Linked List: March 20, 2012

Tuesday, 20 March 2012

The Overlook Hotel 

“Ephemera related to Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of modern horror, The Shining.” Caretaker: Lee Unkrich. He’s always been the caretaker.

The Browser You Loved to Hate 

I’ll say it: this is actually a pretty good spot from Microsoft for IE 9. It’s part of this campaign.

Michael Dell Should Be Satisfied 

Apple’s finally giving that money back to its shareholders.

Apple Statement on iPad Temperatures 

Jim Dalrymple has a statement from Apple:

“The new iPad delivers a stunning Retina display, A5X chip, support for 4G LTE plus 10 hours of battery life, all while operating well within our thermal specifications,” Apple representative Trudy Muller, told The Loop. “If customers have any concerns they should contact AppleCare.”

Allow me to translate: the new iPad can get warmer than the iPad 2 but that’s expected.

Comparing Temperatures 

Sam Byford, writing for The Verge, “Tests Show New iPad Runs Up to 18 Percent Hotter Than iPad 2”:

Dutch website Tweakers.net has taken an infrared camera to the new iPad and revealed that it runs at up to 33.6 degrees Celsius (92.5 Fahrenheit) when running the GLBenchmark — that’s an 18.7 percent increase on the iPad 2, which reached 28.3 degrees Celsius (82.9 Fahrenheit).

As Alex Dedalus points out on Twitter, to say this is a crap headline is give crap headlines a bad name. Celsius and Fahrenheit are relative temperature scales, not absolute, so you can’t do percentage-based comparisons. Think about it: 33.6 / 28.3 gives you an “18.7 percent” increase, but if you do the math with the same temperatures in Fahrenheit, you get 92.5 / 82.9 = “11.6 percent” increase. If you really want to do a percentage based comparison, you need to convert to an absolute temperature scale like Kelvin, which shows you that it’s actually a 1.8 percent increase in temperature (306.75 / 301.45). This is middle school science.

That doesn’t make for a good Verge headline though, and neither would “5.3 degrees” (Celsius), so I suggest going with Fahrenheit — “Tests Show New iPad Runs Up to 10 Degrees Hotter Than iPad 2” — to maximize the sensational impact while still being technically true.

Monthly Reporting of Excessive Work Hours in Apple’s Supply Chain 

Apple seems to be updating this page in its Supplier Responsibility section monthly (the section quoted below is toward the bottom of the page):

In our effort to end the industry practice of excessive overtime, we’re working closely with our suppliers to manage employee working hours. Weekly data collected in January 2012 on more than 500,000 workers employed by our suppliers showed 84 percent compliance with the 60-hour work week specified in our code. In February 2012, compliance with the 60-hour work week among 500,000 workers at those suppliers increased to 89 percent, with workers averaging 48 hours per week. That’s a substantial improvement over previous results, but we can do better. We will continue to share our progress by reporting this data on a monthly basis.

48-hour average workweek and a five-percent month-over-month decrease in 60+ hour weeks — for February, the month where Apple was ramping up production of the new iPad (3).

‘This Is a Work of Non-Fiction’ 

Alli Houseworth, former marketing director at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company:

For months and months four major non-profit organizations across the US (Seattle Rep, Berkeley Rep, Woolly and the Public Theater) worked to put TATESJ on the stage, bringing the story we all felt was so enormously important — a story Mike told at least me time and time again was true. He insisted that “This is a work of non-fiction” be printed in playbills. This was to be a work of activist theatre.

And:

And to the tens of thousands of Americans who paid money to sit in our theatres to see this show that was billed as a non-fiction piece of theatre, I am so sorry. You deserve an apology from us art-makers. We should have known better. We should have done our fact-checking. Our dramaturgs should have gone through every fact in that show, just like they do with other plays that go on our stages. We as marketers should have positioned this as “based on a true story.” We should have known better. We all should have stood up against Mike and made sure with 100% certainty that the story he was putting on our stage was true because why, WHY, when we are producing works of non-fiction should we ever be held to a different standard than journalism.

Why indeed. Imagine how frustrating this situation must be for monologists who do value the truth, who are performing true journalism.