My new iPhone is amazing. I love it. Sure, it is not perfect and I’ve already thought of things I wish it did, but it’s basically light years ahead of any other cell phone. The visual interface is stunning, and the difference between the screen looks and other “smart phones” is comparable to the difference between the first color cell phones and their monochrome predecessors.

My wait in line to get it was not that bad, about an hour before it officially went on sale, and then another once the store opened.

It will be interesting to see how it is perceived in the weeks to come, whether every blogger and tech pundit will consider that it lived up to its hype. I’m not even going to try and speculate about any of that. All I will say is that my own experience with it has been incredible so far, and I don’t regret the ~2 hours of my life spent waiting to get it!

The last British governor of Hong Kong, Lord Chris Patten, reflects on the handover of the territory to China which took place ten years ago on July 1, 1997.

Ten years ago this weekend, Chris Patten’s job as governor of Hong Kong came to an end - and with it 150 years of British rule.

Amid a tropical downpour, Mr Patten, along with the Prince of Wales, new Prime Minister Tony Blair and other dignitaries, saw the British flag lowered in the territory for the last time on 30 June 1997.

It was an emotional moment, says the former governor who was made a Lord in 2004. Both he and his family had come to love Hong Kong during their five years there. He still calls it the best job he ever had.

Lord Patten had insisted upon a ceremony of some pomp, rather than a more functional handover in the city hall that had initially been favoured by the Chinese.

“I felt there should be a proper farewell in order to demonstrate to the world that Hong Kong, a free city, was seeing transfer of its sovereignty to an authoritarian government,” he said.

One of the other interesting aspects of the interview is Lord Patten’s humorous explanation about how he came to be appointed governor in the first place.

Lord Patten jokes that the last governor of Hong Kong was “slightly improbably” chosen by the citizens of Bath - who voted him out as their MP in the 1992 general election.

The humor aside, I think it is a typical example of the sort of interconnectedness present through the history of the British Empire. Although the links between different parts of the world certainly remain, it now seems all the more improbable that a British constituency could “cause” a certain person to be a ruler of a place more than half way around the world.

I was also fascinated by the description of Lord Patten’s relationship with the people of Hong Kong which also seems to reflect some of the sentiments present in other times and places of the British Empire.

As for Hong Kong, the man who was affectionately known as “Fatty Pang” (Pang being the Chinese transliteration of Patten) says he has returned several times in the past 10 years and gets a reception “rather like an ageing rock star”.

The complete story from BBC News: “Last British governor of Hong Kong”

Blogger and Berkeley iSchool PhD candidate Danah Boyd presents a seemingly catchy and provocative claim in an online essay, “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.” Facebook and MySpace are reflecting and creating a “digital divide” because:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.”

By contrast, Boyd argues:

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

As soon as I read those stereotypes, I wondered if Boyd had managed to channel New York Times columnist David Brooks, whose “bizzare misinterpretations” of American society have become legendary fodder for liberal bloggers (see Tom Tomorrow’s hilarious “Mr. McBobo,” http://thismodernworld.com/2973). As Philadelphia Magazine pointed out about Brooks, “There’s just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false.”

I’ve not studied the subscriber data from either Facebook or MySpace to know whether there in fact more “‘good’ kids” on the former any more than there are more “art fags” on the latter service. The language of her generalizations is inherently reductionist, but I’m surprised by how little she tries even to define the meanings of her own categories, much less give some actual numbers to back up the categories she ascribes to each service.

The larger conceptual problem that I see with the entire essay is the fact that Facebook and MySpace have completely different purposes. Although Facebook has grown in scale and in scope since its inception, its purpose was to replicate some of the pre-existing networks in the physical world — first colleges and universities, then geographies and employers, and only relatively recently in its history could people join without a “network.” To the extent that Facebook network groups are homogeneous, and to the extent that Facebook itself is middle class or upper middle class based this simply is indicative of the socio-economic stratifications already existing in American society. Is anyone really surprised to learn that a website primarily populated by college students is generally middle class or upper middle class in character?

By contrast, the MySpace network was originally used by musicians and artists looking to network themselves and their work to as large an audience as possible, as diverse a crowd as possible. Many people become “friends” with strangers they’ve never met and will never meet because they liked each others’ pictures or the same song. Users have hundreds of “friends” from seemingly everywhere. The point is that this is a completely different sort of community, organized differently, and, big surprise, the generalizations about its members are different.

Boyd does not seem to understand that the reason there was a “pedophile scare” in the media surrounding MySpace and not Facebook was because it’s much more difficult for a pedophile to target and befriend children on Facebook than it is on MySpace. A comparison would be the way that the online classified marketplace Craigslist operates as opposed to the newly introduced classified ad section of Facebook. Craigslist, offering users the sense of anonymity, is home to a variety of ads for “escorts,” maintains an “erotic services” section, has a personals section which reads like pornography. I’ve never seen an ad for a prostitute on Facebook. Maybe it will happen, maybe it has happened, but I am guessing that having one’s picture and profile a click away from an ad will keep everything rated PG-13, PG, or G. There’s no “erotic services” section in the Facebook ads. That different people will be using these sites for different purposes seems completely obvious.

There’s another huge conceptual flaw with the entire argument and that is the fact that most individuals belong to multiple social networking websites. Facebook users frequently join MySpace and vice versa. Boyd tries to suggest that while MySpace is accessible to Facebook members and is generally known, the reverse is not true. Preppy kids can go slumming on MySpace, but not the other way around. That’s just ridiculous, especially when she gives only anecdotal evidence to suggest how many users of each service are aware of the other. Boyd would do well to consider the quantitative evidence published recently by Parks Associates, which concludes:

MySpace users are chronically unfaithful…. Nearly 40% percent of MySpace users keep profiles on other social networking sites such as Friendster and Facebook. Loyalty among the smaller social networking sites is even lower, with more than 50% of all users actively maintaining multiple profiles.

These trends highlight a peculiar aspect of the market for social networking services. Nearly half of all social networkers regularly use more than one site; one in six use three or more. The result is an increasingly interlinked environment tied together by links, widgets, and the users themselves. “MySpace is a growing ecosystem and one that ironically now extends beyond MySpace itself,” said John Barrett, the lead author of the report, Web 2.0 & the New Net.

The survey, “Web 2.0 & the New Net”, is based on exactly the sort of data that boyd’s report is lacking. Its findings completely refute any idea of a “digital divide” between social networking websites. If anything, such websites promote mobility and connections between individuals who might not interact as easily in the real world.

It is discouraging to me that boyd’s essay is being so widely circulated on the internet. Even The Chronicle of Higher Education “Wired Campus” blog has picked it up and runs with it, “Social Networking and a New Digital Divide?”

By the time they get to college, many students already have pledged allegiance to one of the two social-networking giants — Facebook and MySpace. (Plenty of young men and women have profiles on both sites, but even most of those students check one site more than the other.)

Despite that parenthetical, the article makes no mention of the Parks Associates study or gives any quantifiable evidence. They cherry picked Boyd’s conclusion, concluding by asking college administrators if they’ve “noticed a social-networking class divide?” At least that piece ends with a question, rather than Boyd’s fairly trite, “MySpace and Facebook are new representations of the class divide in American youth. Le sigh.”

The real “le sigh” in my view should come from reading Boyd’s second paragraph about her methodology:

The practice of ‘ethnography’ is hard to describe in a bounded form, but ethnography is basically about living and breathing a particular culture, its practices, and its individuals. There are some countables. For example, I have analyzed over 10,000 MySpace profiles, clocked over 2000 hours surfing and observing what happens on MySpace, and formally interviewed 90 teens in 7 states with a variety of different backgrounds and demographics. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. I ride buses to observe teens; I hang out at fast food joints and malls. I talk to parents, teachers, marketers, politicians, pastors, and technology creators. I read, I observe, I document.

This strikes me as the sort of research methodology that gives ethnography (potentially even “social science” more generally) a bad name. Which 10,000 MySpace profiles did she pick out of millions? How many Facebook profiles did she look at? How many Facebook profiles could she look at considering many of them are visible only to friends or network members? How was the sample group of 90 teens chosen? At least that’s “only the tip of the iceberg.”

Thankfully, the Valleywag blog picked up on the major methodological problems with Boyd’s work with “The Shaky Sociology of Social Networks.” It’s sort of embarrassing that this blog manages to ask critical questions that escape The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Valleywag even goes so far as to show a graph in a follow up piece, “THE CHART: Measuring the Social Network Divide,” which shows the difference in average income levels of MySpace, Facebook and general web users. This difference is not surprising, of course, because Facebook began as a social networking site for students at elite universities, spread to all colleges and universities, and now to companies and regions.

Again, this doesn’t seem that shocking to me, given the different purposes of the various social networking sites. So, while Valleywag is right to point out the flawed methodology, they still accept the Boyd’s paper’s completely flawed conclusion. “Le sigh” indeed.

Men who wear kilts in Great Britain may soon by subject to new legal regulations designed to protect endangered animals whose fur is frequently used for the “sporran” piece.

The BBC reports:

Kilt wearers could face prosecution if they do not have a licence for their sporran under new legislation which has been introduced in Scotland.

The laws are designed to protect endangered species like badgers and otters, whose fur used to be favoured by sporran makers.

The legislation applies to animals killed after 1994.

Applicants must prove that the animal was killed lawfully before they will be able to get a licence.

The conservation regulations were designed to close a number of loopholes and bring Scotland into line with other EU members.

It’s interesting that the law will require an individual to prove affirmatively that an animal was killed lawfully, rather than placing the burden of regulation on sellers of the items or manufacturers.

It also seems like the law would be difficult to enforce.

Still, what is most noteworthy to me about this story is the way that things associated with “tradition” in the United Kingdom (whether they actually represent a “real” cultural tradition is another point entirely) are being chipped away. Although the UK clings strongly to many particular traditions that are not in line with the EU (most notably retaining its currency), there is a general attempt, of which this story is one specific example, to comply with ever more rules and regulations originating in Europe.

The complete story from BBC News: “Sporran wearers may need licence”

Like, it seems, everyone else interested in technology, society, and business, The New York Times devotes a good deal of attention to Google. Its latest assessment about the search company and its prospects focuses on potential challengers to Google and how they might capture a piece of the market.

The entire article is focused on evaluating the whether Google can accurately be characterized as a business defined by its algorithm, its technical, mechanistic solution; and whether this emphasis opens the door to competitors who are able to adapt more of the “human” element. One search company is paying its employees and users to create results pages which seem to be more fruitful than Google’s.

A hand-built Mahalo search-results page has one conspicuous advantage over Google’s: grouping into subthemes, which make a page of links much easier to scan and to find items of particular interest. For example, Mahalo’s page about Paris Hilton, the site’s top search subject last week, arranges the recommended links into clusters including news, photos, gossip, satire and humor. The use of subject categories also eliminates the need to provide, as Google does, two-line text excerpts from the listed sites to provide clues about the site’s contents.

On the other hand, the article acknowledges that it is not entirely fair to characterize Google only in terms of its algorithm. The company is experimenting with more human results driven pages, and considers itself more of a hybrid of the two extremes.

One thing that is not explicitly considered in the article is the ways that the “machines” are becoming smarter and closer to human thought processes. Frankly, I think that the idea of paying people to edit search result pages and group items based on categories that are intuitive to humans seems amazingly time consuming. I think that the truly innovative research will come in the area of making the machines organize the search results better, more like humans would do.

Still, considering how far Google has come in the past ten years, it boggles the mind to think what the landscape for internet search, information organization and retrieval will look like in another decade.

The complete article from The New York Times: “The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip”

The recent debate about a new charter for the European Union, which would serve as its de-facto “constitution” reveals not only how relative tenuous some of the group’s ties remain but also how many of the present day political struggles are rooted in history.

Paralleling some of the debates during the American Constitutional Convention, Poland had opposed the new agreement, mostly because it would allocate votes based on population which would give other nations greater representation. According to The New York Times, Poland’s objection was based on more than simply an ideal of fair play and equal representation.

Warsaw shocked its European Union colleagues by invoking Nazi Germany at the meeting and arguing that it deserved political compensation for its losses in World War II.

Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland argued, “If Poland had not had to live through the years of 1939-45, Poland would today be looking at the demographics of a country of 66 million.” The Polish delegation even brought a team of 10 mathematicians to Brussels to ensure that it was not duped into agreeing to an unfavorable voting system.

Disputes like this remind me about the extent to which the memory of the Second World War looms in the present day political disputes in Europe. Despite the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the “divided Europe” there are still significant divisions in Europe that are based upon the war and its aftermath. Poland’s independence was twice restored, first from Nazi Germany in 1944-1945, and second from the Soviet Union in the 1980s, but the demographic consequences of the war are unavoidable.

In a similar way, scholars and journalists have noted how many, especially Eastern European, Jewish communities were simply obliterated by the Holocaust, to the extent that they have not come back even more than 50 years years.

This is not to say that the Second World War explains all disputes about the composition of the European Union, but rather to suggest that the political unity Europe currently is attempting to consecrate is very much a historical anachronism. Its success is still very much in doubt.

The article in The New York Times described another nation’s objections to the agreement. Although not related to the Second World War, they are based on a certain conception of the nation’s role in Europe. Britain had problems with the agreement because some of its language seemed to impinge its sovereignty:

Key obstacles to a new treaty began to fall away late Friday. Britain, which had also threatened a veto, accepted formation of a new office for foreign policy, withdrawing reservations over the plan after negotiators scrapped the title “foreign minister,” which offended London’s sensitivities about preserving its national sovereignty.

Britain won further changes, including guarantees that its employment and social security laws would not be affected by a European Union charter of rights and that it would not be outvoted on justice and home affairs questions.

These objections seem to fit with the traditional conception that the British have had of themselves: that the nation was both a part of Europe and apart from Europe. Traditional English rights and liberties are sacrosanct, and the British ability to preserve them in the fact of a united Europe shows the clout that the nation retains despite the loss of its Empire.

The final point of interest in the article is the claim at the end that the French President made about his unique ability to bring Poland toward the compromise solution.

Mr. Sarkozy said psychological and historical factors made relations between France and Poland less tense than relations between Poland and Germany.

Despite the tentative agreement, there are still numerous hurdles to final ratification and implementation of the treaty. Referendums will need to take place in all or almost all of the member nations, and Poland managed to press for delayed implementation of the proportional representation based on national population until 2014 at the earliest. I think it will be most interesting to see over the coming years whether the populations of these European countries are as able to overcome their collective memories of the past and of their national identities as their leaders seem at least temporarily to been able to achieve at the conference.

The complete story from The New York Times: “Leaders in Deal on Europe’s Charter”

A brief article in The Guardian suggests that Tony Blair will convert to Catholicism after he retires as Prime Minister. Apparently he used his last meeting with Pope to discuss matters relating to his personal conversion, among other things.

It is interesting to me how this story shows how Britain today is caught between its traditional staunchly Protestant identity and its contemporary relative indifference to religion. The newspaper coverage was very brief, suggesting a relatively unimportant, personal interest story in addition to something at present unconfirmed. Yet, that Blair (if, in fact, he is going to do this) feels compelled to wait until he relinquishes his office shows that it would be something of a “big deal” for a British leader to leave the Church of England.

Tony Blair yesterday used his last official foreign engagement before leaving office to tell Pope Benedict he wanted to become a Roman Catholic, a Vatican source said last night.

But, in talks lasting more than half an hour, the outgoing Prime Minister was left in no doubt that the Pope took a dim view of his record in office. A statement issued afterwards by the Vatican said there had been a frank exchange of views.

The complete article from The Guardian: “Blair tells Pope: Now Im ready to become a Catholic”

Amazon.com is following Google’s example and embarking on a project to digitize books in university libraries. I think there are a few features of their attempt which, if they follow through, could make their efforts more useful to historians and scholars.

The Chronicle of Higher Education explains:

But, unlike Google and Microsoft, Amazon will not limit people to reading the books online. Thanks to print-on-demand technology, readers will be able to buy hard copies of out-of-print books and have them shipped to their homes.

And Amazon will sell only books that are in the public domain or that libraries own the copyrights to, avoiding legal issues that have worried many librarians — and that have prompted publishers to sue Google for copyright infringement.

Amazon is clearly not taking the “conquer the world” approach that Google has and is not attempting to scan and catalogue every book in existence. This seems like a safe way to go, and it is, perhaps, an indication of the difference in corporate cultures between the two companies.

What really impresses me is the idea that they will make it very easy to purchse copies of rare or out of print books using on-demand printing technology. This is going to be absolutely amazing for scholars who locate a book in some other library and do not want to go through the Interlibrary Loan process and/or need their own copy for extensive research. Hopefully Google will find some way to follow suit.

The complete story from The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Amazon Will Digitize Universities’ Books and Sell Print-on-Demand Copies”

Amazing to think about the numbers of people around the world who not only have internet access but also have high speed broadband connections. The United States still has the highest number of broadband connections, but the trends indicate that China will surpass it later this year. South Korea remains in the lead in terms of the percentage of its population with high speed connections. Even Great Britain (not in the top ten list) has 55% of its population online.

The Guardian reports the latest statistics:

Almost 300 million people worldwide are now accessing the internet using fast broadband connections, fuelling the growth of social networking services such as MySpace and generating thousands of hours of video through websites such as YouTube.

There are more than 1.1 billion of the world’s estimated 6.6 billion people online and almost a third of them are now accessing the internet on high-speed lines. According to the internet consultancy Point Topic, 298 million people had broadband at the end of March and that is already estimated to have shot over 300 million. The statistics, however, paint a picture of a divided digital world.

Amazing to think back to what these numbers were 10 years ago and to ponder what they will be in another decade.

The complete story from The Guardian: “China catches up on US for fast internet as Africa gets left behind”

Google Apps is the implementation of Google applications like Gmail and Docs except customized for a particular domain. It’s pretty cool that they offer all of these features tightly integrated together to pretty much anyone with a domain name who wants them.

The BBC and The Chronicle of Higher Education report that many universities around the world are taking Google up on the offer and implementing Google Apps at their schools.

In Dublin, the news service says, “the addresses and domain name still remain the same — but underneath the bonnet, it’s a service provided by Google.” Trinity College officials say they made the decision to outsource because it let them maintain a robust e-mail system at no additional cost; Google does all the work. 

Arizona State University made the same decision late last year to switch to Gmail, which also comes with a calendar and instant messaging, two items that are very attractive to students. 

My school, the University of California, Berkeley, is not one of these universities. I feel like this is really unfortunate and that the world’s most prominent public university is missing out big time.

The standard UC Berkeley email service, CalMail, offers students, faculty, and staff 250 MB of email storage (the quota until about a month ago was an even more paltry 100 MB). Email through Google Apps would offer more than 2GB of free space for every account. The spam filtering on CalMail similarly only just recently improved from “horrible” to “marginal.” Of course, Gmail’s spam filtering is legendary and very good.

The Google Apps service is completely free as well, including the storage costs, support costs, etc. I wonder how much money that would save a school like UC Berkeley.

Apart from those very tangible benefits, it seems like there would be huge potential for student and faculty collaboration and communication through Google Apps. The Apps include Google’s talk application, meaning that all email addresses would also have the instant message capability. Same thing goes for the Google document relation applications, notebooks, etc.

Obviously I could see a university have strong misgivings about turning over so much of its infrastructure to Google - basically the concern would be “selling out” to a corporation that would data mine users, pitch them ads and do all sorts of “evil” things. The thing is that many individuals already make that choice by signing up for Gmail or another free web-based email service. Obviously there is a huge difference between one person making a choice like that and an institution imposing such a decision on everyone. I wonder, however, what a company like Google, self-desirous of not doing “evil,” would be willing to promise a university in order to gain its adoption of Google Apps. I suspect they might be willing to make a pretty favorable deal.

What Google Apps for education seems to have the potential for solving is the problem of universities with underfunded IT departments and infrastructure. 100 MB of email storage, even the current 250 MB, is ridiculously low. (memo to the university - that unworkably low quota might be a reason why so many students and faculty have their own Gmail accounts already). 100 MB is 50 2 MB PDFs or images, 250 MB is 125 of the same. I know many faculty members and students who send and receive this amount or more of documents in the span of a week or less.

Providing university-wide document sharing, collaboration, chat, etc. capabilities is something not even on the horizon in the current IT planning. The only thing that we have similar is bSpace, Berkeley’s implementation of Sakai, which is great, but is designed for class and project collaboration. A Google Apps implementation would complement that, by proving more advanced collaborative features for students in day to day life (in and outside of the classroom) as well as better supporting ad hoc groupings and sharing.

Something else that Google Apps provides that there is only a half-baked campus equivalent of current is calendar service. Right now, faculty and staff have access to CalAgenda which is an implementation of the Oracle collaboration suite calendar. It works, but it costs the campus (which of course passes on to individual departments) a variety of fees. And it is limited to those signed up. By contrast the Google Apps calendar is tied to an individual’s account, meaning every student, faculty, staff, affiliate, etc. would have a calendar. It seems like in addition to saving money, this sort of universal implementation would cut through quite a few scheduling Gordion knots.

Google and Google Apps have limitations and are certainly not perfect, but I wonder the sort of system they could become for my university if they were implemented here. It seems like Berkeley’s expertise and funds could be used to customize and tailor the Google Apps system to the campus’ needs, while still saving so much money.

I’m also really curious what the response percentage would be if students, faculty and staff were polled on the issue. I suspect that a significant number would support an alternative to the current IT services.

The complete article from The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Wired Campus Blog: Google Mail Takes Over Campuses Worldwide”

The complete article from BBC News: “Google’s Email for Universities”