Avoid the frumious cashew shell

The syndicated column "Ask Dr. Knowledge" addresses the question of what a cashew shell looks like, with scary results. Since I can't find the column on line (i.e., it wasn't in the top ten Google results) here are some other answers to a question you'll wish you hadn't asked:

Detailed description of the nut and how to harvest it (with sightly pornographic photo)

Edible poison ivy ("Poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac belong to the cashew family...")

Why cashew harvesters aren't paid enough ("So, handling the shell or eating a nut with shell oil on it can cause the reaction. ")

You really don't want to touch the stuff between the two layers of shell ("...extremely caustic and can cause blistering of the skin upon contact ... is used in the making ... varnish, insecticide, paint, and even rocket lubricant"

If you have poison ivy, don't eat cashews ("Sometimes people who are very sensitive to poison ivy will also react to mangoes and cashews while they are suffering from the rash ...")

Cashew nut dermatitis ("During April 1982, a poison ivy-like dermatitis affected 54 persons who consumed cashew nut pieces sold by a Little League organization...")

Don't buy el cheapo brands ("While cashews purchased from a reputable store are free of risk, poorly processed cashews retaining traces of oil from the shells can cause allergic dermatitis.")

The bright side of the cashew shell ("One of the best of fuels...")

Now back to your regulalry scheduled fears...

[Vanguard] Dublin Core

Stuart Weibel gives us an update on the Dublin Core, a metadata standard that can succeed because it's resolutely maintained its simplicity: 15 attributes of documents. You can imagine how interesting the conversations must have been about exactly which metadata to capture: Rating and Price aren't in, but Rights Management is. (The standard is extensible so if you want 'em, you can put 'em in yourself.)

[Note: I've been totally spotty in blogging this conference. My fault, not the conference's. Sorry.]

The good of file sharing

As we try to balance the rights of artists to be compensated, let's be willling to blurt out a plain truth: It is good that we can find millions of songs on the Internet and listen to them for free. This is a good thing.

That's not to say that it is the ultimate good that must be honored or that it's more important compared with the rights of creators. But can we at least acknowledge that living in a world where we can listen to the world's music is a good thing?

[Vanguard] Me

I just gave my presentation. Basically, since this conference is talking about Knowledge Management, I tried to shout the words "flesh" and "desire" as often as possible.

Throwing off the Data Miners

Gary Turner writes:

I propose that on Friday at precisely 2.30am, we all visit our local Safeway stores in our home towns and purchase

1 Pack of Safeway brand AAA batteries
1 Tin of pineapple chunks
1 Bottle of Newman's own Caesar Salad Dressing
1 You've Got A New Job greetings card

A good speech

If you haven't yet contributed to the Dean campaign - or even if you have - this would be a good time to. Closing the quarter with a bang would make a huge difference to the dynamics of the race.

[Vanguard] Pesky meanings

Fun factoid from Elizabeth Liddy (director of the Central for NLP at Syracuse U) who's talking about doing context-aware natural language processing: The most frequently used nouns in English have an average of 7 meanings and the most frequently-used verbs have 11.

As always, I got my facts reversed. The entry above is now correct.

[Vanguard] Explicit Metdata: Bad!

Bobby Kishore of Microsoft is explaining how to create a KM system without relying on explicit metadata. People don't like filling out forms and entering metadata explicitly. So, a KM system ought to mine content for metadata.

That's certainly right. But here's a related question: Why don't people enter metadata? It's not simply because it's a pain in the butt: individual pain for organizational benefit. It's also because filling in metadata makes us pull back from the world, an attitude that goes against our biology. In fact, it's desire itself that draws us into the world and makes us shudder as we draw back from it.

David Reed comments that the way people describe how they share information isn't how they share information. Huge implications for how you build a KM system.

[Vanguard] Knowledge in a box

Daniel Bobrow from PARC says that Xerox tried to support its repair folks by modeling the machines in software. The repair people were impressed but didn't find it useful. The conclusion: You can't put the right knowledge in the box. (He goes on to explain the social life of information, as fellow PARC-er John Seely Brown put it.)

Cool way of putting it. And why did we ever think we could put knowledge in a box? It must have something to do with the fact that we think our human knowledge is in the box of bone that sits atop our neck. Knowledge isn't in the box because consciousness isn't in the box. It's of the world and always outside of itself. (This isn't mysticism; it's just a description of consciousness that puts attention at its core.) My conclusion: It's not just the right knowledge that can't be put in the box because knowledge is a way the world reveals itself to us and thus necessarily transcends the box.

Skittish Blogging

I'm at the TTI Vanguard conference in DC. About 120 people are here to discuss this year's topic: Knowledge Management. The advisory board is scarily smart and deep.

The organizers are nervous about people blogging from the conference because they want people to "speak fearlessly." There's a No Press rule, but they are ok with blogging so long as it doesn't violate people's privacy, a nicely fuzzy rule that I'm happy to hew to.

I'm presenting tomorrow, on "The Unspoken," which unfortunately sounds like a Clint Eastwood movie. At the speakers' meeting this morning they stressed how interruptive the sessions are: you are granted a ten-minute opening but after that, anyone can ask a question. Everyone has a microphone at her seat (along with an ethernet cable and a power outlet). This orientation meeting didn't exactly put me at ease, but that wasn't its point. I came here with loose ideas about what to talk about, figuring that I'd end up rewriting after today anyway. Now it's my bowels that are loose. Ulp.

Trusting Verisign

Verisign has extended its mighty middle finger to all of us, according to this clear article at SFGate.com:

Internet users who enter unregistered domains because of a misspelling, for example, are redirected to a VeriSign Web site. The page offers possible alternative Web addresses and a search engine that presents links based on how much companies are willing to pay for top billing.

What can you do about it? Beats me. All ideas gratefully accepted.

World News

Peter di Pietro points to Newstran, a service that aggregates and translates world news.

The translation can be pretty rough, although this is from Chinese and thus predictably is sense not much making going to:

?center port politics has the research ?Wang Yaozong ?with the above ?law, ?refers to Hong Kong ??weak ?, ?caused the Beijing port altogether to govern ?, but the port ?entire ?Deputy to the National People's Congress ?strength ?????law owed the principle ?, ??on "?the system" ?is fuzzy is the matter ?, but politics "?the system" ?had ?.

Aothough have to love a site that has as an entry in its pull down menu:

BULGARIAN >> ENGLISH - IT sux

It lets you use either Babelfish or WorldLingo as your renderer. Some of the languages are translated well enough to get a sense of the article. And when they don't, you're treated to tantalizing bits such as this from the Berliner Morgenpost:

Hans's acorn field man stands to Josef

In the preliminary investigation around compensations with the assumption of man man by Vodafone Hans's placed itself acorn behind German bank chief executive Josef field man

It turns out that Hans Eichel is opposing Josef Ackermann. "Eichel" is German for "acorn," so this is akin to Germans rendering a US headline about a cabinet meeting as "Grain Food advises Small Leafy Plant to Continue Policy towards Actually Exists."

Powers of Magnification

Peter Kaminski points to a site about digiscoping, that is, shooting digital photos through a telescopic device. The difference between the snapshots you're taking now and what you could be doing if you were willing to lug a howitzer-sized scope with you is pretty dramatic.

By gum, Marilyn Vos Savant is the world's smartest person

Marilyn in Parade sets the following problem. You are in a pitch dark room. You are handed a deck that has ten cards turned face up shuffled into it. Your job is to sort the deck into two piles, each of which contains the same number of up-turned cards.

The solution involves no night-vision goggles or the ability to read through one's fingers. It's just so damn clever that you're going to go D'oh when you turn the column upside down and read her answer.

Or, you could click here to get a javascript popup with the answer.

Margin of Error Error

I'm no statistician — in fact, I'm no someone who's ever gotten a statistic right — but doesn't "margin of error" actually mean something?

Here's MSNBC's coverage of the latest poll of Democrats and "democratic leaners" [Forgot the capital, eh?] from Newsweek. The question seems to have been: Which Democrat do you support for President?

Clark: 14%
Dean: 12%
Lieberman: 12%
Kerry: 10%
Gephardt: 8%

Margin of error: plus or minus three points.

MSNBC's conclusion: "Retired Gen. Wesley Clark may have only entered the presidential race on Thursday, but he is already the Democratic frontrunner..."

Shouldn't the actual headline be:

Now, lest you think I'm merely defending my boy Howie, let me hasten to add that the report continues: "The president?s approval rating now stands at 51 percent, down 1 point from last week?s poll..." Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the actual result of the poll that the president's approval rating has not changed in a statistically significant way? That Bush's overall approval rating was at 65% in May is another story, and that his rating for his handling of the War in Iraq slid five points to 46% in a week is an even bigger story.

I think MSNBC came to the wrong conclusion with these numbers as well: Dean fared worse (52% to 38%) than Clark (47% to 43%) and Kerry (48% to 43%) when matched up against Bush. Certainly MSNBC is just plain wrong when it says that "Clark fared better than the others" because of a 1% difference against Bush. But isn't the difference between 38 and 43 statistically insignificant if the margin of error is plus or minus 3?

Are there no Canadian pirates?

Michael O'Connor Clarke, Ireland's gift to Canada, writes:

Could P2P music sharing actually be considered legal in Canada? This tech journalist thinks so, and he makes an interesting argument. He's not a lawyer, of course - but it's an entertaining thought.

Apparently, five years ago, Canada legalized copying of copyrighted material for private use, levying a fee on blank CDs and audio tapes of $0.77 CDN and $0.29 respectively to compensate the studios. So far, that's raised $70M. According to the article:

... you could not have designed a law which more perfectly captures the peer to peer process. "Private copying" is a term of art in the Act. In Canada, if I own a CD and you borrow it and make a copy of it that is legal private copying; however, if I make you a copy of that same CD and give it to you that would be infringement. Odd, but ideal for protecting file sharers.

Loophole or proof of the sly wisdom of those snow-shod Canadians?

Crooked Voting Machines

Cory is encouraging IEEE members to urge that organization to fly right in its recommendations on electronic voting machines. The EFF is pushing the issue. (You are a member, aren't you?) Cory writes:

The people who are writing the IEEE standard for voting machines have been doing their best to rig their deliberative process ot exclude input from non-vendors who want the standard to include performance metrics that will guard against electoral malfeasance. This is heavy stuff: the standard this committee produces will likely form the basis of the US goverment's voting-machine purchases (as well as those of governments abroad), and if there are holes in the standard today, they will be biting our democracies on the ass for decades. There's never been a clearer demonstration that "architecture is politics."

We have to get this right. It cuts to our faith in the legitimacy of elections. Lose that and you lose democracy.

All Bits Are Created Equal?

David Isenberg in his new blog comments on the push to charge more for some bits than others. He's right on the mark as usual: " Price discrimination in the middle of the network is a risk to new app discovery and to free speech."

Matt the Dean Blogger

Matthew Gross, the Dean campaign's
blogger-in-chief, has apparently found
something disagreeable in JOHO...

The Security Metaphor

Seth Gordon suggests that the metaphors by which we talk about computer security are misleading. It's not war and it's not a disease. It's a con game.

The Rise of the Stupid Blog (in a good sense)

Isenblog is berging, um, Isenbulge is begging, damn, blosenbleg is icing. Well, just check it out for yourself. It's darn fine.

Counterfeit Bush

The police in North Carolina are looking for the person who successfully used a $200 bill with a photo of W on it to pay for some stuff. The Smoking Gun has the picture of it. (Thanks to Dave Wasser for the link.)

Talk like a Priate

My friend Ross Knights combines two recent Web thangs:

Wlel sviher me tmiebrs, mteay! Ahrgrrh.

Posted by self at 12:19 PM | Comments (1)

DeanSpace - Man, That's Netty!

I'm at the Howard Dean HQ in Burlington where Josh Koenig has just walked me through DeanSpace (verson 0.95), a facility that launched yesterday. It's further evidence that this campaign isn't using the Internet so much as it's been shaped by the Internet.

DeanSpace is an open source tool, built on Drupal by a community of volunteers independent of the campaign itself, that lets anyone set up a site for a community of Dean supporters. The community might be topical (e.g., Pilots for Dean), demographical (Seniors for Dean), local (Albany for Dean) or just plain peculiar (Girls Gone Wild for Dean). Setting up your own site is straightforward enough for someone who's edited config files before — techier than you'd like, but the documentation walks you through it — and now you have a site with the ability to blog, create a shared calendar (including events from the Dean Get Local registry of local events), hold a forum, invite users, register them and give them each a home page, load up a shared picture gallery, manage a mailing list, run polls, manage a group task list, and send users messages.

So far that's pretty cool in my book. But here's what really impressed me. If you were running a typical business, you'd think first about how you're going to manage the groups that get set up. If you were an enlightened business, you'd let groups do what they want, but you'd figure that a big part of the appeal would be the way you could quietly gather anonymous marketing and demographic data. But if you were really webby, you'd think first about how you could get yourself out of the middle so that the system could truly empower the people using it.

Welcome to DeanSpace.

It's designed to give these community spaces true autonomy, and it assumes that these autonomous communities will want to share their work. So, every bit of content on a DeanSpace site can be served up via RSS. If your site, Mimes for Dean, sees something interesting on the Hassidic Baton Twirlers for Dean site, you can RSS it directly on to your site. The Dean campaign is entirely out of the loop, although you can (don't have to) register your site with a page that lists 'em. And the campaign is busy RSS'ing not just their site but their associated tools, like DeanLink (the social network for supporters).

This is exactly how grassroots campaigns can be transformed by the Internet at its best: not (just) a fund-raising machine, not a way to blast out campaign messages, but a tool for letting people form the groups they want and talk. And act.

Josh says that future releases will be wizard-based and spaces will come pre-loaded with useful defaults and Dean stuff like a banner with a photo of the Governor.

Also,at least some of the official Dean state organizations will be using DeanSpace. (Keep in mind that DeanSpace is independent of the campaign. The Federal Elections Commission cares about that.)

WordPirates Interview

Sarah Lai Stirland interviews Dan Gillmor and me about WordPirates at Corante. Amusing? You be the judge. (But please don't tell me if you think it's not.)

Thank You, Seth Gordon

You know who did a fantastic job putting the WordPirates site up, installing the blosxom software, doing the cgi scripting, and being an all-around pleasure to work with? Seth Gordon, that's who. Here's his resume. You'd be a fool not to hire him.

For your reading pleasure, I'm not writing this with only the first and last letters in place

LanguageHat has some good links about the gibberish-that-isn't-gibberish that's making the rounds of the Web, including one to Metafilter. Amazing stuff.

Word Pirates launches

Dan Gillmor and I have just launched a site called WordPirates where you can register and discuss words that you feel have been taken over by commercial and political rapscallions who twisted them to serve their own nefarious purposes.

For example, people who share copyright mp3s may be many things, but they are definitely not "pirates." And when you stay in a hotel, you are certainly not their "guest."

So have at it, me hearties! And spread the word.

We Media

JD Lasica writes about the "We Media" report on participatory journalism and "How audiences are shaping the future of news and information." It's by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis, edited by JD, with a foreword by Dan Gillmor. I've skimmed it and it looks like it'll be the reference point for any serious discussions of this topic from now on.

Go to Hell, Vote.com

I just got spammed by vote.com. They're selling some schlocky novel best described in its own self-promotional words:

...a riveting thriller about a deadly virus, born of the past that threatens to destroy the present. ... seamlessly weaves genetics, terrorism and the very human struggle of right and wrong into a terrifying and unforgettable story.

Ah, self-parody! What can't it parody?!

So, why is vote.com flogging riveting cheesy thrillers? I'm going to guess that it's for the money. It's sure not for building trust with the site's subscribers since its privacy page says it won't send mail to people who haven't asked for it.

Coffee Standardization & Double Punchlined Jokes

Gary Turner is proposing that Universal Beverage Code for telling vending machines exactly what beverage you would like:

Eventually, an extra milky, extra sugar decaf latte will always be number 283 regardless of which make and model of vending machine ...

Oh, please sign me up for the steering committee! I can't wait to insist that all coffees made with hot milk simply have to begin with the digit 5.

But that reminds me of the only joke I know that has two punchlines:

A new prisoner is at his first lunch. A prisoner stands up and calls out "73" and everyone laughs. Another one stands up and calls out "142" and everyone laughs. The new prisoner asks his table companion what's going on. "Oh," says the companion, "we've been here so long that we've memorized a book of jokes, so now we save time just by calling out the number of the joke."

So the new prisoner figures he might as well give it a try. He stands up and confidently calls out "56." No one laughs. "What did I do wrong?" he asks his companion.

PUNCHLINE #1: "Well, you have to know how to tell a joke," the companion says.

PUNCHLINE #2: "We've heard that one before," the companion says.

Anyone know any other jokes with multiple punchlines?

Journalism's Master Narrative

Jay Rosen's posted a brilliant piece on the role of the "master narrative" in political reporting. That's a term borrowed from the Post Modernists and Rosen uses it to point out that the common themes of political reporting are social constructs, not natural. Politics gets reported as a horse race not because candidates are horses in a race but because that's the narrative form we've created and accepted. As Jay says in another piece, " Journalism schools don't teach this, but it's nonetheless true: Facts can't tell you how they want to be framed." (He should know; he's chair of journalism studies at NYU.)

This is George Lakoff territory and it needs to be more fully explored.

There's no escaping narratives, a mortal blow to objectivity's dream of hegemony. Narratives area how we understand, not an obstacle to understanding. But it's important to remember that events can be incorporated into many different narratives. (My Inner PoMo wants to blurt out that events are not atoms independent of the narratives that take them up.) And, it would be useful to cast politics into alternative master narratives.

For example, maybe the elections of 2004 could be reported not as a horse race but as a conversation. Or as a form of co-evolution. Or as the way in which a community forms its will. Or as how a nation makes up its mind. Or as the story of how many-ness becomes one.

Unfortunately, we have only a little control over which narratives master us. But it'd be worth trying...

Jay has just posted a piece on how you "cover" 133 candidates for governor that touches on some of the same issues.

The great cities of Sodom & Gomorrah proudly cast their votes for ...

According to an article by Anne Geske in the Utne Reader (Sept-Oct):

A map showing percentages of adult movies in the home-video market by state 'bore an eerie resemblance' to the 2000 election, remarked Pete du Pont in a recent Wall Street Journal Web site column. A survey conducted by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States also found that the vast majority of states that voted for George W. Bush are states that are less responsive to issues of sexual rights and sexual health. Criteria used in this survey included the right to engage in sexual behavior in private, the right to express one's sexual orientation, and the right to sexual information and health services.

Bogus Contest: Let's come up with new slogans for the Democratic Party. For example:

Accessibility

Chris "RageBoy" Locke has learned an important lesson from me about sensitivity to the needs of others. You might want to try out his way of making his page more legible for those with various seeing disabilities.

Oh, it's a proud proud day for the Weinberger family name...

Amazinger Grace - FREE MUSIC

Want to hear something extraordinary?

I was at a small conference/seminar sort of thing where Howard Levy was engaged as the in-house musician. He's a pianist and harmonica player of vast experience. Howard gets a full three octaves — sharps and flats — out of a plain old 20-note harmonica, something no one else does. And it ain't no stinkin' parlor trick: he is a remarkably inventive and expressive musician.

So, after he played a three-minute solo version of Amazing Grace on the harmonica, I asked if he'd let us post the recording the conference had made of it, to be distributed free. (It'll probably end up with a Creative Commons license requiring that attribution to Howard be carried with it.)

So, here it is, an MP3 of Howard Levy playing Amazing Grace (3.7MB), recorded Sept. 12, 2004.

Here is Howard's home page.

Here's the recording company where you can buy his remarkable music.

Spread it around!

Soon to be the Software-Developing World

Dan Gillmor is back from Africa with a column on Open source in the developing world. Here's the conclusion:

...this may be one arena where Microsoft simply can't compete, fairly or not. Barring a dramatic change in attitude, product and price from the world's largest software company, open source is plainly the way developing nations should move.

They literally can't afford to do otherwise.