I've added several entertaining surveys to go along with entries on here over the past couple of weeks, and have gotten a great response, however some users have questioned why they immediately get the results for the survey without the ability to pick a choice themselves.

This can happen for several reasons-

• The survey is no longer active. I have start and stop times on the surveys, which allows me to age out surveys and cache the results. I am thinking of ways to add a nice "Survey Closed" notice on them.
• You already answered and have the "I answered" cookie on your machine
• You picked "View Results". Reload the page and you'll get the options again where applicable
• Someone else answered, and the system is correlating them with you because of shared traits (such as the IP address of a shared mega proxy). Even if you don't have the user or answer cookies in your browser, the system may still decide that you must have flushed your cookie cache, and that you've actually already answered. Trying to identify people on the net is a difficult, flawed process, so there will be mistakes.

Almost a decade ago I picked up a pair of relatively inexpensive Sound Dynamics R606 floor-standing speakers. Using the same components from their high-end line (I believe Mirage was the high-end marketing name), these were the poor-man's version. I still have them today, and they are extraordinary. I have never, anywhere, heard better sounding speakers overall, and I've either purchased or auditioned a large number of dramatically more expensive brands and models, and I've tried to follow the advice by a lot of audiophile magazine. Still, though, the voicing and realism of the reproduction that comes from the R606 is just unparalleled - I watched a DVD with them as the fronts for the first time recently, and the realism was absolutely spooky.

Of course like all speakers they aren't perfect - they can get a bit muddy for percussion in the lower range, and they aren't really suited to loud "rock" style music. Yet for other music, particularly of the female vocal genre, they are exemplary.

The only really point here is that with speakers, you don't necessarily get what you pay for: You might get much more, or much less. The only real consideration of a speaker's performance is to actually audition it.

Today marks the one month anniversary of the beginning of this blog. During that period I've put up a ton of content - really I've used it more as a straightforward CMS than a blog (my prior manual content management process was a mess, and this is just a world better). I've been very happy with the process and the feedback, and the excellent response I've seen from the community, and I most certainly plan on continuing: One nice thing about constantly mulling over ideas, and being able to type quickly, is that it only takes a few moments a day to maintain this.

Furthermore, a robust comment system is in the testing stage and will be live imminently, and hopefully it will give users a lot more of a voice to agree or (more likely) disagree. It will probably make it a lot more entertaining (for both readers and myself).

Thanks for making it worthwhile.

Dennis

A psychology study performed in 1977 - The College-Bowl Study (Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz, 1977) - demonstrated a fascinating piece of human psychology, which was that people would over- or underestimate people's intelligence relative to their own, attributing undemonstrated qualities to them, based upon role or situation. They called this an "attribution error".

In the study subjects were split into two groups: the quizmasters and the contestants. The quizmasters were tasked with coming up with some challenging-but-not-impossible questions, which they then presented to the contestants as pairs. Invariably the contestants did poorly, as the quizmasters naturally relied upon their own unique proficiencies for material: Whether they quizzed about classical music, famous art, the Altair 8800, or chemistry, their knowledge (and thus what they thought was "challenging but not impossible") differed greatly from the contestants, as should be expected among a diverse group of people.

Amazingly, when asked afterwards about the intelligence of each other, the contestants overwhelmingly estimated the intelligence and knowledge of the quizmasters as greater than their own. Similarly, in a follow-up study an observer was added, and again the observer believed the the quizmaster was more intelligent than the contestant.

Of course this was a completely ridiculous conclusion: Not only were they randomly assigned arbitrary roles, but general knowledge tests applied across the group showed no correlation between role and intelligence. Logically it seems probable that there is a tremendous bulk of knowledge that the contestant holds that the questioner does not, but because it wasn't demonstrated it was unaccounted for. Out of "sight", out of mind.

This basic human tendency is pervasive, and it goes both ways: Some of us underestimate ourselves because we don't have the (often artificial, superficial, or temporal) domain knowledge of others ("I just saw an episode of Numbers, and boy do I feel dumb now..."), while others under-estimate people who don't share their particular grab-bag of facts ("Boy that guy is an idiot! The guy didn't even know what OPML is!". Us nerds are particularly guilty of this, discounting the incredible array of knowledge and skills that people in other fields have, instead judging them on their knowledge of Linux distros or esoteric Windows shortcut keys. This is a tremendous vice).

Take advantage of this human trait! The next time you're having a big meeting, bone up on fringe facts and edge questions for your peers. Learn some irrelevant facts about an uncommon area - for instance beetles or metallurgy - and bring it up at every opportunity. I just took advantage of this myself, talking about the fairly obvious observations of a 28-year old study. Aren't I clever.

I've taken a look a Microsoft's competitor to Google Maps several times, and each time I've been struck by the incredibly poor coverage of Canada: Not only is the search completely useless for Canadian addresses (even when you've very clearly indicated that you're looking in Canada, which is odd as they had great data on Canada in ancient MapPoint releases), the hilarity is compounded by the fact that the satellite imagery stops right at the border. Whether it's an imagery rights issue or not, it is quite contrary to the whole "Earth" thing in the product name. Maybe Microsoft Virtual United States of America on Earth is a more accurate name.

Of course Microsoft, being largely an American company, is entirely within its rights focusing on the US marketplace, just as I'm entirely within my rights to complain about it. It seems odd that something like satellite imagery has national boundaries, and it seems more likely that some product manager deep within the intestines of Microsoft decided that the hassle and storage of dealing with Canada wasn't worth the bother, and thus was it wiped from the map. A bit of a foolish decision given that there's a fair number of us, and given that it's cold most of the year we all tend to have high speed connections and predisposition to spending lots of time online.

I'm really looking forward to the beautiful colours of fall that are just on the verge of exploding here in Southern Ontario. We're usually pretty good about taking advantage of the beautiful weather and scenery, but I think we'll be extra active this season. I may have to upgrade to a "Pro" Flickr account just to have the upload bandwidth.

Some time back, around a year ago, I released a relatively simple command line utility - PureJPEG - to filter EXIF data (along with application data blocks, thumbnails, and so on) out of JPEGs. The utility took me an evening to throw together (it's a pretty straightforward C++ app), and was actually just a research branch of some image search algorithms I was working on - a project that I need to return to at some point.

Since I released that tool I've had literally 10s of thousands of downloads...

Nonetheless, it really filled a need: An enormous number of people were unaware of the types of EXIF data in their images, or the impact that it had on their data size (many images on the net are over 50% EXIF and thumbnail data, in cases where it is just extraneous waste). Since I released that tool I've had literally 10s of thousands of downloads (interesting note: a largely disproportionate number of the downloads are from people located in Russia - I have to guess that it piqued the interest of a Connector [terminology courtesy of the Tipping Point - great book] in Russia, and they spread it to their network. I think I'll get a Russian translation of the page put up). It is enormously satisfying as a software developer when I see something I've done has helped someone, however marginally.

In any case, on the topic of EXIF - I recently upgraded to a Canon Digital Rebel XT. I absolutely love this camera, but for whatever reason it sticks the camera serial number in the EXIF. Perhaps the serial number of a camera isn't really top secret, but nonetheless this seems like a completely needless piece of info to be sitting in every image I put online or elsewhere. It just seems like a piece of info that could be used in insurance fraud, retail deception, or some other nefarious activity. Perhaps it isn't secret, but it really isn't the sort of thing you shout from the rooftops (similar to how people and organizations obscure license plate numbers, yet they're really ridiculously un-private).

A much more profound privacy concern could come up when cameras finally start making use of the geographical coordinate points sitting largely unused in EXIF currently. These data points, storing items like latitude, longitude, and altitude, will make for absolutely brilliant geocoded photo databases once cameras start incorporating a GPS. For instance many cell phones are starting to incorporate a GPS to accommodate e911 requirements, and of course many cell phones already have onboard cameras, so it's inevitable that the technologies will collide. Imagine having the ability to search in a tool like Picasa for photos taken at a particular house, or in a particular park, without having the hassle of manually adding keywords categorizing each photo. Imagine a shared service like Flickr with brilliant locational searches.

Even better if cameras also stored the attitude and direction each photo was taken - Imagine seeing a cityscape with view cones emanating out, with colour coded focus zones (which can be determined by a variety of other EXIF data points). With a clean GPS signal, you could tell which photos were taken of someone sitting on the steps of city hall, out of the CN Tower looking towards Toronto Island, or towards the leaning tower of Pisa looking West at dusk during late August, all without relying upon haphazardly scatter-shotted user categorizing and captioning.

When this technology finally hits the mainstream - the merging of quality digital cameras and GPSs (likely through our phones) - the impact is going to be absolutely profound, and it will completely change how we archive and access our images.

[SEE FOLLOWUP - http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/2005/10/06.html#a100, and http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/2005/11/29.html#a201]