Only slightly bent

When watching or reading the news, it often feels that the world is full of bad news. I decided to see whether it’s just an illusion and took as source material today’s newspaper and, in particular, the foreign news section.

I then classified each news item (i.e. opinions or columns don’t count as news) according to whether it was negative, positive or neutral in tone. For example, “Anti-Denmark hostility intensifies in several Arab countries” counts as negative, “A new annual day to commemorate end of slavery in France” counts as positive while articles like “President Bush’s State of the Union speech opens the election year in USA” were counted towards neutral items.

The results from this highly unscientific study can be seen in the graph below:

Green is positive, red is negative and light blue is the neutral share of the articles.

As can be seen, most news are somewhat surprisingly neutral. But still, bad news significantly outnumber the good news. So what does this tell us? While I’m sure there are plenty of bad news to go around, I’d be willing to bet there are more good news to go around, too. We’re constantly told, complacency is dangerours (and, thus, bad news have their time and place), but so are desperation and feelings of hopelessness which spring from unending flow of purely bad news.

So, newspapers: instead of reporting torrents of bad news which eventually cause people to throw in the towel, why not try to activate and organize some positive action? Try to make some news, not just report them. Oh, and lame discussion forums with hints like “Discuss the article at www.blahblah.com” are not the way to do this.

Being on sick leave, which I currently am, has very few positives affiliated with it. One of them, however, is the fact that I have time to read the daily newspaper – Helsingin Sanomat in my case – in its entirety. That being the case, I decided I should have one post on what many blogs are all about: news commentary. I’ll skip the main news item (presidental election results) altogether, ’cause I’m sure people hear more than enough about that from elsewhere.

Of course, since we’re talking about a newspaper, none of the news part was really new. Newspapers have, for me at least, become sources of in-depth information, columns on varying topics and a source for an alternative point of view for news discovered online the previous day. Now all we need is for newspapers to realize their changed role and start tweaking the content to the right direction.

And nuclear power shall save us all..

Lasse Lehtinen

“unrealistic to imagine that the additional energy required by the european lifestyle could be produced by wind or by damming up more rivers”.

“If electricity is produced by other means than wind, water or nuclear, emissions will also increase.”

not

Fireplaces screwing up the air quality

One would think that suburban areas like Lintuvaara in Espoo have a pretty good air quality, at least when you compare it to downtown Helsinki. It turns out that’s not quite the case, and the culprit are the citizenry with their “energy-saving” or “romantic” fireplaces. Thanks to people burning wood the air quality has occasionally been extremely bad in areas with few other pollutants.

Recently wood-pellet based heating for houses has become increasingly popular. Yet, particulate matter emissions from these are quite bad, not to mention burning wood is a significant source of carbon dioxide. I wonder how many people think it’s somehow an ecological choice to burn wood in the fireplace and thus save electricity – and fail to take into account that the pollution they’re creating in the process can very well be relatively worse than what they’re saving in electricity.

Another roof down, 66 dead

In Poland, the roof of an exhibition hall caved in on hundreds of people gathered at a pigeon fair. At least 66 people died and more than a hundred were injured. The cause is premilimarily thought to be heavy snow packed on the roof. Quite a few roof collapses have been happening in recent years, and I think t’s inexcusable that places are allowed to remain open when the structures are under more stress than they’ve been designed to take.

But what I’m even more worried about is that accidents like these are probably just going to become more and more common due to climate change – the increasingly extreme weather phenomena can bring lots of snow to places where they’re not used to it and where the buildings have not been designed to handle it.

Letters to the editor

This is always an interesting section and today was not an exception. Leena Mallat is writing well about relative moral values in the society and how they’re nowadays ingrained into both personal and corporate lives. While her writing is somewhat edgy, it’s refreshing to see that there are still people thinking like this.

“wireless technology is taking over even the rest of our time and space”

Down with beer

I’ve never liked beer but do enjoy drinking wine, so the findings of a recent Danish study are just perfect: according to the study, those drinking wine eat more healthily than those who like beer. Some 3.5 million shopping carts were analyzed and it was found that those buying wine more often also bought fruits, vegetables, olives, chicken, vegetable oil and low-fat products – whereas those who preferred beer, bought more TV dinners, sugar, potato chips, butter, sausages, pork and soda. It makes sense on an intuitive level too: I’ve seen the combinations beer & sausage and wine & fruits being consumed at the same time countless times, but rarely do I see anyone downing chips and wine or beer and grapes.

I upgraded the site today to use WordPress 2.0, and while everything seems okay, some things may still be out of whack. If you notice any weird errors or layout problems, please let me know.

A free lesson to everyone thinking of mobile payments on what it takes to have a successful mobile payment scheme. Even the very basic things are consistently forgotten and then some time after launch people wonder why the service didn’t take off..

Speed & usability: a mobile payment scheme needs to be as fast or preferably faster than current payment methods. This means 10 seconds is already pushing it and anything beyond 30 seconds makes it completely hopeless for in-store POS transactions. For speed-crucial applications, we’re talking about one second or so, which is why NFC-based systems have a good chance of making it. From a usability point of view, there can’t be too many buttons to press or dialogs to reply – because none of the other methods make you do that either.
Use-case convenience: it needs to be as convenient or more convenient than current methods for the intended use case. Parking is a good niche because you are much more likely to not carry correct change with you than not have, say, a credit card with you when going shopping.
Fast set-up: nobody is going to go through too much trouble in signing up for a system they’re not sure they’re going to use. Completely automatic provisioning would be best, if possible.
Cost: mobile payments cannot cost more than other ways of paying. No excessive transaction fees are possible; not to the customers, not to the merchants. With payment card fees in the 1-5% range, this makes for a challenging market – especially when a new player, the mobile operator, often wants in on it also.
Availability: it needs to be usable in more than one obscure kiosk in the middle of nowhere!
Patience from the players: mobile payments suffer from the same classic problem as any other new payment method; people don’t want to use a payment method that can’t be used to pay for anything anywhere, and merchants don’t want to sign up when there are no customers using the method. Significant take-up is not a matter weeks or months – it’s years or even decades.

One can get away with breaking or bending one or two of these “rules”, but not too many – sadly, many systems currently in use miserably fail more than one point. The most used service in Finland is probably Helsinki’s public transportation SMS-ticket ordering system. It fails in usability (what idiot came up with the code A 641 anyway?) but scores points in convenience and cost.

In other services, there are no mitigating points. For example, pictured on the right is the Coke machine at the Sello shopping center that works using mobile phones as well as coins. The killer, however, is the price: it costs over 20% more (€1.81+call price vs €1.50) to pay for the Coke using the phone than with coins. Of course it doesn’t help that there’s a supermarket right next to the machine where you can buy the bottle even less.. Another example is Mobiiliraha which completely fails rule #5 – availability. They have a list of merchants where it’s accepted – a whopping 8 merchants. The pitch “And our group is growing!” at the bottom of the merchant list that has not grown for years now seems pitiful.

Of course, all the rules can be forgotten by remembering that a new service needs to solve a problem, not create new ones.

Casa Largo is a relatively new Spanish restaurant right in downtown Helsinki. I’d never before found myself there, but after arriving downtown in -20C weather with the goal of finding food, a restaurant conveniently located something like 50 meters from the railway station started to look very tempting indeed..

So in we went. Much to our surprise, the place was fully booked in early Saturday afternoon, which shouldn’t be popular for either lunch or dinner but full it was. Nevertheless, as we promised to get ouf of there in under 90mins, we were allowed in. The interior of the place hadn’t received as much attention as one would’ve hoped – splashes of paint, basic modern wood tables and standard, though comfortable, chairs were laid out traditionally in the restaurant space with no other decoration to speak of. It might’ve been intentional, but I fail to see what kind of atmosphere they were after in the interior design of the place. In any case, at least it didn’t remind me of Spain.

Me being essentially frozen, a complementary (with main course) hot starter soup was welcome news. As predicted, the delicious creamy garlic soup hit the spot perfectly and I started to melt little by little. Going through the menu was a pleasant surprise; a lot of interesting dishes to choose from. Being hungry, we skipped the tapas selection of some 20 tapas and went straight to the main courses. My selection was Pollo Con Salsa de Lima (chicken with lime sauce), which turned out to be pretty good. A well-prepared dish, but somehow the lime sauce lacked something. Maybe there was too much of it, maybe it was too cold or something, but the overall feeling of the food was just “ok”.

Considering the price of the place (the affordable end of the scale with mains between €10-€22), however, the experience was not a bad one. The service was quick and friendly and there would’ve been a few interesting Spanish wines to taste – some of the other dishes may also need to be given a chance to impress, but so far I’d rank this at an average 3 out of 5.

When it’s -20C (or worse) outside, evenings aren’t good for much outdoors stuff. So what to do when you’re stuck inside? After a busy day, the answer includes a hot chocolate and a movie. So here’s this years first round of mini-reviews.

La Marche de l’empereur / March of the Penguins

why make the penguins talk

The Importance of being Earnest

Jack (Colin Firth) has a troublesome relationship with his reckless brother, Ernest, one who often requires him to travel to London from his countryside manor. The relationship grows increasingly difficult when certain people start falling in love with Ernest – who is, in fact, Jack’s alter ego. Throw in another person (friend of “Ernest”), Algy, who also assumes a false identity and a mess is ready. Set in late 19th century London, the movie is a mediocre comedy that has its moments but also never quite reaches its potential.. 3 out of 5.

The Perfect Man