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January 28, 2005
I just published a new issue of my (free) newsletter:
| Trees vs. Leaves: Tagging may be shaking the leaves off of taxonomic trees, affecting not only how we organize ideas and information but how we think about organization itself. Bridge Blogging: A new effort tries to break through the national boundaries implicit in the blogosphere. Links: Some funnish stuff. Bogus Contest: Wikipedia topics. |
January 26, 2005
Gunner Palace looks like it might be good. It’s a non-political documentary about the life of our soldiers in Baghdad. (Yeah yeah, I know everything is political.) The trailer maybe has a couple too many ironic shots, and the rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack of the second trailer is too expected, but those seem like trailer artifacts. They’re sending me a “screener” – I feel so Hollywood! – so I’ll let you know…
The Annenberg School of Communication is holding a conference called “Ready to Share” (not “ready to wear” …get it?) to explore the way the fashion industry remixes styles without anyone getting their ultra-glamorous knickers in a twist.
We have something to learn from the fashion industry. If it were like the music industry, someone would have claimed a copyright on wearing your cap backwards.
It’s crappy out and getting crappier. Um, I mean, Boston is being blanketed with innocence made crystalline. So, I’m postponing tonight’s Web of Ideas session until Feb. 2.
Damn snow.
January 25, 2005
Tonight I’m going to lead another session in the semi-regular series at the Berkman Center. This time, I’m going to try out a presentation I’m giving in a couple of weeks at a conference. The topic has something to do with taxonomies and tagging. (Yes, it will repeat some material in the dinner talk I gave last week, and a bunch of stuff from the Library of Congress speech. But it will have new stuff on tagging.)
It’s 6-7:30pm at the Baker House (map). It’s open to the public and pizza will be served.
Bill Koslowsky has posted some remarkably good photos taken with his Treo at the Museum of Modern Art.
I readily acknowledge that with this screen capture I’m indulging in cheap irony and that the real question is — as Dewayne Hendricks said in forwarding the link — why the US doesn’t have an initiative like this Canadian one. Nevertheless, you don’t turn down a chance to blog cheap irony, do you, especially when that’s our only way of maintaining our sense of national superiority…?
January 23, 2005
So, Gov. Schwarzenegger has killed his first real person. To me, that makes the case that if we’re going to have actors as leaders, they at least ought to be good actors.
Why? Empathy.
January 20, 2005
January 18, 2005
“How do biological differences in the sexes affect abilities, behavior and social position?” is a totally legitimate research question. Let the evidence fall where it may. And if the president of Harvard wants to be “provocative,” heck, that’s a lot better than the fund-raising drone emitted from most college presidents’ orifices. But (according to The Globe):
”Here was this economist lecturing pompously [to] this room full of the country’s most accomplished scholars on women’s issues in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day,” said [Denice D. ] Denton, the outgoing dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Washington.
It’s true that “innate differences” were only one of three possibile explanations Summers gave for why there are fewer women than men in science and math. But from the reports it doesn’t sound like he was simply laying out three logically-possible hypotheses. For one thing, he cited his daughter’s playing with trucks as if they were dolls despite raising her in a gender-neutral environment. Of course, no environment that has people, windows or a TV in it is truly gender-neutral, so the anecdote seems to expose where Summers’ heart lies; he could equally well have used the story to show the pervasive influence of gender socialization. But we can’t tell because Pres. Summers is refusing to release a tape or transcript of his comments.
What could it hurt?
Here’s the Harvard Crimson report on the presentation.
Here’s Summer’s official statement about the incident.
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