The Friday post at Whitehouse.gov is a little livelier — a little more voice, a little more air. Heck, it’s even got a broken link! (The link to the Energy-Housing partnership is a bridge to nowhere.) The post points to an OMB post that I thought was terrific, explaining and defending the reduction in charitable deductions for the 5% wealthiest Americans. It features a photo of Gaza (promoting State’s question of the week) that isn’t all about happy Israelis and holding hands with happy Gazans. (THat’s why we have Photoshop, people.) And the post points to the ever-lively TSA blog, one of the voicier government blogs around.

The next step I’d take if President Obama made me Blog Czar — I keep writing to him and asking! — is having the people who actually write the blog sign their posts. Baby steps, but that’s how you learn to walk. Next, no press releases! Then, invite in a sequence of non-WH bloggers to blog for a week at a time. Eventually, carefully open up the comments. Then start a flame war with, say, the Belgians, and we will have arrived.

[Tags: whitehouse blogging obama egov e-gov ]

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ExpertWitness.com lists experts willing to testify in court for you, for a pretty penny. It’s got over 1,000 categories, including experts in gates, loading docks, and well logging. Click on a category and you go to a page that begins with an explanation. For example, here’s the explanation for the category “exercise equipment”:

Exercise equipment is any object used in exercise. This can include balls, treadmills, weights, bicycles, track shoes, jungle gyms, or protective equipment such as a back brace. An exercise machine is any machine used in exercise. These range from simple spring-like devices to computerized electromechanical rides to recirculating-stream swimming pools

Pretty straightforward. But the rather self-referential category of “Expert Referrals” seems to have snarled the system:

Find referrals Expert Referrals experts and consultants for referrals Expert Referrals litigation support. Available to be referrals Expert Referrals expert witnesses and provide referrals Expert Referrals forensic consulting in referrals Expert Referrals litigation, in addition prepare referrals Expert Referrals expert witness reports for use in deposition and/or in-court trial testimony.

A global search-and-replace or mailmerge on boilerplate gone wrong? (Try replacing “referrals Expert Referrals” with, say, “exercise equipment.”)

[Tags: experts snarls expert_witnesses ]

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I love this ridiculous thread so much.

And I love it all the more because it could be used equally effectively as evidence against the Internet or for it. [via BoingBoing]

[Tags: the_internets sparkle glitter godwins_law rahm_emanual neil_patrick_harris ]

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MIT will be 150 years old in two years. So, the MIT Museum (where you can see Judith Donath’s arresting and provocative info-overwhelm installation, which opened last night) is asking the public to nominate objects to put on display. The nominations themselves will remain online forever after as a very different sort of permanent display.

[Tags: mit everything_is_miscellaneous museum judith_donath crowdsourcing ]

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Cold war, the cult of expertise, the broadcast metaphor, scientism, chaste kissing…why this one’s got it all!

[Tags: certs advertising expertise ]

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Peter Suber, Research Prof. of Philosophy at Earlham College, a visiting fellow at Yale Law’s Information Society Project, and blogger of open access news, is giving a full-house lecture at Harvard, sponsored by the Berkman Center. [Note: I'm live blogging, making mistakes, leaving things out, paraphrasing ineptly, etc. POSTED WITHOUT PROOFING or even with a basic re-reading. Speed over accuracy. Welcome to the Web :(]

Peter says he’s going to assume that we know what open access is, etc. But he does want to define Green Open Access (= open access through a repository) and Gold OA (= OA through a journal). There’s also Gratis OA (free of charge but may be licensing restrictions) and Libre OA (free of charge and free of licensing restrictions).

Peter says he doesn’t know the future of OA. He likes Alan Kaye’s comment that the future is easier to make than predict. He’s going to talk about 12 cross-over points in OA, in rough order of when they might occur:

1. For-pay journals allow green OA. About 63% of these journals already do this.

2. OA books:: When there are more gratis OA books online than in the average university library. We crossed this a couple of years ago. “The permission problem is harder than digitization.” The next cross over point here is getting more libre OA books online, which we are quite a distance from.

3. Funder policies: “When most publicly-funded research is subject to OA mandates.” This seems to be spreading, Peter says. Today, 32 public funders and more than 3 private funders have OA mandates.

4. Green OA deposits: “When most new peer-reviewed manuscripts are self-archived when accepted for publication.” In particle physics, this happens routinely. If 20% of researchers publish 80% of the articles, we could reach cross-over fairly quickly in some fields.

5. Author understanding: “When most publishing researchers have an accurate understanding of OA.” This is happening, but notvery quickly.

6. University repositories: “When most universities have institutional repositories,” individually or as part of a consortium. This is happening slowly. In the absence of a universal repository, every university ought to have one. Universities will get to this point more slowly than funders because they move more slowly than funders. And we ought to ask why. Aren’t universities interests in line with OA?

Libre gold OA: “When most OA journals are libre OA.” Most OA journals are still merely gratis, but curb copying to drive traffic to their site. This crossover could happen overnight if the journals understood the issues. They’d lose a little traffic, but nothing else. There are grounds for optimism: Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association is an assoc of OA journal publishers and it requires libre gold OA. The SPARC Europe program sets standards for what a good OA journal is, and it recommends CreativeCommons attribution licenses. These two orgs are helpful because there’s no topdown org defining OA, so we rely on bottom up orgs like these two to set the standards.

8. Journal backfiles: “When most TA journals have OA backfiles.” This is expensive to do. Google will do it, but Google’s terms are difficult: They don’t give the journal a copy of the digital files. (Libraries do get copies of the files of the books they let Google scan.) The OCA focuses on public domain literature. “Once digitized, the benefits of increased visibility and citations should outweigh the trickle of revenue.” Journals make most of their money from new issues, so having greater presence should help. In physics, almost 100% of articles are available OA but the publishers can’t see any dip in subscriptions.

9. Author addenda: “When most new research is covered by author addenda” (i.e., additions that grant OA permission, tacked onto standard publisher-author contracts). Now there are few adopters. It’d be good to standardize these. The cross over will come when universities or funders require it. If enough journals allow green OA, that’d make addenda unnecessary.

10. University policies: “When most university research is subject to university-level OA mandates.” Today, 27 universities and 4 depts have these mandates. It’d help to have the largest/most productive universities move on this first.

11. OA journals: “When most peer-reviewed journals are OA.” “I don’t expect this for a long time.” Now 15% are OA. Progress is slow, but there is progress. High prestige journals are likely to hold out for a long time.

Libre green OA: “When most green OA is libre OA.” Today, only a small fraction is libre OA because most OA repositories depend on permission from publishers. UKPMC Funders Group demands green libre. We will reach the cross-over “when it’s safe.” Harvard has taken the lead on this, Peter says, and it will spread as another large university takes this step, then another one … “It becomes self-fulfilling leadership.”

Q: Are we stuck with the Sonny Bono copyright extension act?
A: Yes. All copyright reform in the past few decades have been in the wrong direction. And it’s very hard to roll back copyright terms. The only silver lining is that when we have a consenting partner, we can bypass copyright via contract. The problem is that they’re not the default.

Q: Under libre OA, how are our scholarly attributions protected?
A: It’s a range. One end is public domain, which does not preserve attribution. But all the CreativeCommons licenses preserve attribution. Most scholars don’t want public domain; they want CC-attribution.”Creative Commons attribution license provides everything a scholar could want.”

Q: [me] Conyers!
A: The Conyers bill would tell agencies not to require OA for works they fund. [I've put this badly.] The OA advocates are fighting it, but the agencies affected are not yet. I think Conyers is serious about it. I think he introduced it early because we don’t have a Sect’y of Health and Human Services or of NIH. Conyers may be fighting a turf battle. [Paraphrasing!] “He’s motivated primarily to protect the jurisdiction of his committee.” Peter thinks it won’t pass, but it might be introduced into another bill. “We’d like to spread the NIH policy to the rest of the government.”

Q: Is the economic downturn accelerating the adoption of OA?
A: The NIH just got $10B in the stimulus, which means there will be more and more OA articles. NSF also, but not as much because NSF requires OA for reports generated by those they fund [may not have gotten this right]. But, Peter thinks the downturn strengthens the case for OA. Libraries are going to be canceling subscriptions. And the Stimulus’ emphasis on green research will be more valuable if it’s OA. Open access to research amplifies its value.

Q: [jpalfrey] You’ve noticed there’s no OSF equivalent for OA. But I’d argue that the people in this room — librarians — are your OA OSF. What do you say to these librarians to advance our common cause?
A: Librarians are among the most important allies in the OA movement. But put all the allies together and you still don’t have OSF. Libraries should be sending letters against the Conyers bill. When you negotiate subscriptions you should negotiate the right to pur articles from your authors into an OA repository. Libraries are the only buyers of peer-reviewed journals. When you’re the only buyer, you can dictate your terms, subject to anti-trust. Obama says that we have the right to demand transformation from the banks we’re saving. Librarians can do the same thing for journals. Journals are not serving all of our interests and are acting against other interests. Use your bargaining power. Get the right of self-archive, and, when the time is right, get the right of libre self-archive. Network with one another when you launch repositories. And, btw, every school with an enlightened OA policy had librarians in the head of the charge.

Q: Can you give an example of an archive that works?
A: Universities that have mandatory language still have to supplement the language with incentives and education. As you go from unmandated to mandated, it goes from 15% toward 100%. (15% is the average for voluntary, spontaneous archives.) It works best in the Dutch universities that let the “cream” of the article rise to the top. Every week they feature good work in public. This gets academics to archive their work without a mandate.

Q: Might universities work with publishers collaboratively to create new business models?
A: Publishers differ in their attitudes toward OA. Some are experimenting in good faith. Some, in bad faith. Some who do OA are actively lobbying for the Conyers bill. Librarians understand the scholarly landscape better than publishers and could educate publishers. Society publishers [i.e., societies that publish] could be told that they’re threatened not by OA but by the “big deal” that brings in academic journals.

Q: Is Springer’s taking over of BioMed Central a good thing?
A: Yes. BMC is for-profit. BMC was the world’s largest OA publisher. Now Springer is. Springer says that OA is a sustainable part of their bsiness. My reading is that Springer is preparing for an OA future. [Tags: berkman open_access libraries digital_rights education everything_is_miscellaneous publishing scholarship conyers copyright copyleft ]

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Announcement from the Sunlight Foundation or St. Sunlight, as I think of it:

Washington, DC -Today, the Sunlight Foundation announced ReadTheBill.org, a grassroots campaign to create a more transparent government by calling for all non-emergency legislation to be publicly available online for at least 72 hours before Congress begins debate. Joining Sunlight in supporting its ReadTheBill.org effort is a bipartisan group of individuals and groups, including Newt Gingrich, Joe Trippi, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen and the Federation of American Scientists.

[Tags: sunlight_foundation egov e-gov transparency congress ]

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The Berkman Center has launched Herdict.org, a site that lets you report sites you can’t reach, aggregating reports from every other Herdict user, to paint a picture of the openness of the Net.

You can join here. (And see Eszter Hargittai’s better explanation of it. We’re both using as the title of our posts an aptly-named URL — amIblockedornot.org — that takes you to a page accessibility test at Herdict.)

[Tags: herdict filtering censorship net_neutrality ]

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The Financial Times yesterday ran a terrific op-ed by James Boyle, explaining the ridiculousness of the Conyers bill “that would eviscerate public access to taxpayer funded research.” The op-ed is written in Jamie’s light-hearted-yet-penetrating style, and should be read simply for that reason — preeminent legal scholars of copyright are not supposed to be entertaining.

Then, at the end, he adds an argument that I think is crucial because it addresses the Internet’s effect on knowledge and authority:

Think about the Internet. You know it is full of idiocy, mistake, vituperation and lies. Yet search engines routinely extract useful information for you out of this chaos. How do they do it? In part, by relying on the network of links that users generate. If 50 copyright professors link to a particular copyright site, then it is probably pretty reliable.

Where are those links for the scientific literature? Citations are one kind of link; the hyperlink is simply a footnote that actually takes you to the desired reference. But where is the dense web of links generated by working scientists in many disciplines, using semantic web technology and simple cross reference electronically to tie together literature, datasets and experimental results into a real World Wide Web for science? The answer is, we cannot create such a web until scientific articles come out from behind the publishers’ firewalls….

[Tags: copyright copyleft conyers james_boyle knowledge everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Here’s a useful breakdown of how the stimulus bill will affect education… [Tags: stimulus economy education ]

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Pippa Norris of the Harvard Kennedy School is giving a lunchtime Berkman talk titled “Cultural Convergence: The Impact on National Identities and Trust in Outsiders.” [Note: I'm live-blogging, hence making mistakes, missing stuff, misunderstanding other stuff, typing badly. This is an inaccurate, incomplete record of her talk.]

What might be the impact of cosmopolitan communications, she asks? Her thesis is that there are many firewalls that block global information flows. She will argue that the news media has an impact through cosmopolitan communications, and will look at the implications for public policies. It makes people slightly less nationalistic. [Note: She talks fast. Bad for live bloggers, but good for listeners.] (This is from her book, available free on her Web site.)

Globalization is the starting part. It’s about more than trade; it’s also social and political. Cosmopolitan communications = “the way we learn about, and interact with, people and places beyond the borders of our nation-state.” Cosmocomms have been expanding. But, so what, she asks. In the 1970s, this was seen as cultural imperialism. In the 1990s, it was thought of as Coca-colonization. In the 2000s, we’re still seeing cultural protectionism.

Pippa will focus on audio-visual publishing. Western countries remain dominant. In fact, the gap has widened. There are four views in the literature: 1. There’s a convergence around US exports. 2. There’s a polarization of national cultures. 3. There’s a fusion of national cultures. 4. Pippa’s firewall model.

The firewall model says that there are barriers: 1. Trade barriers; 2. Internal barriers to free press; 3. Poverty; 4. Learning barriers that make it harder to acquire values and attitudes.

She discusses three levels: individual, national, and cross-level. For the national, she talks about the “cosmopolitanism index” she’s devised. She’s surveyed 90 countries using a set of survey questions. At the bottom are the poorest countries with the poorest press freedom. At the top, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark. It goes from 1972-2004.

That’s the framework. She confines her discussion of the results to effects on national identity and trust. Roughly, the more cosmpolitan, the less national identity and higher trust in outsiders. In terms of trusting outsiders, Norway takes the cake. US and Sweden are also high. (The Netherlands are high on the cosmo scale but only in the middle on the trust scale. Also, Germany and Spain.) But because there’s no control group — maybe trust maps to education? — you have to do multilevel regression. She uses age, gender, income, education, and news media use, and finds that trust correlates with news media use.

Her conclusions: Use of the news media “is positively related to more trust in outsiders” (different countries and religions) and “is related to weaker feelings of nationalism.” “I regard that as positive results.” But there are some qualifications: 1. Many other factors create trust in outsiders. 2. This study looks at the impact of news media, but not the impact of entertainment media. 3. There may be self-selection bias or interaction effects.

Policy implications? Is the globalization of news media a threat to national diversity? See www.pippanorris.com …

She concludes by asking what we know about how we measure flows of info from one country to another, over time, say from 1995?

Q: [ethanz] There are some familiar data sets. E.g., Alexa, although because it’s opt-in, it’s not perfect. There’s also Google Search Insights that tracks searches. In most countries, “news” is almost always one of the very top searches. A question: How might your analysis integrate with national-level studies. E.g., a study that showed that as cable TV was introduced to communities in India, you got an increase in empowerment equivalent to 4 years of education. [I probably got this substantially wrong.]

Q: There are categories of trust…
A: We use the World Values survey that includes over a quarter million people. Is trust in Nigeria and Sweden the same? There are many categories indeed. But when you see a strong pattern emerge, as we have, then we should assume something is happening in the data.

Q: A speaker from Microsoft was at Berkman recently, talking about the issues importing and exporting data on the Net across national boundaries. What sorts of measures have you been using?
A: The obvious ones. Internet access. Location of hosts. And some articles that have looked at search terms.

Q: I’m from Poland: High cosmo, low trust. In the US, we rent movies instead of watching TV. But rental stores don’t know about a particular movie highly famous in Europe. My question is about the global dimension of local issues.
A: Poland and much of Central Europe have suddenly become much more open and have found greater value change than in countries open for a long time. You should see greater variation within such countries, e.g., by age.

Q: [smacleod] Pippa asked for ideas about media flows, with some positivist assumptions about the ability of globalization and media studies to be objective. Has she read Appadurai’s “Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,” which emphasizes the mutability of flows. I wonder how Pippa might engage on-the-ground research and how such ethnographic research might recast her methodological assumptions. Extensive anthropological field work has been done in all the countries she’s mentioned, which engages and historicizes the legacy of colonialism.
A: I am a positivist. But I also like dealing with cases. There’s rich work being done in communications and other fields, but there’s also good division of labor. You need both. Some people like to fly over a country and others like to walk through it, and you get value from both.

Q: The US has more cultural exports than imports, while most seem to have about equal amounts. How does this play into cosmo?
A: America also imports a lot. America doesn’t have to import a lot because it’s got so much.

Q: Tribal populations in America have a tight tie to geography. Where’s UNESCO is generating the data to look at other regions than nation states?
A: The data generally depend on national statistical offices. UNESCO depends on those; it has no data generation capability itself.

Q: [hal] Google Ad-Planner lets you download a list of the 500 most visited sites for many countries. It has unique visitor numbers.
A: So I could see how many people go into Norway and how many go out.

This gives us a way to focus on globalization of media by focusing on the people, not on the media, Pippa concludes, reminding us that the chapters are up on her site. [Tags: norris_pippa globalization media trust ]

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Mark Gibbs reports on a, oh, let’s say over-zealous New Zealand copyright law:

This insanity, found in Sections 92A and C of New Zealand’s Copyright Amendment Act 2008 establishes – and I am not making this up – a guilt upon accusation principle!

Yep, you read that right. This means that anyone accused of “copyright infringement” will get his Internet connection cut off; and treated as guilty until proven innocent.

And if that weren’t enough, this crazy legislation defines anyone providing Internet access as an ISP and makes them responsible for monitoring and cutting off Internet access for anyone who uses their services and is accused of copyright violations. Thus libraries, schools, coffee shops, cafes – anyone offering any kind of Internet access – will be considered ISPs and become responsible and potentially liable.

Yikes. That is some extra nasty legislation.

[Minutes later] GlobalVoices reports:

A large swatch of New Zealand’s political blogosphere shut down its websites for a half-day on Monday, February 23 in protest of a copyright law that could have required internet service providers from disconnecting users who download pirated materials like movies or music.

…

The protest appeared to work as Prime Minister John Key announced he will stall the proposal for one month as he looks to forge a compromise with ISPs and copyright holders. If a solution cannot be found, Section 92 will be scrapped.

Be sure to read the entire GlobalVoices article, though. It explains how the boycott happened, points to similarly scary legislation elsewhere, and, of course, aggregates what the NZ blogosphere has been saying about this.

[Tags: new_zealand copyright copyleft conchords hobbits ]

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A couple of weeks ago, I happened to come across a few Wikipedia articles that struck me as too hard. I started getting worried that Wikipedia’s constant review process was resulting in articles inching up the Technical Accuracy pole while slipping down the Intelligibility for Non-Experts pole.

So, I checked in on a handful of articles, looking particularly at the introductory paragraphs Here are the examples, minus the many hyperlinks. (My premise is that you shouldn’t have to click on a hyperlink to figure out what the intro is talking about.)

Please note that this is an entirely unscientific, non-significant sampling. Still, the results were that I’m pretty much reassured. I think these generally are quite understandable intros. I wonder what your experience has been.

Fibonacci number

In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers are a sequence of numbers named after Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci (a contraction of filius Bonaccio, "son of Bonaccio"). Fibonacci’s 1202 book Liber Abaci introduced the sequence to Western European mathematics, although the sequence had been previously described in Indian mathematics.[2][3]

The first number of the sequence is 0, the second number is 1, and each subsequent number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers of the sequence itself, yielding the sequence 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc. In mathematical terms, it is defined by the following recurrence relation:

Iambic pentameter

Iambic pentameter is a type of meter that is used in poetry and drama. It describes a particular rhythm that the words establish in each line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called "feet". The word "iambic" describes the type of foot that is used. The word "pentameter" indicates that a line has five of these "feet".

Entropy

In many branches of science, entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. The concept of entropy is particularly notable as it is applied across physics, information theory and mathematics.

In thermodynamics (a branch of physics), entropy, symbolized by S,[3] is a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work.[4][5] It is a measure of the disorder of molecules in a system, and is central to the second law of thermodynamics and to the fundamental thermodynamic relation, both of which deal with physical processes and whether they occur unexpectedly. Spontaneous changes in isolated systems occur with an increase in entropy. Unexpected changes tend to average out differences in temperature, pressure, density, and chemical potential that may exist in a system, and entropy is thus a measure of how great the unexpected changes are.

Uncertainty principle

In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that the values of certain pairs of conjugate variables (position and momentum, for instance) cannot both be known with arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. This is not a statement about the limitations of a researcher’s ability to measure particular quantities of a system, but rather about the nature of the system itself.

In quantum mechanics, the particle is described by a wave. The position is where the wave is concentrated and the momentum, a measure of the velocity, is the wavelength. The position is uncertain to the degree that the wave is spread out, and the momentum is uncertain to the degree that the wavelength is ill-defined.

Black hole

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, including electromagnetic radiation (e.g. visible light), can escape its pull after having fallen past its event horizon. The term derives from the fact that absorption of visible light renders the hole’s interior invisible, and indistinguishable from the black space around it.

Despite its invisible interior, a black hole may reveal its presence through interaction with matter orbiting the event horizon. For example, a black hole may be perceived by tracking the movement of a group of stars that orbit its center. Alternatively, one may observe gas (from a nearby star, for instance) that has been drawn into the black hole. The gas spirals inward, heating up to very high temperatures and emitting large amounts of radiation that can be detected from earthbound and earth-orbiting telescopes.[2][3] Such observations have resulted in the general scientific consensus that—barring a breakdown in our understanding of nature—black holes do exist in our universe.[4]

Hawking radiation

Hawking radiation (also known as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation) is a thermal radiation with a black body spectrum predicted to be emitted by black holes due to quantum effects. It is named after the physicist Stephen Hawking who provided the theoretical argument for its existence in 1974, and sometimes also after the physicist Jacob Bekenstein who predicted that black holes should have a finite, non-zero temperature and entropy. Hawking’s work followed his visit to Moscow in 1973 where Soviet scientists Yakov Zeldovich and Alexander Starobinsky showed him that according to the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle, rotating black holes should create and emit particles.[1] The Hawking radiation process reduces the mass of the black hole and is therefore also known as black hole evaporation.

Because Hawking radiation allows black holes to lose mass, black holes that lose more matter than they gain through other means are expected to dissipate, shrink, and ultimately vanish. Smaller micro black holes (MBHs) are predicted to be larger net emitters of radiation than larger black holes, and to shrink and dissipate faster.

Higgs boson

In particle physics, the Higgs boson is a massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model.

The Higgs boson is the only Standard Model particle that has not yet been observed. Experimental detection of the Higgs boson would help explain how massless elementary particles can have mass. More specifically, the Higgs boson would explain the difference between the massless photon, which mediates electromagnetism, and the massive W and Z bosons, which mediate the weak force. If the Higgs boson exists, it is an integral and pervasive component of the material world.

Deontological ethics

Deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek δέον, deon, "obligation, duty"; and -λογία, -logia) is an approach to ethics that focuses on the rightness or wrongness of intentions or motives behind action such as respect for rights, duties, or principles, as opposed to the rightness or wrongness of the consequences of those actions.[1]

It is sometimes described as "duty" or "obligation" based ethics, because deontologists believe that ethical rules "bind you to your duty".[2] The term ‘deontological’ was first used in this way in 1930, in C. D. Broad’s book, Five Types of Ethical Theory.[3]

Phenomenology (philosophy)

Phenomenology is a philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness. Developed in the early years of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl and a circle of followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany, phenomenological themes were taken up by philosophers in France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl’s work.

"Phenomenology" comes from the Greek words phainómenon, meaning "that which appears," and lógos, meaning "study." In Husserl’s conception, phenomenology is primarily concerned with making the structures of consciousness, and the phenomena which appear in acts of consciousness, objects of systematic reflection and analysis. Such reflection was to take place from a highly modified "first person" viewpoint, studying phenomena not as they appear to "my" consciousness, but to any consciousness whatsoever. Husserl believed that phenomenology could thus provide a firm basis for all human knowledge, including scientific knowledge, and could establish philosophy as a "rigorous science".

Sarcoidosis

Sarcoidosis, also called sarcoid (from the Greek sarx, meaning "flesh") or Besnier-Boeck disease, is a multisystem disorder characterized by non-caseating granulomas (small inflammatory nodules). It most commonly arises in young adults. The cause of the disease is still unknown. Virtually any organ can be affected; however, granulomas most often appear in the lungs or the lymph nodes. Symptoms usually appear gradually but can occasionally appear suddenly. The clinical course generally varies and ranges from asymptomatic disease to a debilitating chronic condition that may lead to death .

Cascading style sheets

[This is what it said before I edited it, to try to make it a bit more understandable to those who don't already know about the topic.]

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.

CSS can be used locally by the readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for tableless web design). CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element. In this so-called cascade, priorities or weights are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the results are predictable.

Markup language

[This was how it began before I cleaned it up slightly.]

A markup language is an artificial language using a set of annotations to text that give instructions regarding the structure of text or how it is to be displayed. Markup languages have been in use for centuries, and in recent years have been used in computer typesetting and word-processing systems.

A well-known example of a markup language in use today in computing is HyperText Markup Language (HTML), one of the most used in the World Wide Web. HTML follows some of the markup conventions used in the publishing industry in the communication of printed work among authors, editors, and printers.

RNA

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a type of molecule that consists of a long chain of nucleotide units. Each nucleotide consists of a nitrogenous base, a ribose sugar, and a phosphate. RNA is very similar to DNA, but differs in a few important structural details: in the cell, RNA is usually single-stranded, while DNA is usually double-stranded; RNA nucleotides contain ribose while DNA contains deoxyribose (a type of ribose that lacks one oxygen atom); and RNA has the base uracil rather than thymine that is present in DNA.

RNA is transcribed from DNA by enzymes called RNA polymerases and is generally further processed by other enzymes. RNA is central to the synthesis of proteins. Here, a type of RNA called messenger RNA carries information from DNA to structures called ribosomes. These ribosomes are made from proteins and ribosomal RNAs, which come together to form a molecular machine that can read messenger RNAs and translate the information they carry into proteins. There are many RNAs with other roles – in particular regulating which genes are expressed, but also as the genomes of most viruses.

Twelve-tone scale

The chromatic scale is a musical scale with twelve pitches, each a semitone or half step apart. "A chromatic scale is a nondiatonic scale consisting entirely of half-step intervals," having, "no tonic," due to the symmetry or equal spacing of its tones[1].

[Image of "Chromatic scale on C: full octave ascending and descending"]

The most common conception of the chromatic scale before equal temperament was the Pythagorean chromatic scale, which is essentially a series of eleven 3:2 perfect fifths. The twelve-tone equally tempered scale tempers, or modifies, the Pythagorean chromatic scale by lowering each fifth slightly less than two cents, thus eliminating the Pythagorean comma of approximately 23.5 cents. Various other temperaments have also been proposed and implemented.

The term chromatic derives from the Greek word chroma, meaning color. Chromatic notes are traditionally understood as harmonically inessential embellishments, shadings, or inflections of diatonic notes.

I find the above pretty much incomprehensible.

Semiotics

Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems. It includes the study of how meaning is constructed and understood.

One of the attempts to formalize the field was most notably led by the Vienna Circle and presented in their International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, in which the authors agreed on breaking out the field, which they called "semiotic", into three branches: …

Designated hitter rule

In baseball, the designated hitter rule is the common name for Major League Baseball Rule 6.10[1], an official position adopted by the American League in 1973 that allows teams to designate a player, known as the designated hitter (abbreviated DH), to bat in place of the pitcher. Since then, most collegiate, amateur, and professional leagues have adopted the rule or some variant; MLB’s National League and Nippon Professional Baseball’s Central League are the most prominent professional leagues that have not.

Derivatives (finance)

Derivatives are financial contracts, or financial instruments, whose values are derived from the value of something else (known as the underlying). The underlying on which a derivative is based can be an asset (e.g., commodities, equities (stocks), residential mortgages, commercial real estate, loans, bonds), an index (e.g., interest rates, exchange rates, stock market indices, consumer price index (CPI) — see inflation derivatives), or other items (e.g., weather conditions, or other derivatives). Credit derivatives are based on loans, bonds or other forms of credit.

The main types of derivatives are forwards, futures, options, and swaps.

Derivatives can be used to mitigate the risk of economic loss arising from changes in the value of the underlying. This activity is known as hedging. Alternatively, derivatives can be used by investors to increase the profit arising if the value of the underlying moves in the direction they expect. This activity is known as speculation.

Because the value of a derivative is contingent on the value of the underlying, the notional value of derivatives is recorded off the balance sheet of an institution, although the market value of derivatives is recorded on the balance sheet.

This intro doesn’t do a good job explaining derivatives or hedges, but the article itself is actually fairly clear.

[Tags: wikipedia everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Nicole Aylwin at iposgoode suggests that we ought to consider “intellectual property” policy in terms of its effects on culture, rather than sticking solely within the “property” frame. Seems right to me.

[Tags: ip copyright copyleft free_culture ]

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Punya Mishra blogs a “story that connects cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader, Oriya writer and poet J. P. Das, and the father of non-violence Mahatma Gandhi.” It contains some of my favorite things: Reflections on the nature of the Web, “serendipitous connectability,” and Scott Kim-style ambigrams.

Ambigrams are words printed in such a way that they can be read in ambiguous ways. Sometimes they can be read backwards and forwards (even though they’re not palindromes), sometimes they can be inverted or flipped, sometimes they contain other words (e.g., “true” written in such a way that you can also read it as “false”). Scott Kim’s book Inversions has long been a favorite of mine, and the current issues of the relatively obscure journal WordWays has another bunch.

Punya recounts how it came to his attention that none other than Mahatma Gandhi worked on writing his name so that it could be read at one and the same time in English or in Hindi. (He has provided a scan of the pages of the book by an Indian civil servant that discloses this.) The path to this discovery is unlikely, reaching through strangers, hyperlinks and family. And it leads to an ambigram by Gandhi!

(Note that I did indeed find this page by ego-surfing my own name, since Punya cites a book of mine. But, rather than attributing this to my own narcissism, let’s just attribute it to what Punya calls serendipitious connectability.) [Tags: gandhi wordways scott_kim punya_mishra ambigrams wordplay ]

 

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WowTattoos has ambigrams for over 1,000 names, and a generator for words it doesn’t have. They’re not as beautifully clever as Scott Kim’s — they tend to look like gothic text — but it’s still pretty impressive.

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Directors of ten law school libraries, including Harvard’s John Palfrey, have signed an “aspirational” document, called the Durham Statement on Open Access, that “calls for all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.”

This is wonderful.

The statement calls for the end of paper versions of the journals, not merely supplementing them with electronic versions, because printing them costs so much and is bad for the environment. I don’t know if the drafters of the Statement were also thinking that going purely digital would help force a change in mindsets, but I suspect that that would be one of the most important consequences.

[Tags: open_access law_school law_journals publishing media scholarship copyright copyleft everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Aaron Swartz reports that the stimulus bill requires that government agencies use RSS [LATER: or Atom] to report on the stimulus money they disperse, so that those who are interested can get automatically updated. And those who are interested will include institutions and individuals aggregating that information so that the alarms can sound … and, we hope, the bouquets can shower down.

[Tags: rss stimulus e-gov egovernment egov transparency obama everything_is_miscellaneous metadata ]

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In something like 2002, I wrote and posted a kid’s version of my book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, under a non-commercial Creative Commons license. Now Peter Ford has taken it upon himself to create a site with a copy of it with a facility that lets anyone comment on any paragraph. He’s hoping to get the must off of it, stem the link rot, etc.

I totally love this.

[Tags: crowd-sourcing wisdom_of_the_crowd publishing small_pieces books ]

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Lots of good links to Open Courseware courses, tools, and aggregations at The .Edu Toolbox.

[Tags: open_courseware open_access education ]

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The Italian Interior Minister — the one who will be deciding which posts “defend” criminal activity and thus require ISPs to block the post’s host — is setting up a task force to hack Skype so the government can eavesdrop on its citizens.

Among his many virtues, I think it’s safe to say that Roberto Maroni is totally free of a sense of irony.

(I base this on a Google translation of an article sent to me by my friend Gianluca.)

[Tags: italy digital_rights rights skype hacking ]

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Berkman’s Corinna di Gennaro posts about a proposed amendment in Italy that would require ISPs to block sites that permit postings that defend or instigate crimes. So, if there were a video on YouTube that defended a crime, Italian ISPs would be required to block all of YouTube.

Which content would be proscribed by this law? That is up to the Minister of the Interior, whose decisions cannot be appealed in a court of law. I can’t see any problems with that, can you?

So, you’d better think twice before you post to Facebook that you think that that photo of Michael Phelps and the bong is cool, kewl, or figo. You could get Facebook banned from all of Italy.

[Thanks to Marco Montemagno for the alert. And thanks to Twitter for telling me that Italian for "cool" is "figo."]

[Tags: italy censorship free_speech digital_rights ]

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Charlie Leadbeater has posted a paper on why he’s unhappy with the British broadband proposal, Digital Britain. Given Charlie’s way with words, it’s not surprising that it’s a well-done piece, and it makes some essential points: First, you can’t solve problems just by throwing broadband at them, and, second, the Digital Britain proposal takes no account of the Net’s disruptive capabilities. (I’m summarizing to entice you, not to obviate reading it, people!)

[Tags: charlie_leadbeater digital_rights digital_britain broadband ]

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The latest Radio Berkman podcast talks with Jonathan Zittrain about Herdict, a service that lets us together discover which sites are being blocked by whom. Then there’s an interview with Judith Donath about her MIT Museum installation that lets us experience what it means to live in a world supersaturated with information.

[Tags: berkman herdict judith_donath jonathan_zittrain art museum network_tools filtering censorship digital_rights ]

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Lisa Tanzi, VP & Deputy General Counsel of Microsoft is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “A New Era of Computing: The Opportunities and Challenges of Cloud-Based Software and Services.” [Note: I am live-blogging, thus missing stuff, getting things wrong, writing badly, paraphrasing.] Her division at Microsoft is more on the enterprise side than the consumer side.

Microsoft is very excited about cloud computing (which I’ll abbreviate as CC)) she says. She’s going to give an overview but wants to spend time on the legal implications.

Lisa begins by putting CC into context on the history of computing timeline. Mainframes, PCs, Client/Server and WWW, and Cloud Services. During the CC era, people have multiple devices. Also, we’re seeing touch-based manipulation and other natural user interfaces. And there’s CC, defined as “providing software and computing power over the Internet.” With CC, you can pay as you go, connect all your devices, and provide wider access to “unprecedented computing power.” “But we at Microsoft don’t see it as an either/proposition.” People will want to have a mixed environment.

She goes through the benefits of CC for businesses, government, public sector, and developers. She shows a television ad.

Now she addresses some legal and policy issues. She begins with a scenario: A business launches a conferencing and email services offering. It’s HQ’ed in the US with data centers around the world. This creates jurisdictional issues — privacy, law enforcement, liability, running mixed source, data portability. But, she wants to focus on two sets of issues. First, moving data across borders: privacy, security and law enforcement. If the service provider doesn’t think it can reconcile the conflicting obligations, it may end up not launching the service. Or it might turn features on and off in different jurisdictions, although the software doesn’t always allow that, plus you lose some economies of scale.

“Governments are going to have to work together in new ways to find solutions to these issues,” Lisa says. Also, it may be that governments that figure out how to make it easier data across borders will have an advantage in attracting data centers.

Second, “How do the large bodies of traditional telecom regulations apply in this new world?” VoIP, email, IM are all affected. The laws vary quite a bit by jurisdiction, and they are usually written for different technologies. Law enforcement requirements, confidentiality obligations, emergency services (e.g., E-911) requirements, etc. How you do all this while enabling this new technology to evolve and be rolled out.

When it comes to data movement (her first point), imagine a German company that’s out-sourcing email to a CC provider that has data centers in France and Belgian. The data retention laws of Germany say that info has to be kept for 6 months, in France it’s 1 year, and in Belgium it’s 2. Whose law applies?

Some provincial laws in Canada require data in a CC system to be stored in Canada. But if a US company builds a data center in Canada, the Patriot Act may apply, and even if it doesn’t, exceptionalism is a bad way of doing business.

Q: Have you faced any specific cases where the mother country’s laws regulate or not?
A: A lot of these issues just aren’t resolved. Another real-world example: When we build a data center in another country, we go through an extensive process to make sure that we’re not in a situation of conflicting laws. Researching Japan we came across a statute that says electronic communications cannot be transferred outside of the country. It’s not very clear what that means. Can a subsidiary transfer info out of the country? Is there some new process we should be engaged in? Treaty-like solutions?

Q: Are you required to go to the highest common denominator among all the privacy and retention policies?
A: No clear answers. It looks like you can have a high water mark on privacy. And it gets yet more complicated if you have to deal with privacy based upon whether the person is, not where the data is.

Q: I use MS Word. To get it from my computer, the police have to get a warrant, etc. If I use MS Live, your CC service, the FBI needs a subpoena which means they don’t have to go before a judge and show probable cause. I’m worried that users are naively using online programs such as Google Docs and Office Live without knowing they’re online and that they’re lacking legal protection. What is MS doing to educate users?
A: We hope that it’s apparent to users that they’re storing documents online. The Terms of Use make the legality clear.
Q: No one reads Terms of Use.

Q: From the European perspective, the European Commission in2004 required MS to change its licensing policy. MS didn’t comply. In 2006, MS was fined. In 2008 there was another fine. Interoperability was the common thread. In 2008, another two cases were opened, against Office and Opera. It’s a neverending story. What’s your attitude toward interoperability?
A: We take our legal obligations seriously. We’ve announced interoperability principles. Windows Azure (MS CC) is in development. When it launches, the goal is to have it work with non-MS languages and development environments. It’s built on standard protocols. The entire industry would benefit from data portability.

Q: Users in cloud environments tend not to have much leverage. My non-profit in Zimbabwe just got kicked off its web host because Zimbabwe misunderstood US policy. The customer has no power in this scenario. I worry that for people who are very concerned human rights, data protection, etc., the early indications are that we should run like hell from CC. It’s too bad because technically CC is a much better way to do this. Unless large companies running clouds can offer assurance that they’ll fight for the rights of customers, the response from at least some class of consumers will be “Over my dead body.” Beyond harmonizing, how does this come into issues of free speech. What’s the responsibility of a company like MS to act as a defender of rights?
A: This fall we joined a global initiative to have companies protect privacy and freedom of expression. [Global Network Initiative] For enterprise customers would classify the situation differently. They want to impose obligations on the service provider: set up your physical security in a particular way, do retention in a particular way. For them those issues are being negotiated contract by contract.

Q: What are MS’s financial projections for CC?
A: We haven’t made any [well, made any public]. We’ll be making our business model clear sometime this year. Probably pay as you go.

Q: MS has pushed for a high bar for human rights when it comes to the Global Network Initiative. But CC makes it much harder. What are you going to do?
A: It’s a tough question. We’re working on it.

Q: What type of treaty might MS push for?
A: I was raising that as a discussion point. It’s sooo complex.

Q: Akamai has a similarly distributed architecture and business model. Have you looked at it and other such companies?
A: We have looked at what other companies do.

Q: Why aren’t you using SSL for the entire email session or for MS Office Live for Consumers?
A: I’ll get back to you.

Q: [jpalfrey] We at the Berkman Center pride ourselves on having great relationships and talking straight. From the perspective of users with less money than business and than other users, the value prop for CC is “free or cheap services.” When cheap services have been rolled out to the poor, there have been problems making it clear to users what their risks and rights are. So, as this CC rolls out, MS should have a “mitigation plan” in effect (e.g., signs on construction sites apologizing for the disruption). What would the mitigation plan look like?
A: I’ll take that one back to Redmond. I haven’t spent that much time on the consumer side of this. [Tags: microsoft cloud_computing digital_rights human_rights. ]

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Scott Kildall has posted to a public mailing list a very useful compendium of links about an attempt to create a work of art as a Wikipedia article. I have not seen the Wikpedia page and it’s been deleted but the Talk page is there. (And from the Talk page, it sounds to me like the deletion was appropriate.)

[Tags: wikipedia art ]

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Boston University has decided to set up an open access archive for scholarly work produced there. Yay. This seems to stop short from mandating that academics there are required to put a copy of their published work into the archive, but it’s a good step.

On the other hand, the Open Access Blog reports:

Congressional Representative John Conyers (D-MI) has re-introduced a bill (HR801) that essentially would negate the NIH policy concerning depositing research in OA repositories.

Here are the first three points in a letter posted by Jennifer McLennan:

H.R. 801 is designed to amend current copyright law and create a new category of copyrighted works (Section 201, Title 17). In effect, it would:

1. Prohibit all U.S. federal agencies from conditioning funding agreements to require that works resulting from federal support be made publicly available if those works are either: a) funded in part by sources other than a U.S. agency, or b) the result of “meaningful added value” to the work from an entity that is not party to the agreement.

2. Prohibit U.S. agencies from obtaining a license to publicly distribute, perform, or display such work by, for example, placing it on the Internet.

3. Stifle access to a broad range of federally funded works, overturning the crucially important NIH Public Access Policy and preventing other agencies from implementing similar policies.

Here’s a draft letter opposing it.

[Tags: open_access boston_university copyright copywrong john_conyers nih ]

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I just joined a group opposing Facebook’s decision that they own all of the content you create on their site even after you decide to close your account there. So can you.

[Tags: facebook open_access openid terms_of_service ]

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There’s nothing wrong with scratching the surface if that’s what itches.

Alltop.com is a surface skimmer, and it looks quite useful. So, if you’re interested in one of the topics they cover, such as, say, cloud computing, you could click to see a compact listing of what bloggers and others are saying about it. Or GLBT. Or Obama. Or what the top stories in the LA Times are.

The weakness, as well as the strength, is that Alltop decides on the topics and sources (although the sources include searches of Google News, Technorati, and other aggregators). So, a search for “stimulus” turns up nothing because it is not one of the topics, although it is certainly mentioned in some of the content Alltop rounds up.

The very amusing “about” page reports that the decision about topics and sources of topics is made by humans and is “highly subjective and judgmental.” It helps that the site wants to push us out of our comfort zone by including sources we might otherwise scorn. But it’s important to keep in mind that — despite inevitable appearances — Alltop is essentially a magazine that reflects the interests and values of its editors. Nothing wrong with that at all. On the contrary. It’s just important that we not mistake Alltop for anything else. (The following is more concerning to me: “We take care of our friends. If sites or blogs help us, we help them,” as a criterion for inclusion. Is that really the best policy for the sake of us readers?)

Anyway, Alltop looks like a useful way to track the topics that it and you care about. [Tags: alltop aggregators news everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Christopher Beam at Slate has a lively article about the Republican National Committee’s meeting to come up with new ways of using the new media to build the party back up. The article gives the sense of a group that simultaneously is Getting It and Floundering in It.

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Marcus Brown parodies twitter, social software and literary criticism rather savagely and very funnily, picking on some of the leading twitterers. (And the fact that his first video shows him pondering Cluetrain is not exactly an endorsement of Cluetrain.) Sure, it’s unfair to pick a handful of tweets out of context, and twitterers don’t claim to be writing deathless literature. Nevertheless … well, make up your own mind. (Thanks for the link, RageBoy!)

[Tags: twitter humor parody ]

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Could Joaquin Phoenix pass the Turing test?

[Tags: joaquin_phoenix david_letterman ]

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If you are having the crcdisk.sys hang in Vista, check this forum. You’ll know that you have this problem if your screen goes blank and hangs during startup, and if when you do a Safe Mode startup, it hangs at the line that says it’s doing the crcdisk.sys thang (which does a check on your hard drive).

The hang apparently can be caused by a few different factors, including trying to install Vista 64 with 4 GB of RAM (although this may have been fixed by now). For me, it was a problem with one of the drives that is not the boot drive that has Vista on it; it is probably not a coincidence that this occurred when I was rebooting after a power outage and — to pile it on — when an automatic update was due to be installed upon reboot. I physically unplugged the flaky drive and the system started up.

Yay.

[Tags: visa crcdisk.sys ]

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Douglas Kaye, founder of IT Conversations and the Conversations Network, has launched SpokenWord.org. Here’s part of the announcement:

There are perhaps millions of audio and video spoken-word
recordings on the Internet. Think of all those lectures,
interviews, speeches, conferences, meetings, radio and TV
programs and podcasts. No matter how obscure the topic,
someone has recorded and published it on line.

But how do you find it?

SpokenWord.org is a new free on-line service that helps you
find, manage and share audio and video spoken-word
recordings, regardless of who produced them or where
they’re published. All of the recordings in the
SpokenWord.org database are discovered on the Internet and
submitted to our database by members like you.

This is another public-spirited work from a public-spirited guy who has assembled and inspired a public-spirited collective. [Disclosure: I'm on the board of advisers.]

[Tags: spokenword aggregators collaboration doug_kaye douglas_kaye ]

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David Reed blogs about recent research on “practical ways to construct EM (radio) waves with new, complex 3D structures that propagate while maintaining that structure, not necessarily in spherical or cylindrical shapes.” I am not even close to understanding the physics, but, as David writes, this sort of possibility makes it clear how foolish it is to regulate the airwaves as if they were real estate that has to be divided up into slices that are awarded as monopolies to the highest bidder. David writes:

… the policy issue is that such systems for multiplexing such EM fields don’t fit the “law of the land” regarding sharing the medium. So, like UWB [ultra wideband] and spread spectrum underlay, and white spaces, all that capacity will evaporate in attempting to fit the technology into the procrustean bed of the FCC’s “property rights in spectrum” legal framework.

The “property rights” model of spectrum allocation and radio regulation is based on physics-by-analogy, ignoring the reality of propagation. It’s time to end the ignorance of economists and lawyers, and replace physics-by-analogy with better physical analysis.

Or, to put the analogy the other way, if real estate operated the way energy and information do, the little slice of beach front you’re charging $5,000 a night for would go from having room for four honeymooning couples to being the 127 miles of the New Jersey coastline and simultaneously a set of holiday villas in Brazil, just because a Swedish scientist found some new way of twisting it around. In such a case, the FCC (Federal Coastal Commission) would probably want to rethink its rules for allocating beachfront properties. [Tags: david_reed fcc spectrum open_spectrum ]

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How about if there were a magical shape we could draw on top of a slide that would magnify what’s under it? So, if you were showing a slide of a screen capture, you could invoke these shapes to come and go, enlarging the elements to which you want to call attention.

kthxbye.*

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Yes, not an entirely appropriate use of the term, but I find it an amusing youthicism. Its marginal appropriateness in this case is that I’m acknowledging that I’m talking into the wind when it comes to making product enhancement suggestions. And, yes, now the footnote is longer than the post. kthxbye.

[Tags: powerpoint keynote ]

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Dan Bricklin has posted a recording of a reduced version (only five hours!) of a course he took with Rabbi Reuven Cohn about the Passover Haggadah. The Haggadah is the book Jews read aloud before the Pasover meal, recounting one of the religion’s founding events. Because it is a story of liberation, it has resonances all over the place. Dan writes about the class:

The book, mainly in Hebrew, seems to be a random mishmash of different readings and blessings. With the help of the class I learned about its origins 2000 years ago by studying the ancient books of the Talmud, especially the parts called the Mishnah. Through the class I saw this book that I had been reading carefully for my whole life (and the ceremony it describes) in an entirely new light. I got to see it’s important place in the evolution of the Jewish religion after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. It also helped give me some insight into the parallel development of Christianity at the same time.

I talked Reuven into giving a short version of the course (only about 5 hours) to some of my friends while I recorded it for sharing on the Internet (under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, no-derivative works license). With the help of a few microphones and a PDF of the handouts, you should be able to feel as if you were there. The participants had a wide range of Jewish backgrounds, from very little Jewish education to extensive. The class was conducted in English.

Reuven is a very gifted teacher, with an interesting background. He received a law degree from Yale and once was a lawyer at a well-known Boston firm. He also received ordination from Yeshiva University and teaches at Hebrew College in Newton and Maimonides School in Brookline.

I have not listened to the podcasts yet, but trust Dan’s judgment implicitly. I find the Jewish method of exegesis to be fascinating, and quite admirable, even while I am unconvinced of the divinity of the work being explained.

It would be interesting to find a similar project explaining some aspect of Islam. [Tags: judaism haggadah pesah passover ]

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I read David Ogilvy’s “Confessions of an Advertising Man” when I was a kid and was greatly impressed, I think by the subtlety with which humans could be influenced. It was also quite entertaining. Here’s David Susskind’s hour-long interview of him from 1983.

(Thanks to Richard Pachter for the link.)

[Tags: david_ogilvy advertising marketing ]

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We saw Slumdog Millionaire last night. Excellent. Going in, you should maybe know that it’s more about slumdogs than about millionaires and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” The non-linear narrative style is the opposite of a gimmick; it makes total sense as a style. The narrative itself is oddly 1930s/1940s-ish, which is not a strength. On the other hand, it shows you something we in America don’t get to see much of.

Best movie of the year? Tough one. I thought Milk was terrific, with some great performances. Between Milk and Slumdogs I think I’d have to say that we have an example of the ridiculousness of trying to pick a single best movie. I mean, Wall-e had some pretty great filmmaking in it, too.

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I’ve been reading Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lehane thinking that it would be more than a good crime novel. I’m actually finding it to be less, with too many wince-worthy sentences, and too many characters written from their quirks outward. I’m only half way through so maybe it picks up, but since my problem is with the writing, I doubt it. I may not even finish it. Too bad. It’s the first Lehane book I’ve read, and I was looking forward to having a new author to enjoy.

[Tags: slumdog_millionaire slumdog harvey_milk milk oscars dennis_lehane lehane ]

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The latest Radio Berkman podcast is with David Hornik of August Capital. David is delightful — not always the term applied to VCs — and finds some reasons for optimism in the current darkling gloom. [Tags: berkman podcasts radio_berkman david_hornik vcs recession innovation ]

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I really enjoyed the first episode of How’s Your News?, a new series on MTV (Sundays at 10:30 pm EST/PST).

It’s tough to describe. (Tom Shales does a good job.) It documents the travels of a roving bus of “reporters” who are developmentally disabled. The reporters do person-in-the-street interviews and interviews with MTV-ish stars. It’s deeply funny, and bounces around through multiple levels all at the same time.

The obvious criticism is that the show exploits these folks. I don’t think it does even for a minute, although there are undoubtedly people who view it meanly. But, what are you going to do? There are idiots and bullies everywhere. The show in fact takes these folks for what they are. It doesn’t turn them into saints and it doesn’t condescend. The show is created by a guy who works closely with the developmentally disabled.

Now, the truth is that I know this group pretty well. I have a relative who goes to the same summer camp from which this project sprung, and I have spent enough time with them to know that the reporters are participating voluntarily, happily, enthusiastically, aware of their limitations but also of their special strengths and vantage points.

There’s nothing like it on TV.[Tags: hows_your_news jabberwocky developmentally_disabled ]

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