eBay and Scotland Yard

The sound you hear my be a deep underground shift in the seismic plates of the Digital Planet.

One of the recognized breakthroughs in the digital world is eBay's creation of a new kind of market, based on trust, and sustained through their "feedback" system. Every seller and every buyer is open to a rating on every transaction. Positive ratings build trust in the digital marketplace, and supposedly boost sales. Negative ratings depress that trust, and enough of them would lead to a serious reduction in sales.

Today may be the first time that negative eBay feedback has been used to raise suspicion in a murder case. In Hopkington, Massachusetts, the bodies of a young wife and her infant daughter were found over the weekend. The police would like to talk with the husband, who has flown to London. Massachusetts detectives have traveled to Scotland Yard to seek England's help in locating him.

One reason he is " a person if interest" is a recent plunge in the ratings for his eBay business.

Today's Boston Globe

"Neil Entwistle had been accused in recent weeks of failing to deliver software to customers who ordered software from him through eBay. An eBay spokesman, Hani Durzy, said yesterday that Neil Entwistle had registered a business with eBay in England in April 2004, under the name srpublications, Until January, the company was receiving positive feedback, as shown on eBay's feedback site, which as recently as Dec. 27 posted customers' comments such as: ''Great communication. A pleasure to do business with." In a comment posted Dec. 15, a user wrote: ''Good service. Quick delivery. Thanks."
But after the start of the new year, the feedback took a turn. Beginning Jan. 6, srpublications received a series of 16 customers' complaints, with many customers warning that they never received materials for their money and could not get the company to respond. ''Complete Scam, eBay users beware! Absolutely nothing received, " wrote one person. Some of the complaints posted online were directed at Rachel Entwistle, since sales were apparently made in her name.
''What you can see is someone who, at least within the eBay universe, was acting as a good eBay citizen, until all of a sudden there was a period of 48 hours of bad feedback," Durzy said.

No one is claiming that Entwistle is a suspect, but the mere fact that his eBay feedback is mentioned in this story blurs a cultural line and adds a whole new meaning to a person's online reputation.

Flat schools for a flat world

Thomas Friedman makes an strong argument in The World is Flat; A Brief history of the Twenty-first Century that the world is now so interconnected by the internet and globalization that all of the economic assumptions of the past are in flux. America will need, in this new economic world, to redefine itself as a competitor in the global marketplace and to re-define itself as the nation of hope.

Friedman argues that once supply chains opened around the world, manufacturing work flowed to where it could be done the cheapest. Once fiber-optic cable was strung around the planet, data entry work flowed to where it could be done correctly at the lowest cost. And now that the infrastructure is in place, and people around the world are learning how to use it, creative and intellectual work is flowing to where it can be done best.

To compete in this global economy, people will have to be willing to work for less than anyone else in the world, do a better job than anyone else in the world, or be more imaginative than anyone else in the world.

In the United States, we do not have schools to prepare our children for any of these options. To work for less than someone in the most recent developing nation, young people would need to know how to survive with very little money in one of the most expensive economies on the planet. To do a better job than someone working day and night to build a niche in the worldwide market, students would need to develop skills of endurance, tenacity, and commitment. To be more imaginative than people creating new businesses in just emerging markets, our graduates will need to have practiced taking risks, asking questions, accepting ambiguity, and tolerating disagreement.

Right now, American schools do none of this well. Our current emphasis on high-stakes testing is not helping. The way it is playing out in most states is to teach kids to get just enough right answers to predetermined questions to match some arbitrary score. Effort is not factored in. Ambiguity is edited out. Creativity is not sought or measured.

I think we need to get testing right. First, let's make better tests. Massachusetts has a pretty good test. Second, let's set the passing grades at higher levels, commensurate with the levels achieved by the best students in the world. Third, let's teach the kids what they need to know in order to reach those levels.

But we need more, because getting testing right will not lead young people toward the habits of mind they'll need to use and trust their imaginations. For that, we'll need different schools, flat schools, where the adults trust the children to think, to speak their minds, to question, to be wrong for a while, to show what they know in ways that make sense to them.

Some few schools have started this work. North Star Academy in Newark is one. We need more.

Treadmill Dread

I'm liberal to a degree. I live in a Blue state. I vote democratic. I listen to Air America. OK, I try to listen to Air America. I support equal access of all kinds to most everything.

So, when I walked into my building's exercise room tonight and saw the new guy, in a wheelchair, I thought "Good for him!" I tensed up as he slowly maneuvered his chair next to the treadmill. I'm walking on the next machine at four miles an hour, trying not to stare, but really curious. What's going on here? If he needs a wheelchair, doesn't that mean he can't walk?

In the next few, long minutes, the guy pulls himself up from his chair, and balances himself, just barely, on the treadmill belt using his hands on the bars. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice him struggling to press the buttons to start the machine. I'm in a real pickle. Part of me says, "Help the guy get the treadmill going, you moron." And another part of me says, "You want to be responsible for this guy shooting off the end of the belt and up against the counter?"

I decide to help. I step off my machine and onto his with him. We choose the "manual" mode, I enter 170 pounds for him as his weight not knowing if this is a complement or an insult, and I've got my finger on Start when he says "Maybe I shouldn't do this."

OK, I step back onto my own machine; he eases himself back into his chair. Then, the next thing I know he's swinging himself on the the bench for the arm and chest weights. I look away, giving him his privacy. When I glance back, he's pumping more weight than I can lift, doing fifteen reps.

I cut back to three miles an hour.

Cat Terrorists

Anyone who has ever lived with a cat has probably suspected that these animals may secretly be terrorists.

There's the disappearing to God knows where for days or weeks on end, then appearing out of thin air in the middle of the room. There is the midnight skulking around the basement or the attic. Looking for what exactly? There are the sneak attacks while one is simply walking to the bathroom. Simply a primal feline habit, or practice for something much more sinister? They shock us with the corpses of field mice, displayed like some kind of trophy. And don't even talk to me about the sleeper cells.

Last month, we learned that one of them, this "Emily," traveled to...France...in the belly of an airliner, and flew home in Business Class! Who paid for that ticket, I wonder.

And now we learn that a cat in Ohio has been dialing the phone. What's next, encrypted emails?

We cannot sit idly by and let this threat continue. These animals live amongst us, and they hate our freedom and they hate our way of life. We need to fight back now, and we need to understand that this war will be a war like no other.

Snippets of conversation

As I walk around the city, the airport, I can help but hear little snippets of conversaton among other people. It may be one sentence in a hour long serious business meeting, a phrase in a casual conversation among stangers, a mother talking with her child, a bit of smalltalk between a customer and store clerk.

And it strikes me that here we are, spending our separate lives on this planet, going about our business, and these brief comments, overhead in passing, are some tiny momentary connection.

Sometimes they amount to almost nothing, as when two people are reading a restaurant menu posted in a window, one saying "I don't know. You want to try this place?" Other times they seem really important. At breakfast in a hotel restaurant, I look up from my paper to hear one man at a nearby table say to the goup of four other men, "Look, do I have the right people for this project? 'Cause if I don't, I'll go get some other people." Or simply silly. Or poignant.

My plan over the next few months is to rememeber some of these tidbits, these spoonfuls of talk in the river of conversation, and to write them down to see what happens. What could they mean? Even if the answer turns out to be "Not much," it might be fun.