Liberal Talk Radio???

Sheila Lennon interviews the hosts of a new liberal talk show, Outrage Radio that debuts Nov. 13. (I agree with her that the name stinks.) Excellent interview. E.g., one of the hosts says:

Reagan's HUD and the Savings & Loan catastrophe: your taxes are higher by $50/month for the rest of your life because of that bailout.

Great factoid, if true.

Lost Refs

An article in Science reports that "in more than 1000 articles published between 2000 and 2003 in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Science"

Internet references accounted for 2.6% of all references (672/25548) and in articles 27 months old, 13% of Internet references were inactive.

That's higher than I'd have expected for references presumably to scientific journals, but lower than I'd expect for references to the general-interest Net.

(Thanks to Gary Unblinking Stock for the link.)

At Dean HQ

I'm at the Dean HQ in Burlington today where they actually make you sign in now - it's getting so grown up! - but it still feels like the best entrepreneurial company you ever worked at.

I laughed at a "Soylent Dean" - "My God! His campaign! It's made out of people!" - posted on Joe Trippi's door. I'd missed it when it ran in the Dean weblog.

There's also a link to the campaign to have Dean supporters write personal letters, by hand, to undecided voters in NH and Iowa. I did last week. It felt oddly good.

Quadruple negative exemptions

According to Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works there are four classes of works whose copyrights copy protection we're allowed to do a technological end run around [Thanks to Matt Morse for the correction]:

(1) Compilations consisting of lists of Internet locations blocked by commercially marketed filtering software applications that are intended to prevent access to domains, websites or portions of websites... [many qualifications follow]

(2) Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete.

(3) Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access.

(4) Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling of the ebook's read-aloud function and that prevent the enabling of screen readers to render the text into a specialized format.

Unfortunately, I lack the cryptographic key that would allow me to understand this, but it sure sounds like these are too few and too random. [Thanks to Mark Dionne for the link.]

Terrorist DoS?

Someone posted this as a comment on my skeptical blogging of a reported denial of service attack on a group that "outs" what it thinks are terrorist sites.

This arabic site looks like it is planning a DoS against Internet Hagannah to me.

It is a list of ip addresses.

That page has been removed for "administrative purposes."

Trademarked registered copyright

This work is dedicated to the Public Domain.

Photos of fire and sunspots

Photos of the California fires by R. Hannes Niedner, including (on page 2) the sunspots visible through the smoke and haze.

There are more of R's photos here. (Thanks to Jesus Castagnetto for the link.)

If Ahnuld has a sense of humor...

...as one of his first acts as governor he'll create a state telecommunications agency called "SkyNet."

Rudy the VP

Michael Cudahy writes on the speculation that W will dump Cheney and take Rudi Giuliani for his VP. He argues that the Democrats need Republican votes and that the Dean campaign has not been receptive to that imperative.

The Man who Invented Metadata

I just gave a talk at the first Ascential user conference. I was talking mainly about how metadata is rooted in human desire. Afterwards, Bernard Plagman approached me and struck up a conversation. He apparently is the person who coined the term "metadata" in an article in 1971. Back when he wrote Data Dictionary/Directory Systems (Wiley, 1974), it was necessary to argue that metadata ought to be managed the same way data is.

And now, a short 30 years later, metadata is the new data.

Bricklin Unprotected

Dan Bricklin points out the irony of Microsoft using VisiCalc to demonstrate Longhorn's backwards compatibility:

...the only reason I have a copy that can still work is that someone kept a "bootleg" uncopyprotected copy around

Just further evidence that, as Dan has written, "Copy Protection Robs the Future."

Google Defs and Blog defs

Pito points out that if you query Google with "define: blogs" (no quotes, of course), it presents definitions from a whole bunch of places. Very cool.

And the previous entry on Pito's blog is in fact about defining "blog". He argues that we should try to hold on to a fairly precise definition. This is in part a response to my bloggery about what the word may come to mean once blogging really goes mainstream.

I happen not to agree with Pito's particular definition because it leaves out multi-person blogs that I really want to put in the bag marked "Blogs," but I also don't think there's any real point in trying to hold on to the word. Markets do to words what they do to ideas and there's just not much we can do 'bout it. In fact, trying to hold on to the word may slow the market's assimilation of the idea, technology and practice.

On the other hand, I hate to see the word abused. Go figure!

ISGG tried to bribe me

I just got a call from a company called ISGG in Israel offering me money to put a link on my page without acknowledging it as paid advertising. I wasn't clever enough to ask him for what company and how much they're willing to pay before saying no.

Damn!

Anyway, be on the lookout. Bribing people to put links on their page as if they really meant them is a bad thing. If you want to know why, pay me $5.

The Slowness of the Concorde

Gary Turner has some particular trenchant observations about why we stopped caring about the Concorde. He writes:

...have we just gotten too bloody good at saving time in almost everything that we do...that we just can't save any more bloody time?

The excerpt doesn't do it justice...

Reversing the Broadcast Flow

Ed Cone blogs about a comment thread on the John Edwards blog that altered Edwards' stump speech. Ed writes:

Elizabeth Edwards commented here that comments on her husband's campaign blog serve to inform him about people's real concerns. I ask for an example. She replies with a specific example about the Earned Income Tax Credit that led to Edwards refocusing on the issue:

"Scott was on top of it and let us know through the blog, and the criticism that John had expressed earlier but that had been dropped from more recent speeches has been reinserted...

"John and I actually read the blog. When there is something there he finds useful or intriguing, he picks it up. If more research is needed, it goes to Robert Gordon's policy operation. If not, it can got straight into his speech or his answers to questions."

Open Source? Sure, it'll work...when bees can fly! (Snicker snicker)

Mitch picks up and on Steve Ballmer's claim that Open Source software is necessarily shoddier than software written in closed shops. Writes Mitch:

What Steve Ballmer doesn't realize is that his own company takes virtually the same approach, hiring some young coder from Kentucky or Bangalore to write a bit of code that gets appended to Word or Windows, but without the feedback of coders and users that are incorporated into the collective decision-making that produces open source software.

There's another proof that unmanaged, market-driven projects of some complexity can produce robust, innovative software: the Internet and Web themselves. What the hell, I'm going to out on a limb here and just blurt it out: The Internet is a better piece of software than Windows XP.

Rumsfeld on the Cluetrain?

Steve MacLaughlin has a good take on the brouhaha over Rumsfeld actually telling the truth in a memo.

And Mitch Ratcliffe is running a photograph that my spidey-sense tells me just may have been PhotoShopped.

Recount!

Kevin Marks does a recount of the top 100 and finds a bunch more women there.

Also, don't miss the new multi-woman blog Misbehaving. (That's Ms. Misbehaving, to you.)

Cyber Blog War , Paranoia or PR Opportunism?

According to an article by Lou Dolinar in Newsday, Al Qaeda may have initiated a denial of service attack aimed at Internet Haganah, a site that tries to get Web hosts to boot sites it believes belong to terrorists. Internet Haganah thinks that a recent DoS attack was directed at it by "hackers associated with Yussuf al-Ayyeri," an Osama crony.

Although there was a DoS attack last week that shut down a bunch of blogs, the article gives no evidence to support the claim that it was directed at Internet Haganah or that it was instigated by any particular group. According to Internet Haganah, the Al Qaeda group discussed on various bulletin boards how to block its service, but the article doesn't try to verify even that claim.

This is some sensationalistic, sloppy reporting. Big time.

Non-Conformists Unite!

At long last, just what I've been looking for:

C'mon, kids, let's all sign up!

In case you're wondering, this comes from my new Epson Stylus CX5200 printer/copier/scanner. My old one has been making clunking noise, like a car running over a tool chest, so I figured it was time to replace it. The CX5200 prints 22/ppm of black, does 15 copies/minute, and doesn't need to go through the computer to make a copy. It cost $99 after rebates at MicroCenter.

Anyone need a black cartridge and a color cartridge for an Epsson Stylus 900, a model so old that Epson has now come out with a completely different 900? I'll give you a real good price...

Where are you?

Halley wonders why maybe 3 of the top 100 bloggers are women:

It's clear that the top male bloggers are not denying women their blogroll inks, for the most part. It's clear that the top male bloggers take every chance to list women bloggers and engage the topics that they raise. These men are too smart not to take us seriously. We are their colleagues, friends, girlfriends, sisters, bosses, moms, daughters. They want the best for us. Guys, feel free to blogroll us anytime.

Still we are almost invisible and I want to know why. What are we doing wrong?

I doubt the women are doing anything wrong. But something is not right. I'm aware of the usual things that lead to gender inequality, but I honestly don't know why it's showing up so strongly in the Top 100 (aka the "A-List"). Is it a function of the broadcast model since, as Halley points out, "56% of hosted blogs" are created by women." Or is it the fact that even the best-intentioned men can't full exorcise their inner pig? Or both? And more? I don't know.

Less TeleMarketing, More Annoyances

Over the past few days, I've gotten more telemarketing calls than I have in a long time. Except none of them are technically telemarketing calls. And some of them start off by telling you that they're not soliciting sales. Instead, they're "taking a survey" that turns out to be an ad in question form, or they are "introducing themselves" by telling me about the services they can perform for my company.

Has anyone else noticed the Do Not Call list causing telemarketers to reposition themselves so that they can continue to achieve the mission stitched into their shoulder badges: "To Interrupt & Annoy"?

MetaMetaMetadata

Bill Seitz is waxing provocative about metadata. (I'm happy to say that something I wrote instigated it.) Among other tidbits: "We need a semantic analyzer to tell us how much 'new information' is contained in the full content relative to that predicted by the metadata" That is — as I understand it — because the metadata abstract is more general than that which is being abstracted, the abstract may well hide what's new and interesting. It's the old genus-species approach where the genus tells you what it has in common and the species tells you what's different.

Pop!Tech considered

Arnold Kling was at Pop!Tech and instead of simply spewing into his blog (as some of us did), he thoughtfully expounds on what he learned.

And here's the beginning of Ernicle the Attornicle's excellent Pop!Tech bloggage.

Broadcast Blogs Thread

Richard MacManus usefully pulls together some of the threads weaving about on broadcast, conversations and the future of blogs.

He cites the latest from Clay which continues to make a point that strikes me as clearly right: At a certain point, a blog may have so many readers that it can't be as interactive with them as a less-read blog can be. Why this idea ruffles feathers puzzles me, although I have seen people (mis)take Clay as saying that all small blogs are necessarily interactive. People also seem to think Clay is saying that the "tail" isn't as important or interesting as the A-List, which I highly doubt he's saying.

A Marginal Believer

USAToday reports that a protestor outside the hospice where the brain-damaged woman in Florida is kept responded to Jeb's decision to reinsert a feeding tube by saying, "It's restored my belief in God."

While I strongly support the right to die, I am nowhere near close enough to this tragic case to have an opinion worth the air to express it. But I do think that if allowing a woman to die after being basically brain-dead for 13 years is enough to make you believe there is no God, well, you just haven't been paying enough attention.

Why I bought new socks in SF

If you're flying on ATA and you see one of the bathrooms sealed off with duct tape, for God's sake before you walk up the aisle put your shoes back on, people!.

Second Grade Blog

Trevor Bechtel's wife has started a blog with her second grade class. They are asking questions about eating animals. This blog is a sweet experiment.

Civil Disobedience against Diebold

For Immediate Release: Tuesday, October 21, 2003

DIEBOLD TARGETED WITH ELECTRONIC CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Swarthmore, Pa. — Defending the right of a fair, democratic election, Why War? and the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons (SCDC) announced today that they are rejecting Diebold Elections Systems' cease and desist orders and are initiating an electronic civil disobedience campaign that will ensure permanent public access to the controversial leaked memos.

Earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that it will defend the right of Online Privacy Group, the Internet service provider for San Francisco Indymedia, to host links to the controversial memos. Going one step further, Why War? and SCDC members are the first to publicly refuse to comply with Diebold's cease and desist order by continually providing access to the documents.

"These memos indicate that Diebold, which counts the votes in 37 states, knowingly created an electronic system which allows anyone with access to the machines to add and delete votes without detection," Why War? member Micah explained.

The documents are currently available here:
http://why-war.com/memos/

More information about the campaign of electronic civil disobedience:
http://why-war.com/features/2003/10/diebold.html

Electronic Frontier Foundation press release:
http://www.eff.org/Legal/ISP_liability/20031016_eff_pr.php

Social Cars

Daniel Luke has a plan for getting away from relying on the private ownership of cars to get us around. The plan would require a wrenching change, which is both an argument for it and against it. Frankly, I think the odds are stacked just too high against it, but since when have I ever been right?

Not a lot of blogging...

I spent most of today flying to San Francisco and will spend all of tomorrow flying back, so my bloggery will be marginal. I'm sure you'll manage to deal with it.

AKMA at DIDW

Plaudits to AKMA for his excellent DIDW coverage, which I only managed to catch up with this morning. Vivid, rooted and rooting. You go, Akkie! (You can start reading his coverage here.)

Red Sox Haiku

Submit your own or
enjoy those of others,
The Red Sox still lost.

When blogs get really popular

While there are a hell of a lot of blogs and blog readers, blogs aren't even close to being a mainstream phenomenon the way email is. It'll happen. And here are some guesses (note: guesses) about what they'll look like when they do:

1. The word "blog" will expand to cover any linkable posting (a place) where a person gets to speak her mind more than once. If it's more permanent than IM, it'll be a blog.

2. Group blogs will be at least as common as individual blogs. Most people don't have time to stoke the blogfires every day, but groups do.

3. The lines between blogs and discussions will blur. Contributing to a blog discussion requires less effort than creating your own and taking the initiative to come up with topics every day or so. The regular participants in a blog discussion will consider themselves to be blogging. (We see this beginning to happen in the comment boards of the Howard Dean blog.)

4. The lines between email and blogs will blur. Already we can post to our blog via email. But at some point, maybe we'll be able to press a button on an email to post it to the Web, with the link sent automatically to everyone on the message's cc list, creating an instant blog site that grows as the thread grows. There's no technical barrier to this, of course, and the functionality already exists already almost and kind of, but it hasn't been presented to us as a type of blogging. Something like it will be, and the ecological niche between email and blogging will be quickly filled in.

5. Corollary: Closed circulation blogs will become as important as open blogs. Closed circulation lets blogs serve the function of cc lists.

6. Corollary: Many blogs will be event-based and time-limited. I.e., we'll have Leah's Graduation Blog that lasts for a month and the Class Trip to Shenandoah Blog that lasts for two weeks.

7. Blogrolls and buddy lists will thoroughly merge somehow.

8. The distinction between the big, high-traffic blogs and the rest of the world of blogging will be increasingly sharply etched. The "tail" will gain more and more value as the number of high-traffic blogs necessarily grows much more slowly. At some point, the "A-List" bloggers won't even seem like bloggers because what they're doing is so different from what the rest of us are doing. By analogy, when I receive some massive-circ email newsletter, I don't think of it as being like email I receive from a friend, even though both are using email transport. (This doesn't mean the high-traffic blogs will be of less intrinsic value. It does mean they'll be of less value relative to the increasing cumulative value of the lower-traffic blogs.)

9. Blogs will be of increasing value to democracy.

[POPTECH] Our Non-Zero Future

Robert Wright explains that non-zero sumness means "a correlation of fortunes for better or worse." E.g., when you buy something, the merchant is happy with your money and you're happy with the good.

Why care about non-zero sum games? Stopping the spread of AIDS would be a NZ game. Globalization can be. We've been playing NZ games since history began. E.g., hunter-gatherer societies are held together because it's a NZ game. History advances because technology enables poeople to play NZ games over greater distances.

Thomas Schellling, a leading game theorist, told Robert: "In a non-NZ game it never makes sense to communicate honestly." So it's not surprising that information technologies have driven the evolution of social complexity. In this view, history has a moral direction. He references Peter Singer's The Expanding Circle about how we have expanded the realm of creatures we consider to be moral agents and worthy of dignity.

Terrorism creates zero-sum relationships. NZ relationships such as economic interactions get us to acknowledge our common humanity. An active compassion is going to be more and more in our self-interest. If their economic problems cause your economy problems, you need to take an interest in their economic problems. [Hmm. Not what I would usually call "compassion." Seems more like self-interest.] With regard to terrorism: if potential terrorists get happier, it's good for us. That's the definition of a NZ relationship. Hatred is a threat to your children's future.

I.e., Freedom is inversely proportional the amount of hatred in the world.

Q: Do economic sanctions work?

A: It's mixed. Yes in South Africa. But they've been an abysmal failure in Cuba. "Cuba would be the 51st state by now if we'd been trading with them."

[I like all this, and he's a great presenter, but the game theory part sounds like a jargon-izing of common sense; yes, I know game theory has greater depth than you can present in a 25 minute talk, especially where your point isn't about game theory but about futures and peace. Or maybe game theory has shaped commonsense already. Anyway, it was a terrific talk.]

[POPTECH] Support Jonathon Coulton

"All that makes me weak and strange will be engineered away."

So, here's a young guy writing uniquely funny songs, reminiscient of Tom Lehrer. Yeah,almost that good. (His Mandelbrot Set song got PopTech's only standing ovation - unfortunately, none of the songs he performed here are on his Web site.) No fucking recording company stands between you and him. Support the hell out of him.

[POPTECH] The Future of Peace

Scott Hunt says we need to make compassion our guiding light. He wants us to be hopeful. He thinks the media focus on the negative. Since we've been at PopTech, 105,000 kids have died of malnutrition. 4.3B live on less than $2/day.

The says the Dali Lama (with whom he has spent a lot of time) suggests we list all the bad news on one side and all the good acts on the other. Be sure to add all the acts of decency and restraint. After Scott traveled the world's battlefields, he came back and wrote the first line of his book: "Kindness is alive and well and we have good reason to be hopeful about the future."

Here's how technology is helping to move towards Israeli-Palestinian peace. A web cam dialogue between a Palestinian and Israelis turned a would-be suicide bomber away from that path. "Hello Peace" puts people on opposite sides into telephone contact.

He's going to give us a structured plan for peace. The first step is to recognize "something I call human dignity." We will afford all people pursue happiness no matter how different they are. Everyone wants to be happy. [I'm finding this very well-intentioned but jejeune.]

Second, we need to take action. The weapons in our heart are greed, ignorance and anger. We need an eBay-like market system for humanitarian aid. It has a web site with projects that can be sponsored. You can chat with the people who are constructing it. [Good idea, IMO.]

Third, we need persistence.

[POPTECH] Kling on PopTech Bobos

Arnold Kling feels that the PopTechians are a smug bunch o' angry, liberal white guys. He was particularly bothered by Larry Lessig's showing a clip of Bush and Blair video-manipulated into singing a love duet. Arnold felt that the political bias was unnecessary; had it made fun of Hillary, we would have reacted differently, he says.

Well, yes, there is a general ethos at PopTech, but maybe not as uniform as Arnold thinks. For one thing, Bob Metcalfe is one of the organizers and he's not shy about his support of the Bush administration. Nevertheless, if you randomly tell someone that you're supporting Howard Dean, you are far more likely to get an expression of support than a denunciation. I don't actually see a problem with conferences having personalities and political tendencies.

Second, showing a clever re-mixed video that lampoons sitting leaders is a good way to emphasize the social good of allowing sampling and mixing. It's certainly seems plausible to me that if three years ago, Lessig had shown a re-mixed video of Bill Clinton rapping about not having sex with that woman, people would have responded favorably also.

Arnold, it's good to have you here.

[POPTECH] Tech and Global Health

Sally Stansfield of the Bill & Melinda Gates Fund is talking about how technology can be used to improve health globally.

It's been 50 years since the development of the polio vaccine but it's still a threat in much of the world. A child born in the developing world has a 1:6 of dying before age 5. More than 800,000 kids die from measles every year. 25% of the world's kids are moderately or severely malnourished. Less than half of people at risk of AIDS can't get condoms.

Health is a public good gone global, which means that governments, with their concern for national goods, can't deliver it.

The free market is not developing drugs for the developing world. And there's no economic incentive to develop vaccines that do not require refrigeration.

The World Health Organization has committed to deliver 3M anti-retro-virals (42M people are living with AIDS). But we send them back into their communities where they can infect more people because the community has no access to AIDS prevention techologies. Sally says no one is looking into the effect of this. She sees WHO's program as something that makes us feel better about ourselves.

The private sector is stepping up to the plate. Merck has made a new commitment to provide the anti-River blindness drug. Glaxxo SmithKline has agreed to produce the anti-elephantiasis drug. They're putting millions into programs to make these things happen. But private citizens and organizations are required to solve the problems.

[POPTECH] Reconciliation Ecology

Michael Rosenzweig is depressing us with facts about our destruction of our shared ecology. Preserving tracts of lands as parks and reserves is not enough, he argues. Global warming will destroy the parks; Australia has discovered that 95% of its preserves and parks will be under water with global warming. [How many degrees are we talking about?]

The more area of wilderness, the more species.

But we can learn to reengineer our habitats, conserving species diversity, and we can do it where we live. Michael calls this "reconciliation ecology" because it reconciles our needs with those of the diversity imperative. For example, Turkey Point power plant south of Miami, half nuclear and half fossil fuel, has 80 miles of cooling tubes that turn out to be perfect for crocodiles. That was by accident. In another example, British ecologists reengineered golf courses and even bomb craters to preserve a particular frog. [But it took 50 ecologists 25 years to save one frog. Do we know enough to make reconciliation ecology practical?] Also Eglund Air Force Base: it's used without impediment by the Air Force but through small changes preserves the diversity of species there. Key point: "It is not a preserve." The Air Force uses it, the trees are timbered, 2,5000 houses are there.

Costikyan on "Piracy"

Greg Costikyan speaking the truth about the attempts to "fix" the "piracy" "problem." An excerpt:

The whole "antipiracy" thing is not ultimately about preserving the rights of artists. It's about preserving the value of intermediaries who have already fucked over the artist. And from a purely ethical perspective, I don't see why the intermediaries have a leg to stand on.

[POPTECH] TransHab

Constance Adams, a NASA architect, is telling us about TransHab, an inflatable living place for space travelers.

Two surprising (to me) aspects of living in no gravity: hot air doesn't rise so airflows have to be redesigned, and sweat floats so electrical outlets need to be sweat-proof.

The initial design of TransHab didn't design around the needs of the astronauts. "These are great engineers. Give them the right problem and they will sovle the hell out of it." E.g., the astronauts need to be able to meet together and see one another, which means building a big enough area. How wide is too wide? In Space Lab there was 6.5 meter space. An astronaut fell asleep without being tethered and found it to be a wide area to navigate.

"If you can't draw it, forget it." In all of the drawings of the TransHab, no one had the guts to show astronauts sitting upside down relative to one another. Constance said that showed a flaw in the design.

They designed a galley that works like a kitchen, a first. ("On the shuttle, the galley's next to the toilet. That's always good.") The kitchen table rests on a slow helix so that people of all heights can sit on the helix.

Constance noticed that designing TransHab's outer shell faces the same problem as confronted by people weaving baskets.

She ends with a plea for caring about exploring space and for understanding the earth as a beautiful, closed system.

Whitfield Duffie asks if TransHab will accommodate sex since it is a wet activity. Constance replies that it's designed to filter all sorts of fluids, but that in a body in zero gravity, fluids tend to gather in the head and feet, not the right places for sex.

Constance says that the ideal person for a flight to Mars is a 55 year old woman, but she doesn't elaborate. [I myself am quite fond of women around the age of 55. Well, one anyway.]

Great talk. So much that was new, at least to me.

Jonathon Coulton is about to sing a song. The one he sang yesterday was very funny.

[POPTECH] Hydrogen

Jeffrey Ballard of General Hydrogen: Fuel cells will be big.

Service technologies, not energy sources, drive energy systems.

Hydrogen lets you use any primary energy source as your source of hydrogen: coal, nuclear, wind, hydro, etc.

Hyrdogen cars will be able to produce electricity where you need it.

When will we see hydrogen cars in a show room? Jeffrey thinks that the current technology doesn't have the duration need for commercial success. We're still stuck on the first type of design we came up with that work. And he says that we need to get the cost down to $0.10/kw. It's currently at $10.00/kw. [As always, I may have gotten key units wrong. Damn facts!]

He believes that we will turn to nuclear energy as a safe and clean source.

[POPTECH] Wireless

Dewayne Hendricks is talking about wireless communications. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic": Clarke's third law. Wireless connectivity is the closest thing we have to magic.

Communications used to be limited to the speed of travel. Then Marconi happened at the turn of the 19th century. The Titanic disaster spurred government regulation because of interference in the help transmission. In 1934, the FCC was formed, locking us into a property model of communication.

Dewayne talks about his youth as a ham operator. Now with wifi, "everyone becomes a ham." Unlike hams, you don't have to go through the centralized bureaucracy to participate.

He points to problems with the property model. Basically, the needs of the market don't reflect the band assignments made years ago. It's discouraged innovation. Dewayne wanted to experiment in some frequency that couldn't be freed up, so he was told to find a country with open access to spectrum. The crown prince of Tonga heard about a high-speed wireless net he'd set up. Dewayne's company (Dandin Group) is now a common carrier in Tonga.

For an existence proof in the US, Dewayne installed on Indian reservations since they (presumably) have rights to their spectrum. And it worked.

Dewayne talks about the California Gigabit Initiative to bring gigabit access (upload and download) by 2010. He's in charge of figuring how to bring wireless gigabit everywhere. "The problem will be political, not technical." Nothing is holding it back but the command and control, property view of spectrum.

We need a new paradigm, Dewayne says. We need "Open Spectrum." Cognitive radio can take advantage of it.

He ends by citing Tom Freeburg, Motorola's chief futurist until he retired recently, talking about the real possibility of a Star Trek style transporter.

[POPTECH] IP

David Martin says that businesses and institutions knowingly inflate the value of their patents in order to pump themselves up. He says that this is a major scandal that will break soon.

[POPTECH] Virginia Postrel

She's going to talk about the substance of her style (her book), but also will argue that progress is incremental, that we should appreciate change over time, and that "the desires of ordinary people matter and deserve respect."

Art, she argues, means "making special." Even the desperately poor do this: they paint their dwellings, embroider their rags.

Design has three purposes: Function, pleasure and meaning. Biological pleasure is universal, but fashion is cultural. Meaning can be an association or identity (standing out and fitting in [Saussure!]) "The substance of style can be summed up in two sentences: I like that. I'm like that. Pleasure and identity.

We are in the Age of Aesthetics. That means that on the margin we try to make things special, "enhancing the look and feel of people, places and things." And there's more aesthetic competition: it's a key part of product design and store "experiences." There are more aesthetics in more aspects of life. Everyone uses fonts and pictures when doing the simplest of documents.

This is a big change. For a hundred years, the big news was that you got stuff. We wanted it to be standardized, e.g., hotel rooms and fast food. Function but not style. Now we want more. And not just in hotel rooms: 71% of US women 45-54 dye their hair to cover gray, and 13% of men. But color sales among young men are up 25% in 5 years. Teen boys spend 5% of their income on hair color.

Aesthetics is becoming the killer app for information technology.

[Hmm. I'm not convinced. Things have always been designed, even the dwellings of the poor, as she says. So, what's really different? The styles have changed, but have we really dropped style itself? Isn't poured concrete a type of style? Ah, now in response to a question she's pointing to the new willingness to accept a diversity of styles.]

[POPTECH] James Howard Kunstler

No point in trying to summarize this brillilant and hilarious presentation. James Howard Kunstler is showing photo after photo of American architectural monstrosities that are, unfortunately, all completely normal for us: industrial civic buildings, antisocial main streets, schools that are jails. He recommends "the new urbanism."

Did I mention that he's brilliant and hilarious?

[POPTECH] Xeni and Kevin on Weblogs

Xeni Jardin is talking, with Kevin Sites attending from Iraq online. She was responsible for getting Kevin (the CNN war correspondent) started blogging. (Sites apparently hasn't logged in). We see some footage of his war coverage. But because Kevin isn't online, Xeni's doing some ad hoc presentation management.

[POPTECH] Weblog

Clay Shirky is going to talk about "Weblog Ecosystem: Power Laws, Fake Estates, Weblogs and the Media." He defines weblogs as anyting that is simple enough to enable anyone to publish on the web, every day if she or he wants to. (Not a close enough quote, unfortunately.) He's talking about power laws.

Blogs form loose conversations. Link density grows according to Metcalfe's Law. (Metcalfe is in the audience; he's one of the founders of PopTech.) Preferential connectivity. Sites can scan the weblog world and see the links. "Link structure is a proxy for audience." That is, if there are lots of inbound links, there are probably lots of readers.

Clay in February checked Technorati to see the distribution of links and found a power law curve: a very rapid collapse and then a long, slow tail. (Clay says that Jason Kottke had the same idea at the same time.) This is definitely not a bell curve. Most bloggers have less than average traffic. Half the link density is taken up by just 5% of the weblogs. And adding more bloggers makes the curve even steeper: if you start a blog, you are likely to link to one of the top weblogs but they are quite unlikely to link to you.

The links in the tail tend to be among people linking to one another, the pattern of a dinner party. At LiveJournal, people aren't posting in public; they're posting to friends. "You could go down to the mall and sit in the food court, and listen in on a conversation among a bunch of teenagers ... but you're the weird one, not them.")

The links at the top form a broadcast pattern. Glenn Reynolds can't link back to everyone who links to him. He has too many readers to be able to open up comments.

These patterns apply outside of the world of weblogs. Power laws apply in many places. E.g., of word frequencies follows a power law.

The 20th century was the century of mass media. We're comfortable with that. Weblogs are a rapid "do-over" of the 21st century. It's the first medium we've seen go from zero to important. But there are three differences from mass media:

1. No central control

2. No special technology - a teenager bitching about his parents and Glenn Reynolds use the same technology. The same technology scales across 7 orders of magnitude.

3. No scarcity. It's "fake estate" not "real estate." Construction increases the size of the system rather than taking some of it out of circulation.

The differences among the patterns of weblog connectivity are all social differences, not technological ones. So, what does this mean for us?

First, "Broadcast happens." Even though blogs are two-way, the broadcast pattern has re-emerged. "The broadcast pattern arises out of the social wiring of large groups of people."

[Yeah but...broadcast reemerges, but it non-broadcast clusters also emerge. That long tail has a lot of people in it. Sorry to be a fanatic, but look at how Dean supporters are organizing themselves. And Clay points to Oprah Winfrey's book clubs as an example of an attempt to put clusters — local book clubs — at the edges of the broadcast spokes.]

Second, "There is an A List (and you're not on it)."

Third, "Freedom vs. Equality." When you increase the freedom in the system, you get imbalances and power curves.

Q: [Me] It's not that broadcast is all there is; the length of the tail shows the importance of non-broadcast.

A: Yes.

Q: How many weblogs will there be?

A: See the Perseus study.

Q: How about the changing role of authority?

A: The next move is to derive expertise from the link structure. It hasn't happened yet but it will because it has to.

Clay is, of course, brilliant but he's also a brilliant presenter. He argues for a point, shows its broad impact, and gets laughs from the audience just by being smart. Yikes.

Kevin Rips and Burns S. Jobs

From Kevin Marks via email:

At the iTunes Music launch, Jobs said something very wrong - that record labels should be the arbiters of taste - that they edit for our own good, and that unsigned bands need not apply.

The key point of digital media is that we can all edit, so I edited him.

Direct links to the streams of me ripping and mixing Jobs & Sarah:

300kbit

100kbit

Winferiority

With all the geeks using Macs, I discover I have a Winferiority Complex.

[POPTECH] Immortality

Aubrey de Grey is talking about postponing aging. He thinks the "war on aging" is only a decade a away and it "may be a very short war."

He suggests some milestones: when we know all the elements of aging in mice, when we know how to fix them, etc.

He draws a simple diagram:

Metabolism ——> Damage ——> Pathology

Gerontology intervenes before the damage but, Aubrey says, they intervene too early. Geriatrics kicks in after the damage of aging has begun. Engineering is the way to fix aging, he says. Don't try to interfere with metabolism. Instead fix the damage.

He says there are only seven deadly types of damage involved in aging: our organs lose cells, nuclear mutations, mitochondrial DNA mutations, cell senescence, age crosslinks, extracellular junk, and lysosomal junk.

He says that not only are we confident that this is the complete list but "I know how to fix them." All seven. He adds, "In principle."

He wants to "break the log jam" by appealing to philanthropists to spend $100M/year for 10 years. He wants to know if anyone in the audience knows people who can fund it. People laugh good-naturedly.

In response to a question: It will be a world without children.

Provocative and entertaining.

[POPTECH] Cloning

Michael West is talking about cells that can become any type of cell and that don't die. He's showing photos of nerves, folllicles, heart muscle and much more, all made in the lab.

The cells W authorized for NIH funding would all be rejected by foreign bodies, i.e., you and me. Michael's proposing therapeutic cloning, i.e., taking a cell from the body and making it young and embryonic again, and then making what the patient needs. (This is different, obviously, from reproductive cloning.) He shows footage of a cell being cloned: it looks way simple and mechanical.

By introducing young, cloned cells into the body, there's data that they start to reline our aging arteries. And they can be targeted to kill the tumors that attract them. And we've now injected cells into a heart after it had a heart attack; the cells relined the thinning heart muscle with new tissue.

He talks about using "search and replace" to alter a DNA sequence. Someone in the audience asks if there's spellcheck.

Whitfield Diffie asks what will happen when a lesbian couple clones a baby, "thus proving that men are dispensible."

Someone from the audience says that Jews don't resist stem cell research "Because in our tradition, a fetus is a fetus is a fetus ... and then it becomes a lawyer."

Excellent presentation. Much more info than I've captured. Quiet passion.

[POPTECH] Second Industrial Rev

Alan Goldstein is a biomaterials engineer. He says he's going to convince us that xenobiology is an oxymoron, he says. Biology will not get out of the 21st century alive, he says. (He hasn't explained what xenobiology is. It's got something to do with alien life forms. Here's the wikipedia on it.)

I'm not actually understanding much of this. The main points seems to be that the life we find or make (not sure which) will not be carbon based and that we should be worried about unrestrained scientific adventurism in this (which?) field. Ah, at the end he says:"The take home message? Nanotechnology trumps biotechnology."

Ok.

A questioner asks what the problem is. Alan says that the question is whether bioengineering ought to go ahead as it is with no questions being asked.

Allow me to give myself a big fat D'oh! When I first posted this, I thought the speaker was Michael Braungart because that was the name in the schedule. But Braungart had to cancel, and Goldstein subbed for him. (Thanks to Jessie Scanlon for the correction.