Categories
Art

Body Worlds

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I went to the Body Worlds exhibit at the St. Louis Science Center today. If you’ve not heard of this, it’s an exhibit of preserved human bodies formed into shapes to best demonstrate the human anatomy.

The human bodies are without skin, so that the muscle, bone, tendons, organs show. Believe me when I say that there is nothing at all gross about the exhibit. On the contrary, it was all rather fascinating. Our bodies are incredibly sophisticated machines, and the exhibits were a celebration of our wonderful sophistication.

In addition to the staged human bodies, the show also featured cross sections and preserved organs, both diseased and healthy. Another interesting type of display was the vein work sculptures, displaying only the veins.

What was terrible, though, is that I had the strongest craving for beef jerky during the show. I confessed my hunger to my roommate, and he said that he had the same craving. As we were leaving, we could hear the people behind us, debating where to go to lunch because they were starved.

There was something very Freudian about all of this.

update

I gather there was or is a 20/20 investigation of Body Worlds, especially about where the bodies originated. According to the information I know, the bodies used in the displays at the Body Worlds in St. Louis were all donated at the behest of the individuals, and with permission of the individual families.

As for whether the show was purely entertainment, most of the show is devoted to a closer look at organs, including those diseased, as compared to healthy. Displays of lungs damaged by smoking, livers damaged by drinking, and one cross section display of an obese man with diagrams detailing of the damage to his body based on his weight–including a cross section of the pacemaker he wore–were juxtaposed with bodies seemingly in the peak of health and vitality.

Was the work educational?

One elderly woman wearing a camel colored coat, and a hat with a little feather was talking with three kids who part of a school tour group. Their discussion was occurring over an exhibit of hip bones, including one demonstrating a hip replacement. Evidently, the kids had been at the display, looking at the hip replacement when the lady heard them talking. She started telling them about her own hip replacement, her mobility before and after, answering their questions. The small group of four were so intent, they were completely unaware of the kids’ chaperons, patiently waiting for them to finish so they could move on.

Was the work art? Art is, as always, in the eye of the beholder.

Categories
Money People

Obscene Math

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I was a double major in university, psychology and computer science. Double majors weren’t all that unusual, except that most doubles were in fields that had some class overlap, such as computer science and math. The only overlap I had in my two fields were statistics courses. I could take undergraduate and graduate level statistics classes in the psych department to meet a portion of my computer science math requirements.

There were only two of us signed up for graduate level statistics class, so the professor had us meet in his office. The statistics were so complicated, we had to use computers and software created in the days before “usability” was a criteria for all of our course work. I’ve since managed to forget most of my statistics training except for one valuable lesson: don’t trust statistics. If you’re determined, you can manipulate statistics to prove any point, regardless of how extreme.

A case in point is a New York Times op piece by two gentlemen, Michael Cox and Richard Alm, from the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas. According to their statistics, there really aren’t two separate classes, rich and poor, in this country. In fact, the poor live a comparable lifestyle to the rich.

Income statistics, however, don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ living standards. Looking at a far more direct measure of American families’ economic status — household consumption — indicates that the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society […] if we compare the incomes of the top and bottom fifths, we see a ratio of 15 to 1. If we turn to consumption, the gap declines to around 4 to 1. A similar narrowing takes place throughout all levels of income distribution. The middle 20 percent of families had incomes more than four times the bottom fifth. Yet their edge in consumption fell to about 2 to 1.

The data the authors use to perform their statistics is based on the fact that though rich people invest or bank their extra income, while poor families “magically” live beyond their means, they all “consume equally” and therefore are more equal than not.

Of course, Cox and Alm gloss over the fact that most poor people are overridden in debt, barely keeping ahead of bankruptcy in order to indulge in frivolous expenditures like medical treatment.

No, Aunt Sally has a 19 inch color TV in her mobile home while Aunt May has a 60 inch top of the line plasma TV in her pad overlooking Central Park, so there really is no difference between the two.

It’s true that the share of national income going to the richest 20 percent of households rose from 43.6 percent in 1975 to 49.6 percent in 2006, the most recent year for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has complete data. Meanwhile, families in the lowest fifth saw their piece of the pie fall from 4.3 percent to 3.3 percent.

Income statistics, however, don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ living standards.

Speechless. I’m just…speechless…

update More from Paul Krugman and Dean Baker, especially in regards to flawed sampling forming the basis for the pretty charts.

update 2 Excellent commentary from The Big Picture, who focuses only on exposing the flaws in the statistics applied (because there’s not enough time to expose all the other flaws in the writing).

Categories
Web

Google is the new Cloverfield monster

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Oh, the horror! Google hijacks 404 pages!

The reality is that the new Google beta toolbar doesn’t hijack the 404 page if the site provides a 404 page or other form of web error handling. I tried the toolbar out this morning, and the only case I found where the Google toolbar provided a search page is the site matching the screenshots below, and the site given in the original post on this topic. The latter site provided a lame looking redirect back to the main page. However, other sites that redirected back to the home page for 404 errors did not have this problem, so the problem seems to be unique to this site.

If you’ve ever seen default 404 error handling, you know it’s basically useless.
[missing image]

Compare that with a page managed by the toolbar.

[missing image]

I would expect a search engine toolbar to provide useful, alternative methods of finding the content if the web site uses default error handling. However, according to Codswallop, Google steals your visitors.

Why is this “helpful” behavior bad? As well as a link to the domain root they provide a prominent search box pre-filled with search terms. The temptation is going to be to hit that search button, effectively taking away your visitor.

I would say any webmaster that doesn’t provide effective error handling pages for 404 errors doesn’t really care about losing visitors, do they?

update

Matt Cutts from Google explained that the toolbar looks for a result larger than 512 bytes. The example page is nothing more a broken HTML page, with a meta refresh and a link, all of which is less than 512 bytes. Those sites that do a direct redirect don’t, of course, return 404 to trigger the toolbar. End of story

.end update

What really surprised me about this story, though, is that if people are so quick to accuse Google of ‘evil’ behavior in an innocuous situations like this, why was the idea of Google helping to bail out Yahoo to keep the latter out of the hands of Microsoft seen as a “good” thing? I would think a search engine monopoly in the hands of Google would be potentially more evil than Google providing useful features for default 404 error handling.

This environment is confusingly inconsistent at times.

Categories
RDF Specs SVG XHTML/HTML

Our bouncing baby markup has growed up

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

On today’s tenth anniversary of the birth of XML, Norm Walsh writes:

I joined O’Reilly on the very first day of an unprecedented two-week period during which the production department, the folks who actually turn finished manuscripts into books, was closed. The department was undergoing a two-week training period during which they would learn SGML and, henceforth, all books would be done in SGML…My job, I learned on that first day, would be to write the publishing system that would turn SGML into Troff so that sqtroff could turn it into PostScript. “SGML”, I recall thinking, “well, at least I know how to spell it.”

Ah yes. “Unix Power Tools” was formatted as SGML, the one and only book at O’Reilly I worked on that wasn’t in a Word format. I must express a partiality to my NeoOffice, though the SGML system was ideal for cross-referencing and indexing. OpenOffice ODT, or OpenDocument text, will be the most likely format for the next UPT. Just another example of the permanent/impermanence of web trends.

Norm also mentions about HTML5 possibly being the nail in this child of SGML’s coffin, but as I wrote recently, the folks behind HTML5 have solemnly assured us this specification also includes XHTML5. I’d hate to think we’re giving up on the benefits of XHTML just when they’re finally being realized by a more general audience.

Of course, I’m also fond of RDF/XML, which seems to cause others a great deal of pain, the pansies. And I’ve never hidden my SVG fandom and SVG is based in XML. I must also confess to preferring XML over JSON–you know, good enough for granddad, good enough for me. Atom rules. Or is that, Atom rocks? I’m also sure XML has squeezed between the joints of many of my other applications, and I just don’t know it.

Categories
Legal, Laws, and Regs

Monetary damages and cellphone contracts

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

AKMA writes on a situation too many people still face: unreasonably long cellphone contracts and outrageous termination fees. I wrote of my own experiences with cellphone termination fees last year. After reading AKMA’s post, I thought now would be a good time to provide an update to the story.

First, I paid the outrageous early termination fee bill. Regardless of whatever action I would or would not take, not paying this bill puts the account into collections and that way lies a whole other nightmare. If you don’t pay the fee, you’ll get a late payment mark in your credit report, and the cellphone companies almost immediately turn the account over for collection.

Once in collection, you’ll be hounded day and night, as mystery charges get tacked on until the final bill is so bloated, it’s like a minnow has suddenly been transformed into a whale. You’ll also most likely get sued–unpaid cellphone bills account for a significant proportion of the collection law suits filed in state courts–which gives the collection company and/or the cellphone company the edge, legally. So, not paying the fee was not an option.

I then went to town, researching the laws surrounding cellphone termination fees, how to file a small claim case in Missouri, as well as people’s experiences with termination fees (usually detailed in weblogs or forums). It was when reading through weblogs that I discovered an interesting fact.

Did you know that in many states, you can’t be charged a termination fee above and beyond the actual monetary damages suffered by the party with whom you’re terminating said contract? Even if the contract includes a clause that specifies a given amount to terminate the contract early, that amount has to bear some relationship to actual, real damages suffered by the other party.

In contract law, a provision specifying termination damages is called a liquidated damages provision. The purpose of such a provision is to state what damages would be in cases where actual damages might be difficult to assess. However, when challenged the entity behind the contract must be able to defend such a provision, either by demonstrating the difficulty or impossibility of proving such damages, or by demonstrating that the charge closely matches the actual damages suffered. From the FreeAdvice site:

Sometimes business contracts contain a “liquidated damages” provision, providing for payment of a certain fixed amount in the event of a breach. These provisions typically are upheld if the actual damages would have been extremely difficult to ascertain and the amount of the liquidated damages is reasonable. Courts generally do not enforce liquidated damages that are intended to serve as a penalty or are far in excess of the amount of damages the parties may reasonably forecast.

In all my personal investigations into consumer law, one thing I’ve discovered over the years is that contracts are not ironclad or immutable. In other words, a company can write a contract and you can sign it, but that doesn’t mean the contract or any part of it is enforceable, or that you’re forced to comply with the provisions without any other recourse.

A great disservice has been done to the American people in the last hundred or so years. We have been brought up to believe that contracts are law, as well as acts of honor, a belief reinforced by companies such as Verizon and Sprint. After all, one only has to call customer service of either of the aforementioned company to hear how the how enforceable is the company’s contract, how defenseless we are to debate or quibble with any part of it.

However, it is up to the courts to truly determine the enforceability of the contracts (a right, I want to add, which companies have been attempting to erode by adding arbitration clauses). If a contract or any part of it is not enforceable, and we research our case and come to court prepared, the courts are just as likely to side with us as the companies.

As for the indoctrinated sense of “honor” when it comes to contracts, tell me how honorable is it to charge a $500.00 fee for two cellphones, 3 and 8 years old, and failing? Or to arbitrarily change contract terms? Or force a renewal of a contract, just because you want a cellphone that works? To corporations, there is no honor in contracts, only corporate benefit and enforceability.

I digress. Returning to the concept of “liquidated damages”, the reason that cellphone companies ostensibly give for the cellphone termination fee is that the cellphone company is subsidizing the cost of the equipment, i.e. the cellphones. However, as the current spate of class action lawsuits against most cellphone providers are stating, if this is true then the termination fee should prorate, reflecting the prorated value of the equipment so provided, over time.

It is ludicrous to assume that the monetary costs to the cellphone company based on them giving you a cellphone would suddenly accrue the last month you have your contract. No, the value of the equipment, and their investment in it, would depreciate over time. The termination fee should reflect this depreciation.

(Perhaps what I should have done is offer Sprint $1.83 to cover any perceived value for two cellphones. I imagine this would be more than adequate to cover any income derived from scrapping both phones.)

Armed with anecdotal accounts and actual examination of Missouri state law, I was ready to take my case against Sprint to Small Claims court. First, though, I did a look up using Missouri’s own Case Net to see how successful people were against Sprint. Lo and behold, I found that everyone who had filed against Sprint–and there weren’t many–had won a default judgement. Why? Because it costs Sprint more to defend against the case in small claims court than to just pay the judgement.

Now, I imagine that buried in all of the agreements Sprint had sent out over the years was a clause insisting on the use of arbitration rather than the courts if people like you and me want to sue the company. However, there’s another fact about arbitration that comes into play with companies like Sprint: if I initiate a suit in small claims court, Sprint would have to send in a lawyer and file a response to have the case removed to arbitration. Then, Sprint and I would go, back and forth, about arbitration law and applicability–not to mention whether Sprint’s arbitration clause was conscionable (equally fair) and so on–until the courts either sided with me, or with Sprint.

While all this back and forth is going on, Sprint is paying for the services of a lawyer who would probably charge in the first two hours the same amount as my claim–and I can guarantee taking up more than two hours. Just because the Supreme Court has bent over backwards to kiss corporate butt in favor of arbitration doesn’t mean we have to roll over and play dead. There are arguments and defenses one can make against arbitration. Nor, since the suit originated in small claims court and according to Missouri law, can I be forced to pay the lawyer’s fees even if I lose the case. I would only lose the filing fee: $35.00.

In fact, it is the cost of the attorney as compared to the possible value of an award that leads many companies, and most likely Sprint, too, to *add a provision to their arbitration clauses that would allow small claims actions. Telecommunication, manufacturing, and most other companies outside of the finance industry add arbitration clauses to prevent class action lawsuits, not “nickel and dime” small claims cases like mine. Well, not nickel and dime to me, definitely nickel and dime to Sprint.

With all this in mind, I decided I would give Sprint another chance before going to court. I submitted a claim to the Better Business Bureau, detailing not only the problem, but also the course I would be forced to take if resolution could not be satisfied via intervention by the BBB. The important aspect of all of this is that the course I would take was one I would follow. I was not bluffing, and it was important to communicate the sincerity of my intent.

Sprint did respond just before the BBB deadline, denying my claim. The BBB asked if I would be willing to compromise. I responded back that at one point in time I was willing to compromise but Sprint was unwilling. Now, there would be no compromise: I wanted a refund of the entire termination fee and state and local taxes or I would have no recourse but to take this to court.

This week I received a check from Sprint for a full refund. I’d like to think that the reason I got the check is that Sprint is beginning to realize that it would be a more successful company working with customers, rather than “trapping” us into untenable contracts enforced with unreasonable fees. Verizon was the first cellphone company to make this determination, prorating termination fees based on how far into the contract the customer is. Other companies have followed suit, including Sprint, though its prorate program came after my termination.

I’d like to think the company saw the light, but I don’t think Sprint, or any of the cellphone companies, is there yet. Until they are, challenging the contract terms and termination fees via the BBB and small claims court, though not the ideal path, did work, at least in this instance.

I’m not advising AKMA to take the same course I did. I won’t give out legal advice, as I’m not a lawyer and I’m not qualified. Hopefully though, AKMA and others with similar cellphone termination fee problems will discover some ideas in regards to their own situations from this recounting.

*I found a copy of the most recent Sprint agreement. It does allow for small claims court cases.