Archon Fung, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, is proposing that we crowd source the fairness of the upcoming presidential election at MyFairElection.com. You can watch a 7 minute video presentation or read a brief paper.
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Archon Fung, at Harvard’s Kennedy School, is proposing that we crowd source the fairness of the upcoming presidential election at MyFairElection.com. You can watch a 7 minute video presentation or read a brief paper.
Great reflective post about the Global Voices Summit from Rebecca MacKinnon…
Bloomberg reports that Mattel’s market cap, “helped by rising sales of Matchbox and Hot Wheels toy cars,” is now larger than GM’s.
Photo by Neha Viswanathan: A small subset of the Global Voices bloggers who met in Budapest.
(Apologies in advance for the length of this post. I've decided to subject my readers to this even-longer-than-usual "brain dump" because at least a few people out there are interested in some of the ideas related to global participatory media, and I'd like feed back on some of the outstanding questions faced by Global Voices.)
At the end of last week's Global Voices Summit, one of our Middle Eastern bloggers came up to me and said: "nationalism is dead for me now." He said that ten years ago he was a strong nationalist. Being a blogger and debating issues with other people online over the past few years has greatly weakened that feeling. Now after four days hanging out with bloggers from all over the world, nationalism makes no sense to him any more.
(For full accounts of the summit, see David Sasaki's excellent overview, Ethan Z's great series of posts, our media digest, the summit blog, technorati, google blog search, Rezwan's excellent roundup of summit bloggers, etc.)
The blogger's rejection of nationalism (I'm not going to name him because he is sensitive about how he has been portrayed in the past), and the role GV seems to have played in his change of thinking, brings me to Joi Ito's post-summit blog post. Joi is now on the GV Board and has been involved since the very beginning - when it was just a meeting of bloggers. He writes:
Global Voices is a super-important part in fixing what I call the "caring problem". There is a systemic bias against reporting international news in most developed nations. When pressed, many editors will say that people just don't want to read articles about other parts of the world. This is because most people don't care. They don't care because they don't hear the voices or know people in other countries. I think that by providing voices to all over the world, we have the ability to connect people and get people to care more.
I also believe that voice is probably more important than votes or guns. I believe that combating extremism is most effectively done by winning the argument in public, not by censorship, elections or destruction. I believe that providing everyone with a voice to participate in the global dialog is key. The ability to communication and connect without permission or fear of retribution is a pillar of open society in the 21st Century. Global Voices is the best example of this that I know of.
Patrick Philippe Meier, a self-described GV "outsider" and doctoral research fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative had this conclusion:
...The Internet, and the information society, the global network of social nodes and connections, is becoming more complex. This complexity adds to diversity and balance. Most people, most of the time, in most places are nonviolent. Social extremes are by definition minorities. Global Voices are more informed and moderate. Giving a voice to these Global Voices online is likely to diminish the impact of extremists. How do we find these voices in the symphony of the superhighway? We need to make quanta of information more indexable and more searchable. Tag, tag, tag away. Only then will locality, diversity, opportunity be made more visible....
So how did we get to the point that people are saying such things about GV - things we never imagined when we started the project - and where might we go from here? As this article that I wrote jointly with Ethan Zuckerman back in 2006 tries to explain, GV arose as an attempt to address badly skewed global information flows in which the voices of people from North America and Western Europe are disproportionately amplified in the global media. But now here's the problem: the skewed flows aren't just happening on a global scale, there are imbalances within countries, regions, and communities. So the question is: what is the best way to achieve a global media environment where everybody has the ability to speak and be heard? And is there also a way for people to find authenticity, relevance, and quality amidst the cacophony of cat-blogging and hidden agendas?
By having a tiered system of expert blogger-editors and translators who curate what they find to be globally relevant and authentic from their regions, we've made a decent but imperfect stab at the second question, although I think we need to revisit our systems in the future and find ways to improve them, funds and people permitting. This year's discussions in Budapest focused largely on the first question: equity of "voice" within national borders as well as across borders. At several points during both the public conference and the internal community meetings, people talked about the importance of amplifying minority, non-elite, disadvantaged and dissenting voices alongside "representative" or "typical" voices from various countries. Simultaneously, there's also the problem of "silent majorities" who tend to spend less time seeking media interviews, demonstrating in public, and doing things that headlines than people who tend to be on the more atypical extremes of any given country's political spectrum. These attention deficits lead not only to imbalance in media coverage, but also create social pressures that lead to self-censorship: people think, think "why should I stick my neck out and risk getting in trouble for an issue few people in my country really care about or agree with?"
It's not just mainstream media that presents a skewed and un-representative picture to the world; it turns out that blogospheres, at least as they have naturally evolved so far, are amplifiers for the voices and views of educated, wired elites. As David Sasaki, who runs Rising Voices, Global Voices' outreach arm, writes: "As incredibly diverse as the global blogosphere is, the 'blogger demographic' tends to [be] very homogenous. From Tanzania to Tasmania, most bloggers live in the wealthy neighborhoods of urban centers, most are well educated, and most belong to the majority groups of their countries."
Whose voice - and whose life - gets to represent a particular nationality, ethnic group, or community, is a problem that both Ethan Z, who co-founded GV with me, and web philosopher David Weinberger have been writing about over the past few days. Media reporting about any given issue tends to rely on a few colorful examples, chosen for their interestingness, the willingness of the subjects to talk to the media, and their ability to speak articulately Weinberger points out that extrapolating reality from a few examples results in what he calls "The Fallacy of Examples."
As Ethan points out, "it’s lots easier to write about extreme examples rather than median ones." He cites Clay Shirky's excellent new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - which I happened to read on the plane en route to Budapest. Shirky analyzes the way in which online communities tend to follow a "power law." Ethan describes the phenomenon: "If you attempt to generalize about the group as a whole from the most prolific participants, you’re going to misunderstand what’s going on."
There are many factors contributing to who gets to the top of the power curve, starting with who even tries to speak, who succeeds in speaking, and who is silenced. The digital divide - access to affordable internet and mobile communications - is only one small part of it. Many people are so accustomed to being ignored, it doesn't occur to them that creating their own media would produce any useful result. They worry about bringing trouble on their families by calling socially unacceptable attention to themselves. In Budapest, we agreed that Global Voices has an important role to play - and some believe a responsibility - in supporting people who have stories to tell but who are isolated for various reasons. When local authority figures (or their parents and spouses) discourage them from speaking, they can be encouraged by the fact that people around the world are indeed linking to them - and that if something happens to them, questions will be asked.
Censorship and threat of imprisonment also skew the conversation: if certain kinds of views are silenced - or driven to quiet largely-unnoticed pockets of their online communities - then it becomes hard to tell whether the loudest and most predominant voices really represent the majority view of a particular community if the censorship and threat of retribution had not been imposed on its people. There was some discussion in Budapest about to what extent our regional editors and bloggers who represent certain countries have an obligation to amplify "representative" or "mainstream" views and to what extent they should be amplifying minority and "dissident" voices. It's a tough balancing act, and no matter what you do, you get criticized by people who think you're misrepresenting their country or community.
Perhaps the biggest unresolved problem on Global Voices is how to be truly fair to everybody - to minorities as well as majorities, while not appearing to take sides in various people's independence struggles. Now here's the background: Our editorial structure is based Wikipedia's list of countries - a list maintained by a very active community who fight fiercely about any addition or subtraction. It generally serves us well - or better than any of the alternatives seemed likely to do - but it's impossible to please everybody, and there are people who regularly trash GV for this choice. Our ideal goal (far from being realized) is to have a contributor from all of those countries except North America and Western Europe. This stems from a decision at the beginning that if we started out including those two regions, GV could get dominated by those bloggers who have other global platforms anyway. Our priority was to create a platform for people who have a harder time getting their voices heard. At any rate, the countries that we do cover are then divided up into regions, each managed by a "regional editor". We also have a number of language editors who post summaries and excerpts of translated content from non-English blogs into English on the main site. What languages we translate onto the main site is primarily a function of funding and volunteer interest. (Meanwhile, as Ethan described in this post, a family of websites have sprung up on which volunteers translate GV's English content into various languages.)
One of the questions debated most heatedly in Budapest (though politely and respectfully after several days of eating and drinking together and sharing hotel rooms) was this: Should GV include blogs from North America and Western Europe, especially those from minority communities whose voices are not well heard in their own national medias let alone the global media? Does it make sense to be covering Macedonia but not Greece? And the corollaries: Does our system of organizing the world - and thus people's identities - largely according to their U.N.-recognized nationality help or hinder the idea that people from anywhere on the planet should be able to have a voice and be heard? But if we don't organize ourselves according to the nation-state framework, and on top of that a regional hierarchy of editors, how do we organize our website without descending into chaos - or turning into a platform for the world's independence groups? On the other hand, there have been strong disagreements in the past year or so amongst contributors and editors over whether we should have separate categories and/or contributors for "Tibet" and "Chechnya" (to give just two examples of many others) - and if by failing to do so we are failing to adequately represent online voices from those places, and thus in effect discriminating against those minorities? It was fascinating to see who came down on what side of these questions - and it was not split along regional, ethnic, or socio-economic lines at all, people from all continents came down on both sides of these questions, to varying degrees. One observer of our community who I spoke to after the meeting suggested creating a "shadow" or "parallel" website in which we try organizing ourselves according to some other criteria than nation-state and see what happens. It's an interesting idea. I'd be interested in hearing more ideas and opinions from readers of GV as well as contributors and community members. Can GV come up with an innovative and equitable way to organize a global citizen media website without using the nation-state as its organizing principle?
...which brings me back to Shirky's book. Another point he makes which I agree with is that "communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring." Activities like blogging, podcasting, and uploading videos to YouTube-like websites are no longer considered technically innovative by the Silicon Valley set. But these tools are only just starting to be used by indigenous Bolivians, barrio kids in Medelin, Colombia, young people in Madagascar, kids in Kolkata's red light district, etc. Only after digital citizen media tools become commonplace in such communities will the most interesting social innovation really start to happen on a global scale. What excites me is that people who work on Global Voices are perhaps uniquely positioned to understand what's going on - as well as play a part in it. One thing that's clear from the GV experience so far is that people have multiple identities: many bloggers chafe at being pigeonholed in accordance with one accident of birth above all others. At the same time, others - especially bloggers from countries that gained independence in the past decade or so - are extremely proud of their national identity and proud to have the opportunity to promote that identity on a site like GV. Others come from minority groups seeking independence. How best to build a collaborative citizen media community among people who define their identities - and identities of others - very differently? What - beyond an interesting website - might result from such an attempt? Is it possible to build a global citizen media community with a post-nationalist identity?
Shirky also talks about how systems of collaborative production - like Wikipedia, for example - are not organizationally flat. A very small percentage of Wikipedians do the bulk of the work. There are also community "enforcement" systems in place in order to prevent this open platform from being completely destroyed and overrun by a few ill-intentioned individuals. At the same time, these systems and structures - "rules" if you like - were not driven by a central management team in the way that the president and publisher of a news organization would decide (largely top-down, in my experience) and enforce (journalists' fear of being fired or laid off in the next round of cutbacks) how things should be run and what the editorial policies should be. If you ask Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales whether he had a plan for "solving" the many problems of vandalism and self-promotion Wikipedia faces, he says he didn't - the core community of Wikipedia's most passionate and active volunteers came up with solutions and developed the "management" and "enforcement" structures around them. Likewise, I'm quite positive that Ethan, myself, and GV's core management team are not going to come up with answers and solutions to the questions and problems I brought up in the previous paragraph. The solutions are going to have to be generated by the community, somehow, if enough of them even want to solve these problems or can achieve some sort of consensus. Who knows if that will ever be possible.
...which brings me to another book: Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet, And How to Stop It. JZ (as he is known at the Berkman Center) is concerned about the Internet's potential loss of "generativity:" the ability of PC users at the edges of the Internet to innovate - develop software applications and all kinds of media platforms - without coordinating with some central authority, whether it be a computer or device manufacturer or whoever controls the Internet connections between devices. Increasingly, people are connecting to the Internet with what he calls "tethered devices" that are not generative: they don't allow the user to create new applications or media without working directly with the manufacturer, or at very least using the manufacturers designated and/or proprietary systems. A PC is generative while iPods, TiVo's, Wii's, etc., are not. There are some good reasons - security and user simplicity primarily - why these devices are tethered, not generative. But Zittrain warns that as the Internet becomes less and less generative, innovation and freedom of speech will suffer.
Reading the book on my way back from the GV summit I wondered: if the Internet becomes less generative just as growing numbers of people in the developing world are connecting to it, what does that mean? Will indigenous people in Bolivia and teenagers in Malawi be deprived of the chance to shape the future of global communications to the same extent that college kids in California and Finland were able to do? If this is a real concern (which I think it is, the more I think about it), what do we do to make sure that generativity is preserved in the next generation of Internet-connected devices (largely mobile phones and set-top boxes, most likely)? At least for enough of those devices that people in the developing world will have the chance to innovate and shape communications technologies to their own community needs to the extent that Westerners have shaped technology to theirs?
Zittrain also talked a bit about generativity as an organizing principle, with Wikipedia once again as the prime example. This got me thinking about Global Voices and the extent to which GV is also a generative organization. Traditional news organizations are non-generative for the most part: changes in the way things are done generally are not due to initiative taken by reporters in far-flung bureaus: you can suggest changes but the policy decisions have to be made at the center then implemented downward - and substantial reforms happen very slowly, usually with great organizational resistance. GV is I think probably less generative than Wikipedia the way it's currently run, but still a lot more generative than a traditional news organization. Rising Voices, Global Voices Advocacy, and especially Lingua all arose from activities that bloggers in our networks saw the need for and were taking it upon themselves to do, long before GV created formal platforms for these activities. Since we are a largely volunteer-driven organization with only a couple full-time staffers, a couple dozen part-timers who are really working for love more than money and a couple hundred volunteers, we can't make any major policy decision about structure or funding without first gaining consensus from the community. One might argue that this slows down executive decision-making, but on the other hand, if our community doesn't agree with a decision they'll stop contributing and GV will cease to exist anyway - like Wikipedia our volunteers are not tied to us by salary and employment contracts. But is GV generative enough? Are we enabling enough innovation at the edges and are we enabling new ideas that come from far-flung volunteers to get support and be implemented if the community agrees that they're worth implementing? I don't know the answer. I hope some of our editors and volunteers will let me know what they think.
-----------------
Footnote: To be clear, I take zero credit for the success of the Budapest summit, as I had very little to do with the planning other than a bit of fundraising and a bit of brainstorming early on. Most of the credit goes to Georgia Popplewell, Sami Ben Gharbia, Solana Larsen, and David Sasaki, not only for the awe-inspiring public program, and an advocacy workshop before the public summit, but also for two days of "internal" brainstorming meetings for people who contribute directly to the various GV projects. The meetings were so energetic that even cynics lost some of their cynicism. But the real magic came from all of our community members, just by being there and being themselves. It's not hard to have a great meeting when you bring together some of the most articulate people from around the planet who are generally not on the conference circuit, and thus have new things to say and brand new perspectives that you've never heard before!
What happens after TV’s mainframe era ends next February? That’s the question I pose in a long essay by that title (and at that link) in Linux Journal.
It’s makes a case that runs counter to all the propaganda you’re hearing about the “digital switchover” scheduled for television next February 17.
TV as we know it will end then. It’s worse than it appears. For TV, at least. For those already liberated, a growing new world awaits. For those still hanging on the old transmitter-based teat, it’ll be an unpleasant weaning.
Remember television? For most of its history, TV wasn't cable, satellite or YouTube. It was radio with low-res moving pictures.
If you follow trademark law you must bookmark this invaluable web site at the University of Texas at Austin Law Library. It lists every new trademark law article weekly. Fabulous (though I wish it linked to online versions of the articles too).
InciWeb just updated 8 minutes ago, with this report:
Fire continued creeping to the north, east, and west with limited movement due to competing wind that kept the fire from making any significant runs. On the south flank significant containment was gained due to the diminishing down canyon winds.
Fire progression continues on the northeast and northwest perimeters. The west perimeter of the fire has progressed into Tecolote Canyon.
Just added a bunch more maps to this photo set.
Tag: sbgapfire.
I’d put more on Twitter, except it isn’t working for me when I go there. 
First, kudos again to Edhat’s news list for not only gathering info from many sources, but for giving equal weight to both professional and amateur sources — and for hosting a great many comments on some of the postings. As an interactive local news service, “Ed” does a fine job. When surfing for the latest on the fire, it’s a good place to start. Others among these are good as well:
Second, I have been somewhat remiss by not including GeoMAC among sources for following the fire. You can follow maps from multiple sources, as I make screen shots and upload them, here. The latest from MODIS shows new fire activity (red dots, meaning in the last 0 to 12 hours) near highway 154 and on the uphill (north) and west sides of the fire perimeter. Highway 154 (San Marcos Pass) remains open.
The LA Times this morning has ‘Critical day’ dawns for Goleta fire, enlarged by overnight wind gusts, with a dramatic photo of an air tanker (see last paragraph below) dropping red fire retardant near a house. The summary:
The blaze, while 24% contained, grew to 8,357 acres. Firefighters plan to concentrate on protecting homes to the east before another night of ’sundowners.’ At least 2,663 homes have been evacuated.
Note that there are 97 comments so far to that story.
KEYT has a summary of evacuation areas as of 5pm yesterday. That story also has a map.
Note that chapparal wildfires, especially in steep rocky country like this, do not only spread from their edges. They also spread by dropping burning material at distances from source flames, which can have powerful updrafts. This makes fighting these fires very hard on the ground.
Inciweb’s page for the Gap Fire currently gives its size as 54oo acres, with 1072 personnel working on the fire. Under Fire Behavior, it says,
Down canyon winds continued through the night pushing the fire front into the north side of Goleta and widening the flanks east and west. Fire also continued to the north into the wind overnight with limited movement.
Planned actions:
Structure protection, create safety zones and establish contingency lines In the Goleta foothills. Construct control lines when conditions permit. Damage assessment from last night will be conducted.
Remarks:
Firefighters are from several agencies including the United States Forest Service and Santa Barbara County Fire Department and several local cooperators including the San Marcos Volunteer Fire Department. The California Highway Patrol, Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, and the American Red Cross are assisting. ICP has been established at Earl Warren Showgrounds. Dos Pueblos High School will remain a staging area.
Current wind is gusting at 30mph from the north (down the mountains, toward Goleta). The temperature is 75° and the humidity is 25%.
InciWeb has no maps for the fire, but does suggest visiting these sources:
It’s sad that InciWeb remains both slow (often overwhelmed) and behind its own curve. I’ve had a number of email exchanges with folks working on InciWeb, and have great respect for the hard work they do within what is essentially a bureaucratic morass. I think the lesson here is that we have to do our best with many sources, and the messiness that involves.
Somewhere among the sources above I read that an aggressive aerial attack was planned to start at dawn this morning. I’m too far east (~5 miles) of the fire to see that; but it helps that Santa Barbara’s airport is in Goleta itself, almost next to the fire, and is home to one of the main Air Attack Bases for the U.S. Forest Service. Here is a photoset I shot of that base, and the P3 Orions used for bombing fires with supressant. I am sure these are in use right now.
Finally (at least for now), I want to say that I’m optimistic about this fire, even though I must disclaim any qualifications for that other than as an amateur observer. I feel a need to do that because I’ve also shot photographs that could easily be seen as scary. These two sets, for example. Please note that I shot those with a long telephoto lens to maximize the apparent size of the sun — reducing the apparent distance between subjects in the photo (such as Mission Santa Barbara, the fire and the Sun). Also because, hey, I wanted to take good photos.
Speaking of which, I also shot the fireworks from up in the hills last night, where there was also a pretty rocking party. Life goes on.
Tag: sbgapfire.
I am a crotchety old man about graffiti. 99.9% of them — and, as usual, all my statistics have been authenticated by having been made up — impose an adolescent narcissism. But I also think: (a) I don’t really understand the cultural positioning behind it, (b) some of it is public, rebellious art, and (c) it’s not like the commercial exploitation of public space is so great.
So, the documentary Bomb-It looks very interesting. (The initial trailer is meatier than the new one.) (Thanks to RageBoy for the link, for this follow-up, and for posting the beautiful poster.)
I’ve loaded too many pictures onto this blog, so for this round I’m going to just point to shots elsewhere: in this case to a photo set of maps built with .kml files from the MODIS Active Fire Program and Google Earth.
The latest one, from about 6pm this evening, has fewer active hot spots than the previous one from 4am this morning, or the one before that from yesterday afternoon. Not sure how to interpret that, but whatever. It’s data.
This afternoon we took a walk along the beach, where hundreds of families and other social groups had set up homes and kitchens and play areas along the beach and in the park, in preparation for the fireworks tonight. It’s an annual festival, and a lot of fun. There was hardly a sign of the fire, since the wind was mostly onshore.
But this evening the wind shifted, and now we’re getting orange clouds of low smoke and ash fall.
The fire hasn’t stopped the fireworks though. Going next door now for a party. Watch for pictures of that show too.
Tag: sbgapfire.
As a big lawsuit grinds forward, its parties engage in discovery, a wide-ranging search for information “reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.” (FRCP Rule 26(b)) And so Viacom has calculated that scouring YouTube’s data dumps would help provide evidence Viacom’s copyright lawsuit.
According to a discovery order released Wednesday, Viacom asked for discovery of YouTube source code and of logs of YouTube video viewership; Google refused both. The dispute came before Judge Stanton, in the Southern District of New York, who ordered the video viewing records — but not the source code — disclosed.
The order shows the difficulty we have protecting personally sensitive information. The court could easily see the economic value of Google’s secret source code for search and video ID, and so it refused to compel disclosure of that “vital asset,” the “product of over a thousand person-years of work.”
But the user privacy concerns proved harder to evaluate. Viacom asked for “all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewd on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website,” including users’ viewed videos, login IDs, and IP addresses. Google contended it should not be forced to release these records because of users’ privacy concerns, which the court rejected.
The court erred both in its assessment of the personally identifying nature of these records, and the scope of the harm. It makes no sense to discuss whether an IP address is or is not “personally identifying” without considering the context with which it is connected. It may not be a name, but is often one search step from it. Moreover, even “anonymized” records often provide sufficiently deep profiles that they can be traced back to individuals, as researchers armed with the AOL and Netflix data releases showed.
Viewers “gave” their IP address and username information to YouTube for the purpose of watching videos. They might have expected the information to be used within Google, but not anticipate that it would be shared with a corporation busily prosecuting copyright infringement. Viewers may not be able to quantify economic harm, but if communications are chilled by the disclosure of viewing habits, we’re all harmed socially. The court failed to consider these third party interests in ordering the disclosure.
Trade secret wins, privacy loses. Google has said it will not appeal the order.
Is there hope for the end users here, concerned about disclosure of their video viewing habits? First, we see the general privacy problem with “cloud” computing: by conducting our activities at third-party sites, we place a great deal of information about our activities in their hands. We may do so because Google is indispensable, or because it tells us its motto is “don’t be evil.” But discovery demands show that it’s not enough for Google to follow good precepts.
Google, like most companies, indicates that it will share data where “We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.” Its reputation as a good actor is important, but the company is not going to face contempt charges over user privacy.
I worry that this discovery demand is just the first of a wave, as more litigants recognize the data gold mines that online service providers have been gathering: search terms, blog readership and posting habits, video viewing, and browsing might all “lead to the discovery of admissible evidence” — if the privacy barriers are as low as Judge Stanton indicates, won’t others follow Viacom’s lead? A gold mine for litigants becomes a tar pit for online services’ user.
Economic concerns, the cost of producing the data in response to a wave of subpoenas, or reputational concerns, the fear that users will be driven away from a service that leaves their sensitive data vulnerable, may exercise some constraint, but they’re unlikely to be enough to match our privacy expectations.
We need the law to supply protection against unwanted data flows, to declare that personally sensitive information — or the profiles from which identity may be extracted and correlated — deserves consideration at least on par with “economically valuable secrets.” We need better assurance that the data we provide in the course of communicative activities will be kept in context. There is room for that consideration in the “undue burden” discovery standard, but statutory clarification would help both users and their Internet service providers to negotiate privacy expectations better.
Is there a law? In this particular context, there might actually be law on the viewers’ side. The Video Privacy Protection Act, passed after reporters looked into Judge Bork’s video rental records, gives individuals a cause of action against “a video tape service provider who knowingly discloses, to any person, personally identifiable information concerning any consumer of such provider.” (”Video tape” includes similar audio visual materials.) Will any third parties intervene to ask that the discovery order be quashed?
Further, Bloomberg notes the concerns of Europeans, whose privacy regime is far more user-protective than that of the United States. Is this one case where “harmonization” can work in favor of individual rights?
Here is a Fox News video* that tours the Gap Fire area from the air. It’s clearly submitted by an amateur using a helicopter, judging from the monolog, flavored with casual explitives. To those (like me) familiar with the landscape, the video does an excellent job of showing how “perimeter” is a mileading notion. The fire is in many places at once. Wish that Fox or the shooter gave us a time/date for the footage. (Maybe they do and I miss it.) Seems to be from yesterday morning.
A lot of commenters on Edhat take exception to Santa Barbara’s decision to go ahead with the city’s fireworks on the waterfront. I don’t. It looks right now like the fire’s moving away from the city, which means plenty of work for firefighters keeping the rest of us safe to enjoy the holiday. Huge kudos to them for some of the hardest and most dangerous work that humans can do.
* I lost the direct link. The link to the video was in a narrow banner atop this story on Fox News, which I found via an Edhat comment. The banner is gone, and I can’t find anything through searches on the Fox site. I can still see the video, which comes up in a separate window, but copying the URL doesn’t seem to work. The URL I see is not what copies. Instead it’s the story that no longer has the banner with the link in it. (I hate this too-clever video crap on sites like this. Not to mention the lame search as well.) If anybody else has luck, let us know in the comments below. It really is an interesting video.
The Declaration is obviously a remarkable document, part philosophy, part legal document, part performative, part a moral accounting, part beautiful rhetoric. It’s good reading, although I do tend to skip the long middle that lists the particular complaints and justifications.
Here are some resources:
Text
Wikipedia
US Archives
Facsimile
With annotations of our failure to live up to it
Lightly annotated to show draft changes
Martin Luther King’s Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam
Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese Declaration of Independence
Among the most amazing things to me, during my many years as a North Carolinian, was the eagerness with which a majority of voters there elected, and kept re-electing, Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate. Hal Crowther did the best job, I thought, of summarizing Helms’ politics, even if Hal went over the top in some ways. (I can’t find my favorite Jesse piece by Hal, alas. It was written too long before the Internet, I’m sure. Meanwhile here are a few among Hal’s more recent and all-too-rare columns.)
I met Jesse Helms once. He seemed — as he was to all acounts — a nice guy. And he did save Internet radio from obliteration before retiring from the Senate. I appreciated that much.
He died early this morning, at age 86.
The above is the latest from http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/wms.php. These are updated every hour. Download the .kmz and you’ll have what I show above on Google Earth. Details:
The data links below provide access to MODIS MOD14 fire and thermal anomaly data in both a Web Mapping Service (WMS) and Keyhole Markup Language (KML) format for each specified geographic area. Both the WMSes and KMLs are updated hourly.
What’s new here, and very consistent with Ray Ford’s report below, are the red spots spreading in all directions from the fire’s origins and earlier dimensions (other colors). Note the new red ones on the right, or east. They are very close to Painted Cave, which is on the east side of highway 154. Painted Cave is currently under mandatory evacuation orders.
Bear in mind that winds are currently from the northwest, and quite gusty. The conditions are very much like those that prevailed during the Painted Cave fire, almost exactly eighteen years ago.Read the story at that link. We had friends over to the house last night. They barely escaped the Painted Cave fire, and said that the look of the smoke last night was nearly identical to what they saw during Painted Cave.
More than six hundred homes were lost in that one.
[Later…] at 7:50am the skies look clear to the west. Between this picture and story at Noozhawk (using this among other pictures by Tim Burgess) and this story at the Independent — and nothing so far on the radio (that I can find) — it looks like the winds blew the fire in a westward direction overnight, which is good for Santa Barbara, though not for the houses and ranches to the west.
Click on the shot above to see the sunset I witnessed on Upper State Street in Santa Barbara last evening. I had gone to Radio Shack for supplies, and paid cash in a dark store, since the power was out. Stopped on the way back, stepped out of the car and shot this series.
Tag: sbgapfire.
Ray Ford has an excellent report on the fire in the Independent. A sample:
Rather than forcing the fire downhill into the ranch lands where it could be dealt with by the forces that were massing along Cathedral Oaks, the flames followed lateral channels east and west along saddles formed by erosion of softer rock materials, turning what was a half mile wide fire into one with a three-to-four mile wide. By 8pm, in the Ellwood area, rancher Ken Doty, his son, and son-in-law were busy spending the night building dozer lines to protect his property from the advancing flames.
On the other end, at the top of the Fairview area, neighbors were out in the street, dumb-struck by the huge flames they could see on the hills immediately above them. The questions were mounting.
Here is Ray’s photo gallery. Also excellent. And as scary as the text.
It is significant that Painted Cave is now under mandatory evacuation orders. If the fire jumps 154 and moves into the Painted Cave area, then winds blow down toward the city from the ridge, that would be extra bad.
[Later…] 9am. Looks like the wind is blowing the fire to the west now. Except for the firefighters, it looks like this will be a nice 4th in Santa Barbara.
Tag: sbgapfire.
[Note.. Somehow I killed this post, but managed to find the HTML in cache somewhere and restore it. I can’t get the comments over, but I can point to them here and here. Meanwhile, my apologies. — Doc]
Here’s the latest MODIS-based map of the fire, which you can obtain as well, staring on this page:
Here is the latest Google Earth image, with .kmz data from ActiveFireMaps.fs.fed.us:
To their credit, KTMS/990am and 1490am are covering the Gap Fire live, between national Fox newscasts. (Though they just broke into one to cover a press conference live. They’re talking about maps and other resources, but with no references to where those might be on the Web. Also Edison “had a harrowing time” getting power back up.)
Other items from the press conference:
Now KTMS is breaking away. Says 2400 acres have burned so far. KTMS has no live stream, far as I can tell.
The News-Press‘ radio station, KZSB/1290, can be heard via Windows Media from a link on the home page of the newspaper. But while KTMS and KCSB were covering the fire live, KZSB was airing an interview with a guy who’s pushing for offshore oil drilling. For what it’s worth, it was a major oil spill from an offshore platform here in Santa Barbara in 1969 that gave birth to lots of protective legislation, as well as Earth Day and much of the environmental protection movement that has peristed ever since. Odd choice, odd timing. KZSB may be the only news station in the whole country lacking a website. Sad.
For up-to-date fire maps from a national perspective, with satellite coverage by MODIS, go here. More:
Tag: sbgapfire.
Click on the above to dig one of the best photosets I’ve shot in a while. I was driving to a Radio Shack to pick up a volt-ohm meter, so we could monitor the browning out of electrical service, when I saw the sun setting through the smoke from the fire, and knew instantly that I could get a good angle on that through the Mission in silhouette. So I turned the corner, and sure enough. Got it.
Any blogger or news service that wants to use any of those shots should feel free to grab any of them. Give me photo credit if you like, but it’s not necessary. Just here to help.
(tag: sbgapfire. Hashtag: #sbgapfire)
What better way to dive back into regular blogging than to discuss the Info/Law implications of a naked blue anthropomorphized M&M in Times Square?
A recent decision by Judge Denny Chin in New York federal court involved two billboards in Times Square advertising M&M candies. The video animation in the billboards depicted M&Ms in various iconic scenes of New York City: an M&M hailing a cab, an M&M as the Statute of Liberty, an M&M as King Kong scaling the Empire State Building, and so on. Among these was a blue M&M dressed up like “The Naked Cowboy,” a long-time street performer who appears in Times Square in nothing but his boots, hat, undies, and strategically placed guitar. (Wikicommons image here.) The performer behind the character, Robert Burck, sued M&M maker Mars Inc. and its ad agency for two claims. First, he claimed infringement of his trademarks in the Naked Cowboy. He also claimed a violation of a New York privacy statute prohibiting use of a person’s “name, portrait, picture, or voice” in an advertisement without written consent. (This is one of the statutes I have previously suggested could be seen as prohibiting some of Facebook’s advertising programs.)
Importantly, the decision was just a ruling on initial motions to dismiss the case — essentially, arguments by the defendants that the claims are groundless so the judge should throw them out out before the litigation really gets started. Mars got a split decision. Which claim had no merit, according to the judge?
(more…)
Here’s the latest MODIS-based map of the fire, which you can obtain as well, staring on this page:
Here is the latest Google Earth image, with .kmz data from ActiveFireMaps.fs.fed.us:
To their credit, KTMS/990am and 1490am are covering the Gap Fire live, between national Fox newscasts. (Though they just broke into one to cover a press conference live. They’re talking about maps and other resources, but with no references to where those might be on the Web. Also Edison “had a harrowing time” getting power back up.)
Other items from the press conference:
Now KTMS is breaking away. Says 2400 acres have burned so far. KTMS has no live stream, far as I can tell.
The News-Press‘ radio station, KZSB/1290, can be heard via Windows Media from a link on the home page of the newspaper. But while KTMS and KCSB were covering the fire live, KZSB was airing an interview with a guy who’s pushing for offshore oil drilling. For what it’s worth, it was a major oil spill from an offshore platform here in Santa Barbara in 1969 that gave birth to lots of protective legislation, as well as Earth Day and much of the environmental protection movement that has peristed ever since. Odd choice, odd timing. KZSB may be the only news station in the whole country lacking a website. Sad.
For up-to-date fire maps from a national perspective, with satellite coverage by MODIS, go here. More:
Tag: sbgapfire.
Tim Bray blogs about the head of ISO pooh-poohing the concerns about the way that Microsoft’s OOXML document format was strong-armed through his organization.
An interview with me, talking about the role of multinational companies in Chinese Internet censorship, followed by a great exchange with Danwei.org's Jeremy Goldkorn, aired on On The Media last Friday. I was traveling and so I've only just listened to it. It's online here:
You can read the transcript here, I won't cut-and-paste the whole thing. Everything I say there, I've written on this blog somewhere before. But it was a good opportunity to sum things up succintly. (Also note: my collgeagues Qian Gang and David Bandurski said brilliant things in a previous OTM show here and here.)
Somebody called "super88" left this comment:
"American companies make the calculation..." Goes beyond that -- the very idea of firewalls, filters, tracking, and most other ways of technologically restricting or monitoring the Internet were peddled and still are from the Free World to the, er, less free (no offense, China!)!
China's governmental wants and needs are absolute market makers for Seimens, MSFT, Google, ATT -- and zillions of niche firms, many in Cali. And also a big thanks to Stanford, CalTech, MIT, the Fulbright Committee and the other institutions hived around China's best and brightest, some of whom are now experts in not expanding but killing free thought and discussion.
We can't blame the companies -- dollars are neither clean or dirty once spent again -- but I point this out to remind us that we cannot either rely on them to "do the right thing," or "do no evil" without making our own voices heard, via our representatives, our letters and/or our dollars.
That is absolutely true. If users act like they don't care very much, companies will tend to assume there's nothing wrong. Not just in China, but anywhere they operate. As I pointed out in the interview, this is a global problem.
Companies are pushed not only by governments, but also by other powerful corporate interests that are trying to impose their interests, unreasonably, on others. We've got both in the United States. Just read how a Judge threw YouTube users to the wolves, deciding that protecting Viacom's intellecual property is more important than users' reasonable expectation of privacy and free speech. Nor can Americans count on our elected representatives to protect us from illegal government snooping unless we yell a lot louder than we have done until now.
We can craft all kinds of global corporate codes of conduct, but unless users get more vocal and educate themselves better about how Internet and telecom services use their personal data and manipulate information at government behest, it will be hard to prevent a global race to the bottom.
Technorati Tags: Bushco, Constitution, FourthAmendment, Freedom, Obama, Telco, Wiretap
Nicholas Kristof has a terrific column today about how the donation of a goat to a family in Uganda ultimately led to one of the children, Beatrice, earning a degree from Connecticut College, and beginning a path of service for her community. It’s a wonderful story, the point of which is what Jeffrey Sachs calls the “Beatrice Theorem” of development economics: “small inputs can lead to large outcomes.”
Well, yes, of course. In fact, small changes have determined the success or failure of us all. And I have no misgivings whatsoever about this past Channukah having given our children certificates announcing that Oxfam had given goats in their name. Yes, I am a goat-giver, and proud of it.
But…
…I’ve noticed in business writing in particular the frequency of what we can call the Fallacy of Examples (a type of Fallacy of Hasty Generalization). You read some story about a successful CEO as if we should learn from his (yes, usually it’s a him) example. But we are struck by examples frequently because they’re exceptional. As exceptions, examples are the last thing you want to learn from.
Not always, though. Sometimes examples are typical. That’s different. The trick is determining which are which.
An even when you can, you’re still not done. Is Beatrice and her goat an exception? Yes. That’s why her story is so inspiring. As an exception, it may be exactly what we should not be emulating. After all, if she’d won the lottery, we wouldn’t think that giving lottery tickets to the poor is a sensible approach to the problem of world poverty. But, even though Beatrice is an exception, the typical effect of donated goats (and other such small-ish gifts) may be quite good.
That’s why the Fallacy of Examples is a fallacy. Reasoning from examples doesn’t always lead to false conclusions. The reasoning just isn’t enough to tell you what the valid conclusions are.
And in the absence of valid conclusions, here’s Kristof’s list of ways to donate goats or their equivalents. And here’s Oxfam’s program. And, because it’s the Internet, here’s samizdata’s warning that goats cause poverty.
Ethanz brilliantly contextualizes this post. Thanks, Ethan!
Inciweb’s latest on the Gap Fire (tag: sbgapfire. Hashtag: #sbgapfire) is 10 hours old, it says (as of 12:17am Thursday morning). Most of KEYT’s 11pm newscast was devoted to the fire. Currently they’re reporting 1200 acres burned, 5% containment. The winds are not Santa Ana grade, but do come down from the NNW, flowing SSE over the Santa Ynez mountains (where the fire burns, above Santa Barbara and Goleta), directly toward town (and also in to the path of areas already burned by backfires, one hopes). KEYT also reported 10-13mph winds, with possible gusts up to 35. But the reporter on site said winds below, where houses are threatened, were calm.
Meanwhile ash is falling and the smell of smoke is strong. It’s stuffy, but we have all our windows shut here.
We also had a power outage. KEYT reported that nearly all of Santa Barbara and Goleta were knocked out by smoke affecting the main power lines into town, which come over the mountains from the North. (The other main power lines come over the mountains near Gibraltar Peak.) We came back on, but around 70,000 homes are still without power. The County of Santa Barbara has more on the front page of its website (that last link), but no direct link to any single report.
I’ll put up some pictures shortly, taken from our neighborhood close to the center of Santa Barbara itself, about 10 miles by air from the fire center. [Later: It wasn’t easy, since the Net’s speed has been way down… no doubt Cox is affected by this… but I got at least one picture up: the one above.]
Tuning around the radio dial, I only hear fire news right now on KCSB/91.9 from UCSB, alternating between English and Spanish. The station’s many Web streams are here.
More from The Independent (also on its fire page), Noozhawk, Edhat…
Here is a very deep history of wildfires around Santa Barbara. Scary and important. And here is my post about them, from the last time a fire threatened. I also had some ideas last year about public radio filling the hole left by departed news and “full service” commercial stations (all of which are gone from Santa Barbara). It was on my old blog here, but seems to be gone right now.
[Later…] The Net from Cox, our cable Internet provider, is down. The borrowed Sprint EvDO card, however, works perfectly. I even managed to upload the rest of my fire smoke photo set to Flickr.
My latest in Linux Journal: Time to school the FCC on what “free” really means. One excerpt:
| The easy take here is to say “On the one hand, it’s free; on the other hand, it’s filtered.” But there are more than two hands here. FCC rulemaking is octopus farming, often resulting in a tangle of tentacles that suck in more ways than you can count. |
It's time to get ornery again with the FCC. Fortunately, they're asking for it, by soliciting comment on this FCC rulemaking proposal for "Service Rules for Advanced Wireless Services in the 1915-1920 MHz, 1995-2000 MHz, 2020-2025 MHz and 2175-2180 MHz Bands.
It's a chocolate-covered spider.
As a Free Range Customer, I’m following Uncle Dave’s lead and starting up at Identi.ca. Follow me there as dsearls, same as my Twitter handle. We’ll see how it goes.
At its 32d International Junket Meeting last week, ICANN’s Board approved the GNSO Council’s recommendations for the eventual addition to the root of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). This means that eventually, when the staff drafts, community comments upon, and Board approves implementation processes, those with deep pockets will have the opportunity to bid for new TLD strings.
In the meantime, though, the hype-machine was in full swing, with ICANN calling the move the “Biggest Expansion to Internet in Forty Years” in a newsletter mailing, since corrected. The BBC picked it up as “internet overhaul“; while CNN sent a crawler scrolling. New gTLDs may have value to Internet users, who will get a larger field in which to find memorable stable identifiers, but they’re hardly an “expansion” on the level of broadband rollout or protocol interoperability. Luckily, ICANN doesn’t have much to do with those actual innovations, so it can’t get in their way.
Before we get new generic TLDs, one of the initial purposes behind ICANN’s creation ten years ago, we still have to wait for ICANN’s staff to iron out the application process, including processes for resolving contention between multiple applications for the same string, and objections based on “legal rights of others,” the illusory “generally accepted legal norms relating to morality and public order that are recognized under international principles of law,” or “substantial opposition to it from a significant portion of the community to which the string may be explicitly or implicitly targeted.” (The At-Large Advisory Committee, from which I am non-voting liaison to the ICANN Board, had these comments. I speak only for myself in this blog.)
Then too, we have yet to see the application fees that will be levied upon applicants who wish to run this gauntlet. Even ICANN’s FAQ suggests we won’t be seeing the roll-out until mid 2009. So those of you holding your breath for .blog or .sex might want to relax and check back in a few months.
I’m enjoying my Amazon Kindle ebook reader, albeit while accidentally pressing the “next page” button as often as everyone else (did they beta test this thing all on the thumbless?), and whining about the rest of the annoyances about which you should not even get me started. Nevertheless, it works fine for pleasure reading and I like carrying a whole bunch of books among which I can switch rapidly. And despite its ugly DRM heart, you can upload books from the Net in PRC, MOBI, or text formats.
But, when it comes to books I read for research, it’s about as effective as it would be as a boat anchor.
First, the note-taking and highlighting are jokes.
Second, it (usefully) lets you repaginate on the fly, but (annoyingly) doesn’t know the original page numbering. How am I supposed to cite a page in a reference? It should let us ask nicely about which physical page the current text came from.
Third, there’s no bibliographic tool.
Obviously, Kindle was not designed for researchers. I understand that, and I would have made the same marketing decision. But for Kindle 2.0, it’d just take some software. (Well, and a change to the Kindle book format to capture the original page numbers.)
There’s a bunch of skeptical Kindle links here.
There are orange clouds to the West. Turns out this is the Gap Wildland Fire. (Tag: sbgapfire. Hashtag: #sbgapfire) It’s only 35 acres so far, but it’s very close to civilization. Here’s an LA Times story that shows the fire itself, near Lizard’s Mouth, a favorite local hiking site off West Camino Cielo. (Here are some pictures I took a couple years ago.) It started late yesterday afternoon and evacuation orders stand for Glen Annie and La Patera canyons. There is also an evacuation warning for residents above Cathedral Oaks Road, between Glen Annie Road and Fairview Avenue. Here’s a Google Map with the evacuation order marked. Lizard’s mouth is the bare area above that on the map.
Cool: Kevin Marks just turned me on to the user-created Maps search for Glen Annie Canyon. (Tried to embed it, but that didn’t work. Not sure one can embed stuff in Harvard blogs.)
If you are among the hundred thousand or so in the potential line of fire (pun intended), here are some links:
I’d include the Santa Barbara News-Press, our local newspaper, on that list, but the website is down right now. Of course the News-Press itself has been one long sad story over the past three years.
I’ve also just set up an experimental Twitter source, sbgapfire. If it works it should serve the same purpose that sandiegofire did last year. If any of ya’ll want to help me set it up right, or to set up something else that’s better, please do. (As of 10:02am PDST, Twitter is “down for maintenance.” Grrr.) Thanks.
Since moving to the Boston area for the school year, we have done appoximately zero astronomy. Now that we’re back in Santa Barbara, it’s fun to pick up where we left off.
Last night I sat outside with The Kid, just like we did for most evenings of his first ten years on Earth and re-acquianted ourselves with the ranking stars and constellations. Boötes, Hercules and Corona were high overhead. The Big Dipper was about as high as it gets at our vantage at 34° north. It was a bit hazy and lights from the city blanked out the Milky Way, but objects brighter than the third magnitude were visible, and two of those were the TRMM and Genesis II. We’d seen TRMM (NASA’s Tropical Rainforest Measuring Mission) many times before, but the Genesis was new to us. Turns out it’s a commercial venture by Bigelow Aerospace, and was launched only recently, in June 2007. Among its payloads are “Fly your stuff” and a bingo game you can play from the ground. Really. More here.
Remember ACTA, the draft proposed “harmonization” of copyright found on Wikileaks? In keeping with the view that harmonization is a one-way ratchet up, RIAA has some suggestions for the US Trade Representative.
J. Online Infringing Activities
Parties shall:
1. Provide exclusive rights under copyright to unambiguously cover Internet use.
2. Establish appropriate rules regarding liability of service/content providers:
(a) Establishing primary liability where a party is involved in direct infringement; and ensure the application of principles of secondary liability, including contributory liability and vicarious civil liability, as well as criminal liability and abetting if appropriate.
(b) Establishing liability for actions which, taken as a whole, encourage infringement by third parties, in particular with respect to products, components and/or services whose predominant application is the facilitation of infringement.
3. Provide remedies and injunctive relief against any entity that:
(a) Creates or otherwise maintains directories of infringing materials;
(b) Provides “deeplinks” to infringing files;
(c) Commits any act, practice or service that has little or no purpose or effect other than to facilitate infringement, or that intentionally induces others to infringe (specifically allowing proof of “intent” by reference to objective standards–i.e. a reasonable person would surmise such an intent);
4. Require internet service providers and other intermediaries to employ readily available measures to inhibit infringement in instances where both legitimate and illegitimate uses were facilitated by their services, including filtering out infringing materials, provided that such measures are not unduly burdensome and do not materially affect the cost or efficiency of delivering legitimate services;
5. Require Internet service providers or other intermediaries to restrict or terminate access to their systems with respect to repeat infringers.
6. Establish liability against internet service providers who, upon receiving notices of infringement from content provides via email, or by telephone in cases of pre-release materials or in other exigent circumstances, fail to remove the infringing content, or access to such content, in an expeditious manner, and in no case more than 24 hours; or
Provide that, in the absence of proof to the contrary, an internet service provider shall be considered as knowing that the content it stores is infringing or illegal, and thus subject to liability for copyright infringement, after receiving notification from the right holder or its representative, normally in writing, including by email or by telephone in the case of pre-release materials or in other exigent circumstances.
7. Establish, adequately fund and provide training for a computer crimes investigatory unit.
8. Provide injunctive relief against intermediaries whose services are used for infringing activities regardless of whether damages are available.
9. Establish policies against the use of government networks and computers, as well as those networks and computers of companies that have government contracts, to prevent the use of such computers and networks for the transmission of infringing materials, including a ban on the installation of p2p applications except, and to the extent to which, some particular government use requires such installation.
10. Consideration to be given to the following: possible rules on data retention, the right to information giving right holders access to data held by ISPs in the preparation and course of proceedings including in civil proceedings, and availability of complete and accurate WHOIS data
RIAA’s proposal is a compendium of everything they dislike about rulings that have gone against them: the lack of a “making available” right (Atlantic v. Howell); the requirement of knowledge before non-volitional actors such as ISPs can be held liable (RTC v. Netcom); the provisions of safe-harbor that let ISPs avoid liability (17 USC 512); the limitation of vicarious liability to situations where the proprietor has a right and ability to control; the possibility that non-infringing use could save a technology with infringing uses (Betamax); the status of hyperlinks (Perfect 10 v. Amazon).
Add in codification of stronger versions of rulings they like such as Grokster, and you’ve got a prescription for utterly insane copyright law! As the LA Times’ Jon Healy puts it, the RIAA’s ACTA would turn ISPs into enforcers, when they should be simple conduits.
Let’s hope enough ISPs, tech companies, public interest groups, libraries, educators, and friends can keep this RIAA wishlist from becoming our nightmare. We should start a corresponding wish-list, extravagant but alternate-universe plausible, would include on the other side. I’d start with:
Zachary McCune, who is at the Berkman Center, became an “ambassador” for One Web Day. To rev up for it, he did an anthropological study on himself by going without the Net for one day. He’s blogged his odyssey.
As an example, here’s what Zack wrote at 12:22:
I decide it’s high time I got my daily intake of news. I imagine my fingers crawling over the keyboard to open up nytimes.com, wired.com, boingboing.net, and boston.com in different tabs. I imagine opening up facebook to “friend” Barack Obama. Does he (or one of his nameless intern/aides) check out your profile before he friends you? I will need to wait to find out.
I remember that I am going to interview the “Plain White T’s” tomorrow. I note that I would be wikipediaing “plain white t’s” at about this time.
I realize that every time I use wikipedia, I end up clicking through to an average of three other articles. So for every wikipedia entry I don’t read today, I am actually not reading four wikipedia articles.
A single tear falls down my cheek.
And at 1:20, amidst all the urges to google this or click on that, he has a quieter moment:
I begin to realize that the internet shapes my sense of self, in that I may be directed by ads, emails, stumbles, or traditional hyperlinks, but I am still an arbiter of what I consume.
The internet suddenly seems to not be a space I inhabit but rather a (re)structuring of my self as a sort of data flaneur.
Oh, just read the whole thing yourself! It’s wonderful.
From gigbert (via Paul English (email)):
looking for a monkey who can bang on my keyboard to try to find the one random sequence of characters that is not yet taken as a domain name
The gig offers $100.
I thought I might lose my Trader Joe’s Blueberry Muesli this morning, listening to Adam Davidson chat with Morning Edition co-host Ari Shapiro about free trade, Colombia and the US election. Their 4-minute conversation is ickily chatty (”Hey Adam, hey Ari”) and unbearably arrogant and US-centric. Adam contends that making a big fuss over trade agreements with Colombia is, in his words, “nutty” because Colombia is just too small to matter: “I did the math and… the entire Colombian economy is the size of Hollywood, Florida, not Hollywood, California” They both laugh. Indeed, what could be more entertaining than living in a country where the per capita gross domestic product is less than $20 a day?
So, Ari persists, why do US politicians care about this silly little country, since only “some people here and there” (Adam’s words) will be affected by any trade deals? Well apparently, unions are upset because a lot of union leaders get killed there, but as Adam goes on to observe in the same cheerful “gosh-how-silly” voice, “a lot of people get killed in Colombia, it’s a very violent society.” Wow, that’s even funnier than being poor!
The hilarity continues as Davidson notes that in some states “trade is a big, big deal” even though those foolish voters are just wrong about trade being the reason they lost their jobs. Davidson presumably thinks that American voters in those states may be almost as stupid as the people who choose to live in poor, violent Colombia.
I’ll leave union members and residents of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio to defend themselves against Davidson’s flip dismissal of their concerns. On behalf of the rest of the world, though, I urge NPR to make both Ari Shapiro and Adam Davidson spend a few hours learning something about Colombia. Wonderful place to start is on Global Voices, which will steer them to a heart-breaking series of short videos on the struggles of a brave group of women to fight back against the violence and economic hardship in the Barrancabermeja region, home to the country’s biggest oil refinery. Hey, did Davidson really fail to mention that petroleum accounts for almost 30% of Colombia’s exports? Yup, I listened one more time to be sure.
This offensive piece of “analysis” (perhaps that’s just another word for “filler” at Morning Edition?) added nothing to our understanding of trade issues or the election politics it was supposedly about, while actively encouraging the worst sort of American closedmindness. Which public is public radio aiming for?
Photo: Bogotá
2600m + montañas paisas…
Uploaded on December 27, 2006
by One*mandarino
Some rights reserved
There are aparent connections between forms of cholesterol and memory.
In The right to blog: freedom’s next frontier , Evgeny Morozov came away from Global Voices Online’s Citizens Media Summit in Budapest with a perspective on blogging that is refreshingly free of U.S.-centric tech and political preoccupations, and grounded in truly serious social and political concerns elsewhere. Some excerpts:
| …these idealistic people did not talk much about gadgets, fashion, or campaign-financing; nor rush to praise or scorn Barack Obama or John McCain; nor fret over the latest celebrity-hunt or political trick in the style of Gawker or the Huffington Post. Instead, they got into heated discussions (often in heavily accented English) over a different set of topics: internet filtering, human-rights violations, and the future of freedom of expression. |
| This, then, was a different kind of blogger and a different order of reality. The background of many of the participants told the story: for in their countries of origin many at the Budapest gathering sustain their blogs in face of the threat or reality of arrest, intimidation and beating from the authorities. Their enemies are real, not imaginary. Their blogs are exercises in courage. |
| …Even in places with low internet penetration, blogs can still have a significant impact in creating channels to voice dissent and influence wider media networks. |
