[Tags: politics humor john_mccain ]

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At the Berkman - Annenberg Re:Public Media conference at USC, I ran into Tristan Harris who was at the event to drum up interest in Apture. Apture lets a site owner easily insert links to multimedia content. This post is full of them. It is extremely slick as an editing tool: Drag select any text and it pops up a window with lots of different things to link to, including Wikipedia and any YouTubes it’s found. It’s in private beta right now.

Seems appealing so far, but I’m just getting started with it…

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous apture widgets ]

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Paul Gillin has posted draft chapters of his new book, Secrets of Social Marketing, for our enjoyment and, more important, our commentary. I haven’t taken a look at them yet, but I like to see people practicing what they preach, and Paul’s The New Influencers was good.

[Tags: marketing paul_gillin business ]

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For those who are keeping track (= me), the new new motherboard on my MacBook has not prevented the same old problems from recurring. I still am getting random app crashes, most well-behaved by an occasional crash to blue. (Actually, only Keynote crashes to blue.)

I’m feeling pretty certain that we’ve eliminated the mobo as the source of the problem. Since these same problems have occurred in two separate operating systems, including through a clean install of the second one, I don’t think it’s an OS thing. Since they’ve persisted through the creation of a clean user account, I don’t think it’s a software thing. Because the RAM has passed repeated testing by me and by the service professionals, I don’t think it’s a RAM problem.

I am therefore taking it personally.

[Tags: macbook apple ]

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I was pretty excited about finding myself on a “BetaBlue” JetBlue plane because they touted it as providing free inflight email and more.

It turns out that above 10,000 feet you can indeed do email and more, so long as your email is a Yahoo email account and the more is Yahoo instant messaging. No browsing, no one else’s email or IM.

I really don’t understand JetBlue’s thinking on this. They’re likely to annoy more passengers than they please, some of whom will be petty enough to write snarky blog posts. without even mentioning that they’re posting their snarkiness via the excellent free wifi JetBlue provides at its Long Beach gates.

[Tags: net_neutrality jetblue marketing ]

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Lisa Williams, who was great in the previous session on the world of media in 103 (which I didn’t blog because I’m so damn tired) is moderating a panel on “viable models.” [I'm live blogging, missing stuff, getting it wrong. I'm posting this before I've proofread it because I have to get to the next session. Reader beware.]

Mark Ranalli from Helium gives a quick talk about Helium, a site where people compete to create the highest-rated content on a topic. They share the money they make with the writers. Only peers can evaluate. They do head to head evaluations of two articles and use that to rank what may be dozens of articles on a topic. Helium also flogs its content to publishers in their “freelance marketplace.” And it integrates content into mainstream media. E.g., Boston Now invites readers to write articles and sends them to Helium. A PBS show uses Helium to run a weekly essay contest. [Ah PBS and its essay contests!]

John Sawyer from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting reports from tough areas. They create content and place it all over, from MSM to YouTube. All the reporters blog.

Doc Searls is talking about “a new business model for free media” (= VRM). Marketers have a split in their heads, he says, that allows them to talk about “targeting” consumers even though they themselves are members of markets too. We no longer have to be put into silos, as if we were owned by businesses. We need Vendor Relationship Management. “With VRM I can inquite and relate to markets on the fly.” Express global preferences without having to give all the same info. He’s willing to pay money to reach a human in under 60 seconds. We should be able to manage our own health care data.VRM’s first use case is paying for public media. VRM is introducing the “relbutton” which you can put anywhere you want; press it and you can remember the site and relate to the site in the way you want. It has four visible states: Intention to relate, an existing relationship, an existing relationship, or an intention to sell.

Q: Why isn’t this the same as a PayPal button?
Doc: Because that’s take it or leave it.
Q: Sites have lots of ways of interacting with viewers. What’s different here?
Doc: There’s no one way to interact with them. And they’re not under you’re control. Public radio’s tip system takes too long to pay.
Q: This is not a micropayment system…
Joe Andrieu: It’s an invitation to relate in any number of ways. It’s a generalized approach.
Q: is this supposed to replace the pledge system?
Doc: It’s not intended to replace them. But 90% don’t pledge, and everyone hates the pledge drives.
Q: So how does the RelButton generate money?
Doc: It’s uniform and efficient.

Q: Can you give an example of something that’s approached solving a problem in this way? Letting people take control of a transaction?
Doc: For transactions, no. It’s like an old-fashioned marketplace.
Joe: An example are the old proprietary email systems.

Q: Could you explain how Helium makes money?
A: 1. We have about 700,000 articles, attracting 3M visitors/month. Ad revenue, which we share with the writers. 2. We take part of the fees publishers pay our writers. And, no, we’re not profitable yet but we hope to be soon.

Why do people write for you?
Mark: Individuals building a portfolio. Non-profits have been sending people to us. I’ve stopped trying to guess why people write.

Lisa: You’ve all presented transactional models. That’s where many people are going, but they require huge volumes to work. How do you get to the volume you need?
Mark: Advertisers and publishers.
Doc: We’re not burdened by a business model…
Lisa: You still have to get users…
Doc: You make it available. A Firefox download, etc.
Q: Any partners integrating the button yet?
Doc: It’s a barn raising. A few dozen are highly active on a list. [Tags: media mediarepublic lisa_williams doc_searls helium pulitzer_crisis ]

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I’m at the Berkman-Annenberg Media Re:Public conference. Manuel Castells (AKA The Manual Castells) leads off. [Note: Live blogging. In fact, I'm doing this while on stage as one of the presenters who follows Manuel. Reader beware. I get lots of things wrong.]

He wants to connect communication, democracy, power, and social change. Whoever prevails in the field of power relationships defines what that society is. “There’s never absolute power,” he says. “That’s how democracy comes about.”

If the construction of meaning is a key source of power (and it is, he says), meaning is constructed through a process of communication … communication between our neural networks and the external communication networks. A growing stream of research in neuroscience (e.g., DiMasio) shows the role of emotion/feelings in the construction of meaning and cognition. Political scientists are now developing studies that show how important feelings are in the realm of politics, through the construction of meaning. E.g., people reject info that doesn’t fit into their basic feelings. Such info has 4x chance of being rejected. The theory of affective intelligence (cf. “The Affect Effect”) says politics is substantially rooted in feelings that trigger emotions that lead to cognition. This has extraordinary consequences for democracy.

George Lakoff has shown how the metaphor of the war on terror has dominated American politics through linking to powerful images in our brain, appealing to the deepest emotion in human experience: fear of death. This helps explain why so many Americans still believe that there was a connection between 9/11 and Hussein.

This goes further than politics. Social movements act on the mind more than politics, he says. E.g., Environmental has transformed societies by activating mechanisms that led us to think we have a relationship with the planet that cannot be reduced simple to mining it for materials. The movement is scientific but also media-focused. Same thing with the women’s movement, the most important movement in [I missed the range] of history. This has been a revolution in the miond of women. Men try to accept but fundamentally we have not changed. What’s changed is how women think about themselves and their place in the world. It’s become normal. That is a cultural revolution. That goes through communication which comes through the process of activiating images and feelings in the brain.

That’s why media are fundamental, critical. They are the connection between our environment and our brains. That fact is widely recognized now. Media are the field of power, where power relationships get constructed, even though the media themselves don’t have the power. Politics are not determined by the media, but without the media politics doesn’t reach the society and have an effect.

Media politics in the past twenty years has led to the politics of scandals. Everywhere except in Scandinavia, major political changes are now always linked to some form of scandal. That’s become the fundamental weapon for political change.

If media are the political field, then politics and democracy depend on the power battles in the communications field at large. Therefore the transformation of communication and the media system is a fundamental component of the transformation of politics and democracy. There’s a fundamental transformation underway. Already 50% of the planet is connected to wireless communications. The wall that was stopping the rise of the Net in developing countries is beginning to crack. (There is of course still a digital divide, he notes.)

Corporations loom large, but corporations are being interpentrated by the horizontal communication the Net allows. You have to transform freedom into a commodity. [Not sure if he's recommending this.] That’s where the business is. The endless capacity of hackers to create more levels of communication means the corporate world has to try to incorporate this. Ultimately the corporate media have to rely on a new form of articulation.

The key is that this distributes power to the edges of the network. The consequences are powerful. New images. Public debates. And throughout history, they have watched us; now we watch them. The real citizen journalist is anyone with a cellphone who can upload into YouTube.

The media space is where political struggle is being contested because that’s where the struggle over meaning is waged. [Tags: manuel_castells mediarepublic politics ]

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Richard Sambrook, Director of Global News at the BBC World Service and a great blogger, is giving the opening talk at a small conference hosted by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the Berkman Center. The aim of the conference is to talk about how we can begin to assess how the media are changing and what’s going on with participatory journalism. One of the focuses will be on what research we need done (where “we” = our democracy) and how we can get it done. [I'm posting this without re-reading so I can go to the reception, frankly. As always, I'm typing quickly, not keeping up with Richard's fast pace, getting things wrong, misspelling, etc. etc. If that's not ok, then read no further. Also, when in doubt I'm reporting what Richard is saying, not inserting my own comments.]

This afternoon, a bunch of us sat in the Annenberg’s atrium, in front of four large panels showing mainstream news channels. We were just trying to do our email and talk with one another, but it was hard as CNN looped for 45 minutes about the discrimination against “short, obese” people and then for an hour about a murdered women. Wow. Great scene-setting for this conference. (Doc may also be blogging about the multi-screen atrium experience.)

Richard is giving the opening “provocation” (as John Palfrey puts it in introducing him). Richard points to Jay Rosen’s saying “Blogging vs. journalism is over” (showing the power of agood sound byte, Richard says) at a conference 3 yrs ago. Much has changed since then, says Richard. Consolidation has happened. Social networking has taken off. Video and conversation have become more dominant. There are still issues of trust and transparency. He mentions someone who said that journalists ought to answer questions and bloggers ought to ask questions, which he thinks is an interesting way of thinking about it. He points to how much blogging and podcasting the msm are doing. “But these aren’t really about participation,” he says, because there are very few links going out and very little interaction.

New research shows (he says) that news sites are now way-stations, not final destinations. He points to memeorandum, “and algorithm replacing a newsroom.” Google is the fourth most trusted news brand in the world, but doesn’t create any content.

The big payers talk about user generated content. It’s a marketing tool. “You have to be seen to be talking about citizen journalism.” But it’s narrowly defined. Four categories: 1. Eyewitness news. MSM have always done that. 2. Sharing of opinion. MSM have not done a good job taking this in. 3. Sharing of discovery. 4. Sharing of expertise (or networked journalism). This is the most valuable and richest example of what citizen journalism holds out, but is the most difficult to deliver. But it’s a minority of the audience that engages in this.

He gives an example. Last year, the BBC chartered a boat and took it up the Bangladesh River to chart the course of climate change. Flickr, Twitter, Google Maps. They had 50,000 followers on Flickr but only 26 on Twitter. Several million listened on shortwave radio.

It’s not about technology, Richard says. What’s the social purpose of social networking, he asks. Have we found one?

Corporate media still has a huge grip on the Internet, he says. The top 5% of sites reach a billion people. With that type of corporate grip on access, will anything change, he asks. Richard says big changes are indeed happening. In the recording industry, what used to be a simple process (get radio play, get on MTV, distribute the disk) has become complex. Same thing is happening to the newspaper industry.

He talks about The Guardian’s leap of faith, trying to become a digital platform. Meanwhile, the NY Times is saying that “Demand has never been greater…” He meant that there are 17M unique visitors to NYTimes.com, half from search and half direct. NYT.com makes money but not enough to fund the Times’ operations. Online advertising is slowing, especially on journalism sites, Richard says. The economic basis of journalism is in qusetion.

He talks about networked journalism. E.g., iPM from the BBC. Highly participatory and transparent. Newsnight on BBC invites people to come to the daily meeting about what stories to cover. He says CBS closed its own experiment on open journalism because “they said they couldn’t find a business model” for it. “As if you have to find a business model for accountability.”

He points to how much live video is now around, from seesmic to vpod.tv. “We need to take the cameras out of the backyard to where things are actually happening.” The video community can be very self-referential, he says. This is early stage of a powerful new technology, so it’s bound to be in a bit of a bubble, he says but he’d like to see us grasp the opportunity more fully. This is about the move from mass to community-based communication.

Technology is bringing in “the new creatives,” he says. Many are very good. Nextnewnetworks.com. TheNerve.tv. Vidshadow.com. The cost base is a quarter of commercial TV and if they can gather a community they can make a business out of it.

He shows a dummy [?] page from the BBC. “My Democracy Now: Create your own political dashboard.” Aggregate what you want. What’s happening in your area. Right now the plan is to only aggregate BBC content, but Richard says that that’s just a first step.

He talks about the shift to the importance of the DJ in music. “What’s the equivalent of that in the information ecology?” Last.fm news? News scrobbling? Personalization is about to work, at last. Tagging, Calais, Twine all add metadata. It’s all about to happen and will take us up to the next level.

He ends with questions, but I can’t keep up. Great talk.

Q: (Ethan Zuckerman) Almost all the examples you gave were of you inviting people into your universe. But often people didn’t show up. Are there ways citizen participation can shape what the story will be?
A: I agree. Inviting people to your party is a very old media attitude. We’re starting to shift. We’re now allowing people to embed our video on their site. We’re starting to understand that. And we do respond to how people define the news, etc. Most of the comments are people shouting. We’re happy to have them there, but they’re not defining the news agenda. We haven’t found the right way to enable that.
John Palfrey: Ethan, be a consultant. You have something in mind…
Ethan: Bloggers have become commentators and error-checkers. That’s not changing the agenda. The question is whether citizens can change what stories show up on the BBC site…
A: We try to do that. We use GlobalVoices. There are examples…

Q: (susan mernit) In hyperlocal journalism you see events that have happened or things that need to be changed. Traditionally, organizing and journalism are separate. BBC lowering the barrier to entry so that local people can reflect local issues?
A: We had ICAN [?], a site to provide people the tools to discover what’s going on and link them up with people with shared interests. Community issues. And we gave them the tools for civic engagement. It was reasonably successful for a while, but it wasn’t getting enough interest.

Q: What gets in the way?
A: The BBC has a huge audience and is growing. There are managerial problems nurturing deep innovation; generally it has to come in from the outside. It’s not that there’s huge resistance to it. We know we have to change. But pushing it through and getting it to work is a big and complicated project. [Tags: media journalism bbc richard_sambrook citizen_journalism everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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On the flight to LA this morning, while I was standing in the attendant’s cranny, waiting for the bathroom to free up, I noticed a sign on a bit of the JetBlue plane that jutted in at about knee level. The sign said:

DO NOT SIT HERE
NO SENTARSE AQUI

But, the attendant had left a piece of paper there which accidentally obscured half the sign, so that it read:

SIT HERE
ARSE AQUI

(This would be funnier if I’d had a camera with me. Or maybe not.)

[Tags: humor funny_signs ]

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The Massachusetts Republican Party has posted a want ad on its Web site:

Have you ever thought of running for office? Do you have the passion and commitment to raise money, knock on doors and make thousands of phone calls?

Do you think you could do a better job than the Democrat [sic] incumbent?

We would love to meet with you to discuss your potential candidacy for public office.

617-523-5005
Candidates@MassGOP.com

Doesn’t this sound like the beginning of an Adam Sandler movie? [Tags: politics ]

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TechCrunch has a good explanation of Footnote’s digitizing of the Vietnam Memorial, which is handy because the Footnote site is getting hammered with traffic right now, so the app is running slowly. The site lets you browse the Wall by multiple categories, and links together bunches of information. Sounds very cool.

The Vietnam Memorial wall is an argument for stone over information. But information is good, too.

[Tags: vietnam memorials ]

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Google Maps now (well, I just noticed) lets anyone add a place marker that is visible to all other users. Their example is a spot in a SF park where there’s open air dancing.

I’ll be interested in following two questions: 1. How will policy evolve to handle abuse and edge cases? 2. How will the system be hacked?

1. What controls is Google going to have to introduce to keep maps from being polluted with markers such as “Best pizza in town,” “Marcie the Slut lives here” and “[enter your choice of slur]town”?

As of now, Google lists two types of controls. First, some listings are protected, either because they’re hospitals or government buildings, or because the owners of a business have “claimed” the listing; Google does some form of verification before awarding ownership. Second, there’s a “report abuse” button which sends the listing to a moderation process.

I hope that that’s sufficient. But what about edge cases? If grieving parents mark the spot on the road where their child was killed, will Google count that as abuse and remove it? Historical markers? Celebrity homes? Notices of where events will be held? Treasure hunt clues?

2. Related to the first: How will people creatively hack the system, not to bring it down (the bad hacking) but to use it in ways Google didn’t anticipate (the good hacking)? For example, maybe citizens will mark potholes, possibly giving the text a distinctive, findable tag. Or educational walks. Or the rankings of public schools. Or all the places there was a death by gun. Or a link to a Flickr query that aggregates photos from that spot. Or the ten million better ideas that everyone else will have.

It’ll be fun to watch. [Tags: google google_maps everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Ashish Jha at the Harvard School of Public Health is giving a Berkman lunch talk on “U.S. Healthcare: Can Information Drive Better Care?” [Note: I am typing quickly, getting things wrong, missing stuff...]

He says the first few minutes should leave us depressed about the state of health care in this country. A major problem underlying all this, he says, is a lack of transparency.

We spend $2.1 trillion dollars on health care in the U.S. in 2006. That’s about a sixth of the economy, about $7,000 per person (minimum wage is $11K/yr). It’ll be a fifth in the next decade. We spent a much bigger percentage of our GDP than other countries.

What do we get for this, Ashish asks. He cites a Rand study that came up with 439 “indicators of healthcare quality.” These are core, non-controversial treatments and practices. Rand found they get done about 54% of the time, suggesting “the care we get is pretty inadequate.” Even for privileged groups — e.g., white, wealthy, educated men — it doesn’t go much above 58%. “There’s a disconnect between what doctors think they do and what they actually do.” One of the listeners says that recent studies show that this is because there are typically 7 health care people involved with any one medicare patient, and they don’t get this done because they don’t know what others in the group are doing. “It’s completely about the system,” says Ashish.

He continues depressing us: About 10% of people admitted to hospitals suffer an injury there. One in four doctor visits lead to medication injury. (Ashish says he’s not confident in that study.) 44k-98k deaths come from medical errors.

His conclusion: The quality of care is unacceptable.

Why? 1. Because we pay for the quantity, not quality, of health care. 2. Care has gotten complex, but the health care systems haven’t kept up. 3. Little transparency. E.g., usually we don’t usually know how much our medical care actually costs (as opposed to what our co-pay is). We know how much health care for our pets costs, but not for our children. 4. No adequate feedback loop: Medical malpractice has been a failure and regulation sets the bar too low.

Ashish talks about one part of the response: The Ny State Cardiac Surgery reporting program. In the early 1990s, NY found huge disparities in cardiac surgery mortality across 31 hospitals: 1 in 200 dying vs. 1 in 14. So the state started publishing mortality info about every hospital and surgeon. As of about 2000, it’s all on the Internet. Over the course of 12 years, the rates dropped dramatically. Why? The market share of the hospitals didn’t change; the bad hospitals didn’t lose business. But the hospitals now had data that reinforced good practices. There’s anecdotal data that physicians began to learn from one another. Most dramatically, the rate of surgeons leaving their practices among the bottom fourth was way higher. Ashish’s project tracked them: Some quit, some moved. Even after adjusting for age, etc., people in the bottom quarter were 3x likely to quit.

People don’t check the ratings. Ashish thinks this is a place where the Internet could help.

90% of hospitals are still paper-based. Even those that are electronic can’t share info. The law says patients always have a right to get their records, but the doctor or the hospital owns the record. Patients can view it but it’s not in exportable, shareable form. (There’s a discussion about the state of electronic health records and why it’s a more complex problem than it seems.)

Ashish says that the HQA initiative has hospitals reporting on 23 quality indicators, and performance has improved steadily. HCAHPS makes patient experience data available.

Gene Koo: Health care decisions aren’t made by purely rational agents. All sorts of quirks come into it. So, how does the transparency of info help us?
A: Maybe consumer involvement in health care won’t work out. I’m looking for empirical data.

Q: What’s the role of the consumer in this? Are there data now that consumers are taking on more of the responsibility for their health care?,br>
A: People on the right say that consumers aren’t behaving like consumers because they don’t have any skin in the game. You don’t know how much things cost. So, we need transparency (they say), linked to having skin in the game (i.e., you pay for visits out of your pocket). But, few have high deductible health plans. My personal feeling (says Ashish) is that this isn’t going to be big. People are generally in them not because they want to be involved but because the plans are cheap.

Rob Faris: There’s a huge role for intermediaries. Intermediation is not working well right now. We need intermediaries who looks at outcomes and figures out what works and what doesn’t. And I’d like to see how quality considerations can be inserted into this.
A: We’re at the beginning of a very interesting journey. If someone like you can’t navigate the health care system…

Q: What do you think of the candidates’ positions?
A: They all talk about the uninsured, which is just one part of a complicated set of issues. We have 47M uninsured because health care is expensive. Most of the health experts I talk with think Clinton’s health plan is a little more realistic. But all of this falls apart if we can’t get a grip on healthcare costs. They’re rising at twice the rate of inflation, and neither Obama nor Clinton have gotten serious about healthcare costs.

Q: (me) How do you contain costs?
A: Electronic records would help. Payers should pay more for outcomes not for particular tests, etc. And there;s a whole “comparative effectiveness” movement. E.g., what do you do for someone with low back pain? You get different treatments based on locality. Payers should start taking more of an active role. But payers have not wanted to take up that responsibility.

A (person in the audience): Part of the answer is that the amt of money spent in the last 6 months of life is shockingly high. We should spend more earlier on preventative measures.

Ashish: You don’t always know when the 6 months are. And there’s a huge issue around managing expectations at the end of life. Plus, when someone else is paying…From a policy point of view, it’s very hard to fix this stuff. Even though health reform comes up every five years, it doesn’t get done because the status quo is everyone’s second choice. [Tags: berkman healthcare health ashish_jha ]

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On the heels of her splendid explanation of the outcome of the 700MHz auction, Susan Crawford explains Google’s proposal to the FCC for the “white spaces.” Here’s my take on her take. (The NYT also has a useful article.) (Note: All errors in the following are mine. I am in over my head.)

Congress has mandated the end of over-the-air broadcast of analog TV signals. This frees up some spectrum. (Spectrum = frequencies = colors) Actually, it frees up a lot of spectrum: the 700MHz auction was for just 22MHz of frequency, whereas we’re now talking about 300MHz of spectrum. So, what should we do with this newly unbound stretch of public airwaves?

We could slice it up and sell it off to private companies. That’s generally what the FCC does with spectrum. And that made sense back in the 1930s when the FCC was created. Radios were so primitive that broadcasters had to be given untrammeled access to a frequency to avoid “interference” with other broadcasts. So, the FCC sold swaths of spectrum to broadcasters, but, recognizing that spectrum belongs to the public, the FCC also placed some requirements and restrictions on broadcasters.

Radio technology has advanced since the day the Titanic’s signal wasn’t decipherable. Not only are radios better able to tune in to particular frequencies and strip out noise, they are also able to respond dynamically. They can, for example, hop around the spectrum to hold on to a particular broadcast, if the broadcaster changes lanes, so to speak, in order to find a less unoccupied frequency. Not only does this sort of “open spectrum” approach promise far more efficient use of available spectrum — more bandwidth, to put it inaccurately — but it means that the government doesn’t have to decide for us who gets to use the spectrum. (For more on this, see David Reed’s explanation.)

Google has outlined to the FCC how it would use unlicensed white space spectrum. It’s proposing conservative approach that moves cautiously toward open spectrum, providing the FCC with a vision for how the white space spectrum might bring enormous benefits.

Google envisions how wireless devices running the Android operating system — Google’s mobile operating system — might use the white space frequencies. Google points out that such devices could help deliver Net access to rural areas, a sore spot at the FCC since the policy of handing the Internet over to a duopoly has kept the rural and the poor in the dark. (Surprise!) But, as Susan writes:

Google suggests that *all* devices for unlicensed use of the white spaces should be required to receive an “all clear” signal for the particular channel where they wish to operate, by using geolocation, checking a database of licensees in that location, and getting permission in advance.

This would achieve some of the objectives of an open spectrum system, allowing for the dynamic allocation of frequencies. Google suggests that they could use dynamic auctions to assign frequencies for limited times and strengths, adding another element of extrinsic control (as opposed to a fully open spectrum approach that depends on the devices negotiating for the airwaves). Further, Google suggests that some channels be kept unavailable for all but some high-priority, specialized uses.

This is a calm and rational approach that could see an enormous blossoming of innovation. Think about how many devices exist because tiny ranges of spectrum have been left unregulated. Opening a big swath of spectrum is like opening up a big tract of land. Who knows what we’ll build once we have the space? [Tags: fcc spectrum susan_crawford google open_spectrum wifi ]

* * *

Harold Feld thinks Google conceded too much too soon.

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Solana Larsen has a fabulous idea. For those of us vegetarians who love faux meat, why doesn’t a restaurant serve up something besides the usual mock chicken, beef, pork, etc.? Why not faux endangered species? Solana suggests a menu… [Tags: vegetarian solana_larsen food ]

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[Info: Think Progress] [Tags: democracy cheney iraq ]

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It came to me as if in a dream. They constructed Stonehenge by digging holes in the ground, dropping slabs into them, laying the crosspieces on the ground, and then excavating around the whole shebang.

Or, possibly, Superman built it for them. [Tags: stonehenge ridiculous_theories ]

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My wife and I saw Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park last night so you won’t have to.

I’m about to tell you what the movie is about, but I won’t go further than what you’ll read in the typical capsule review. So, if you don’t want to know that, please count this as a [SPOILER ALERT].

The movie is about a teen-ager who may or may not be involved in what may or may not be a fairly random-sounding murder. It’s told in a jumbled-up chronological order. It’s not a murder mystery, though. It’s focused tightly — and literally, since much of the rest of the frame is often blurred — on the boy’s day-to-day coping with the maybe-murder. And here’s the key to the movie’s ultimate failure: If you assembled the pieces chronologically, it’d be clear that it utterly does not address the moral, psychological, and spiritual consequences of the boy’s involvement in the movie’s central event. The disentangling is not of the boy’s feelings or culpability but of a timeline arbitrarily snaggled by the film-maker. He cuts up the narrative simply to keep something from the viewers. That’s a cheap way to manufacture revelation.

The result is a movie that is told from no one’s point of view. The boy remains a cipher. We don’t think he’s heartless or psychotic. He seems to be simply emotionally guarded the way many teens are. He is effectively portrayed as a subordinate member of his social group, under the wing of a dominant friend, and appealingly nervous about hanging with the hardcore guys at the local illegal skateboarding park. But we don’t get past his bangs and fetching face. We don’t know why he is heartless to his girlfriend. An important event with his girlfriend (no spoilers here!) is shot carefully so we don’t get any sense of how the boy felt about it. We don’t see any emotional change before and after the movie’s central event. We don’t see him wrestling with the consequences in any except the most pedestrian ways. You could edit out the central event and not affect the movie.

Maybe Van Sant is trying to show us a teen who is so alienated that not even an event as horrific as the one he shows us — an intense and graphic scene out of a horror movie — can get a response from him. If so, it’s got to be an indictment of an entire generation, or perhaps of the teen years themselves, for Van Sant seems to tag the protagonist as typical to a fault. Are we supposed to think that teenagers are that impervious to events outside their own narcissistic sphere? If so, then this movie is Van Sant saying “I just don’t get kids today.” But I don’t think that’s his point. I think he thinks he’s showing us the turmoil under the skin.

Except he forgets about the part where he shows us the turmoil under the skin.

* * *

By the way, Ted Fry of the Seattle Times is among those who disagree with me. Here’s his opening paragraph:

Gus Van Sant’s capper to a trilogy of experiments in elliptical narrative and lyrical structure is a masterful triumph of art, craft and empathy for the complicatedness of being a real teenager. With “Paranoid Park,” Van Sant has solidified his niche as a singular American film auteur whose vision melds formal skill and abstract invention with an intuitive sense of the poetry movies can exploit to convey their unique interpretation of life.

Yeah, that’s what I meant. [Tags: movies van_sant paranoid_park reviews ]

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CNN actually had a reporter listen to the entire tape of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermon, instead of just the sound bytes. Wow! What a revolutionary idea! And it turns out that in context, Wright’s words are — get this! — more understandable and less inflammatory. Isn’t it crazy how context will do that? Furthermore, it turns out that the when Wright suggested that our chickens were coming home to roost, he was quotingciting Edward Peck, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan’s terrorism task force.

How many days did it take for the professional news media to get around to this?

[Tags: media journalism obama jeremiah_wright cnn ]

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Susan Crawford has a brilliant, clear explanation of the significance of Verizon’s winning the auction for Block C in the FCC’s 700MHz auction.

If that sentence made no sense to you once you got past the phrase “Verizon’s winning the auction for,” all the more reason to hie yourself to Susan’s post. Ten minutes ago it didn’t make sense to me, either. Don’t worry. Susan will explain it.

[Tags: susan_crawford auction 700MHz internet fcc verizon net_neutrality ]

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From Politico:

Journalists have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is. Most coverage breathlessly portrays the race as a down-to-the-wire sprint between two well-matched candidates, one only slightly better situated than the other to win in August at the national convention in Denver.

In fact, says the post,

But let’s assume a best-case scenario for Clinton, one where she wins every remaining contest with 60 percent of the vote (an unlikely outcome since she has hit that level in only three states so far — her home state of New York, Rhode Island and Arkansas).

Even then, she would still be behind Obama in delegates.

The post is about why the media portrays a contest Hillary is highly unlikely to win as a neck-and-neck horse race.

(As an Obama supporter, I’m reluctant to blog this since I have never been right.)

[Tags: politics obama clinton ]

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Here’s a short YouTube of the calculating machine the British Museum made in 1991 following Charles Babbage’s design:

[Tags: computers babbage ]

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I am so disappointed that I had to miss Lisa Stone’s Berkman talk. She’s blogged a transcript here, and pretty soon the video will be up here. Sounds like a great talk…

[Tags: lisa_stone ]

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John Palfrey has blogged about Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected (open access version here), reflecting on the essays and enticing us to read them ourselves. The book sounds terrific, and the post is a treat to read just to see the generosity of JP’s intellect. (Disclosure: JP is the exec. dir. of the Berkman Center, and, I’m thrilled to say, I’m co-teaching a course with him this semester.) [Tags: ]

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Big deal. My own algorithm for solving the Rubik’s cube puzzle is faster and requires only a hammer and a quarter pound of superglue.

(But seriously: Wow.) [Tags: legos rubik ]

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Gene Koo has a terrific post that looks at the Christian themes woven into Obama’s speech on race.

[Tags: