The most obvious theoretical implication arising from these claims is that the role and application of synchronous text-based computer-mediated communication in education is at least as important as its asynchronous counterpart. The asynchronous mode has been presented as one of the key characteristics of CMC for group support and online educational applications@Cite(RapaportM91a, HarasimLM90b, HiltzSR90a, TuroffM90a). Not only does it provide the convenience of time independence, but it is also reported to foster richer intellectual exchanges@Cite(LevinsonP88a ", p. 115") and to allow variation in the individual cognitive styles of participants@Cite(TuroffM89b ", p. 11"). Synchronous CMC, on the other hand, has been the subject of various studies@Cite(DobosJ85a, SiegelJ86a, WiltonJA88a, PeytonJK88a, WilkinsH91a), but synchronicity, per se, has not been the focal issue.

Found some cough drops last night with Menthol, eucalyptus, and benzocaine. Yeah! But now my throat seems to be doing better. It was one of those wimpy, two-day, lack-of-sleep colds.

Phil Agre's analysis of the responses to the David Nobel's articles My messages debunking the cyberspace ideology have made some people happy. Those people are sick of the hype, and are relieved to know that they're not alone. But other people are upset, and these upset people have kept me thinking away at the problem. The upset people often argue that their wild-eyed millennialism is simply an expression of their "optimism" -- the implication being that their critics have some kind of personality problem. This argument is simplistic, not to mention offensive. Mindless optimism and mindless pessimism are equally useless. What's needed, instead, is analysis. And the problem with cyberspace is not that it is disproportionate to the wondrous reality, but that it is analytically *wrong* -- that is, it describes the world inaccurately.

Forbes.com - Magazine Article No wonder we are so smirkily obsessed with sex and the momentary release of orgasm: Almost all other routes to ecstatic experience have been effectively blocked.

There has got to be a better cough drop out there. I am using these gutless halls things. I have also been trying cold-eeze. They are supposed to shorten your cold while providing very little throat relief. I want to be made numb and healthier at the same time. Painless healing! That's all I ask.



Things I have lost:



1. one nimh aaa battery. This is maddening. Only three left now.

2. Brian Street's Literacy and Development Why didn't I just buy this book? Now the library gets $55

3. My enthusiasm for much of life. (I know I left it around here somewhere)

Red Rock Eater Digest - notes and recommendations

You see this conflation, for example, in Foucault's talk about the

"production of subjects". The idea is that, by becoming a doctor

or a citizen or a psychiatric patient, you become inserted into an

all-encompassing social being -- a way of seeing, thinking, acting,

interacting, talking, writing, feeling, and so on. There is, to

be sure, some truth in this: to become a doctor is certainly to be

socialized to a significant degree into ways of thinking and acting

and so on. Much of this lies beyond individual consciousness: it

happens so complicatedly, and in so many different ways, and with

so much nonobvious structure, and with so many appeals to emotion

and reason, and with so much seclusion from the outside world, that

it is bound to change you. In fact, the very difficulty of becoming

a doctor is part of what causes it to change you so completely:

the skills require effort to master, and demands rain down upon

the emerging doctor from so many directions that great dedication is

required to integrate them all by slow degrees into a smooth everyday

performance.

Life will have to wait (1/29/2002) For Bay design engineer Steve Chen, 43, the most painful personal test came last summer. He had to decide whether to go immediately to his mother's bedside in Japan or take a day or so to get his work in order. The doctors had told him his mother was dying of cancer. They said he probably had a few days, but they were wrong.

``She was already dead,'' Chen says of the day he arrived in Japan. He helped with the funeral and handled the bureaucracy of death. Then he brought his mother's ashes back with him to Cupertino.

Red Rock Eater Digest - Part IV. Bad Design

(24) Bad Information Design in Scholarly Books

I often read scholarly books, that being part of my job. And
most scholarly books come with endnotes. This "scholarly apparatus"
is indispensible if you are trying to map a new field, and so I spend
much time referring back and forth between the text and endnotes.
(I don't care about the choice between footnotes and endnotes, and
I understand the publishers' concern that footnotes depress sales.)

Now, properly designed books make this flipping-back-and-forth easy
by printing things like "Endnotes for pages 137-144" at the top of
each endnote page. What pisses me off is the majority of publishers
that don't do this. In fact it's doubly annoying: they make you
flip around to remember what number chapter you're reading, which
makes you feel stupid because you can't remember the number from
one minute to the next, or else you have to exercise great cognitive
effort in order to keep the number in mind when you'd rather be trying
to understand what's in the book, and then they make you flip around
in the endnotes to find the endnotes for that chapter number. Ack!

There are plenty of other ways to present scholarly notes, as
designers of more arts-oriented scholarly books have shown for years.
But publishers, well, publishers have their habits.

Red Rock Eater Digest - Minor Annoyances and What They Teach Us

Then you haveThomas Sowell. His columns in Forbes rarely make logical sense, but the logical problems are not evident at first because he writes with such assaultive hostility that you feel like you've been kicked by a mule. It took me years of reading his columns at the newsstand before I managed to penetrate their toxic surface and search for an actual argument.

(9) The Language of the Staff in Computer Stores

People who work in computer stores are a different breed. The level
of product knowledge that they require is so great that management
can't also require them to act like salespeople in other stores. So
when you go to Fry's, you have to adapt yourself to a different kind
of interaction. It's not rude, exactly, but rough, as if Wal-Mart
were staffed by cowboys. But okay. If you can find the right gear
then it's not so bad.

Except for one thing. It pisses me off when computer store workers
ask people questions they couldn't possibly answer. Say, for example,
a customer comes in looking for a scanner for a Macintosh. The store
workers are liable to say something like, "Do you have FireWire?".
I can't quite tell whether they are being clueless or lazy, or whether
they are actually being sadistic. The average human being has no idea
even what sort of question that is, or what sort of thing FireWire
is, or whether having FireWire is a good thing or a bad thing, or
how they would possibly know whether they have it. The customers
who get asked this question all go into a little dance. You've seen
it. It's a slight bow, a slight twist off to the side, and a sort of
recoil. Then they stammer. Not only can't they answer the question;
not only can't they come up with a suitable way to explain that they...

This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow "We've seen it in cases like this before, where it's demanded that presidents cough up and compromise on important principles...we are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years."



Translation: Nixon should never have turned over those tapes 30 years ago, and by god I'm not going to make the same mistake today.

Red Rock Eater Digest - Supporting the Intellectual Life of a Democratic Society

[I don't know what to make of this paper. It's the strangest thing

I've ever written. It grows out of many years of careful observation

of the process by which I do whatever it is I do for a living. But

its significance is not just personal. I believe that everyone has

an intellectual calling, and for years I've evolved methods to force

students out of an attitude of passive conformity, doing whatever the

professor wants, and instead to discover what it is they really care

about, so that they can articulate in intellectual terms a calling

that they really feel, really believe in, and really get up in the

morning to act on.

Red Rock Eater Digest - Social and Technological Resources for Learning [A lot of useful work is happening in the community of education people
who descend intellectually from a Russian psychologist named Vygotsky.
According to Vygotskian psychology, thinking has its origins in social
interactions: you interact with other people, you internalize those
patterns of interaction, and that's what thinking is. This theory has
innumerable consequences, all of which are illuminating and productive.

Net Presence I decided that I was more interested in the social aspects of computer work than with the technical aspects. My dissertation, which is probably one of the more peculiar theses ever accepted by MIT outside of art and architecture, offers a deconstruction and partial reconstruction of AI's technical ideas about human action. From there I took a series of short-term jobs as I went through the painful process of shifting from a semi-nonconformist computer person to a semi-outsider social scientist.

Abstract. Many people believe that information technology will bring massive
structural changes to the universities. This paper draws on concepts from
both computer science and social theory to explore what these structural
changes might be like. The point of departure is the observation that the
interaction between information technology and market economics creates
incentives to standardize the world. Standardization can be a force for
good or evil, depending on how it is done, and I consider in particular
the forces that operate on the *places* in which university teaching is done.
Information technology allows these places to be more diverse than in the
past, and a good rule of thumb is that the places in which learning occurs
should be analogous in their structure and workings to the places in which
the learned knowledge will be used. Universities can support this increased
diversity of learning places with appropriate structural reforms, including
decentralized governance and explicit attention to certain aspects of the
university organization, such as media services and the career center, that
have historically been marginalized.



The twentieth century has taught us to be skeptical of revolutions. Proposals
for revolutionary social change have invariably rested on superficial ideas
about the world, and as a result they have changed both too much and too
little, with tragic results. What, then, are we to make of the revolution
that

PageSix.com: Cindy Adams: FUTURE'S ON THE LINE FOR CHENEY It would almost seem - almost - almost as if, if somebody eventually needs to be thrown overboard in light of Enron's end run, that the wise heads, wise guys and wise asses on top of the mountain are readying the VP to be the designated sinker.

Space Trader Information Space Trader is a complex game, in which the player's aim is to amass enough money to be able to buy a moon to retire to. The player starts out with a small space ship, armed with one simple laser, and 1000 credits in cash. The safest and easiest way to earn money is to trade goods between neighbouring solar systems. If the player chooses the goods to trade wisely, it isn't too difficult to sell them with a profit. There are other ways to get rich, though. You might become a bounty hunter and hunt down pirates. It is also possible to become a pirate yourself and rob honest traders of their cargo. Beware, though: pirating is a way to get rich quickly, but the police force will go after you.

www.palmopensource.com - The PalmOS Open Source Portal

Palm::Datebook - Handler for Palm DateBook databases. The Datebook PDB handler is a helper class for the Palm::PDB package. It parses DateBook databases

It's Clear Bush Tax Cuts Have Hurt Americans Published on Sunday, December 9, 2001 in the Boulder Daily Camera

It's Clear Bush Tax Cuts Have Hurt Americans

by Paul Krugman



Shortly after Sept. 11, George W. Bush interrupted his inveighing against evildoers to crack a joke. Bush had repeatedly promised to run an overall budget surplus at least as large as the Social Security surplus, except in the event of recession, war or national emergency. "Lucky me," he remarked to Mitch Daniels, his budget director. "I hit the trifecta."

Lucky him, indeed. The Enron analogy will soon become a tired cliche, but in this case the parallel is irresistible. Enron management and the administration the company did so much to place in power applied the same strategy: First, use cooked numbers to justify big giveaways at the top. Then, if things don't work out, let ordinary workers who trusted you pay the price. But Enron executives got caught; Bush believes that the events of Sept. 11 will let him off the hook.

Justice wears a Burka!

He had ordered massive draperies to conceal the offending figures. But initially not only could the story not be confirmed — it was strongly denied

Attended three meetings this week. They could have all been combined and the essential business conducted in 20 minutes. But when is that not true. Goodbye, 4.5 hours of my life that I'll never get back.

Yesterday was pajama day at my son's preschool. He was so excited that he put on his scooby doo slippers the night before and paraded around the house. Ezra is five. He was totally stoked. It's a cliche, perhaps, but it would be great to feel that way on occasion. Of course, he gets pretty upset at times too, so there is a downside to this instant enthusiasm. Ezra brought home a borrowed copy of Ranger Rick from preschool, and he is also very excited about Ranger Rick as well. RR just reminds me of how completely removed from nature I've become in the last five years of graduate school.

Like many bloggers, I've decided to write more and post to fewer links in this weblog. It's like flossing though--great in theory, but nobody ever does it.



I found out last night that my estranged 25 year old sister had a brain tumor taken out a week ago and is recovering. Her eight month old son is in the hospital awaiting a heart transplant. I don't know if it would be possible for her or her family to experience any more stress right now.

Signing With Your Baby: Use sign language to communicate before your baby can talk. Infants develop the fine muscles in their hands before they develop those required for speech, so they're equipped to communicate with you before they can speak.

I should say that I don't really think they're on about transferable
skills as much as about explicit teaching of skills. The big news
from their project (they were at it for seven years, and it's
impressive work) is that, in general, they're finding that explicit
instruction in writing in pre-professional programs (i.e., how to
write like a social worker or an architect) doesn't show much
evidence of efficacy. People learn genres by dwelling in them
(Michael Polanyi, call your office), not by paying attention to them,
or to the skills you need to wield them. I draw the further
conclusion that explicit instruction in the academic literary essay
probably doesn't help a whole lot when you start actually writing and
publishing scholarship -- and that if the skills you develop writing
term papers don't have much in the way of consequences for an
academic career, they probably don't transfer over into writing
persuasive business plans or client referrals or building program
summaries. Or MOO dialogue.

Not to say that you don't learn _something_ by practicing all those
genres, and that the something might be general. I think I learn
genres quicker than I used to, for instance (especially now that I
know that's what I'm doing).

Russell Hunt, from Techrhet

Ex-Doors bandmate reflects on life with Jim
by Brett Milano

I just want to lay the hint out there that there's another way of living. It goes beyond materialism, and it goes beyond girls with navels selling millions of records.''

New Scientist "We think it will prove very effective," said Kazuyuki Oi, a spokesman for the Hokkaido police. "One of the reasons is that foreigners are very big. We are trained in judo and kendo, but the nets may be a more effective way to tackle violent fans."

In an exercise, police dressed as hooligans were successfully restrained using the gun, the newspaper reports.

ONLamp.com: Slash's Wiki Plugin [Jan. 17, 2002] What A Wiki Is

"The nice thing about a Wiki is its simplicity."

While the story and comment format is fine for discussions, there's a whole class of collaborative work that can't be done with a standard Slash site. Occasionally, it's useful to have a brainstorming session, where getting ideas down coherently is more important than following a traditional call-and-response question format. Business people call this "synergy," but it really means something here.

Though I can't prove it at the moment, I suspect that's what lead Ward Cunningham to come up with the idea of a Wiki. It's like one of those smart whiteboards, where anyone can write anything and erase anything, but there's still a record of all revisions. The theory goes that putting simple but effective tools in the hands of smart people and staying out of the way can produce great results.

Three Roses, Cognac on Poe Birthday Jerome said the man, wearing the traditional black hat and coat, with a white scarf concealing his face, appeared to be different from last year's so-called Poe Toaster.

``He appeared to be a younger man,'' said Jerome, who has witnessed the ritual for 20 years. ``He stood erect and walked quickly.''

The man made no gestures, other than the secret signal he sends Jerome to show he is the genuine Poe Toaster, as he laid the tribute.

Search Results Assistant Professor of English
Prairie State College, a comprehensive community college located 25 miles south of downtown Chicago, has an opening for a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English. For position description and qualifications, please see our web site at www.prairiestate.edu. Send a cover letter, resume, and unofficial transcript to Office of Human Resources (English position), Prairie State College, 202 S. Halsted Street, Chicago Heights, IL 60411. Questions? Call Rose King at 708-709-3541. Review begins February 11, 2002, but position is open until filled. OEO/AA [R]

The Register

It's the XP 'product activation' slavery agreement that drove me, finally, to Linux. And fortunately, a lot of the newer Linux distros now install nicely on any x86 machine. I've been able to install it successfully and then refer to the documentation to tweak it properly, just as I used to do with Microsoft's products before the cheap bastards shrank their documentation to a mere glossy advertisement brochure.

Carl G Boice, Robert. "Work Habits of Productive Scholarly Writers: Insights from Research in Psychology." Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition Eds. Gary A. Olson and Todd Taylor. Albany: SUNY, 1997, 211-28.

Red Rock Eater Digest - Institutional Analysis for Design Even though networked individualism is a compelling idea, however,
I am always uncomfortable with theoretical constructs that declare
qualitatively new conditions to have arisen just because technology
has helped us do more of the things we already did before. As a
result, I prefer to think of networked individualism as a permanent
condition, one that already held during the Stone Age and that has
become more intense in fits and starts throughout history. On this
conception, networked individualism is independent of particular
technologies; the concept encourages us to go looking for the diverse
means by which people maintain an ongoing awareness of one another --
visits, parties, rumors, letters, phone calls, Web pages, and so on,
all of them embedded in the society's larger workings in various ways.

nothing, and lots of it

There was an interesting post at Kuro5hin the other day, by a high school student wondering why he couldn't just keep a weblog to learn the finer points of english and grammar. I've found that practice does indeed make perfect. If I had to point to one thing that allows me to write well today in comparison with my college-aged self, it'd have to be email. After seven years of churning out thousands of words a day, I've grown a lot as a writer. Keeping a weblog here and with MetaFilter has also helped, especially in terms of learning how to make a point and structure an argument. Maybe blogs have a place in education, I know just the daily act of writing has immensely helped with expressing myself.

kuro5hin.org || Weblogs in high school english?

It's often been said to me that communication is one skill that many people lack or are poor in. Why not use a weblog in high school english classes?

Hazards of Design Let us turn from the situation of the designer to the situation of the user. Computers, evidently, are machines that we build so that we can talk about them in a certain way, and ethnomethodology recommends that contexts of computer use are self-organizing with regard to the production of every aspect of rational order. Although computers abundantly supply the linguistic resources that users might employ in accounting for their behavior, in other words, we must still look to each occasion of computer use for the unique way in which it interprets these resources and makes them relevant to ongoing practical concerns. What the people do provides a reflexive ground for making out what the machine has done, and vice versa, and all of this is accomplished only for all practical purposes, being endlessly revisable in light of subsequent evidence. Woolgar (1994) has described this process from the related perspective of reflexive sociology.

O'Reilly Network: How the Wayback Machine Works [Jan. 21, 2002]

Am I disillusioned? No. Is it depressing to see a lot of my friends out of work? Yes! But the goal of universal access to human knowledge is in many ways an original goal of the Net. It's a tremendous goal. It makes me want to jump out of bed in the morning and try to get this thing done. People working on digital divide issues want to join in, advocates for children's literacy programs want to join in. It's not about driving slick cars, it's about using this technology for the betterment of education and people. I'll take that any day over random stock option grants.

O'Reilly Network: How the Wayback Machine Works [Jan. 21, 2002]

Kahle: We're trying to show how people can do it themselves. We're trying to encourage everyone to take their old content that's not online and put it online. A professor at UC Berkeley said that students use the Web as the resource of first resort, which is a huge change. But that's a little dangerous if the Web doesn't have the good stuff on it, and many people complain it doesn't. Instead of trying to whip students to go back to the physical library, let's put the good stuff on the Net. Otherwise, we could have a whole generation learning from ephemeral content collections, as opposing to learning from the books of the ancients. And a lot of materials are not there yet.

Why do I ask this of you as you go about developing a web site? Because developing a web site is only a part of the learning goals for this course. Writing web sites, especially writing interactive web applications, is an inherently heuristic activity. I don't believe anybody can be engaged in writing interactivity without having to rethink what such interactivity is in a digital society, and especially how that interactivity affects learning in a society in which all knowledge will be available to anyone who can effectively appropriate it. Your accumulating understanding, shared with and growing out of the accumulating understanding of your classmates, is as valuable a part of this course as your growing ability to construct data-driven web pages.

How large a house can you afford?

bryanboyer - zui-huh?

"Every current artist who says they hate computers has a secret computer room labeled 'top secret' where it's ok to use computers."

--John Maeda

nothing, and lots of it

If they ever create something like an iWrite application that automatically stores and categorizes local copies of writing (which could offer weblog as a format option), with some sort of instant html-ize and upload to your homepage.mac.com account, they stand to legitimize the collective work of online writers if they choose to allow print and custom book creation. I can see the Steve Jobs presentation now “The Great American Novel will be written on an ibook running iWrite, and printed, published, and delivered instantly for $14.95 for the first 50 pages.”

New Scientist | Mobile Phones | Write here, write now

Pinning messages in mid-air, using the location's Global Positioning System (GPS) reference, could become the next craze in communications. The messages are not actually kept in the air: they're stored on an Internet page. But that page's Web address is linked to coordinates on the Earth's surface, rather than a person or organisation. As you move about, a GPS receiver in your mobile phone or PDA will check to see if a message has been posted on the website for that particular spot. If you're in luck a snippet of info-left as text or a voice recording by someone who passed there previously-will pop up on your screen or be whispered into your earpiece.

Over half the nation's workforce is now directly engaged in producing, processing, and distributing information. In the age of the information superhighway and multimedia technology, the talents of skilled information professionals are in unprecedented demand. Information professionals have the expertise necessary to manage the acquisition, organization, preservation and retrieval of all types of information. They have the knowledge that enables them to make best use of information - both when making individual decisions and when meeting the needs of society.

Organizations in business, education, science, government, and industry all depend on accurate and relevant information. They all need specialists who can connect people and knowledge, whether these specialists are called librarians, information scientists, knowledge managers, or archivists.


In turn, prospective information professionals must take care to seek an education that will best prepare them for an exciting and demanding career.

UCLA's Department of Information Studies is widely regarded as one of the finest in the nation. We offer students:


an academic program at the forefront of the field
a dynamic, diverse and highly respected faculty
a learning environment rich in first-class resources and facilities.
Our MLIS program prepares students for successful, rewarding and challenging careers as information professionals. Our PhD program prepares students for careers as internationally respected, rigorous and creative researchers.

COMPUTER NEWS DAILY - NYT SYNDICATE

Nearly half of American adults believe incorrectly that they would risk electrocution by using a portable phone while in the bathtub.
``We are technologically illiterate,'' an expert committee set up by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council said Thursday. ``As a society, we are not even fully aware of or conversant with the technologies we use every day.''
The panel met at the National Academies to discuss a Gallup poll used in its two-year study of what to do about how little Americans know about technology.

Protectv: $79.95 box that filters out profanities based on close captions. Interesting.



http://www.protectv.com/buy_online.html

Goat Milk Carries Spider Silk in Canada Experiment

``The spiders unfortunately are territorial carnivores. They eat each other, and this has caused them to resist all forms of domestication,'' Turner said.

The perils of spider farming.

Strained relations / Business magazines struggle to maintain objectivity under pressure from their biggest tech advertisers Silicon Valley heavy hitters PeopleSoft and Sun Microsystems sank their teeth into Forbes and Fortune, respectively, in some cases threatening to pull their ads in protest of hard-hitting coverage, according to reliable sources

Knuth versus Email

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

InsiderOne - The Drama You've Been Craving Gough is a self-made DIY kinda artist. In that Rolling Stone profile, writer Gavin Edwards reports that early on Gough bought a Tascam 144 four-track recorder, the same model Bruce Springsteen used to record Nebraska. After getting his recorder, Gough began writing a song a day, says Edwards; then in 1997 he released his first EP on his own label, Twisted Nerve.

IP: the web runs on love, not greed >

In our disappointment of grand riches, we have failed to see the miracle

>on our desks. Ten years ago, it was easy to dismiss visions of a wondrous

>screen in our homes that would provide the whole world in its magical

>window. The idea of a universal information port was considered

>uneconomical, and too futuristic to be real in our lifetimes. Yet at any

>hour of today, most readers of this paper have access to the full text of

>the Encyclopedia Britannica, precise map directions to anywhere in the

>country, stock quotes in real time, local weather forecasts with radar

>pictures, immediate sports scores from your hometown, any kind of music

>you could desire, answers to medical questions, hobbyists who know more

>than you do, tickets to just about anything, 24/7 e-mail, news from a

>hundred newspapers, and so on. Much of this is for free. This abundance

>simply overwhelms what was promised by the most optimistic guru.

The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed
>By Kevin Kelly
>
>Right on cue, the demise of the dot-com revolution has prompted skepticism
>of the Internet and all that it promised. An honest evaluation would have
>to admit it has been a very bad year for hip startup companies, hi-tech
>investors, and hundred of thousands of workers in the technology field.
>Three trillion dollars lost on Nasdaq, 500 failed dot-coms, and half a
>million hi-tech jobs gone. Even consumers in the street are underwhelmed
>by look-alike gizmos and bandwidth that never came. The hundreds of ways
>in which the Internet would "change everything" appear to have melted
>away, or to have not happened at all. As the end of the year approaches a
>collective New Year's resolution is surfacing: "Next year, next time, we
>won't believe the hype."
>
>This revised view of the Internet, as sensible as it is, is a misguided as
>the previous view that the Internet could only go up. The Internet is less
>a creation dictated by economics than it is a miracle and a gift.
>
>Netscape's legendary IPO in 1995 launched the web in the mind of the
>public. That jumpstart happened not much more than 2,000 days ago. In the
>2,000 days since then, we have collectively created more than 3 billion
>public web pages. We've established twenty million web sites. Each year we
>send about 3.5 trillio

CNN.com - Transcripts The most explosive charge, Paula, is that the Bush administration -- the present one, just shortly after assuming office slowed down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrorism in Afghanistan in order to do a deal with the Taliban on oil -- an oil pipeline across Afghanistan.



ZAHN: And this book points out that the FBI's deputy director, John O'Neill, actually resigned because he felt the U.S. administration was obstructing...



BUTLER: A proper...



ZAHN: ... the prosecution of terrorism.

Salon.com Technology | The geeks who saved Usenet "Usenet has always been about arguing about itself," Jones says of the posts that were unearthed. "And the arguments that you see today are the same arguments that go way back into the early '80s, and I'm sure that those arguments will continue well into the future."

Salon.com Technology | The geeks who saved Usenet "We started dumping stuff that we thought was obviously of no future use, groups that specialized in a lot of talk and no substance, so to speak. For example, fairly early on there was a newsgroup about abortion which specialized in violent arguments."

DAT-Heads Digest #198 The RIAA's campaign against bootleg dealers climaxed this year with the federal conviction of New York bootlegger Charles LaRocco. A Long Island record dealer, La-Rocco was arrested in 1996, 1997 and again in January for running a distribution network that supplied millions of bootleg CDs to record stores and Web sites.

winterspeak.com Here's how to empty your inbox (and keep it empty)



1. Put the oldest, crustiest emails at the top. This will help you remember to get rid of them.

2. Delete all spam (without opening it).

3. Go through all personal messages from friends and family (the most important emails). Read them, enjoy them, delete them. If you must keep them, copy and paste the text into a text editor and save it in your hard disk as "'initials of sender' 'date' 'keywords'".



4. Your inbox now contains email of middling importance only. Sequentially engage each email to remove it from the inbox:



- If the email is a to-do item or appointment, copy and paste it as a to-do or appointment into your calender program. To-do items should be tied to specific days, so Outlook users are out of luck. Delete email in inbox



- If email is a item of correspondence tied to a project, save it in the folder for that project as " ". Delete email in inbox.



- If the email is reoccurring (newsletter, list), read the email and enjoy it if you have time, else delete it. You'll be getting a new one tomorrow anyway.



5. Continue until your inbox is empty, and keep it that way.

Absolute Powerpoint "What I miss is, when I used to lecture without PowerPoint, every now and then I'd get a cool idea," he went on. "I remember once it just hit me. I'm lecturing, and all of a sudden I go, 'God! "The Wizard of Oz"! The scene at the end of "The Wizard of Oz"!'" Nass, telling this story, was almost shouting. (The lecture, he later explained, was about definitions of "the human" applied to computers.) "I just went for it--twenty-five minutes. And to this day students who were in that class remember it. That couldn't happen now: 'Where the hell is the slide?'"

Absolute Powerpoint Instead of pleading for domestic harmony, Sarah Wyndham was pitching for it. Soon she had eighteen pages of large type, supplemented by a color photograph of a generic happy family riding bicycles, and, on the final page, a drawing key-the key to success. The briefing was given only once, last fall. The experience was so upsetting to her children that the threat of a second showing was enough to make one of the Wyndham girls burst into tears.
PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people. It allows you to arrange text and graphics in a series of pages, which you can project, slide by slide, from a laptop computer onto a screen, or print as a booklet (as Sarah Wyndham did). The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn't seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it-you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.

'Cutout' Macs a Real Passion "To make sure that Caitlin grew up with the right priorities, I created huge padded rainbow apples, the early Apple logo, to go at each end of her cot," she said.
"My Mac is not a tool," Dragon Tongue said. "It is a lifestyle, a friend, a place, a home, sometimes a pain, never a 'thing.'"
Ken Forbus, a professor of Computer Science and Education at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said people create these models for many reasons, but many Mac modelers want to remember machines they loved.
"These paper models serve as tangible reminders of cherished devices," he said. "That's unusual these days. People used to bond with their computers with ceremonies upon their installation and decommissioning. Now computers flow through our lives, not staying long enough to become companions. In fact, given the transient nature of today's machines, these paper versions will probably outlast the machines themselves."

Crazy Apple Rumors Site This went on for a while and by about 11:30pm, we were all so full of caffeine we were getting kind of paranoid. Chet said "What if Steve pulled his face off and there was this hideous gorgon underneath, with fire and brimstone spewing from its nostrils? Its foot-long tongue split at the end, it throws its head back and bellows 'All look upon me and despair!' Then it starts eating the souls of everyone in the Moscone Center."

Corporations Behaving Badly The movie won’t include product placements and Coca-Cola says that its marketing program includes a literacy campaign. But, “the bottom line is that an adored literary phenomenon is being put to work to sell more junk food,” says SaveHarry.com organizer Jacobson.

Corporations Behaving Badly Under the federal False Claims Act, whistleblowers who file qui tam lawsuits against companies defrauding the government are entitled to 15 to 25 percent of whatever funds the government recovers in cases where the government joins the lawsuit.



Durand filed a False Claims Act lawsuit in May 1996. The government intervened, and earlier this year, Durand was awarded $77 million as his part in the recovery of the lawsuit.

Computer in Kabul holds chilling memos The memo laments al-Qaida’s sluggishness in realizing the menace of these weapons, noting that “despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that they can be produced simply.”

NBA Pages Britney Spears for TV Special NEW YORK (Variety) - Britney Spears will perform during a televised one-hour literacy special next month organized by the National Basketball Association.
Six networks will carry a simultaneous run of ``The NBA All-Star Read to Achieve Celebration'' at 11 a.m. on Feb. 9, the weekend of the NBA All-Star Game in Philadelphia.

War

Returning to the war, the airstrikes quickly turned cities into "ghost towns," the press reported, with electrical power and water supplies destroyed, a form of biological warfare. The UN reported that 70% of the population had fled Kandahar and Herat within two weeks, mostly to the countryside, where in ordinary times 10-20 people, many of them children, are killed or crippled daily by land mines. Those conditions became much worse as a result of the bombing. UN mine-clearing operations were halted, and unexploded U.S. ordnance, particularly the lethal bomblets scattered by cluster bombs, add to the torture, and are much harder to clear.10

Migrating from MAC to Windows Both versions of Eudora keep their mailboxes in the same format (UNIX mbox). However, Macintosh and Windows file systems handle text differently, so line feed conversion must be done. You can do this by FTPing the files in ASCII (text) mode, or by using a carriage return/line feed conversion utility (like the shareware application CRLF). It's very important that you FTP or convert the files to take care of the carriage return/line feed processing.

Palm, Long a Leader, Has Big Plans for 2002

The new chairman and chief executive, Eric A. Benhamou, has vowed to correct the missteps of 2001. "We simply did not innovate enough," he said this month. "We have made it a priority to correct this trend."

Accelerated Publishing

There are exceptions. Less than three weeks after the twin towers atrocity, www.BookSurge.com produced 09/11 8.48am: Documenting America's Greatest Tragedy. It was on sale within the month. The content of the 320-page book (a traditional ink and paper job) is choral. It brings together dozens of witnesses, weaving their voices into a complex narrative. It is, essentially, a bundle of stories. And, as in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, people have become the incarnation of their stories.