The Wisdom of Crowds

Crowdsourcing was the New Coke; JavaScript’s sloooow in Firefox; Overrated minds on display; Sarah Palin’s real threat; AND: Wait, wait...

Carl Kasell and Peter Sagal of Wait, Wait ... Don’t Tell Me. | Tony Nagelman / NPR

CNet’s Matt Asay says that crowdsourcing—the zeitgeist behind Wikipedia and open source software like Firefox—isn’t the magical democratizing force it was once thought to be. Asay, citing examples at Apple, The Mozilla Foundation, and Wikipedia, says the idea of communities of independent programmers and users gaining clout with tech giants by building their own brilliant software never completely caught hold because those endeavors, like Mozilla, are heavily backed by big money operations like Google (in Mozilla’s case) and Novell (in the case of my favourite OS, openSUSE).

The big shift, however, has been in the transparency of the feedback loop, which has been a welcome change in the industry. So, to the extent that "community" simply implies a more open way of developing and distributing software, then, yes, it has been significant.

But it hasn’t changed the world. It has only changed the way the dominant technology companies...dominate.

Asay overstates the case. He doesn’t at all mention Linux, which is backed by several competing companies like Novell and Johannesburg-based Canonical, and all those wonderful apps that seem to be mostly community-driven, like graphics application GIMP and 3D modeler Blender. The competition between developers of operating systems based on the truly open-source Linux kernel, as well as the large, sophisticated communities behind GIMP and Blender, show that while corporate sponsorship backed by full-time workers is usually a big plus, it’s not the only way to go, and those sponsorships can be competitive and (more or less) in the true spirit of open source development. Generally speaking, that’s good for the quality of software, good for the consumer, good for the companies involved.

But Asay gets right two basic points: One is that the open source spirit has everything to do with commercial involvement. Paid, dedicated staffers do better work on average. The idea that no one really owns the Linux kernel in the traditional sense of the term ’own’ just means that more people have access to the ins and outs. Professional organizations should and do call the final shots. But potentially everyone with something useful might have a say, and that’s good.

Secondly, the idea that the Internet might have some instant democratic influences are largely fallacious. The technology of the Internet revolutionized publishing, but it did not eliminate the domination of certain organized interests—big corporations—in technology, media and culture. It didn’t even reduce it.

Asay doesn’t say this, but democracy requires a social structure, not just an IT structure, to grow and thrive, as we see in China today. In many ways, information technology is no different than other technologies: It empowers already ascendant groups quicker and to a greater degree than it will ever give people at the bottom of the totem pole a say in how things go. In technology, that’s partly to do with access. Poorer people aren’t on the cutting edge of Web technology. But it’s also in the nature of social power structures.

The Tortoise And The Fox

I just installed my new menu system made entirely from CSS and JavaScript, which replaces the old Flash-based menu that served me well for years. The new code—I’m slightly embarrassed to say—is heavily based upon Emrah Baskaya’s example, because JavaScript is fucking hard.

It’s also damned slow in Gecko, Firefox and family’s rendering engine. Kevin Purdy at Lifehacker rates Chrome 4.0 as faster than Firefox 3.5 by an easy factor of three. And it shows—my new menu flies in Webkit browsers like Epiphany and Chrome and in Opera 10, but slows to an incredible crawl on Firefox and Swiftweasel and KHTML-based Konqueror.

The code looks like this:

function menushrink(menu){

     var element = document.getElementById(menu);

     if (element.interval)

          window.clearInterval(element.interval);

     var bwidth;

     element.interval = window.setInterval(

          function() {

               bwidth = element.offsetWidth;

               //bwidth = bwidth*(93/100); Too slow on Gecko and KHTML w/ 20ms interval

               bwidth = bwidth-4;

               element.style.width = bwidth+"px";

               if (bwidth<=15 || element.event.type==onMouseOut)

               {

                    window.clearInterval(element.interval);

                    element.style.width = 14+"px";

               }

          }

     ,20);

}

The function that makes the menu grow looks pretty similar. I changed the algorithm for the animation, which was on some crazy Bezier curve ish (commented out), thinking it was getting into problems at the steep slopes. But switching to a simple linear algorithm (the following line) didn’t help at all. The menu is still slow as hell in Swiftweasel and fast as shit in Chrome 3.0—not even 4.0—and Epiphany.

Update | 09.12.01

Seems like Firefox’s JavaScript engine is much slower in Linux than it is in Windows. This is pretty annoying. So I added a little bit of code to the above-mentioned script to make it very, very simple in FF/Linux but all smooth and sexy in other browsers and in non-Linux Firefox:

if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Firefox") != -1 && navigator.platform.indexOf("Linux") != -1) {

element.style.width = "80px";

}

else {

...

}

Royal Ontario Museum’s Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Sam Javanrouh/The Star

Crystal Clear

Don’t tell Daniel Libeskind—would he even listen?—but his ridiculous Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, a 2007 addition to the Royal Ontario Museum, is, like much of his work, a tribute to his ego and an example of his mediocrity as an architect.

One example of the indulgence of his mess: On my first visit in ’07, I noticed that on higher floors, there were oddly-shaped portals looking down some dozens of feet onto the foyer, and across these portals were bits of rope pulled taught with screw eye hooks—clearly not part of the original plan. Because—stupid—children tend to frequent museums and climb into easily-accessible and sometimes dangerous spaces. What a ridiculous oversight.

It comes as no surprise to me that the building has been listed as one of the ugliest buildings in the world, according to The Toronto Star.

On the theme of fooling lots of people into believing you’re brilliant and getting into high places—and later, hot water—because of it, former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion’s wife had some choice words for current head Grit Michael Ignatieff (from the Star):

A fellow university professor, [Janine] Krieber said party members were duped by Ignatieff and would have recognized his obvious shortcomings if they’d only taken the time to read his academic writings.

Too little too late from the Dion camp, but still, ouch.

Palling Around With Demagogues

Frank Rich’s most important line in his recent Times columns, on Sarah Palin and the American Right, was this:

The only person who can derail Palin is Palin herself. Should she not self-destruct, she will doom G.O.P. hopes of a 2012 comeback. But the rest of the country cannot rest easy. The rage out there is larger than Palin and defies partisan labeling. Her ever-present booster [Matthew] Continetti, writing in The Weekly Standard, suggested that she recast the century-old populist outrage of William Jennings Bryan by adopting the message “You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of Goldman Sachs.” If Obama can’t tamp down that rage across the political map, Palin will at the very least pave the way for a demagogue with less baggage to pick up her torch.

<Shudder>.

Meanwhile, Deepak Chopra—who apparently is a more than decent writer—says we should just ignore the mean-spirited narcissist.

Wait, Wait, Don’t Leave Yet

Carl Kasell will no longer grace the airwaves as NPR’s news-reading James Earl Jones. But The Voice, 75, will still be moderating the network’s radio game show, Wait, Wait ... Don’t Tell Me, and New Yorkers will still be able to barely get up at 1 p.m. on Saturdays to listen in.

I actually used to work Saturdays. End.