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METAFORIX MAIL Volume 1, Issue 18 November 28 2000 CONTENTS AT A GLANCE: ON MY MIND: Election,
Continued
ON MY MIND [From the Editor] I promised myself that I wouldn't write any more about the election. An entire issue on the subject was just about enough. As a dyed-in-the-wool political junkie, it was hard enough to talk election without really talking politics. Now, thanks to all those infotech publications that fill my mailbox and my inbox, I have several great excuses for election redux. First, as even the most casual TV news viewer now knows, our three-week-long election night is due in part to antiquated information technology. Here, at the dawn of the 21st Century, we are using early 20th Century technology to enact the provisions of our late 18th Century Constitution. It's obvious, says Wired, that "Ballots Need an Upgrade -- Duh!" Most American jurisdictions use voting technologies that have not been updated since the 1960s. Their lack of reliability has been a dirty little secret for years, and a joy to politicians, say the experts. A faulty system is always a good excuse for a recount. We just haven't been aware of the prevalence of high error rates because we've never had such a close national election Second, this ballot thing is not simply an artifact of technology per se. It's also a problem of information design. As FEED makes clear in a dialog among four renowned information designers, a field considered "nerdy and esoteric" only a month ago is now at least "newsworthy" -- if not downright sexy. If your eyes would once have glazed over at the notion of web site usability testing (or if, perchance, you don't have a clue what "usability testing" means), consider the problems that might have been avoided if the Palm Beach Butterfly had been tested in advance by real live voters. We'll get back to usability testing another time, but you get the point. Third, though ATMs and other computerized voting systems have been touted by some as the solution, The New York Times reminds us that e-voting is not quite ready for prime time. Apart from public suspicions of change in general and computers in particular, computerized voting poses genuine threats. Secret ballots that can be audited if need be may turn out to be a contradiction in terms. The lack of a paper trail could turn out to be even worse than a trail of chads. And the sheer potential for havoc could be a powerful attraction to hackers, who might inflict enormous damage using relatively unsophisticated tools. Even expert researchers in online voting, such as Avi D. Rubin of AT&T Labs, caution that maintaining public trust in the system must be the paramount concern. For the present, it seems, we may be forced to choose between built-in counting errors and the health of our democracy. Let's hope that our options will have improved a year or two down the road. Cordially, Lois C.
Ambash, Editor
IN THE MEDIA [a recent news article, feature, or opinion piece] "World's
Dying Languages, Alive on the Web" The "Circuits" section of The New York Times -- published each Thursday and archived on the Technology channel of nytimes.com -- is a consistently valuable source of information on the Internet and other new media. Timely and remarkably free of undefined jargon, "Circuits" mixes feature articles with a number of regular columns. One of these is Michael Pollak's "Screen Grab," a weekly compendium of Web sites on a single topic. The column under discussion here is a fascinating introduction to how the Internet is being used to stave off the extinction of the world's 6,000 oral languages -- some of which have only a handful of elderly speakers left. Sites like Ethnologue and Terralingua emphasize the relationship between linguistic diversity and biodiversity. Others offer audio clips and learning resources for languages ranging from Cherokee to Gaelic. And, as Pollak points out, a University of Kansas site intended to help actors learn various dialects of English "suggests an untapped possibility for rare languages on the Internet."
To sample this linguistic potpourri and to read the full article, go to:
INFORMATICON The Sense
of Space and the Sense of Place "Hypertext erases distance. Everything on the Web is either here or connected to here. You don't know where it was before you looked at it. You don't know where it goes when it's gone. Space is blown to smithereens. The resulting ability to leap from any point to any other point has rightly been compared to the way the mind works. After all, if I ask you to think about a toaster oven and a dishwasher, your mind wouldn't have to travel any less mental distance from one to the other than it would from a dishwasher to, say, Ted Koppel. "Unfortunately, in appropriating one aspect of the way we think, hypertext abandons another equally strong aspect: the ability to put huge numbers of ideas into a single mental map, perceiving the whole while examining its parts. That sense of place that the old spatial world of print provides is more than just a warm, fuzzy feeling--it is information. And restoring that information to digital environments has been the goal of many different initiatives from many different disciplines."
Cyberspeak [the vocabulary of the information age] And You Had Trouble With .com, .net, and .org! In a previous Cyberspeak column, we discussed domain names, the part of an Internet address that appears after the @ sign in an e-mail address or after the "www." in a web site address. The present column is both an addendum and a correction. It's true, as mentioned in the earlier piece, that new domain name suffixes have had to be created to keep up with the burgeoning demand for unique Internet addresses. However, the possible new suffixes we cited had not yet been approved. They were merely under consideration by Icann (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organization created in 1998 by the US Department of Commerce to dismantle the monopoly on domain name registrations previously enjoyed by a single vendor. Two weeks ago, Icann announced seven new domain suffixes it plans to recommend to the Commerce Department to supplement .org, .net, .edu, and the ubiquitous .com (20 million strong and counting). The winners are .info and .biz for general use, .pro for professionals, .name for individuals, .museum for you guessed it, .aero for airline groups, and .coop for business cooperatives. Although the new suffixes will meet a documented need, the purchasers of the rights to them predict that profitability is several years away. Source: The New York Times, 11/17/00. SITE OF THE DAY [a nice place to visit] Deja Vu All Over Again? When it comes to the Internet, you may be an expert, a newbie, or a wannabe -- but odds are, even if you've been online for a while, it's hard to remember what the Web looked like the very first time you logged on. Enter DejaVu.org, a site that offers a visual history of the Internet, from the days before graphical browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer to the present. A timeline revisits the history of the Web, and an emulator allows you to view both old and contemporary sites through the lens of antiquated browsers. The emulator even prompts you with commands no longer in common use so that you can truly savor the experience. Technology is wonderful when it works. DejaVu.org reminds you how much more easily it works now than it did then. To visit this site, go to www.dejavu.org.
GUEST COLUMNISTS
WANTED! If your column is accepted for publication, it will be permanently posted on the Metaforix web site, along with a link to your e-mail address or URL. As a small token of appreciation, you will also receive a $10 gift certificate toward your next purchase at Amazon.com. To submit
a column for consideration, e-mail it to Please note that the links contained in Metaforix Mail are current as of the time of publication. Some of them may no longer be operative at the time you access past issues. To
Volume 1, Issue 17 November
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