-
CONCLUSION: "For every kid that I bump into who is wandering the media industry looking for an entrance that closed some time ago, I come across another who is a bundle of ideas, energy and technological mastery. The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down. Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well. For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave."
-
And that's to be the first of a bunch of changes at PBS. The changes at the Newshour include... "A redone Web site will go up Thursday. It will be easier to find Mr. Brown’s popular but often hidden Art Beat blog. Ms. Woodruff and Ms. Ifill, along with much of the rest of the staff, will begin contributing to a news analysis blog, as well. Mr. Sreenivasan, once he settles in, will anchor regular video news updates on the site, which will also feature extended interview material not used on the air. All the show’s content will be more easily adaptable to various digital outlets, including, eventually, an iPhone app, said Simon Marks, the show’s new associate executive producer."
November 2009 Archives
-
Great points from Dave Chappelle. Under the law of many states, a 17-year old is unable to consent to sex with her 18-year old boyfriend. In those same states, a 15-year old can be tried as an adult. If a person lacks the ability to understand the nature of sex, how can a person understand the nature of criminal acts? Add in race, and you have the wisdom of Chappelle (video starts at 4:20, and is worth watching from the beginning)
-
More on tenure... A few alert readers called my attention to this post by Michael Berube, in which he attacks my response to the AAUP. He even goes so far as to "nominate DD’s post for the coveted Richard Cohen Award for Advanced Wrongheadedness." Clearly, a response is in order.
-
As regular readers know, I've argued for some time that the tenure system is unsustainable and even unethical. I've proposed as an alternative a system of long-term renewable contracts with academic freedom stipulated in the contract language. (For the record, I envision an initial contract of three years -- consistent with current practice for most tenure-track lines -- followed by renewable five-year contracts.) That way, if academic freedom is attacked, a complainant wouldn't have to rely on an extra-constitutional and undefined legal doctrine; she could bring action as breach of contract. Academic freedom could also be stipulated in institutional policy. To the extent that employee handbooks and/or institutional bylaws are given the force of contract, the objection from 'expiration' is rendered moot.
-
Gould says it's pretty clear ants don't have maps in their heads and don't recognize markers along the route. This experiment strongly suggests that ants do have internal pedometers that allow them to "count" their [steps to find the] way home.
-
"Whatever you have thought of me in the past, I can tell you right now that I am one of your greatest friends and I mean for us to work together," he said in a live interview with Telemundo's Maria Celeste. "I hope that will begin with Maria and me and Telemundo and other media organizations and others in this national debate that we should turn into a solution rather than a continuing debate and factional contest."
Mr. Dobbs twice mentioned a possible legalization plan for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., saying at one point that "we need the ability to legalize illegal immigrants under certain conditions."
-
Good for all; me, I'm looking for tips.
-
Scary... A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time. Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them - but could make no sound.
'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,' said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegatative state.
The hot platform of the two is definitely Android, but Windows Mobile still has a lot to offer. While criticized for being an aging platform that has been around seemingly forever, the evolution of the WinMo ecosystem is, in fact, an advantage. If only Microsoft would make that clear.
-
It has a long history. Generally, he gives Obama good marks, but "The White House has also mishandled liberal and left-wing movements when they have run ads against wayward Democrats who appeared unwilling to back the administration’s reform agenda. Generally, the White House has tried to discourage them from taking positions independent of the administration’s. And it has thrown its support to Organizing for America, a quasi-political machine that grew out of the campaign and that is united by its loyalty to Obama rather than by its support for liberal reform. That’s a mistake. Obama and the Democrats need active, unruly, and independent pressure from the left to combat Republican conservatives, intimidate Democratic fence-sitters, and persuade business that, if it doesn’t back Obama’s reforms, it could face much more radical measures."
-
From Google 1 year before release...
-
overview history and update status of domestic robots. I want the Scooba floor washing robot: http://store.irobot.com/category/index.jsp?categoryId=3334444
-
Medical robots are, for the most part, tools to enhance a doctor’s or a therapist’s techniques—like orthotic devices, which help improve motor control and range of motion after a stroke or other trauma and can offer modified degrees of assistance as the patient recovers.
-
Nearly 20 percent of the families in Vashon Island, Wash., aren't getting their children vaccinated against childhood diseases. At the Ocean Charter School near Marina del Rey, Calif., 40 percent of the 2008 kindergarten class received vaccination exemptions. Author Michael Specter says the parents in these upscale enclaves are prime examples of what he calls "denialism."
That's also the title of his new book, . "We can all believe irrational things," the author of Denialism tells NPR's Scott Simon. "The problem is that I think an increasing number of Americans are acting on those beliefs instead of acting on facts that are readily present."
According to industry insiders, Palin got a $7 million advance for her book. She’s earning a royalty rate of 15 percent, which means she makes $4.35 per book sold, and therefore needs to sell 1.6 million books to earn out her advance. The Wall Street Journal reported Wed. that HarperCollins had printed another 100,000 copies bringing the total in print to 1.6 million. Palin would need to sell all of those to earn out her advance, so it’s unlikely that’s going to happen. But HarperCollins will be making money long before that. There’s a rule of thumb in the industry that publishers net about $10 per hardcover sold, after expenses, but before the cost of the advance. Once she’s sold 700,000 copies, then, HarperCollins is in the black. And what of that 1.6 million printed? An ideal “sell-through” rate is about 75 percent, which means HarperCollins thinks it’s going to sell about 1.2 million copies. At that level, Palin will have made $7 million and HarperCollins $5 million of its own.
"Victimization plays well with the conservative base and that's a problem. If conservatives don't rise from the muck of feeling excluded, disrespected, ignored and mocked, they will continue to suffer all of these things. There is nothing like proving the worth of your ideas to put the mockers in their place. Victimization can raise money, sell books and get one face time on TV, but it doesn't advance the ball."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net), and other international copyright experts joined together today to launch Copyright Watch -- a public website created to centralize resources on national copyright laws at www.copyright-watch.org.
-
"I have outlined six broad principles that I believe can be applied as a design methodology for companies building services online today. They are inspired by others, a list of whom would be very long, I’m not going to attempt to document it, I will surely miss someone. Building companies on today’s internet is by definition an exercise in standing on the shoulders of giants. Internet standards from TCP/IP onward are the strong foundation of an architecture of participation. As users pick and choose which services they want to stitch together into their cloud, can companies build services based on these shared data sets in a manner that is consistent with the expectations we hold for the medium? The web has a grain to it and after 15 years of innovation we can begin to observe the outlines of that grain. We may not be able to always describe exactly what it is that makes something “web consistent” but we do know it when we see it."
-
Very interesting! EXCERPT: "Old World cities like London—recently declared the most confusing city in the world by a 12,500-person Nokia Maps survey—present huge challenges. So pity London’s cabbies. Before getting behind the wheel of a black cab, would-be drivers have to pass a test called the Knowledge, which requires them to memorize some 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks, a task that takes two to four years.
A cognitive map featuring that level of detail, as you might imagine, requires a fair amount of storage space, and, sure enough, University College London neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire found that the back part of the hippocampus in London taxi drivers is enlarged compared with that of the general population. The longer they’ve been driving, the bigger the gap. Maguire also found, though, that the front part of the hippocampus gets correspondingly smaller. “So there is a price to pay for their expertise,” she says."
-
Reviews of The Panasonic Lumix GF1, and Canon PowerShot S90: at the forefront in allowing easy yet sophisticated photography. --David Pogue
-
EXCERPT|: "Starting next week, Verizon will double the early-termination fee for smartphones. That is, if you get a BlackBerry, Android or similar phone from Verizon, and you decide to switch phones before your two-year contract is up, you'll be socked with a $350 penalty (it used to be $175)."
It gets worse. They intentionally scam customers with an easy-to-accidentally-hit button that charges $1.99 even as you hit cancel immediately. We need re-regulaltion!
Opening lines: "I'm touching a wet slab of protein, what feels like a paper-thin slice of bologna. It's supple, slimy, but unlike meat, if you were to slice it down the center today, tomorrow the wound would heal. It's factory-grown living tissue."
-
Eris is #2 to iPhone: "There's much to like about the Motorola Droid and the Eris, but they're each missing several things -- things that the iPhone 3G S has. Of course, the iPhone is still tethered to AT&T's troublesome network, so maybe the best bet of all is for the iPhone to land on Verizon's network. Unless and until that happens, the HTC Droid Eris is a capable smartphone on a better network."
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/11/10/urnidgns852573C4006938800025766A006821F4.DTL#ixzz0Wfc9XZPe
I'm leaning toward an HTC Droid Eris. This is a good summary comparison. Includes Mobile Deathmatch Calculator to get a customized score for each smartphone.
Umdiddlediddlediddleumdiddleye. Umdiddlediddlediddleumdiddleye:
-
Exchange issues make it unfit for business: "Given that more businesses use Exchange than any other enterprise-class e-mail server, the uncertainty over the Droids' level of Exchange support, the revelation that TouchDown inaccurately reports at least on-device encryption ActiveSync policy support, and the fact that the Droids don't support IBM's Lotus Notes or Novell's Groupwise secured connections, I can't imagine any responsible business or IT department permitting the use of the Droids for corporate e-mail access."
-
My post on European Road Train tests. Posted here because DLS put a passel of good links on automated road trials in California.
From my iPhone, the best I could do.-
At age 13! One of the 2 to be considered by SCOTUS tomorrow. EXCERPT: Whatever the court decides, its ruling will be based on the premise that Sullivan received a fair trial. The adequacy of that proceeding isn't before the justices now. But a brief review of the trial record reveals a process so pathetic that it raises questions about whether Sullivan committed the crime in the first place.
-
Duke Law Professor James Boyle describes the history of a single song - protesting the government's inept response after Hurricane Katrina - and its century-old lineage in the work of Kanye West, Ray Charles, and others. Each borrowed from others, yet they borrowed in different ways, with different legal rules, in different musical cultures. At the end, we can sense how future music may be shaped and what our musical culture may give up in the process. Sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
-
Nice overview of the Singularity
-
When executives from Hilton Worldwide, the venerable hotel chain, called on "Mad Men" creator Matt Weiner last year, he thought he would be getting a pitch to use the Beverly Hilton on his show. He had no idea that the product they wanted to place was the company's founder, Conrad Hilton himself.
-
A real predator strike!
-
The company is trying to round up support for a monthly subscription service that would deliver TV programs via its multimedia software, multiple sources tell me.
Apple (AAPL) isn’t tying the proposed service to a specific piece of hardware, like its underwhelming Apple TV box or its long-rumored tablet/slate device. Instead, the company is presenting the offer as an extension of its iTunes software and store, which already has 100 million customers.
CBS's 60 Minutes has made itself out to be more of a laughingstock than usual when it comes to "investigative reporting," putting on an episode about "video piracy" that is basically 100% MPAA propaganda, without any fact checking or any attempt to challenge the (all MPAA connected) speakers, or to include anyone (anyone!) who would present a counterpoint. The episode is funny in that it contradicts itself at times (with no one noticing it) and gets important (and easily checked) facts wrong. And, of course, it basically mimics that old episode that history has shown to have been totally (laughably) false.
-
If you are a media exec and you look at your product and at the end of the day it’s a digital file that can be copied, then you have a serious problem with your format. Think of your product like a pie chart of the value you are giving the consumer. If 100% of the value is in that file, it is not a sound approach for defending the future of your business. However, if a portion of the experience is derived thorough an integration with a Web component that will yield additional value in functionality or social elements, then it will be more sustainable. ... Applications that let consumers interact with the media. Create things and share them with their friends. These will not only make the consumer the one who markets your product, but also create an unprecedented level of engagement. That level of engagement will directly map to reduction in piracy as consumers will pay for this experience and wont be able to copy it. Sell access and experiences, not media files.
-
A team of researchers has found that Hummer owners say their vehicle choice is strongly related to their personal morals. Of course, those morals are guns, guts and gas guzzlers.
According to an article published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Americans who believe in rugged individualism and the frontier myth see an H2 as John Wayne on wheels. “As we studied American Hummer owners and their ideological beliefs, we found that they consider Hummer driving a highly moral consumption choice,” the authors wrote. “For Hummer owners it is possible to claim the moral high ground.”
Ads 'n Such
Love them...
