TCC 2002



May 21-23

Salon | My favorite author, my worst interview

This can't go on much longer, but I'll give it the ol' lesbo communist try. "Are any aspects of the two books particularly Mormon?"

"Not really, except in the sense that they're written by me and I'm a committed, believing Mormon. There are Mormons who think I'm the devil because they're unable to tell the difference between Mormon doctrine and right-wing conservative views. And I find it extremely discomfiting that, really to a shocking degree, love of money has pervaded Mormon society. It's something that as a people we have great cause to repent of. I think it will lead to our condemnation in the eyes of God. When I talk that way, there are some people who are extremely troubled because they think I'm saying that they're wicked. And they're correct -- I am."

Salon | My favorite author, my worst interview

Card laughs. "Well, let's put it this way. Most of the program of both the left and the right is so unbelievably stupid it's hard to wish to identify myself with either. But on economic matters, I'm a committed communitarian. I regard the Soviet Union as simply state monopoly capitalism. It was run the way the United States would be if Microsoft owned everything. Real communism has never been tried! I would like to see government controls expanded, laws that allow capitalism to not reward the most rapacious, exploitative behavior. I believe government has a strong role to protect us from capitalism. I'm ashamed of our society for how it treats the poor. One of the deep problems in Mormon society is that really for the last 75 years Mormons have embraced capitalism to a shocking degree."

Locus Online: Neal Stephenson interview

We had heard somewhere that Tom Clancy had made like $17 million in a year. So we thought, 'Let's give this a try.' The whole idea was that 'Stephen Bury' would be a successful thriller writer and subsidize my pathetic career under the name Neal Stephenson. It ended up going the other way. I would guess most of the people who have bought the Stephen Bury books have done so because they know I've written them. It just goes to show there's no point in trying to plan your career

Locus Online: Neal Stephenson interview

''[When I wrote The Big U] it was July, and the weather was boiling hot and humid. There was no air conditioning, so I'm sitting there in my underwear, pounding this thing out as fast as I can go. The plastic backing of the carbon film ribbon was actually softening in the heat, and if it stopped moving, it would adhere to the guides it was threaded through and seize up, and I would have to completely disassemble the typewriter and get it unstuck. So there was this huge incentive not to ever stop typing. That manuscript is full of these long, rambling, incoherent sentences, which were probably just me typing in order to keep the ribbon moving! Later, of course, it came in for some heavy editing

Locus Online: Neal Stephenson interview

''In Cryptonomicon, some of the characters have been going along and they've discovered a little crack in the sidewalk, it splits wide open, they fall through it, and they're in this whole universe that they didn't imagine. It happens for them in different ways. The clearest case is Bobby Shaftoe, who is minding his own business having a career in the Marine Corps and suddenly everything becomes very, very strange for him. It takes him a long time to figure out what's going on, and he never totally gets the whole story

C R Y P T O N O M I C O N

Q: How does the writing process work for you?

A: A good deal of the work that I do takes place in the background, which is a computer-ese way of putting it. It is a process that runs quietly at an unconscious level while I am doing other things and that goes on 24 hours a day.

The actual putting of words on paper might come out to 2-3 hours a day. I’ve found that from long experience that the best way to facilitate that process is to do that 2-3 hours of putting words on paper then stop and do something as completely different from writing as I possibly can. Specifically, to get it off my conscious mind. That can be just about anything. For me, what works is doing something of a practical nature. Playing around with technology is a convenient choice because I know how to do it and I can get the stuff I need pretty easily. Anything to get the hands busy and take the mind off the actual work in progress

Q: Your next novel Quicksilver, goes further into the history of cryptography and its role. What can readers expect? A: Quicksilver is set 300 years ago, and it’s still a work in progress. Since its not done, I am still pretty reluctant talk about it in specifics. It is a continuing effort to go farther back into the history of these technologies and to think about how they formed the way the technological world is structured today.
Q: Will we see a relationship between the characters in CRYPTONOMICON and Quicksilver?
A: There are familial connections between the 2 books.
Q: This is the book you are writing with a fountain pen.
A: I’ve written every word of it so far with fountain pen on paper. Part of the theory was that it would make me less long-winded, but it hasn’t actually worked. I think it has improved the quality of the actual work somewhat, simply because it is actually easier to edit something on paper than on screen. So usually every page of the original manuscript has been gone over 2 or 3 times before it goes into the computer and then when I type it into the computer that’s another pass again where I can make changes if I want to.
Q: What about the future of Crypto?
A: We’re in a strange moment right now where everyone who uses the internet seems to be cognoscente at some level that it has its weaknesses from a security standpoint. So if you sit down and talk to most peo

NYPress - Culture - Mimi Kramer - Vol. 15, Iss. 13

Oh, I mustn't sit here, I must sit there; I can’t wash dishes, I’m afraid of foam; I couldn’t possibly work, I have a terror of energy–they’re everywhere, it seems: The People Who Simply Can’t. And they have a simple thing in common: they always get their own way.

NYPress - Culture - Mimi Kramer - Vol. 15, Iss. 13

I came straight home from The Dazzle, Richard Greenberg’s three-character play about the Collyer Brothers (at the Gramercy Theater through May 12) and threw out all the plastic shopping bags that had been mounting up in the pantry closet. Then I went at the piles of newspapers waiting to be gone through–two in the kitchen and three or four on the hallway bookcase. I was heading for another mound, on the living room futon, but got distracted by the laundry cart and sorted some socks instead. Such is the transforming power of art.

Paul Boutin : Bloggers vs Journalists

Hard to believe, but the spat between online weblog writers (“bloggers” for those just tuning in) and mainstream media pros is nearing the finale of its third season. Bloggers vs Journos is easily the most entertaining show on the Web – it’s less like the Super Bowl, more like the weekly running gags between two sitcom characters who can’t admit they’ve got the hots for one another.

Everything isn't under control.

iMac already looking old. Steve Jobs in Japan, its kind of like Tarzan in the city. The iMac looks so hopelessly out of fashion compared to Japanese industrial design, especially towards techno gadgets like cell phones. That's really the main problem of being fashionable, somewhere someone else is much more fabulous than you are. The retro design doesn't help much either, it just reinforces the past-my-prime look and having Steve stand next to it doesn't help the situation much either. I want to own something high-tech and futuristic on the outside as well as the inside. Steve, ditch your uber cool design nerds and get cracking on something I can hang from the ceiling, submerge in a fish tank, or hide behind the drywall

gladwell dot com / Examined Life

"People have this idea that there are those who learn better than others, can get further on less effort,"Sloboda says. "On average, our data refuted that. Whether you're a dropout or at the best school, where you end up can be predicted by how much you practice."

gladwell dot com / Examined Life

Sloboda found another striking similarity among the "musical" children. They all had parents who were unusually invested in their musical education. It wasn't necessarily the case that the parents were themselves musicians or musically inclined. It was simply that they wanted their children to be that way. "The parents of the high achievers did things that most parents just don't do," he said. "They didn' t simply drop their child at the door of the teacher. They went into the practice room. They took notes on what the teacher said, and when they got home they would say, Remember when your teacher said do this and that. There was a huge amount of time and motivational investment by the parents."

I think the reason for this penomenon is simple. Up until about two years ago, the Net still constituted an alternative to the world outside the net. That is to say, it offered things you couldn't find anywhere else: a flourishing of individual opinion, experience and eccentricity that no one had seen before.

With time, however, the Net was colonized by everything it used to exclude. The Net is now basically a place to buy things or to read the newspaper you used to subscribe to. It's your radio station and your Tower Records. It's your porn theater and your bank, your stock broker and your phone sex line. Etc.

You can chart this change fairly accurately by charting the prevalence of Flash-enabled sites, since Flash is used by almost every commerce site I run across. Flash is also significant in that it signalled the replacement of text as the medium of communication with the Net equivalent of television commercials. This is why I consider Flash the single most malignant influence on the Net. Now before the thousands of Flash developers out there start flaming me, let me say I've seen some cool implementations of Flash, but 90% of the implementations really are just animated frou frou that get in the way of accessing content and information.

Indeed, one can say that what happened to the Net is that it was transformed from the Net into just another TV commercial taking place on your computer.

Of course the old Net

News about Air Force at StrategyPage.com's How to Make War.

March 28, 2002; An analysis has confirmed that the December incident in which a US bomb killed three US soldiers and a number of Afghan allies was the result of an operator error of the GPS used to determine the target's location. The error is understandable, and would even be funny except that people were killed. An Air Force combat controller (forward observer) was on the front lines spotting targets. He used a Precision Lightweight GPS (which the troops call a "plugger") to calculate the target location. A few minutes before the deadly mistake, he used his PLGPS to determine the target's location in degrees, minutes, and seconds so it could be attacked by Navy F-18s. Then, he recalculated the position in "decimal fractions of a degree" which is the way that the Air Force wants it. The battery was low, so he replaced it, unaware that the PLGPS is programmed to calculate its own position when turned on. In a moment of confusion, he gave these coordinate (i.e., his own) to the B-52 bomber that dropped the fatal missile instead of the target coordinates. The Pentagon has said that this episode indicates that the troops need more training with their equipment before using it in combat, as the troops were not as familiar with the newly-issued gear as they should have been.--Stephen V Cole

Silicon Valley | 03/27/2002 | Journalistic Pivot Points

I was blogging a session on wireless technology, and wrote something about SkyPilot, one of the presenting companies. Duncan Davidson, SkyPilot's CEO, finished his presentation and sat on the podium, reading on his laptop, while other people talked.

Then, in the Q&A, he corrected something I'd written in the blog. In other words, he'd caught this in near-real time and had better information (he should). I immediately posted another paragraph, which began, "I've been corrected...."

Whoa. I'm still not entirely sure what happened. But I do know this. My journey in journalism hit a pivot in that moment. Maybe journalism itself hit a pivot point, as pretentious as that sounds.

1989 Miles Hochstein

I don't think I knew what I was doing in this year. I was a graduate student, taking courses, but I can't remember much from this period, except a general feeling of directionlessness and depression that permeated everything.

1986 Miles Hochstein Answer: I was living a false life, walking around with a kippa on my head and thinking "Shulamit Aloni is right about everything!" (She was a left wing Kinneset member at the time). Meanwhile my friend David was dying or had just died of cancer. Furthermore, I knew I couldn't live in Israel, but I couldn't admit it to myself. Furthermore, I needed to become a temporary resident (the document above) but I didn't want to. I lived in a world that was not mine, and that I could not understand. I was a walking bundle of nervous contradictions, political confusions, and personal uncertainty. I knew that I hated the religious/orthodox life that I was leading, or the fact that I was in Israel, or something, but it was terribly painful to admit these things to myself and to face up to the fact that the choice I had made to live in Israel, in the religious community I had chosen, was the wrong choice for my life.

Question: So you don't like what you see in this photo and document?

Answer: I remember what it felt like, and it seems like a sad time, a cul de sac. There was no apparent way to move my life forward. Something had to change, and soon. But at this moment the future was almost completely obscure.

Geek.com Geek News - iMacs: Design, Inspiration, and Hype There have been a number of articles posted regarding the design, inspiration, and hype (er, blunder releasing the Time Magazine article early). An article from the Independent.co.uk News website interviews Jonathan Ive, Apple's chief of design, about his two years of secretly designing the new iMac. But did the inspiration come from a walk in a vegetable patch with Steve Jobs, or did it come from a Belgian Web designer who posted a sketch that looks very ... well, similar, to the newly released iMac? That can be debated. What isn't up for debate is the "kerfuffle" that Time Canada caused by publishing the magazine's exclusive account of the new iMac 12 hours too soon. The New York Times has an article about how Time's deal with Jobs was broken and the "hyped" thunder was stolen from the Macworld announcement. I bet the thunder blunder doesn't happen again.

INTERNATIONAL BLOODY MURDER

No power in the world can stop you from remembering”, Carmille told the students, “that you are the heirs of Cartesian thought, of the mysticism and mathematics of Pascal, of the clarity of the writers of the sixteenth century…All this is written in your soul, and no-one can control your soul, because your soul belongs only to God.” Think about Carmille’s words. For there are technologies at work in the twenty first century world which make Thomas Watson’s Hollerith business look like child’s play - and there has never been a greater need for real thinking.

INTERNATIONAL BLOODY MURDER

Information technology is the very symbol of twenty first century civilization. It is also the technology which, more than any other, symbolises what Martin Heidegger called the ‘enframing’ of human beings: their reduction to statistical units in vast labor and marketing processes; to the status of “utter availability and sheer manipulability”5 IBM under Thomas Watson embodied and enacted the massive use of information for social manipulation and control. It was, as Edwin Black remarks, “gripped by a special, amoral corporate mantra: if it can be done, it should be done.” The direct consequence was Hitler’s automated genocide and the blitz in his krieg.

For the activists of today’s infowars against ‘massively organised information’ there is even a counter narrative to be told. The most astonishing hero to emerge from this history is a military technocrat by the name of Rene Carmille. A punchcard enthusiast and an originator of the Personal Identification Number (PIN code) he undertook the effort of conducting the French census by IBM punchcard on behalf of Nazi Germany. Oddly, his data was never used and Black shows how efforts to round up Jews in France relying on a traditional paper population census yielded poor results. Compared to neighbouring Holland where the punchcard data harvested a bumper crop of Jews, only a fraction of the French Jewry were ever deported to the camps. With the liberation of France it became clear that Carmille had in fact used the census results to organise and mobilise the French resistance, having gathered details of every worker, gunsmith, farmer and mechanic. Indeed he had never even collected the relevant ethnicity data - in record after record that part of the punchcard was left unpunched. Although Rene Carmille was arrested, sent to the concentration camps and died for his treason, he probably saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives by withholding and redeploying data in the service of the resistance. In telling his story Edwin Black has uncovered an Oskar Schindler for the hacker generation to claim as their own. If for his inspiration alone, read this book, then open your

Drugs Now Legal If User Is Employed

"There's no point going after some cardiac surgeon who needs some speed to keep him sharp," Hutchinson said. "That's not what the law was intended to prevent. But the more destructive drug users—the addict who spends his welfare money on crack, the guy in Harlem who smokes marijuana—that is something that we as a society must not tolerate."

According to Drug Czar John P. Walters, the legislation should have a beneficial effect on the health of the American people.

"As a result of this new law, we expect use of addictive, harmful drugs like heroin and crack—those statistically more likely to be linked to unemployment—to drop," Walters said. "Meanwhile, decent people with good jobs can continue their responsible use of milder drugs like E and cocaine in peace."

Telling A Story Weblogging, or blogging, has emerged as a genuinely new literary/journalistic form. The narrative structure of a weblog is that of a daily diary. The style is one of commentary -- that is, a weblog refers to the readable Web, focuses attention on selected items, and tells a story about those items from a particular point of view.

Telling A Story Tale Of A Project WeblogFor knowledge workers in cyberspace, as I've said, the venue consists of a messaging medium (e-mail) and a publishing medium (the readable Web). At the intersection of these two media there is a niche for a storyteller to occupy. The story that needs telling is a project weblog. Here's a sanitized picture of what I mean.

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

IBM constantly updated its machinery and applications for the Nazis. For example, one series of punch cards was designed to record religion, national origin, and mother tongue, but by creating special columns and rows for Jew, Polish language, Polish nationality, the fur trade as an occupation, and then Berlin, Nazis could quickly cross-tabulate, at the rate of 25,000 cards per hour, exactly how many Berlin furriers were Jews of Polish extraction. Railroad cars, which could take two weeks to locate and route, could be swiftly dispatched in just 48 hours by means of a vast network of punch-card machines. Indeed, IBM services coursed through the entire German infrastructure in Europe.

Dave Winer's Scripting News Weblog

I had my own revelation about Eisner's argument. I think I can boil it down to its essence. It goes something like this. We remember the days, not long ago, when our users were stupid. They thought they were giving money to the artists. We want them to be stupid again

The New Yorker: Fact

The Germans have a special interest in Saddam's intentions. German industry is well represented in the ranks of foreign companies that have aided Saddam's nonconventional-weapons programs, and the German government has been publicly regretful. Hanning told me that his agency had taken the lead in exposing the companies that helped Iraq build a poison-gas factory at Samarra. The Germans also feel, for the most obvious reasons, a special responsibility to Israel's security, and this, too, motivates their desire to expose Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. Hanning is tall, thin, and almost translucently white. He is sparing with words, but he does not equivocate. "It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years," he said.

The New Yorker: Fact

Chemical weapons had been dropped on Halabja by the Iraqi Air Force, which understood that any underground shelter would become a gas chamber. "My uncle said we should go outside," Nasreen said. "We knew there were chemicals in the air. We were getting red eyes, and some of us had liquid coming out of them. We decided to run." Nasreen and her relatives stepped outside gingerly. "Our cow was lying on its side," she recalled. "It was breathing very fast, as if it had been running. The leaves were falling off the trees, even though it was spring. The partridge was dead. There were smoke clouds around, clinging to the ground. The gas was heavier than the air, and it was finding the wells and going down the wells."

GameSpy.com - Game Developers Conference 2002 Coverage

A Controlled Environment





Star Wars Galaxies: a meticulously crafted environment in a galaxy far far away...

Everyone at the conference was intimately familiar with the Disneyland analogy: the school of thought that says a massively multiplayer, online world should be just like Disneyland, a "controlled environment," built for the entertainment of guests and with all unsavory elements removed. Others referred to this as "a fascist state," and not always in jest.

A chunk of a recent Metafilter thread





Speaking of pop-glitch, the new Notwist album (Neon Golden) is pretty good. Unfortunately, after repeated listens, I tend to ultimately find almost all of that stuff (Dntel included), pretty flat.


posted by Marquis at 1:11 PM PST on March 18










Sapphireblue: Here's Halou's website if you don't have it already. They're on Nettwerk these days. I have't heard their new album, only We Only Love You but it's beautiful. I've heard a ton of good things about the new album though.


posted by sigma7 at 1:45 PM PST on March 18










Someone gimme a list of the first five albums I should listen to.





I suggest Amon Tobin's Supermodified and Talvin Singh's OK. Also, Ninja Tune's Xen Cuts is a great 3 cd compilation of some of the label's stuff from over the years.


posted by Ty Webb at 2:17 PM PST on March 18










What about us poor pathetic unhip middle-aged losers who only know electronica through mitsubishi commercials? Someone gimme a list of the first five albums I should listen to.





a good place to start might be with the albums and artists listed in Grooves magazine IDM 2001 Year End Poll. Of course, these are all from last year, and electronic music tends to be pretty vital -- artists tend to revisit their sound from album to album. (Autechre is a pretty good example of this.) but it's a good start. there's also a small archive of web reviews there, and i'd also recommend picking up the magazine itself, which is really pretty good (except for it's gear reviews, grrr).





i'd make more assertions about the state of IDM/experimental/fuckall music but i don't spend an excessive amount of time trainspotting or well, reading the mailing lists, or all that and whatnot, and so i'm rather likely to be yelled at by a miffed nitpicker: "What? That's not glitchcore brokenbeat! That's coreglitch beatbroken!" also i'm just not that damn knowledgable, although occasionally i like to fake it. i will say this: it's got a nice beat, and you can dance to it.


posted by fishfucker at 2:29 PM PST on March 18










Someone gimme a list of the first five albums I should listen to





this is more techno / house than idm / electronica, but:





5 artists - 5 albums / 5 mix cds





Derrick May - Innovator / Mix-up vol 5 (aka Mayday mix)


Jeff Mills - The Other Day / Mix-up vol 2 (aka Liquid rooms)


Surgeon - Force and Form / Counterbalance Collection


Green Velvet (aka Cajmere) - Green Velvet / Techno Funk


Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman) - Sheet One / Decks, EFX & 909


posted by inpHilltr8r at 2:44 PM PST on March 18










Aargh! The server ate my post. Oh well, take two.





Here's my sugeestion for a couple:


Warp Records - Routine


- compilation with Autechre, Boards of Canada, lots of other 'popular' IDM style artists


Ninja Tune Records - Xen Cuts


- great comp, more hiphop influenced


Thievery Corporation - Mirror Conspiracy


- not really electronica, but again a great intro into downtempo/acid-jazz





I also really like Tobin's IDM/jazz and Singh's tabla-infused electronica, mentioned above.


posted by sauril at 2:49 PM PST on March 18










I second The Notwist, which is only electronica to the degree that Console adds noises to the sounds of a three-piece band, but the results are enthralling, at least for a few listens. Even the reknowed Die Zeit likes them.





For laid-back mellowness, may I suggest the Gotan Project's "Revancha del Tango," which pleasantly combines classic tangos with beats. Air's "Moon Safari" is also nice in a background sort of way.





There's also a thriving sub-sub-culture of live techno jam bands, including Sound Tribe Sector 9, Disco Biscuits, Lake Trout, DJ Logic, and the New Deal.





Caveat: I have no idea if any of this stuff constitutes hip. Just thought I'd contribute some names worth plugging into Grokster.


posted by muckster at 4:43 PM PST on March 18










i like "telefon tel aviv" lots.


kinda pop-idm.


posted by juv3nal at 8:23 PM PST on March 18










Console's great stuff. A friend of mine played me 14 Zero Zero and I've been hooked ever since.


posted by sigma7 at 8:20 AM PST on March 19

Powerbook 2400: A True Tokyo Rose

Demonstrating that odd attachment to the machine, one of its most influential fans, Naritomo Mizutani, has created an entire site about the underside -- that's right, the bottom -- of the machine.

It was Mizutani's contention that the 2400 was more beautiful because its entire case had been carefully designed, not just the parts that most people see. To prove his point, he created a Web page with pictures of the underside of the 2400, which he compared to the undersides of about 100 other laptops, in particular Windows machines.

Taiwan Maker of Notebook PC's Thrives Quietly

"The reason Barry is so bullish is because he got the iMac contract," Mr. Tseng said. "Quanta was hitting the ceiling with its existing clients."
One of those clients, Dell, has prodded Quanta to move more of its production to mainland China, where labor and other costs are much lower.
Joining the exodus to China raised ticklish issues for Mr. Lam. He is a strong supporter of Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, whose party has expressed misgivings about the migration of technology and jobs from Taiwan to the mainland. Until recently, Taiwan restricted the production of notebook computers by local companies in China.
Mr. Lam's solution was to say little about Quanta's ambitions in China, while quietly laying the groundwork for an expansion. The company built a sprawling factory near Shanghai, with room for 20,000 workers. By the time Taiwan lifted the restrictions on manufacturing in China last fall, Quanta already had 2,000 people in place there.

Book blog

Anything invented before you were born is NORMAL.



Anything invented between the ages of 15 to 35 is cutting edge and very cool.



Anything invented after the age of 35 "just aint right"

redhat.com | Red Hat Support

By default, sendmail does not accept network connections from any host other than the local computer. If you want to configure sendmail as a server for other clients, please edit /etc/mail/sendmail.mc and change DAEMON_OPTIONS to also listen on network devices, or comment out this option all together. You will need to regenerate /etc/sendmail.cf by running:


[root@localhost /root]#m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/sendmail.cf



(NOTE: You must have the sendmail-cf package installed for this to work.)

redhat.com | Red Hat Support Redhat 7.1 Gotchas

The Chronicle: 3/22/2002: 'Hybrid' Teaching Seeks to End the Divide Between Traditional and Online Instruction

And some professors say that some activities -- such as delivering basic facts -- are better handled online, while some discussions and group activities are best done in person

Ananova - Face creams and preservatives are 'pickling dead bodies' Researchers say graveyards face overcrowding problems because dead bodies aren't decomposing properly.

The team of German scientists says people's use of anti-ageing creams may be causing the problem.

They also say preservatives in people's food may be helping to preserve their corpses.

Generating a program identity

Generating a program identity
Friday, 9 November 2001
Web presence Level 1: Web-based Comm. Disorders program web site
> Consider this the "entry point" to the program
> Identify the audience for this program web site
--potential students
--communications disorders scholars/practitioners
--current students
--community inside/outside of WKU

EVHEAD

What I meant was... Speaking of Kuro5hin, at the P2P Journalism panel at SXSW, Rusty mentioned that one of the problems with blogs as journalistic vehicles was their short attention spans—they flutter from one thing to the next and don't cover things in any depth. I argued that the opposite was true in many cases and the weblogs often covered stories as they unfolded or special interests over a period of time—moreso than traditional media. What I realized later was that I was thinking mostly of magazines—where a story about a company or technology (to compare to the type of stuff I write about) will come out once and rarely be mentioned again, even though it's constantly evolving. Whereas, newspapers and other hard-news type vehicles actually do have lots of follow ups about the same topic (at least when a story is hot), though they have a tendency to lose interest quickly, as well. (Anyway, don't take this comment as an indication that I want to get into that debate again.)

Red Rock Eater Digest - The Return of Antimasonism in American Political Life

I got that feeling again this afternoon. For the last few months,

in amongst my official duties, I have been reading the literature on

apocalytic social movements. I was originally inspired in this by David

Noble's book "The Religion of Technology". Noble observes, for example,

that many of the important early engineers, particularly in the United

States, were Masons, and he describes the development of a particular

kind of millennialism -- or at least a secularized form of religious

utopianism -- among engineers that became secularized and formed the

outlines of technical movements such as artificial intelligence and --

he might as well have added -- cyberspace.

Commentaries on Cheap Pens

Just this year, the world of cheap pens was revolutionized by disposable liquid-ink pens. As someone who spends hours a day writing on actual paper, I can't tell you what an improvement they are. The reason is simple: it's liquid ink, not that nasty viscous stuff that's always clotting up, and so it flows much more smoothly onto the page. They're also more entertaining than regular pens, since they include a window onto the ink reservoir. While I was travelling, I went to art supply stores in several countries looking for them, and the best was the Reynolds model, which I could only find in a single art supply store in Nice, France. (Reynolds makes a lot of other, more garden-variety pens, which are distributed more widely. Forget them.) I did find some other pens that are almost as good. The most widely distributed is the Uni-Ball Eye (called Vision in the United States), which has the advantage of coming in a range of slighly unusual saturated colors. Another good model is the Pilot V-Ball, although its barrel is a little too skinny to be comfortable. You can get a disposable fountain pen, too, the Pilot Varsity, but much like regular fountain pens it's way too much trouble.

Doing a Number on Violators

One afternoon during the data entry phase, Ball found one of his co-workers Net surfing. She was building a bookmark file in the database of Internet links to online photographs of the dead. He was dismayed.



"Stop. Don't look," Ball told her.



"She was useless for the next two days," he recalled. "All she could do was cry.

Doing a Number on Violators

A 'Hacktivist' Who Thinks in Code



Ball, 36, is a "hacktivist," employing his programming skills in the service of human rights. A sociologist by training, he has been writing computer software since high school.



"I think in code," he said.



He worked his way through graduate school at the University of Michigan by writing computer databases. His passion for dBase, Fox and Paradox code was more than matched by a sense of political outrage. He wrote his dissertation on human rights movements in Ethiopia, Pakistan and El Salvador.



When Ball found himself in El Salvador as that country's civil war was ending in 1991, he heard that a local human rights group "needed someone who could hack a database."



He volunteered.

Doing a Number on Violators

For three years, Ball traveled back and forth to Kosovo, systematically culling data on civilian deaths from refugee reports, exhumations and witness accounts. Building on that evidence, he and his colleagues compiled a database documenting the ebb and flow of "ethnic cleansing" of ethnic Albanians during the spring of 1999 in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's main republic. The statistical portrait of the displaced, missing and killed reveals the timing and ferocity of fatal blows that fell across an entire province. This numerical pattern of death and panic exonerates some people; it points toward others.



Now, the statistics that Ball calculated on a Boston white board have become evidence in a war crimes trial. On Wednesday, in an international courtroom in The Hague, Ball confronted the man he believes is responsible for the deaths--former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

When I could see the deal was exploding, I told Jean and Gino about my unpublished manuscript. They asked me if I had ever written a screenplay. I said no. So they showed me what a screenplay looks like. They told me to make the margins the same, to write 120 pages and put dramatic scenes on page 30 (the end of Act I), page 90 (the end of Act II) and end with a bang.



http://www.ocregister.com/sitearchives/2002/3/10/news/mymovie00310cci3.shtml

Jim Munroe's Archives The batteries are $6.99. I shake my head and leave the store. We visit three other stores before I find the same item for $4, after I talk the tax off of it. As we leave, Terry shrugs his shoulder and says that he would have bought it at the first place.

"And you would have gotten ripped off." I say with a smirk.

Another shrug. "So? It's not worth the trouble."

Like hell it's not, my slightly ruffled mind retorts.

What the Cultural Sector Can Learn from Enron

Like the energy industry we in the cultural sector are now dealing heavily in intangibles, and discovering that the distinction between materials, information, and money is not fixed but fluid. The new environment has intensified the "unbundling" of property rights in creative works, a phenomenon that had only begun to occur in the analog realm. As a result digital works can, like Enron's disappearing assets, easily slip through our institutional fingers. Keeping a work of art that is "born digital" is not just a matter of storing it safely and away from heat and light: it must be migrated to a new platform when the software to run it becomes obsolete or unsupported.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Reading your mouse movements

"Just by looking at the way the mouse moves, I can tell whether you are reading a web page," says Ted Selker, an MIT professor focusing on context-aware computing.
"I can tell because when you read a webpage, you do one of a couple of things. You either shovel the mouse off to the right so that it is out of the way, or you will walk down the page with your mouse," he told the BBC's Go Digital programme.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Turning into digital goldfish

If you are spending too much time on the internet and are concerned that it is affecting your concentration, you are not alone.
The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds - the same as a goldfish.
"Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things," says Ted Selker, an expert in the online equivalent of body language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

Building an Internet Culture

10. Machinery does not reform society, repair institutions, build social networks, or produce a democratic culture. People must do those things, and the Internet is simply one tool among many. Find talented people and give them the tools they need. When they do great things, contribute to your society's Internet culture by publicizing their ideas.

I, Cringely | The Pulpit

There are so many things I like about this site, which is still in beta test. For all the web logs and pictures from family vacations that one might throw on a web page, this thing actually DOES something, and it does something that is useful for more than 20 million people. Think of it as a business. Aolhistory.com needs no updating, no refreshing, it just sits there -- probably with a little banner ad -- generating revenue for Bruce Forkush for years to come. I think the guy is brilliant. I also happen to know he isn't much of a programmer. And that is where we get back to the beauty of the Internet for collaboration.



While Bruce Forkush knew he wanted a history button for AOL, he didn't know how to program one. He didn't know javascript at all, and still doesn't. Instead, like Blanche DeBois in "A Streetcar Named Desire," Bruce relied on the kindness of strangers, using various web resources to gain programming help for his project.

Gamers Fight It Out in the Street

Good players can make as much as $1,000 per tournament, clearly not a living wage but evidence that these players aren't in it for the money. Alex Valle, the best Street Fighter player in the United States and maybe the world, is a janitor in Orange County.
But if the money is lacking, celebrity and respect in this sub-culture are very much a part of the experience. And the lure of competition is transforming the very social structure that kids have traditionally had.

At Airport Gate, a Cyborg Unplugged

The security guards continued to require that he turn his machine on and off and put it through the X-ray machine while also tugging on his wires and electrodes, he said. Still not satisfied, the guards took him to a private room for a strip-search in which, he said, the electrodes were torn from his skin, causing bleeding, and several pieces of equipment were strewn about the room.

Slashdot | Doctorow and Sterling Cyber-Riffing at SXSW

Sterling: "[Napster is] a kind of profoundly undemocratic technical fait accompli. 'Look at this neat gizmo that we geeks built while you weren't working. We geeks accidentally ate your industry.' [This is a] techno-imperative market argument which I don't think really makes all that much sense in a stagnant monopoly ... where is the steamroller going, I don't see it going anywhere particular, it's just abolishing other people's money. Does Napster give anybody money for a reelection campaign? Do they have a friendly judge? Is there somebody to sue?"

Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique

Technology is designed into 'black boxes', so that the labourer/user is left without influence over the functions that the machinery imposes on her. A classic illustration of how technology is used in this way to control labour activity is the speed set by the assembly line in a factory (Edwards, 1979). Recent studies shows that user-friendly but impregnable automation has escalated a defeating sense of helplessness among the deskilled, blue-collar workforce operating the machinery (Sennett, 1999). Furthermore, computers make even highly intellectual and artistic professions vulnerable to the deskilling process (Rifkin, 1995). Concerns are raising that multimedia and recording technology may mechanise education, turning it into a 'digitalised diploma mill' (Noble, 1998).

Sorta reminds me of Webct and Blackboard.

Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique

Marxists have been dismissive of literature giving priority to information over labour and capital in production. The notion of a post-industrial age has become associated with apolitical futurists. Claims that information would replace labour as prime source of value helped to raise suspicion among Marxists, and (not without cause) the post-industrial hype was often written off as a hegemonic smokescreen. Marxists rightly criticize the post-industrialist advocates for failing to take account of power relationships, to forget that information is the result of human labour, to ignore that a staff of 'symbol-analysts' require a labour force that satisfy society's material needs, and to downplay the continuity of capitalist industrialism in the new era (Dyer-Witheford, 1999). Technological utopias have been touted before to justify the destructiveness and smoothen the acceptance of new technologies (Stallabrass, 1995).

Diary 2002_0311

"OK," I said. "We'll leave." I then mumbled something about the last time I checked, this was still the United States of America -- even if we were just five miles away from where it ends. They escorted me and the few remaining souls out of the building. The brave lady who was the owner of the independent bookstore and who was there selling my book, leaned over and whispered to me, "I am willing to go to jail for this if you want me to." Ya gotta hand it to the independent bookstores -- they've been through hell lately, so much so that they are now ready to be led away in handcuffs!

Science Fiction Weekly Interview

Gibson: Well, E.M. Forster once said that if a novelist was in control of plot and character, he really wasn't doing his job. And I took that very much to heart. So for me the hardest part about writing is getting to the place where I completely give up and surrender, and admit that I can't do it. And that's when it starts to happen, and all I can do is watch it.

An Interview with William Gibson and Tom Maddox TM: There's that key line "He fell into the prison of his own flesh," which is the whole point, in a way. I don't know--if you want some real ammunition for this that's not just bullshit Postmodernist criticism, there's a guy at Berkeley named Lakoff, George Lakoff. He's a cognitive psychologist, and he's testing a whole set of theories based on the notion that all knowledge is a "body" of knowledge, and that every single intellectual structure in the world is ultimately a piece of embodied spatial knowledge translated by metaphor into something else.

An Interview with William Gibson and Tom Maddox A conversation with William Gibson is kind of like a full-immersion baptism in all of the weird and disturbing gomi [1] that comprises late twentieth century culture (Arthur Kroker would call it "excremental" culture, but then again, he's also capable of calling "the post-Einsteinian individual" a "hyper-Hobbesian energy pack." Screw that noise). Japanese Nazi geneticists in white bathrobes and terrycloth tennis hats, Luddite death squads, catfish farms, high rollers drawing voodoo designs in lines of cocaine, guinea pig- driven flamethrowers, unlicensed denturists... these are a few of his favorite things.

Perci's LiveJournal

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | US sends suspects to face torture

The US has been secretly sending prisoners suspected of al-Qaida connections to countries where torture during interrogation is legal, according to US diplomatic and intelligence sources. Prisoners moved to such countries as Egypt and Jordan can be subjected to torture and threats to their families to extract information sought by the US in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The normal extradition procedures have been bypassed in the transportation of dozens of prisoners suspected of terrorist connections, according to a report in the Washington Post. The suspects have been taken to countries where the CIA has close ties with the local intelligence services and where torture is permitted.

Greeley Tribune Online

Team picks white man mascot to make point

Story By Julio Ochoa

Posted on Sunday, March 10 @ 04:11:47 EST (30155 reads)





An intramural basketball team at the University of Northern Colorado called “The Fighting Whities” is turning the tables on the Eaton mascot issue.

Led by Solomon Little Owl, director of Native American Student Services at UNC, the team chose a white man as its mascot to raise awareness and understanding of stereotypes that some cultures endure.



“The message is, let’s do something that will let people see the other side of what it’s like to be a mascot,” Little Owl said. “I am really offended by this mascot issue, and I hope the people that support the Eaton mascot will get offended by this.”

The players, made up of a mixture of American Indian, Hispanic and caucasian students, wear white jerseys with the picture of a white man in a suit on the front and the slogan “Every thang’s gonna be all white!” printed beneath.

Molly Japan Cell Phone Digital Camera = Morii's Keitai Cam - photos from Molly's adventures in Japan

Cool cell phone cam!

Perci's LiveJournal

And now one of these downloaders for hire (at about $12 an hour), Numair Faraz, has stepped forward to say that Mr. Greene's claim that three students downloaded 6,000 files from easily accessible Web sites isn't even true. For starters, Mr. Faraz, 17, isn't a student: he left school to start his own technology business. But more to the point, he says that the group didn't spend two days downloading music; they spent three. And most revealing, he says that most of the music wasn't even downloaded from publicly accessible Web sites.



Speaking about Mr. Greene, Mr. Faraz said, "He said it took two days to do all the stuff, and we did it for three days from 9 to 6 and left the computers on all night long, except we'd come back and the computers would be frozen."

Lord of the Hackers

Hackers used to be known simply as computer people. But if we take the computer as representative of a way of knowing, a way of seeing the world, then we are all computer people now. We use computers in different ways, of course, and they can offer more than one perspective on our lives.

instructor Resources

It started out simply enough: smuggling aerosol snack cheese and crackers into my top secret study space for snack purposes. But now I'm out of crackers and squirting the cheese straight into my mouth. I am so ashamed.

One Toke Over the Harvard Line? (washingtonpost.com) • Here's a vignette we're dying to see on the ABC broadcast of Sunday's Ford's Theatre Presidential Gala: When Stevie Wonder sat down at the keyboard center stage, President Bush in the front row got very excited. He smiled and started waving at Wonder, who understandably did not respond. After a moment Bush realized his mistake and slowly dropped the errant hand back to his lap. "I know I shouldn't have," a witness told us yesterday, "but I started laughing."

Andrew is watching...you.

Hacktivism and Human Rights: Using Technology to Raise the Bar

Hacktivism is finding ways to speak truth to power using technology in this way. It's technology or hacking in the service of human rights, or civil liberties, or the environment.

When the truth commission in Guatemala was able to conclude that we find that more than 200,000 were killed during the armed internal conflict, more than 93% were people killed by the government. The army of Guatemala can no longer deny that this occurred, because the basis on which we made this claim was defensible on scientific grounds.

Good (or Unwitting) Neighbors Make for Good Internet Access

Several of the major cable and phone companies that provide high- speed wired connections to the Internet say customers are violating their service agreements — and perhaps breaking the law — by letting others outside a given household piggyback using 802.11.

"Anyone who is using it that way would basically be stealing," a spokesman for Time Warner Cable said of those who patch into its Road Runner cable modem service. "It's the same thing as cable theft."

20 Questions With...Cory Doctorow

11. I am most happy when:

I've gotten up early, done Tai Chi in a nearby park, come home and written 500 words on a novel, blogged 10-20 items, eaten some granola, watched a TiVoed South Park, gone to work, accomplished good stuff, gone to a movie and topped it off with a good dinner with great conversation

This is the voice of a person with no children.

Plus, what's so special about these MIT guys is that they have documented the heck out of this little endeavour. I'd gladly hire one of these guys to work with me. Sure, it's not the best idea every conceived--but at least it's documented. I could now go and reproduce their efforts without much thought.
In all, it seems rather impressive to me. It's a neat new UI that's not typical. It's documented to all heck. That beats half of everything I've ever done.

Metafilter | Comments on 15205

New scholarship on the origins of the Koran claims that the Koran has been misread and mistranslated for centuries. For example, Islamic martyrs are not rewarded in paradise with "virgins," that's a mistranslation. Oops. (NYT member: metafi, password: metafi)

posted by homunculus at 9:00 PM PST (15 comments total)





So they're really rewarded with vegans? Must be hell!

posted by HTuttle at 9:37 PM PST on March 1

The Austin Chronicle Screens: Information Wants to Be Worthless

Net types like to catfight about whether blogging is the Way Forward or utter self-indulgence. Since it is almost certainly both at once, blogging is quite the hot topic. So there will be some bloggery debate, with scowling, and finger-wagging, and pepper-gassing. Yes, blogging has its limitations. There isn't much in the way of original content, for instance. Weblogging consists mostly of logging one's websurfing activities, then making sardonic comments about whatever you see. An activity one's admirers find hilarious. Yet admirers rarely pay for this. Except in their admiration.

The Austin Chronicle Screens: Information Wants to Be Worthless

Back in the Neolithic dawn of the Internet, you see, the academics who built it used to beat the living crap out of a businessman the very moment they saw him. One peep of commercial spam on their stainless not-for-profit network, and the net-gods would reach right into your router and just throttle you, like an egg-sucking dog. Businessmen would take one look at that impossible Internet code, and they'd pick up their gray flannels and flee headlong to CompuServe and Prodigy. You young folks these days, you probably don't even remember "CompuServe." They croaked from being way too compu-servile.

. Interesting speculations on student motivation, the role of humor, and different ways of reading are offered in Chapter 10; however, no conclusions are drawn. I found myself searching for those places I marked in other chapters which could allow me to piece together an argument. Linking these cites would allow readers to think associatively but critically. Another example of hypertextual leaping occurs in the discussion of underlife, specifically addressed in "Underlife_and_Identity" (13). Some of the best insights and analysis of student dialogue and the role of underlife occur in this chapter. "While some language is clearly inappropriate, students benefit from talking in ways that they choose. Slang, for example, is part of youth culture and can be a critical ingredient in the struggle for identity" (104-5). The underlife issue is picked up again in "Net_Working_in_the_Workplace_of_the_Future" (15) and could have been integrated in the earlier chapter. While networking in the workplace had some interesting ramifications, it had little application to the ethnographic focus of the book. If sections of this chapter and other seemingly irrelevant chapters could appear as hypertextual links, the book might not seem so fragmented. Chapter 9 features Todd, one of Burns' students, and includes many of his posts and responses to them; Tornow comments that the online environment worked for Todd. But the chapter is sandwiched in between two theoretical chapters and adds little to either the ethnogra

Meatball Wiki: ConflictResolution Collected on this page are some techniques to resolve conflict. Since conflict is a natural part of life, most will likely apply in any context. However, certain forms of conflict are unique to OnlineCommunity, so some will likely only apply in that context. Also related, the ConflictCycle?, ConflictIntensity?, SourcesOfConflict and HealthyConflict.

Rhinoskin Leather Flipcase for the Palm m100 Series Review It took me a little bit of time to get used to the idea of leather cases being made under the Rhinoskin name, but I am definitely warming to the idea. Marking yet another departure from their famed line of hard protective cases made of aluminum and titanium, Rhinoskin has now come out with a Leather Flipcase for the Palm m100 series PDA. This case is available in both brown and black. For this review, I was presented with the brown version.

kuro5hin.org || technology and culture, from the trenches Years went by. One day I was looking through Rolling Stone or some other corporate rock rag, and there he was, the punk apprentice locksmith. Axl Rose. Now a corporate rock star himself. With a corporate biography of his troubled youth in Lafayette Indiana, his many run-ins with the law, (oh, the daring outlaw! How glamorous!) and his many jobs, including his apprenticeship as a locksmith (what a loser job!) So I put two and two together, and realize that this punk asshole rockstar, this small-talent whiney-boy, not only did he steal the guitar for which I had swept floors and cleaned toilets and scraped dishes for months; but also he's getting bad-boy rockstar mileage out of the fact that he had, quote, brushes with the law, unquote, for things like stealing guitars from loser nerdy graduate students who have never even shot heroin.

Microcontent News: Weblogs, email digests, Webzines, personal publishing, content strategy, Microads. Corante. Weblogs are perfect for Google: frequently updated websites crammed chockfull of tasty links. It's no wonder that Google loves Weblogs so much.

Of course, if that's the case, why doesn't every Google search land the searcher on a blog? That question underscores a crucial point about weblogs and Google: weblogs are the voters in this political system. In other words, weblogs don't get elected by Google... but the sites they voted for do.

So even if you never visit a blog, you're being influenced by them. The collective votes of the weblog community are determing what sites you see on Google, the world's largest search engine.

Microcontent News: Weblogs, email digests, Webzines, personal publishing, content strategy, Microads. Corante. But Google didn't stop there. Its insatiable appetite for fresh content spilled over to any frequently updated websites, including Weblogs. If Google noticed a page updating frequently, it started visiting that page much more frequently so it could suck the latest content into its database of over 3 billion documents. As they put it in their latest press release, "Google refreshes millions of web pages every day to ensure that Google users have access to the most current information."
Putting it Together: Google loves Weblogs

Reading list

Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think brought all the best lessons from usability down to a readable text that began a discussion, and explained the give and take that usability and design sometimes have to work against. It was refreshing to read after hearing only decrees from on high, delivered in the full style of academics telling everyone how Things Should Be Done. If I had to pick one web-specific book as my all time favorite, this would be it.

Your Thumb Here: Newest ID of Choice at Store and on Job Businesses and government agencies defend the practice as a reasonable response to the widespread traffic in false identifications. But civil rights advocates worry that fingerprinting is being used to intimidate people who patronize businesses that serve lower-income people. Some wonder if fingerprint databases can be protected from abuse.
Wayne Crews, director of technology studies at the conservative Cato Institute in Washington, said the technology can protect privacy, making it harder for a thief to use a stolen charge card encoded with a thumbprint. But Mr. Crews said that big, compulsory databases, like those for driver's licenses and other ID's that store people's finger or facial images, can be abused by officials, identity thieves or others who find a way into them. "You create a honey pot for hackers," he said.

Absolute Powerpoint
Can a software package edit our thoughts
by Ian Parker
Before there were presentations, there were conversations, which were a little like presentations but used fewer bullet points, and no one had to dim the lights. A woman we can call Sarah Wyndham, a defense-industry consultant living in Alexandria, Virginia, recently began to feel that her two daughters weren't listening when she asked them to clean their bedrooms and do their chores. So, one morning, she sat down at her computer, opened Microsoft's PowerPoint program, and typed:

• Family Matters
  
• An approach for positive change to the
  
• Wyndham family team
  

I'm sure I blogged this before, but it's still great.

The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century Yet something more important may be afoot. At a time when many dot coms have failed, blogging is on the rise. We’re in a lull between waves of commercialization in digital media, and bloggers are seizing the moment, potentially increasing cultural diversity and lowering barriers to cultural participation.

The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

Consuming Rituals of the Suburban Tribe Housecalls does not describe what it does as anthropology; it prefers to say that its researchers generate ''reality-based product differentiation.'' But the language of Margaret Mead and her followers constantly creeps into the company's official literature.

Consuming Rituals of the Suburban Tribe Consuming Rituals of the Suburban Tribe

By LAWRENCE OSBORNE

Angela Macri crouches beneath the shower nozzle and blinks into the blazing lights of a one-person film crew. The shower curtain has been drawn back so that her movements are exposed to the camera; Macri seems a little nervous as she adjusts the faucets.

''Look up a moment,'' says Terri Marlowe, the camerawoman, as she checks the light reading.

Field Studies Done Right: Fast and Observational (Alertbox Jan. 2002) Last week, The New York Times ran a long article about companies using anthropological techniques to study their customers. It's always great to see articles that promote field studies, but the information in the Times article perpetuated two common mistakes that not only produce bad data, but squander a company's research budget:

portfolio

Find out what is expected for your career path. Positions in fund-raising and what is called "Institutional Advancement" require leather and top-quality portfolio because your contacts will be persons with money.

This just struck me as funny.

http://www.alistapart.com/stories/writebetter/

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

With so many writers apparently uneasy about the state of the world, I would expect plenty of mordant commentary on our entanglement in the wheels of the runaway technological locomotive. But almost none of the stories in these 13 Asimov’s issues--not even those set in a "real future"--offer a genuine critique of technology, of its use by and its impact upon humanity. David Marusek’s biting "VTV," about new extremes of media manipulation, is a standout exception (3/00). Critique requires that its author gaze unflinchingly at present and future, ugly and perverse as those might appear. What we have instead here is a pervasive techno-anxiety that for the most part looks away from the source of its fears.

Web 'turns people into goldfish'

A US EXPERT RECKONS obsessive web browsing can cause attention spans to drop to as little as nine seconds - equivalent to a goldfish.

"Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things," says Ted Selker, a professor at MIT. "If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating," he told the BBC.

A US expert reckons obsessive web browsing can cause attention spans to drop to as little as nine seconds - equivalent to a goldfish.

"Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things," says Ted Selker, a professor at MIT. "If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating," he told the BBC.

Online Journalism Review, Gary Baum: On Publishing Scoops and Canards

In fact, it seems to have become the gospel at the trail-blazing news Web site, which has gained fame in recent months for its eye-catching, jaw-dropping reports on the current war on terrorism in the region. However, Debkafile has received a mixed reaction from the media it so confidently challenges; critics have questioned the publication's accuracy and objectivity, giving its overall coverage comments ranging from "just plain scary" to "complete bunkum."

PostNuke.com :: Rogue Content Management

How do I do a fresh install of Post-Nuke

nothing, and lots of it

A related lesson, learned from several client meetings:
I didn't use "Lorem Ipsum" latin filler text in mockups or prototypes shown to customers until a few meetings went like this:

Me: So, here's what the proposed home page will look like, and you just simply click on the discussion ar...

Client: What's that paragraph say about healthcare funding getting slashed?

Me: What? Oh, that. I just copy and pasted the first story on Yahoo News' medical news page, I thought it'd fit as filler text since this was a medical site. Now about the functionality of the featur...

Client: Well, can we change that? I mean, I don't want to look at bad news when visitors see the site.

Me: I just put that in for this photoshop mockup, it won't ever be seen by anyone. Now about the new proposed sub-sectio...

Client: Ok, but if you could change all the mockups, that'd be great, I don't want to show these around the office with that bad news on there.

I've used Lorem Ipsum as filler text from then on.

HotScripts.com : PHP-Nuke

PHP-Nuke is a Web Portal System, storytelling software, news system, online community or whatever you want to call it. The goal of PHP-Nuke is to have an automated web site to distribute news and articles with user system. Each user can submit comments to discuss the articles, similar to Slashdot and many others. Features: web based admin, polls/surveys with comment option, statistics, user customizable box, themes manager, friendly admin GUI with graphic topic manager, moderation system, Referers page, sections manager, an integrated banners ads system, backend/headlines generation (RSS/RDF format), Yahoo like search engine, Ephemerids manager, file manager, download manager, faq manager, advanced blocks system, reviews system, newsletter, multilanguage content management, encyclopedia generator, md5 password encryption, support for 25 languages, 100% modular and very easy to use and configure. PHP-Nuke is written 100% in PHP and requires Apache, PHP and a SQL Database Server. Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Adabas, mSQL and many others.

Online Pedagogy with Discussion Management Software

Feenberg's Textweaver project

But here is the rub: interactive text based applications lack the
pizzazz of video alternatives and cannot promise automation, nor
can they be packaged and sold. They do not conform to the fantasy
of total central control over a flexible, disseminated system
defying spatial and temporal boundaries. On the contrary, they are
labor intensive and will probably not cut costs very much. Hence
the lack of interest from corporations and administrators, and the
gradual eclipse of these technological options in public discussion
(if not on campus) by far more expensive ones. But unlike the fancy
alternatives, interactive text based systems actually accomplish
legitimate pedagogical objectives faculty and students recognize and
respect.

To resist the automating trend in education is not simply to wallow in
an old-fashioned Mr. Chips sentimentality. Rather, it is a question
of different civilizational projects with different institutional
bases. The traditional conception of education must be preserved
not out of uncritical worship of the past but for the sake of the
future. I have tried to show here that the educational technology
of an advanced society might be shaped by educational dialogue rather
than the production oriented logic of automation. Should a dialogic
approach to online education prevail on a large enough scale, it could
be a factor making for fundamental social change. This prospect is
explored in all its utopian impl

Red Rock Eater Digest - Critical Theory of Technology

The Factory or the City: Which Model for Online Education? [1]

Technology and Modernity

Much recent discussion of the Internet emphasizes its promise
of epoch making changes in our lives. In no domain are these
anticipated changes more radical than in education. We are told that
the substantive content of instruction can now be delivered better
by computers than by teachers. Are we on the verge of a fundamental
transformation of all our assumptions about education as we enter
a postindustrial information age, or are we instead witnessing
significant but more modest changes in education as we know it?
As a participant in the early development of online education,
I hope to be able to bring a touch of realism to the debate.

news.telegraph.co.uk - Pink hair girl sees red as school photo is altered

"We have been trying to resolve the issue of Ashley's pink hair since before Christmas," he said. "Initially, we were assured that she would return it to the natural colour over the holiday but since Christmas her hair has remained pink.

Literacy.org

A nice site with literacy resources.Duh.

In Praise of Sloppy HTML - The Web Developer's Journal My point is that there are many cases where it should be spent on something else, that perfecting HTML is often not the best use of resources. To be fair, there are also many cases where perfect HTML is worthwhile, and for mature businesses that's probably most of the time, but for young businesses it's worth considering the sloppy HTML option. It may be the only way to get through those lean, early years and get to a stable position where you can start contemplating perfection. A two percent budget shift from perfection to promotion in those early days may mean the difference between success and failure.

With the World Redesigned, What Role for Designers? As Ms. Kare wrote in a follow-up note, "When times are confusing, it's more important than ever to produce images of clarity and simplicity."

Salon.com Life | Don't say "cheese" I treasure the photos I have of my boys, their doe-eyed looks, their fat baby bottoms, their naked boy bodies rollicking in the tub. I want to hold them forever in those moments; preserve them, keep them alive. I'd love to always hear their baby boy voices, their made-up words, the songs they sing. I'd love to always watch them dance their little boy dances. I want to keep my boys forever. But I can't, any more than those Victorian mothers in those silvery tinted Daguerreotypes could hold onto their stillborn babies by having them photographed cradled in their arms as if alive.

Winter 2002: Weblogs, part II: A Swiss Army website?

Because weblogs handle text, images, and other media, they are by definition a kind of information management system for "capturing, organizing, manipulating, and accessing information" [5]. Many groups and individuals, including the IU, are looking at ways to use and improve how weblogs can be used for this. The ability of weblog software to provide automatic and consistent date-based archiving, persistently assigned URLs, and interoperable workspaces, has sparked much recent discussion about ways that weblogs can be used as content management systems (CMS) "to manage the content of a web site" [6], and for knowledge management (KM) to "consciously and comprehensively" gather, organize, share, and analyze "knowledge in terms of resources, documents, and people skills" [7].

little.yellow.different [remix] And apparently, my other option is to drive out to Pier 3 in San Francisco, where NBC is showing the opening cermony on a giant boat with free food and giveaway prizes. While the offer is tempting, am I really going to jump in my car and drive out to a pier to watch singing and dancing Mormons?

Jarrett House North : Confessions of a referral junkie I would have written my scripts anyway, and Manila Envelope. But I think unconsciously I was adjusting my web writing to the stuff that had gotten me attention in the first place. And I'm not super happy about that.

ACM: Ubiquity - Need "Therapy" for Your "Information Pain"? LOUIS ROSENFELD: Information architecture the thing is the structure of an information system and the ways it's organized and labeled. Every information system, be it book or Web site, has an architecture. For a book, it's the stuff we all know and count on-chapter and section headings, tables of contents, back of the book indices, sequential pagination, consistent information on the cover and spine, and so on. But for a Web site, your guess is as good as mine-the architecture might consist of many different kinds of hierarchies for navigating, sets of terms used for labeling content, search interfaces, site maps, indices, data models . . . . Unlike books, sites have no conventional information architecture, but that's another story.

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

Percy Schmeiser is a farmer from Bruno, Saskatchewan, Canada whose canola fields were contaminated with Monsanto's Round-Up Ready Canola. Although Schmeiser never planted any Monsanto seed, Monsanto took him to court for using their intellectual property without permission -- and they won.
Roundup-Ready canola was found among Schmeiser's canola crops along a major haulage roadside. Monsanto's position is that it doesn't matter whether Schmeiser knew or not that his canola field was contaminated with the Roundup Ready gene, and that he must pay their Technology Fee. Since Monsanto won this suit it has lodged similar suits against farmers in North Dakota, South Dakota, Indiana, and Louisiana.
The case is on appeal. And apparently Schmeiser's fields continue to be contaminated. Schmeiser has been growing his own canola seed for 40 years, but he had to purchase brand new seed because his old stock was contaminated by Roundup-Ready canola volunteer plants.

Foam Props: All About Foam: The History of Foam: Mount Rushmore In brief, the truth of the matter is that Mount Rushmore was carved out of foam. And why not? Foam was lightweight and durable, and far faster to work than granite. In fact, with the addition of a special granite-like coating the four presidents appeared to be seamlessly carved into that mountain

Hot-Synching With a Heavenly Presence

A growing number of people are finding that pocket-size computers are useful for religious purposes, from saying a virtual rosary to relaxing with a virtual Zen garden while using the palmtop's stylus to rake images of digital sand.

kottke.org comments

Joshua makes a great point about emergence. and that's also where Aaronland's point is related. one strategy is to establish a default structure --based on a limited number of nodes and edges-- and then allow the taxonomy to "emerge", based on your own feedback and/or other user feedback. the results can actually take an implicit form, where the most common groupings rise to the top. you can then set a cutoff point so it returns a smaller result set. hey, maybe you can write a simple sorting application, a-la christina's suggestion, where each post-it is actually a SQL insert. you insert or post-it all the items and then start ranking them in categories. the problem though, is that whenever you add more categories, you will need to re-rank all the previously inserted items to see how where they fall in the updated "bigger picture".

Really cool thread on developing a personal taxonomy

Web journals by professionals

Fortune.com - The Readers' Corner

Good Indie MP3s

AlterSlash ~ the unofficial SlashDot digest

1. Let me know when there is a problem - early on so I can get help and resolve it. If a spec isn’t clear, let me know so I can get an answer.

2. Remember, better is the enemy of good enough - at some point, it’s time to let the working code go and not try to wring even more performance out of it - as long as it does what is needed.

3. Sure, writing documentation and help screens suck - but everyone has to take their turn in the barrel.

4. Don’t keep trying to get your pet hardware/software through based on a project “need” or “solution.” Yea, I know you want a bigger, faster box running Linux, but once it’s clear that it ain’t happening, constantly bringing it up as the “solution” to every problem is counter-productive. ( A real situation I ran into - one of our programers kept pushing a Linux server becasue he needed one for another project (that was on hold but that he wanted to revive))

4. Have a life - if your getting burned out, say so. Everyone needs a break, and let me run interference for you. As a follow-on, when the rules get bent to help the team, don’t brag about it.

I, Cringely | The Pulpit

Dan's idea was to use a high gain rooftop antenna to offer wireless Internet service. What if I found a place that already had wireless Internet service, and used a high gain antenna to take advantage of that service from a great distance? It would be just like sitting in Starbucks with a notebook computer and a latte, except that I'd be at home where the coffee is considerably cheaper.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Being the Janitor, An Interview with Dan O'Donnell, about Cleaning Up Q: How did you end up being a janitor?

O'Donnell: I was in school during the day so I needed a job that I could work at night. So, I got a job as a janitor at an insurance company and I did that for a little while. My wife Carrie worked as a janitor for another company, and one day she told me that they had just fired someone and needed to hire someone to take his place. So I moved over to that company because I would be working with Carrie cleaning these doctors' offices. Later on I found out the guy whose place I took got fired because he was stealing drug samples.

Clay Spinuzzi: Curriculum Vitae Spinuzzi, C. (2002). Toward integrating our research scope: A sociocultural field methodology. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 16.1, pp. 3-32.

Corporate Mofo Goes to The World Economic Forum

"Where is your jacket, young protestor?" called out a petite policewoman, who asked us to refer to her as "Officer Smith."

"I'm not cold," I said through chattering teeth. "And I'm not a protestor, either. I do a Web site, and I'm writing about the demonstration. Have any thoughts?"

"Yeah, let them move to Afghanistan and see how they like it there," Officer Smith said.

I had to admit she had a point.

great article.

Trooping off to find their corner of a foreign field, in much the same spirit as an earlier generation went to Spain with the International Brigade, the volunteers were Web designers, engineers, students, delivery drivers. They came across as cool, wired types, as comfortable in their modernity as any of their fellow-surfers in the Internet cafés. So did Mohamed Atta, Hani Hanjour, Ziad Jarrah, and the other hijack suspects, who left a forensic spoor of brand names across the length and breadth of the United States. We know them best as efficient modern consumers—of Parrot-Ice, Tommy Hilfiger, Econo Lodge, AAA discounts, Starbucks, Cyber Zone, Golden Tee '97 golf at Shuckum's Raw Bar and Grill, Salem cigarettes, Heineken and Budweiser, Chinese takeout from Wo Hop III, lap-dancing at Nardone's Sports Go-Go Bar and the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret.

http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/?020204fa_FACT

The experience of ministering to this impossible parish radicalized my father. A lifelong reflex Conservative voter, he joined the Labour Party. His High Church theology became ever more attenuated and symbolic. He climbed his way through the tower blocks less as a priest than as a psychiatric social worker. He grew a beard that made him look like Karl Marx, left his dog collar in the drawer, and went about in an open-necked plaid flannel shirt. Although his church congregations were now tiny, he worked around the clock, negotiating with the authorities on behalf of his parishioners, succoring the needy, counselling the desperate, befriending the friendless.

http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/?020204fa_FACT

Robert Brooke "Underlife and Writing Instruction," College Composition and Communication, 1988. Braddock Award.

http://www.twinturboz.net/freaky.gif



stare at the rear left corner for 60 seconds.

ToyIdeas

Mechanical Toys Page

I must have passed seven sleeping students while walking over to my library carrel. Let's just end the charade, shall we, and install cots?

prison survival guide

The most senseless use of time in prison has to be constant television watching. There are adult men in prison who watch cartoons and soap operas for hours each day. They know all the soaps' characters, plots, and can figure all the possible scenarios of upcoming episodes. They live through the tube. They call television the "Boob Tube" because it will make you dumb if you aren't already. Its shameless, naked images will poison your mind and spirit. Its fantasy will rob you of all original creative thinking abilities. Constant television watching develops the dangerous habit of always wanting to be entertained, which causes laziness.

Television is a no-no. Cut out television for one month and you will be surprised at what you can get accomplished in that time. Knowing how to manage time properly is important in everyday life. When we learn how to get the most out of our days, we will come to know a real sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. There are only twenty-four hours in a day. The more you begin to actually do the clearer it becomes that there never is enough time to get things done. Then you will understand the value of time.

ANDREW S. FASTOW - ENRON CORP. - CFO.com

Ethics Schmethics--an early article praising Enron for its innovative finance strategies.

Numbers Tell the Story

Despite the traditional rules of financing, Fastow reduced the balance-sheet debt, maintained the credit rating, and reduced the cost of capital while simultaneously growing the balance sheet. In just the last two years, Enron has nearly doubled its total assets from $16 billion to $30 billion--without shareholder dilution and without a drop in the company's credit rating. "He has successfully financed billions of dollars in a manner that has held credit quality," says S&P's Barone. "And that is not an easy thing to do. It is a testament to Andy's focus on cash flow and his ability to think outside the box."

Protect your PDA screen with our D.I.Y. guide - Product Reviews - CNETAsia

Making your own screen protector is actually pretty simple. All you need are:

A sheet of clear plastic wrapper, the kind you use to wrap your books. A single sheet you buy from the stationary shop for about S$1 can make you enough protectors to last a long time. Also note that plastic wrappers have different thickness. If it's too thick, your screen will not be too responsive. If too thin, it may not provide enough protection.

A pair of scissors or penknife.

Monitor cleaner, the kind you use to spray on your PC monitor to clean your screen.

Lint-free cloth or camera lens cleaning wipes.

A plastic card, e.g. a credit or ATM card.

Epinions.com - Cheap Screen Protector

Cheap Screen Protector

by gsearle | Aug 06 '01 (Updated Jan 09 '02)



The Bottom Line Don't shell out $25 for a PDA screen protector when a cheap (often free) sheet of vinyl will do.





I was appalled to see PDA screen protectors being sold for $25.00. All I wanted was a piece of plastic to cover my PDA's screen, and these companies wanted me to shell out this kind of money! Well, I found a really cheap alternative that works really well - vinyl sheets! This is the same stuff that manufacturers use to create those temporary, easy-to-remove labels that you find stuck to new electronic equipment

Adondo's Cheap to make, last forever PDA screen stylus

Smithsonian Benefactor Cancels $38 Million Gift (washingtonpost.com)

"Apparently, the basic philosophy for the exhibit -- 'the power of the individual to make a difference' -- is the antithesis of that espoused by many within the Smithsonian bureaucracy, which is 'only movements and institutions make a difference, not individuals.' After much contemplation, I see no way to reconcile these diametrically opposed philosophical viewpoints," she said.

Small could not be reached for comment last night. Smithsonian officials had maintained throughout the eight months of increasingly strident debate that they would maintain final say over the nature of the exhibit. That sentiment was repeated yesterday in a statement by Marc Pachter, acting director of the American History Museum.