Charter Communications, our local co-axial monopoly and recent bankruptee, sent a technician out to our house today, to hook up our new net connection. As is almost always the case, the tech was friendly, helpful and generally knowledgeable, in stark contrast to just about anybody you can ever get on the phone if you call the company. The customer service people are like robots. Sometimes, like robots with buggy firmware. They are, quite literally, running a program written by someone at Charter, codified in a choose-your-own-adventure style script booklet or web application. They seem to have no intrinsic knowledge of the business they work for, or the systems they are meant to support. Honestly, I wish Charter (and other such companies) would just put these resources on the web directly, so I can page through them on my own without having to be on hold first. They probably won’t do this, at least not in full, because one of the most important jobs this script/program does is to retain as much of their customer’s money as possible, whether or not they’re really supposed to have it, and to direct people into more lucrative service contracts, aggressively if need be.
Continue reading ‘To Charter Communications: transparent bills get paid faster’
Published by
Zane Selvans on
August 29th, 2009 in
linkstream.
Tags: activism, agriculture, amsterdam, apocalypse, archaeology, bbc, bicycle, bullshit, capitalism, china, cities, climate, communication, copenhagen, csa, cuba, data, denmark, design, dutch, economics, education, energy, film, fish, food, google, green, greewashing, holland, human, india, information, infrastructure, internet, islam, maps, monopoly, netherlands, ocean, oil, organic, peak-oil, performance, phone, physics, policy, propaganda, regulation, religion, santacruz, satire, sex, sustainability, technology, transportation, urban, women.
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading ‘Links for the week of August 28th, 2009′
At the Sustainability Symposium last night (which was nominally about water footprints (PDF) and this paper on the international trade in virtual water) we ended up “off topic” and talking about science communication, public outreach, and how policy gets made. Inevitably it seems like these conversations end up coming back to the issues from Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet’s Speaking Science workshop that SASS sponsored last summer.
There is huge discomfort for scientists in the fact that the way in which information is conveyed impacts how it is interpreted. The idea is at odds with the scientific ideal of objective facts and communication, but nevertheless it is true. A one liter glass plus 500 ml of water equals what? The glass is half empty. The glass is half full. The glass is twice as big as necessary to hold that much water. The same objective facts, different connotations. Different implications. Different frames. And sometimes, the frame ends up being a more important determinant of the listener’s reaction than the information the speaker intended to convey.
Continue reading ‘Framing Embeds Values in Scientific Facts’
