These photos of bubbles bursting may be old (or not), but I just stumbled across them, and they’re pretty amazing.

[Tags: bubbles ]

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Blair Levin heads the national broadband initiative.

He says he can’t tell us what will be in the initiative because he doesn’t know. He’s been working on the process, which will be “open and public.” The process will be transparent, inclusive, participatory, and citizens are “Priority Number One.”

The process will be data-driven, rather than starting from the conclusions.

He asks whether 40% is larger than 108%. He says a telco says 40% is larger, pointing to a chart that shows that investment went up 40% after deregulation, but missing the data on the very same chart that shows it went up 108% after regulation. This, Blair says, violates a fundamental law of lobbying: Don’t show data that contradicts your point on the very same chart. He says we need to look at the whole broadband ecology, not at how a single sector does. He says that his team is going to take the task very seriously. And, he says, he’s sure they’ll say some dumb things and make some mistakes. He asks for leeway (as per Jeff Jarvis) to make some mistakes.

The result will be a plan, not a report. Recommendations. The policy decisions will be made by the FCC, not by Blair’s group.

He asks for our help. 1. Study the law requesting the broadband plan. 2. Attend the July 2nd FCC meeting. 3. Go to Broadband.gov. (It’s not up yet.) 4. Participate in the foming events and workshops. 5. Give them your best ideas.

[Great to hear this sort of clear commitment and clear talk. Now there’s a panel, which I’m not going to try to liveblog…]

[Tags: pdf09 broadband fcc ]

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Dave Winer says he’s going to be our discussion facilitator.

He begins with the story of BloggerCon, the first US blogging conference, in 2004. They invited the political bloggers, but the conference cost $595 [or 494 — sorry, missed it], so Dave added a second day that would be free. He asked himself what blog would do about it. So, he tried to get good discussion leaders who would act like a reporter who’s developing a story from the sources in the room. He tells us he’s going to run this session at Reboot that way.

Audience: Sometimes it’s good to listen to an expert. And if you don’t have a strong facilitator, things can get hijacked.

Dave: Yes, it depends on the quality of the facilitator. Some got it, some didn’t. Jeff Jarvis, who was a former reporter, completely got it. I get goosebumps thinking about it.

Audience: The media are part of the mess.

Dave: A big part of it. [I can see this is going to be difficult to live blog!]

Aud: But people can put lies up on the Net. Everyone has their own spin.Now we don’t know who to trust. How do we know what to trust?

Dave: It’s hard to find anybody you can trust. You have to develop your own sense of triangulation, i.e., what happened at the intersection of various opinions.

Euan Semple: Each of us has different leverage, and we have to be aware of that.

Dave: Yes. For example, I have more leverage in this room because my mic is always on. In fact, I want to use that leverage to ask a different question. I think Twitter is a dress rehearsal for the news system of the future. Yes? And what would you like from Twitter?

Matthias: I follow you, and you ignore the 140 character limit. I’m not complaining. But 140 chars aren’t enough for much of journalism.

Dave: I’d like Dave to have a time-expired unfollow: Unfollow but automatically refollow after 24 hrs.

Aud: With Jaiku, we could follow a discussion because they had threaded conversations. And wrt news: At the 140 conf in NYC, it was fascinating watching Al Jezeera using Twitter to get stories out of the West Bank. They were twittering from riots and attacks, and collecting them on a page on their site. On the other hand, it can be a source of misinformation.

Bruce Sterling: I’d like to read some tweets. (He reads spambot tweets using the hashtag #reboot11.) It seems to be a natural progression. If twitter is the future of media, it’s got enough spam to beat humans into a bloody pulp.

Aud: As The Victorian Internet made clear, media are always spammed.

Dave: And how do you keep the garbage out of Wikipedia?

Aud: I read the article that said that tech has always been instrumental to journalism. E.g., the journalist pyramid was due to the telegraph: You had to put the most important stuff first in case you lost the connection.

Dave: What do you do when you’re following someone who says something you don’t like?

Aud: During the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict I didn’t unfollow people with extreme opinions I disagree with.

Dave: I like extreme opinions that are respectfully stated because they often get me to think. I have strong opinions on that conflict, but when I stated them, some people unfollowed me and cut me off. That’s up to them, but I don’t cut them off.

Dave: By the way, if you’re moderating a session like this, the moderator needs to be strong.

Aud: Twitter needs a better reputation system.

Dave: Right now the reputation system is merely the number of followers.

Aud: Whenever you have a community, 90% are lurkers, 9% occasionally contribute, and 1% do all the work. We need a renaissance in critical thinking.

Me: I’d like to see Twitter remove the public display of the number of followers.

Dave: That would create what we call a “shit storm.” As the session ends, I’d like us all to think about what we’d like to see from Twitter, what we can add, etc.

[Because of the discursive nature of this session, I’ve done a particularly poor job liveblogging it.]

[Tags: dave_winer twitter ]

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An unexpected jump in U.S. durable goods orders last month backed hopes that the economy was healing, but news from the hard-hit housing market remained mixed.

In case you were wondering how long Americans could put off buying that new fridge, we now have the answer: About ten months. (And apparently the time spent resisting the urge to buy that new iPhone: 0.)

[Tags: economy ]

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At the Reagan Airport (would I be jumping the gun to start calling it the Obama Airport already?), Clear has a little square of space right before the security inspection stations. For $200/year, you can skip the long lines and go for the exceedingly short line to Clear. There the uniformed employees will compare some of your body parts (iris and fingerprints) with the information on the Clear card you present. Once you’re through, you can go straight to the Conveyor of Transparencies where you rejoin the hoi polloi so that the TSA can make sure your shoes aren’t on fire.

What I don’t get is why Clear has to give you an extra special biometric scan. Why can’t they just do what the TSA folks do: Look at your drivers license, look at you, and wave you on through? All I can figure is that Clear’s market research showed that people would be more willing to pay to cut in line — which is what Clear is really about — if there’s a pretense that it enhances security.

As far as whether all the fancy-shmancy biometrics — heck, my face is the only biometric I need! — actually increases security, if I were an evil do-er, I’d just bribe a Clear airport employee. They don’t go through security clearances the way TSA folks do, at least according to the Clear employee I asked.

[Tags: airports security tsa terrorism line_cutters ]

June 22, 2009: Clear just went out of business.

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Jonathan Zittrain’s high school commencement address is hilarious and sagacious. It’s a classic.

[Tags: jonathan_zittrain commencement_addresses ]

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If you’re here because you read Scott Kirsner’s excerpting of my post about E-Ink, click here to jump to the post. (Here’s a more permanent link.)

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My $100 Million Dollar Secret, my novel for young adults, is now available for free on your Kindle. In fact, it’s available in multiple e-book formats, thanks to ManyBooks. It’s available there because it went through ManyBooks’ rigorous vetting process, which consisted of me filling in a form that basically required me to say “Wanna list my book?” I submitted it in html format, and ManyBooks converted it to a dozen other formats. Thank you, ManyBooks! And, yes, at ManyBooks you’ll find many books worth reading.

You can also read it for free online, or download it in .Doc or .PDF formats free at its own site. You can also get a paper copy (and pay me a couple of bucks) at Lulu, where it has sold well into the low dozens of copies.

The book is about a kid who wins $100,000,000 in the state lottery, through a contrivance because his parents are philosophically against the idea of lotteries. Because he’s a good kid and gets along well with his parents, he decides he will not lie about having won it. But he doesn’t want to acknowledge that he (more or less inadvertently) bought a ticket. So, he has to hide the fact that he now is rich. The book is about him figuring out how to spend the money, and more importantly, what good money can do.

[Tags: ya_fiction novels fiction lotteries ebooks e-books kindle ]

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A press release from the Department of Unwanted Efficiencies:

Huntsville, AL – June 1, 2009 – Cabinet NG (CNG), provider of document management and workflow software, today announced that Limestone County, Alabama is using CNG’s document management software to enable a unique Video Hearing application. By processing new jail inmates through CNG’s Secure Access Filing Environment (CNG-SAFE), all the necessary legal forms and other court paperwork is instantly available during the video hearing process. Limestone County can now get the most out of local government resources in a time of fiscal restraint and challenging economic conditions by streamlining the preliminary hearing process while protecting a defendant’s constitutional right to participate in the legal process.

David Seibert, Limestone County’s Commission Chairman, said, “We are committed to putting into place technology that allows us to better serve Limestone County citizens. Enabling electronic preliminary hearings by integrating document management with videophones eliminates the manpower, transportation and time needed for trips between the Limestone County Jail and the courthouse.”

Added Mike Blakely, Limestone County Sheriff, “There are public safety benefits to conducting preliminary hearings without transporting inmates, and we can process more inmates through the system this way, saving the county time and money.”

…[T]his Video Hearing solution is a unique integration of electronic document management and Videophone technologies that can be applied in a number of environments. For example, any face to face process requiring the processing of documents can be liberated from the physical constraints of appearing in person.

If you want face time, don’t do the crime.

[Tags: document_management jails justice video_hearings ]

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PC Magazine has a useful guide to taking your digital camera off automatic.

David Sifry’s 2007 guide to buying a digital camera still gives good guidelines, although the particular models he recommends are of their day.

ABetterBounceCard.com tells you how to use a piece of paper to vastly improve the results of flash photos. (via Tim Bray) And here’s a way to make a diffuser for your built-in popup flash. (I haven’t tried it.) Here’s one for $20, which I also have not tried.

[Tags: photography digital_photography cameras flash_diffuser ]

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