On Sunday, I came in at the middle of a talk being aired by the local NPR station. Someone was outlining what sounded like a progressive approach to Voice Over IP and to telecommunications in general. Oh, there were so worrisome phrases — for example, freeing up more unlicensed spectrum but not addressing the broader licensing concerns — but my grasp of the issues is weak enough that I figured I was just getting them wrong.

Turns out it was Michael Powell, chair of the FCC, addressing the National Press Club.

Well, I’ll be.

(I’d trust people like David Isenberg, Larry Lessig, Dewayne Hendricks, and David Reed to do a better job evaluating this speech than I can.)

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Mike O’Dell has found a site that features posters from the ’50s with an atomic theme.

What the hell were we thinking?

(See also how to survive a nuclear blast with only a hat.)

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BootXP is cheapware that will let you replace the screen Microsoft shows you as XP boots. You can download some alternative screens here, some of which express an amusing skepticism about the reliability of Microsoft technology.

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Congratulations to the Kerry supporters. Edwards’, too.

See you in New Hampshire :)

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Hugo, I’m trying to respond to your email but my msgs keep bouncing. If you read this, could you please send me a msg with another way to reach you? Thanks.

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Larry takes on and takes apart the intellectually dishonest Cato article on Dean’s Internet policy. Here’s a snippet:

Apparently Cato thinks the end-to-end neutrality of the original internet was a weakness. Governments do too: It’s harder to regulate internet behavior when intelligence is at the ends; so too is it harder to protect legacy business models when intelligence is at the ends. But while I understand (and even predicted) why governments and legacy businesses will therefore fight the end-to-end character of the Internet, I don’t get why a libertarian would. A libertarianism guided by principle — rather than contributors — would embrace the values of the end-to-end network. Cato does not.

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Greg Linden stumbled across “The Daily Me? No, the Daily Us,” an old Wired piece of mine that pointed to a disadvantage of personalized news sites: they don’t build communities the way paper newspapers do. (Look, it was an interesting idea in 1995.) Here’s an excerpt, chosen because of its quaint reference to that other Iraqi war:

The fact that the document I’m looking at is the same for all who receive it has other important effects. It establishes a baseline of expectations about what we, as a community, are all supposed to know. If, at the height of the Persian Gulf War, we encountered an American who said he or she had never heard of Desert Storm, we would have learned something important about that person.

In short, the act of publishing – which, at its root, means “making public” – helps to establish a public in the first place…

Anyway, the important thing is that Greg points to Findory.com, a fascinating personalized news aggregator. There are no profiles to fill in and no groups to join. Every time you click on a story to read, the site takes it as an indication of your interests. When you return to the home page, it will have adjusted the spread of stories it thinks you care about. If you click on a link to an article that it turns out wasn’t interesting, you can delete it from the list of articles you’ve read.

The privacy policy seems exemplary. There’s no registration required. No information about you is stored except for a random number stored in a cookie that’s associated with the list of articles you’ve read (according to the FAQ). It explains how it works its magic in this hard-to-parse sentence:

The algorithm combines statistical analysis of the article text and of users who viewed the articles with information about articles you previously viewed.

I’m guessing that this means that it goes one step further than Google’s “find more like this one” option. Google (presumably) does a word usage analysis of an article to find other articles with similar patterns. Findory (I’m guessing) does a word usage analysis of the article and of the article lists of others who have clicked on it, and then compares that with an analysis of your own list. (There are only two problems with this explanation: I probably got it wrong and it’s more confusing than the thing it’s trying to explain.)

The site also throws in articles outside of your statistically-derived profile to enable serendipity. It does not, however, get past the problem my Wired article points to. But, then, it’s not intended to.

A footnote says that “Findory News is provided in cooperation with Memigo.” Memigo’s banner says:

Memigo recommends news articles you will be interested in based on your ratings and those of other users that are similar to you. The memigo front page can be overwhelming; check out this guide for more details.

Seems about right. Lots of articles, ratings, comments…I want to spend some more time there…

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Scott Kirsner has an amusing quiz in the Boston Globe today (gone tomorrow) that will tell you if you are a “true believer,” i.e., a computechnologist who was in before the Net, or would have been had you been born in time. Here’s the first question, as a sample:

You know the name of the first computer software company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, in 1982. It was eventually acquired by Computer Associates in 1989. (Two points.)

I did very badly on this quiz, even when I gave myself credit for answers I knew I knew but couldn’t quite recall.

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RageBoy talks a quick trot through AI, cognitive psychology and philosophy, proving once again that autodidacts are the best educated people on the planet.

Since RB ties me into the piece — I am not worthy, I am not worthy — let me answer the question he ends with: “I don’t know quite how I got here from Fodor’s funny take on Dasein.”

Here’s how you got there, muh friend. In a few pithy — and NC-17 — paragraphs you raise the notion of Dasein, and then take us through the clumsy way AI has tried to reincorporate the baby it threw out with the bath water: the mind. But, as you quote Bruner as saying, mind “has been technicalized in a manner that undermines the original impulse.” (BTW, I’ve never read Bruner. Thanks for the tip.)

So, here’s the connection, as if you didn’t know, you sly boots. Dasein is Heidegger’s term for human existence. He uses it precisely to keep his readers from making the mistake Bruner says AI has made: thinking of the mind or self as a thing. Consciousness is always of the world, Heidegger says (building on the insight of Husserl, a Jew he later betrayed). We experience the world, not a thing-like self. In fact, you can’t find a thing-like self even if you look. Nor can you find a self experiencing inner representations of an outer world; that concept comes not from experience but from having certain ungrounded theories about consciousness. We are always beyond ourselves in in time, too, understanding the present in terms of the future we’re heading ourselves towards. So, Heidegger used the weird term “Dasein” — “being there” — to keep us from thinking too easily of our minds and existence as being substances or things.

But there’s more…We are in the world not as knowers but as creatures that care about ourselves and our fellows. That is, the “of” in “consciousness of” isn’t neutral or rational. It’s how the world matters to us.

Anyway, read RB. He’s got a head full of ideas that are driving him insane.

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Here’s the current draft (still under discussion) of the description of the session I’m leading at the O’Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-in:

The common wisdom — that the Internet is just one more tool in the campaign box — is wrong. Experience so far seems to show that to effectively using the Internet means giving up some of the most basic assumptions about the nature of campaigns as top-down, one-to-many, marketing efforts. This raises more questions than answers: Is the Internet reshaping campaigns, political parties and the electorate? Are the most important effects of the Internet the ones we expect or are they emergent? Are any of emergent effects apparent yet? If using the Internet effectively means remaking a campaign in its end-to-end image, will only certain campaigns use it? Is the excitement about the Internet’s role that of early adopters? What is the role of a candidate – and a leader – in an Internet-based campaign? We will share what we’ve learned so far and discuss all these issues and more in a conversational and interactive session.

I’m supposed to talk for 15-20 minutes and then lead a directed discussion with the audience, in the majestic style of Jeff Jarvis‘ brilliant session at BloggerCon. Ulp. But there will be a really interesting bunch of people in the audience I can call upon.

I’m thinking of beginning my presentation by saying that there’s an existential paradox at the heart of voting. It’s not a logical paradox, but one that we live: We’re individuals voting our hearts but we are reduced to being merely one among millions. We let ourselves be reduced to a simple binary switch — ballots are T/F exams, not essays — and we rejoice in it.

This then would lead me to talk about the paradox of massed individuals that I think the Dean campaign’s use of the Internet has begun to crack: How do you scale personal involvement? The old broadcast model of politics can’t do it…

The Digital Democracy Teach-in happens Feb. 9 in San Diego, the day before the O’Reilly Emerging Tech sessions start.

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