Information is power: Civil War edition

Susan Schulten has a typically awesome piece up in the New York Times about the use of the telegraph during the Civil War. Being able to coordinate war efforts in real time was a tremendous advantage for Lincoln, but it wasn't exactly laid out as such when he moved into the White House:

When he took office in March, the telegraph extended only to the Navy Yard and the War Department, not the White House. For several months thereafter the administration had to use the city’s central telegraph office to send its dispatches.

By contrast, the nerve center of the Union war effort in 1861 was found at the headquarters of Gen. George McClellan, who had actually issued a standing order that all messages were to be given solely to him. Such was the situation in October 1861, when telegrams reporting the disastrous Union defeat at Ball’s Bluff were brought directly to McClellan as he met with Lincoln in the White House. McClellan withheld the news from Lincoln, who later learned of both the defeat at Ball’s Bluff and that his close friend Edward Baker had been killed in action. Such a policy was unacceptable, and Lincoln soon transferred control of the telegraph from McClellan’s headquarters to the War Department.

Solid state

My university is finally, after four long years, buying me a new Mac. They'll give me the bare-bones Macbook Pro, but I can pay for upgrades. And now I notice that Apple will install a solid state hard drive instead of a standard mechanical spinning-wheel one, if I'm willing to pay for it. Is it time to make that jump?

Needless to say, I've been excited about the prospect of going solid state since my great hard drive crash of 2007. But I've been researching the topic a little bit, and now I'm not sure I should make the switch.

The pros of going solid state come down to durability and speed. I doubt I'd notice the speed so much, since I don't do too many hard-drive-intense activities like video editing, although my computer would surely start up more quickly. Durability's the big issue. Solid state chips can handle getting bumped around and dropped. I've dropped my iPhone enough to know how important durability is.

But one of the major down sides of solid state is that the chips don't age all that well. As Mark Chinsky writes,

Flash memory quite simply has a limited number of times that information can be written to a location (a bit). Most consumer drives on the market today can handle about 10,000 writes to a bit. Once that spot is used up, it can never be used again.

Now, it's quite possible that this wouldn't really affect a user like me. Given how I use computers, the flash memory might not degrade for at least five years, which is beyond the lifespan of a typical laptop anyway. And some estimates suggest that solid state memory could last decades. But there is some chance of degradation. So near as I can analogize, standard hard drive failures are like aneurisms (rare, but they can kill your brain suddenly and without warning) while solid state drive failures are like senility (slow but pretty much inevitable if you last long enough).

Another concern is that solid state drives might be prone to sudden crashes, as well. The research done here isn't very scientific, but it reports a disturbingly high incidence of solid state failure. The author justifies their continued use simply for the speed, but I don't think that's enough for me.

The final concern is price. I'm generally an advocate of buying as much computer as you can afford, at least in terms of processor speed and hard drive space. But solid state drives cost significantly more than standard spinning drives, and that's not about to change. 512 gigabytes of solid state drive space costs over $1,000 more than the same amount of standard hard drive storage. From what I've read, the dollar-per-gigabyte costs of solid state drives are dropping at about the same rate as the costs of standard spinning drives, so half a terabyte of the former will always cost a lot more than half a terabyte of the latter.

It's sounding like solid state memory is great for those who do disk-heavy computing and for those who expect their laptops to get bounced around a lot. Basically, if you're a war correspondent and you do your own digital video editing, you want solid state. But for me, I'm not sure it's worth the price.

Biggest focus group ever?

If you have an iPhone and plan to watch President Obama's State of the Union Address next week, please download this app. (via Charli Carpenter)

Unfortunate dialogues with iPhone's Voice Command

Me: "Play Bruce Springsteen."
iPhone: "Now playing songs by Sting."

Dammit, iPhone, are you just going to play anyone from the 1988 Amnesty Tour?  Throw in some Tracy Chapman, why don't you?

I've seen the future of state legislative apps

Greg Combs, a recent PhD from UT Dallas (and fellow Sleestak fan), has assembled one of the coolest political iPhone apps I've ever seen.  It's called TexLege.  Basically, it's just a really sophisticated directory of the Texas state legislature.  It's far better than any app I've seen for the national government, and I don't know if any other serious apps exist for state legislatures.

The upper screenshot at left shows the main alphabetical listing of legislators.  Note how each line shows you the name, the photo, the party, the district, and the number of years of service.  Plus, you see that red-blue bar with the star?  That's an estimated ideal point derived from legislative roll call votes.  How cool is that?  That's a lot of of information displayed in a very economical way.

The lower screenshot shows the entry for one particular member.  Here we get to see a comparison of the member's ideal point with those of the two major parties over time.  Scroll down further and you can see which committees he serves on, contact information, an interactive district map, the Votesmart profile, and other things.

The version of TexLege up on the App Store right now is a bit outdated -- Greg has been letting me demo the new version.  Unfortunately, I believe he plans to ask $10 for the new one.  Still, I'd imagine that a number of lobbyists would be okay paying for that -- this could be a very valuable resource for them.

I wonder if Greg would be willing to partner up with some other state legislatures or the NCSL to export this technology beyond Texas.

Hopelessly devoted

While we're on the subject of social networking technology, I had much higher hopes for Olivia Newton-John's Twitter feed.

Technology in the House

Republicans currently make up about 40 percent of the U.S. House of Representatives.  But you wouldn't know that from their Twitter presence, reports Colleen Shogan in the April issue of PS:

As the minority party, Republicans currently use Twitter more frequently (Vogel 2009). Not only did more House Republicans use Twitter than their Democratic counterparts, they also tweeted more frequently. House Republicans, who constitute 54% of members registered with Twitter, sent approximately 74% of all tweets during session and approximately 64% of tweets during recess.

So I guess the next question is, does that matter?  Republicans may have out-tweeted Democrats over the past year, but the final health reform vote looked almost exactly as it was expected to look a year earlier.

Well, I can relate a story from my Simgov class, which is a simulation of the U.S. Congress.  The Democrats, although in the majority, have been getting their agenda stalled on the floor by a smaller but much more organized and prepared Republican Party for several weeks now.  Today, the Democrats seemed to figure it out -- they controlled debate very effectively, rebutting Republican arguments and limiting amendments at every opportunity.  I was impressed with how organized the Democrats were.  After class, the Speaker admitted to me that while he was running the chamber, he was also coordinating Democratic floor tactics via Facebook chat.

Now, an instant message program like Facebook chat is kind of the opposite of Twitter -- the former allows you to secretly communicate with select people; the latter is designed for broadcasting.  And in the real House, Pelosi doesn't have to multi-task like that, as she has a whole office designed to let her run the chamber and coordinate party activities simultaneously.  But you can see where instant messaging software like this might come in handy.  (It can also be a boon to lobbyists.)

Using Twitter is very different -- this is how members might communicate with their constituents or with a small number of hardcore activists.  It can be good for messaging or for generating interesting quotes for reporters.  But it's less obvious to me how something like Twitter might be a game changer for legislators.  It seems to just run alongside the already existing structure for communicating messages outside the chamber.