February 2010 Archives

IMPORTANT RESOURCE: We are very excited to announce the lineup of participants for our special February programming on Race and the Supreme Court, in recognition of Black History Month.

From 2007 so old for a world in flux. But worth remembering: "Only 30 percent of 13-year-olds read almost every day.

The number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.

Almost half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 never read books for pleasure."

A new generation of young, hip and occasionally tattooed librarians is driving them out. They call themselves guybrarians, cybrarians and "information specialists," and they blog at sites like The Free Range Librarian and The Lipstick Librarian. They can be found in droves on Second Life, but also outside the Republican National Convention, dodging tear gas canisters and tweeting the location of the police.

I'm preparing a post on the re-segregation of America. Will likely incorporate this: "The name of White Settlement originated as a result of there being two settlements in the area: one occupied predominantly by Native Americans (near where Fort Worth, TX is located today), and the other one being occupied by white settlers. The latter settlement received the name "White Settlement" as a way to distinguish itself from the Native American settlement. The city was incorporated in 1941.

On October 14, 2005, City leaders announced a plan to have local voters decide on a possible name change for the town from White Settlement to West Settlement. In the November 8 election, the name change was overwhelmingly rejected by a vote of 2388 to 219."

2005????

Expiration dates are intended to inspire confidence, but they only invest us with a false sense of security. The reality is that the onus lies with consumers to judge and maintain the freshness and edibility of their food—by checking for offensive slime, rank smells, and off colors. Perhaps, then, we should do away with dates altogether and have packages equipped with more instructive guidance on properly storing foods, and on detecting spoilage. Better yet, we should focus our efforts on what really matters to our health—not spoilage bacteria, which are fairly docile, but their malevolent counterparts: disease-causing pathogens like salmonella and Listeria, which infect the food we eat not because it's old but as a result of unsanitary conditions at factories or elsewhere along the supply chain. A new system that could somehow prevent the next E. coli outbreak would be far more useful to consumers than a fairly arbitrary set of labels that merely (try to) guarantee taste.

"It's [the filibuster]just brought the process to a halt, and the public is suffering. So the minority needs to have a right. I think that's important. But the public has a right to see its business done. And not routinely allow a small minority to keep us from addressing the great issues that face this country. I think the filibuster absolutely needs to be changed."

Pogue on Buzz: Funny, isn’t it? It’s a running joke that Google labels many of its services as “beta” (meaning “in testing”) — and leaves that label in place for years. And here’s Buzz, a truly beta product that isn’t labeled that way.

Buzz probably won’t make much of a dent in Facebook or Twitter or FriendFeed. But because it’s nicely integrated with Gmail and Google chat, because it has powerful and flexible features and because millions of Gmail members can get in with a single click, Buzz will have its own following. In other words, its complex design is a challenge that Google will have to overcome — but it’s not enough to be a Buzzkill.

Dazzling: a prototype version of Google Goggles that showcases the potential of integrating Google's machine translation and image recognition technologies. A video in which Goggles to takes a picture of a German menu and instantly translate the text into English.

"Microsoft just planted a massive flag in the ground with the debut of Windows Phone 7 Series. The company's new mobile operating system is a radical and potent departure from the past, and there's a lot to take in …"

Carr's seminal 2003 article, "Are we spending too much on technology? This provocative Harvard Business Review excerpt suggests that IT no longer conveys competitive advantage, so invest your capital elsewhere."

Critique of Carr & Cloud computing: "Carr's vision is either utopian or dystopian, depending on how you look at it, but either way, it mixes a few likely trends with lots of naive wishful thinking, unsound logic, and sophomoric shock value."

The donation, in true social media fashion, was announced via tweets from Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia Foundation advisory board member Mitch Kapor. Neither Google nor the Wikimedia Foundation have made an official announcement yet — it’s supposed to come tomorrow.

The video.

Their press release.

He likes it. A lot. Says it's too bad it won't work w/Macs. Microsoft will be more demanding with the hardware companies. Ships in about 6 mos.

"Instead of revamping Windows Mobile software, which first came out in 2002, Microsoft decided to start from scratch. The result is a completely new look and feel to previous generations of Microsoft Windows Mobile software."

Brin: I don’t actually think the question of whether this is the Chinese government is that important. ... even if there were a Chinese government agent behind it, it might represent a fragment of policy as it were. I think that there are many people there and have different views. If you look at when we entered China and did Chinese operations in 2006...things really improved in the subsequent years. I know there was a lot of controversy surrounding that...but were were actually able to censor less and less and the competitors there were also able to censor less and less. We from the outside provided notification when laws prevented us from showing information and competitors followed suit. But I feel like our entry made a big difference. But things started going downhill, especially after the Olympics. There’s been a lot more blocking going on since then. Also our other sites, YouTube and whatnot, have been blocked. So the situation really took a turn for the worse.

"Maybe it's a generational thing," says Cody Bayne, club promoter at Fubar in West Hollywood... Perhaps it's because he runs a bar full of young punks that you wouldn't guess Cody is in his 40s. (He says he prefers to be contacted the old-fashioned way: “through Facebook.”) He's a product of a time when gay life took place in a bar, and in a strange way, Grindr resurrects a bit of that spirit, returning the online scene to the public sphere. "I've been club promoting for 20 years," Cody says. "I lost clientele with the advent of online dating because a lot less people go out to meet others at bars." But now, he says, Grindr "has brought gay life full circle." It's an app that complements—even enhances—a night of barhopping. This weekend, he's hosting a Grindr party where those with the app get into the club for free: 400 men, 0 feet away.

Obama to Democrats at last week's policy committeeconference, "You did all this despite facing enormous procedural obstacles that are unprecedented. You may have looked at these statistics. You had to cast more votes to break filibusters last year than in the entire 1950s and '60s combined. That's 20 years of obstruction packed into just one. But you didn't let it stop you."

From 2004: Are Weblogs a passing fad or a revolutionary new form of communication and publishing? That's still an open question, but the presence of blogs in the academic environment makes it more likely that they'll survive and thrive in the long term.

The New York Times reports...that the Obama Administration's student-loan reform package is in jeopardy. This is unsurprising. The current federal student loan system involves the transfer of tens of billions of dollars from the public treasury to private corporations through a sweet deal of locked-in profit margins and guarantees that taxpayers will make good on loan defaults. Because the loan bill, having passed the House of Representatives last year, has been held up in the Senate for months pending the resolution of health care, that's given private banks and loan companies plenty of time to take some of the tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds they've received in the past and use them to hire lobbyists and former Congressional staffers to advocate on behalf of receiving additional tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds in the future. Because the United States Senate is no longer a functioning democratic institution, they might get their way.

Republicans say Dems are in the pocket of the trial lawyers. I note this line: "The Tea Party movement is growing up," said Judson Phillips, a Nashville-based criminal defense lawyer who organized the National Tea Party Convention.

New research takes a close look at what happened when one institution, Brigham Young University, experimented with granting free access to the content of some of its distance-education courses. The study examined the cost of opening up those materials and the impact their publication had on paid enrollments, a concern for institutions worried that giving away free courses could cannibalize their ranks of paying students.

The data suggest they needn’t worry. Opening the courses “provided neither a large positive marketing effect that boosted enrollments nor a large negative free-rider impact decreasing enrollments,” wrote Justin K. Johansen, who conducted the study... “Really, the OpenCourseWare ended up serving as an advertising tool.” ... But Johansen cautions that the limited length of the pilot study meant that a “statistically significant” measure of the impact of opening the classes on paid enrollment “was not possible.” DOESN'T THE LAST LINE MAKE THE POINT OF THE STORY MOOT?

THE DEFINITIVE TAKE ON BLOGGING FROM THE HIGH PEAK OFF THE BLOGOSPHERE: A blog, for those who don't know, is a journal or log that appears on a Web site. It is written on line, read on line, and updated on line. It's there for anyone with an Internet connection to see and (in many cases) comment on. The entries, or posts, are organized in reverse chronological order, like a pile of unread mail, with the newest posts on top and the older stuff on the bottom. Some blogs resemble on-line magazines, complete with graphics, sidebars, and captioned photos. Others just have the name of the blog at the top and the dated entries under it. You can find blogs by doing a regular Google search for the blog name (if you know it) or by doing a Google Blog search using keywords....

FROM MY SEARCH ON WHAT THE BLOG USED TO BE: "Here's what blogs are not: (1) the super-personalized news filters that social critics fretted would splinter the nation into a million tiny interest groups, or (2) the Drudge Report. Blogs don't limit your news intake, break stories or promulgate rumor, at least not intentionally. They have an only seemingly more innocent agenda. Blogs express opinion. They're one-person pundit shows, replete with the stridency and looniness usually edited off TV.

How does the Copyright Office remedy DRM, DMCA & copyright? Not very well...

Accused of plagiarizing tweets for using headline and bitly shortening. Ridiculous!

GAWKER BREAKS IT DOWN: Fox News has generously placed the full, unedited conversation between Bill O'Reilly and Jon Stewart online, so we can see precisely how unfairly and deviously Fox edited the interview in order to weaken Stewart's case: A lot!

None I want but cool what's happening in the marketplace as the megapixel race winds down: "reviews of nine answers to that question. Most are small, attractive, competent little machines with 12 megapixels, 3-inch screens and hi-def video capture.

All have image stabilization and face recognition, for sharper, better exposed shots. The Panasonic, Fujifilm, Canon and Casio models have unusually wide-angle lenses for capturing vistas — but can also zoom in 10X or even 12X. "

Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.

Duncan: "I’ve posted some free software that allows you to run a high resolution webcam. The application lets you connect a DSLR or digital camera (with ptp) to the web and upload photos at a given interval. It’s basically a web connected DSLR intervalometer that uses Amazon S3 for online storage."

A vitally important article. An excerpt doesn't capture the tiniest fraction of it: "I’ve always taken exception to the constant reference to “stimulus” as the policy objective, because implied in that word is the idea that all one needs to do is to undertake one or more relatively short term spending sprees...and that this will somehow return the economy to its pre-crisis state, putting it on a path of what economists like to call “self-sustaining growth.” I maintain that in the present environment there is no such thing as a return to self-sustaining growth. There will be no return to the supposedly normal conditions, which were in fact, from a historical point of view, highly abnormal, of the 1990s and 2000s. What one needs is to set a strategic direction for renewal of economic activity. We need to create the institutions that will support that direction. Those institutions are public institutions, which create a framework for private activity. This is the way it is done."

EXCERPT: "Today...our only public mourning takes the form of grief at the death of celebrities and statesmen. Some commentators in Britain sneered at the “crocodile tears” of the masses over the death of Diana. On the contrary...this grief is the same as the old public grief in which groups got together to experience in unity their individual losses. As a saying from China’s lower Yangtze Valley (where professional mourning was once common) put it, “We use the occasions of other people’s funerals to release personal sorrows.” When we watch the televised funerals of Michael Jackson or Ted Kennedy, Leader suggests, we are engaging in a practice that goes back to soldiers in the Iliad mourning with Achilles for the fallen Patroclus. Our version is more mediated. Still, in the Internet age, some mourners have returned grief to a social space, creating online grieving communities, establishing virtual cemeteries, commemorative pages, and chat rooms where loss can be described and shared."

NOW THAT'S MORE LIKE IT: " the information we’re hearing is that Apple is thinking much larger for another version of the product, maybe all the way up to the 15.4″ size that it currently uses for one version of the MacBook Pro. If you think that would be way too big for an iPad, we’re also hearing that this other tablet would be quite a bit different from the one revealed last week. Namely, it could run a version of OS X much closer to the traditional version that runs on Macs.

If there is any truth to that, we could learn something as soon as Apple’s WWDC event this year, which will likely take place in June (just as it does every year)."

Oxytocin is the most important social-bonding hormone, present notably between mother and child but also in just about any interaction involving pair bonding, social affiliation, and trust. More specifically, it’s involved with the gaze between infants and mothers. Researchers at Azabu University in Japan found last year that the dog’s gaze at its owner increases the owner’s oxytocin level.

No one believes, in his conscious mind, that the dog is a person. But that may not matter. The oxytocin study, while providing the key to understanding the myriad health benefits of dog ownership—oxytocin is a serious stress reducer—also makes scientifically clear what’s obvious anecdotally: The dog is an honorary human, accorded many of the same considerations.