Alex Payne recently wrote something of a teaser on the idea of radical transparency:

You will see, in time, organizations that put everything on the table. Organizations for which there is no concept of non-public communication from day one; no internal email, nothing that isn’t a matter of public record, by design. Organizations for which every employee’s salary is public knowledge. Organizations that compete solely on the merits of their work, not on surprise, deceit, and manipulation.

People will think these organizations are crazy. And then, over time, radical transparency will become the norm.

While I share Alex’s desire for a generally more open and transparent society (including increased corporate transparency, as corporations are an essential part of our modern society), I find that I cannot go so far as to endorse his idea for radical transparency. Just as the smooth functioning of civilization is predicated upon each of us being able to keep our less share-worthy thoughts to ourselves, so too is the smooth operation of commerce predicated upon the timely release of financial information.

Let’s not forget, after all, that only public companies are required to publicly disclose what would otherwise be sensitive financial information. Public companies are required to do this because ownership shares in these companies are freely and frequently traded and this information is vital for pricing these shares. Private companies, whose shares are not traded on public exchanges, are required only to make financial information available to shareholders, not the public.

Of course, Alex’s proposal goes quite beyond financial information. He advocates the immediate and complete dissemination of all communication within a company or organization. In Alex’s world, if you have an email (or even an instant messaging) conversation with your boss about how some personal problems may be affecting your performance at work, that would instantly become public knowledge. So would your request for some time off for a medical procedure. Oh, and knowing everyone else’s salary might be handy if you happen to be on the low end of the totem poll and would like a bargaining chip with which to negotiate, but not so nice for those on the other end of the scale. Whoever makes the most money will likely be the target of unremitting hostility from his or her coworkers, regardless of the value that person brings to the company.

Returning to financial information, can you image the volatility of radically transparent stock? If every slow sales day immediately became public information, the stock could lose significant value even if the peak sales season is just around corner. Just as dangerously, the odd day of unusually brisk sales would bring about unsustainably inflated stock prices. It brings to mind the immortal words of Agent K from Men in Black: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”

I have a simpler proposal: Instead of requiring public companies to disclose only financial summaries, let’s require at least some of the raw data used to generate those summaries to be disclosed as well.

Jeremy Keith takes on the formidable task of letting us know what HTML5 is, how it got here and what is driving it. The most insightful section is “The Process”:

The WHATWG process isn’t democratic. There’s no voting on issues. Instead, Hixie acts as a self-described benevolent dictator who decides what goes into and what comes out of the spec. That sounds, frankly, shocking. The idea of one person having so much power should make any right-thinking person recoil. But here’s the real kick in the teeth: it works.

In theory, a democratic process should be the best way to develop an open standard. In practice, it results in a tarpit (see XHTML2, CSS3, and pretty much any other spec in development at the W3C—not that the membership policy of the W3C is any great example of democracy in action).

There is, or at least there should be, a difference between a democracy and a rudderless ship. Successful democracies incorporate a healthy dose of consensus building. Too many Internet-based projects, however, concern themselves only with consensus seeking. Openness is no excuse for a lack of leadership.

(via Daring Fireball)

A very cool demonstration of the HTML5 canvas element:

We’ve created a little experiment which loads 100 tweets related to HTML5 and displays them using a JavaScript-based particle engine. Each particle represents a tweet—click on one of them and it’ll appear on the screen.

And yes, you will need a real browser like Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4. IE users need not apply.

Troubling new research from Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University revealing that we humans tend to put more stock into confidently asserted opinions than into more nuanced statements of fact:

In Moore’s experiment, volunteers were given cash for correctly guessing the weight of people from their photographs. In each of the eight rounds of the study, the guessers bought advice from one of four other volunteers. The guessers could see in advance how confident each of these advisers was (see table), but not which weights they had opted for.

From the start, the more confident advisers found more buyers for their advice, and this caused the advisers to give answers that were more and more precise as the game progressed. This escalation in precision disappeared when guessers simply had to choose whether or not to buy the advice of a single adviser. In the later rounds, guessers tended to avoid advisers who had been wrong previously, but this effect was more than outweighed by the bias towards confidence.

This last line, especially, should make you think:

So if honest advice risks being ignored, what is a responsible scientific adviser to do? “It’s an excellent question, and I’m not sure that I have a great answer,” says Moore.

This has implications for nearly every facet of our lives, including politics, religion and business. When did you last accept a strongly-worded opinion as fact?

Walt Mossberg explains how to upgrade to Windows 7:

There are limitations on which current Vista machines can be directly upgraded to the various versions of Windows 7. In general, you can only upgrade your current version of Vista to the comparable version of Windows 7. For instance, Vista Home Premium can only be upgraded to Windows 7 Home Premium and Vista Business can only be upgraded to Windows 7 Professional. This rule has two exceptions. Any flavor of Vista except Starter can be upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate, if you care to spend the extra money. And Vista Home Basic can be upgraded to Windows 7 Home Premium. […]

However, there’s another complication. For each of the three main consumer versions of Windows 7, there are actually two editions. One is meant for PCs with standard processors, called 32-bit processors, and the other for PCs that sport newer processors called 64-bit processors. The 32-bit version of Windows can recognize only 3 gigabytes of memory, but the 64-bit version can use much, much more. […] The problem is that you cannot directly upgrade 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7, or vice versa. So that adds another layer of complexity to the upgrade process.

Thanks, Microsoft, for not making technology any more intimidating than it needs to be for the non-technical. Oh, wait.

Maira Kalman, of The New York Times, provides an illustrated look at Benjamin Franklin:

Don’t mope in your room. Go invent something. That is the American message. Electricity. Flight. The telephone. Television. Computers. Walking on the moon. It never stops.

To no one’s surprise, the big four in the cellphone industry continue to gobble up their competition:

Sprint Nextel Corp. is intensifying its focus on the fast-growing market for prepaid cell phone service with a $483 million deal to buy Virgin Mobile USA Inc.

The deal reinforces this year’s main trend in wireless. The top two carriers, Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc., are grabbing the more profitable contract customers, while Nos. 3 and 4, Sprint and T-Mobile USA, are left to compete for prepaying customers with smaller upstarts like MetroPCS Communications Inc. and Leap Wireless International Inc.

Of course, the deal must first garner regulatory approval. That won’t be hard.

The two classic dystopian tales are, of course, George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In 1985, social critic Neil Postman contrasted these two works thusly:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

Now Stuart McMillen has illustrated this comparison.

UPDATE: It looks like Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio may be working on a new film adaptation of Brave New World.

Can this be true?

The idea that he, him and his should go both ways caught on and was widely adopted. But how, you might ask, did people refer to an anybody before then? This will surprise a few purists, but for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine. Nobody seemed to mind that they, them and their were officially plural. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, writers were comfortable using they with an indefinite pronoun like everybody because it suggested a sexless plural.

Maybe they’re right, but it is going to take some time for me to get over how wrong it seems to me. (You may need to search for “all purpose pronoun” to get past the pay wall.)

It looks like Verizon has generously offered to make some changes, now that the government has (finally) started to investigate what has been going on in the cellphone industry:

On the same day as [the Senate] hearing, [Verizon] sent Congress an announcement on exclusive handset deals—that’s where you’ve got to take AT&T with your iPhone or Verizon with your Blackberry Storm (assuming you actually kept the Storm after the trial period; I fumbled around with the contraption for two hours, then traded it in for a Curve). “Effective immediately for small wireless carriers (those with 500,000 customers or less), any new exclusivity arrangement we enter with handset makers will last no longer than six months,” Verizon CEO Lowell C. McAdam informed Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), and Senators Rockefeller and John Kerry (D-MA) “—for all manufacturers and all devices.”

The Tetrarchy knows that the best way to prevent meaningful change is to preemptively make token concessions.