Anyway, Seth is responding to and offering some criticisms of Anderson's new book - Free. In his response, Seth writes, "A good book review on Amazon is more reliable and easier to find than a paid-for professional review that used to run in your local newspaper, isn't it?" My goodness, NO!

One of the many reasons I do still read newspapers, albeit usually their digital versions, is to get reliable, easy to find reviews of restaurants and books. I don't want reviews of movies because I don't want to know too much going into the theater. Sites like Amazon and Yelp have many, many book and restaurant reviews. My problem with these reviews is the same thing Seth is pointing out - anyone can write them. Let's face it, most people should not write book reviews. Book reviews on Amazon, much like restaurant reviews on Yelp, are often poorly written, hard to follow, irrelevant, boring, the list goes on. Reading through readers' reviews does not save me any time when decided to buy a book, and it may not even help me make that decision.

For a rather fair example, see the reviews of Heat, a really fun book by Bill Buford. Right on the page you can compare the usefulness of a review by Anthony Bordain and those made by readers. I say the example is fair because the readers' reviews aren't the worst examples I could find. One of the reviews begins, "I don't go to restaurants. I don't watch FOOD Channel. I don't even order take-out. I'm just a pizza and burger guy with an occasional side trip to Taco Bell for my veggies. So why was I reading this book?" Please, why am I reading this review? I read reviews in established publishing sources because I know who the writers are and have some reason to trust them. 270 readers on Amazon thought the review that started with that line, about a cooking book, was helpful. That shows me that both the reviews and the people who rate them are not to be trusted when I'm deciding how to spend my book money.

Amazon's statistics about what people buying books I liked, like Heat, also bought are more helpful. Those stats are about user behavior though, not user contributions. Not all reviews are equal. To have more reviews is not necessarily better - it just makes finding the useful ones harder. I have in the pipeline a site that will address that problem for restaurants by aggregating reliable, professional reviews - Food Pilgrim - but for now, I'll just avoid the reader reviews on Amazon and stick to trusting the reviewers at Salon, the NY Times, and my local library.

I have a form with text box inputs for dateDepart and dateReturn. This code takes those inputs, turns them in JavaScript dates, compares them to each other and to today, and returns alerts or submits the form, depending on how the comparisons shake out.

Here's my code:

// check to make sure Return date is after Departure date, and both are after today
if ( (the_form.dateDepart.value !="") && (the_form.dateReturn.value !="") )
{
	var strFromDate = the_form.dateDepart.value;
	var dayPartFromDate = parseInt(strFromDate.substring(3,5),10);
	var monPartFromDate = parseInt(strFromDate.substring(0,2),10);
	var yearPartFromDate = parseInt(strFromDate.substring(6,10),10);
	var dtDepart = new Date(yearPartFromDate, monPartFromDate-1, dayPartFromDate);

	var strToDate = the_form.dateReturn.value;
	var dayPartToDate = parseInt(strToDate.substring(3,5),10);
	var monPartToDate = parseInt(strToDate.substring(0,2),10);
	var yearPartToDate = parseInt(strToDate.substring(6,10),10);
	var dtReturn = new Date(yearPartToDate, monPartToDate-1, dayPartToDate);
	var now = new Date();
	var today = new Date(now.getFullYear(),now.getMonth(),now.getDate());	

	if(dtDepart > dtReturn)
	{
		alert('Departure date must be before return date. Please fix and resubmit.');
		return false;
	}
	else if (dtDepart < today)
	{
		alert('Departure date must be after today. Please fix and resubmit.');
		return false;
	}
	else
	{
		the_form.submit();
	}
}

Turn User Input into a JavaScript Date
To turn the user's input into a Date, I needed to parse the input and then pass the pieces to the Date() function.

The JavaScript substr function syntax I used corresponds to dateToChange.substring(start,finish). My users are mostly in the U.S., and they enter dates in the form MM/DD/YYYY, e.g., 03/14/2009. JavaScript starts counting at 0, so the substr functions above grab "14" for the day, "03" for the month, and "2009" for the year and then pass those substrings to the Date()function to be converted in a Date JavaScript understands.

getFullYear(); returns a four-digit year such as "2009" that makes it easy to compare to the default version of today's date that
var now = new Date();
var today = new Date(now.getFullYear(),now.getMonth(),now.getDate());
gives.

Why monPartToDate-1? Remember, JavaScript starts counting at 0, so January is month 0, and December is month 11. That means I need to subtract 1 from what my user entered to get the right month for JavaScript.

Compare Dates
I needed to compare the two dates the user entered to make sure she had departure first, then return. Once I have converted both her inputs to JavaScript dates, the comparison uses a simple "greater than" operator: dtDepart > dtReturn

Calling the Date-checking Function
You'll notice my code doesn't include a function declaration; that's because this date-checking procedure is part of a larger function to validate my form. You could wrap this code in a function declaration such as
function checkDates(the_form){}

In order to call the code when the user submits the form, I like to use something like

<input id="search" onclick="checkDates(this.form);" type="button" value="Submit Form" />

in the HTML.

1. articulate the standards used in their particular field to ensure rigor across the range of qualitative methodological approaches;
2. identify common criteria shared across the four disciplines for designing and evaluating research proposals and fostering multidisciplinary collaborations; and
3. develop an agenda for strengthening the tools, training, data, research design, and infrastructure for research using qualitative approaches.

The whole report is 180 pages long, but you can get the gist from the executive summary. For graduate students, the longer sections on "Recommendations for Producing Top Notch Qualitative Research" and "Promising New Research Areas and Topics" are especially interesting reads. I'll post more details when I have a little more time. We don't get to see into the minds of our faculty members every day, and reports like this one give us a glimpse. Take a look, and keep working on your top notch research.

I dropped my iPhone 3G and broke its glass. I was so distraught about dropping it that I never got a picture of the broken glass. Trust me, it was depressing.

I checked with the Apple store about a repair, and they offered me a replacement for $299 + tax. That seemed steep and wasteful, so I went hunting online for repair options. No need to fill landfills with broken iPhones. I found two companies who do iPhone glass repairs and had positive reviews: Mission: Repair and iResQ. After blogging about my broken glass, I got emails and blog comments from employees at both companies. Way to be on top of the blogosphere, guys. After checking prices and reviews, I decided to go with Mission: Repair.

Disclaimer: Ryan at Mission: Repair offered to pay me for the ads on my blog whether I got my repair through them or not. He also offered me the same discount available to Apple store visitors who get a coupon from the Genius bar.

My Repair

I chose the 3G iPhone Digitizer Glass Repair and the "I'll send it in; return it to me overnight!" option for $9 extra.

My Review

So, how did it go? Swimmingly!

I sent the phone off via USPS Priority Mail with delivery confirmation on Monday from Ann Arbor.  According to the USPS, my package arrived at 11:25am. Less than 2 hours later, I received an email from Phil at MR letting me know they had received my iPhone and would fix it right away.  They fixed it Wednesday, shipped it first thing Thursday morning, and I received my phone back in near-new condition on Friday in Los Angeles (I was traveling). At first I was concerned that the glass was not flush with the sides of the phone, but I saw the "real" thing at the Apple store today, and the glass isn't flush on brand new iPhones either.

Bottom Line

Mission: Repair will fix your iPhone glass for less than the other guys and will do it fast and right. I highly recommend them.

The Freakonomics post was about a website where potential employers could post mini projects for students and other job seekers to complete. The idea is that then job seekers can demonstrate their skills before being interviewed or hired. Sadly, I think such a site would get plenty of traffic. I sympathize with all the students who would feel compelled to do those extra projects during what little remains of their sleeping hours. And no, I don't think it would help them get jobs.

Oh, I also commented on Question: Where to Study Information Visualization or Infographics at Information Aesthetics today. Yes, I gave the School of Information a shout out. I would love to have more infoaesthetics types around.

On the employer side, I doubt that such a site would actually help find appropriate employees. If my work at Microsoft taught me nothing else, it showed that domain proficiency does not indicate success in employment. Great engineers have mad social skills. All engineers spend more time in meetings than any student could ever imagine. A site for mini projects might get work done for free, but it won't help people weed through CS graduates to find the ones that can work in teams and on large-scale projects. Now if only there were some way to figure out whether a potential employee could work well with others...