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Wednesday, July 16, 2003 |
World's poor to get own search engine: People in poor
countries could soon have a new and cheap way to get hold of
the wealth of information on the internet. By Alfred Hermida,
BBC News Online.
Someone using the software would e-mail a query to a central
server in Boston. The program would search the net, choose the most
suitable webpages, compress them and e-mail the results a day later.
More and more we are creating an information divide in the world and
this can help narrow that divide and have a huge benefit in that sense,
said Professor Saman Amarasinghe of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science
in Boston.
The thinking behind the TEK search engine is that people in poor countries
are short of money but have time on their hands, whereas people in the West
are cash-rich but time-poor.
The idea is that developing countries are willing to pay in time for
knowledge, explained Prof Amarasinghe.
In the West when we surf we want the information in the next two
seconds. We are not willing to wait.
1:29:08 PM 
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Loosening binds, strengthening ties: As restrictions ease, Iranian women are telling their own stories. By Janet Saidi, L.A. Times. Discusses Funny in Farsi: Growing Up Iranian in America
Firoozeh Dumas' account of moving from the small town of Abadan, Iran, to Whittier as a 7-year-old. Hilarious stories involving her engineer father's disastrous appearance on "Bowling for Dollars" and her mother's embarrassing mispronunciations introduce everyday Americans to everyday Iranians — Iranians who enjoy watching "The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour" amid the oil crisis. Also, two recent books mentioned here at A blog doesn't need a clever name previously, Marjane Satrapi's graphic-novel and memoir Persepolis and Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi.
  
more later . . .
12:29:25 PM
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Deconstructing the Defacer Challenge Hoax/FUD, by
Richard Forno, Brian Martin.
On June 21, 2003, a small web site was created to harnass the competitive
nature of the defacing community by holding a contest of computer
vandalism. Several computer security companies took this event as an
opportunity to whore themselves out to any media outlet that might listen;
once again blowing an event of questionable origins and dubious
consequences way out of proportion. Their claims ranged from the event
being capable of disrupting internet traffic to it causing tens of
thousands of defacements and posing a serious threat to internet security.
Yet, rather than teach the public, industry, and policymakers anything
about security, it taught us another lesson in the power of FUD (Fear,
Uncertainty, and Doubt) and the scare tactics that security companies will
use to make a quick buck.
11:28:51 AM
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Feedster now can index your entire weblog if you have an RSS archive of it. I have one for much of 2002, and all of 2003. [Scripting News]
6:56:07 AM
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Scott:
Found on Lambda the Ultimate: Some fascinating notes on a Neal Stephenson lecture about his approach to writing, with parallels to programming:
A good writer (and a good programmer) does not work by distilling good ideas from a large pool of bad and good ones, but by producing few if any bad ideas in the first place. It is important to give ideas time to mature [in the subconsciousness] so only good ideas percolate to the conscious level.
6:47:07 AM
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Morgan is missing out on the AALL conference in Seattle. Skip on over there to read that and a bunch of other new posts catching up on things. I especially wanted to quote the P.S. One of my pet peeves is that all library professional associations are named after the buildings we work in. Would it be too shocking to have an American Association of Law Librarians?
Music: Liz Phair, Liz Phair, Take a Look [explodedlibrary.info]
6:44:33 AM
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