This computer replaced a five year-old Mac Pro; the very first tower Mac that Apple shipped with Intel CPUs.

In a nut, the Mac Pro had been a trusty computer, and actually still works splendidly. The only trouble is that it takes up a bunch of floor space, guzzles electricity, and – most painfully, during a NYC summer – kicks off a ton of heat. I was looking to lower all three profiles.

As part of my intention to use less electricity, I also picked up a Digital POWERCENTER 650G “GreenPower” surge protector, by Monster. It looks like this:

For anyone unfamiliar with Monster’s “GreenPower” products, they describe the line as follows:

Monster GreenPower™ is a revolutionary new way to automatically reduce energy waste and save you money. Simply plug your computer into the GreenPower Control socket. When it’s turned off or goes to sleep, the other GreenPower sockets switch off, automatically eliminating energy wasted by peripherals, like your monitor and scanner, when you’re not using them. When your computer turns back on, the GreenPower sockets automatically power up again.

The gist is that the surge protector has one “master” socket (labeled above as “computer”), into which you’re meant to plug the “primary device”, and a number of “subordinate” sockets (for the various accessories attached to the computer), which only get juice when the device on the “master” socket is consuming 17 Watts or more of power. The surge protector also has a single “independent” socket (labeled “modem” in the photo above), into which you can plug a device that isn’t part of the “master / subordinate” equation.

So, following the direction suggested by the labeling, I plugged the Mac Mini into the “master” socket, and plugged the monitor, printer, speakers, and USB hub into the “subordinate” sockets. The “independent” socket remained unused.

Then I turned the computer on. The “subordinate” devices remained off for a few seconds. But once the startup process was in full swing, the monitor came to life, I heard the printer begin to do its “wakeup dance”, and the speakers popped as power flowed to them!

Then the login screen came up, and the monitor, et al lost power.

I figured that I just needed to get past the login and start using the computer, and that this would keep everything juiced up. So I typed my password and hit the ENTER key. Immediately the monitor came back to life, the printer did it’s initialization dance, and the speakers popped to life again, while the Finder launched, my “startup items” got spawned, and Lion restored my application state from before I had shut the computer down in order to replace the old surge protector.

As I reached to the trackpad, however, the monitor and the rest of the devices plugged into the “subordinate” sockets all shut off again; the Mini simply did not consistently draw enough power to meet the 17 Watt minimum required from the “master” socket in order to activate its subordinates.

Remember when I mentioned that i5 Intel CPU back at the top? Apparently they are particularly energy efficient.

No wonder Apple put ‘em in the Air.

I started to wonder, however, if I’d just bought some new but utterly useless thing, destined to merely collect dust.

So I plugged the monitor into the still-free “independent” socket, and managed to safely shut the computer down again. While was clear to me that the Mini couldn’t be the device plugged into the “master” socket, it simply wasn’t safe to plug it into the “subordinate” sockets. So it had to take the “independent” socket, while some other device was to be used to drive the “master” socket.

At first, I tried plugging the monitor into the “master”. It seemed like a reasonable selection, given that putting the computer to sleep would cut the video signal, hence putting the monitor into standby mode.

Switching it on, I learn the monitor had no trouble driving the master socket. At all.

But now I had two devices (the Mini and the Monitor) which would be sipping power 24 hours a day, even in standby mode. My savings were diminishing. I also keep a clamp light next to my desk, which I always turn on when I’m using the computer. I’ve presently got a 60W bulb in it; which uses far more than the 17W minimum required to drive the “subordinate” accessories. And it draws ZERO Watts when switched off.

And so I’d found the winner.

So, in the end, the device powering setup on the surge protector looks like this:

There is also no longer a Mac Pro on the floor, claiming 6″ of space between the wall and my desk; and the corner remains much cooler, letting me run the AC at lower levels.

I’m noticing a significant difference in the angle of elevation that the Android adoption curve is showing, amongst the different carriers. Specifically, I’m looking at how it’s showing the flattest rate of growth on AT&T, the only carrier on that list that’s also offering the iPhone.

And only now, at the end of December 2009, Firefox 3.5 — the latest release of the software open sourced twelve years ago — has at long last eked out ahead of any single version of rival Internet Explorer.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Version Market Share

It’s been a long road, Mozilla; congratulations on this hard-earned milestone.

From the NYT article:

The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics…. Drafts of scientific papers … were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

To say the least, the leak contains some juicy fodder for skeptics of human-driven climate change amongst the leaked materials.

Amongst these leaked emails, for example, are conversations which document various difficulties some of the CRU’s climate researchers have encountered over the years in trying to work with the data collected and managed by the organization. The Times article focuses on a discussion thread in which researcher Phil Jones mentions using a “trick” — originally employed by another colleague, Michael Mann — to “hide [a] decline” in temperatures apparently shown in some set of data.

In an interview about the leaked emails, Dr. Mann attempts to defuse the statement as a poor choice of words. Unfortunately, whether he’s being sincere or not, his is frankly a response that’s to be expected.

The article continues:

Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.

This is also a statement that you’d expect from a climatologist building a career on a body of work disagreeing with the idea of human-driven warming. These emails are naturally material that skeptics of the human-driven climate change argument will latch onto (and, frankly, they certainly should; it’s just how scientific work is tested — through dispute).

The next several days sees a flurry of activity throughout the media and the blogosphere.

Before long, the name “Climategate” (kitschy but concise) gets attached to the discussions about the leaked materials. And since there’s a bit of both data and program source code in the mix, techies from around the world immediately jump into the fray.

One of the most popular files from the leak discussed most heavily in techie circles is called HARRY_READ_ME.txt (copies available in both original format and more structured edition). The story that unfolds in this file reveals the plight of a programmer named Harry who had struggled for three years, attempting to reproduce some research results with a collection of data and the source code for an algorithm created to calculate research conclusions.

Sadly, this man’s three-year effort to reproduce the published results with the given material never succeeded. Here’s an excerpt from the file, for a glimpse at this poor fella’s mounting frustrations along the way:

getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data. so many new stations have been introduced, so many false references.. so many changes that aren’t documented. Every time a cloud forms I’m presented with a bewildering selection of similar-sounding sites, some with references, some with WMO codes, and some with both. And if I look up the station metadata with one of the local references, chances are the WMO code will be wrong (another station will have it) and the lat/lon will be wrong too. I’ve been at it for well over an hour, and I’ve reached the 294th station in the tmin database. Out of over 14,000. Now even accepting that it will get easier (as clouds can only be formed of what’s ahead of you), it is still very daunting. I go on leave for 10 days after tomorrow, and if I leave it running it isn’t likely to be there when I return! As to whether my ‘action dump’ will work (to save repetition).. who knows?

Yay! Two-and-a-half hours into the exercise and I’m in Argentina!

Pfft.. and back to Australia almost immediately :-( .. and then Chile. Getting there.

Unfortunately, after around 160 minutes of uninterrupted decision making, my screen has started to black out for half a second at a time. More video cable problems – but why now?!! The count is up to 1007 though.

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight.

Assuming the original conclusions he was attempting to reproduce were all based on this data (and, there’s frankly no reason not to), it’s impossible to invest much confidence in their validity.

Martin points out that the data and algorithms with which Harry was working were “inherited” from a previous researcher (or researchers), and came in a poorly-organized bundle with poor documentation. And what’s worse, he didn’t have access to anyone who had originally derived the conclusions he was tasked to reproduce.

The real egg in the face of this anecdote is the fact that CRU has clearly done an atrocious job at properly archiving their data, and documenting the work their researchers produce. Naturally this level of disorganization is a serious problem anywhere it may occur, but it’s a particularly glaring issue in the field of scientific research, where the validity of research results lies squarely upon the ability of independent third parties to reliably reproduce those results on their own. Yet here we find that the CRU is demonstrated to have either managed their data so poorly as to prevent its own scientists from being able to reproduce the organization’s own published results (in which case “embarrassing” doesn’t even begin to describe the situation), or to have manipulated the data and produced false results. And the fact is that either story tells a horrible tale about the CRU.

Charlie Martin, in a post to the Pajamas Media blog, writes:

I think there’s a good reason the CRU didn’t want to give their data to people trying to replicate their work.

It’s in such a mess that they can’t replicate their own results.

…

This is not, sadly, all that unusual. Simply put, scientists aren’t software engineers. They don’t keep their code in nice packages and they tend to use whatever language they’re comfortable with. Even if they were taught to keep good research notes in the past, it’s not unusual for things to get sloppy later. But put this in the context of what else we know from the CRU data dump:

1. They didn’t want to release their data or code, and they particularly weren’t interested in releasing any intermediate steps that would help someone else

2. They clearly have some history of massaging the data… to get it to fit their other results….

3. They had successfully managed to restrict peer review to … the small group of true believers they knew could be trusted to say the right things.

As a result, it looks like they found themselves trapped. They had the big research organizations, the big grants — and when they found themselves challenged, they discovered they’d built their conclusions on fine beach sand.

I won’t belabor the discussion of the implications these leaked documents offer; there is no shortage of people writing about exactly that. In case you’re interested in some of the more detailed coverage of the tech community’s review of the leaked data and algorithms, I would point you to the following pieces:

• Climategate: Violating the Social Contract of Science [Pajamas Media]
• Data-leak lessons learned from the ‘Climategate’ hack [Computerworld]
• Climategate: hide the decline – codified ["Watts Up With That" blog]

There’s also some great ongoing coverage at Devil’s Kitchen.

Regardless whether or not there’s any merit to any of the CRU’s climate research, however, this little drama leaves me unable to resist repeating an argument from my last post:

But with all these arguments and assertions about corollaries, trends, and predictions that this number crunching activity will generate, it will become increasingly crucial to have a mechanism by which the results claimed to have been derived from the number-crunching can be accounted for.

…

It must … become incumbent upon anybody publishing findings derived from mining such data to share both the sources and processes used to derive their results or conclusions. In cases of claims rooted in the fruits of data mining endeavors, it is specifically important that results indicate:

1. exactly which data sets it draws from, and

2. precisely which algorithm(s) processed the data in question.

At this point, the specific implications this debacle has for the CRU’s research is irrelevant. For, whether by deceit or incompetence, this leaked data has left their published research about climate change completely unreliable.

Yet developing a confident clarity around the subject of their research remains of critical importance, for climate change is a real challenge that humankind must cope with. Regardless whether or not human industrial activity is a driving factor for climate change, the fact is that the ice at our poles is melting at an accelerating rate. Decades worth of satellite photos and other survey data sufficiently demonstrate this fact. We similarly have data collected over the last several decades by the world’s meteorologists that global mean temperatures seem to be rising, as well as increasing levels of extreme weather (from droughts and famines to floods and more) around the world.

The climate debate isn’t over whether these events are occurring, but instead whether human industrial activity accounts for a relevant piece of it.

Governments around the planet will be forced to take some sort of action to deal with the prospective repercussions of these changes (e.g., rising sea levels, expansion of the Sahara, and the rest). The consideration at stake, therefore, is how each country will individually and collectively direct their efforts and invest their resources in dealing with it.

If human industrial activity has bearing on the matter, we’ll have to make some serious policy changes and invest heavily in developing alternative methods of production, lest we imperil our own (and other) species. But if, on the other hand, our industrial activity is not a determining factor in climate change, our efforts are best spent trying to figure out how we’re going to deal with the realities of a changing climate that we cannot mitigate simply by being more responsible with our emissions.

In any case, everyone needs to make informed decisions about where they’re investing their money and efforts.

And so a number of the world’s governmental and industrial leaders (including US President Barack Obama) are scheduled to meet — along with members of the climate research community — at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December in an attempt to work out policy directions to deal with climate change. I’m hoping the event will focus on methods to improve and reinforce confidence in the remainder of the climate research work being conducted around the world, and that it won’t turn into a political food fight.

Fingers crossed.

I am left hoping that some real good can rise from this mess. And so I call on climate change researchers and institutions around the world to take this opportunity develop the practice of providing full disclosure on the sources of their data sets and the functionality of their algorithms. There will likely be many political, legal, and logistical obstacles to address and overcome in this effort, but failure to do so carries stakes that are simply too high.

One of the most commonly-leveraged contact points has become the email inbox.

Nearly everyone has an email address, and many of us have several – one for work, one personal. I presently have four, for example.

Generally speaking, people have largely become very comfortable communicating over email. It doesn’t carry the “burden” of requiring an immediate response, unlike a phone call, and can be whatever length the author thinks is appropriate for the correspondence.

It’s also easy to share information around the conversation in emails, by including a URL that points to further information on some website, or by attaching photos or other small files. This capability allows promoters to keep their message concise (if they’re clever), and yet provide leads to supplemental information for those with interest in pursuing the deeper details of the message.

Finally, it allows the author to write up a single message that can be delivered to a (theoretically) limitless number of people.

For all these reasons, one of the most common techniques that promoters adopt is the email campaign. They focus efforts on accumulating email addresses of people that could potentially be interested in their product, services, performances, or whatever it is they’re on a mission to promote.

Some years ago, I would share my email address with people and organizations whose news I’d have interest in following: bands, artists, pro-social organizations, and more.

But after a while, I noticed my inbox just blowing up.

The more I gave my email address out, the more emails I’d have to deal with every day.

I’m not really interested in anyone’s ideas on how I can be making millions from home, offers for debt reduction, or substances that promise me the ability to drive nails through wooden boards with my penis (promise me the same for granite, however, and maybe we’ll talk).

Access Gone Awry

It got to the point where the first thing I’d do when I sat down to check in with my email was to scan each new message to determine who sent it; if the sender wasn’t a friend or some other party that I’d considered important to hear from at the moment, I’d just delete the message. Then I’d start actually reading the new messages.

How does one’s email address wind up on those lists? There’s no one answer, but they’re usually “stolen,” either from mailing list databases with lax security, or by malware that manages to infest peoples’ personal computers.

This clandestine and unauthorized collection of email addresses is a huge business. It’s also illegal in most parts of the world.

In the US, there are several laws in place intended to safeguard our email addresses. These laws require anyone conducting email promotions to be forthcoming about any intent to use the addresses they collect for promotional messaging. In fact, everyone collecting email addresses is required to completely disclose how they intend to use peoples’ email addresses, as well as provide a reliable mechanism by which people can “unsubscribe” from promotional email messaging at their sole discretion.

There are even laws that dictate the handling of email addresses.

I work at a major media company, largely doing server-side development on their websites. I occasionally have to request copies of databases from these sites in order to enhance or otherwise alter how the site works with its data; I work on copies to the risk of hosing the live site’s database. Many of our databases include the private email addresses of their users, and we are required by law to take precautions to ensure that their information is reasonably protected from theft. Typically, the user table containing the addresses might be omitted, if possible, or the email addresses may get randomized. What specifically happens depends on the data requirements around what needs to get done.

Compile and Sell

For some sites, user registrations exist for the express purpose of accumulating and selling the database of peoples’ contact information to other organizations. The good news is that it the law requires anyone doing so to completely disclose this intent to each person that provides their email address. The bad news is that not everyone follows such rules, so do be careful with whom you share your email address.

For this reason, many people have an “auxiliary” personal email address (maybe some Yahoo! or GMail account) that they use to sign up for random stuff they just want to check out, only later providing their primary email address after the quality of that membership proves valuable to them.

Theft & Harvesting

More commonly, however, the email addresses are simply stolen by hackers from insecure servers. And more common still is that email addresses are harvested from peoples’ personal computers by malware (like a trojan or virus) that makes it aboard the system, and starts to scour the computer owner’s address books and inboxes for all the email addys its greedy little algorithm can dig up.

Emails with a bazillion addresses in the To or CC fields are fucking gold mines for such malicious software.

This is why law-abiding email promotion campaigns do not disclose the email addresses of members to each other; each email you receive on a mailing list run by a respectable entity (whether company, organization, or professional artist) is either addressed to the promoter’s own email address, a “do not reply” address, or only to the recipient.

This safeguard strategy is nowhere near bullet-proof, but it’s the best the law can presently do. The rest is up to you.

So I’m very discretionary about giving my email address out. I certainly want my friends to have it. I’m even comfortable with the idea of my bank or utility companies having it. The benefits of certain specific people having that contact point outweighs the potential disadvantages of what might happen if it leaks out.

Of course, I consequently expect that anyone with whom I’ve shared the information will treat it respectfully; at some point you just have to take a leap of faith, or three.

Discretion

But I don’t give my email out to, say, bands any more. Nor do I give it out to representatives of charity organizations, or political campaigns, or stores I like to shop at, even if I may be interested in some or all of their promotional messaging.

I prefer to modulate the degree to which I’m messaged by promoters.

Email has become an important communications medium; one that, for better or worse, I have become reliant upon. There are plenty of useful and relevant messages that come into my inbox for me to deal with, from billing statements to travel itinerary confirmations. And at work, I want to see only the email that’s relevant to my job.

In 2009, we have no lack of things and people vying for our attention throughout the day. It’s consequently become increasingly useful to protect the signal-to-noise ratio of the information vying for our attention. People won’t stop competing for it, so it’s each person’s responsibility to safeguard access to their attention to the extent appropriate for the life they want to lead.

Unfortunately, email is not a medium that affords you any control whatsoever over incoming messaging. Anyone with your email address can send you a message (or even flood you with them), and there’s next to nothing you can do to stop them.

And so there’s an implicit trust contract that underlies each decision one makes to share their email address.

Access Modulation

Because my inbox is such an important personal contact point in my life, I have little interest in finding some generic, written-for-everyone-yet-no-one-in-particular messaging when I sit down to review my inbox. Of course, there are exceptions, like a CheapTickets travel deals list I’m on, but I want to keep such exceptions minimal (remember: signal-to-noise ratio).

So I’m stingy with giving out my email address.

Even so, I am still interested in keeping informed about “other stuff,” like upcoming shows of my friends’ bands, news from the White House, public health advisories, and parties at my local pub. I simply prefer to have some control over when I grant this material my attention.

I want to subscribe to their news in a way that allows me to modulate their access. And I’m not alone.

I hear, more and more, people telling stories about their “rediscovery” of a mode of life in which they’re less accessible. This usually comes attached to some story about a camping trip they took to either a national park, a vacation to some island abroad where they were just too far removed from the Internet, and their cell phone service. No phone calls, no text messages, no email. And attached to each such story – without fail – is a realization that there was something about this state of inaccessibility that they had started searching for ways to return to after returning to their “normal” lives.

“Mad As Hell” at the Network

Quite like the classic film Network foretold, I believe that modern society has been approaching a tipping point at which people are increasingly starting to demanding the reclamation of control over their accessibility. Not everybody, but a non-trivial amount, nonetheless.

So what’s a promoter to do?

The good news is that there are loads of ways for promoters to accommodate this. I’ll cover three.

RSS Feeds

Let’s start with adding RSS feeds to the news or announcements you post on your website. RSS isn’t as trendy as some of the other options I’ll cover, but it’s got the lowest barrier of adoption because anyone can access it, without having to register for a user account and remember passwords.

Like email, RSS feeds are unidirectional messaging. People need to come to your website and subscribe to your feeds.

And you have no insight into information about your subscribers, unless you use a service like Feedburner, which can at least give you insight into your total number of subscriptions, how your subscriptions change over time, and their geographic dispersal.

Twitter

Everyone has heard of Twitter. Some love it irrationally, while others hate it irrationally. Both of y’all need to get over this. The fact remains, however, that it’s a medium that gives promoters access to loads of people.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that people aren’t just “listening” on Twitter; they’re also “talking.” You’ve got opportunities to have conversations with your audience. And, just like at a party, you can leverage opportunities to jump in on conversations that are going on, and get your message out. Also, like at a party, you should exercise discretion on how and when you jump into conversations unsolicited; you can still come across as just as much of a douche bag on Twitter as you can in real life.

Twitter feeds are also relatively easy to promote. You uniquely identify yourself to people using @username notation (I, for example, am @prometheas). That’s something super easy to put onto, say a flyer or sticker.

Like RSS, however, you don’t get much information about who is “following” your posts.

Facebook

If you’re not promoting on Facebook, you’re dropping a serious ball. At the time of this writing, it’s got a vast number of members (and the most international members), and the highest rate of growth of any social networking community.

What you want to do is set up a Page; don’t use your personal profile for promotions (I’ll explain in a moment).

Of course, the first step would be to create a personal profile, if you don’t already have one. But personal profiles are designed to be personal, and built with privacy concerns in mind. As such, the social connections between profiles are bi-directional – “friendship” requests must be “approved” before Facebook recognizes them, to allow “sharing” of information and messaging between the parties.

Pages, by contrast, are not designed with privacy in mind. They are designed for the public dissemination of information for promotional purposes.

Connections between users and Pages are therefore uni-directional: a person becomes a “fan” of whatever person, organization, etc has organized a particular Page. It is not necessary for the users maintaining the Page to “accept” anything; the subscribing user immediately has access to all messaging produced by the people maintaining that Page.

The maintainers of a page also have access to anonymous information about the Page’s fans, such as the breakdown of their ages, their geographic dispersal, and access to page views, and more. This is all information that you can then use to run ad campaigns online (both on Facebook and other places), and build an understanding of your audience. Email will never give you this.

Let’s Make a Deal

So, I know you’re not going to stop asking me for my email address. And I know people will continue to willfully hand over their email addresses to promoters; it’s their right to do what they wish with their own information.

While I may well be interested and willing to tune in to your message, you can’t have me any old time you want me.

And so I suggest that you promoters wishing to have access to my attention (and the growing numbers of others like me) make it possible for me to follow your news on my terms, and we can both win.

As you can see, it’s quite simple and straight-forward to use. The tweeters out there will recognize that this feature is modeled directly after Twitter’s “mention” functionality.

Happy tagging.

Let’s revisit:

Are software touchscreen keyboards good for everyone? Certainly not. But this is another aspect of the Apple Way. Apple tries to make things that many people love, not things that all people like. The key is that they’re not afraid of the staunch criticism, and often outright derision, that comes with breaking conventions.

[...]

That the iPhone — or specifically its software touchscreen keyboard — does not appeal to everyone is not a problem. Nothing appeals to everyone. Even if you try to make something that appeals to everyone by adding every single clamored-for feature, you wind up with something like Windows that does not appeal to people with a taste for the elegant and refined.

And so Apple demonstrate mastery of yet another classic showmanship tactic: know your audience.

Although he amusingly paints the behavior of folks annoyed with unmet expectations with absurdity, his insights actually led me down a different path of reflection: the importance of the art of managing expectations.

Nearly any undesirable situation can be dealt with more gracefully, with the application of effective expectation management.

From Walt Mossberg’s review of the Palm Pre:

In fact, during my testing, one of my downloads from the App Catalog caused my Pre to crash disastrously — all my email, contacts and other data were wiped out, and the phone was unable to connect to the Sprint network or Wi-Fi. Palm conceded the catastrophe was due to problems it still has getting the App Catalog to work with the phone’s internal memory, and explained that this is one reason it hasn’t widely distributed the developer tools. [Emphasis added]

Now, in all fairness, the Pre is a brand new device whose software was written afresh, from the ground up. While this makes it very modern, its WebOS software stack has not as yet been run through any ringers, and it is most definitely a very complicated stack of software. As such, stories like this do not surprise me. In fact, I’m actually anticipating a number more to surface in the coming months. I do not say this disparagingly, by the way — it’s simply a very ambitious piece of kit that Palm are putting to market.

My greatest “doomsday scenario” fear for the Pre is that some disastrous bug in its immensely complex Synergy API is found that starts eating up or corrupting people’s address books all throughout the cloud.

O, Palm — my fingers are crossed that you’ll find (and patch!) any Synergy bugs before the rest of the world does.

And, by the way: congratulations!