WGBH, one of Boston’s NPR affiliates (89.7 FM), is broadcasting two interviews in Jennie Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast series this Sunday, 10-11pm. Writes Jennie:

The first half hour is an interview with theHarvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, who authored “The Clash of Civilizations,” and the second is an interveiw with Megan Marshall,on her new biography of the three Peabody Sisters who helped found the Transcendentalist movement in the early to mid-19th century.

Meanwhile, over at PRX you can hear her interview with David Ferry who recently translated Virgil’s Georgics.

Oh, Jennie, when will you stop pandering to the mainstream?

But seriously, isn’t this just the sort of thing we all wanted the Net to do for us? That is, make room for everything from talking dogs to freelance intellectuals? Occasionally at the same time?

[Tags: podcast thoughtcast jennie+attiyeh wgbh ideas virgil]

At Corante, Civic Minded is a new, promising blog devoted to the Internet’s effect on democracy.

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I mean this as an honest question: Take a look at this page from WhiteHouse.gov. I haven’t spent a lot of time at that site over the years. Has it always been this blatantly political? [Tags: politics]

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Five soldiers in Iraq have been carrying video cameras with them throughout the past year. Working continuously with a director via IM, they have produced a 94-minute version of the film set to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 29. It is non-partisan, or perhaps multi-partisan…How could you be a soldier in Iraq and not have points of view?

At TheWarTapes.com you can see the latest clips from these citizen-soldier journalists. And the site is also a blog and a place for others to submit their images, words and stories.

Remarkable. It is a site that shows how everything has changed. [Tags: iraq media citizen+journalism war ]

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An interesting front-page story by Jonathan Saltzman in today’s Boston Globe talks about the fact that an ailing justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has been listening to oral arguments over the Web. The article spends most of its time discussing whether it’s necessary for a judge to hear oral arguments and in only one paragraph wonders if hearing arguments over a webcast might affect the case or the judge’s decision. That is, there’s no discussion of the medium’s effect on the message, yet another sign that the medium is becoming invisible, as all successful media must.

A page 2 story thinks it so unusual that Bush took questions from the audience that it merits a subhead: “Takes questions at an Ohio event.” Our president actually deigned to speak spontaneously, albeit undoubtedly after hours of rehearsal. The article doesn’t mention how many questions he took or how long the Q&A session was.

I’m puzzled, though, by one transition in the article, by Tom Raum of the AP:

The White House made no attempt to screen the audience or the questions, spokesman Scott McClellan said.

However, much of the downtown near the hotel where Bush spoke was barricaded off. About 100 antiwar protestors chanted…

What’s the “However” supposed to tell us? What’s the implied contrast?

My wife, son and I had an amusing five minute conversation in which we talked past each other because we took the following teaser and text radically differently:

[Teaser] There Goes Arroyo: Red Sox send rocking righthander to Reds for slugging outfielder Pena.

[Text] Yesterday, the Red Sox opted to …deal Bronson Arroyo to the Cincinnati Reds for slugging outfielder Wily Mo Pena…

My wife and I couldn’t figure out why they would trade a player as a penalty for hitting another player. Our son understood that “slugging outfielder Pena” means Pena is a slugger, not that he was slugged.

Ah, language! Ah, sports know-nothings! [Tags: boston+globe media george+ bush web]

WRT to the length of the Q&A period, Tim Grieve at Salon has the mot juste:

At the end of his speech in Cleveland today, George W. Bush said he’d be “glad to answer some questions.” But when the questions at the lunchtime event dragged on a little long for his liking, Bush blurted out, “Anybody work here in this town?”

Think Progress beat us to the inevitable punch line: Not as many as used to, sir.

Since Bush became president, the unemployment rate in Cleveland has increased by 29 percent, from 4.5 percent in January 2001 to 5.8 percent in January 2006.

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Harvard Law School students have put together a pretty impresive — and funny — web site anticipating the future of documents in Massachusetts if the Commonwealth does or does not adopt the ODF for all its state documents. [Tags: odf standards web2 ]

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Hao Wu, a Chinese documentary filmmaker and blogger, who’d lived in the US for 12 years, has been detained for a month by the Chinese government without being charged with a crime. Under the name Tian Yi, he’s been an editor at Global Voices. The site at this point has no recommendations for action… [Tags: china hao+wu globalvoices censorship]

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danah speculates whether production of DMT (a brain chemical) helps explain how cults draw people in. Then, reflecting on it, she asks:

This then puts me into an interesting bind as an ethnographer trying to make sense of these things. If there are changes to the neural processes, are there ways to see practitioners on their own terms? Is it possible to understand the cultures there without experiencing the effects that the rituals are meant to bring on? I have to imagine that anthropologists studying religion and religious practices went through some of this. (Anyone?)

There is, of course, a long tradition of mystics warning that outsiders can only understand the experience by experiencing it. The epistemological question is whether mystical experience is any different from ordinary, non-mystical experience in its ineffability and unknowability. A difference in brain chemistry would suggest that, yes, mystical experience is qualitatively different. [Tags: danah+boyd epistemology anthropolgy]

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Yellowikis is a wiki-based, open yellow pages. On the main page of a business, you do the Wikipedia-ish thing of all agreeing on the neutral-point-of-view facts. On the discussion page you can do the ranting and raving you crave.

The pickings are pretty slim at the moment, but founder Paul Youlten hopes that college students (and others) will want to earn some extra cash by making YW pages for local businesses, including making videos for them; the students keep all the money. Paul has some other ideas up his sleeve as well.

It would be great if YW gained critical mass in some localities. Alternatively, maybe one of the yellow page services — e.g., local.yahoo.com (disclosure) — would like to integrate YW. In any case, it’s a project that could be tremendously useful not only as a service but as a Web resource. [Tags: yellowikis yellow+pages directories local+business business paul+youlten ]

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Comedy Central has yanked the South Park episode that makes fun of Scientology. Trey Parker and Matt Stone responded by writing the following statement to Variety:

So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun!

Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!”

—Trey Parker and Matt Stone, servants of the dark lord Xenu.

For what it’s worth, I don’t watch South Park because I don’t find it funny enough. But after SP’s endless ragging on the world’s major religions, there’s something pathetic about Comedy Central pulling an episode making fun of Scientology. [Tags: south_park scientology entertainment tv]

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Continuing what is apparently my new policy of only blogging about Wikipedia, with occasional posts about how Bush sucks: Jay Fienberg recommends that we take a look at the Semantic MediaWiki if we want to see the Semantic Web in action. He says that it even shows that RDF can be easy to use.

He also points out (in an email) that Pandora, a music taste site that’s got lots of people excited, uses a “ginormous faceted taxonomy/ontology.” (Just to make my position clear, if I actually have one: Local ontologies obviously can be highly useful. The question is how hard is it to knit them together reasonably well? And then the question is what counts as reasonably well. But one thing we know for sure: Bush sucks.)

Finally, Jay recommends a post by Steve Krause about Pandora vs. Last.fm. “Pandora’s recommendations are based on the inherent qualities of the music,” says Steve, while Last.fm is a collaborative filter. [Tags: jay_fienberg steve_krause pandora taxonomy ontology everything_is_miscellaneous EverythingIsMiscellaneous semantic_web wiki]

And while talking about taxonomies, VerbDate.com is a new, free dating site that integrates tags, tagclouds, Skype and google maps. If it were any more Web 2.0-ish, you’d only be able to date Tim O’Reilly.

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