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Readin', Ritin', and Rithmetic, by Rote

Yesterday in Twitter, @jemmons wrote

If answers to your test questions can be looked up by "cheaters" on their phones, maybe they don't need to learn them? BETTER QUESTIONS PLZ?

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Surprise

surprise - v.

1. to strike or occur to with a sudden feeling of wonder or astonishment, as through unexpectedness
2. to elicit or bring out suddenly and without warning: to surprise the facts from the witness.
3. to lead or bring unawares, as into doing something not intended

I'm thinking about "surprise" today and what it means. Yesterday, at the Job, I announced a decision that I believed was mine to make and that I also understood to be an expected, eventual outcome of discussions and plans we all had in mid-January. In other words, none of this should be surprising. The only unknown was the date of the decision.

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Job vs Company; I'll Take the Job

When I began working for Cotheme (the Company that employs me), it was with decidedly mixed feelings. I hadn't gone looking for a job there; they found me. I wasn't in their customer demographic. I didn't use any of their products or services. The location was at the far edge of the distance I was wiling to commute.

But, they had a position available and I needed a job. Many of the people in the department used Mac OS X, so Windows wouldn't be an issue. I wouldn't have to drive; the location is reachable by train and shuttle. Telecommuting one day a week was not only permitted, it was common.

And, after all, I didn't actively dislike the Company or any of their products or services. Working there wouldn't be philosophically repugnant. It just felt a bit odd that I didn't really care about what they did.

Besides, it was a only 3-month contract. And then it became full time...

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Leaving A Mark

As I was reading a discussion (April 2006) in the 43Folders (Productivity) forum, I came across a reference to a disturbing quote attributed to Jean Baudrillard:

The compact disc. It does not wear out, even when one uses it. That is terrible. As if one had never used it, as if one had never existed at all.

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Who Owns the Data?

There's been a lot of discussion in the Cyberverse recently regarding Robert Scoble and Facebook. Robert lost his Facebook account (he got it back after appealing) when he violated Facebook's Terms of Use by using a program to "scrape" (download) Facebook data -- specifically, his "friends" list. Facebook’s Terms of Use "broadly prohibits the running of automated scripts on the site."

Here's what Robert was trying to do:

I was alpha testing an upcoming feature of Plaxo Pulse .... It is a Facebook importer that works just like any other address book importer.

What does it collect?
Names and email address and birthday.

It did NOT look at anything else. Just this stuff, no social graph data. No personal information.

I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 1,800 of my friends are already on.

It’s ironic that you can import your Gmail address book into Facebook but you can’t export back out.

I sympathize with Robert's plight; I recently triggered a "bot sensor" myself on a site. (I wasn't even using a program, just looking at a lot of pages in sequence!.)

But what's interesting to me is that most of the discussion doesn't surround Facebook's policy or whether they were within their rights to turn off Robert's account, even temporarily. Much of the discussion concerns whether Robert Scoble had any right to the data he was "collecting".

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