A court in Milan recently convicted three Google execs of violating Italy’s privacy laws, which are quite strict. Some jail time could result, but the verdict has been appealed and it seems that many judgments are reversed by the appeals court, so it’s not over. The European Union has also sent Google a warning about privacy concerns resulting from the use of its Street View feature in Google Maps. Street View gives the Maps user exactly what the name implies: a view of the street, with the houses, businesses, factories etc. on both sides of the street. You can “drive” along a street that has been tagged with SV data and get some idea of what it all would look like from the seat of a car moving along down the roadway. Street View is created by Google teams that drive the various roads, boulevards, avenues and other thoroughfares of the world, taking pictures with a decent quality camera. The images are mapped to the satellite and map data, so that at a certain level, the user can activate Street View and take a peek at the area. Google has a “blur” function for the shots, so they’re not of good enough quality to see much detail. I’ve looked at our house here on SV and at some other places in my past life, and they seem recognizable, but they look a little vague, somehow. A letter to Google from the EU’s privacy commission asked that the G provide plenty of warning about when its camera crews would be shooting in an area, and should reduce the time the images are kept from one year to six months.

Privacy

The Guardian published some rules gathered from famous writers about what to do and how to do it, if you decide you want to be one, writer that is. Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaman and others list their best advice, although some of it seems pretty tongue in cheek or even a bit testy (“have something to write with”), as if the famous writer was piqued at the question. But, maybe not. I like some of Margaret Atwood’s remarks, to the effect that this is tough work, and nobody forced you to do it; get on with it, and stop whining. You can always tar roofs or catch salmon or whatever on those big boats in the Bering Sea, with all the storms and accidents.
Rules

Google has been putting out fires set by the launch of its social networking software BUZZ. A lot of people were very upset when they began to use BUZZ, because the system was revealing a lot more about them to a lot more people than they were aware of. Stung, Google is now back-stroking to get the privacy tools more in evidence, so users can have more say in who sees what.

BUZZ

Macmillan Company is one of the biggest textbook publishers in the US. Recently the company unveiled a new product line called DynamicBooks which is digital in character, but adds an interestig freature. Instructors using one of the offerings on DynamicBooks as a class text will be able to modify or even re-write the text to suit the needs of particular courses or students. So, if a faculty member doesn’t care for the explanation of how the moon causes tides to rise and fall on the earth, then the prof can enter the authoring system of the publisher and suppy an alternative wording, add a drawing, change an equation, etc. The price to students will be a great deal less than would be the price of the printed version. Most of the action on ebooks this year has been on the technology side, and by that I mean the development of readers of different kinds. But this is something different. It may flop. Who knows? Maybe everybody likes things just as they are. But I think we can all remember instances of error, oversights, misinterpretations or places where the authors simply missed saying something important, and we would have corrected the text on the spot, had that been possible. Now, maybe it will be.
Textbooks

Yesterday was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederick Chopin, the Polish composer. At that time what we call Poland today was divided among Russia, Austria-Hungary and Prussia. Chopin was much in demand as a pianist, an instrument that itself was undergoing changes as it developed from the earlier piano-forte. Most of his creative life was spent abroad, largely in Paris. He didn’t live very long, but he accomplished a great deal in the little time he had. The bulk of his work was devoted to compositions for solo piano, but he also wrote in larger forms, including two concertos for piano and orchestra. Celebrations of his bicentennial are planned all over the world, and will showcase both concertos and almost all of his works for piano alone, many of which are the despair of pianists because of their technical difficulty, and need for subtle techniques to sound right. Chopin died from tuberculosis, which was the Great Killer, of the 19th century, and well into the 20th:”the Chief Captain of These Men of Death”. There was no cure until the antibiotic era, but all kinds of treatments were tried, including long periods of rest in sanatoria, usually at higher elevations or warmer climates. I had an uncle who had to do this, and it was no joke for working class people during the Depression. TB even took on a bizarre kind of Romantic aura, as the curse of the greatly gifted artist, cut down in early life by cruel fate. Chopin had a long affair with the novelist Georges Sand, a psuedonym of Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, who published her novels under a man’s name. Chopn, Sand and her chldren moved around a lot, summering at her estate north of Paris, and looking for a climate that would ease his condition. But he was finally overwhelmed, and died in Paris, surrounded by some friends and family. Oddly, a lot of people claimed to have been at Chopin’s deathbed, many of whom were not even in the city, or even in France, at the time. It was sort of like JFK’s PT-109. If all the people who claimed to have been ‘with’ him on the torpedo boat had actually been there, it would taken a good-sized warship to hold them all.

Dick Francis died recently, at the ripe age of 89. Francis won his spurs, quite literally, as a jockey in Britain. In fact, he rode for the Queen Mother, and was about to win a big race when the horse suddenly dropped dead. That, and the fact that his numerous injuries were starting to plague him, drove Francis to give up the saddle. He became a journalist, and then started a novel, a thriller, making use of his turf smarts and racing lore. Dead Cert was the first, followed by 39 others. He had a loyal, and large, base of enthusiastic readers, who never missed a DF story. Many of his novels center on the world of thorough bred racing, with the money, the risks, the glamour of big-ticket gamblers and the bloody hard work of the ignored trainers, vets, stablehands, and, of course, jockies. I doubt if the Francis corpus will last the Ages, but for the stressed and the harried, the books gave entree to another world, one they probably never would enter in ordinary life.

Francis

Ralph McInerney died over the weekend at the age of 80. He was a well-regarded scholar of medieval philosophy and theology at Notre Dame, but branched out beyond the Academy through a series of mystery stories, most of which center on the priest Roger Dowling, a man well acquainted with frailty since his own career in the Church as a canon lawyer and hot-ticket candidate for higer office was derailed by one too many encounters with the bottle. In rehab, Fr. Dowling serves as a parish priest, who keeps tripping over corpses, thefts, and other crimes in what one would think to be a low crime midwestern US city….low crime because it’s usually too damn cold for anybody to go outside to do anything, good or bad. The Father Dowling stories were grabbed for TV and a decent series evolved, starring Tom Bowsley and Tracy Nelson, the daughter of Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Hilliard, the Ozzie and Harriet of radio and early TV fame, for you Old Timers out there. As a thinker, Dowley was a traditionalist and didn’t like a lot of the Vatican II reforms. He said so, quite bluntly.
<a href="In rehab, Fr. Dowling serves as a parish priest, who keeps tripping over corpses, thefts, and other crimes in what one would think to be a low crime midwestern US city….low crime because it's usually too damn cold for anybody to go outside to do anything, good or bad. The Father Dowling stories were grabbed for TV and a decent series evolved, starring Tom Bowsley and Tracy Nelson, the daughter of Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Hilliard, the Ozzie and Harriet of radio and early TV fame, for you Old Timers out there. As a thinker, McInerney was a traditionalist and didn't like a lot of the Vatican II reforms, and he said so, quite bluntly.
McInerny