Thursday, September 26, 2002

The 2002 MacArthur Fellows have been announced. (You know the program, right? $500,000 in quarterly installments over five years, no strings attached, to individuals who show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work.) They are: Bonnie Bassler, Ann Blair, Katherine Boo, Paul Ginsparg, David Goldstein, Karen Hesse, Janine Jagger, Daniel Jurafsky, Toba Khedoori, Liz Lerman, George Lewis, Liza Lou, Edgar Meyer, Jack Miles, Erik Mueggler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Stanley Nelson, Lee Ann Newsom, Daniela Rus, Charles Steidel, Brian Tucker, Camilo Vergara, Paul Wennberg, and Colson Whitehead. 1:56:52 PM    comment []

US warns Nigeria over online fraud schemes, by Gideon F. For-Mukwai, IDG News Service. Online schemes operating out of Nigeria that have defrauded victims out of tens of millions of dollars have become so pervasive that the U.S. government has given the West African country until November to take steps to decrease such crimes or face sanctions. Financial fraud is now reportedly one of the three largest industries in Nigeria . . . . 1:56:51 PM    comment []

Very interesting new issue of Steve Talbott's NETFUTURE -- Technology and Human Responsibility today. This number addresses The Evolution of Progress, and What Are the Right Questions? (a continuation of dialogue between Kevin Kelly and Steve Talbott) ... regarding machines and organisms Inspirational quotation from the first of those: If I read the trends at all correctly, our idea of progress has been shifting. Where, a century ago, progress just seemed to be the way society and science and evolution worked — a kind of law built into the nature of things — now progress is increasingly felt to depend on fateful choice. We find ourselves situated on a knife edge, with a hopeful future on one side and catastrophe on the other. Not that we always have a clear idea which is which! But, one way or another, we sense that we are choosing our own fate. This is the result of the continuing emergence, or coming of age, of the modern individual. We are, in fact, more responsible for the future than our predecessors were, if only because we have grown more aware of the implications of our activity. >From the second, Kevin Kelly writing: There are thousands, if not hundred of thousands, of creative humans around the world currently building, directly and indirectly, the convergence of life and machine. You claim to not want to talk about what will be, but about what is; nonetheless, in the near future there will be beings which you, or your counterpart, will not be able to distinguish between an organism or machine. These entities will be both in the lab and in our lives; some will be operating in the background out of people's awareness, and others will be in our faces. Some will start as genetic organic beings and will end up like machines, and others will begin life constructed and end up organic. Their existence isn't a matter of conjecture, or philosophy, or definitions. My question to you: What is your advice to those now working on these projects? If you had the chance to send them a short email that you know that they would have to read, what would you tell them? I suspect references to Kant and Coleridge aren't going to cut it for this. It needs to be utilitarian. What would you like them to do (or not do)? To keep in mind, or not keep in mind? Worth the read. 12:56:50 PM    comment []

Profits from piracy: Evidence is mounting that cracking down on software copyright infringement may not be good for business. Case study: Microsoft in China. By Sam Williams, in Salon. Earlier this summer, Microsoft and China, two inscrutable monoliths waging a protracted cold war over copyrights and software pricing, finally decided to settle their differences via a three-year, $750 million "memorandum of understanding," the largest deal ever between the Chinese government and a foreign software company. Details of the "understanding," announced in June, were both vague and open-ended. . . . . . . . Asked about the glaring lack of a copyright enforcement clause in the new deal, Microsoft president and CEO Steve Ballmer did a quick Nixonian shuffle. Certainly, software piracy rates in China are high, but there is nothing in the agreement specifically around that, Ballmer told a reporter from Reuters shortly after the June announcement. . . . . . . . It's ultimately a question of strategy, says Carlos A. Osorio, a Harvard researcher and author of a recent working paper examining the "Catch 22" facing proprietary software companies in developing markets. For a closed-source company competing with open-source companies, the optimum strategy is often to use its illegal user base in addition to its legal user base. Representatives of Microsoft and other leading American software vendors refused to discuss the Osorio paper with Salon. Still, the numbers coming out of China certainly make a case for strategic flexibility. 6:49:13 AM    comment []

Over at RFB: Compendium of weblog resources. The most useful thing in the aforementioned article was a link to Weblogs Compendium, another good central clearinghouse of blog information and resources, today featuring pointers to useful third-party services such as myMediaList (for adding lists of books, music, and other media to your blog or web page) and blogLinker (for managing a modular link list, much like blogrolling.com). Naturally, there is a Compediumblog as well. [Radio Free Blogistan] 6:44:05 AM    comment []