Carbon neutral, smug positive

Last week I had the pleasure of helping out with a 5 minute TV segment on light bulb exchange and going carbon neutral. It was for a local cable-access show called Maui Daily, produced at the Akaku Maui Community TV station (a great local resource!) and our dear friend, local artist and all-around super-chick Stephanie Sachs. The idea sprung from a session of brainstorming we had about coming up with good guerilla environmental tactics - no, not vandalizing Hummers, but rather replacing all of the incandescent light bulbs in the big hotel and condo complexes around Maui with compact fluorescent (CFL) ones. It turns out that about 93% of Hawaii’s electricity comes from burning diesel oil, which isn’t the cleanest source of energy (hey, better than petroleum tar). CFLs are far more efficient than incandescents, using 25% of the electricity for the same brightness. They have also gotten super cheap ($1.50/bulb) and are available in COSTCO-esque bulk quantities. And given that electricity rates are above $.30/kWh on Maui, this might be a good way to save building owners a little cash too (guerrilla niceness tactics!). So why not?

I want to be neutral

I was particularly interested in this idea because it turns out I’m a major carbon polluter. To the tune of 20+ tons/year, about 3 times as much as the average American. It’s all that flying back and forth between Boston, Maui and La Campanas. And the fact that our home here on Maui is fully solar-powered doesn’t help to alleviate my environmental faux-pas. So following the lead of our dear Mr. Gore (who proved that you CAN win a Nobel prize and an Oscar in the same year), I decided to become carbon neutral. And one way of doing this was to replace a lot of light bulbs.

And I mean a LOT of light bulbs.

Here’s the math: CFLs save 75% of the electricity use by incandescents, so the CFL equivalent of a typical 60W incandescent bulb uses only 15W of juice, saving 45W/bulb. Now, assuming that the average household has 10 bulbs that are on for an average of 4 hours/day (including those that you keep on overnight), replacing those bulbs saves about 1.8 kWh/day (which, incidentally, is half the power we produce at home on sunny days), or about 660 kWh/year.

How much carbon pollution does this prevent? Using numbers from the US Department of Energy and the Alternative Energy Action Network, I estimate that for every 1 kWh of energy produced by MECO, 1.4 lbs of CO2 are released. So 660 kWh/year of less electricity translates into about 0.46 less tons of CO2 released. Great! so all I have to do is replace 430 light bulbs to offset my carbon footprint!

But this is where the math breaks down. Just buying the bulbs alone would cost me $700, and it takes several days to replace that many bulbs. And of course CO2 is released in the manufacture and transport of the bulbs, and I have to burn gas in my car to get the new bulbs to all the places I want to replace and the old bulbs to recycling centers (on Maui this means the trash, grrrr…). All in all, I’d probably have to replace twice or three times as many bulbs to really go carbon neutral, costing me upwards of $2000 and a good few weeks of my time. Not such a great way to reduce my carbon footprint after all.

Grandma’s got some new lights

But still a good idea for saving energy and money, so the Akaku segment went ahead as planned. Gen and I did some studio talking-head stuff (Gen did a second segment on recycling incandescents and CFLs, the latter of which contain small amounts of mercury), then headed out to our light-bulb replacement target - an assisted living facility called Roselani Place in Kahului (we had intended to do Stephanie’s condo as well as Harbor Lights, but both had already replaced their bulbs - good on ‘em!). A wonderful, renovated apartment complex with cute little tutus watching TV and chatting with their pals - I totally wanted to stay for the couch volleyball game.

Turns out they need CFLs badly - 900 incandescent light bulbs happily burning away every day, adding to Roselani’s $4000/month electricity bill. So we brought a camera and a few dozen bulbs, interviewed the marketing director Diane Alba-Means, and spent a hour replacing a grand total of … get ready for it … 20 light bulbs.

Not too productive, to say the least, and I’m positive that with all our gear this was not a carbon neutral activity.

However, it struck me in the end that this was a great way to amplify one’s charitable contribution to a place like Roselani. I spent about $30 on the bulbs we replaced; those bulbs are going to save Roselani something like $400 over the course of the year in electricity costs (did I mention $0.30/kWh on Maui?). Where else can you get a 10-fold return on an investment?

And hey - they still need 880 more bulbs!

Selling out

A fun little segment to be sure (I’ll post it on YouTube when its done), but none of this helped me achieve the holy grail of carbon neutrality. So I did what any good American would do - I bought my way out of it. I donated about $190 to Pop!Tech’s Carbon Initiative Project to buy 24 tons of carbon offsets - less than a third of what I would have spent on CFLs. Half is going to a solar irrigation project in Kalale, Benin; half is going to project to restore native forests in Rivas, Nicaragua.

Will this save the world? Probably not. But I sure felt better, in fact quite proud of myself for embracing carbon neutrality. Yea me!

Of course my Hawaiian friend Trinette laughed at me when I told her about this. “You bought off your pollution? That’s just about the stupidest thing I have ever heard!”

Any place I can go to offset my smug pollution?

Too Much Violence in Astronomy?

Recently NASA released a press report with the colorful title: “Death Star Galaxy’s Black Hole Fires at Neighboring Galaxy.” Death Star Galaxy? Does the administration know about this weapon of mass destruction? Is this a new member of the “axis of evil”? Should we fear the wrath of a rogue and aggressive galaxy?

The report actually refers to a new set of observations of the system 3C321, the 321st object in the 3rd Cambridge radio catalogue. Daniel Evans at Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led a recent study of this source using the three “great space observatories” Hubble, Chandra & Spitzer, as well as the VLA and MERLIN. They found a jet emanating from the galaxy in the lower right of the image (big pink spot) was “slamming the side of a companion galaxy” (smaller pink spot closer to middle of image). The jet then flares off to the side (blue nebulous emission) having apparently done its damage.

A very interesting (and rare) discovery to be sure, and one that will likely help us better understand the energetics of these jets, which are formed by accreting, supermassive black holes commonly found at the centers of galaxies (our own Milky Way galaxy has one of these supermassive black holes, Sagittarius A*, but it doesn’t seem to be producing a jet at the moment). But it is no surprise that this story had real legs because of the seemingly “violent nature” of this galaxy-galaxy interaction. And boy did Evans and his press conference colleagues push the violence angle, calling 3C321 the “death star galaxy” that is “causing all sorts of problems for the smaller galaxy it is pummelling”. “A truly extraordinary act of violence,” Evans reportedly stated.

The most colorful comments came of course from everyone’s favorite astro-talking-head Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who was “not a member of the research team”. Some winners:

“This is like a black hole bully, reaching out … and punching the nose of a passing galaxy.”

“This shows there are no safe islands in the universe.”

But the astro-pundits were not the only ones stoking the flames of cosmic violence. Many of the reporters wanting to soup up their articles added their own phrases in praise of anger and strife:

“In a display of cosmic violence that has never been seen before, the jet of radiation is pummelling a small nearby galaxy, likely damaging or even destroying any planets that might lie in its path.” - NY Times

“The power-packed particles…delivered the cosmic equivalent of a right hook to a smaller galaxy that just happened to be wandering by.” - Boston Globe

“The aggressive ‘death star’ galaxy was caught in its attack by an array of space and land-based telescopes.” - BBC News

“The latest act of senseless violence caught on tape is cosmic in scope: A black hole in a ‘death star galaxy’ blasting a neighboring galaxy with a deadly jet of radiation and energy.” - Yahoo News

“Cosmic equivalent of a right hook”? This “battle galactica” makes Iraq look like a minor tussle between ants. But honestly, are galaxies really doing violence unto one another? As “courtgolf” says in his/her post to Comcast.net forums, galaxies do not choose to inflict violence on one another as humans do, so anthropomorphizing a galaxy as “aggressive” or on the “attack” is a little ridiculous.

Moreover, why play the violence card? Reading the paper, the analogy that struck me was more of an invigorating massage, like a whirlpool jet, stimulating a little star formation in the companion galaxy. A little titillating, perhaps, but sex sells, right?

Apparently not in astronomy. No, the order of the day is aggression, violence, danger. Tyson’s latest book: “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries.” The next book of my friend Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy: “Death from the Skies”. And if that isn’t enough, here are a few other recent acts of violence reported from the cosmos:

Jupiter: Friend or Foe? - Astrobiology magazine

Planet Venus: Earth’s ‘evil twin’ - BBC News

Killer Asteroids: A Real But Remote Risk? - National Geographic

Cosmic Cannon: How an Exploding Star Could Fry Earth - space.com

Cosmic catastrophe “a certainty”- BBC News

Cocoon surrounds “black widow” star- BBC News

Stellar Violence in 30 Doradus - Astronomy Picture of the Day

University of Chicago astrophysicists simulate hellish violence of neutron star explosions - U. Chicago News Office

Violent galaxy seen in 3D - BBC News

It sure makes me want to duck and cover!

In my opinion, these headlines promote sensationalism over thoughtful research. But they can also have a negative impact on our culture as well. In the daily violence that surrounds us here on Earth, humans for millennia have taken refuge in the tranquility and beauty of the heavens. What kind of picture are we, as astronomers, now portraying to the public by making cosmic events look like an endless series of violent acts, with the forces of Nature bent on not only destroying us but each other in a perennial cycle of aggression? What is happening to the beauty and imagination the Universe inspires - the colorful wisps of nebulae and the sky-arching swirl of the Milky Way, the presence of other worlds and the possibility of other life, or the sheer awe of the vastness and age of the cosmos? Instead of uplifting the public about the grandeur of Universe around them, are we dumbing down our research into some kind of running commentary on the ultimate “ultimate fighting championship“?

When we anthropomorphize an aspect of the natural world, we impose not just physical attributes but psychological and emotional ones as well. Perhaps the portrayal of the Universe as an arena of uncontrollable violence is simply a reflection of the uncontrollable violence in our own lives. Projecting our fears and anxieties onto the stars allows us to “make sense” of war, anger, violence as a natural process, not simply a man-made one. In the end, this serves only to continue the cycle of human violence, instead of seeing the irrationality of it in the grand scale of the cosmos.

Perhaps it is time to bring sexy back to astronomy…

IRex Iliad

This week I received an IRex Iliad, an e-reader that has gotten increased scrutiny as a result of the Amazon Kindle launch (funny how Amazon’s launch has probably helped increase the sales of its rivals). My choice of the Iliad came after weighing the benefits of some of the the major e-readers now out there (see this Wired review and this MobileRead grid), and my personal desire to have something I can read research papers with while commuting or at home, without wasting paper and ink.

In the end, I found that the IRex Iliad was the ideal choice primarily for its ability to annotate documents. The Iliad is in effect a stripped-down tablet PC that uses e-Ink instead of backlight. Its stylus allows one to sketch out notes directly on the document which will reappear every time you bring the document up again (these notes can supposedly be incorporated with software, which sadly is only currently available for the PC). Of course, it is hard to make detailed notes on an 8″ screen, but I could write additional notes on a separate notepad function, which can be converted to ascii text and ported off on my work computer. Right now this is a bit clunky - one has to leave the document you are reading, open up the note, write, then go back to the document and find where you left off - but my hope is that it will be more streamlined in the future. This capability is extremely useful for grading papers, referee reports, etc., things I want to be able to do offline. Iliad has a number of other great features, most notably its native PDF support, something the Amazon Kindle really got wrong by not including. It is trivial to port my documents on and off the device either though a USB jump drive or connecting it to the computer through a USB cable - it shows up just fine on my MAC as an external drive, a real bonus over the PC-centric e-readers now available.

There are of course some major problems with the Iliad too. First, the battery life is abysmal. It lasts barely a day before its charge is gone (which is why I cannot use it at the moment!). This seems to me in direct conflict with one of the major benefits of e-Ink, namely that it requires no power to maintain the displayed page. It would make far more sense if the reader could stay in a perpetual “sleep mode”, woken only through user input, and thereby have its battery life dictated by page flips, not time. Second, I have yet to find a way to “bookmark” my place, so that I can go right it when I return; this, however, appears to be under consideration and possibly even solved through independent development. Third, the cost, at $700 (which is actually much cheaper than converting the cost in British pounds to US dollars) is astronomical, and while you do get the tablet functionality that other readers don’t have, this cost is actualy higher than existing tablet PCs that can do more than read books! (Fortunately I was able to pay for the Iliad on a research grant) Finally, the wireless component of this device is at the moment rather useless - all it does is download software updates. This feature would be great for downloading reading material directly to the device, say from another computer on the network, something that I think independent developers are working on.

However, the best thing of all about the Iliad is that it is a Web2.0 device. With a linux operating system whose code has been made available to developers, a great deal of software is being developed independently to address some of the software shortcomings. There is a good FAQ from the Mobile read forum on the Iliad. I’m just getting in to this now, and excited to see how I can improve the functionality of this device!

Pros:

• Tablet PC supporting “scribbling” on PDF documents
• Wireless
• Web 2.0 development allowed
• Native PDF support, as well as HTML, TXT, JPG, etc (but currently not DOC)
• USB jump drive and compact flash ports
• large screen (8″ vs. 6″ for others),

Cons:

• Expensive ($700 on Amazon)
• Battery drains in less than a day
• Company software only available for PCs
• No bookmarking (yet)
• No straightforward access to e-books (yet)
• “heavy” (13.7 oz)

Links:

• IRex homepage
• IRex’s list of e-book resources
• MobileRead’s forum on the Iliad
• List of 3rd party software for the Iliad

The Hirsch index: part 1

While I am lecturing MIT’s 8.012 class (”Mechanics for Masochists”), I don’t have a lot of time to concentrate on my brown dwarf research, so I find myself drawn off by other, shall we say, intellectual dalliances. My most recent distraction has been the so-called Hirsch index, or h-index, a single number that is meant to indicate the “impact” of a researcher’s published work in science. Think of it as baseball stats for science geeks - Ted Williams may have the highest on base percentage, but I’m sure I’ve got him beat on the h-index!

For better or worse, I’ve been contemplating this index quite a bit recently - perhaps too much. In particular, I’ve been concerned about its growing impact (pun intended) on hiring decisions, salary raises, and - perhaps most importantly - the psyches of young researchers who over- or under-estimate how their h-index is perceived. It seemed to me a perfect topic for an extensive blog discussion.

What is the h-index?

The h-index was formally proposed in a 2005 publication by Jorge Hirsch as a simple metric to gauge a researcher’s impact on her/his field (incidentally, Hirch was also my Physics 105: Computational Physics professor when I was an undergraduate at UC San Diego). As described in Hirsch (2005):

“A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np−h) papers have no more than h citations each.”

In other words, if you were to list all of a researcher’s publications in order of decreasing number of citations, then the h-index is the number of papers down the list one can go until the number of citations for a paper is less than the number down the list.

While it sounds somewhat complicated to describe this in words, the h-index can be determined very easily with publication search tools such as those on the ISI Web of Science (for which you or your university needs to have a paid subscription to use) or, more appropriate for astrophysics, NASA ADS (which is free!). Here’s a procedure to calculate the h-index using the latter:

• Go to the NASA ADS site
• Enter the researcher’s name (e.g. “Burgasser, A”) in the “Authors” text box at the top of the page
• Choose the databases to query (”Astronomy” and “Physics” should generally both be checked)
• Choose “Sort by citation count” in the Sorting section at the bottom of the page
• Click “Send query”
• The next page will give a list of papers ordered (at left) by the number of citations (the number immediately to the right of the list of authors). Scroll down until the order number equals (or is just less than) the number of citations. That’s the h-index (mine happens to be 29).

What is the h-index good for?

In his defining paper, Hirsch argues that the h-index is useful number “to characterize the scientific output of a researcher.” This is justified through a variety of arguments, including the high h-index values for several prominent physicists, most notably Edward Witten (h=110 in 2005) and several Nobel Prize winners (however, see caveats below). Hirsch estimates that h^2 corresponds roughly the number of citations of an author (an arguably clear measure of impact), without being subject to biases such as a few “big hit” papers or highly cited (but with little original work) review articles. He also argues that the h-index has advantages over several other common metrics, such as the total number of papers (no measure of importance), citations per paper (”rewards low productivity”), number of significant papers (”significant” is arbitrary) and number of citations in most cited papers (again, an arbitrarily defined set). He therefore argues:

“that two individuals with similar h are comparable in terms of their overall scientific impact, even if their total number of papers or the total number of citations is very different.”

Hirsch goes on to list some h-index “metrics” for gauging the status of an individual:

• h ~ 10-12: advancement to tenure (associate professor)
• h ~ 18: advancement to full professor
• h ~ 45+: National Academy of Sciences (NAS) membership (the average for newly elected members in 2005 was just over 45 as reported in Hirsch’s paper)

These benchmarks should not be interpreted literally, however. There are several brown dwarf astrophysicists with h-indices well above 18 (including yours truly) who are nowhere close to full professorship. Furthermore, while Hirsch argues that Nobel prize winners and NAS members have high average h-index values, but there are a handful of the former who have h-indices less than I, but clearly far more impact! More on this later.

The h-index, being a seemingly simple number that can gauge the entire life’s work of a scientist, has not unexpectedly garnered considerable attention by these same scientists. Google scholar lists >170 citations for the Hirsch 2005 paper as of December 9, 2007, most notably in the fields of bibliometrics and scientometrics (indeed, analysis of the h-index seems to form the core research of one Ronald Rossaeu). Nature has published 13 articles and new stories related to Hirsch’s paper (which is itself published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science) The scientific press have picked up on this “scientist stat”, and it is featured in a PhD Comics (a sign one has truly made it in the eyes of graduate students everywhere). Several groups have even come up with web-based calculators to calculate one’s h-index using Google scholar. There are also several extensive blogs discussing the h-index, including a very nice one by Prof. Anne-Will Harzing. And I cannot count the number of researchers who are expending time (like me) looking up the h-indices of themselves and their colleagues.

Major caveats

Despite the hype, many researchers (including Hirsch himself) have pointed out caveats in the use of the h-index in assessing the impact of a published researcher. Excellent reviews of these criticisms are found in recent articles by Bornmann & Daniels, Wendl, Kelly & Jennions, and include the following issues:

• Bounded by the number of publications: the h-index can only be as large as the number of publications. This makes it a poor metric for a young researcher (who, of course, may not yet have substantial impact), but also for well-established scientists whose work is confined to a few classic publications (a prime example is Alan Guth, founder of the inflationary theory of the Universe, who has a relatively paltry h-index of 22 according to NASA ADS).

• Context issues: highly cited papers may in fact be review articles (with little new research) or poor articles that are negatively criticized by several citations. My feeling, however, is if 100 articles are published to attack an article, it clearly had an impact (or at least struck a cord!).

• The Matthew effect: analogous to “money makes money”, an already highly cited author may continue to garner citations because that person is highly visible. Again, I believe this in fact argues in favor of h-index measuring a researcher’s impact.

• Home runs don’t matter: the h-index may de-emphasize very-high impact publications from a particular researcher, failing to distinguish that person from someone who is simply steadily productive. This touches on the meaning of “impact” implicit in this metric.

• Lost in the crowd: the h-index makes no correction for researchers who are the Nth coauthor of a paper with many authors, and for which she/he may not have greatly contributed. This is common for large collaborations with agreements that all or most collaboration members are coauthors (frequently the case for particle physics experiments or for publications from consortiums such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey).

• Incompleteness in the publication/citation record: NASA ADS clearly advertises that its citation library is not complete, ISI Web of Science appears to be limited to 1955 and onward (based on a comment made in the Hirsch 2005 paper), and you can bet Google scholar is considerably incomplete (my h-index drops by 8 points when calculated with it). Such incompleteness worsens for the more senior scientists.

• Generic names: The h-indices of scientists like Mike Brown or T. Nakajima are fraught with the contributions of scientists with overlapping names.

• Self-citation: Hirsch points out this will effect the bottom few citations in the h-index set, possibly dropping one’s number by only 1 or 2 (in fact, it drops mine by 5). There is some controversy, however, as to whether self-citation is truly a problem.

• Normalization between fields: Hirsch points out in his original paper that h-index can be very different between the top physicists (which in 2005 top out at 110 for Edward Witten and top biologists (which in 2005 top out at 191 for Solomon H. Snyder). This issue has been raised by a number of critics (see for example Iglesias & Pacharroman)

• What defines impact? The is probably the most important criticism, and one that plagues any bibliometric index. Hirsch (and others) nicely tip-toe over this issue, which forces the user to understand what is really being measured in the h-index , regulating the interpretation of impact to the user (again, see Kelly & Jennions).

In response to some of these perceived deficiencies in the h-index, a number of “derivative indices” have been proposed by the number-happy researchers that follow statistics (and appear to be as equally enthralled as me in wasting time on them). Beyond basic numbers (such as the total number of citations or number of citations per paper) these include:

• g-index (Egghe 2006): Designed to boost the impact of very highly cited papers, the g-index corresponds to the gth paper in a citation-ranked list of publications for which the cumulative number of citations is g^2. This index effectively compares researchers’ total citations assuming that that number is proportional to h^2 (as per Hirsch 2005). Michael Schreiber finds that the g-index is more susceptible to self-citation, but nevertheless shows less variation amongst scientists at a common career phase.

• H^2 index (Komulski 2006): The H^2 index is similar to the h-index, except that instead of the number h papers with at least h citations, it is the number H papers with at least H^2 citations. For example, I have 9 papers with over 81 citations (my 9th has 90), so my H^2 number is 9. Like the g-index, this variant is meant to reward researchers with high citation counts per paper over the slow and steady researchers.

• Individual h index (Batista et al. 2006): This index is meant to compensate for papers with many authors for which the researcher in question may have had minimal contribution. The individual h index can be computed by dividing the h-index by the average number of authors in the 1st through hth papers in a citation-ranked list. An alternate formulation is to divide each paper’s number of citations by the number of authors and compute the equivalent h-index.

• Contemporary h-index (Sidiropoulos et al. 2006): This modification of the h-index is meant to enhance the weight of a researcher’s most recent papers in the calculation of the h-index, in order to gauge her/his current productivity. This is in some way meant to “flush out the dead wood”; i.e., those researchers who may have published considerably several years ago but haven’t had much to show more recently. Individual papers are weighted according to a prescription the balances the “decay time” of a paper and when that decay sets in (this compensates for the lag period in which a paper in absorbed into literature of that field) One particularly brutal implementation that Sidiropoulos et al. apply name “publish or perish” (now “be cited or be consumed) gives a weight of 4/(# years since article was published).

• A, R and AR index (Jin et al. 2007): Jin and colleagues suggest these few modifications to the h-index, all computed from the “Hirsch-core” - the set of h papers that contribute to the h-index. A is the average number of citation per paper within the h-core, R is the square root of the number of citations in the h core, and AR is the square root of the sum of citations/(# years since publication) over all of the papers in the h-core. The latter is meant to allow a decrease in the “impact” of a scientist who has stopped publishing. However, I feel this supposition is hard to justify, given for example Albert Einstein’s continued impact despite a recent lack of publications!

• m-index (Hirsch 2005): In the same paper that Hirsch defines the h-index, he also defines an m-index to gauge the rate at which a researcher’s h-index increases; i.e., the growth of impact. Hirsch assumed (and later verified) that the h index grows roughly linearly with time, h ~ mn, where n is the “academic age” of a researcher (hence m = h/n). This latter, rather subjective variable is assumed by Hirsch to be the number of years since that researcher’s first publication. Hirsch considered m ~ 1 as an indicator of a successful scientist, m ~ 2 an outstanding scientist, and m ~ 3 a truly unique individual (these classifications are at best misleading: I wonder how Hirsch would classify Edo Berger, who has an m-index of 5.3!

• V index (Vaidya 2005) Jayant Vaidya suggested a modification of the m index, scaled by the proportion of time a researcher is able to spend actually doing research. This would obviously normalize out the time constraints on academics whose time is spent teaching and in committees (or writing blogs), but is a somewhat arbitrary number to come up with

• h-b index (Banks et al. 2006): This index is defined identically to the h-index, but is instead applied to a field of research as opposed to an individual researcher. In other words, it is meant to gauge the impact of a particular field. However, I find this index to be somewhat suspect. If I do a citation-ranked search of papers on NASA ADS using keywords of “brown dwarf” and “dark matter”, I find h-b indices of 213 and 205, respectively. I highly doubt brown dwarf research has a greater impact that dark matter, particularly with regard to national funding!

So the h-index can be problematic; but it is also simple to use and simple to calculate, and it is clearly popular amongst bibliometrists, employers, job seekers, and time-wasting researchers. This blog entry was meant purely as a starting point. In a future blog, I will throw out my own suggestions for improvements to the h-index (yea, more indices!), examine how this index rates brown dwarf astrophysics, and assess when the h-index and its derivatives would be best served or ignored.

Mac fun

Welcome world, to my humble blog. I’ve finally gotten a chance to start this up while I wait….and wait….for Apple Support to help me fix my ailing MacBook. For the most part, this happy little machine has been working like a charm, with seemingly innocuous problems that software update doesn’t work (NSURLErrorDomain -1100, anyone?) and I can’t stream good live radio like Radiopio. I finally decided to do something about it today, googling my error message and reading the various blogs and lists with other having similar problems. When permission repair, file repair, and fsck’ing all failed to resolve the problem, I broke down and gave Apple Support a call. An excerpt of this experience post auto-responder (+15 minutes):

AS: Hello, my name is xxxxx, may I have your name, please?

Me: Adam Burgasser

AS: Hello, Adam, may I have the serial number of your computer?

Me: Yes, its XXXXX

AS: Thank you. Our records indicate we do not have your email address, may I have it?

Me: My email address? Do you really need that?

AS: Yes, it will allow us to send you information in case we are disconnected, or for future reference.

Me: Um, ok, its xxxxxxxx.

AS: Thank you. Can I please have a phone number that you may be reached by?

Me: My phone number? Don’t you know that already? It’s the one I’m calling from. Why do you need my phone number?
AS: Sorry sir, I do not have access to that information. If you can provide your phone number I can call you back in case our connection is lost.

Me: Oh, good idea. OK, its xxxxxxx.

AS: Thank you, Adam. Now what seems to be the problem?

I gave a long and thorough description of the seemingly minor problems I’m having and the efforts I made to reconcile it. My support person was reasonably impressed I had tried to solve it myself, gave me a few tests to try, and then instructed me to download an update of the operating system (10.4.11) from the Apple site to check if that would work, then do an Archive + Install from my install disks. It sounded like all would be well in a mere hour or so.

One hour later, I had my computer back running, but with an even more outdated operating system (10.4.6) which could no longer run half of my software (e.g., iTunes), and the same exact problem with software update. So I called support again.

AS: Hello, my name is xxxxx, can I get your name?

Me: Adam Burgasser, I have a case number, its xxxxxxx.

AS: Thank you, Adam, can I have the serial number of your computer?

Me: What? Isn’t that in my case?

AS: No, I don’t see it here, please if you could provide it.

Me: Um, fine, its xxxxx.

AS: Thank you. Our records indicate that we do not have your email address, may I have it please?

Me: What? You already sent me email from the last time I called, two in fact, how could you not have my email address in your system?

AS: Sorry sir, I don’t see it here. Could you please provide your email so we can follow up on the problem if we need to?

Me: (grr) Sure, its xxxxxx

AS: Thank you. May I please have a phone number that you may be reached by?

Me: Oy! Again, why isn’t that in my record? Are you actually storing this information?

AS: Please sir, you phone number will allow me to call you back if we get cut off.

Me. Fine, xxxxxxx.

AS: And what seems to be the problem?

Me: Umm, isn’t that at least in my case?

AS: Yes, uh, it says you’re not able to download files and your internet is not working?

Me: Did you actually read the case?

AS: I’m, uh, reading it now.

Me: Why don’t you ask me after you finish reading.

AS: [a pause] Ah, you are unable to use software download.

Me: Yes, and I followed the directions given to me and now I have an even older operating system running and that didn’t solve the problem at all and my software isn’t compatible.

AS: Do you have a portable harddrive nearby?

Me: No.

AS: Well, sir, you are going to have to do an erase and install, and that should fix the problem.

Me: What? I was told that this wouldn’t be necessary!

AS: Well, I don’t know what the problem is, sir, but an erase and install will definitely fix it.

Me: What about this NSURLErrorDomain -1100? Doesn’t that mean anything to you?

AS: I’ve never heard of such an error sir. I am sure this is a unique problem.

[Now would be a fun time to see the number of references to NSURLErrorDomain on the web. Only 5060 sites. Clearly an obscure error]

Me: [fuming] Please connect me with someone familiar with my system.

And here is where I am now, 30 minutes later, listening to bad music through my tinny cell phone speaker, expecting little to come of it. Sure, I am an inpatient, suspicious and quickly frustrated support customer, but if this is “support” who needs an enemy? However, when I see how the folks fail to carry my information from one call to the next, I have to admit I’m not as worried about them having my personal information as I was before…

Still waiting…