June 2. 2008 by Dick.

I know it doesn’t seem true, but data is everything. Oh, sure, we see plenty of examples of apparent professionals who punch the fire alarm on a hunch, but advertisers want to measure everything. If you don’t know how many people see your ad, if you don’t know when they see your ad, if you don’t know who sees your ad, you aren’t selling. I’m talking names and addresses, people.

Billboards seem unlikely data gatherers, eh?

But wait! Imagine a billboard with a camera that can “look back” at passers-by and gather details about gender, age, expression, and time-span of the contact. “We’re not storing actual images of the peeps we see,” saith the billboard owners, “so privacy is not a problem.”

Horse puckey.

Facial recognition programs already use surveillance cameras in public places to store, sort, and process actual images of the passers-by and to compare those images to the stored images of known bad guys.

That’s pretty cool from a Homeland Security standpoint.

But wait.

Those who would give up an essential liberty for
temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.
–Benjamin Franklin

Huh.

A billboard camera that photographs passers-by and a facial recognition program that can tap the databases of every state DMV. Driver’s licenses have photos now; the issuing states require you to update your photo periodically so they can actually identify you. The technology exists now. All it takes is a few lines of code to mix and match.

“Oh, that would never happen,” you say. “We have too many safeguards.” Betcha you think the FBI needs a warrant to rummage around in your phone, email, financial, and library stuff, too.

Can you spell G-e-o-r-g-e O-r-w-e-l-l meets D-a-v-i-d O-g-i-l-v-y?

So. How long will it be before both the Feds and Proctor & Gamble have not only your Social Security number but also your last year’s income tax return?

Posted in Marketing, Society, Random Access | 4 Comments »

May 26. 2008 by Dick.

Today is Memorial Day in the United States. The holiday once known as Decoration Day commemorates the men and women who perished under the flag of this country.

Although the recognized birthplace of Memorial Day is Waterloo, New York, many Vermont Towns including North Puffin marked the end of the Civil War with a day and ceremonies to decorate the graves of the fallen soldiers. Today, in addition to parades and remembrances, Vermont offers Memorial Day Weekend Specials (3 nights and Sunday brunch for just $150 for two people) and an Open Studio Weekend with artists marking the beginning of summer. Other areas really do treat Memorial Day as the first day of summer. The Indy 500 today has run on Memorial Day weekend since 1911.

Lest we forget, the Americans we honor did not “give their lives.” They did not merely perish. They did not just cease living, check out, croak, depart, drop, expire, kick off, kick the bucket, pass away or pass on, pop off, or bite the dust. Their lives were taken from them by force on battlefields around the world. They were killed. Whether you believe they died with honor, whether you believe our cause just, died they did.

There is no end to the mutts who would kill our men and women and would then turn around and kill their own. If I had but one wish granted on this day, I wish not another soldier dies. Ever. But die they did and die they will.

Because those men and women died, I get to write these words. And you get to read them.

Posted in Society, Holidays, Death, Big Thoughts, Random Access | No Comments »

April 7. 2008 by Dick.

An email trumpeting that “Casa D’Ice is back!” has made the rounds again.

For anyone not in the know, Casa D’Ice is a restaurant in North Versailles, Pennsylvania, some 10 miles from Pittsburgh. The restaurant has a lighted message board sign out front, the kind that typically heralds the daily special or the Sunday sermon with black slide-in-the-groove lettering. Outspoken owner Bill Balsamico changes the sign every couple of weeks when he feels the need to make a political statement.

I don’t think Mr. Balsamico uses factcheck.org. In fact (heh) I reckon that 90.31% of all online content is not fact checked.

Fact checking is a reporting term for verifying statements through several reliable, independent sources before publication. We expect the professional media to do it and we censure the professional media when they do not. The Dan Rather fiasco over his CBS News story about President Bush’s Air National Guard service is a case in point. His statement on the documents that he reported were written by President Bush’s National Guard commander lead the 272,000 hits returned when I Googled “Dan Rather” “CBS News.”

I did not fact check my 90% statistic. I made it up out of thin air but I’ll suggest that someone out there can correct me. I’ll further suggest that I’m within 20% of the correct answer. That may be seriously poor statistically but it still means there is a lot of misinformation online.

According to another email this week, a 1,200 pound Great White shark was caught in the Chesapeake over the weekend. That’s wrong, too.

This Casa D’Ice sign caught my eye first: “President Bush’s great fuel efficiency program on trucks & SUVs [will] save 30 gallons in 2008.” I couldn’t find anything to back that up. The current energy bill requires auto companies to achieve a 35-mpg CAFE by 2020. “Social security recipients get 3 dollar raise per month.” The actual Social Security Benefit COLA Increase for 2008 was 2.3 Percent.

I like Mr. Balsamico’s signs anyway. They are pithy–sometimes Deckish–and popular. His heart is in the right place even if he sometimes uses “Internet wisdom” for his source. I have singled him out not because he is doing a bad thing but because he could do his good thing so much better. More people see Mr. Balsamico’s signs than read this blog. Since the signs have gone viral, many many more people see photos of Mr. Balsamico’s thoughts than read this blog.

All that leads me to posit this theory: Internet Information Popularity is inversely proportional to Internet Information Accuracy.

That’s a rather sad commentary.

FactCheck.org describes its own goal as “[reducing] the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.” The Annenberg Public Policy Center project is run by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. It is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.

Posted in Politics, Society, Media, Grumpery, Big Thoughts, Random Access | 1 Comment »