Schools are important because they house a vulnerable population, children, and because they often end up being used as shelters when a major disaster hits.  I’ve been working on mapping California schools by pulling data from state web sites, adding geographic tagging as needed and putting it into a format that can be mapping with various tools, including Google Maps.  Below is a link to a map using data I’ve stored in Google Fusion Tables, which allows you to see all of California’s private schools and filter by their religious affiliation, which is helpful because churches often are also involved in disaster response.

California Private Schools – Note that you can zoom in, pan, etc., to view a particular area of the state.  You can also click on the icons to get detailed information about the school.

The underlying data is available as a Fusion Table.

Lesley Arnett Tujague died at Pardee Hospital on January 4, 2010 after a short illness. She was born Lesley Ruth Arnett on April 16, 1962 in Pittsburgh, Pa., and grew up in nearby Edgewood, graduating from The Ellis School and Chatham College in Pittsburgh, where she majored in English and Russian literature with a minor in art history.  She earned teaching credentials from California University of Pennsylvania.  During her Chatham years, she was an exchange student at Berea College in Kentucky. For nine years in St. Thomas, USVI, Lesley taught English at Charlotte Amalie High School, taught ballet, created award-winning Carnival costumes and grew orchids.

Lesley came to North Carolina in 1996 and lived here until she was married and moved to Pittsburgh in 2001.  She returned to North Carolina with her daughter in 2007.  A talented seamstress and designer, she created historically accurate costumes for re-enactments and local theater productions.

Lesley is survived by her five-year-old daughter Sarah, her parents, Will and Pat Arnett of Hendersonville, her sister Susie Nivin and husband David of Santa Barbara and their children James and Heather, her brothers John Arnett of Hendersonville and Nick Arnett and his wife Cindy of Santa Clara, California and their daughter Carrie.

A memorial service will be held on Friday, January 15th at the First United Methodist Church of Hendersonville at 12:30 p.m.  Children are welcome. In lieu of flowers, gifts may be made to the Sarah Yvette Tujague Educational Trust or the charity of your choice.

Here is a poem that my father, Will Arnett, wrote and read at the service.

A Message from Lesley

On a cold cold winter day
I suddenly found my fairy-angelic wings
And had to fly away at once,
Too fast to even say goodbye to my lovely lovely Sarah
Or Mom or Dad, or Susan and John and Nick,
Too fast to fold my wings and raise my arms
To wave goodbye or give a last important hug to everyone.
But I know you will recall
That as child, teacher, and loving mother
Arms for me were never for fighting back
Or holding swords and guns
Or even mainly for making pretty clothes
Or mixing cookie dough
On every mile I drove I tried to say to everyone
Arms are for hugging.

Lesley's car

If teeth are made for chewing
And wings are strong for flying
If feet are made for running
And the tongue for speaking words of love,
It’s no less true for me
Arms are for hugging.

In the darkness of our family’s grief, the darkness of what the future holds, I am grateful for many things.  I am grateful that Lesley’s Facebook page helped me to find her friends.  I am so grateful for all the messages of support, compassion and empathy that I am getting on my Facebook page and in emails.  Technology is helping us connect when we most need it.

Though it is hard to even write about it, I am grateful that my parents were able to use the Internet to find pictures to show Sarah what an intensive care unit looks like, so that she might not be overwhelmed when she saw her mommy for the last time.

In the midst of all of this, I am talking to a social media company about joining them as a product manager.  Although it is a hard time, I’m realizing that more than ever, that’s what I want to do, to be part of a community of people who are committed to using technology to build and nurture communities.

Dead on, Chuck.  I’m not in any way faulting Twitter by agreeing with Chuck.  There are good reasons that they are succeeding where others have failed at microblogging.  It is good that they are demonstrating the broad appeal and usefulness of this kind of communications.  The problem, as Chuck nailed it, is that they are centralized.  Compare this to blogging, which was designed from the start to be decentralized.  There are dozens of blogging platforms that you an run locally, on a rented host or at a site dedicated to hosting blogs.  Choices, choices, choices.  But if you want to tweet, there’s only one way to do it – Twitter.

One reason Twitter succeeded where others failed is that it has a good API and is extremely open when it comes to sharing data.  The default, unlike most other social media companies, is that all of your data is open to everyone, except for direct messages.  That’s fairly radical and perhaps more than anything else, has inspired developers to create many, many Twitter applications.

I caught the bug myself, attracted by the volume of data that is easily available.  I threw together TwURLed News, not with the idea of building a company around it, but because I wanted to see how well something like it would work.  It wasn’t very hard to built, has a back end that requires a BSD machine worth maybe $1,000 and the front end runs on a very low-cost hosting provider.  Amazing.

Still, I can’t believe this is the future of microblogging.  Instead of running applications that use the Twitter API on our desktops, it seems much more likely that we will end up running something like the Twitter API ourselves, which talks peer-to-peer instead of client-server.

Consider how Twitter and Google have opposing information flow.  The Google model is that people publish information on web servers, then Google’s robots gather the data. To access Google, you use a standard web client.  In the Twitter world, nothing gets published until and unless it is pushed to Twitter’s servers and a lot of the people who read Twitter-published information do so using custom clients.  I guess you can rationalize this by arguing that Twitter is getting its users to do all the work that Google’s robots would otherwise do, but that’s a terrible idea.  As Chuck pointed out, it doesn’t scale.

Consider also how different Twitter’s data flow is from blogging.  When you post a blog entry, you’re usually also publishing it as an RSS feed.  Outfits like Technorati (and Google, of course) send robots out to read those feeds and make them available via the web or newsreaders.  People call Twitter microblogging, but instead of encouraging people to tweet locally and make the tweetstream available to anybody who wants to retrieve it from your site, as with RSS, Twitter says no, you have to send your tweets to Twitter and then they become available to the public.  The pain of that centralization is already hurting Twitter, as developers complain about being unable to get even a single user’s entire tweet history, about being unable to search more than a few weeks’ data and other limitations.

So, here’s a thought.  How about if every Twitter application developer throws off the yoke of centralization and adds local (or hosted, via XML-RPC) RSS publishing as an option?  This is relatively simple for desktop apps – it could use the same mechanisms as RSS. It could actually be an RSS feed tagged as a tweetstream, so that anything that reads it will know that no entry will be more than 140 characters, expect hashtags, “@” screen names, etc.  Phone apps could use a proxy to do the same while continuing to publish the tweetstream on Twitter.

Imagine the services that could bloom if everybody’s tweetstream were available without haing to rely exclusively on Twitter and its limited resources?  In no time at all, we’d see comprehensive indexing and other value-added services.

So, why not?  I’m not suggesting anyone abandon Twitter, I’m just saying that microblogging will take off much faster if Twitter developers realize that they don’t have to depend only on Twitter to publish their tweets.

URLs in real-time media – blogs, microblogs, etc. – can be the foundation of near-real-time search relevance ranking.  This is simple in principle.  When a lot of people (or an intelligently selected set of people) suddenly start citing links to a given page or site, there is obviously something of interest there.  That is the kind of analysis that Google’s PageRank and similar algorithms use.  Each cite is a signifcant “vote” for the page.  When they occur in real-time media (v. static web pages), it provides a relevance metric that Google and its competitors aren’t touching yet.  The big search engines are not yet doing much in this domain.  Nobody has emerged as a leader in doing it comprehensively. 

In other words, as many people have pointed out, URLs in blogs, microblogs, etc., are the foundation of something like PageRank in near realtime.  But they become increasingly useless as they are uniquely shortened.

It would be interesting to figure out a motivation for the URL shorteners to offer comprehensive resolution to their APIs (given a long URL, return ALL shortened versions).  I can’t quite see why they would do that, but perhaps developers with a vision for real-time search (which probably is more correctly called monitoring rather than search) could lobby the shorteners to add that capability… or even create a shared repository as a community project that would also solve the linkrot problem.

One more thought… Twitter and others who do the shortened themselves have all of this data for the URLs they shorten.  As large customers of the shortening services, they have more influence than the individual developers, so perhaps that’s where the lobbying effort should focus.

I have to share my epiphany. ”Six Days in Fallujah” must be banned, since the company creating it says that it will allow players to ”become someone else,” specifically, the players apparently will become combatants in the battle for Fallujah.  Combatants are maimed.  Combatants are killed.  I know this because I’ve buried one.

No matter how entertaining it might be, we just can’t allow all these game players to be wounded and killed.  To use the classic example, the right to free speech doesn’t allow us to yell “Fire!” falsely  in a crowded theater.

I realized that the game needs to be banned when I received a personal email from the president of Atomic Games, Peter Tamte, in which he said he was misquoted by a reporter who wrote that he said  “The challenge was how to present the horrors of war in a game that is entertaining.”  Perhaps so.

However, Tamte also wrote to me, “We believe it is time for videogames to deal with complex issues and that videogames can give players deeper insight into the events in Iraq than passive forms of media, such as movies or TV, because videogames can make players become someone else.”

That’s when the light bulb came on.  I can become a Marine, like my niece’s husband, fighting in Fallujah.  And if I do what he did and go start up the engine in my AAV near the train station at the wrong time, somebody will fire a rocket at me from a nearby mosque and blow me to bits and I’ll be dead.  Seems harsh for a “game,” but that’s what happens when you walk a mile in somebody else’s boots.  I wonder if I’ll be eligible to be buried in some sort of simulated Arlington cemetery?  Will my wife receive survivor benefits from Atomic Games?  

If the game is published, how many people will it kill and wound?  Let’s calculate!

In the actual battle, there were about 5,000 combatant troops, of which 95 were KIA and 560 were wounded.  That’s about 2 percent killed and 11 percent wounded.  If this game is as successful as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, it will sell around 6.25 million copies a year.  Assuming at least one player who will “become someone else” per copy, about 125,000 of them will die and close to 720,000 will be wounded.  Good news, though – only 55 percent of the wounded in Fallujah were so badly injured that they could not return to duty, which means that about 325,000 of Atomic’s wounded customers will fare well enough to play the game twice!  Let’s just hope they have good health insurance.

Still, that’s a lot of dead and wounded people – and we haven’t even counted those who choose to “become” insurgents, who had a far higher mortality rate.  I doubt if “innocent bystander” is a category that players can “become,” but if so, that’s another 5,000 to 6,000 dead.  In any case, it seems to me that if there ever were a justification for setting aside the First Amendment, killing and wounding this many game players fits the bill.

One thing I’m still wondering about.  If the game really would let me become my niece’s husband, does that mean that the computer will actually scatter pieces of me hundreds of yards in either direction?  That would be messy.  The cleanup costs alone would be prohibitive.

Well, enough bitter satire.   Back to measuring social media.

Is this guy out of his mind?  The idea of such a “game” is hard for anybody who has lost anyone to violence.  My niece’s husband, a Marine, was killed in action on one of those six days, November 10, 2004.  One of the ways I responded to his death was to become a grief counselor, as part of the Bay Area Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) Team.  I spent last Thursday and Friday doing crisis intervention at a school attended by children recently killed in a murder-suicide here in Santa Clara.  I’m also a former paramedic.  I know the reality of violence.

I am angry.  Any sane person who has lived with the horror of deadly violence knows that it cannot become entertainment.  The fact that it is based on real events makes “Six Days” intolerable as a game. Tamte’s boasts about it have re-traumatized hundreds of thousands of survivors, at a time when violence is on the rise in our nation.  In recent days, the news has been full of horrible police and family homicides and suicides.

I know that simulations can save lives in the battlefield by creating realistic simulations.  I know that simulations can help therapists treat post-traumatic stress.  I was writing about and advocating those uses of simulations many years ago when I co-founded Multimedia Computing Corp., a market research and publishing company.

Another quote from Tamte: “Our opportunity for giving people insight goes up dramatically when we can present people with the dilemmas and the choices that faced these soldiers.”

Baloney.  This “game” offers zero insight into what it is like to be in a chaotic situation where peoples’ real lives are on the line.  It is profoundly disrespectful to claim to know what it was like for those who where there, no matter how many of them may have contributed to it.  

Atomic Games has lost me forever as a potential customer and I hope others will follow.

War is not entertainment a game.

Monday morning, the phone line died completely.  Dead silence – no dial tone, no DSL.  I looked over our wiring, saw nothing except some insulation rubbed off the CAT5 cable that connects our DSL splitter to the model and taped that over, since it appeared to me that the internal wire pairs were intact.  I called AT&T/Pacific Bell to report the trouble.  Eventually, that is.

Eventually, because we don’t have any phone books in the house and when I tried to use the AT&T web site via my Treo, I found it impossible to navigate. Despite the fact that AT&T is a huge provider of mobile phone services, it doesn’t seem to have a mobile-friendly web site.  You’d think that “mobile.att.com” would be there, but it’s not.  Nor is the even more mobile-friendly “m.att.com”.  What are they thinking?  I finally gave up and dialed 411 and got the number.  After navigating the voice response system, which always seems to request the same information at least twice, I got to a live person, who said they would test the line and if they found a problem, they’d dispatch a technician no later than 8 p.m.  Not 8 p.m. the same day, but 8 p.m. the next day.  Great.

As long as I had them on the phone, I asked to be transferred to the billing department because we have been “crammed” (or “slammed,” I forget which is which) for the second time lately.   This item showed up at the bottom of our billing page:

Item
   No.  Date  Description
   Billed on Behalf of BUSINESS TO BUSINESS
   Questions?    Call: 1 888 296-8079
   3-01 12-14        BUS. TO BUS. ONLINE,INC-MONTHLY FEE                    19.95

   Total The Billing Resource                                               19.95

I called the company and they claimed that we signed up for high-speed Internet service.  Yeah, right.  Just like the crooks who started billing us for voicemail we never ordered.  They promised to refund our money and stop billing us.  But the refund will take two to three months.  Enjoy the interest on my money, crooks. 

Meanwhile, since AT&T had been willing to refund three months of the bogus charges when this happened before, I asked if they would do that for me again.  

No, absolutely impossible, the customer service rep said.  

“But I know it is possible,” I said,  ”You did it for me when this happened before.”  

“I’m sorry, sir, there’s nothing we can do.”

“But I know that isn’t true, you did it for me before.”

“There’s nothing I can do. We are required by law to allow companies to bill through us.”

Although that bit about the (idiotic) law is true, I pointed out to him that as an individual, I have little influence, but a big company like AT&T surely can lobby to change the law – and surely will if it hits them in the pocketbook.  As long as AT&T can just pass along the charges, they have no incentive to try to make change happen.

Eventually, the customer service rep offered me a $20 refund “as a courtesy.”

“That’s the best you can do?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I guess I’ll take that, then.  But make a note that we’re going to cancel our home phone service because we don’t want this to keep happening.”

“I understand sir.”  Long pause.  ”Sir, since you mentioned cancelling your service and we want to keep you as a customer, I am authorized to refund the entire amount to you.”

Huh????  This from the same guy who told me moments earlier that $20 was the best he could do.  And before that, zero was the best he could do.  I’m starting to think that if I hang on longer, they’d give me more than just a refund.  And they did.  With no further prompting, the customer service rep, who sure sounded like he was reading from a script, said, “Since you said that you are going to cancel your service and we want to keep you as a customer, I’m going to give you $5 a month off your phone and internet service for the next 12 months.  Would that be okay?”

Yes, that would be okay.  Except that we’re going to get rid of it anyway, I’m fairly sure.  But I wonder if I had held on longer, they’d eventually pay me to keep the line.  Crazy.  And no wonder I never believe a customer service rep who says, “There’s nothing more I can do, sir.”

Meanwhile, I figured out how to tether my Treo to my desktop system and go on-line at GPRS speed.  Slow, but better than nothing.  That enabled me to do something I’d been planning anyway – move my mail server and mailing lists to Bluehost.  It was a fire drill, made harder by a lack of access to the Mailman mailing list utilities, but I seem to have gotten it done.  All that’s left at home now is the back end of TwURLed News, which can tolerate brief outages and doesn’t need any incoming connections (which I figure will be a necessity if we switch to a cable modem at home).

The phone service guy didn’t make it by 8 p.m. last night.  He showed up around eight this morning and found a short in my wiring – the spot where the insulation rubbed off.  I was embarrassed that I didn’t replace that wire when I saw it, but hey, it was pouring rain.  I was doing the best I could.  He had us up and running by about 8:30.  About 25 minutes after he left, I got an automated phone call from AT&T saying that they would not be able to send a technician before 8 p.m.  Last night.  Right.

It’s good to be back on-line.  I’m doing everything I can for you from here.  Believe me.

The bad news is that everything was dead for about 12 hours because my hosting company, Bluehost, shut it down for consuming too many CPU cycles.  The culprit was a WordPress plugin that generates XML sitemaps.  It was generating an updated sitemap for every post, with a fairly expensive MySQL query each time.  No more.  The plugin is set to only permit manual updates and I’ll trigger that every few hours, not at every posting.  That should also make the site more responsive.

Live and learn.

I seeded the search system with a number of words, phrases, people and tags that are related to social media.  This includes things such as the phrase “social media,” for example.  The robot periodically searches Twitter for a handful of those terms, which leads it to find people and cited web pages related to the target subject.  I have a fairly long list of other evidence that a tweet or web page is about social media; each tweet, page title and page description is checked against all the evidence.  I’m calling it evidence because, like the other TwURLed News algorithms, this one uses evidential logic to estimate relevancy – the more, the better.  Each bit of evidence is assigned a weight and those weights are combined to meaure how related to social media a tweet or page is.

As the system identifies people, pages and tags that have strong correlations to social media, it should be able to figure out additional evidence, particularly words.  We’ll see how much that can be automated, but I’m hoping that TF/IDF (term frequency/inverse document frequency) will reveal at least some such terms.  One of these days I’ll take a deep breath and use SVD (singular value decomposition) and other clustering techniques to find patterns in the people, pages, tags and words.  I’ve had fairly good success with that in the past, although until lately, I could never figure out a good way to fully automate it.  If Twitter continues to be a place where people retweet and repeat the same URL citations, I have high hopes that a fully automated system will be useful.

If it’s not already obvious, what I’m doing is not very different from Google’s PageRank algorithm, which considers a page more significant if a lot of other pages have links to it.  I’m finding pages cited on Twitter that have a lot of people linked to them, so to speak.  One of Google’s ongoing problems is link spam, which is more or less like the problem TwURLed News faces with aggregators.  It is very easy to spew a ton of URLs, which can make a “person” on Twitter appear more prescient than it really is… but the good news is that it is fairly easy to exclude them.  On the web, it is relatively simple to fake the date and time an article was posted, but not on Twitter.  That means that nobody can fool the system by pretending to have cited a popular page before it became popular.  That’s a big advantage – it prevents quite a few potential spoofing approaches.

I’d love to hear your suggestions for further verticals.  I’m working on one that will cover web analytics, though at first glance, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of #wa talk on Twitter.  (That was a hashtag, for those who don’t Twitter yet.)