairly small percentage of them are insightful. But I'm honestly not going to sift through a mid-sized novel to find them.

The way I see it, there are three possibilities for blogs to exercise better "comment control."

First, Slashdot has an interesting system whereby frequent commenters are awarded points they can then assign to other comments. Furthermore, they can tag comments as "insightful," "interesting," "funny," etc. On the plus side of this rather formal system, registered users of the site can adjust their filters to, for example, display only "insightful" comments rated +2 or higher. On the downside, it's sort hard to break in, there still is a human/semantic factor (who's to say if something is really "insightful" as opposed to "interesting"?), and power can be wielded by a very few with a lot of time on their hands.

Second, over at Metafilter, a pretty solid set of unspoken rules govern commenting. The community self-polices to the extent that excessive "Me toos!" and off-topic snark are met with considerable hostility and usually result in swift moderation. On the plus side, the comments actually end up being largely worthwhile to read. However, the community standards are unpublished and it's is pretty intimidating for newcomers to feel comfortable commenting on anything.

The third possibility is one I have yet to see, but it would involve using something like Bayesian analysis to automagically do what the Slashdot community does. This is how spam filters work, and the algorithms can probably be adapted to do some level of content analysis of comments to give a first pass at "insightfulness" or "interestingness." Flickr has an "interestingness" quotient for photos; I'd like to see something like that available for blog comments.

Comments? (Interesting or insightful ones only, please.)