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April 8, 2008
This is a Google-automated translation of the Baidu page on Obama. (Baidu is the Chinese search engine.)
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Ethan Zuckerman says his favorite way to browse GlobalVoices is through the digests page.
Ethan Zuckerman is about to show a video of Alisa Miller, the head of Public Radio International, talking about the distorted picture the news media give when covering global news. E.g., the death of Anna Nichol Smith basically drove out the coverage of any place else in the world except Iraq. (Ethan points to the carograms at WorldMapper.)
April 7, 2008
Steve Pepper is calling for a demonstration against Norway’s flaky acceptance of Open XML as an ISO standard, AKA Caving in to Microsoft. Here’s a list of the “irregularities” of the process.
Nice post today by Gene Koo about Wikipedia’s view of truth in a postmodern world. A social process replaces the simple one-to-one relationship which we used to think “knowing” was. Something like that.
BradSucks sees a 750GB external hard drive for $159.97 CAD that says it holds 660 hoursdays of MP3s and does the math:
* 660 days around-the-clock is 1.8 years of non-stop music, never repeating a single song
* That’s 15,840 hours.
* That’s 990 days or 2.7 years of non-repeating music if we adjust for waking hours.
* 28 of these hard drives full of music would play for 75 years, the average American male’s life-span. Again never repeating a song.
* 28 drives (18,627,840 hours of music storage) would cost only $4,464 CAD.
* Digital downloads to fill those drives would cost roughly 370 million dollars.
Best of all, you’d only have to listen to “Mandy” once!
April 6, 2008
Attention, passengers. We are now 15 minutes from landing. Please turn off any electronic equipment, make sure your seat belt is buckled, your seat is returned to an upright and locked position, and any carry-on luggage is safely stowed under the seat in front of you.
For our Deluxe Elite passengers, please return your footrests to their stowed position, and turn your stemware in to the attendant who will shortly be coming down the aisle with your choice of mints and Belgian chocolates. Also, turn off and stow your media entertainment console, reduce your back massage to off or low, and make sure your balloon hats are safely secured around your head, as loose headgear can disturb the poodles. If you are seated next to one of the surprise celebrities strewn about the cabin, now would be a good time to exchange telephone numbers, unless you’re seated next to Bono, in which case be advised that he is happy to accept your contribution in the African denomination of your choice. Those of you traveling with small children should have them begin to say goodbye to their clowns, and please don’t forget your pony vouchers. Feel free to keep your travel tiara for your next trip, with our compliments. And now, as we approach our destination, we ask you to please return your attendant to the upright and secured position.
It is, as always, our pleasure to serve you here in the luxurious skies.
April 5, 2008
Damian Kulash Jr., of the band OK Go, has a great Net neutrality op-ed in the NY Times. He ties it back to the rules of common carriage. Here’s an excerpt:
They won’t be blocking anything per se — we’ll never know what we’re not getting — they’ll just be leapfrogging today’s technology with a new, higher-bandwidth network where they get to be the gatekeepers and toll collectors. The superlative new video on offer will be available from (surprise, surprise) them, or companies who’ve paid them for the privilege of access to their customers. If this model sounds familiar, that’s because it is. It’s how cable TV operates.
We can’t allow a system of gatekeepers to get built into the network. The Internet shouldn’t be harnessed for the profit of a few, rather than the good of the many; value should come from the quality of information, not the control of access to it.
For some parallel examples: there are only two guitar companies who make most of the guitars sold in America, but they don’t control what we play on those guitars. Whether we use a Mac or a PC doesn’t govern what we can make with our computers. The telephone company doesn’t get to decide what we discuss over our phone lines. It would be absurd to let the handful of companies who connect us to the Internet determine what we can do online. Congress needs to establish basic ground rules for an open Internet, just as common carriage laws did for the phone system.
Susan Crawford views with concern the court decision that says that Roommates.com has to abide by the fair housing law that forbids asking about sexual orientation, gender, whether you have children, etc. (See her previous post as well.) It’s not that Susan would like to see some good, old-fashioned discrimination back in the housing market. Rather, she’s concerned about the continued applicability of laws that protect Web sites from bad speech that occurs on them. She cites from a recent CDT/EFF amicus brief:
Broad Section 230(c) immunity fosters freedom of speech and the development of the Internet. Without broad immunity, interactive computer services would lack the freedom to structure their websites in any way they want and to solicit and encourage user-generated content. They would run a high risk of being treated as publishers of objectionable third-party content and face liability for it. Broad immunity has allowed the flexibility for the eBays, Amazons, MySpaces, and blogs of the world to create unique sites that encourage the sharing and development of content, information, and speech by their users.
April 4, 2008
During the end session, the moderator asked the panel why topic maps have not been catching on as quickly as they should. I suggested that one reason was that people think they’re graphical representations, when in fact they’re a data representation that can be displayed any way that makes sense.
I hit some resistance among the panelists, however. Some maintained that maps themselves are abstractions. Sure, but when you say you’re going to give someone a subway map, they expect a piece of paper with colored lines on it, not an abstract representation of the relationships among the stations.
If I were in the business of selling software that implements topic maps, I’d come up with another name, and at some point mention that underneath is an ISO standard called “topic maps.” Some people at the conference talk about “subject-centric computing,” which is still pretty techie but I find much less confusing than “topic maps.”
I have tomorrow (Saturday) in Oslo with nothing planned until 7pm when I leave for the airport. Other than sleeping in (I am soooo jetlagged that that’s unlikely), any suggestions?
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