bookmark

Airplanes, Faith and Latent Networks

@EthanZ on networks: "... I think projects that connect professionals in the developed and developing world to encourage cooperation and skill transfer are significantly more likely to lead to good outcomes."

How Do Aid Organizations Target Relief?

"aid organizations are driven primarily by normative goals rather than material organizational ones"

Pentagon orders Wikileaks to delete classified documents

This tactic often works with leaked documents on the Internet. Just try googling DeCSS!

Campbell's Soup Exec Writes to Andy Warhol

Normally, this letter would be a legal threat

Surprise! Feds stored thousands of checkpoint body scan images after all

Is anyone really surprised about this? "Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse."

Mark Zuckerberg's Age of Privacy Is Over

Gawker sends pararazzi to photograph the Facebook CEO. Not much happens, but it is somehow still amusing.

The Story Behind the Publication of WikiLeaks’s Afghanistan Logs

Fascinating story of journalistic collaboration

"The room—tucked away on a floor used by The Guardian’s advertising staff, deliberately out of view of curious newsroom eyes—featured two rows of a half-dozen or so desks, facing each other. A floor to ceiling window looked across The Guardian’s office building.

Davies was having further discussions with Assange in Stockholm, and, until Monday when he joined the staff in the bunker, was somewhat out of touch with the effort he had kicked off in London."

ACTA leaks -- again - Boing Boing

"ACTA is an extreme copyright treaty that threatens to establish a world of border iPod and laptop searches for infringing music and movies; jail sentences for downloading; universal network surveillance; and whole-house Internet disconnection orders served on ISPs against customers who are accused (without proof) of violating copyright law."

Penn and Teller interview - Telegraph

"They first met in Philadelphia in 1974. Teller was a high school Latin teacher who did magic in his spare time. It had gripped him with the force of an obsession since, as a five year-old laid up at home with a heart ailment, he had sent away “15 cents and three Mars bar wrappers” for a magic kit advertised on television. Penn was a student and a juggler with a fierce distaste for magicians. “Early on, Teller said to me that magic was essentially an intellectual art form which, when you picture the kind of dips---s that do magic, sounds like an insane thing to say,” he says. “Can you do magic without insulting the audience? Can you do magic that is intellectually satisfying? It is those questions, rather than the magic itself, that fascinates me. Those are the question that we have been playing with for 35 years.”"

The Taliban War on Women Continues

Via Boingboing, don't buy into the revisionism

The surprisingly low carbon footprint of a banana

"Both kiwis and bananas are shipped long-distance. But what is being grown—and the inputs (fertilizer, pesticide, heat) needed to grow it—often matters as much as where the growing happens. The point: Carbon footprints for food are, unfortunately, not terribly intuitive. To me, this is why we need some standardized system of carbon labeling. Right now, it's all but impossible for individuals to make decisions about the carbon footprint of the things they buy. You shouldn't have to be an expert, or tote a calculator and the proper formulas around with you."

Patent holder's demand: stop discussing my patent

Clearly the patent holder is unclear about the entire patent system

History of piracy, reviewed by EFF's senior copyright lawyer

Fred von Lohmann, senior copyright attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has just posted a review of Adrian John's monumental, 500-page Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, a thoroughgoing and well-researched history that draws compelling conclusions about the need to view piracy as a business-model crisis, not a moral one

Bruce Sterling Interview: Cities

How do you think the psychogeography of the city might be affecting identity and tribalism? Do you suspect the trend is more towards collaboration or fragmentation?

That word "psychogeography" probably means something, but guys who use it go out on Situationist drifts and look for urban ley-lines. I do a lot of similar activity, but I don't like to dignify it too much.

Modern large cities are the engines of globalization in the way that New York used to be an engine of Americanization. You look at New York back in the 1800s, obviously collaboration and fragmentation were going on there at the same time. Little Italy, Little Ukraine, whatever... but those sharp distinctions tended to melt with time. Cities that segregate their citizens into ghettos tend to go broke.

What the invention of Nicaraguan Sign Language teaches us about the human brain

Sign languages tend to spontaneously emerge when the deaf people of a country or region first start coming together to form a community, usually based around a school. It's happening right now in Nicaragua, where special education schools opened in the 1970s. Over the past 30 years, Nicaraguan Sign Language has evolved from simple gestures between friends, to a full and complete language. That recent evolution makes Nicaraguan Sign Language the enticing blue bug zapper to linguists' and cognitive scientists' curious moths. Case in point: The study of the way language and learning interact. The structure and composition of the language you speak has a big impact on how you think and perceive the world.

ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance

At a California State University, Fresno lecture on veganism, six of the 60 in attendance were undercover officers from the local and campus police. The Oakland Police Department in California had infiltrated a police-brutality demonstration, and its undercover officers selected "the route of the march."
A vegetarian activist in Georgia was arrested for jotting down the license plate of a Department of Homeland Security agent who was snapping photos of a protest outside a Honey Baked Ham store. A Joint Terrorism Task Force in Illinois went on a three-day manhunt in Chicago searching for a Muslim man for his suspicious activity of using a hand counter on a bus. As it turned out, the man was counting his daily prayers.

World Telecommunication/ICT Development Report 2010

The 9th edition of the ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Development Report (WTDR 2010) focuses on Monitoring the WSIS Targets. The year 2010 marks the midpoint between the 2005 Tunis phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and 2015, the deadline for achieving the ten targets that governments agreed upon at the WSIS. The Report is a mid-term review, and provides policy makers with a comprehensive assessment of what has been achieved so far, and what remains to be done.

Who Really Owns the Gulf of Mexico? | Mother Jones

Who owns the Gulf of Mexico? That's a question you have to ask while perusing Offshore magazine's 2010 poster of the Gulf—downloadable here as a large PDF, but well worth checking out. Where most people look at the Gulf, they see a vast marine ecosystem, wetlands, and, until recently, gorgeous beaches.

What energy executives see is a massive grid, tangled with scores of oil and gas pipelines and rival fields with macho names that sound like heavy metal bands, black-diamond ski runs, and weapons systems. (See "Quiz: What Do BP and Kurt Cobain Have in Common?") Here's a small detail, slightly blurry, but you get the point. (Red lines are gas pipelines and pink are gas fields, green lines are oil pipelines and green blurbs are oil fields.)

True Reverse Perspective on Vimeo

"This is the final proof-of-concept video from 2009, made to illustrate True Reverse Perspective. The scene was modelled and rendered in a camera-hacked version of AoI [ artofillusion.org ], Peter Eastman's open source, java-based 3D package.

In Reverse Perspective the expected visual rules are inverted, so close objects are small and far objects are big. This is not only true for whole objects, but their structure as well. So the near points of an object are closer together, relative to its far points, which gives the flared-out look of the buildings, and the scene as a whole."

To save journalism, save the net

Dan Gillmor on the future of journalism: "First, direct subsidies for journalism are the wrong way to go, even dangerous. But we absolutely could use the kind of indirect help -- taxpayer-funded deployment of high-capacity, wide-open broadband networks -- that would be an analogue to the early American postal subsidies, and then some. This would be essential infrastructure, aimed at beefing up all 21st Century commerce and communications, including but not limited to journalism."

WikiLeaks inspired "New media haven" proposal passes Iceland Parliament

The WikiLeaks advised proposal to build an international "new media haven" in Iceland, with the world's strongest press and whistleblower protection laws, and a "Nobel" prize for for Freedom of Expression, has unaminously passed the Icelandic Parliament.

Realism and the World Cup

Drezner’s main explanation is that great powers have proud civilizational identities (and thus their own sports) while lesser powers presumably do not. I don’t buy it. Most countries have their own proud cultures and their own sports (korfbal anyone?). ... Soccer success is all about prestige. Superpowers have no incentive to put their prestige on the line by putting 11 men on a field against 11 other men, arbitrated by a neutral referee. As Schelling would remind us, if you invest strongly in soccer, you put your reputation on the line. Why do that with so few opportunities to rig the result? If you sit on top, you organize a tournament, invite a few hapless Canadians, and call the winners World Champions. Or, you do what China does: invest heavily in those sports with many Olympic medals and relatively little competition. If you are a middle power, however, winning the World Cup is the closest thing to being on top of the world.

Mad 3D maze-city of Kowloon

Salim sez, "Photoblogger Dark Roasted Blend has found some excellent footage (Cantonese with English Subtitles) of the (now bulldozed) 'Walled City of Kowloon'. You might remember, that this was a quirk of history - a small region of land which for political reasons could not be policed by the British when they managed Hong Kong. It proliferated for years without any building regulation or law-enforcement. It became a vast chaotic 3D maze."

Glee vs copyright: do as I say, not as I do

In one recent episode, the AV Club helps cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester film a near-exact copy of Madonna's Vogue music video (the real-life fine for copying Madonna's original? up to $150,000). Just a few episodes later, a video of Sue dancing to Olivia Newton-John's 1981 hit Physical is posted online (damages for recording the entirety of Physical on Sue's camcorder: up to $300,000). And let's not forget the glee club's many mash-ups -- songs created by mixing together two other musical pieces. Each mash-up is a "preparation of a derivative work" of the original two songs' compositions - an action for which there is no compulsory license available, meaning (in plain English) that if the Glee kids were a real group of teenagers, they could not feasibly ask for -- or hope to get -- the copyright permissions they would need to make their songs, and their actions, legal under copyright law. Punishment for making each mash-up? Up to another $150,000 -- times two.

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx: free OS that Just Works

Cory Doctorow reviews Ubuntu's latest: "Since then, it's Just Worked. When I need to do something new -- edit audio, say -- I go to the software center and look at what apps exist for that purpose, select some highly rated ones, download them, try them, keep the one I like (all the software is free, so this is easy). Migrating to new machines? Easy. Just take my list of installed apps to the new machine as a text-file on a USB key and ask Software Center to download them and configure them. Backups? Easy: external generic USB drive and rsync (exactly what I used with my Mac)."

Wikileaks/Manning: "Are America's foreign policy secrets about to go online?"

"If he really had access to these cables, we've got a terrible situation on our hands," said an American diplomat. "We're still trying to figure out what he had access to. A lot of my colleagues overseas are sweating this out, given what those cables may contain."

The Power symbol's history

The universal power symbols are described in the International Electrotechnical Commission 60417 standard, Graphical symbols for use on equipment, appearing in the 1973 edition

Lessig on Copyright and Culture: "Things could have been different"

Whatever your view of it, notice first just how different this future promises to be. In real libraries, in real space, access is not metered at the level of the page (or the image on the page). ... The real-space library is a den protected from the metering of the market. It is of course created within a market; but like kids in a playroom, we let the life inside the library ignore the market outside. This freedom gave us something real. It gave us the freedom to research, regardless of our wealth; the freedom to read, widely and technically, beyond our means... The architecture of access that we have in real space created an important and valuable balance between the part of culture that is effectively and meaningfully regulated by copyright and the part of culture that is not. The world of our real-space past was a world in which copyright intruded only rarely, and when it did, its relationship to the objectives of copyright was relatively clear. We forget all this today.

TV Economics 101: Why you can't watch every show online for free - Boing Boing

SyFy SVP exposes the seamy, 20th century licensing of TV shows, and why online TV sucks so much

A Young Mad Scientist's First Alphabet Blocks | Xylocopa

Mad Scientist alphabet blocks - pretty much as advertised.

IP Alliance says that encouraging free/open source makes you an enemy of the USA

The US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance has asked the US Trade Rep to add Indonesia to its list of rogue nations that don't respect copyright. What did Indonesia do to warrant inclusion on this "301 list"? Its government had the temerity to advise its ministries to give preference to free/open source software because it will cost less and reduce the use of pirated proprietary software in government. According to the IPA, this movement to reduce copyright infringement is actually bad for copyright, because "it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions."

Does the World Bank have a sense of humor? - PSD Blog - The World Bank Group

The World Bank Institute recently launched a massively multiplayer game called Evoke designed to get people around the world to work collaboratively on pressing problems like food security, human rights, etc. Evoke builds a storyline based around a comic book (eh hem, sorry, graphic novel) to lay out a quest each week. The initiative is still very new, so it is hard to judge its value, but in general I see great potential in "serious games" like this.

It took very little time for a parody of Evoke to crop up, called (appropriately enough) Invoke. At first, I took it in good humor. Parody and snark have their uses, all the way from Swift's A Modest Proposal to Bill Easterly's Aid Watch. But many of the parodies I've run across lately go beyond useful criticism into the realm of snark for the sake of snark.

Cryptome Restored After Microsoft DMCA Takedown | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

Cryptome.org publishes documents "that are prohibited by governments worldwide," according to the site. It recently posted Microsoft's global criminal compliance handbook, prompting the DMCA takedown notice from the software giant.
Under the DMCA, a hosting company that is notified about possibly infringing content on one of its sites is required to either remove the offending content itself or ask the site owner to remove that content, pending an investigation. Sites that believe they are not in the wrong can file a counter-claim to have that content restored.
Microsoft said it did not want the site to be removed.
"We did not ask that this site be taken down, only that Microsoft copyrighted content be removed," Microsoft said in a statement. "We are requesting to have the site restored and are no longer seeking the document's removal."

Stephen Levy on Google's algorithm

The Audrey Fino failure led Singhal on a multiyear quest to improve the way the system deals with names -- which account for 8 percent of all searches. To crack it, he had to master the black art of "bi-gram breakage" -- that is, separating multiple words into discrete units. For instance, "new york" represents two words that go together (a bi-gram). But so would the three words in "new york times," which clearly indicate a different kind of search. And everything changes when the query is "new york times square."

The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash - Charlie's Diary

arket cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here's why ...

Facebook Zero: A Paradigm Shift — Soma Without A Prescription ...

Just a week ago I was in Cape Town talking about how entrepreneurs in Africa are looking at the prepaid mobile phone market and are trying to solve for the cost structures for data provided by the mobile carriers. Who knew that internet giant Facebook would beat them to it?

This week Facebook launched 0.facebook.com, where they worked out deals with 50 mobile operators in 45 countries to either zero-rate data costs coming to that URL, or paying that data cost themselves. This means that anyone, even those with no airtime on their mobile phone, can still take part in Facebook.

InfoLadies of Bangladesh revolutionize rural life

Bangladesh's Infoladies ride from village to village on bicycles, toting netbooks and mobile phones, and set up infobooths where they use net-gathered info to teach hygiene, help with childbirth, assist with crop problems, and so on. There's an army of them

Secret copyright treaty debated in DC: must-see video

Last month, Google's DC office hosted a public debate on ACTA, with Steven J. Metalitz, a lawyer and lobbyist representing the International Intellectual Property Alliance; Jamie Love, an activist with Knowledge Ecology International; Jonathan Band, a lawyer representing a coalition of library groups and a variety of tech and Internet companies and Ryan Clough from Silicon Valley Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren's office; moderated by Washington Post consumer technology columnist Rob Pegoraro.

The video runs to 90 minutes. I don't get a lot of 90-minute chunks of time in my life, but I made time for this. It was one of the most spirited -- even heated -- debates I've heard on the subject, and it got into substantive questions of law, jurisdiction, economics and ethics. It was especially interesting to hear Metalitz, the main mouthpiece for the private corporate interests behind this proposal, attempt to defend both the proposal and the secrecy behind it.

Rising R&D Expenditure in Developing Countries

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics is reporting that the number or researchers in developing countries has increased by 45 percent from 2002-2007. As of 2007, there were roughly 500 researchers per million inhabitants (compared to 3,600 in developed countries), or 2.7 million total (compared to 4.4 million).

Syndicate content
Syndicate content
Powered by Drupal, an open source content management system