« March 9, 2008 - March 15, 2008 | Main | March 23, 2008 - March 29, 2008 »
March 22, 2008
Giant Beets
From the Ferry Plaza Farmers market, these giant beets! Ever since I had the baby, I've craved beets without end. It's amazing since I detested them previously. Even so, I couldn't convince myself that we could eat all the beet dishes one of these would yield.
Union Square Pillow Fight...in Pictures!
The pillow fight just started 30 minutes ago, and the pictures are already coming in. Part of World Pillow Fight Day, this is the third consecutive year the feathers have flown around Union Square.
We're you there? Don't forget to tag your pillow fight pics with "Gothamist" at Flickr.
Simon Willison's Wikinear, Wikipedia pages near your current location
demonstrates Fire Eagle and OAuth, mixed with Wikipedia, GeoNames, and the new Google Maps Static API
wikinear.com: OAuth and Fire Eagle
"...a simple site that does just one thing: show you a list of the five Wikipedia pages that are geographically closest to your current location. It's designed (or not-designed) to be used mainly from mobile phones."
Belzer, Reed, Dog
Richard Belzer, Lou Reed, and a dog.
March 21, 2008
11/12ths of Apperceptive
11/12ths of Apperceptive
Originally uploaded by capndesign.
Michael Chabon on why real-life superhero costumes don't work. This...
Michael Chabon on why real-life superhero costumes don't work.
(link)This sad outcome even in the wake of thousands of dollars spent and months of hard work given to sewing and to packing foam rubber into helmets has an obvious, an unavoidable, explanation: a superhero's costume is constructed not of fabric, foam rubber, or adamantium but of halftone dots, Pantone color values, inked containment lines, and all the cartoonist's sleight of hand. The superhero costume as drawn disdains the customary relationship in the fashion world between sketch and garment. It makes no suggestions. It has no agenda. Above all, it is not waiting to find fulfillment as cloth draped on a body. A constructed superhero costume is a replica with no original, a model built on a scale of x:1. However accurate and detailed, such a work has the tidy airlessness of a model-train layout but none of the gravitas that such little railyards and townscapes derive from making faithful reference to homely things. The graphic purity of the superhero costume means that the more effort and money you lavish on fine textiles, metal grommets, and leather trim the deeper your costume will be sucked into the silliness singularity that swallowed, for example, Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin and their four nipples.
Steve Nash directed his own Nike commercial. Nash's original...
Steve Nash directed his own Nike commercial. Nash's original concept for the commercial is clever:
At first, the idea was to shoot on different mediums -- camera phone, 8-millimeter, 16-millimeter (the eventual choice), security footage. My idea was the city was watching me. The genesis was a lot of people film me or take a picture of me in the city on cellphones. If it's such an appetite to see me do normal things, it was an idea to do something people like.
(via truehoop)
(link)
Jens Alfke: ‘The iPhone Has Blinders On’
Another one from the I-don’t-agree-with-it-but-it’s-well-worth-reading dept.
For what it’s worth, I believe the number one reason why the iPhone OS doesn’t allow background processes is RAM. Battery life, CPU sharing, bandwidth — all of these are factors, too, but I think RAM is foremost. The iPhone only has just 128 MB of RAM and no swap space. A good chunk of that 128 MB goes to the OS itself and the built-in apps that do run in the background — Phone, Safari, and iPod. There really just isn’t much left over. If Apple were to just allow background processing now, what would happen is that background processes would often wind up getting killed by the OS at some point when the frontmost app needs more memory. From the user’s perspective, it would seem as though background apps inevitably mysteriously fail and stop running. You can argue that you’d rather have that than no third-party background apps at all, but it’s clearly a reasonable trade-off for Apple in terms of consistency and obviousness in the user experience.
Wait a few years for iPhones with 1 GB of RAM and it’ll be a different story.
Still Fightin'
TPM Reader MR disagrees ...
I have to say that I disagree with your entry stating that Clinton supporters have thrown in the towel and accepted that Barack Obama will be the nominee. Let me be clear, we will never back down until the fat lady sings. And that performance, which will be for the better, will be on the convention room floor. It will be an all out brawl!We're not backing down! The fight has just begun!!!! Pennsylvania is around the corner and a large victory is excepted. Polls in West Virginia also strongly favor her. Polls in North Carolina that have favored Obama are now virtually tied. There will be big surprises in North Carolina.
It's not over. And I might also point out how inaccurate the Politico article that you quoted/linked to really is. If the superdelegates support Clinton there will be "a backlash of historic proportions"!?!? THEY WOULD BE DOING THE JOB THEY WERE CREATED FOR, JOSH. The superdelegates weren't created to add fluff to the popular vote, but to make the educated decision that voters sometimes can't. They're there for the same reason the electoral college is. For example, picking a glorified motivational speaker over an experienced leader (good example, eh?). The SD's are there to put the better qualified and more electable candidate in charge. And in poll after poll, that's Hillary.
I'm sorry Josh, but you have it wrong.
Signs of Spring: Putting the 'Beach' into Water Taxi Beach
It's no Cozumel or Costa Rica or wherever you kids are spending Spring Break these days, but this is a sight for sore eyes for New Yorkers craving warmer weather and a juicy burger out by the East River. This week the owners of LIC's parking lot turned summer playground Water Taxi Beach had 500 tons of sand trucked in to make the transformation happen once again. Says WTB's manager Harry Hawk writes: "In the 2008 season, Water Taxi Beach will double its space to about 44,000 sq ft. Delivery has started on an additional 500 tons of sand. The sand placed down in 2005 was 400 tons and came from NJ. This new sand is from Long Island." Spring has officially begun.
· LIC Tries to Ruin Summer, Calls Water Taxi Beach a 'Public Nuisance [~E~]
· Signs of Spring: WTB Ferry Service [~E~]
Signing Off
While this blog has been a lot of fun, I'm starting a new job next week and will no longer be posting here or making any updates over at New Jersey by the Numbers. In the newspaper industry, the type...
Justseeds at SF Anarchist Bookfair
Roger, Mary and Josh will be tabling for Justseeds at the San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair this weekend. If you are in the area, come by and say "Hello!"13th Annual San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair
Saturday, March 22nd, 10am -6pm
Sunday, March 23rd, 11am - 5pmSF County Fair Building
Golden Gate Park, 9th Avenue & Lincoln Way, San Francisco, CAThe event is free
presented by Bound Together Anarchist Collective Bookstore
artwork by Hugh D'Andrade
11/12ths of Apperceptive
capndesign posted a photo:
For The Doc Geeks Out There
The new Errol Morris doc, Standard Operating Procedure, has it's latest trailer up on Apple Trailers. It looks so good! Also, Errol Morris' website is one of the biggest time sucks ever. There is a ton of stuff there! —posted by Angela
Law & Order: Plastic Surgery Victims Unit
Last week, Lara Flynn Boyle guest starred on Law & Order, playing an unscrupulous reporter looking for answers in a case that involved dog-fighting, wine fraud, and divorce. Except it's unclear whether many viewers realized it was her, because of her apparent plastic surgery.
The former Twin Peaks and Practice star looked so unlike herself that there's a thread on Yahoo! Answers, asking, "Is that really Lara Flynn Boyle on Law and Order right now? It doesn't look like her." Others replied, "Yes, that's her. That's what years of eating disorders, drugs and plastic surgery can do to a person," and "It looks like she was hit by a car and they had to reassemble her face with Botox and collagen... She looks like Joan Rivers long lost daughter, but uglier, with more plastic surgery--and more fake looking and shinier and red."
In other L&O news, the NY Times reports a libel lawsuit against Law & Order creator Dick Wolf can proceed; bald Indian-American lawyer Ravi Batra claims an episode that shows a bald Indian-American lawyer named Ravi Patel bribing a judge is defamatory. (Batra was friendly with corrupt judge Gerald Garson.) Another lawsuit should be filed by Boyle, against her plastic surgeon for the terrible work and her agent for allowing her to appear on TV like that.
NL East Blogs
There's a few of us Braves fans holding down the Atlanta card blogging world, but we're getting some new rivals in the internet NL East.
Out of the Mill has nothing to do with the NL East as it's written by an Indians fan, but the Braves are playing the Tribe right now in Orlando so for today they are bitter rivals. Rich is probably pleased as the Braves blew a three run lead on CC Sabathia when
O'Reilly releases one of the first books for iPhone coders
A new book from O'Reilly details iPhone development, though it shows no sign of covering the official SDK.
Think galactically, print locally
Remember that groovy Saturn wallpaper they used to sell for kids' bedrooms? The Hubble Space Telescope folks are making available a very chic, grown-up, and open source, version of that same idea. In this case, it's a black and white image of the Carina nebula, stitched together from 48 separate images taken using the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. It shows a region of space 50 light years across.
At hubblesite.org, I found myself intrigued by the menu item advertising wall murals. "This," I thought, clicking on it, "is how they make their money." Since NASA makes just about all of their images available in the public domain, I should have known better.
What I found astonishing was not the hefty resolution—NASA offers a lot of images at ultra-high-resolution, after all. (They have a link to a colour image of the Carina nebula weighing in at 29566 X 14321, for instance. Given that images at this resolution can crash both browsers and computers, download only, as they emphasize, at your own risk. It's almost always adequate to use the lower resolution versions).
What was intriguing were the DIY instructions that describe how to assemble one of these multi-frame wall murals, using eight large downloadable images that you can take to any photolab for black and white printing.
The key to this model of distribution is the accompanying letter that certifies that these images are in the public domain. Photolabs are not permitted to print copyrighted images, so in order to make a large-format set of images available in this way, it is necessary to provide the shop with documentation proving that they won't get into trouble if they agree to print the photos.
This model of distribution is both free and open source, of course. But it is also a distribution model which is here right now, and which points to the promise of localized production, in this case, to the possibility of local, on-demand printing. There are few facilities that offer local, on-demand printing of books. Photolabs, however, and print shops, have become a ubiquitous feature of many urban centres.
The content might be generated quite remotely (7500 light years away, in this case). The physical artifact can be cheerfully printed at a photo store near you.
Front and Inside Images: Space Telescope Science Institute
Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!
(Posted by Mark Tovey in Stuff at 9:48 AM)
Top 5 reasons why “The customer is Always Right” is wrong
Written by positivesharing
When the customer isn’t right - for your business
One woman who frequently flew on Southwest, was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the company’s operation. In fact, she became known as the “Pen Pal” because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint.
She didn’t like the fact that the company didn’t assign seats; she didn’t like the absence of a first-class section; she didn’t like not having a meal in flight; she didn’t like Southwest’s boarding procedure; she didn’t like the flight attendants’ sporty uniforms and the casual atmosphere.
Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwest’s customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herb’s [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest] desk, with a note: ‘This one’s yours.’
In sixty seconds, Kelleher wrote back and said, ‘Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.’”
The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:
- Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
- Convince employees to give customers good service
Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim - ironically because it leads to bad customer service.
Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.
1: It makes employees unhappy
Gordon Bethune is a brash Texan (as is Herb Kelleher, coincidentally) who is best known for turning Continental Airlines around “From Worst to First,” a story told in his book of the same title from 1998. He wanted to make sure that both customers and employees liked the way Continental treated them, so he made it very clear that the maxim “the customer is always right” didn’t hold sway at Continental.
In conflicts between employees and unruly customers he would consistently side with his people. Here’s how he puts it:
When we run into customers that we can’t reel back in, our loyalty is with our employees. They have to put up with this stuff every day. Just because you buy a ticket does not give you the right to abuse our employees . . .
We run more than 3 million people through our books every month. One or two of those people are going to be unreasonable, demanding jerks. When it’s a choice between supporting your employees, who work with you every day and make your product what it is, or some irate jerk who demands a free ticket to Paris because you ran out of peanuts, whose side are you going to be on?
You can’t treat your employees like serfs. You have to value them . . . If they think that you won’t support them when a customer is out of line, even the smallest problem can cause resentment.
So Bethune trusts his people over unreasonable customers. What I like about this attitude is that it balances employees and customers, where the “always right” maxim squarely favors the customer - which is not a good idea, because, as Bethune says, it causes resentment among employees.
Of course there are plenty of examples of bad employees giving lousy customer service. But trying to solve this by declaring the customer “always right” is counter-productive.
2: It gives abrasive customers an unfair advantage
Using the slogan “The customer is always right” abusive customers can demand just about anything - they’re right by definition, aren’t they? This makes the employees’ job that much harder, when trying to rein them in.
Also, it means that abusive people get better treatment and conditions than nice people. That always seemed wrong to me, and it makes much more sense to be nice to the nice customers to keep them coming back.
3: Some customers are bad for business
Most businesses think that “the more customers the better”. But some customers are quite simply bad for business.
Danish IT service provider ServiceGruppen proudly tell this story:
One of our service technicians arrived at a customer’s site for a maintenance task, and to his great shock was treated very rudely by the customer.
When he’d finished the task and returned to the office, he told management about his experience. They promptly cancelled the customer’s contract.
Just like Kelleher dismissed the irate lady who kept complaining (but somehow also kept flying on Southwest), ServiceGruppen fired a bad customer. Note that it was not even a matter of a financial calculation - not a question of whether either company would make or lose money on that customer in the long run. It was a simple matter of respect and dignity and of treating their employees right.
4: It results in worse customer service
Rosenbluth International, a corporate travel agency, took it even further. CEO Hal Rosenbluth wrote an excellent book about their approach called Put The Customer Second - Put your people first and watch’em kick butt.
Rosenbluth argues that when you put the employees first, they put the customers first. Put employees first, and they will be happy at work. Employees who are happy at work give better customer service because:
- They care more about other people, including customers
- They have more energy
- They are happy, meaning they are more fun to talk to and interact with
- They are more motivated
On the other hand, when the company and management consistently side with customers instead of with employees, it sends a clear message that:
- Employees are not valued
- That treating employees fairly is not important
- That employees have no right to respect from customers
- That employees have to put up with everything from customers
When this attitude prevails, employees stop caring about service. At that point, real good service is almost impossible - the best customers can hope for is fake good service. You know the kind I mean: corteous on the surface only.
5: Some customers are just plain wrong
Herb Kelleher agrees, as this passage From Nuts! the excellent book about Southwest Airlines shows:
Herb Kelleher […] makes it clear that his employees come first - even if it means dismissing customers. But aren’t customers always right? “No, they are not,” Kelleher snaps. “And I think that’s one of the biggest betrayals of employees a boss can possibly commit. The customer is sometimes wrong. We don’t carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, ‘Fly somebody else. Don’t abuse our people.’”
If you still think that the customer is always right, read this story from Bethune’s book “From Worst to First”:
A Continental flight attendant once was offended by a passenger’s child wearing a hat with Nazi and KKK emblems on it. It was pretty offensive stuff, so the attendant went to the kid’s father and asked him to put away the hat. “No,” the guy said. “My kid can wear what he wants, and I don’t care who likes it.”
The flight attendant went into the cockpit and got the first officer, who explained to the passenger the FAA regulation that makes it a crime to interfere with the duties of a crew member. The hat was causing other passengers and the crew discomfort, and that interfered with the flight attendant’s duties. The guy better put away the hat.
He did, but he didn’t like it. He wrote many nasty letters. We made every effort to explain our policy and the federal air regulations, but he wasn’t hearing it. He even showed up in our executive suite to discuss the matter with me. I let him sit out there. I didn’t want to see him and I didn’t want to listen to him. He bought a ticket on our airplane, and that means we’ll take him where he wants to go. But if he’s going to be rude and offensive, he’s welcome to fly another airline.
The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service.
So put your people first. And watch them put the customers first.
Picking Up After Penn
From the Journal ...
“The time that he could have been effective has long since passed,” [Penn] continued, “I don’t think it is a significant endorsement in this environment.”Perhaps sensing that it may not be effective to dismiss out of hand a popular Hispanic governor’s political clout, campaign spokesman Phil Singer chimed in. “We respect Gov. Richardson,” he clarified, “But at the end of the day this campaign is about Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama.”
The IFP Rough Cut Lab is coming up!
The ladies of Production here at Arts Engine are mentors for IFP's Documentary Rough Cut Lab, a program that, through the feedback and guidance of more experienced filmmakers, supports first time filmmakers in the completion of their first feature length documentary. This week we had our first meeting to prep for the upcoming madness. Apparently there is a video on the IFP website that features both the narrative and doc labs. Watch it to (briefly) see us in action. Note: Filmmakers talk with their hands ... a lot!—posted by Angela
MacBook Air USB hacks
Filed under: Cool tools, Hacks, MacBook Air
TUAW reader Rowan Pope pointed us to this insane MacBook Air hacking post. How many USB ports does the Air support? Apple says just one; this post says up to 7. Apparently, the Air has a few extra live USB port connections built into that thar skinny little computer. How do we know this? Because the guy downloaded developer documentation for the ICH-8 chip, which offers 5 low-speed and 2 high-speed USB controllers.
He popped open his Air and measured the voltage at each pin. He then used a hacked memory key with a modded USB extension cable (with an extra resistor just to be safe). After connecting the memory key to one of the pins, his MacBook Air system log reported a USB error. A few more tests and adjustments later, he actually got his laptop to recognize the drive. In total, he found three working USB connections plus an unused SATA controller.
TUAW is awed. Be sure to check out the other mod on this much-opened Air: a carbon-fiber bottom case. Sleek!
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
T.A. Ad Drives It Home … to Westchester
Taking aim at the richest irony of the faux-populist case against congestion pricing, Transportation Alternatives has released this ad [PDF], coming soon to a newspaper near you. The copy reads:
Drivers from Westchester earn an average income of $176,231.
Only 4% of New York City commuters would pay the congestion fee.
100% of the congestion fee goes to improving mass transit.Do the math:
Congestion Pricing = Better TransitYou know, he even sort of looks like that other guy from Westchester.
Today's Must Read
Just a case of three bored cube rats scoping out a celebrity presidential candidate's passport records -- or something more sinister?
Blogonomics: Gawker's Payroll, Redux
You wanna know how much Gawker writers get paid? Well, let me tell you. Remember that they don't really get salaries any more, just advances. And it's been widely reported that bloggers on the flagship Gawker site get $7.50 per thousand pageviews. All we need to know now is how many pageviews they get, and, well, it turns out there's a public webpage detailing that information.
In the month of February, Gawker's most-read blogger was Richard Lawson, with 1,208,704 pageviews: he earned $9,065 for the month. Ryan Tate, in the number-two spot with 970,219 pageviews, earned $7,277. The least-read blogger was Nick Douglas, who got 267,570 pageviews. My guess is that his base salary is more than $2,007 per month, which means that he can't be feeling very secure right now - especially since he's bottom of the league table in March as well.
Total payroll for the month of February was $33,294, plus some extra for people whose base pay is more than their earn-out: call it $40,000 in total. Gawker received a total of 14,088,429 pageviews in February, which means that Denton is paying his writers about $2.84 per thousand pageviews that he receives.
In any case, take that $40,000 per month, and distribute it among six bloggers: that works out to an annualized $80,000 apiece, on average. Which is really not at all bad for the kind of people Gawker hires, who are often talented but unproven twentysomethings.
You can reasonably expect that the $80,000 figure is going to remain roughly constant, even if pageviews steadily increase. The pageview rate ($7.50, at Gawker) gets reset every quarter, and is calculated essentially by taking the editorial budget and dividing it by the number of eligible pageviews. So if pageviews go up, then the pageview rate goes down: you can be sure that the staff over at Gizmodo, seven of whom got over a million pageviews, and one of whom (Jesus Diaz) got 3.1 million pageviews in February, don't get paid $7.50 per thousand.
Still, cruising around the Gawker Media stats pages (just put /stats onto the end of the domain in question) does make you realize how the Gawker-obsessed media misses much more important writers for the network as a whole. Do you know who Adam Pash is? He's a blogger at Lifehacker; he got 5.2 million pageviews in January. Dashiell Bennett got 2.8 million pageviews at Fleshbot.
I'd assume that Pash and Diaz are making comfortable six-figure incomes blogging, and that a good few of the "site leads" (Gina Trapani, Brian Lam) are as well. Conversely, some of the less popular bloggers are likely getting paid $50-60,000 per year.
Gawker Media as a whole is holding reasonably steady on about 210 million pageviews per month. If Denton's payroll is $3 per thousand pageviews (remember he has to pay his site leads as well, on every site other than Gawker), that would mean he's paying about $630,000 a month in editorial salaries - which is pretty close to the number I arrived at at the end of my first post on this subject.
What are the effects of making bloggers' pageview figures so transparent not only to themselves but also to the general public? I can't help but feel that it must mean more competitiveness, and less helpfulness and collegiality, among bloggers on any given site. With the total editorial budget largely preset, there is a zero-sum game being played between bloggers, over time: a successful blogger's gain will be an unsuccessful blogger's loss. It's certainly not an atmosphere I'd like to work in.
Related Links
Blogonomics: Paying for Content
Tech Blogger Banned in Las Vegas
Blogonomics: Gawker's Payroll
Today’s Headlines
- Bronx Assemblyman Seeks to Clear Path for Congestion Pricing (Daily Politics)
- Horse Trading Ramps Up in City Council (Sun)
- News Endorses Pricing, While Columnist Regurgitates Brodsky's Line
- Brooklyn Community Board 7 Votes Against Pricing and RPP (Gowanus Lounge)
- Member of Bronx Community Board 8 Rejects Parking Permits Too (R'dale Press)
- Economic Downturn Casts Doubt on Future of Atlantic Yards (NYT)
- Selection of Hudson Yards Developer Delayed (Sun)
- More on the Protest Against Park-Hogging Brooklyn Judges (News)
- Cabbies Say They Need to Use Cell Phones for Their Safety (AMNY