Sandstorm in Iraq

Oh the pictures you find in the Flickr Iraq feed. Amazing.

Cory in CGW

This is from the fine-print crawl on p. 26 of the new issue of Computer Gaming World:

Author Cory Doctorow is promoting his new novel witha virtual book tour. His first stop? The MMO Second Life.

The new book is Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Cory promoted his previous book via Second Life. This time, though, Second Lifers are trying to create a book object in-world that they can read, with turnable pages, since Cory donated a copy of the text to them.

Not to mention that it's so cool to come across Cory's name in CGW.

Preleaking encores

From BradSucks:

[01:01] very very soon it would seem that preleaking an album will be like a band leaving the stage before their encore

[01:01] just totally expected, even though everyone can see it for what it is

All part of the way the Net is disintermediating time.

Ok, so that phrase means absolutely nothing. But it sounds damn good. In fact, the Net is making time more complex, smudging it, interlineating it, hyperlinking it, depriving it of its gatekeeping function.

Ok, that didn't mean much. Here's what's actually happening, IMO: We have social conventions that let us act as if there are moments that strictly divide one state from another, especially when it comes to making things public: products, artworks, selves. But now the public revelation of a work happens as the work grows. And after it's made public, many objects are fluid enough that they remain in process. Time is not as neatly divided as it used to be.

But "disintermediating time" sounds so much better!

Also from BradSucks:

Uncyclopedia on Air Guitar - the Uncyclopedia (it’s like Wikipedia, but all lies) article on air guitar is worth a read.

Also from BradSucks: New songs, including

Certain Death
Total Breakdown
Understood By Your Dad
You're Not Going Anywhere
Dropping Out Of School

All free of course. Which is why you ought to buy them. [Technorati tags: bradsucks music time]

Linux on Xbox: The shape of DRM to come

Michael Robertson, who funded the $200,000 attempt to get Linux running on an Xbox, writes about the XBox's successful DRM implementation as a harbinger of Longhorn:

In spite of sharing the insides with a traditional PC, the Xbox has a dramatic and dangerous difference. A PC buyer can install any software or hardware that they wish. They own the machine and can change it to suit their needs - true ownership. There are no limitations. This open architecture is largely responsible for the two-decade personal computer revolution. With an Xbox, the user is merely renting the box. Microsoft decides what software (games) users can load and even how they can use it. When it connects to the net, Microsoft can and has instructed the machine to change its behavior to block certain users, functionality or software that it does not agree with. They are changing the rules after you purchase it to suit their needs and not your needs.

The Xbox served as the training wheels for Microsoft's new Longhorn operating system, which is slipping to a 2007 launch. Like the Xbox, Longhorn will limit what software you can load. In the guise of "security", Microsoft is trying to dramatically change the way PCs work. Instead of the owner deciding what software they want to install and run, Microsoft is seizing that power from them. Under the smokescreen of security, they are pronouncing that it is good for Microsoft to decide what software you can use.

Kids' drawings from Darfur

At Global Voices, Ethan blogs about children's drawings of the horrors of Darfur.

"The Janjaweed came on camels and horses, very fast. Sometimes two on one camel, with guns. Many soldiers, with guns. This one is a machine gun. They were shooting us."

"These here, at the bottom of the page, these are dead people."

"Now my nights are hard because I feel frightened"

"We needed help. There was no one to protect us."

Rebecca's Vietnam photos

She took some nice 'uns on her recent trip, which you can read all about here. [Technorati tag: vietnam]

Joe Mahoney's ontology

No, not ontology in the computer science. Ontology in the "logos of being" sense, whatever that means, which is exactly why my friend Joe turns to poetry.

Also, it's spring. [Technorati tag: poetry]

Global Voices gets even better

Global Voices now is running roundups of the news. Surprisingly, there are things going on in the world! GV is a daily must-read for me.

And to hear some actual voices, you can listen to Ben Walker's Theory of Everything episode about GV here. [Technorati tag: globalvoices]

Bill Gates demands more heterosexual foreign engineers

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates yesterday urged the Bush administration and lawmakers Wednesday to abolish immigration limits on heterosexual foreign engineers who can be hired by U.S. companies.

Ok, so I'm combining two stories...

Scare Your Child Straight Day

I'm at corporate HQ in Atlanta where the unusual number of kids is explained by the fact that it's Bring Your Child to Work day. And thus ends childhood.

Note to self: Invest in anti-depressants.

I remember going to work with my father — he was a labor lawyer for NY State — and, well, let's say it did not fill me with a desire to grow up. Still doesn't.

Yahoo News' cool touch

Yahoo News has been redesigned for the better. Unlike Google News, it doesn't automatically figure out what's news by looking at thousands of news sources. Instead, it defaults to showing you the news from one of six major news sources, one source at a time, although you can add any RSS feed as a new source. I like the fact that at Google you're likely to find an Indian or Chinese newspaper's version of, say, an American political story, but Yahoo — which is configurable, while Google News is not — presents more stories on a single page than Google does.

If you want to see how Yahoo manages the problem of compressing more news stories per square inch of screen real estate, hover over any of the news links for a second or two...

Cool! [Technorati tags: yahoo google news]

Rasiej for Advocate

Andrew Rasiej is running for Public Advocate of NYC. He would transform this position into a true voice of the people...not to mention that he'll do very cool things with the Net. Heck, his theme is "A New Campaign to Reconnect New York."

You can sign up here. And here's the campaign's blog.

Go Andrew! [Technorati tags: AndrewRasiej politics]

I should have mentioned not only have I met Andrew a few times, for a couple of months I was on the payroll of Personal Democracy Forum (to the tune of a couple of hundred dollars total), which Andrew generously bankrolls. Sorry for the lapse, but I promise you that my enthusiasm for his candidacy is based on knowing something about him and not on the money that changed hands.

Tell Steve Jobs he's a vain, petty tyrant

Jobs doesn't like what a biographer says about him so he stops Apple stores from selling all books by that publisher? Note that he's not just keeping the book he doesn't like out of the store. No, he's de-shelving any book from that publisher in retaliation.

You can pre-order the book here. Let's drive it up the charts. (Hey, Amazon, how about pairing this book with a Dixie Chicks album?) [Technorati tags: apple SteveJobs DixieChicks]

A million deaths from malaria

TotheSource calls for a reform of how the US spends our money on malaria prevention and treatment. It argues that small amount of DDT could save many lives without causing environmental damage.

I'm not an expert in, well, anything, so I don't know how much DDT it takes to start screwing up the ecosystem, nor do I know how effective it is at preventing malaria when used in small amounts on house walls, as ToTheSource suggests. But wel over a million deaths a year — most of them children? And apparently the US aid agency, USAID, has not been forthright about how it spends our money.

(The article is not yet up on the ToTheSource site. Check the archive eventually, for "Silent Tsunami.") [Technorati tag: malaria]

Chris Locke has a disturbing bit of history on display at ChiefBloggingOfficer, discussing research into America's history of support of eugenics, including Margaret Sanger's belief in the "mass sterilization of so-called defectives."

Les Photos

Doc's photos from Les Blogs 2005 in Paris, the lucky bastard! [Technorati tag: lesblogs2005]

danah judging community

danah blogs enthusiastically about her time in Austria being a judge for Prix Ars Electronica. Apparently, the discussion of what constitutes a community was vibrant and informed by a sense of the differences in the world. A snipppet:

We had a long conversation about what it means to think about two axes - the process of giving people access and the process of allowing people to make their voices heard. So much of what we considered sat in this narrative. We talked about technologies themselves vs. the communities that take the technologies to a newer, deeper level. We talked about work from around the world that fit into so many different cultural contexts with so many different languages.

[scs] Community

Amy Bruckman at George Institute of Tech says that researchers knock the use of the word "community." We ought to use a prototype model for defining communities, using Eleanor Rosch's idea of prototypes, she says. [Go Rosch!]. Our prototypes for communities vary by "genre," e.g., Flickr is one type of community and so is the WELL; we understand them in relation to different prototypes. The work she proposes going forward would try to discern the relevant differences among the prototypes.

Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon's CommunityLab Project begins by upbraiding the conference for using a panel of kids to discover what kids think instead of using the serious research that's been done on the topic. He suggests using group theory to design online groups. For example, in many online communities, a small percentage of people (80:20, roughly) contribute. The "collective effort model" explans under contribution and the conditions that mitigate it. It says that "effort = outcome probability x outcome value." It predicts you can increase contribution by make salient the uniqueness of contributions, increasing how much people like the group by making it more homogeneous, and make the benefits of contributing more salient. (This is based on well-established research, he says.)

He describes two experiments.

First: To get more people to contribute movie ratings, the system reminded posters of their uniqueness (identify a movie the person has rated but no one else has) and made the group more attractive by putting together people with similar tastes. Results: Uniqueness increased the number of discussion posts and movie ratings, but similarity in tastes depressed the posts. (The first finding supports the hypothesis, the second disconfirms it.)

Second: They sent email inviting people to contribute ratings. Some were told thjey've been invited because they have unusual tastes, others because they have typical tastes. Some were told that the more ratings they contribute, the better the system works for you, or for other people. Again, emphasizing uniqueness helped, but being told the number of benefits they would get depressed the results.

He concludes by looking at how useful it is to approach the design of online communities by starting with theory. He found that it inspired design features not often used and allows for reuse of principles.

Randy Farmer, now at Yahoo! but an early pioneer in Net communities, says that at last we're ready to scale. But, he points out, there are problems with scaling communities, including spam, fraud and "intellectual property" issues.

Massively Multiplayer games have blazed one trail, Randy says, raising hard questions of virtual economies and property law: Are virtual goods property? He says Sony is enabling an actual cash market for Everquest.

Social networking has blazed another path. Because too much info was published with too little to do with it, selective disclosure is arising.

Challenges: Boundaries of identity and disclosure. How do we scale trust? Answer: "Hand the trust question over to the users." He says Yahoo's "This is spam" is an example of handing trust to users. And how will public-scale tagging avoid tagspam. How do we do "pagerank" for tags?

1. Tag rating: Positive reputation: "537 people tag this as penguin" Negative: People respond to a tag saying "This is not a penguin."

2. Tagger reputation: As people are known for putting better tags on things, their tags count for more.

David MacDonald at U of Washington looks at "visual blogging communities" — sites with photos and a little text. (Example 1 2 3) His project has been archiving 9-25 sites of the 53+ he knows about. They picked 19 sites with at least 3 months of data. You can do content analysis (what's in the picture?), ethnographic analysis (what is this picture about?), and interaction analysis (what's the relation among a set of pictures).

He talks about preliminary results from the interaction analysis. He suggests some categories: Positional polay (glance, point), inmage stealing (re-use), theme (impromptu or planned group action), text in picture as a title (which forms the majority of the interaction). Then he gives great examples of how people engage in various forms of "conversation" in these photo sites via their images. (Molly Wright Steenson in the backchannel points to the Internet employee of the month page at Flickr.)

Fernanda B. Viegas at MIT Media Lab talks about a project visualizing the evolution of wiki pages. She's been visualizing archives: email, usenet, chat. She shows work, with Martin Wattenberg, in visualizing wikis as a way of understanding the dynamics of the community that builds them. You can play with it yourself: HistoryFlow. She points to the abortion page, showing how quickly it gets restored. And she points to the chocolate page where a zigzag pattern indicates an editing war, in this case over whether there is such a thing as a "chocolate collage." The patterns also show that the text of the people who start a page tends to be long-lived.

She says IBM is releasing the software and will likely also release the Wikipedia plugin.

[Excellent morning.]

[Technorati tags: scs2005 community]

Fun about places

Satellite Fun finds some amusing photos in Google's collection of satellite images (similar to here and here, previously blogged). It also has a link to City-Data that displays long lists of data about various cities. For example, did you know that between 7:30 and 8:00AM, 201 people over 16 leave for work in Great Barrington, MA, making that the peak leaving-for-work time in this city of 7,527? [Technorati tags: maps google]

[scs] IBM Research

Wendy Kellogg from IBM Research says that IBM replaced its solid doors with ones with windows so you could see if someone is on the other side before you slam the door into her. They call this "social translucence." Not only can you see the person, but the other person knows that you know, which creates accountability. Social translucence is common in the real world but rare in computing systems, she says. She talks about how this got idea got implemented in the Babble and Loops projects that provide a minimalistic graphical "proxy" that provides some of the metadata that occurs naturally in face-to-face meetings. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware ibm]

[scs] Curriculum

Molly Wright Steenson talks about some interesting student experiments. In one, students put up official-looking "Silence please!" signs in a car of an Italian commuter train, resulting in that car being the loudest in the train. Another was a favor bank. Another, Mass Distraction, studies the social interactions around being interrupted by cellphones: In one example, you have to close your hood around your entire head in order to take a call. In another, if you get a call, you have to give your friend a video game to play and your call lasts only as long as she keeps on playing. At FashionVictims you can see clothing that bleeds when it comes in contact with cellphone radiation. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware mollySteenson]

[scs] Anthropologists

Anne Kirah is Senior Design Anthropologist for Microsoft. She lives in Paris. She points to some of the oddities (from a US pov) of how cyworld.com (Korea) and Almererulez (Netherlands) are used. She gives lots of great examples of how cultural norms affect the take-up of tech, especially IM, text messaging, and the like.

Genevieve Bell from Intel Research points out that technology is not just going to be in our hands as we commute, it's going to be in rural villages, powered by truck batteries, etc. We'll see work-arounds to unexpected problems, she says, such as cellphone charging stations. She says the most popular phone service in China is a novella being sent out to cellphones via subscription, in part because cellphones can display 120 words, not just 120 characters. She says 30% of Koreans with Internet connections at home nevertheless use cyber-cafes because of the social millieu and because there is fragmentation across devices. She talks about the Indonesian e-mosque project, providing access through mosques because they are close to ubiquitous; Indonesia built access into the existing infastructure.

In most of Africa, she says, "flashing and peeping" predominate: You signal that you've arrived somewhere by calling home and hanging up. Families have developed remarkably sophisticated codes: Call once means "Where are you going?" Call twice means "I've arrived," etc. She says that 95% of calls are incomplete. And flashing and peeping are being adopted by the African community in Europe.

Her conclusions: We should think more broadly about what computers can or should do, and we should be prepared to critically interrogate taken-for-granted terms and ideas. We could even look outside of the US for new technology cutures and design inspirations. [Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware]

[scs] Teenage panel

Six teenagers from a local sci/tech high school give presentations on how they're using their computers socially in the course of a day. Random tidbits (kidbits?):

One got a gift certificate for iTunes, but otherwise she uses Limewire (a gnutella shell).

Text messaging costs too much to use.

One wishes there were upgrades for cellphones since hers can't receive photos from others.

It's rude to call up a friend just to ask about a homework question. So she uses IM.

One does a lot of Photoshopping and enjoys Audacity for remixing.

One doesn't do much with IM but spends a lot of time on online forums about games.

One has a gmail address, a school address, and a "hotmail address for my junk mail."

Q: Do you listen to podcasts? A: To what???

A few have blogs. One uses deadjournal instead of livejournal because it's simpler and easier to figure out.

Q: Do you use Typepad? A: Never heard of it.

Blogging was big last year, but now it's not. People got tired of commenting on their lives and sharing their lives.

One keeps a secret blog to put the feelings she doesn't want to share.

One has blacked out all the names of her friends and all of their content in the screen captures she shows us in order to protect their privacy.

Some of the banner ads are fun to play especially since the popup blockers block the popups that result from, say, swatting the fly.

One's phone broke, and even though she only talks on it maybe once a day, she "freaked out," feeling completely disconnected.

"My attention span is just too short for email. I need a rapid response."

They tend to use a handful of away messages. They do not use different screennames for different groups of friends.

They think the remixing they're doing is within the law because they're not redistributing the results. They think people will always invent new ways to get around any legal limitations on filesharing. They have no idea that "trusted computing" is going to lock down content.

They only buy music when it's so new that they can't find it on filesharing.

[Technorati tags: scs2005 SocialSoftware]

[scs] Social Computing Symposium

I'm at the second Microsoft Social Computing Symposium in Redmond, a group of about 100 academics and normals. Last year, the conference was useful mainly outside of the presentations (and I say this as one of the presenters) because we didn't quite figure out how to talk with one another in a public forum. This year, it's more discussion-oriented. They even switched from last year's One Big Room format to a hotel with some nooks and crannies.

The main room is a typical set up: long tables with chairs, all facing forward. (I'm sitting next to Liz!). But Shelly Farnham has us do an unusual opening exercise: A person stands up, says a few sentences about herself, and throws a ball of string at someone she knows, creating a physical knot of people.

The IRC is at irc.freenode.net #scs. Come join us. [Technorati tags: scs SocialSoftware]

Open the RAW

RAW files contain the raw, low-level info about the state of the camera when you took a digital photo. It's important to the pros but it remains undocumented. Now Stanley Krute writes, in an email:

..we're launching a website today that'll spearhead our campaign to get the camera manufacturers to document their RAW formats. The website is here: http://OpenRAW.org There's a press release here: http://OpenRAW.org/press/

Sounds like just the sort of thing wikis were built for. Anyway, good luck to the RAW folks. [Technorati tags: raw photography]

Stark optical mouse

The Stark (or is it spelled "S+ark"? Hard to tell) mouse from Microsoft is lovely — a chromium version of some bicameral body part. But the entire left and right side serve as the buttons, which means that you have no place to rest your hand. As a result, I end up clicking three times by mistake for every time I intend to. As my father would have said: Designed by someone who never used it. Ack.

(I'm being rude to my hosts. I'm at the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, and the mouse was part of the swag. So I should at least mention the two lovely books they gave us, including The Interventionists from a very cool exhibit at Mass MoCA. Also, dinner last night was lots of fun.) [Technorati tag: PhilippeStark]

The size of topics

In the course of researching a column for KMWorld:

The Encyclopedia Britannica has about 65,000 topics spread across 32 volumes, for a total of 44,000,000 words. Average size of a topic: 676 words. [source]

Wikipedia has over 500,000 topics in English. Average length (using year-old figures): 294 .

BTW, I may have found an error in Wikipedia's Britannica entry. It currently says: "As of 2004, the most complete version of Encyclopædia Britannica contains about 120,000 articles, with 44 million words." That page count refers to the online version, but I think the word count applies to the print version. I haven't found a word count for the online version.

I haven't corrected the Wikipedia article because I haven't found a source that really clarifies this. Besides, I've never gotten a fact right. [Technorati tag: wikipedia]

On the road again

Traveling to Seattle today for two days at a Microsoft social software conference, a morning at Amazon doing research for my book, and a morning talking with CNN about taxonomic stuff. Back on Thursday night, possibly too late to catch Steve Johnson's free talk at Harvard, which you would be nuts to miss if you're anywhere nearby.

Canadian mashups

From an email from Jon del Mothe:

Our prime minister (Paul Martin) and his party (liberals) are in a fair amount of hot water over an ad sponsorship scandal in Quebec.

On Thursday night he took over the airways to try and calm (and avoid an immediate election).

All other Media covered it their usual fashion - we took a different approach and mashed it in the mag, cover can be seen here and then let our audience mash back. Some good ones!

There are indeed some good ones. I'm particularly fond of the second one by Marc L that turns the talking-head speech into an American-style news network drama. (His first entry is funny also.)

(See page 4 of the Dose PDF for straightforward reporting on the speech. Then read the cover mashup.) [Technorati tags: dose PaulMartin mashup]

Del.icio.us bundles

Del.icio.us has a feature in beta that lets you collect a set of your tags into a "bundle" that then shows up at the top of the your personal page. For example, if you declare the tags "parody," "sarcasm" and "puns" to be part of a "humor" bundle, all three of those tags will be listed under a big, bold "Humor" on the right hand side of your del.icio.us home page. You can create a bundle by going to http://del.icio.us/settings/YOURUSERID/bundle.

(Thanks to Hanan Cohen who found this at LibraryStuff who found it at BlogDriversWaltz. Very interesting discussions at both those sites.) [Technorati tags: taxonomy tags folksonomy delicious]

Meredith Sue Willis Fiesta!

Merry Willis, my sister-in-law the writer, has had a bunch of writing published recently.

You can read "The Story of Scheherezade and Dunzyad" in The Pedestal Magazine here. How can you go wrong with a story that begins "Except for the eunuchs..."? It's a terrific read...sort of Scheherezade fan-fiction.

And the American Book Review gives Merry's Dwight's House and Other Stories a very positive review. That book and her new sf novel, The City Built of Starships, are both finalists for Foreward Magazine's Book-of-the-Year award. Go Meredith Sue! [Technorati tags: MeredithSueWillis fiction]

Booker Rising

Booker Rising describes itself as a "News site for black moderates and black conservatives." It aggregates news stories through that filter and comments on them briefly. In my poking around, it seemed pretty fair, and I'm finding stories there that I'd otherwise miss. (Thanks to Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice.)

(BTW, hardly any of the left column displays in Firefox, but it does in IE.)

Powerful MP3 tag editor

I'm trying to whip my collection of MP3s into basic shape so that I can find them via the rather limited UI of my Creative Nomad Not-an-iPod Zen player. (Oy, so now I'm taxonomizing on the weekends!) And The Godfather has turned out to be really helpful. It's overly-featured from my point of view, but I have minimal needs. And it sure seems to do the job. Want to tag all the tracks in your Bach directory as artist="Bach, JS" and rename them using a "Composer - Album - Track" format? This is the tool for you. (Well, I actually haven't figured out how to do the renaming, but it's definitely a key feature.) It's free, it's got a scripting capability, and it's well-supported by a forum. Thank you, JTClipper!

The Christian Science Bloggy Monitor

Ethan has a great data-driven post, analyzing which US newspapers have the highest number of blog links per paper subscribers. The winner, hands down, is the admirable Christian Science Monitor.

Ethan wraps up with this:

Is there a way for the Monitor to embrace it's unique status and become the "official paper of the blogosphere"? Or is the Monitor slated to become one of the first — and most tragic — casualties of the move from paper to bits?

Ethan's continuing work gives statistics a good name :) [Technorati tags: media CSM EthanZuckerman]

Steve Johnson talks about his new book

Steve is going to give a free talk about his new book, Everything Bad Is Good For You — How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, this Thursday, at 7pm, in the Langdell North Classroom in the Langdell Law Library at Harvard.

The book is going to be a big bestseller, and Steve is a wonderful, funny presenter. (You can see a preview of the book in this Sunday's NY Times Magazine.)

Help a busted Mac?

My daughter's friend's Powerbook crashed after she downloaded an episode of "Gilmore Girls." Now it won't boot, and reports that there's nothing on the hard disk. She needs to turn in a paper on the drive on Monday. Any advice? In fact, if you're in Boston, wanna fix it for her...?

The spit fight that ended my career at MSNBC

It's an interesting experience: You get to hone a topic to 90 seconds, memorize it, and talk into a camera in an isolated room. Plus, they send a limo for you. (It's possible they pay, but I forgot to ask.) They're nice people and were happy with the two pieces I did for them. But...

They want reports on what moderate left and right wing bloggers — "Nothing out of the mainstream," the producer told me yesterday — say about a "major" topic. What the hell does that have to do with blogging? And when two of the producers yesterday independently suggested that I report on the blogosphere's reaction to a Vietnam veteran spitting on Jane Fonda, I blurted out — because the flu had lowered my normal Walls of Timidity — that this wasn't a job I'm comfortable with.

What makes the blogosphere interesting to me is not that there are moderate left and right voices talking about mainstream topics. Mainstream major stories are about issues such as freakish celebrity pedophiles, a spit match over a fight from 30 years ago that the press is hoping to revive, and whatever unfortunate child has been reported missing and presumed (better for the story) murdered. I'm in the blogosphere to escape from this degradation of values.

In the ninety seconds MSNBC gives over to blogging, they want to pair A-Listers into a he-said/she-said report on a Major Topic. Yippee for the A-Team! You do two of those and the last of the three segments should be something "fun," i.e., humorous and trivial because the news no longer knows how to operate without a closing joke. It's downright pathological.

I have mixed feelings. I'm genuinely glad Jeff Jarvis, Ed Cone, and others are doing it. It's better that they get to squeeze a few new voices into the MSM, even if those voices aren't always as diverse as we'd like. It's good for the MSM to acknowledge their viewers aren't passive. And people who follow the URLs may find other voices worth listening to. The odd thing is that the two I did for them (1 2) didn't follow the pattern they want, but they were happy with them nonetheless, so I probably could have kept on if I hadn't raised the issue. But I just couldn't face implicitly confirming the idea that the blogosphere consists of big voices arguing with one another — spit fights! — instead of 10 million real voices engaged in every variety of human conversation and delight.

So, fuck it. I quit. [Technorati tags: msnbc msm media]

April 23, 2005: There are some things I didn't express well in the post above. Thankfully, the blogosphere is so damn conversational that it doesn't take long for at least some of the weaknesses to come out. So, sorry for the bad writing, and here are some things I should have said.

I should have concluded my second paragraph by noting that after I said that I didn't think this was going to work out, we continued our amicable conversation and found three topics -- two of which I'd suggested, one of which they did -- for my segment. It was definitely not an "I quit!" and stalk out moment. The two producers were both great to work with and treated me well. I like them both.

Jay Rosen, ever sensitive to nuance, wonders why I used the word "quit" in my last sentence, instead of "stop." The answer is that I was instilling the episode with false drama, as a type of self-aggrandizement. That's a disservice to truth and I apologize. My word choice throughout the piece also reflects some anger, some of which is directed at [Warning: Generalization ahead] the MSM's laughably corrupt values but some of which is born of my own disappointment at not getting to be on TV any more. It's complex.

And speaking of complexity, Jeff Jarvis does a great job teasing apart the skein of ideas and emotions here and here.

Fever dreams

Because of my flu — today it's turned into merely a seal-like cough and Quasimodo's headache — I've been waking up with odd snippets of dreams in my head.

Two days ago I awoke from a dream in which the contestants on American Idol were catching fish shaped like the way they sing. So, the one who does all the Mariah Carey-esque swooping around every note reeled in an eel. Disgusting, but, then...

Yesterday I woke up with this bad joke from the early 1990s:

Why exactly I'm having Ross Perot dreams is beyond me. (And I'd clean up the awful red outlining but I'm too beat. It's not like it'd be real funny if only I'd done a better job image editing it.)

Audible RSS

Thanks to work and prodding by Mitch Ratcliffe, Audible is now on the RSS bandwagon. You can subscribe to a feed of their bestsellers, NY Times Bestsellers, free audio, and lots more... [Technorati tags: audible rss MitchRatcliffe]

MSNBC presentation

This is the bit I memorized for today's 90 seconds on MSNBC. It should be pretty close to what I actually said, short of the epithet's I involuntarily barked out. (PoliticalTeen has captured the video. Thanks!)

BlackFive, a right wing military blog, is running a list of about 80 blogs by military personnel. It's quite a collection. At the National Guard Experience, a mortar infantryman stationed in Afghanistan runs lots of photos of children, and seems, mildly obsessed with care packages. At Jack Army, a special forces soldier tells us why he flunked out of Medic training. A good read. Soldiers Mom, says that her son's division in Iraq has entered a communications blackout period, which often means there's some bad news coming. I hope not. By the way, the Army Times itself last month ran a list of military blogs, so they're becoming more mainstream.

Some bloggers have been talking about a cache of 400,000 documents discovered a hundred years ago in Egypt that's now legible thanks to new technology They've already found lost works by Sophocles and Euripides, and there's speculation there maybe even be a lost gospel in there. The blogger, Eyeless in Gaza, explains the documents were trash dumped on the outskirts of the town, which was far enough from the Nile that the trash stayed nice and dry. It's apparently an amazing store of riches that'll take years to explore.

Finally, Jeremy Stribling, a student at MIT, felt that an academic conference was spamming him, so he generated a gibberish paper…which was, of course, then accepted. If you want to generate your own gibberish academic paper, you can go to Jeremy's site. [Technorati tags: oxyrhynchus stribling iraq]

Blogline categories

Confusability is scraping bloglines and noticing how people are categorizing feeds. Great idea. First results: A list of the 100 most popular categories. It shows the gap between the categories we use for ourselves and those we use for others. I have a category called "Web" for entries in this blog because within the confines of my blog, it's a useful way of sorting posts. But tagging a post "web" for retrieval within the wide world of resources would be pointless. We're either going to get more sophisticated in how we tag, or our computers are going to have to get ever more clever about reading lots of implicit and metadata to help us find what we're looking for. Or both.

Betsy's great-grandblogger

Betsy runs snippets from the daily letters her great-grandfather wrote to his family. Charming.

In a separate post, she reports that one of the t-shirts for sale at a scientific meeting she went to reads:

PLEASE FLIRT HARDER, I AM A PHYSICIST

Me on MSNBC today

I'm jarvising on MSNBC todayt at 5:20 EDT, assuming I can shake myself clear of this awful cold-flu-y thing for 90 seconds... [Technorati tag: msnbc]

Success by puns

Just as we knew blogging was succeeding because of the hundred different plays on the word, "folksonomy" is now spawning its own, including "fauxonomy," a phrase used by Tom Coates and used in The Daily Chump's tagline, so to speak. (I myself am guilty of the highly forced "folksongnomic.") [Technorati tags: folksonomy fauxonomy]

A backlash

Graeme Thickens, in a de-hyping mood, gives ten reasons why businesses won't blog. I agree that business has been slow to pick up on blogs, but I find too many of his reasons unconvincing. For example:

"Businesses don't do passion." True, but employees do. And employees, not businesses. write blogs.

"Business doesn't like gossip." So now we know which types of blogs Graeme's been reading :)

"Businesses already communicate well in various ways." Puhlease! Businesses can barely croak out intelligible phrases. Have you heard an executive talk recently? Or a marketer? That's maybe the biggest reason why businesses ought to blog: Employees get to talk like humans.

"Business writing style and blogger style don’t even come close." See above.

Other of his points make more sense to me. I agree that companies don't like to do public experiments and blogs take time without providing an easy-to-measure ROI. And companies do need reassurance that they can have some measure of control over what gets blogged on their site: They can set up policies and editors.

But Graeme, I think, misses two points. First, blogs are more likely, IMO, to show up internally. As project groups come to rely on blogs as a great way of communicating and capturing their knowledge, companies will get more comfortable with outward-facing blogs. Second, Graeme ends by saying he's much more excited about word-of-mouth marketing. From my point of view, the companies who succeed at word-of-mouth marketing will do so by entering the blogging fray as equals. [Technorati tag: blogs]

Chinese tagging

Rebecca reports on the use of tagging by Chinese bloggers. Also, in response to a post by Joi Ito, "If you are posting something on your blog about Chinese-Japanese tensions, Sino-Japanese history debates, and related issues (or if you’re uploading related photos to the web)," she recommends you use the tag "cn_jp_dialog."

Also, GlobalVoices has a great post about Chinese bloggers managing to post about the anti-Japanese rallies even though they are not supposed to. (One of the main IM services blocks messages that contain the word "march," for example.) [Technorati tags: cn_jp_dialog tags globalvoices]

Melatonin anyone?

As I prepare to get on yet another plane — and I have a cold that has pushed me into the bottomless well of self-pity — I'm thinking about the three trips to Europe I'm making in the next couple of months. They're all red-eyes. I don't sleep well on planes. I have on occasion dosed myself with dramamine because it knocks me out without leaving much of a hangover. Some people I know swear by melatonin to reset the diurnal clock. I've never tried it. Any suggestions?

Alternatively, if you'd like to upgrade me to business class, I'd be happy to give up the drugs. It's your choice really. [Technorati tag: melatonin jetlag]

House of the Rising Sun explained

The Boston Phoenix this week runs an excerpt from Dave Van Ronk's memoir, the Mayor of MacDougal Street. The piece is about how Van Ronk lost control of his arrangement of The House of the Rising Sun, first to Dylan and then toThe Animals. Van Ronk was not on the Lessig side of the copyright battle. Anyway, I bring this up because Van Ronk ends by saying that late in life he discovered that the song isn't about a whore house. It's about the Orleans Parish women's prison.

Add it to the annals of busted folksongnomies. [Technorati tags: vanronk risingsun]

Million dollar idea and assorted crotchety whines

Carbonize some marshmallows and sell them as "Microwave Campfire Marshmallows." It's a surefire million dollar idea, assuming you figure out the marshmallows-explode-in-the-microwave part. But, you could probably just market your way around that: "Poppin' Fresh Microwave Campire Marshmallows (Caution: Be sure microwave door is securely closed.)"

And while I'm not on the subject: Towards the bottom of the Dunkin' Donuts coffee cup, on the outside, it says "Caution: Contents extremely hot." I understand that lawyers made the company put that there, but why are coffee places serving us coffee that's extremely hot? And am I now responsible for reading the fine print on a coffee cup before drinking? Breaking the seal on the lid of this coffee cup constitutes agreeing to the EULA..."

Have I mentioned I'm in a whiny, crappy mood because I'm sick as a dog (a cold) and am about to fly to Phoenix and back? Poppin' fresh eardrums, away! [Technorati tag: eula]

Everything that's wrong with advertising

This was the working keycard a hotel I was at recently gave me:

[Technorati tags: marketing advertising]

Dreamweaver's UI idiocy

I just downloaded Dreamweaver 2004 (v7) and to my amazement, in order to change the default extension from .htm to .html you have to edit an XML file, just as in v6. The Preferences dialog box shows you the current extension but doesn't let you edit it there. Oh no. Go root around in XML.

I like Dreamweaver at lot, but what the hell are they thinking over at Macromedia? [Technorati tag: dreamweaver]

Marathon giveaways

How to tell the people on the plane who are coming into Boston to run in the Marathon:

1. They have big LCD watches

2. They carry their running shoes on board because they're afraid of checking them through.

3. They are built like whippets.

Two papers, one real

Karen Schneider, the Freerange Librarian, has an article in the Library Journal on the ethics of librarian blogs that begins promisingly: "Blogging is turning information into a conversation..." And, it continues just as well, explaining the ethics and ethos of blogging in what she calls the "biblioblogosphere." She recommends transparency, linking to sites with which you disagree, being accurate — even postponing pressing the Publish button until you're sure, a pretty drastic step for some of us — and admitting your mistakes.

The BBC reports that the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI) to be held in July in Orlando accepted a paper that was in fact machine-generated gibberish. Well, what do you expect from a conference that calls itself "the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics"?

You can generate your very own gibberish science paper here. [Technorati tags: librarians blogs]

Order of Magnitude Quiz: Death by moose

Fill in the blanks with answers within an order of magnitude and win the satisfaction of having guessed right:

One in ___ people who hit a moose are killed, compared with one in ___ who hit a deer..."

USAToday, April 15, 2005, "Moose brake for no one..." by Trudy Tynan

Select between the X's to see the answer:
X     Deer: 1 in 75 .... Moose: 1 in 5,000     X

[NOTE: Be sure to reverse the answers once you've revealed them because I, um, totally screwed this up. Sorry.]

Infoworld goes tagalicious

Matt McAlister explains that the Infoworld.com upgrade isn't merely cosmetic: On the articles pages they've moved from a fixed taxonomy that took them a lot of time to develop to a structured tagging system:

What I like most in this new architecture is that the related links are now driven by del.icio.us. Our edit team is tagging content in del.icio.us. The engineers are pulling down the del.icio.us RSS feeds. And then we create matching logic based on the common tags. We also link back out to del.icio.us pages via the tags for the article on display.

This is a first step with several more ideas for leveraging tags coming soon. We need a more densely tagged data set behind us before some of the other plans can become real. The accuracy of the related links will also be a little shady, I'm sure, until we get more sophisticated with our tagging. But we're all excited about the possibilities for the site now that we have these tags. New ideas seem to crop up daily.

Fascinating. Matt also talks about the intersection of tagging and marketing.

So, see Ephraim Schwarz's article on Oracle and Sybase offering RFID integration. To the right is a "See Also" box that lists the article's tags: Ephraim_Schwartz Oracle_RFID Sybase_RFID. (You can also click on "Complete List of Tags," which takes you to Infoworld's del.icio.us page.) The Oracle_RFID link takes you to the del.icio.us list of pages Infoworld has tagged as "oracle_RFID." It being de.licio.us, that page also shows all the articles every other del.icio.us user has tagged that way. (The fact that zero non-Infoworlders have used that tag to me means that it's a tad overly specific. Why not tag the article "oracle" and "rfid" instead?)

Meanwhile, the first mention of a company or technology in an Infoworld article is followed by three little links, one of which is "articles." It takes you to a list of articles about that company. That list is not coming from del.icio.us and seems (seems!) unrelated to the tagging scheme. I don't know if they're planning to switch over at some point.

I'm also not sure what it means that Infoworld is applying matching logic to del.icio.us feeds. Does that mean they're looking at tags from non-Infoworlders?

In any case, this is exciting because a high-traffic site that lives and dies by content is trusting the looser bonds of tagging to help us explore what's related. And if Infoworld is using del.icio.us to include related links outside of their site — even if they don't, because Infoworld is using del.icio.us we can do that for ourselves — then we have a great example of the social power of links: They owners of the information no longer are the sole proprietors of the organization of that information. [Technorati tags: tags infoworld folksonomy]

Open Spectrum podcast

In this podcast, Kevin Werbach and I are interviewed by Richard Giles about Open Spectrum, i.e., getting the government out of the business of controlling frequencies. I haven't heard it, but I remember Kevin being very interesting. [Technorati tags: werbach spectrum]

Worst hotel wifi...ever

I'm at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort (trip #2 of my 3 trips to Phoenix over the course of 8 days). The hotel is lovely but their broadband offerings consist of two parts: You can get broadband via a wire in your bedroom for $10 for 24 hours, or you can take advantage of the wifi in the hotel lobby for $10 per use.

Yes, per use. Cheaper hotels offer wifi for free. More expensive hotels sometimes, in my experience, make you pay for a wired hookup in your bedroom but provide free wifi in the lobby. Leave it to the pace-setting Scottsdale Plaza Resort to move to the per-session wifi model made popular by pay phones and hookers.

I have left the hotel a strongly worded note. Of course, the fact that I just spent 5.5 hours in the middle seat on a packed, overheated plane where dinner consisted of 12 peanuts has had no effect on my mood. None whatsofucking ever.

Murdoch notices that Net thingy

"Rupert Murdoch urged newspaper editors Wednesday to embrace the Internet," says the story on Fox News:

"The challenge for each of us in this room is to create an Internet presence that is compelling enough that users make it their home page. Just as people traditionally started their day with coffee and a newspaper, in the future I hope that the way they start their day online will be with coffee and our Web site."

Isn't this the headline that every freaking media company ran in the fall of 1996? [Technorati tag: fox]

Meetup starts to charge

Over at many2many I've posted comments about Meetup's decision to start charging groups $19/month. What will this do to the social dynamics that have made Meetup so important to many of us? Will Craigslist will be the new Meetup? [Technorati tag: meetup]

Scott Heiferman of Meetup responds. A factual correction: Scott says Meetup isn't having financial problems; they just want to make sure that it stays financially viable.

German-American-Romanian-etc. bridgeblog

John D. Erickson points to Halfway Down the Danube, a group blog by a German-American couple living in Romania with lots of comments from expat Americans and Europeans... [Technorati tags: BridgeBlog GlobalVoices]

MSNBC piece

This is what I wrote out, intending to jarvis it on MSNBC this afternoon. I'm not sure what I actually said.

There's been a fair bit of discussion about the fact that tech conferences, for all their good intentions, haven't been able to attract enough women onto panels or into the audience. So a group of women bloggers have started a conference, called Blogher, July 30 in Santa Clara. One of the contributors to the Blogher blog, Surfette, or Lisa Stone, says that the conference is being organized as a do-ocracy - you want a topic on the schedule, then do it! She writes ""How do you subvert the dominant hierarchy? You give up control."

There's also been discussion of clampdowns on blogging. China has shut off access to a blog by Isaac Mao a popular blogger, In fact, tomorrow, the OpenNet Initiative, a consortium of 3 universities, is going to issue their latest report on which sites countries are blocking access to. Tomorrow's report is on China.

Hoder, the Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, reports an Iranian correspondent has been banned from the Iranian parliament building, supposedly for being rude and intrusive,— Hoder suspects it was really her reporting on corruption — so now she's started a Persian weblog to get her story out.

Then there a couple of sites making creative use of the satellite images of the earth Google's providing. They're collecting interesting shots: Fenway park from above the Grand Canyon, Bill Gates' house. Lotta fun. And that's a little of what's going on in the blogosphere

You know what distinguishes professionals from amateurs in this line of work? The professionals can look into the image of themselves projected in front of the camera and not be thrown off by their own image or by the three second delay... [Technorati tags: msnbc blogher hoder berkman]

Ian Schwartz has posted a video of the segment. Thanks, Ian!

I'm jarvising on MSNBC this afternoon

I'm doing the 90-second "What's new in blogs" segment on MSNBC this afternoon. Now if I can only lose 50 pounds, get the moles sanded off, and have the hair transpants take, all before sometime around 5:15pm EDT. Unfortunately, that won't leave me time to come up with something to say.

Ah, vanity, thy name is David.

Content spam?

Miles Wolbe of TinyApps.org has stumbled across a site, StarGeek, that re-posts contents from blogs, larded up with with irrelevant ads. For example, here's a page that "repurposes" one of my posts.

The site says:

projectGrok is a beta portal CMS written in PHP and driven by RSS content. Using MYSQL tables to store headlines and text from a bank of RSS url's from your target niche, projectGrok automatically clusters entries of relavant and timely content.

Or possibly it uses other people's content to try to get ads in articles returned by searches at Google. Hard to tell, but their article on "Keyword Research" is about search page optimization. So I'm suspicious enough to use the "nofollow" attribute when linking to them. If I'm misjudging these folks, let me know and I'll post a correction immediately below.

BTW, the latest entry in the weblog on their home page is dated 7/13/04 [Technorati tag: spam]

Blogher's do-ocracy

Gotta love the Blogher conference's idea of a "do-ocracy": Want to get a topic on the agenda of this one day event? Do it!

And the political philosophy behind this:

"How do you subvert the dominant hierarchy? You give up control."

So writes Surfette (Lisa Stone).

Sounds like a great event. I look forward to following along via blogs and IRC... [Technorati tags: blogher do-ocracy surfette]

Cool sights from above

Nicj has started aggregating cool snippets from Google Maps satellite photos. For example, here's Disneyland, Bill Gates' house, the Grand Canyon, and Mount St. Helens. The site credits the Google Sightseeing site for the idea...where, for example, you'll find a bunch of people who have spotted images with planes flying through them. [Technorati tags: maps google]

Republican podcasts

The Republican National Committee is pushing a podcast of Bob Dole talking about his new memoir, One Soldier's Story, part of a series on "new books by accomplished conservative authors."

When I was a kid and there were still liberal Republicans such as Nelson Rockefeller, the joke about conservatives such as Barry Goldwater was that their idea of progress was putting an AM radio into their buggies. Haha.

People were making the same joke about Ronald Reagan. But you sure can't make that joke now.

The sites China censors

The OpenNet Initiative (U of Toronto, Berkman Center and U of Cambridge) is releasing a report on Thursday about the sites China prevents its citizens from seeing. From the press advisory about the press conference:

"Internet Filtering in China in 2004-2005" documents the degree to which the Chinese government controls and manipulates the information environment in which its citizens including websites, blogs, email, and online discussion forums. Since ONI last released on filtering in China in 2002, the Chinese government has developed far more sophisticated filtering techniques. Using a distributed testing application run from within China's trusted volunteers from different locations and network access points, ONI's report empirical and comparative study of China's filtering systems. The report also offers legal and regulatory regime that supports and justifies these filtering practices.

These topics are particularly timely given recent efforts by the Chinese government to monitor websites and chat rooms, large-scale arrests of Chinese citizens who post material the government deems offensive or threatening, and the firing of prominent scholars critical of the Central Propaganda Department.

If you happen to be in DC on Thursday, you can mosey on over to Room 285 of the Russell Senate Office Building at 9:30am. If you'd like to get a copy of the report when it comes out, you can send an email to amichel /AT\ cyber.law.harvard.eud. [Technorati tags: china censorship berkman]

Smartest Guys in the Room

I got a preview DVD of a documentary about Enron that's about to be released. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room will remind you just how shameless the Enron guys were. Rather than dwelling on the thousands of people who lost their retirement money, it focuses primarily on the the conscious, willing, and intentional fraud Enron's executives executed. The movie takes us step by step through the games the execs played, as if they couldn't believe that anything guys as smart as them did could possibly be wrong. These were first class bastards.

The format of the movie is conventional: Some talking heads, some insider footage of rah-rah corporate meetings...although the footage Bushes senior and junior shot to pass their good wishes to one of the execs is a pretty startling reminder just how close Kennyboy and the Bush family are. The documentary takes us step by step down the path that led to Enron going from boom in the good sense to boom in the bad sense.

At 110 minutes, it felt a little long to me, and some of the stock footage (e.g., a guy in freefall) and music choices struck me as too predictable. But it tells quite a story. We can only hope that the Enron boys become the smartest guys in Cellblock C.

The movie will be released on April 22. [Technorati tag: enron]

BlogBridge aggregator hits 1.0

BlogBridge, the aggregator I've been using for a few months in beta, has gone to 1.0. There are a few things to like about it, not least of which is that it's a free, open source project done by someone I know well and trust 100%, Pito Salas.

Blogbridge is a client, but it stores your info on a server so you can use it on multiple machines. It tries to help you discover new weblogs by noting links in your feeds. You can rate your feeds and this somehow magically gets fed into a community rating system. (I'm not finding the rating system very helpful to me.) You can set keywords and ask to see only posts that contain them.

In short, BlogBridge has been doing the job for me.

[Disclosure: I'm an uncompensated member of its board of advisors.] [Technorati tags: rss blogbridge aggregator]

Surprisingly irksome airline behavior

I'm on the first of three trips to Phoenix over the next eight days, for three unrelated events at which I'm speaking. Weird.

On the America West ride from Boston, the guy in the seat ahead of me was surprisingly annoying. He was about my age (115+) but he rocked in his seat like a 5 year old. And for much of the trip he sat with his hands clasped behind the top of his seat. They were lovely hands — pale, freckled, soft red hair. But they were 4 inches from my face.

I didn't have the nerve to ask him to move his hands, but I did "accidentally" brush them with my book a few times as I turned pages. He didn't seem to mind.

I don't know why I found this so annoying. But I did. I mean, doesn't he understand that one person's back is another person's front?

Order of magnitude question: Foul balls

Between five years in the 1990s, how many attendees per year were injured by foul balls hit during baseball games in Fenway Park? A correct answer is any within 10x up or down. Oh, that's too easy. Make it 5x.

Select between the X's to see the answer:
X     From 36 to 53     X

Prisoner #425684932A

Continuing my mild obsession with Michael Jackson's face:

If he goes to jail, how many weeks could he possibly survive? [Technorati tag: MichaelJackson]

Greatest game in history - Now with a sandbox!

Garry.tv has a Half Life 2 mod that lets you use the game's astounding physics engine and its existing objects to build Rube Goldberg-like machines, pose rag dolls, etc. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks amazing. [Technorati tags: halflife2 mods]

Bittorrent marketplace

Prodigem, a legal torrent site, has announced a marketplace that will let you upload a file and sell bittorrent access to it. So, if you had, say, a video of your band performing its hit "Download Me, Baby, and Then Why Doncha Set Me Free?" that you wanted to sell, you'd upload it to Prodigem Marketplace and slap a price on it. Prodigem takes 10% plus the PayPal fee and passes the rest on to you.

It's DRM-free once you've downloaded it: It's just a file that you can redistribute as you see fit. And they're contemplating an interesting licensing scheme:

To accomodate this new method of transfer, we have added a Copyright Plus Prodigem license to the available licensing options. This simple license allows you to retain copyright over your work while making a specific grant of rights to Prodigem and its users. In effect you are saying that it is fine to share your work so long as it's only through the torrent you created, and since access to the torrent is only granted when payment is received, you get exactly what you are looking for.

You are also free to instead license your work under the Creative Commons. Though with a CC license you are technically granting everyone redistribution rights regardless of venue. This is fine by us if it's okay with you, but does mean that people are free to share without payment. Realizing this conundrum, we are busy mulling over something akin to a "Delayed" Creative Commons license, where Prodigem users will be able to stipulate their work as covered under Copyright Plus Prodigem license, and then on some fixed date of their choosing (eg. 1 year, 5 years) it automatically switches over to a CC license of their choosing. It's like peanut butter and chocolate.

I hope the marketplace takes off. But I'm worried about the "small monthly fee" Prodigem will require of users once it's out of beta. It may keep the chicken from ever getting out of the egg. But I assume they've thought this through better than I have.

Here's the site's blog. [Technorati tags: bittorrent drm CreativeCommons]

Damn you, Monty Hall!

My son and I spent a little time this afternoon on the Monty Hall paradox, a topic we'd discussed a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, it takes me 20 minutes to understand the explanation, and I only understand it for 4 continuous seconds.

Here's the situation. You are asked to pick one of three doors. Donkeys are behind two of them, and a new car is behind another. After you choose your door, but before it's revealed to you, Monty Hall (the emcee) opens one of the doors you didn't choose and reveals a donkey. He then asks if you'd like to switch from your initial choice to the remaining door. It turns out that if you agree to switch, you double (?) your chance of winning.

It just doesn't seem possible. Here's how one site, that has a simulator on it, explains it:

The easiest way to explain this to students is as follows. The probability of picking the wrong door in the initial stage of the game is 2/3. If the contestant picks the wrong door initially, the host must reveal the remaining empty door in the second stage of the game. Thus, if the contestant switches after picking the wrong door initially, the contestant will win the prize. The probability of winning by switching then reduces to the probability of picking the wrong door in the initial stage which is clearly 2/3.

Despite a very clear explanation of this paradox, most students have a difficulty understanding the problem...

Yeah, that was real clear. Oh yeah.

The only explanation that's ever worked for me is the 1,000 door variation, which you can find here. And here's the front page NY Times story about it.

Now please don't bring this up for another two years. It's given me a headache. [Technorati tags: paradox puzzle]

[s2n] Machinima

Paul Marino has been doing machinima for six years. Machinima are animated films created using the tools video game companies make available to build levels to add on to their games. It started with Quake in 1996. He shows some terrific samples

He says his group is working with game developers to allow for derivative works and to explore various licensing models, ultimately making machinima commercially viable. He says that machinima's future is the democratization of animated storytelling. [I have to leave the conference now. Damn.] [Technorati tags: s2n machinima]

[s2f] New opportunities

David Dixon tells how in 2001 he publicized an MP3 that performed a Beatles track in the style of Metallica. He did it without permission of the band that did it. Sony sent him a cease and desist letter. Lars of Metallica is actually on the right side in ths case, trying to get Sony to drop its stupid, bullying lawsuit. Sony is not pursuing the suit, although they also haven't dropped it.

Wendy Seltzer of the EFF says that this is a good example of chillling effects. The new means of distribution bring small-town bands under the gaze of big corporate property holders.

Naomi Novik is a fanfiction writer. She says she hasn't received any cease and desist orders. She talks about "fan vids": Clips from favorite shown over music tracks. "We're flying under the radar," she says. "The better the work is, the more likely it is to be hidden and hard to found" because "the people who write the better things are more aware" of the risks. The better writers, she says, post a few things publicly to draw people in, but keep the best hidden. She's trying to create a modified Creative Commons license that let people read a work and use it in fan fiction, while protecting the author from later getting sued by a fan who claims the author stole the idea from her.

Wendy: "I'm really distrubed to hear that we have fewer rights when we're dealing with richer media than when dealing with text."

Should the owner be allowed to control who gets to use or remix? Naomi says if you let someone, you have to let anyone. Walter McDonough of the Future of Music says that if an objectionable group were to do that to music made by one of his clients, he'd go ballistic.

[They've delayed lunch by an hour, to 2 o'clock, and I'm losing focus. Sorry.] [Technorati tag: s2n]

[s2n] Yochai Benkler

Yochai Benkler of Yale (and, Charlie Nesson says lightly in his introduction, he hopes someday maybe of Harvard) begins with a video of DangerMouse's Gray Album, which mixed the Beatles' White album and Jay-Z's Black album.

Then he shows something "not so complimentary": "The Mashin' of the Christ." It mashes clips from Jesus flicks on top of a "Christianity is stupid. Communism is good" soundtrack.

He gives an example of using these techniques to critique the media representation of news from CapedMaskedAndArmed.

He shows a couple of others, but I didn't get enough info to be able to link to them. Anyway, they were impressive examples...

[Technorati tag: s2n]

Cultural assumptions of photo editing software

Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah has a fascinating post about how photo upload sites and image editing packages look to someone whose skin is dark and who is shooting in very bright sunlight. This is just an example of a broader theme in the post: "The Subtle Business of Software Localization," as Ethan puts it. Snippets:

The first thing I very quickly noticed: somehow all the photos that I uploaded to Yahoo Photos turned out darker than on Flickr (the services both resize uploaded photos). The photo-resizing algorithm used by Yahoo Photos was giving worse results. This was noticeable to me because a large number of photos featured darker-skinned people such as myself. The originals were fine and where there were lighter skin tones everything looked good, but with darker skintones, the resized photos were not so good.

...Thirdly, when retouching photos, the Quick Fix or Auto Correct options in Photoshop seemed tailored for lighter skintones so I was constantly having to do manual tweaking of my photos. Now this is not a big deal for a few photos and indeed it's fun to fiddle with photos but after a couple of hundred images, it gets tiresome. I found mysef longing for "smarter" recognition by the software or for at least, a nice 'dark skin' option that I could set in a preferences dialog.

[s2n] Wayne Marshall

Wayne Marshall traces the movement of one particular musical idea, the "mad mad" of Reggae, used in Alton Ellis' Mad, Mad, Mad in 1967. [Technorati tag: s2n] [Technorati tags: s2n reggae]

Thomas Jefferson on blogging

Dan Bricklin points to Chris Daly's Are Bloggers Journalists? Let's Ask Thomas Jeffeson. Here's a snippet that Dan pulls out of the article:

Common Sense and other pamphlets like it were precisely the kind of political journalism that Jefferson had in mind when he insisted on a constitutional amendment in 1790 to protect press freedom — anonymous, highly opinionated writing from diverse, independent sources. In historical terms, today's bloggers are much closer in spirit to the Revolutionary-era pamphleteers than today's giant, conglomerate mainstream media.

Both Chris' piece and Dan's discussion of it are well worth reading... [Technorati tags: blogs bricklin ChrisDaly journalism]

[s2n] Borrowing or stealing panel

Terry Fisher runs a panel.

Bill Alford wrote a book about the Chinese views of "intellectual property," called To Steal a Book Is an Elegant Offense. He says that the Chinese have a sense of the past as a living, shared context. One makes one's mark not by breaking from the past (as our Romantic geniuses do) but by making it one's own. "Copying doesn't carry the same dark implications as in the West."

Unfortunately, I missed most of what Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club, had to say. When I came in, he was speaking charmingly about noticing that his book had been slapped with a "all similarities to people living or dead is purely coincidental." In his book, the similarities aren't coincidental at all. His publisher allowed him to re-write it since he's a grad of Harvard Law.

Lawrence Ferrara is chairman of the dept. of music and performing arts at NYU, as well as a pianist. He explains the law around basing one musical work on another. [There is no chance I would represent his views accurately, so I'm not going to try.] He thinks that even tiny samples should be paid for, although he says he'd like to see some "common sense" applied so that "minimal" samples don't have to be paid for; but he thinks that a three note arpeggio, even if digitally transformed, isn't minimal enough [I think]. It can be hard to determine that something is a sample in the final recording but, he says, when you get the ProTool file, you can tell precisely. [Remixers take heed.]

Q: Is there any point at which a sample is so altered that it no longer is the same sample?

Lawrence: It probably wouldn't be picked up. But if it were, the record companies would want it to be licensed.

[Lawrence's disquisition is learned and subtle. But is the world better if his regime continues to win?]

[Technorati tag: s2n]

[s2n] Briefing book

There's a PDF of a "briefing book" for the conference with articles about fair use, sampling, fan fiction, and more.

John Palfrey is blogging the conference, too. [Technorati tag: s2n]

[s2n] Signal to Noise conference - Mike Doughty

The second Signal to Noise conference begins to the sound of "Sexy Jesus" beating through the Ames Courtroom in Austin Hall at Harvard Law. The conference — sponsored by Berkman, Journal of Law and Technology, the Harvard Committee on Sports and Entertainment Law and Gartner G2 — has something to do with remix culture. About a hundred of us are sitting in an auditorium, facing forward, which seems at odds with the aims of the get-together.

Charlie Nesson begins by saying the aim of law is to create a culture in which we can have freedom and creativity in peace. He talks about copyright's original balance being continuously upset by Congress's one-side expansion of the length of copyright's protection. He points to the expansion of copyright across space as well, beginning with Reagan linking copyright to trade expansion.

Eric Hellweg interviews Mike Doughty . Mike says he learned how to write songs by learning the 4-5 basic rock riffs. He quickly goes through a half dozen songs that use the basis C-F-G structure: Louie Louie, Wild Thing, Good Lovin', etc. He talks about how what he listens to affects the songs he writes. E.g., his new single simplifies the chord structure Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast" — "just enough to get past the lawyers," but for aesthetic not legal reasons. (He points out that it's actually basically the same as "Oh When the Saints Go Marching In.")

He says one band listed literally every sample, including a single snare drum hit, that would have been $1.2M in clearances. As a result, they never put out an album. Implicit advice: Don't declare it unless you can get caught. Mike says that when he was the frontman for Soul Coughing, they did an album in '93 that heavily sampled lots of tracks. "There are samples on our first album that we didn't declare that it blows my mind we haven't been caught on."

He points out that the labels don't care how many samples a band uses because the money for rights comes out of the artists' pockets.

Mike recorded an acoustic album in the mid-90s that was rejected by his label, Warner. Years later, he was at a concert where people were singing songs from the album because it had been Napterized. "The thing about the file-sharing era is that it's a great time to be me," because he was already in a position to build a touring career. The file sharing helps build that. But he worries about new artists. "Autotune is going to get so good in the next five years that you won't even have to be able to sing as well as Jennifer Lopez." (AutoTune transforms your warbles into in-tune melodies.) These "artists" won't be able to support themselves singing live. [I somehow don't have a lot of concern about the ability of bad singers to make a living as singers.]

He says that on his blog, he has an "amnesty for file sharers" link that takes you to Musician's Assistance Program.

Eric points us to Paul's Boutique, a site that tries to decode all the samples in the work of Paul of the Beastie Boys. [So, Beastie Boys and "Sexy Jesus" both mentioned in a single JOHO blog entry.]

[This session was a terrific reminder that remixing, in one for or another, is a prerequisite for the existence of culture. Also, a really enjoyable conversation.] [Technorati tags: s2n Doughty remix]

Reading Machines for the Blind and Dyslexic...Acquired

Kurzweil Educational Systems, which makes scan-to-speech systems for the blind and dyslexic, has been purchased by Cambium Learning, a company serving "at-risk" students.

In 1976, Ray Kurzweil invented a system that would read a page out loud. At that point it cost $100,000 and was the size of a major kitchen appliance. Kurzweil Computer Products became Xerox Imaging Systems in 1980. In 1996, KES was officially launched on its own. In 1998 it was purchased by Lernout & Hauspie. When the founders of L&H were led away in manacles because they were despicable con artists who should rot in hell, the company bought itself back, completing the transaction in November, 2001. Since then the company has continued to innovate and has been making a profit by doing something good. [The facts in this paragraph came from here.]

I know some of the folks at KES well. One of them is, in fact, my cousin-in-law. These are folks who have been working for years with intense and heartfelt focus on helping people with disabilities integrate further into the world. The company has become a living member of the communities it serves. It's been through tough times. I hope and assume that this new acquisition means KES will be around for a long, long time. [Technorati tags: kes kurzweil blind dyslexic lernout cambium]

Betsy on happy bikes

Betsy explains quite clearly why the Dutch use of bicycles make them happier than we are. It's almost enough to make me get back onto my damn bike. [Technorati tag: bicycle]

Advice to young terrorists

I have been pulled aside for special searches four out of the previous four times I've flown. Yesterday I asked the supervisor at the US Air desk at Logan Airport about it. He said that if you test positive for any two of the following three tests, the computer marks you for searching: A one way ticket, a ticket purchased in the past 24 hours, or paying by cash. On this particular trip, I met the first two criteria. Thus, I am a likely terrorist.

So, here's a word of advice to today's would-be terrorist: Splurge on the round-trip. Sure, it's going to cost an extra couple of hundred, but at the end of the trip, you're not going to care. Also, try to plan your murderous attack well in advance.

Sigh.

PSP hacked into something more useful

Apparently hackers have turned Sony's latest portable game player, the PSP handheld, into a device for online chat, Web browsing, and a venue for movies and music.

Leave it to hackers who managed to add an online chat function by hijacking a Web browser built into a racing game called "Wipeout Pure." Once the hackers are able to change the PSP's network settings, they can point the browser to a Web portal. There's also a way for hackers to transfer TV programs recorded on the TiVo service to the PSP player, a program for reading e-books, and a viewer for comic books downloaded from the Web.

That's from the email version of Tobi Elkin's Online Minute at MediaPost. (These paragraphs are not on the online version.) So, how many minutes exactly did it take?

Should we assume that Sony will do everything it can to crush this egregious addition of value to its device? Or for once should I not be so cynical? [Technorati tags: sony psp drm]

My most head-scratching email in a while

Please be aware that the submission date for Proposal Abstracts for NineSigma RFP 50113-1, " Technologies to Enable Rapid Cooling of a Steam Iron " is this Friday, April 8, 2005. The RFP and associated documents can be accessed online at http://www.ninesigma.com/mx/50113-1 ...

Sincerely,
Kevin C. Stark, Ph.D.

How the hell did I get on this particular mailing list? Talk about things I don't care about...

[berkman] Vietnamese online paper

This morning during the "fellows hour," we hear from Tuan Nguyen who founded Vietnam Net (English version) in 1997, an ISP and content provider. He began in 1995 by putting together computers, installing linux, etc. In 1997, the government officially permitted people to connnect to the Internet. The site now has 1.5M viewers/day. (Vietnam's population is 85M. About 5M people in Vietnam are on the Internet. About 6M have mobile phones.) The site has a newspaper license which enables its reporters to go anywhere and talk with anyone. The leaders of the party provide "guidelines" rather than ruling particular stories in or out. Mr. Nguyen also talks about some ways in which these talks and his site's actions have affected government policy.

He says that the Internet is good for democracy in Vietnam, and has caused the mainstream media to become more open. The media in general have been a force for democracy, including in the fight against corruption. He points to the comments section of the site and to the ability of readers to post articles and comments — they receive about 1,000 submissions per day. They select and edit them, and post about 700/day. (His ISP services connects to a gateway that censors about .001% of web sites, mainly foreign ones critical of the government, based on the Ministry of Security's directives.)

The site has a staff of 280. He is excited that his company advances people based on merit, including women. The company is profitable because of its mobile phone business; it loses money on its Internet operations. He invested in providing content to mobile phones. About 1M SMS messages go through his system every day. (It's $0.20 for a ringtone.)

He concludes be expressing his excitement about how the Net is improving democracy in Vietnam, and what an exciting time this is.

(Take a look at Vietnam.net's photo essay on "seeing off the Kitchen Gods." More photo galleries here, including: Boat festival, Tet, first Valentine festival.)

[Technorati tags: vietnam blogs] [Technorati tags: vietnam blogs globalvoices]

Berkman Signal to Noise conference

This one looks different — Fan fiction, dance, machinima, deviant art, remixing, mashups, On Friday. Open to all ($20 admission fee) but you need to register ahead of time because the space is not infinite. [Technorati tags: berkman s2n]

Google Maps surprise

Go to Google Maps. Select an address. Have it plot directions to another address. Click on "Satellite." Omigod.

I don't mean to be ungrateful, but how about displaying street names on the satellite image? C'mon, Google, let's get on the ball! :) [Technorati tags: google maps]

The Internet Pope

3 Quarks Daily wonders if the Internet could influence the selection of the next pope by setting up a wiki where the webosphere could educate itselff about the 117 people who cast their votes in the Sistine Chapel, and then pepper them with opinions.

Sounds like a waste of time as an attempt to affect the decision — the process is cloistered on purpose — but a worthwhile exercise in citizen journalism.

Besides, do you think maybe as a Jew I kinda lack the standing to be listened to on this particular topic? Now, when it's time to select a new Pope of the Internet, send me a butterfly ballot.

(Thanks to Marko Ahtisaari for the link. Joi and Mark Federman also have interesting posts on the Pope and MSM.) [Technorati tag: pope]

Wiki resume

Wendy Koslow has posted her resume on a wiki so her friends and colleagues can help her come up with one that'll help her get a job in Toronto. Gutsy, innovative and fun, much like Wendy herself. (I added a section where we can post testimonials.) [Technorati tags: berkman wendyKoslow wiki]

Shirky's example

Clay tells BoingBoing about how he was thwarted from making a copy of a video of him given to him by a friend. As always, he brings matters to a very sharp point : "This is because copyright laws do not exist to defend the moral rights of copyright holders — they exist to help enforce artificial scarcity." (I'd put it slightly differently, albeit less pithilly: When copyright enforcement is built into machinery, it favors artificial scarcity over fair use and over the rights of copyholders.) [Technorati tags: shirky copyright]

Pippa tag

AKMA has discovered that all the "pippa" tags Technorati knows about have to do with the Pippa he knows about. He adds, jokingly: "...you other Pippas of the world, sorry, you’ll have to devise modifiers for your own tags." Ah, the privileges of the rarely named!

Of course, we're all going to be devising modifiers if tagging takes off, or our computers will add them behind our backs: "Hmm, do you think David Weinberger wants to see all the photos of that new, heavily-marketed soft drink, Pippa!, or is it more likely that, because he's friends with AKMA, he really wants to see that darling Pippa's tags?"

(By the way, don't miss the sight of AKMA thinking he's "boasting." He doesn't even know what boasting is about.)

[Technorati tags: taxonomy pippa akma tags]

Deadwood enters into self-parody after only one season, and other TV headlines!

Deadwood has become a self-parody at the very beginning of its second year, beating the previous record holder — 24 — by 4 episodes.

Someone apparently told David Milch, the show's creator and writer, that he's brilliant at dialogue because everyone now speaks like a lead character in a Shakespearean drama, except for the poetry, and half the time I don't have any fucking idea what the fuck they're fucking talking fucking about.

I find the show painful to watch and have only managed this far by thinking that maybe someone will remember that dialogue is supposed to: A. Express differentiated character, B. Advance narrative, C. Not be howlingly pretentious.

Meanwhile, Project Greenlight has become as delicious and difficult to watch as Curb Your Enthusiasm. The Office is better than I'd thought but isn't as deliciously horrible as the British version because Steven Carrell hasn't yet located the odious little man behind the odious outer man. Arrested Development I'm finding funny despite its determination to be whacky. Likewise for Scrubs.

Yes, I watch TV and I'm proud of it.

Global Voices: Live from Kyrgyzstan

Global Voices has published a remarkable first-person account of the overthrow of the Kyrgysztan government. It's by Elina Karakulova, a 21-year old Kyrgyz student who gives an excellent picture — personal and ambivalent — of what's going on and how it feels. [Technorati tags: kyrgyzstan globalvoices]

From the Boston Globe...

The Massachusetts Legislature passed a research-friendly stem cell bill over the objections of Governor and Spokesmodel Mitt Romney recently, so the Boston Globe today turns its op-ed page over to the controversy.

Michael Sandel, a Harvard political philosopher, carefully analyzes the ethical objections to the different types of stem cells, and exposes the inconsistency in Romney's position:

...if he believes that embryos are human beings with inalienable rights, he should oppose all embryonic stem cell research, not only research on cloned embryos. If extracting stem cells from a blastocyst is morally equivalent to yanking organs from a baby, then it is abhorrent no matter how the embryo came into being.

Then there's Lawrence Summers, the current president of Harvard. The first three paragraphs remind us that stem cell research can relieve suffering. Then comes the heart of his argument:

Our universities and hospitals create new high-paying jobs in large numbers. They are magnets for the world's most talented and ambitious young people who stay here in large numbers after concluding their studies. They remain because the scientific work is intense and satisfying and the Boston area is a vibrant and exciting place to be.

That our great universities and hospitals are not going to move or be bought out by an out-of-state acquirer is not a reason for them to be taken for granted by policy makers.

I find this column flat-footed. Sandel's provides an analysis by which we can understand the differences between the pro's and anti's, and challenges the anti's by understanding their position. Summers' piece has no sympathy for the people he's trying to influence. Massachusetts legislators who voted against the bill for moral and religious reason are not going to be swayed by an economic argument, any more than those who wanted to see Terri Schiavo's heart kept pumping would have agreed to unplug her once they found out how much it cost to keep her alive. Plus, there's a whiny, self-centered tone to the piece, as if "not compromising" Harvard's Stem Cell Institute takes precedence over human life: If you think (as I totally do not) that killing fertilized eggs is murder, the preservation of the Harvard institute that depends on murder just isn't going to be a top priority.

In the third op-ed on the page, Bradley Jones, the minority leader of the House, skips any argument about why he opposes therapeutic cloning — he's also against in vitro fertilization — and suggests a slower, step-by-step set of laws would be better because there are "so many unanswered questions about the process and the ethics of cloning." There's not much to the column beyond that brief boiling-down.

The prolific Hiawatha Bray has a review of the Sony PSP (portable PlayStation) that I found useful from the gamer's point of view. Wesley Morris, a movie critic, reviews it as a movie watching device:

Nobody is watching the works of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky on this thing. Or better yet: No one should. The PSP is only slightly more ideal for watching Sony's ''Spider-Man 2," which is included with some players.

On the PSP, I marveled at the sharpness of the picture and the boldness of the colors. I was again impressed with Tobey Maguire's skills as a scrappy comedian as well as with the shrewdness of the writing and directing. But soon I noticed that viewing a movie on a hand-held game console makes you feel obligated to play it somehow.

Baddabing.

BTW, feel free to send me any left over PSPs you have hanging around. Thanks in advance...

[Technorati tags: harvard BostonGlobe summers stemcells psp]

Song of innocence and experience

SFist is running Irina Slutsky's interview with Mark Jen who was fired for putting information about Google on line. The lesson he learned?

I wasn't sensitive to the media at the time. My experience with blogs has been a personal experience, as in you read the blogs of your friends or your family, and that's about the circulation. I didn't actually know that blogging was becoming a huge movement and there was a huge community coming around it. But now I know.

He's now at Plaxo. Plaxo's attitude towards blogging:

Plaxo recognizes the value of the value of employees connecting with the community. There are rules—you can't talk about sensitive or confidential information. But as far as personal feelings on things, that’s ok.

So, he's learned not only where to draw the line, but that there are lines. That's a tough lesson for people brought up in the blurry, open world of blogging, and a big part of me is sorry that anyone has to learn it.

Here's "Nurse's Song" by William Blake because, well, why not?

When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
  And everything else is still.

"Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies.''

"No, no, let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly
And the hills are all cover'd with sheep.''

"Well, well, go & play till the light fades away
And then go home to bed.''
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh'd
  And all the hills echoed

I love this poem because the poem is itself so innocent. Yet the nurse is so complex: An adult who mediates the darkness that looms over the scene. How do you know what is un-see-able over the horizon? At best you have a nurse and not, say, a regulatory agency. (Sorry, I'm just back from Isenberg's Freedom to Connect and it's still, well, looming over me. In a good way.)[Technorati tags: google blogs f2c WilliamBlake]