Let's clear up the other big Watergate mystery

Now that we know to a fair certainty who Deep Throat was, it's time to have modern science look at the tape with the 18-minute gap. I've been told by one of the engineers who examined it at the time that we could probably recover the erased sound, but we have to act soon before the tape deteriorates entirely. [Technorati tag: Nixon]

RSS and TV

Holmes Wilson of Downhill Battle's ParticipatoryPolitics.org is giving a lunchtime presentation at the Berkman Center (well, we've actually moved to a different building because the jackhammers on Mass Ave make every conversation come with its own headache) about their open source project that will enable people to watch RSS-based video. You'll download a client and be able to "tune in" to the channels you like. E.g., you might decide to see what's on the moveOn.org channgel.

Of course, you might also tune into any of the 500,000 porn channels, or fans of 24 who republish all of Series 3, or a channel showing a video of Star Wars III taped in a local theater. In order to achieve Downhill Battle's political objective — to enable citizen participation — the client will have default channels and a channel guide. They've also been doing outreach to political organizations, trying to get them to provide channels. They'll asl enable "del.icio.us-style republishing," i.e., bookmark a feed and then socialize the bookmarks.

I love the idea of making RSS feeds be browsable the way TV is because it opens it up to a much wider group of people. Add to that Downhill Battle's aim of enabling citizen voices, and I'm pretty damn enthusiastic about this. [Technorati tags: DownHillBattle media]

Infringing technologies

Wendy notices that her new Canon camera comes with a warning that it's not intended to be used to infringe on anyone's copyright.

Next to get stamped with that stupid warning: Pencils, paper, brains and the air used by speech. [Technorati tags: canon copyright digitalrights]

Chris Lydon's Open Source

I just came back from Chris Lydon's new radio-Net show, called "Open Source." Doc, Dave and I were the first guests.

Chris and his team, including long-time producer Mary McGrath, are trying to do something new. They take seriously that one-way broadcasting is the solution to a problem we no longer have. Chris is even more besotted with the Web than he sometimes lets on. He's open to ideas about how to make it more open, more Webby, more integrated with the Web. This show will be an interesting experiment...not a statement one can say about many shows you find on your radio dial.

Afterwards, Mary cracked open champagne to celebrate the first episode in Chris' new show. It was a privilege to be a little part of that.

(Here's Chris' blog entry about the show. The podcast of it should be available within hours.) [Technorati tags: media Lydon]

MT vs. WordPress

A friend of mine wants to move from Blogger and set up blogging software on her server. She's not very technical, but knows which end of an FTP to hold and has at some point in her past changed permissions on files on her server. Between Movable Type and WordPress, which do you think she's more likely to succeed at installing on her own?

David Koch missing in Vancouver

Shel Israel posts a message from Gary Bolles asking for help publicizing the fact that a friend of his, David Koch, has gone missing on a mountain in Vancouver; apparently he missed the tram down and set out to hike it. Gary is worried that the Canadian authorities are giving up their search, and he's looking for ways to encourage them to continue, including by publicizing David's plight. Time is short, so if you have any thoughts, you can reach Gary through Shel's post.

This has ended sadly. My sincere condolences to David's family. He touched many people.

Dickens: Better than I thought

I've never been much of a fan of Charles Dickens, what with his two-dimensional characters jostled about by his steam-driven plots. But I started Little Dorrit yesterday. Here's how it opens:

Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.

A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.

There was no wind to make a ripple on the foul water within the harbour, or on the beautiful sea without. The line of demarcation between the two colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not pass; but it lay as quiet as the abominable pool, with which it never mixed. Boats without awnings were too hot to touch; ships blistered at their moorings; the stones of the quays had not cooled, night or day, for months. Hindoos, Russians, Chinese, Spaniards, Portuguese, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Genoese, Neapolitans, Venetians, Greeks, Turks, descendants from all the builders of Babel, come to trade at Marseilles, sought the shade alike—taking refuge in any hiding-place from a sea too intensely blue to be looked at, and a sky of purple, set with one great flaming jewel of fire.

The universal stare made the eyes ache...

Best of all, the action in that first chapter takes place in a cave-like jail cell, hidden from the stare. Brilliant, so to speak. [Technorati tag: CharlesDickens]

Fish out of school

The normally gregarious blue gills in the lake where my family owns a house are each standing guard over their broods.

I thought about taking some of them out of the lake for the night so they could get a good sleep, but my son nixed the idea.

Star War games

Haiwatha Bray reviews four Star War games in The Boston Globe. And at last a reviewer represents my reaction to Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel: "...the games were giving me a strange new power — the ability to sleep with my eyes open." [Technorati tags: starwars games]

The generosity of Ms. or Mr. Linksys

We're in Western Massachusetts for the weekend. There's no cellphone signals out where we are, and also no water. So, I'm in a parking lot in the nearby small town where I'm picking up a very weak open wifi signal. SSID: linksys.

I don't know who this Linksys person is, but she seems to have residences everywhere! Thank you!

AOL's "Quit Now!" incentive

I can't believe I understood this correctly, but, here goes:

I have had a minimal AOL account for many years. Until wifi came around, I sometimes used it for dialing up when traveling. I haven't used it for that for years now. But two of our kids have aol email accounts as their default, so I've kept it since it was just a few bucks a month.

This month, I got a bill for $68. The customer support person carefully explained to me that that was because I've been on AIM a lot this month. For every hour over my service plan, they charge me $2.50. But, she said, had I downloaded my AIM client from www.aim.com instead of www.aol.com, it would have been free.

So, let me get this straight. If all I use is AIM, I can pay AOL about $70/month or I can get it for free. Hmm, let me think...

Hey, kids, you're about to get a great opportunity to make up new email addresses.

Go stem cells!

Bill Koslosky wonders why the blogosphere isn't jumping on the stem cell topic. " The Republicans sitting on the fence are just waiting to hear the roar of grassroots activism."

I haven't much about it because I've got absolutely nothing interesting to say about it, where "interesting" = "something you are not certain to have come across somewhere else." Further, I know people like Bill are doing an excellent job of tracking the issue and aggregating links.

Since I'm not the only thinking this way, it seems that blog numbers are particularly bad indicators of blog public opinion.

Satire is fine so long as it doesn't have a point of view

From the Washington Post:

LOS ANGELES — Posters that depicted President Bush with a Groucho Marx-style mustache and cigar were ordered torn down at a high school after a student complained.

Theater students, who had created the posters to advertise a satirical play, countered with new posters with a First Amendment message.

Principal Kenny Lee ordered 100 posters removed from the campus of El Camino Real High School in the Woodland Hills area last week on grounds that they promoted smoking and "endorsing one ideology over another."

"That's our take on the student speech and conduct," Lee said.

The school-funded posters advertised the students' play, "The Complete History of America (Abridged)," which satirizes U.S. history.

I haven't found a photo of the poster, so here's my blind re-creation. (I'm sure the HS students have better PhotoShop skills than I do.)

Feel free to supply your own captions. [Technorati tags: bush freedom groucho]

Wisdom of the crowds says M. Jackson (moon)walks

InTrade, an online market where you get to put your money where your opinions are, reports that shares on MJ being found guilty have plummeted to their lowest point ever.

Meanwhile, shares in Zarqawi will be captured are up.

Anyone want to bid on shares in David will be fatuous? [Technorati tag: knowledge]

Fast Company for sale

Fast Company's parent has put Fast Company up for sale. That makes me sad in multiple ways. And not so coincidentally, it's a reminder that corporate parents really shouldn't be called parents. (Thanks for the pointer, Halley.) [Technorati tag: media]

I will be 2 billion seconds old on 3/25/14

And I expect something nice from y'all then.

This piece of superfluity comes via TimeAndDate.com. (Thanks to Marcia Blake for the link.)

Acupuncture

This afternoon I went to an acupuncturist for the first time. Interesting experience.

I went because I've been having shoulder pain that extendsdown to my wrist. Of course, it's gotten considerably better since I made the appointment, but it still ranges from an ache to an intrusive shout of pain. Besides, I've never had acupuncture before.

The acupuncturist, trained in Shanghai, inserted about a dozen needles in my back, as well as attaching some suction cups (similar to what my people used to do with small cups and matches) and shining a heat lamp on me. I slept for 15 minutes. Then she had me flip over (well, she took the needles out first) and repeated the drill, so to speak. I slept again. Afterwards I was surprised to learn that the needles had been in a full inch; they felt more superficial than that.

At the moment, my shoulder is pain-free but my arm aches noticeably, pretty much the same as before the treatment. She wants me to come back twice more, a week apart. I will if only for the cat naps.

Besides, I believe the evidence that acupuncture works for some ills, even though I don't pretend to understand the theory behind it. (Someone once told me that it's not so much a theory as a mnemonic device. Don't know if there's any sense to that remark.)

A joke I hereby donate to Jay Leno:

"I went to an acupuncturist. She was very gentle. In fact, when she ran out of needles she switched to Post-It notes."

Hey, I said it was for Leno so it doesn't have to be funny!

[Technorati tag: acupuncture]

The size of topics

David L Marcus, recounting how a brief article about "therapeutic schools" turned into a book:

As I wrote my nine-paragraph article for U.S. News, I knew I was missing the real story. It was an increasingly familiar feeling. The newspaper and magazine journalism I did seemed superficial, a caricature, a sketch that reflected some editor's idea of an issue. This time the feeling obsessed me. I decided to write a book about teenagers who get themselves into jams... [p. 32, Brown Alumni Monthly, , "Close to Home," March/April 2005, pp. 30-45]

We're seeing discourse assume a more "natural" shape now that the bonds of the physical have been loosened. Encyclopedias have 10x as many articles that tend to be shorter. Topics that cost too much newsprint get spun out at length in electrons. I find this fascinating. [Technorati tag: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

Wikipedia and critical thinking

From Jimmy Wales, on a mailing list, talking about someone criticizing Wikipedia because (they claim) students read it uncritically:

Wikipedia invites critical dialogue with the text in a way that Britannica never could. I mean this not only in the metaphorical sense of "dialogue" — in that you can review the history of a Wikipedia article, and the discussion page, and thus come to a more informed understanding of theeditorial choices that were made. But I also mean this in a literal sense: with Wikipedia, you can simply click to ask the authors aquestions, and they will actually answer you. You can leave a note on individual author pages, or on the talk page of the article, or you can even edit the article itself.

What encyclopedia in history ever supported the notion of critical analysis so thoroughly?

[Technorati tags: wikipedia EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

XP networking fix of last resort

I seem to go through periods when attempts to access a computer on my home network gives this error msg from XP:

"... is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions. The network path was not found."

Google tells me I am not alone. After trying many many different fixes, this time changing node types worked. No, I don't know what a node type is, but neither do I much care. The solution may work for you if you meet the following condition:

Go to one of the computers that's not accessible. In a command box type "ipconfig /all". (If the results scroll off the screen, instead type "ipconfig /all | more" and use the space bar to scroll.) Look for "NodeType." If it's not "Hybrid," you may have found your trouble. (I'm not spelling this out step by step because if you don't know to do this stuff, you shouldn't attempt the fix.)

Here's a discussion thread that explains how you can change the node type by editing the registry. Note that editing the registry is a scary, scary thing that can kill your PC dead, so don't do it unless you know what you're doing.

Also please note that there are lots of reasons that you may be getting that message. Google it and you'll find many other less drastic solutions, including remembering to share some folders, turning on the file and print sharing client, and making sure the squirrel has left your computer for the summer (it's a long story). Only edit your registry if all else fails. (Final disclaimer: This seems to have worked for me, but in an hour I may find out that I've hosed my entire system.)

Or - allow me - Get a Mac. [Technorati tags: xp networking nodetype]

The shape of the long tail

In a conversation with Erica George at the Berkman she pointed out that the demographics of Live Journal don't always represent one's experience of Live Journal — the demographics say that teenage girls are the largest users, but if you're a 25 year old, your social group there may not look that way at all.

Which raises an issue about the way the "long tail" is pictured. Clay's charts are accurate depictions of his data, but they have a mythic power that's misleading: The long tail looks like, well, a long tail when in fact it's a fractal curlicue of relationships. It's more like a squirrel's tail than a monkey's. When marketing folks don't understand that, they confuse the long tail with an opportunity to do one-to-one marketing, treating each person as a "market of one," instead of seeing that the ones are in conversation with other ones. [Technorati tags: LongTail shirky blogs EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

The cure to information overload is more information

The power of tags shows that the way to manage information overload is more information. That's what the doomsayers of the 90's — Information Anxiety! Information Tidal Wave! — didn't foresee. [Technorati tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous tags]

Apple the bully

Alex Beam, a Boston Globe columnist who frequently makes me uncomfortable because of the personal nature of his attacks, today holds his fellow journalists' feet to the fire for not making a bigger deal about Apple's suit against Nicholas Ciarelli, a blogger who published "trade secrets."

Ciarelli is accused of doing exactly what reporters all over America are supposed to be doing: finding and publishing information that institutions don't want to reveal. Do you think the Pentagon would have released additional details about football hero Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire in Afghanistan unless pressed by Washington Post reporters? No, I don't think so either. To think that a 19-year-old man should face trial for engaging in behavior that is the cornerstone of our democracy is sickening.

He then uses this failure to attack one of his consistent targets, Harvard, this time because the Nieman Foundation hasn't taken a stand on the issue.

Of course, Beam tilts the playing field by introducing Ciarelli as a "19-year-old journalist," not as a blogger. The last thing I want to do is open up that fruitless debate — remind me to blog about Eleanor Rosch's prototype theory some more — and I don't know if bloggers should have precisely the same protections as journalists. So I ask the question differently: What's better for our democracy? And in this case, having a Big Company sue a Little Guy for publishing stuff that they wouldn't have sued a Big Company like The Globe for strikes me as bad for democracy. [Technorati tags: apple media ciarelli blogs]

A really bad pun

Q: Why don't peanuts fly coach?

A: Not enough legume.

NigerianAmerican scam spam

David Miller, my literary agent, passes along the first Nigerian-style "419" spam scam I've seen that uses a dead American as the source of the supposed millions:

It is obvious that this proposal will come to you as a suprise. This is because we have not met before but I am inspired to send you this email by the huge fund transfer opportunity that will be of mutual benefit to the two of us.

However, I am Barrister Phillip Andrews,the personal attorney to the late Senator Paul lane Wellstone, a Citizen of the United states and he was into politics.

On the 25th of October 2002, my client,his wife and their three children were involved in a fatal Plane Crash near Eveleth-Virginia Municipal Airport.

Unfortunately they all lost their lives including other people in the Plane.Since then I have made several enquiries to several Embassies to locate any of my clients extended relatives, this has also proved unsuccessful.

After these several unsuccessful attempts, I decided to trace and locate any member of his family but of no avail, hence I contacted you.

I contacted you to assist in repartrating the money and property left behind by my client since I have no place to locate any of his relatives. I can easily convince his bank in the Europe with my legal practice that you are the only surviving relation of my client.Otherwise the Estate he left behind will be confiscated or declared unserviceable by the bank where this huge deposits were lodged.

Particularly, My late client had an account with one of the banks in Europe valued at about US$9.3Million...[etc.]

Paul Wellstone??? Well, we already knew these people have no shame.

By the way, the return address is to the .az (Ajerbijan) country code. [Technorati tag: spam]

The curse of friends

Marilyn "World's Smartest Person" vos Savant today in Parade agrees with a letter writer that it's reasonable to drop friends who curse. Writes vos Savant:

I notice that none of my friends use bad language! I guess I've never found an interesting person with a foul mouth.

Wow. Some of my best friends curse like sailors in a croc pond. And some of the best writers do also. Heck, I even know a chief blogging officer who's been known to have a mouth on him, and no one has ever ever called him not interesting. [Technorati tag: misc]

Restaurant advice ripped from today's best sellers

I enjoyed Kottke's riff... [Technorati tag: humor]

Head-slapper

Here's a puzzle I read in A Beautiful Mind — wow, is the movie a lie! — as expressed at The Ultimate Puzzle Site:

Consider a road with two cars, at a distance of 100 kilometers, driving towards each other. The left car drives at a speed of forty kilometers per hour and the right car at a speed of sixty kilometers per hour. A bird starts at the same location as the right car and flies at a speed of 80 kilometers per hour. When it reaches the left car it turns its direction, and when it reaches the right car it turns its direction again to the opposite, etcetera.

The question is: How far does the bird fly?

I'm going to give you two hints:

FIRST HINT: If you're filling up a page with complex formulae, you're going wrong.

Scroll down for the next spoiler. (This is for those of you readi1ng this as an RSS feed.)

SECOND HINT: Select between the X's to see the hint:
X     The two cars are an hour apart     X

Scroll down for solution.

SOLUTION: Select between the X's to see the answer:
X The cars take an hour to reach each other. That's supposed to be the easy part. That means the bird is flying for an hour at 80km/hour. Hence, the bird flies 80km. X

No, I didn't get the answer. [Technorati tag: puzzle]

Gamers' machines

Steam, the obnoxious wave of the future when it comes to delivering games, has been asking players to participate in a hardware survey. You can see the 1,000,000+ results tabulated here. You'll see a profile of what the power-hungry side of the market looks like: Lots of RAM, lots of disk, lots of cycles.

Marketers take note: The amount of installed HD space is far higher than the amount of unused HD space. It'd be a good time to launch those teradrives you're stockpiling... [Technorati tag: games]

Measure twice, cut once, backup three times

Today I found out why I make two backups every night. It's because, sure as snow gets in your boots, when you really really need a backup, one of them is going to turn out to be corrupt.

Fanaticism has its rewards.

Globe editorial: Good until that last drop

The Boston Globe has an editorial today that gets past the usual MSM condescension towards blogs...right up until the last paragraph.

Because The Globe — owned by the NY "Behind The" Times — after a few days locks its content away safe from the prying eyes of the populace, here's the editorial in its entirety:

Virtual virtues

'Blog" has A strikingly uninspiring sound, as if it were a cousin of blah-blah-blah — a heavy stream of words without much sparkle. But blogs are lighting up the Internet, and the field is getting crowded.

One definition of blog, short for weblog, is that it is a personal journal published on the web. But bloggers aren't talking to themselves. They're starting, joining, and changing public conversations about politics, culture, commerce, and people's personal lives.

Even more striking are the virtual connections among blogs, a dense forest of links, referrals, and attacks that lead from one blog to the next, forming seemingly endless branching streams. Often, who bloggers are and what they do for a living doesn't matter as much as the power of their persuasion.

Some blogs are bogged down with news only a mother could care about. Others are written by passionate polemicists who see the world's trends and flaws in ways that are missed by others. They are unregulated and often undisciplined, letting a thousand unverified opinions bloom in the carefree belief that the participatory nature of blogs will eventually correct any errors.

Now the blogosphere, the vast electronic village square, is being invaded by some big mouths. Columnist Arianna Huffington has just launched her own multi-voiced blog, a place where the famous can sound off: from Walter Cronkite telling the Democratic Party to get its act together to Massachusetts's own Democratic congressman, Ed Markey, writing, ''I wonder how many North Korean nuclear weapons we will have to discover in order for this administration to conclude we can no longer continue to preach nuclear temperance from a barstool."

Recently The New York Times reported it is exploring the possibility of creating a Times blog ''that promotes a give-and-take with readers while satisfying the standards of our journalism."

Other newspapers are already there. For example, the Reading Eagle in Pennsylvania hosts blogs written by the paper's staff, the mayor of Reading, and area residents.

It must be a little daunting to the bloggers — something like what happens when a funky neighborhood with a sleeper reputation becomes gentrified by a parade of new arrivals. The hope is that fresh voices will survive — that the outraged theory-busters and hole-pokers will keep changing the ways that society talks about itself. Like voting, protesting, and debating, blogging can be a key ingredient of democracy. The trick is for the blogging pioneers to take seriously their responsibilities to the town square and resist trashing it with self-indulgent graffiti. That would improve the neighborhood for everyone.

Damn that last paragraph. The writer doesn't even have the guts to come out and say who hopes that "fresh voices will survive." Either way, the rest of that sentence undoes the good work of the third paragraph by conflating blogging with "outraged theory busting" and poking holes. The pendulum swings back and we get an uplifting association of blogging with the pillars of democracy. Finally, back the blade swooshes and we get two sentences that pull the editorial from the brink of concluding on a positive note about blogging. Once again, the mainstream media feels it must lecture us "blogging pioneers" (when there are more than 10,000,000 of us, do we still count as pioneers?) about "taking seriously" our "responsibilities." We are told that we have to resist our urge to trash the town square, to spray it with graffiti, to be self-indulgent. We "pioneers" should be more like the newbies who are gentrifying our little village: The Huffington blog where famous "big mouths" get to talk, the maybe-someday NY Times blog, and the Reading Eagles blog where respectable people like journalists and the major speak.

Note to Globe: You, Huffington, Walter Cronkite, the NY Times and the Mayor of Reading are all welcome in our blogosphere. But your concern that your high-toned bigness might just drown out our wee voices is misplaced. The blogosphere isn't a town the professionals can buy up; it's an infinite landscape that will have towns of every sort. We little, irresponsible bloggers are going to continue to find one another and delight in one another. And now and then we're also going to drop in on the upscale respectable towns — well, not the gated ones, of course — and, yes, sometimes we'll be carrying cans of spray paint. But we damn well will not be daunted.

An that's my condescending lecture to The Globe. See how it feels, Globey? [Technorati tags: msm bostonglobe blogs]

Quicktime without the cruft

Applehas turned the default download of Quicktime into a full download of iTunes. If you want to get Quicktime and only Quicktime, go here. (And when you install it, carefully check the default MIME types Quicktime takes over.)

The NY Times world of pain

I just heard (!) that the Times is going to start charging $50/year to read its op-ed columnists. (That will also get you access to their archives.) I feel their pain, even as I think it's the wrong decision.

The Times is watching its value erode. Electronic distribution is only going to become a bigger part of the picture, its readership is exulting in the exposes of the failures of the MSM to provide full and accurate coverage — the real story about the Newsweek brouhaha is why we are so eager to hear about ways the MSM is failing — and the authority of The Times is being challenged by a new news architecture that denies the necessity of having gatekeepers at all. In this face of all this confusion, the Times has made some smart moves, including giving a backdoor to permalinks to its articles and moving towards dynamically building "topic pages" that aggregate information.

This new move, however, is the salmon trying to swim up a perpendicular waterfall. By making us pay to read Krugman, Friedman, et al., the Times asserts the value of its Big Fish experts against the blogging plankton. But what they're actually doing is withdrawing the authority that those experts were earning in the blogosphere through the power of their speech. Krugman, for example, is 10 times more important as a voice on the Web than as Rapunzel locked in a tower.

Not everything has to be free, and I'm all in favor of The Times making money. But not at the cost of its value. With this move, the Paper of Record is on its way to becoming the Paper of What-Ever-Happened-To? [Technorati tags: nytimes msm]

Ross Mayfield in the comments makes the excellent point that we're likely to see columnists become bloggers in order to rejoin the fray. We can only hope.

Meanwhile, Joi is worrying that his blog has changed focus and mood without him being aware of it. Rebecca does some excellent bucking up. Here's mine: Yo, Joi! Your blog reflects you and you don't ever have to worry about being boring. You're just otherly interesting. So, buck up, muh friend!

AKMA's good stuff

There's just a whole bunch o' goodness over at AKMA's these days, including comments on why anyone would take the Star Wars twaddle seriously, a way not to take Star Wars seriously, a discussion of the difference between narratives and narrative theology, and a new drawing by Pippa. What a terrific blog. [Technorati tag: akma]

Dan Bricklin has started podcasting a series explaining software licensing issues, especially Open Source. I haven't heard it yet, but obviously Dan knows this stuff. Sounds like a good way to get your pointy-haired boss up to speed on "All this open sauce malarky."

Light blogging day on Friday

I'm on a 7am flight to NYC on Friday and will spend the day visiting possible publishers of my book. I will be delivering fully dressed geese and money clips as mementos. That's how things get done in the big city, my friend!

Pervasive broadband in schools

According to The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in March of this year, supplemented by eMarketer, 93% of instructional rooms in public schools have Internet access, a serious rise from just 64% in 1999 and only 3% in 1994. And, the number of schools with broadband connectivity has risen to 95% in 2003.

...The report also determines that as Net connectivity rises in the public school system, the ratio of students to instructional computers has declined. In 1998, the ratio was 12-to-1, but by 2003 that ratio was 4-to-4.

Center for Media Research

The state of digital ID

If you want to catch up with what's going on, read Kim Cameron's whitepaper (even thought it's a screen-hostile PDF) and this article by John Fontana. (Thanks to the DigitalID World newsletter.) [Technorati tag: digitalid]

Can games be art?

I went to Steve Johnson's book signing event at the Harvard Bookstore tonight. (I've blogged about his book here.) He talked engagingly for 30 minutes and then took questions. So, I asked: While some books clearly count as art, could the same ever happen to some video games? He replied that, yes, he thought so, but it wasn't going to be via narrative. It will be more like architecture, he said, in which the aesthetic value has to do with building complex and beautiful places. He thinks The Sims and Sim City by Wil Wright approach that degree of aesthetic quality already. He also points out that it took a hundred years for Dickens to be appreciated as more than a writer of entertainments. (I'm still not convinced about Dickens, but bought Little Dorrit while I was there on Steve's recommendation.)

There's no doubt that video games (e.g., Myst) can be pretty. But beautiful? The truly remarkable thing is that we don't even know where to look. As Steve says, the first game we're willing to call art may be architecturally beautiful, but I think it might instead be narrative. Or some mix that hasn't been discovered yet. We may well argue as fiercely about whether it's a game as about whether it's art.

That's what makes this such a wonderful time: Our ignorance is so thorough and our capacity to be surprised is so deep.

[Technorati tags: SteveJohnson games ebigfy]

By the way, it turns out that Steve is the next speaker in the series that brought me to Naples and Capri. Lucky students, lucky Steve!

And one of the grad students, Gianluca Baccanico, has just launched his own English-language blog where he is going to explore the ideas in the book he;s writing.

Four things I'm sick of

A woman just called, asked for me by name, and began her spiel. John Kerry has introduced the Kids Come First bill to expand health care coverage, and would like me to add my name to the other 600,000 citizens who are "co-sponsoring" it. Before I can say OK, she continues that Sen. Kerry would appreciate it if I would pledge one penny for every thousand (million? hundred?) uninsured kid — 11,000 pennies — to continue the campaign to get one million "co-sponsors."

I know it's shameful that a modern, wealthy society has such unequal distribution of health services. I don't know if Kerry's bill is the best way to go, but I'm willing to "co-sponsor" it because it's better than what we currently have. So I agreed to be put down as a supporter. (You expect me to become an expert in health care policy before I back a bill? Not gonna happen.)

But I also know that I am sick to death of bills with emotive names, of marketing-driven twists of language that turn supporters into "co-sponsors," of ending every political statement by begging for cash, and of John Kerry: When you're beaten by the worst president in modern history — a man who lied us into a war and was caught at it, a man who is poisoning our kids' planet — you shouldn't show your face for a whole lot longer. [Technorati tag: kerry]

Iran election blog

OpenDemocracy, Hoder and others have started a blog — Iran Scan — to cover the upcoming election in Iran in June. I'm guessing that it's going to be one of the very best sources of information about that event. It'll sure beat the round-up articles we'll see in the MSM. [Technorati tags: globalvoices iran]

Jake Shapiro

Jake Shapiro of PRX is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk.

PRX is the Public Radio Exchange, a service that enables public radio stations to find audio reports posted by producers. Public radio's audience is increasing (currently 30M listeners per week). How can it embrace the new ecology? Program directors have been gatekeepers, but many are open to the idea that through the Net they could provide more than 24 hours worth of programming per day. (You can see Public Radio's statement of values here.) They feel threatened by time-shifting, the growth of

Chris Lydon asks if there's any point in going through the stations instead of just posting podcasts. Jake, who was a producer of Chris' previous radio show, says that it's not an either/or. "Public radio is primed to plug in."

Chris: Have you thought about PRX becoming a packager of podcasts, filtering the thousands of them?

Jake: That's what we're doing. PRX hopes to have many people creating playlists.

Rebecca MacKinnon: You could do Greensboro101 but for podcasting.

Much discussion ensues. A few random points:

Jake: Program directors can become a "feed-j."

Jake: You could have the pledge drive feed that interrupts and asks you to buy flowers for your mother, or you could pay to get the pledge-free feed. Or there could be subscriptions and/or sponsorships.

Jake wonders what the legality and good practices of the redistribution of feeds will be. He says the only terms of use for a feed that he's seen is on NPR.org. He points out that Cory recently blogged a similar question. [Technorati tag: berkman]

The cost per decabit

Mark Dionne points out that the old toy computer, Geniac, is sellling on eBay for $305, whereas he bought a new real computer for $250.

Tagging the Star

Alexandra Samuel posts the full text of her story on tagging that ran in The Toronto Star. Good story either way. And, of course, you have to love the way in which posting the full story is getting to be common. [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy]

Personal Democracy Forum

The tag for those blogging from or about the Personal Democracy confab is pdf2005. Check for updates at Technorati... [Technorati tag: pdf2005]

Chris Lydon, back on the air, and on the Net

You can hear Pilot #2 of Chris Lydon's new radio program, Open Source, which launches officially on May 30. This pilot features Global Voices.

Chris and his long-time producer, Mary McGrath, are trying to bust the radio medium open, weaving its conversations into and through the Net. They're in the rare position of knowing the MSM inside out and being true believers about the Net. It's going to be fascinating to watch Open Source develop. [Technorati tags: ChrisLydon GlobalVoices media]

Yes, the glaciers are melting

George Monbiot has a piece, published by The Guardian, showing exactly how a scientist — David Bellamy — came to the get a letter published in New Scientist that claims that 555 of the 625 glaciers being monitored are in fact growing in size. That figure is crap. Bellamy is president of the Conservation Foundation, the Wildlife Trusts, Plantlife International and the British Naturalists' Association, so his statement has been picked up all over the place. Unfortunately, it's total crap.

Monbiot traces it back to a web site touting a book published by the paranoid demagogue Lyndon Larouche. The "555" apparently was Bellamy's mistyping of the site's figure that "55%" of glaciers are increasing, which is itself unsourced and false.

Fascinating article by Monbiot. Depressing conclusion about the reliability of big-time science journals. Heartening conclusion about the truth getting out anyway. (Thanks to Gary Nexcerpt Stock for the pointer.) [Technorati tags: science GlobalWarming]

My doctor is a hypochondriac

When I travel, I carry a heavy knapsack on my left shoulder, and for the past two weeks, I've been traveling a lot. I've also had a persistent ache in my left shoulder, occasionally in my left pec, and persistent aches and pains in my left arm. I've had no shortness of breath and no sweating. Ibuprofen does a good job relieving the pain. So does changing my position. In other words, I am showing all the marks of a muscular/skeleton problem and only one of a heart attack.

Nevertheless, when I called Harvard Vanguard, our excellent (and impossibly expensive) health plan, to see if I could get an appointment with an acupuncturist or possibly a muscle-shoveler, they had me come in for an EKG.

They knew I wasn't haven't a heart attack. I knew I wasn't having a heart attack. But they're hypochondriacs. So, I had an EKG confirm that I wasn't having a heart attack.

I appreciate the care. I appreciate more that they were reasonable enough to let me wander in when it was convenient instead of sending an ambulance shrieking to our house. But the doctor - friendly, professional, attentive - spilled the beans. He told me about a guy who came in with unalarming symptoms, passed his EKG, and dropped dead 2 hours later. "They sued the pants off of us."

I admit I'm an alarmist. If I get ink on my fingers, I assume it's skin cancer. But I'm also a rational alarmist and can usually talk myself down off the ledge, at least since the time in grad school when I had a doctor inform me that that lump in my chest was a rib. Our health care system is far worse. It's a fear-based alarmist hypochondriac. The result is that I get medical care that most of the world would die for, so to speak. But the system is optimized badly.

(By the way, if I drop dead of a heart attack in two hours, nothing I've written here should be construed as preventing or inhibiting my survivors from suing the clinic's pants off.) [Technorati tag: healthcare]

Speaking of health care, Dr. Bill Koslosky points to an NPR story and a report in Time Canada that even some Republicans are getting behind a bill that would expand the stem cell lines currently available for research. Bill wonders if this might occasion W's first veto.

Darknet: The Installments

JD Lasica is beginning to post long installments from his entertaining new book, Darknet: Hollywood's War against the Digital Generation. First up: The story of some teen film-makers. He'll also be posting new material. [Technorati tag: drm]

Lamest Star Wars tie-in ever

Back of the Frosted Flakes box (click for large image)

Jedi Spoon next to Jedi Google Tchochke for size comparison

[Technorati tag: starwars]