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"Don't Be Evil"? Silicon Valley seems to be thinking a lot more about the unthinkable, or at least the distasteful.The New York Times Digital Domain feature notes with tongue only partly in cheek that Apple has just applied for a patent on a system that would let consumers use electronic devices free in return for exposure to a stream of advertisements that would compel responses before the machines would resume functioning.
Would anyone have guessed that Apple, so widely revered, would seek patent protection of a gimmick not unlike one used to sell vacation timeshares? (Agree to attend the sales seminar and get a free weekend getaway!) Or could anyone have predicted that the Apple of 2009, a company with premium products, would file a patent application that could make it a latter-day descendant of Free PC and ZapMe, companies that in 1999 gave away PCs engineered to always display on-screen ads?And there's a parallel move, disclosed in 2008 by The Times (London):
The Times has seen a patent application filed by [Microsoft] for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees' performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer's assessment of their physiological state.
The obstacle to both applications is clearly not the "understaffed and underfunded" Patent Office.
Both ideas may be non-starters, at least as presented by the respective newspapers. The kinds of businesses that would be interested in buying the Microsoft system are already causing considerable physiological and mental distress to their employees. As long as the profits are rolling in, they don't need to pay Microsoft to tell them so. And Apple's mooted satanic pop-ups have their own structural flaw. Consumers seeking free equipment for agreeing to watch advertising have all shown that they hate paying money for anything. Not the best prospects for marketers except con artists, and why should they pay when broadcasting spam is virtually free?
Of course, the applications could be staking out less offensive innovations in deliberately grandiose general language for maximum legal protection. Or they could be intended to thwart expected moves by competitors.
In fact, maybe both documents are really disinformation, designed to lure journalists (and bloggers) into speculation that obscures the companies' real intentions, like those World War II "invasion plans" designed to be discovered by the Wehrmacht.
But who knows whether Microsoft against Apple might some day turn into Big Brother versus Big Bother.
(Photo: Lars Plougmann/Flickr)
President Obama wants to make it easier to dismiss teachers whose students aren't performing well on tests. But what about the parents? By the president's own account, his daughter's performance jumped when he and his wife made clear their expectations, evidently without a change of instructor:The president . . . went off script for a few moments, telling of a C grade that his 11-year-old daughter, Malia, brought home from school recently. It didn't meet the standards at the Obama home, he said, and Malia knew it.
More recently, he said, she came home with a score of 95.
"What was happening was, she had started wanting it more than us," he said.
And I wonder about negative incentives when positive ones have such questionable results; merit pay for test scores has been a disappointment, at least in Texas:
Maybe attrition plus the dread jobless recovery will come to the schools' rescue. From the Depression into the 1960s, the teaching corps, not only in major cities, were an elite, many of whom had aced competitive examinations (the best known, Lyndon Johnson, was an outstanding classroom teacher). Not all new recruits of the postwar boom could be expected to measure up, just as the nation was spoiled by the efficiency of the mid-century Post Office, but there was more to it than the drought of investment banking jobs. Discrimination in other professions made instruction one of the few alternatives for talented women. There was also more religious and racial bias in what remained of the private sector. Fortunately, Depression-era unemployment levels, racism, and sexism are unlikely to return. So how do we recruit and train teachers?For the $300 million spent on merit pay for teachers over the last three years, Texas was hoping for a big boost in student achievement.
But it didn't happen with the now-defunct program, according to experts hired by the state.
The Texas Educator Excellence Grant, or TEEG, plan did not produce the academic improvements that proponents - including Gov. Rick Perry - hoped for when the program was launched with much fanfare in 2006, a new report from the National Center on Performance Incentives said.
"There is no systematic evidence that TEEG had an impact on student achievement gains," said researchers for Texas A&M University, Vanderbilt University and the University of Missouri.
Since teacher education and certification programs don't seem to relate to progress in actual instruction (not unusual; bar exam results aren't correlated with future legal competence) Malcolm Gladwell has proposed the sink-or-swim system used in football and financial advising. You can't evaluate aptitude in advance, so let lots of people try and keep those who work out because of a mysterious interpersonal aptitude one researcher has named "withitness." (Who, I wonder, will re-teach the kids who experience withoutitness?)
But teaching isn't like pro sports, finance or the arts. The average struggling musician can take hope, like the aspiring athlete, from a few colleagues' superstar incomes. Not teachers. Even Frank McCourt never planned to be a best-selling author -- it was his method of teaching by storytelling that helped him become one.
And we need many more teachers than quarterbacks, investment advisors, or special forces commandos. According to the Census Bureau, in 2004 there were 3.1 million primary and middle school teachers and 772,000 secondary school teachers. In 2005 we had only 800,000 physicians, and 20 years before that only 500,000, according to one unofficial report. Education's problem isn't that people don't realize it's important. Most do. The problem is that it is so important, just as health care became a greater issue with the expansion of medicine.
So if the educational establishment is still not delivering, conventional incentives are disappointing, major salary increases unrealistic because of scale and state and local fiscal crises, and sifting battalions of aspirants for Gladwellian "withitness" is a non-starter, what's left?
Musical ability was once considered the domain of "withitness" too. Shinichi Suzuki showed it was possible to train teachers to bring out latent talent in large numbers of students. We should focus not on threatening teachers but on creating better ways to help them.
The greatest of the twentieth-century gurus, Peter Drucker, was also the one who best recognized the educational side of all enterprises. Zachary First, managing director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University replied to my query about one of his most brilliant insights, which I haven't yet found in print:
"Peter Drucker long consulted for ServiceMaster. He was both an advisor and friend to the company's Chairman and CEO, C. William Pollard. Drucker once suggested to Pollard that ServiceMaster's real business was not janitorial services or lawn care or pest control, but rather 'developing people.'"Maybe academia can in turn learn something from the crabgrass removal business. How to develop the people who are developing people -- that's the question.
(Photo: Gamma-Ray Productions/Flickr)
Recent tributes to the late composer Vic Mizzy show the power and unpredictability of hits. The LA Times explains how it worked:
. . . [B]ecause the production company, Filmways, refused to pay for singers, Mizzy sang it himself and overdubbed it three times. The song, memorably punctuated by finger-snapping, begins with: "They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, they're altogether ooky: the Addams family."It's encouraging to note that budget limits helped make the song such a success.Mizzy was challenged to become a one-man band and chorus, rose to the task, and managed to include copyright ownership in his contract. Mizzy not only had the right idea, he was willing to put hours of work into the right execution.
In the 1996 book "TV's Biggest Hits: The Story of Television Themes From 'Dragnet' to 'Friends,' " author Jon Burlingame writes that Mizzy's "musical conception was so specific that he became deeply involved with the filming of the main-title sequence, which involved all seven actors snapping their fingers in carefully timed rhythm to Mizzy's music."
For Mizzy, who owned the publishing rights to "The Addams Family" theme, it was an easy payday.
"I sat down; I went 'buh-buh-buh-bump [snap-snap], buh-buh-buh-bump," he recalled in a 2008 interview on CBS' "Sunday Morning" show. "That's why I'm living in Bel-Air: Two finger snaps and you live in Bel-Air."
For whatever obscure neurological or aesthetic reason, the theme song has joined the ranks of the earworms. It's infectious even across species. Parrots learn not only speech but melodies and rhythm from their human companions, and the Addams Family theme song is an avian hit on Youtube, with dozens of versions by cockatiels alone. Here's the best finger snap I found:
Creative success is usually a lot of work -- except when it isn't. And in the end, like the Mizzy's Adamses, it can also be a bit "mysterious and spooky."
Whatever investigators and courts ultimately decide about three deaths and a number of alleged injuries in a "sweat lodge" program at his Arizona New Age retreat, the guru James Arthur Ray has no plans to abandon his mission. And to judge from the positive reaction of many prospects, the risk might even make the program look more attractive -- no pain, no gain and all that. (There's a theory that as technology makes motoring and other activities safer, some people compensate by craving new risks.) According to the Los Angeles Times,Though shaken by the deaths, Ray has quickly returned to the road, teaching his secrets of success even as he uses them to cling to his own.Self-help gurus--and their disciples--have exasperated skeptics for over a century, at least since the debunkers of the Russian-born spiritualist Helena Blavatsky, whose Theosophy movement has survived its early detractors to become a presence on the Web. Even negative publicity keeps leaders in the news, and weren't many of the founders of today's great religions denounced in their own time as charlatans?
"I've taught that we're all going to have adversity and we can't run from it," a somber, teary-eyed Ray said Tuesday night at the beginning of his free recruitment session in Denver. "I've certainly learned a lot in the past 10 days."
Some weren't aware of the Sedona deaths until Ray addressed it. But Lyle Guthmiller, 44, a heating and air conditioning technician, said it didn't dissuade him from considering signing up for one of the retreats. "When you're pushing the limits, unfortunately, things can happen," he said. "I'd rather live that life than be a couch potato."
Video in particular favors today's prophets, with their often spellbinding performances, over less charismatic naysayers. Ray was featured on the Larry King show, as the self-help critic Steve Salerno notes with dismay in the Wall Street Journal. Even accomplished investigators of alleged occult phenomena like the magician James Randi, who offers $1,000,000 prize for proof of the paranormal, can't expose the advice of motivational speakers in the same way. One of Randi's blog contributors does have an illuminating account of a post-tragedy appearance by Ray. It should not be so surprising that Ray and his followers have taken the offensive; over 50 years ago, a Chicago end-of-the-world movement was not dissolved but galvanized into action after its Armageddon deadline passed, helping inspire the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance.
There are many sins in the self-help industry. One is the dogma that anybody can be a great success at any time simply by drawing on inner resources. It's one thing -- and a good thing -- to show how many people have overcome poverty, illness, disabilities, and discrimination. It's another to deny the role of factors beyond our control, especially chance (despite some evidence that our attitudes can affect our luck) and circumstances. For example, in 1996 magazine interview, the great computer scientist Donald Knuth observed that people with exceptional programming aptitude existed and exist where there was no opportunity to display their gifts: "I imagine there are computer scientists in the pygmy forest." Some people's gifts may no longer be profitable; others' not yet. And then there's the insidious Just World Hypothesis, recently exposed here by Jonah Lehrer. Louise Hay, the publisher-doyenne of New Age healing, told the New York Times Magazine writer Mark Oppenheimer that while she would not confront victims with guilt, she could see justice even in genocide:
"Yes, I think there's a lot of karmic stuff that goes on, past lives." So, I [Mark Oppenheimer] asked, with a situation like the Holocaust, the victims might have been an unfortunate group of souls who deserved what they got because of their behavior in past lives? "Yes, it can work that way," Hay said. "But that's just my opinion."Should we condemn all self-help books? Some are recommended by mental health professionals, as Daniel Goleman observed years ago, before going on to write a best-seller of his own. The monarch of the genre may still be Samuel Smiles, author of the original Self-Help, a Victorian sensation still in print after 150 years.Smiles was a disillusioned political reformer who argued for individual effort. Reactionary propaganda or progressive politics by other means? Make up your own mind here. Smiles glorified the work ethic, not wealth or social status, and admired his protagonists for the sacrifices they made, for example the French Protestant ceramicist Bernard Palissy supposedly fueling his furnace with his household furniture as a last-ditch measure. This and many other anecdotes in Smiles have been questioned by more recent scholarship. But his message was the opposite of most of today's movement. He taught at workers' schools and declined lucrative offers to memorialize self-made industrialists.He preached no Secret but perseverance and dedication to the work for its own sake rather than for external rewards.Smiles the Scots Calvinist may have been the last great apostle of the Protestant Ethic, but he was also a forerunner of twenty-first-century ideas like self-efficacy.
Photo Credit: Flicker User Casey Serin
A Newark Star-Ledger report on this year's Nobel Prize for Physics shows how the twentieth century's greatest innovation in imaging was the indirect result of two research "failures." Wired has more details of the internal politics.The breakthrough of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, the charge-coupled device (CCD), had a curious motivation. What catalyzed it was the peculiar agenda of AT&T in the late 1960s. Managers of Bell Labs thought that a new technology called bubble memory was about to replace semiconductors and let researchers on the latter side know they they needed a great new idea fast to prove semiconductors were worth continued funding. Bubble memory turned out to be a bubble and is now only a memory, but pressure, based on an erroneous projection of the future, helped create another future. It also made it possible to capture the images of Apollo 13. Yet the videotube that used the first CCDs became a dead end itself. AT&T's Picturephone service was based on a very rational early fear of cable and television as rivals of the telephone in building new, high-speed networks, as the historian Kenneth Lipartito has confirmed in his standard account of the program.
Veterans of Bell Labs are rightly proud of the organization's record. To quote the Star-Ledger:
Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, has now produced 13 Nobel laureates and more than 31,000 patents since 1925. During the 1960s and 1970s, the lab in Murray Hill was regarded as a crucible of some of the most innovative research in the world.
"Everything we take for granted today -- digital music, digital art, lasers -- came from Bell Labs," said A. Michael Noll, emeritus professor of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California and a former Bell Labs research scientist.
But it also noted the changes and research group closings under Lucent:
Many Bell Labs scientists, past and present, say their research community has never recovered.
"The environment that was there back then, the excitement about being around creative people who were open to talking about their work, was not duplicated during its time," said Dan Stanzione, a former director of Bell Labs.
Ironically some non-profit research laboratories like Battelle and Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft have been able to support themselves at least in part through income from the innovations they helped sponsor -- like dry photocopying and the MP3 format, respectively. I have found no information on royalties received by AT&T or Lucent for the invention of Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs -- possibly because original patents had expired before the digital imaging boom. (I'd welcome information from readers in telecommunication and imaging.)
This prize for 40-year-old work raises an intriguing question. Has something been lost from American and world science by the dispersion of so many great researchers? Some of them have profited personally; at conferences I've met former technical staff members who have made fortunes in finance and entrepreneurship. Others, like the late electrical engineer and perceptual psychologist Bela Julesz, a future MacArthur Fellow whom I met while I was a science editor, flourished in academia and became mentors to a generation of students. Still others have had the best of both worlds, with high-salaried tenured teaching jobs plus lucrative industrial ties.
But is society better off with so much talent redeployed? Are great innovations more likely to arise in the newer, decentralized, and more responsive global environment? Does everything important get discovered independently anyway, regardless of what happens to one organization? I'm not so sure. In Jeremy Bernstein's Three Degrees above Zero, Bela Julesz said Bell Labs had no counterpart in Europe or elsewhere and was "an absolutely unique treasure . . . for the whole world," a "baroque organ" for the maestro who needs "to pull out every register." Maybe the old Bell Labs resembled the Hollywood studio system, where massive resources and depth of skills could be deployed to produce qualitative leaps. The Labs set a high standard for the reconfigured world of global science.
(Photo: Wiki Commons)
Was there ever really a generation gap? Recent obituaries of the retailing billionaire Donald Fisher make me wonder. Fisher apparently called his clothing and music store The Gap with reference to that unstoppable 1960s concept -- the name actually was suggested by his wife as an alternative to his original "Pants and Disks." Significantly, he was an outsider to the garment industry and retail; his real estate background prepared him for all-important skills of store location.As for that lower-case gap that inspired the stores, Fisher's career are reasons to reconsider the pop social science fixation on generational differences. First, in some ways contrasts within an age cohort may be greater than those between different age cohorts -- for example, in religious and political issues -- though the balance does change. Germans recognize a flakhelfer generation pressed into anti-aircraft and other combat service as teenagers in the later years of the Second World War, but apart from this military experience and ensuing controversies, what do Pope Benedict XVI and the novelist Günter Grass really have in common?
Second, age boundaries are fluid except when laws (like those conscripting the flakhelfer born in 1926 and 1927) create sharper breaks. Usually the balance of attitudes and values is a continuum over time, but is treated in discrete units. Compare the color spectrum. Culture and language lead children of each society to recognize a different set of colors according to psychological studies, even though humanity perceives the same wavelengths through essentially the same eyes and brains. Generational differences also can be arbitrary ways to slice what's really smooth.
Third, and the most relevant here, the culture of each "generation" is shaped by men and women somewhat older -- in the case of The Gap by a 41-year-old businessman whose 20 or so years' seniority over his customers did not impede his success. His own disappointment with the cut and fit of jeans in other stores was evidently shared by many younger people. Even the defining musical superstars of the 1960s and beyond weren't Baby Boomers themselves; John Lennon and Ringo Starr were born in 1940, Paul McCartney in 1942, George Harrison in 1943, and their legendary producer George Martin in 1926. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were both born in 1941. The leading orator of the Berkeley student revolt, Mario Savio, was vintage 1942, his German counterpart Rudi Dutschke, 1940. Even France's Daniel Cohn-Bendit (1945) doesn't strictly qualify; most definitions of the Boomer generation cited on the Web give 1946 as its beginning, reflecting the demographic bulge that is the name's original basis.Speaking of California protest, whatever your opinion of Ronald Reagan's policies, his recalled comeback to a student spokesman while governor of the state is still the best commentary I know on generation gaps, even though I haven't been able to confirm it so far in another source; it might be applied to the "Millennials" and the Internet, too. When the student expressed doubt that his generation could be understood by people who had not grown up with space satellites, rockets, and computers, he says he retorted: "You're absolutely right. We didn't have those things when we were your age. We invented them."
Photo Credit: Flickr User Eleanore H. and LittleMissCupcakeParis
The Wall Street Journal reports a new wave of interest in the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, a Depression-era rearrangement of typewriter keys, developed by a psychology professor and typing expert in Washington State. Many users believe Dvorak offers speed and comfort superior to the conventional QWERTY arrangement. In the 1980s, computers brought a qualified victory, as software made it possible to remap keyboards without the massive costs of converting conventional typewriters or custom-building Dvorak models. The option was even built into both Windows and Macintosh operating systems.Now the age of the smartphone is setting back the movement, as Microsoft, Apple, and other manufacturers decline to offer a Dvorak option. Having tried to enter a simple URL with a new iPod touch (similar to the iPhone in its user interface), I'm puzzled that the issue came up at all. The small touch screen makes it a challenge to press the correct letter rather than an adjacent one. The problem for Dvorak users is cognitive, not physical; shifting from one layout to another is a mental pain. Considering the trivial cost of adding a Dvorak feature, Dvorak fans are probably right to believe that the industry is dissing them, hoping that they'll give up. It's a matter of respect.
Actually, respect for the user was August Dvorak's big problem. In the history of human factors, change often comes from below. I discovered this when writing Our Own Devices. For example, the first modern ergonomic chairs, introduced in the U.S. in the 1920s, were sold by leaving a sample chair for secretaries to try. Typewriter ribbon brands were also marketed with attractive boxes that typists could reuse for storage. Dvorak, evidently influenced by the ideas of the self-taught industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, took an opposite approach. He tried to sell government agencies and corporations on the idea that his keyboard would mean 1) more output per typist, and 2) fewer typists employed. But managers weren't buying the system, probably because it required a big investment in new equipment, retraining, and temporary decline of productivity. Those typists who were aware of it must have considered it just another speedup -- higher work quotas without an increase in wages -- that industrial unionists were protesting. Even government studies supporting the keyboard (to judge from descriptions I have read) focused on raw output rather than user comfort. The real advantage of the Dvorak layout is that while the brain can reprogram itself to use QWERTY nearly as fast as Dvorak, heavy typists and people subject to overuse injuries appreciate that their fingers don't need to move nearly as much.
Ironically, manufacturers themselves made reduced effort a selling point, for example in this postwar advertisement for IBM electric typewriters in the 1950s. So was there a chance for Dvorak's invention, at least as a niche product? It's impossible to say. But decades of papers on keyboard design and productivity are mostly moot because the great age of "production typing" in affluent countries is over, thanks to cut-and-paste clipboards in operating systems, cheaper and more accurate scanners, voice recognition software -- and outsourcing of much remaining keyboarding to developing nations. Meanwhile the interface of new touch-sensitive devices needs a new, end-user-friendlier twentieth century August Dvorak.
What is hard to explain is why Apple has kept third-party Dvorak software out of its official App Store, which means users have to hack their devices, possibly voiding their warranties. As Ed Hansberry explains on an InformationWeek blog:
The iPhone comes solely with a virtual keyboard. All Windows Mobile devices with touch screens have virtual keyboards. With that, you should be able to install whatever keyboard you want assuming someone has written it. You can run such a keyboard on the iPhone, but only if it is jailbroken.[One of many sites explaining this concept is here.] I don't know why Apple would block such an app from the App Store, but you won't find one there.The crisp elegance of the iPhone/iPod Touch interface carries a price: neo-Taylorist One Best Way design -- the very mentality that dogged Professor Dvorak. The Apple motto is evidently: "Think Different, but Not Too Different."
Photo Credit: Flickr User guspim
If John Beck Sr.'s happiness depended on his success, he'd probably be miserable. Sales at his Branchburg hair salon are down for the fifth straight year, a trend that began when budget chains such as Supercuts, Fantastic Sams and Great Clips moved into town. To make matters worse, when the recession hit, even his most loyal clients started stretching out their hair appointments.The report also suggests that farming, forestry, and fishing are satisfying occupations despite their risks and low compensation.
But Beck, who runs DJ's Hair Studio with his wife and daughter, is anything but miserable. After spending most of his life working for other people, he's just happy to be his own boss.
"We're in control. A lot of decisions that are made, are made by me," said Beck, 69, who opened the salon in the mid-90s after retiring from a 40-year career at Johnson & Johnson. "We have a lot of very happy clients."
Of course these statistics have their limits. You could say that the difficulties of running most small businesses (or farms) means that the people who have stayed with them, or entered them, are self-selected for intrinsic enjoyment of what they are doing. And what's the satisfaction level of employees of small businesses versus large corporations in the same line of work?
But the study still underscores an important finding of epidemiology. It's not stress itself but the sense of control that determines what work is beneficial or injurious to health. For helping reduce levels of obesity, smoking, excess drinking, and heart disease, perceived control is a dimension of life that deserves more attention.Writing in the Wall Street Journal of a wave of suicides at France Télécom, a business school professor in Paris, Isaac Getz, calls for new organizational styles:
Treat people as modern pilots, not as soldiers of the old wars. Give people real control over their work, stop giving them orders about how to do their jobs, and their stress will go down. With it, absenteeism will drop, and stress's hidden costs will shrink, while employee engagement goes up. All this, of course, is hard to accomplish in a traditional command-and-control company that often pays a lip service to autonomy but preserves the hierarchical chain of command--but it is possible.France has a highly regarded medical care system. But there, as here, the most important determinants of health and disease occur during the time people spend outside physicians' offices and hospitals.
For months, Germans have been stocking up on conventional incandescent light bulbs as the European Union (EU) phases in a ban on their manufacture and sale. There is open revolt even at the summit of nation's cultural establishment:
Many complain that the lights are just not bright enough and that they falsify colors. The Hamburger Kunsthalle, for example, recently made a bulk order for 600 incandescent light bulbs to make sure that it can keep illuminating the works it displays in the time-honored way.And it's become a mass movement, too:
The aesthetic issue is a powerful one. For Munich-based lighting designer Ingo Maurer, the CFL bulbs are ushering in a decrease in the quality of life. "We recommend protests against the ban, civil disobedience and the timely hoarding of lighting implements," Maurer told SPIEGEL. He also adds that he believes the ban might drive more people to use more candles, which are about as bad as you can get in terms of energy efficiency.
There are three problems with a legislative ban on anything in the absence of immediate harm. The first, as the German case shows, is that some people who might have increased their use of energy-saving bulbs, will protest limits on their choice by hoarding -- resulting in more energy spent producing bulbs that may outlive their purchasers. The second is that it removes an important incentive for the development of compact fluorescent lamps and light-emitting diodes that produce a more pleasing light, killing off the competition and reference standard. And the third is that it is an arbitrary and inconsistent way to promote energy saving; there's no limit to the wattage of new-style bulbs. The industry failed to learn from its founder, Thomas Edison, whose light bulb was designed to be not only more convenient than gas light, but more pleasant, according to Charles Bazerman's study.
Well-meaning Americans can be tone-deaf (or spectrum-blind) to culture, too. The U.S. counterpart to German incandescent aficionados are the people who have been stockpiling firearms and ammunition, like these preppies (Oregon-style), anticipating a crackdown by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress. But there's a difference. The incandescent phaseout is law in Europe. It hardly matters that the Supreme Court clearly favors firearm rights and that between health care, Afghanistan, and the deficit, the Democrats won't be spending much political capital on gun control. Still, Barack Obama's remarks at a California fundraiser haven't helped: that economically discouraged Pennsylvanians "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations" -- an oil spill on troubled waters.
Obamaphobes' panic buying is having its own revenge. Democraticunderground.com reports that even one Wisconsin ammunition manufacturer is warning its own customers:
Due to hoarding of ammunition, you consumers have managed to raise theWelcome to the state of New Hamster.
prices of ammunition and components 50 to 500 percent.
You didn't even need the Government to impose any taxes or bans.
You did it all yourself.
Photo Credit: Flickr User Shika Kaoin
Call it a tempest in a VÄRME teapot. Critics are protesting the new catalogue typeface of the global furniture chain Ikea. As TIME Magazine reports:
Branding has been a large part of the Swedish chain's success -- what urban dweller today, whether in Atlanta or Kuala Lumpur, doesn't recognize that bright blue warehouse, glowing like a beacon of fine living, at the side of the highway? And its signature typeface, a customized version of Futura, has long been an integral part of that brand. But with its 2010 catalogue now arriving in mailboxes, the supplier of headboards and coffee tables to the world's thrifty and trendy has switched to what it sees as a more functional typeface: Verdana. In the process, it has provoked an instantaneous global backlash, the kind that can only happen on the Internet.
What bothers the protestors is that Futura was an influential 1920s font that had long entered the modernist canon, whereas Verdana, released by Microsoft in the 1990s, is designed for optimal monitor display. As the official Microsoft typography site puts it -- using Verdana:
This isn't merely a revival of classical elegance and savoir faire; this is type designed for the medium of screen.
But that doesn't matter to some critics, who are using the Internet to protest technological change intended to optimize design for the Internet.
Verdana is a landmark in its own right. Its chief designer, Matthew Carter, is one of the world's most honored typographers. He also designed Georgia, the typeface you are reading now.
I asked my friend Charles Bigelow about Verdana. He's a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a former MacArthur Fellow, who co-designed the font Lucida Sans in 1985 -- a breakthrough in type engineered to be legible on screen as well as in print. His verdict (from a longer e-mail):
. . . even at a large size, Verdana has a clear, crisp look.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the face when used
in print. It has a different graphical style than Futura,
or Helvetica, or Lucida, but that's a good thing. It shows
the originality and creativity of the artist who designed
it. It is a great accomplishment. We should admire originality
and creativity in fonts, just as we do in music, art, and
literature.
The problem that most screen-optimized fonts have in print
is that the big x-heights, the wide shapes, the open spacing,
the careful reduction of fine details, all combine to make
the text image look too big, too strong, too aggressive,
and too simple. One way around this is to compose the text
at a smaller size than would be used for print-optimized
typefaces. As the printed text point size gets smaller,
the screen-optimized faces begin to look more amenable
in form, finer in detail, more subtle in texture.
In the specific case of the Ikea catalog, another issue
is that the same font is used for both text (small sizes)
and display (big sizes). This one-font-for-all-sizes
approach to design reduces the graphical complexity of
the typographic image. Many graphic designers and
typographers prefer to use different faces for text
an display, to create more complex harmonies and contrasts
in the type image.
Certainly, there are many beautiful books printed in one
typeface, such as Garamond or Baskerville, at different
text and display sizes, but those faces were designed for
traditional printing, not optimized for screen display,
and they have many subtle and charming features that emerge
in different ways at different sizes.
If Ikea had used Verdana only for the text sizes, and a
different typeface for display, or vice-versa, the flap
might never have occurred, because the typographic image
would have been more complex, more nuanced, and less
likely to attract or arouse strong criticism.
And then there's the question of whether Futura was ever quite appropriate for Ikea in the first place. To some critics, Ikea's undeniably successful focus on cost-cutting and global sourcing compromises the ideals of interwar design. One of them, David Barringer, comments:
IKEA clearly tips the Bauhaus balance in favor of business. IKEA's success, however, might prove that consumers care less about the Bauhaus emphasis on lasting value and a humane society than they do about buying cheap stuff right now.
Ellen Ruppel Shell has made a similar point on this site. And as the critic Stephen Bayley recently wrote in the Guardian, flat-pack shipment of easily assembled furniture actually is 150 years old, the innovation of the (still existing) originally Vienna-based bentwood chair firm Thonet. Nineteenth-century globalization in this case was based not in Asia but in the forests of Central Europe, where skilled, strong men steamed and bent chair parts that were stacked and crated, to be reassembled (depending on the model) for elegant parlors or backwoods dives:
Source: Wikimedia Commons I wonder what images, and typefaces, will evoke early 21st-century Ikea 150 years from now.
Top Photo Credit: www.flickr.com/photos/colouredinks/440471470
(IInadvertently the original post omitted thanks to Steven Heller for the link to David Barringer's blog.)
Edward Tenner
