The O’Reilly Digital Democrary Teach-In‘s lineup is now online. It’s sorta kinda part of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, which was a must-attend event last year and promises to be as good this year. The Teach-In — bring a flower and anything written by Howard Zinn — looks like it’ll be a great day with some fabulous folks who are actually making a difference. (Disclosure: I’m on the conference committee, but that doesn’t mean I’d lie to you about being excited about the event.)

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I will admit it’s a little thing, but it irks me. The Boston Globe today has an article by Joanna Weiss about the Clark campaign “blasting” a leaflet from the Dean campaign. In order to build the narrative, the fourth paragraph says that “Clark aids said that the Dean attack was a sign that…the presidential race might be evolving into a two-way battle…”

The fifth paragraph then validates this point of view:

A New Hampshire tracking poll released this week by American Research Group indicated Clark in second place behind Dean, pulling ahead of … Kerry…

The sixth paragraph continues the story:

A USA Today poll indicated Clark and Dean in a statistical tie nationwide.

Hmm. The first poll mentioned has Clark at 16% and Kerry at 13%, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points. The second one has Dean with 24% and Clark with 20%, with a margin of error of 5. The Globe article ignores the margin of error in the NH poll but includes it in the national poll. Why? I can only presume because the story tells better that way.

Clark is coming up quickly in the polls. That’s an important story. We could do without shading the statistics to make it “tell” better.

The Globe’s lead story today is Bush’s immigration reform proposal. I read all three articles in the set and I still don’t what Bush is proposing or how it’s different than what currently exists. This is some bad reporting.

Here’s a Q&A from the Miami Herald that I found much more helpful.

It turns out that the proposal, which does not give illegal immigrants the right to apply for permanent residency, sets up a “guest” status where “guest” means “Willing to pay a fee to take a job so crappy that, even during the worst economy for jobs since the Depression, no American is willing to take it.” Be our guest to do our back-stooping, subsistence-paying labor! You’re welcome!

(Are FAQs becoming more useful than inverted pyramids in telling non-narrative journalistic stories?)

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The Club for Growth, a Republicanish group, has spent $75,000 to air an ad in Iowa that features a couple saying, “I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding…[etc.] … freak-show back to Vermont.”

One has to wonder why. If Dean is the weakest candidate against Bush, why is a Republican group working so hard to keep him from getting the nomination? In fact, why would Karl Rove be telling the world that Dean is the candidate he would most like to run his boy against? Surely Karl is too devious to be giving the Democrats such good advice!

Anyway, thanks to the Club, we now have an easy way to gauge whether Dean is the candidate for you:

	Me	You
Tax-hiking
Government-expanding
Latte-drinking
Sushi-eating
Volvo-driving
New York Times-reading
Body-piercing
Hollywood-loving
Left-wing
Freak show
PERCENT DEAN SUPPORT	70%	??

By the way, in response to this ad, Dean supporters donated an additional $280,000 to the Governor’s campaign.

Charles Taylor at Salon has a good review (i.e., I generally agree with his assessment) of the ads created by amateurs as part of MoveOn.org’s contest. He particularly likes Charlie Fisher’s “Child Play.” Me, too. As Taylor says:

If I were Howard Dean or Wesley Clark, the impact and economy of these ads would make me think twice before I shelled out big bucks to some media professionals.

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Edward Mac Gillavry has a paper on collaborative mapping that comes at the idea from a different angle than does Matt Haughey’s suggestion that someone combine a mapping system with a Slashdot-like system to do collaborative routing:

Collaborative mapping is an initiative to collectively produce models of real-world locations online that people can then access and use to virtually annotate locations in space.

Mac Gillavry points to two aspects of collaborative mapping: 1. Generating maps by mapping with your feet, so to speak. For example, at Waag.org, you can see maps of Amsterdam generated by aggregating data from people carrying GPS devices. 2. Collaboratively annotating locations with content that is displayed on location-aware devices.

A wiki for every street corner!

(In case you’re wondering why mapping stuff has started showing up in this blog, it’s because I’m working on an article on it for Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0.)

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Mike O’Dell points us to a hard-to-fathom game at the Things You Never Knew Existed site.

Why this counts as a game is a bit of a mystery…

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I sent an email to a friend this morning asking for help thinking of technology people who meet a particular parameter, you know, along the lines of “Do you know any techies who ____?” Unfortunately, my friend forwarded my hastily written mail to about 20 people who might also be able to fill in the blank.

One of those twenty mentioned Metcalfe’s Law in her reply. Someone else talked about the need to supplement that law in order to understand a different aspect of social dynamics. Someone else commented, contradicted, expanded…

Now those 20 people — strangers — are engaged in a conversation about social network dynamics.

This leads me to a conclusion: The Web is more social than I am.

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I just posted this at Corante Many2Many:

I like Skype. It lets me make phone calls for free to the other 4M people who have signed up for the service. The calls go through my computer and they work real good.

But I’ve just gotten my second random phone call from some well-intentioned stranger who wants to know if I want to chat. Actually, I don’t. If you call my Skype number randomly, the odds are just about perfect that you’re going to be interrupting something that I’d rather be doing than speaking with a stranger. And here’s how you know that: If I wanted to be speaking with a stranger now, I’d be on the Skype phone calling one. If you can get through to me on my Skype line it’s because I don’t want to be speaking with a stranger now.

Thank you for your attention.

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Anyone care to review the following snippet, about open source GIS projects, for accuracy, completeness, fairness, etc.? It’s part of a much larger piece on the GIS industry. I’m on short deadline here…

<Draft>

One of the leaders at this point is the University of Minnesota’s MapServer. It was initially developed as part of the ForNet forestry management project, funded by the state of Minnesota and NASA. While the MapServer lets an application display a browsable map, the site notes it, “is not a full-featured GIS system, nor does it aspire to be.” The US Geological Survey announced last month that it will use the MapServer technology to help build The National Map, an open source map server with access to 20 terabytes of data from TopoZone.com (a site created by Maps a la carte, Inc.). TopoZone’s map data comes, in turn, from the USGS as well as other sources.

There are other open source GIS web servers and applications. For example, GeoServer [led by whom?] implements the OpenGIS Consortium’s Web Feature Server with the noble aim of making the citizenry better informed about matters geographic. PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the open source Postgres SQL database. GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System), an international effort hosted in Italy, Germany and at Baylor University in the US, is strong in producing map graphics.

Of course, the open source projects generally don’t provide all the functionality that the commercial services do. For example, if you give MapPoint or ESRI’s map server a list of points you want to visit, you will get back an optimized routing map. MapServer and its like don’t offer that functionality. But, because the open source map servers are non-proprietary, the community can add the features it needs as it needs them. For example, the Rosa Java Applet is one among several tools developed by the DM Solutions Group that add functionality to the MapServer, enabling users to interact with an image of a map by clicking, pressing buttons and dragging and dropping. Open source lags commercial development in this space, but it is good enough for many applications…not to mention it has the advantage of being open source.

</Draft>

Thanks!

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MoveOn.org has posted the selected nominees in its create-an-ad contest. If I weren’t on deadline, I’d be watching them right now…

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Hanan Cohen explains why Israelis refer to New Years Eve as “Sylvester“:

It’s just because Israel is a Jewish state. The [Jewish] new year holiday is celebrated on the eve of Tishrei 1st. People who immigrated to Israel from western countries still wanted to celebrate the “old” new year, like at home, but could not say that they were celebrating the new year so they used instead the Catholic name of the day, Sylvester. That’s why the Jews in Israel celebrate the event using a name of a Catholic saint.

Hanan also points to an article about the 25% increase in poverty in Michigan.

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