Common Sense versus the Uncommon Situation

When I was starting my career at SRI, I was roped into being on the Emergency Action Team. I had a white helmet with “EAT” on it.

During EAT training, I learned of the hierarchy. I and a few others were at the bottom. In an emergency we were supposed to get people to a designated place. There we would meet the next person up the hierarchy. That person would not only have an EAT helmet but also a walkie talkie. From the walkie talkie would come instructions from the next level up the hierarchy.

I was surprised to learn the designated place was inside the building. I asked our building’s EAT chieftain what I should do if, given a blaring alarm, people did the common-sense thing of heading for the exits. To which he replied: “Common sense is a bad thing in an uncommon situation. Your job is to get them away from the exit and to the designated place.”

“Is there really any harm in people just going outside?”

“If there’s a sniper on the roof, then yeah, there might be some harm.”

Worm Grunting

File this under “I learned something today”: Worm grunting is the practice of luring earthworms out of the ground.

Per Wikipedia, worm grunting “generally refers to the use of a ‘stob,’ a wooden stake that is driven into the ground, and a ‘rooping iron’ which is used to rub the stob.” That’s in contrast to worm fiddling, which “also uses a wooden stake but utilises a dulled saw which is dragged along its top.”

The Wikipedia article goes on to note, “Techniques vary from sprinkling the turf with water, tea and beer to acupuncture, music or just ‘twanging’ with a garden fork. In some organized competitions, detergents and mechanical diggers have been banned.”

Here is a brief video on the subject.

And for those wondering how I came to know about worm grunting...

I was trying What Do You Suggest?, a site that shows Google’s suggested topics given an initial letter or word. I clicked for a random word and got worm. Out of the suggestions, grunting immediately caught my eye. In turn, its suggestions looked like this:

That prompted a few minutes’ additional research on Wikipedia and Google, which led to this posting.

Jason Roberts’ A Sense of the World

In A Sense of the World, Jason Roberts makes the case that James Holman was the greatest traveler not just of his time, in the 1800s, but of all time before then. On his own funds and initiative, Holman covered at least 250,000 miles. If that was not remarkable enough, Holman was blind.

As Roberts sums up Holman’s achievements:

He could claim a thorough acquaintance with every inhabited continent, and direct contact with at least two hundred distinctly separate cultures....Alone, sightless, with no prior command of native languages and with only a wisp of funds, he had forged a path equivalent to wandering to the moon.

Roberts reconstructs Holman’s time and travels with a vivid narrative style. The hero makes Roberts’ job easier by being continuously remarkable: learning to ride a horse by echolocation, playing politics with Queen Elizabeth, getting thrown out of Siberia by the Russian czar, and (literally) so on.

Along with drawing on Holman’s own writings, Roberts deftly taps other original sources and literature for additional color, such as this comment from the time about Edinburgh’s polluted air: “you might smoke bacon by hanging it out the window.”

I liked the book a lot, but recognizing that the subject matter is well off the beaten path, I suggest you test-drive this short excerpt at the author’s site. You will know quickly whether A Sense of the World is for you.

Copy and Paste Provenance

In today’s New York Times, Public Editor Clark Hoyt, wrote about a recent case of alleged plagiarism by a Times reporter. Here is the explanation of how the plagiarism happened:

[The reporter] said he would copy stories from wires, paste them into a file in the editing system, verify the information and then put the material in his own words. At least, he said, that is what he intended to do. When I asked him how he could fail to notice that he was copying someone else’s work, he added further explanation: He said the raw material in the computer files in which he assembled his stories included not only reports from other sources but also context and background from previous articles that he had written himself. When putting it all together, he said, he must have thought the words he copied were his own, earlier ones. “It was just my carelessness in trying to get it up quickly,” he said.

It seems like those accused of plagiarism often have this explanation. Hoyt goes on to note...

The explanation was similar to one offered only days earlier by Gerald Posner, a reporter for The Daily Beast, who was caught by Jack Shafer of Slate cribbing sentences from The Miami Herald. Posner, who resigned after even more plagiarism was found, also said that he did not do it intentionally. He said he had poured all his research — interviews, public documents, published articles — into a master electronic file and then boiled it into an article under tight Web deadlines, a process that led to disaster.

This isn’t just about reporters cranking out stories on deadline. You might also recall historian Doris Kearns Goodwin had a similar explanation for her appropriation, without quotes, of another author’s verbiage in one of Goodwin’s books.

In all these cases, the explanation is more believable than not. The benefit of copying was minimal yet the cost, upon detection, was high.

What these people needed was a special copy-and-paste mode that retains the provenance of the copied text. That is, every piece of copied text would automatically say what document or URL it came from. Especially for an organization like The Times, which apparently has its own dedicated “editing system,” making such a feature available (or perhaps mandatory) seems like a good idea.

And for the rest of us who use Microsoft Word or Google Docs’ word processor, maybe it’s an option we will see someday too.

TypePad Sitemap Template with More Than 100 Entries

[Update, 3/13/2012: This blog is now on Google’s Blogger platform. However, I’ve kept this post around in case it helps those still on Typepad.]

Sitemaps are a way to help search engines find pages on a Web site. This blog has its own Sitemap, which I noticed was limited to displaying the last 100 blog entries. That’s bad, because I have more than 100 entries, and Google was losing track of some of the early ones.

A Sitemap can have up to 50,000 URLs, so I emailed the support desk of TypePad (the service that hosts this blog), asking what the problem was. The answer was, TypePad’s suggested template for Sitemaps uses a template tag called MTEntries, which is limited to showing 100 entries. That’s confusing because the relevant part of the suggested template says, as of March 6, 2010, <MTEntries lastn=“1000”>. Oh well. The person who answered my support question said TypePad was evaluating raising the limit.

It should be raised, or TypePad should provide some other means for directly communicating the presence of more than 100 blog entries. But in the meantime, I’ll share a quick workaround I devised. It’s ugly, but it works for this blog’s 250-odd posts.

In the suggested Sitemap template, I duplicated the block of XML responsible for generating the list of blog-entry URLs. I set the first block’s “lastn” parameter to 100. For the duplicate, I also set “lastn” to 100 but I added an “offset” parameter of 100. That means the first block gets the 100 most recent entries, and the second block gets the 100 next most-recent entries. Then I created another duplicate block, “lastn” of 100, “offset” of 200.

That’s all I needed (for now). The resulting Sitemap had all 250 postings. I don’t know how far this hack scales up, but I figured I’d share the idea. May it be useful for the hopefully short time between when this was written and when TypePad better supports Sitemaps.

FYI, this is the relevant block in the suggested Sitemap template (as of March 6, 2010):

<MTEntries lastn=“1000”>
<url>
<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml=“1”$></loc>
<lastmod><$MTEntryDate format=“%Y-%m-%d”$></lastmod>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</MTEntries>

Replace that block with the following three blocks:

<MTEntries lastn=“100”>
<url>
<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml=“1”$></loc>
<lastmod><$MTEntryDate format=“%Y-%m-%d”$></lastmod>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</MTEntries>

<MTEntries lastn=“100” offset=“100”>
<url>
<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml=“1”$></loc>
<lastmod><$MTEntryDate format=“%Y-%m-%d”$></lastmod>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</MTEntries>

<MTEntries lastn=“100” offset=“200”>
<url>
<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml=“1”$></loc>
<lastmod><$MTEntryDate format=“%Y-%m-%d”$></lastmod>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</MTEntries>

If you want to try more blocks, the pattern for doing so should be evident. The only thing you need to change is the “offset” in the first line of each additional block. Just increment it by 100.

One final note: The generated sitemap.xml document did not change after I saved the changes to my Sitemap template. This was apparently due to caching, which a template-save should have immediately overridden but did not. I confirmed this by copying the text of my changed template to a new template, sitemap2.xml, which generated the correct XML file. The next day, when I checked my sitemap.xml again, it had updated to the correct XML, so the cache apparently needs time to detect changed templates.