Monday, November 30, 2009

OMG! Britannica.com!

An article I wrote has been indexed by Britannica.com!

http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/38313406/Data-Security-for-Libraries-Prevent-Problems-Dont-Detect-Them

Wow! Gosh!

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Visit Finland Thanks to Rotary

If only I had had a blog when I visited Nepal and West Bengal in 2004 on a Group Study Exchange trip sponsored by the Rotary Foundation.

I hope that Rotary District 7470 sends bloggers to Finland in 2010. What an opportunity would go to waste otherwise, now that Finland has declared universal broadband access a right.

To be eligible you must be between 25 and 40 years old, a full-time professional, either living or working in one of the following New Jersey counties:
  • Morris
  • Essex
  • Warren
  • Sussex
(If you're not from those counties, check with your local Rotary club. Many districts participate in the Group Study Exchange program. You could find yourself visiting some other foreign country for an entire month, staying in the homes of Rotary Club members and seeing your host country from the inside out.)

The team going to Finland will go from March 21 to April 21, 2010. You need to get your application in by November 30, so email fgeraghty@verizon.net now.

Social Networking

"Katharine?" You sounded very nervous. "As you know, I have just finished my training here at (famous insurance firm marketing financial instruments). I wonder if I could..."

Of course you can come over to my house and give me your spiel. It's a tough economy for everybody, and you are changing careers. I'm sure that they just put your whole class in front of a bank of phones and told you to call everybody you know. How frightening!

I've known you for 20 years. I very much want you to succeed. I probably am not going to invest anything with you, but at least now you can turn around and give a thumbs-up to your supervisor. "I made an appointment!"

Who knows? Maybe I'll think of somebody who can use your services. Or maybe I'll help you think of a way to market yourself and set yourself apart from the competition.

Good job--keep tapping that social network! But, if I may, two words of advice.

1) I have made other people irate when I did not end up buying their product even after (or especially after) their drawn-out sales pitches. I trust that if I do not buy. we will still be friends. After all, I am not really interested in your product. I'm meeting with you because you're my friend and it's good karma.

2) Your call displayed on my caller ID as "UNAVAILABLE." That's the same as screaming "SALES PITCH"--you might not get as many pickups that way. I did pick up, we did make the appointment. And after we hung up I remembered that I had a conflict. I wanted to call you back, but you had not left me your number. You might want to try leaving your number next time, just in case. :)

See you this afternoon. And, good luck!

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt

Just finished reading Junk Science Judo: Self-defense against Health Scares and Scams by Stephen J. Milloy. Milloy seems to assume that poor science makes headlines because scientists, peer reviewers and editors do not understand the scientific method, and that if he just explained it, the scientific community and the media would see the error of their ways. They would refuse to report on inconclusive but alarming results.

How touching. Milloy does not know that there is an entire marketing technique abbreviated as FUD. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt--deliberate dissemination of disinformation about a product or service in order to confuse consumers and dissuade them from supporting the competition.

Blogs make FUD easier than ever. If I wanted to, I could say disturbing things about my competition here on this blog, and encourage my friends to leave similar comments to boost the PageRank. I could moderate any ripostes from the maligned competition. And if I were truly devious, I could have other websites pick up my posting--websites that do not allow comments. No peer review, just my slanderous word out there in the blogosphere forever.

It's hard to get other people's blog posts taken down, even if they are blatantly inaccurate. Another blogspot blogger took some of my press releases last winter and ran them through a blender, but left my name and telephone number intact. They looked like real press releases, albeit written on hallucinogens. The purpose of those postings was to create links back to an Internet pharmacy site. See the "report abuse" choice at the top of this page? I complained to Google, which owns blogspot. I filled out their online form (the only way they allow complaints) but I when they requested it I did not send a scan of my driver's license because they did not offer me an encrypted transmission. Because I did not send it, Google has not acted. Stalemate.

Fortunately, the bogus press releases do not spread FUD, except on the question of whether I might be blogging while intoxicated. But I give this example to show how easy it is to post misinformation, and how hard it is to remove bad information. Who needs the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical Association if they can start a free and anonymous blog and say whatever they want?

Do I believe everything Milloy writes about the inappropriate reporting of scientific studies? I don't know. And I find his web site, JunkScience.com, more strident and abrasive than the book. But I do think that as long as people are out there perpetrating FUD, we all need to be aware of it lest we wind up, as Milloy quotes Carl Sagan's foreboding
of an America in my children's generation or my grandchildren's generation...when clutching our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what's true and what feels good, we slide almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.

On a similar subject but from an entirely different section of the library, I also just finished reading How to Rig an Election by Allen Raymond and Ian Spiegelman. Raymond is the former top GOP operative who served time in federal prison for jamming the Democratic call center phone lines during the 2002 New Hampshire Elections.

Raymond did not go to the pokey for his political FUD. Having actors portraying urban men calling conservative, potentially racist, households to urge them to vote for the Democratic candidate, in order to scare them into voting Republican is just business as usual, I guess. Ugh. Between shenanigans like that and Operation Bid Rig is it any wonder The Star-Ledger, the largest paper in New Jersey, endorsed independent candidate for governor Chris Daggett?

Adrenaline gets our attention. But we have to keep questioning the source of the information that makes our hearts race, lest we be frightened into acting against our own best interests by cynical purveyors of fear, uncertainty and doubt.