As Far As I Can Tell

Finally, Eminem steps up and says something worthwhile. If you haven’t seen it, watch his new video, Mosh, in QuickTime format.

Also, read the text transcript of the new Bin Laden tape. This is going to be spun every which way over the next few days, so just read the straight translation first. Examples of note:

…contrary to Bush’s claims that we hate freedom. Let him tell us why we did not attack Sweden for example.

As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way (and) to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.

Nothing justifies the attacks, but can we please put the rhetoric of “hate our freedom” behind us? There are real reason that people hate the United States. Even if you don’t agree that those reasons are worthy of hate, you have to understand the mind of your enemy. Can we please get beyond the constantly repeated (and believed) marketing messages of this war?

The New York Times has an editorial today about yet another ballot flawed by bad design. Apparently in Ohio (where all the action is this year) some absentee ballots use a punch card system with a separately printed sheet listing the candidates. Even though it looks like you’re supposed to overlay the two and punch the hole that the arrows point to, you’re not. You’re supposed to correlate the number next to your choice to the number on the punch card — the arrows are there by mistake.

The Times rightly points out that these sorts of problems are caused by local officials designing the ballots themselves rather than seeking out a professional designer. Why is design knowledge so profoundly disregarded? Knowing how to use PageMaker doesn’t mean you know how to design a ballot; give it to someone who can do it right. In relation to this story, here’s a tip: If you have to include separate instructions on how to use the ballot, your design has failed.

Dear Election Officials, I will gladly quit my job making bullshit advertising promotions to design and test better ballots. Please contact me or for god’s sake someone. Nothing as solvable as ballot design should be allowed to ruin our election process.

Oh wait, it’s too late. Never mind. I can only hope that Kerry wins by a wide enough margin to avoid the impending litigation mess.

On Thursday I attended a lecture by design legend Wolfgang Weingart at Western. He taught at the famed Basel School of Design in Switzerland while it was the epicenter for graphic design’s coming of age. It’s interesting to hear from someone who remembers the transition from hot metal to film based typography. From the sounds of things he never really made the jump to the computer. He was an early experimenter with it in Europe, though his examples where nearly all film based.

His history is important to understand, particularly since he educated one of my professors from the program at WMU. The lecture was good for historical reasons, though I can’t say that I took much inspiration from it. His lesson seemed to be “have fun” and the process he shared was getting a bottle of wine and then designing. He talked a lot about his sketches and experimentation, but I would have liked some more insight into his methods, like maybe a case study of a particular project.

No doubt it’s very hard to give a lecture about your life in an hour, especially when English isn’t your first language. Luckily for the design students at Western he was here all week, giving workshops and advice in a more direct manner.

I’m listening to a recorded copy of Talk of the Nation on the subject of RFID tags. If you don’t know, RFID tags are tiny little radio transmitters whose information can be read from a distance. This sort of thing has existed for a while, but now that it’s really small and really cheap it’s ubiquitous implementation is being predicted. It has serious privacy implications and if it’s a new topic for you then I suggest reading the RFID Wikipedia entry and the ACLU’s position on RFID.

The guest expert on the show is full of canned and optimistic answers. For example a librarian called in and was concerned about the use of the tags within books for barcode replacement and theft deterrent purposes. The guest outright dismissed the concerns, saying that the chances of people having a reader were low and that libraries are doing it to reduce costs, so it’s okay. The reply was so ill considered that when he was thanked the caller replied with a sarcastic and drawn out “Ohhh…kay.”

Security by obscurity? Not a problem because of current technological roadblocks? The reason we need to talk about the privacy concerns is precisely because the most concerning technology hasn’t yet fully materialized. If we wait until everyone can get a $30 general purpose RFID reader, or until the tags can broadcast a long distance, then it’s too late. The rate of technological progress and its inverse to the cost of purchase mean that the more we snooze on this, looking only at the benefits, the higher chance that we’ll end up in a world where everything is tracked and privacy is a quaint and unrealistic ideal.

It’s already happening, as just this week the FDA approved implanted RFID tags for medial use within hospital patients. While the health care industry obviously has a data management problem I think there are unexplored and less concerning ways to solve it. Other proposed uses of this technology are downright trivial. On the show they talk about smart clothing that will allow your washing machine to alert you about its care instructions or milk being able to tell the refrigerator that it’s expired. These are comically minor problems in our lives, and are served just fine by the existing method of printing information on the tag or container.

This sort of ridiculous complication is pure techno-fanaticism mixed with irresponsibility. It reminds me of the mindset used when a new species is introduced into a non-native area to control the population of another species. It solves the original problem in a band-aid manner while introducing a whole new set of issues.

Already people are talking about how RFID concerns can be covered up instead of addressing them. They say you could get a RFID blocking handbags to keep any items in that you don’t want broadcasting their data. Come on — opt out solutions are privacy nightmares and protect only the fringe groups in the know.

We need to have some more serious discourse about this technology and implement legislative as well as technological solutions. There’s no doubt that RFID offers time and cost saving benefits, so I doubt the market is going to slow its implementation or sort out the privacy concerns on its own.

Happy birthday to Meredith!

Ms. Adams-Smart loves birthdays and is stretching this one as long as she can. The b-day related activities started on Saturday and continue through tomorrow. They might even jump to the weekend; there’s no stopping it now.

So everyone, all at once, send her an e-mail. Along with well wishing for another year we need top persuade her to start the year off right by reviving that dead weblog of hers.

Way back in the early spring I met up with 11 other people to start planning for an art project. We wanted to make a calendar, hand silk screened, with each month designed by a different person. It’s been a long process, but last night we got together to see all of the finished pages for the first time.

The prints look great, with a wide variety of styles and colors. There’s a show scheduled at Brakeman for the December 3rd Art Hop if you’d like to see the prints framed and on display. That’s also the first time the calendar will be for sale, just in time for Christmas.

I did November.