A lot of things are broken because we fixed them. Somewhere out there is a web site that specializes in listing these things; Please let me know if you have a link, I can’t find it at the moment. There is a web site that specializes in these things called “This is Broken” run by Set Godin (see video below). Anyway, it is annoying when some advancement causes something to not work. And it is especially annoying when the advancement is something that specifically should cause something to be improved in a certain direction and instead it gets unproved, er, messed up in that direction.
Examples are myriad but I’ll give you just a couple here.
I just looked up “Zoonosis” in Wikipedia because I wanted to see if I could get a quick and dirty list of diseases that we get from domesticated animals to throw on a slide I’m making for a lecture. If I cared a lot about this I’d go get a PhD in the subject and then make the ultimate perfect and most authoritative possible slide, but what I really want to do is to make sure that the list I already have in my head does not have anything obvious missing or wrong, and I want to do that without standing up and walking across the room to dig out any of a dozen books or thirty or fourty papers I have on shelves or in file cabinets, or search through my hard drive or Google Scholar for the 20 or 30 electronic or on line references that would be embedded among or mixed up with stuff I did not want, in order to spend two hours researching and verifying.
And on the Wikipedia page for Zoonosis there is a list of animals that are implicated in human diseases. It looks like this:
Now, in theory, since this is the internet and this is an encyclopedia of sorts I’m looking at and information should be all organized and stuff, I should be able to click on “cattle” (for example) and get a list of cattle related diseases sometimes transmitted to humans.
That would be good. But no. What I get when I click on “cattle” is the wikipedia page on cattle, on which there is no information about diseases transmitted to humans. Information Technology Fail.
One could argue that making the Wikipedia page on Zoonosis half-baked is somehow the correct thing to do, and I’m sure there are those who will. They’d be wrong. This is not the time and place for Wikipedia to tell me it has a page on cows. Jeesh. It is the time and place to give me organized information, that it knows about and probably has somewhere.
A second example is different structurally and while the wikipedia zoonosis example may be flawed, this one is not. If you use Netflix you will probably know what I’m talking about the moment I mention the word “series” or the phrase “tv series.” Series …. like “House” or “Betwitched” or “MI-5” or “Law And Order: Criminal Intent” are things where there is one name (given just now) followed by another phrase such as “season 1” and then “season 1” and so on. Then, within a season, there is “episode 1” and “episode 2” and so on, and often those episodes are named. So there may be a series called “Murder on the Maya Riviera” which ran for three seasons and included episodes such as “Murder on the Maya Riviera: Season 2, Episode 7 ‘Killer Coral'” and an episode called “Murder on the Maya Riviera: Season 3, Episode 1 ‘Pedro is not Dead'” and so on.
Netflix does recognize that episodes are grouped into seasons (but see below) but it does not recognize that a series has multiple seasons. So, when looking at a set or list of items from a series, you can’t always tell what you are looking at because of truncation of the absurdly long names that result from this hierarchical structure. You can’t tell “Murder on the Maya Riviera: Episo…” from “Murder on the Maya Riviera: Episo….” See what I mean?
Also, when searching for or otherwise managing such things, it would simply be easier if the entity that is the series was considered as one thing. There are complexities in doing this (i.e., earlier episodes are available on instant view, others on DVD only, etc.) but that is really unimportant. Such complexities can be managed. Honestly. They can be.
(Note: DVD only series are not grouped by year … they are subgrouped because a typical DVD holds only a few episodes. This adds to the length of the actual naming of the item, and to further annoying confusion.)
There’s more. There’s lots more stuff that’s got broken when it got fixed. One could develop an entire web site on this topic. In fact, some guy did. Here’s his Ted Talk.
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uh, indoor plumbing and antimicrobial soap broked our immune systems? fire suppression in the southwest made super-forest-floor-fuel, which broked our ability to combat fires?
not really the same thing, i guess, but i sympathize.
pretty much everything i try to program in R ends up being a conundrum like this.
If you want a quick review of zoonoses, you should go to PubMed instead of wikipedia.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=zoonoses%20review
But if you do go to wikipedia, in the second sentence they quote the number of zoonotic and non-zoonotic diseases and have a citation. If you go to the citation, it is open source.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1088493/?tool=pubmed
As an appendix, this paper has the complete list.
I used to have a bookmark for that site, but sometime during upgrades through various browsers, I seem to have lost it.
Yes, that’s annoying, but, unlike Netflix, in a community-driven site like Wikipedia, you can take the time to improve such things yourself if they annoy you enough. In fact, you are encouraged to do so, especially if you have the knowledge, resources and ability to do so.
Or, you could just complain about it in a blog post. That’s what I would probably do (really!), but it still doesn’t make me feel good about it
Damn. I really do need to take the time to figure out the mechanics and culture of editing on Wikipedia one of these days…
I could not get print copy of your postings on your blog .Could you explain your policy on getting print copy that I want for my research at alter date and could you help.I know this comment is not related to this posting I just used the opportunity to communicate with Greg Laden about the problem that I am facing since last Wednesday.
I used to have a bookmark for that site, but sometime during upgrades through various browsers, I seem to have lost it.
ROFL
Yes, that’s annoying, but, unlike Netflix, in a community-driven site like Wikipedia, you can take the time to improve such things yourself if they annoy you enough.
Sure, but actually this seems to be a wikipedia policy: Every word that is an entry gets to be a link to that entry, even if the link is inappropriate. But yes, if one could build a table with that info one could improve it.
Or, you could just complain about it in a blog post. That’s what I would probably do (really!), but it still doesn’t make me feel good about it
Actually it feels pretty good.
I dread updates of ArcGIS and Petra. The more user friendly they become the less useful they are to someone that isn’t doing something standard and easy.
One word – Microsoft.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Bzoonoses+%2Bcattle
or for more fun, of course, Scholar:
Molecular update on cystic echinococcosis in cattle and water buffaloes of southern Italy 2008 – Wiley Online Library
Cystic echinococcosis (CE) â?? caused by the larval stage (hydatid cyst) of the cestode Echinococcus granulosusâ?? is one of the most widespread zoonoses of veterinary and medical importance. Molecular techniques have allowed the identification of 10 different genotypes ….
Was unable to find the site your thinking about using:
Luddite
Two steps forward one step back
Disimprove
If impossible is the opposite of possible then why isn’t prove the opposite of improve? Because the “English” language is has a long set of disimprovements an example of which is adopting the word emprouwer as improve.
On your general point of lack of hierarchical information it takes work, there are fields based on it, it doesn’t pay well. The lack of hierarchical information is equivalent to the lack of basic research, safety, and many other things. Simple put things get skipped.
The thing is, there are movies and there are TV shows and TV shows exist as hierarchical entities with seasons and episodes. It isn’t an add-on, an afterthought, a rarity, a glitch, or anything like that. It is just what they are. It should be the first thing they thought of and dealt with.
I found the web site and will be adjusting the post.
I know how to solve your Netflix problem. Someone should suggest that all series names, episode names etc have no more than 8 letters. That would work. No one would object. Would they?
You know what else is broken? ID3 tag defaults on cd ripping software. I have always wondered “who cares” which track number on a particular CD a song may be. When the song name displays on the readout of my mp3 player, I am not concerned about what track it is on a cd. It is irrelevant to my enjoyment of the music. I also find it annoying when I buy music from an online source that the filename includes the track number.
I then have to rename batches of files so that I can strip out this bit of “non-information.”
Repeat after me:
Track numbers are irrelevant for mp3’s.
Iain, that thought totally occurred to me. Or, one could just do what we already do with birds and counties; Come up with a three or four letter code for every series to use in instances like this. That would work and appease those of use who like to refer to things in coded terms already. And, it would fit nicely with the TexGen crowd. LOL.
I have always wondered “who cares” which track number on a particular CD a song may be.
That rather depends on what music you’re listening to. Certain artists designed albums to be a coherent unit, with the songs heard in that order, and one song blending smoothly into the next. Dark Side of the Moon is a well-known example, and it arises frequently in classical music as well. Classical music suffers from a similar flaw as TV series in Netflix: the title of the whole multi-movement piece will come first, and the title of the movement will come at the end. Thus “Five Songs from Old American So…” (to take the first such example in my iTunes library) appears as the title of five consecutive tracks, and as this is one of the lesser known works of the composer in question (Aaron Copland) I can’t tell without clicking on the tracks which is which.
A related gripe: While most popular music is marketed by performer, most classical music is marketed by composer. But the “Artist” field usually contains the name of the performer, which for me is usually a secondary consideration. To get my classical music to sort by composer in my library, which also includes popular music, I have to move the performer’s name into the Comments field and put the composer’s name in the Artist field.
One final point: the default iTunes alphabetic sort is on the artist’s first name, not last name (that’s why Aaron Copland is near the top of my library). Apple added an option to specify how to sort a name (or artist or song title) a few versions ago, but they never updated their database to make this the default for artists who are people rather than bands. I made the effort on my home computer, but not on my work computer.
@tuibguy
Without the track number you have no way of knowing the order the songs appear on the album. I for one like listening to an album in the order the artists intended.
I know people at Netflix. (I live >3 miles from Netflix HQ) They love to fix stuff. I’m going to recommend they add “season” and “disc” as columns. That way no matter how long the name gets, two numbers show afterward. Of course that may take a little space away from titles that are really long without numbers. I doubt that will be much of a problem.
I recently burned a CD from a firesign theater album. The skits got placed (because I was not paying attention) randomly. Ooops….
And apparently, I am now Analiese Miller even though I’m not. I mean, it would be great to be Ana and all, but I think this is a glitch in how the signon thing is working.
So, yes … we fixed multiple authorship and broke commenting!!!!!! LOL!
Ah… ok, just me again.
Holy crap, Bob! You did it!
Yeah, it gets to be a lot of work.
On track numbers again, I don’t use iTunes to transfer files to my mp3 player or flash drive. I use Nautilus. Nautilus sorts by the file name, and in those files named with the number first it is a pain to sort through all the “01’s” and then “02’s” and so on down to the “17’s” to get the songs that I want moved over to the player or flash drive.
That is why I complain. And I complain a lot, rather than try to fix them.
Well, I gotta tell you, somehow Bob’s friend got this Netflix thing fixed. Netflix now organizes their TV episodes with a label such as S2E02 for season 2 episode 2. It’s fixed. Thanks for listing, Netflix! I Heart Netflix!