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Thursday, October 30, 2003 |
isen: The Future of Money -- Summit and Valleys. Anywhere Dan Gillmor goes is bound to be interesting. When he blogged that he would be at "The Future of Money Summit" today, I looked it up. Hmmm . . . Cory Doctorow, John Gage and Porter Stansberry will be there too, and Tim O'Reilly is on the advisory board.
Here's a piece of interesting trivia from the conference website: The Top 10 Inventions in Money Technology: 1.) The Electronic Cash Register - 1906
2.) Electronic Money - 1918
3.) The First Armored Car - 1920
4.) Credit Bureaus - 1937
5.) The Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) - 1939
6.) The Credit Card - 1950
7.) Barcodes - 1952
8.) The Smart Card - 1974
9.) The Spreadsheet - 1978
10.) RSA Encryption - 1983 Runner-up technologies include micropayment technologies, prepaid credit cards, mobile payment systems, and biometrics.
The agenda is interesting, but with glaring holes where the problems of the world are. For example, take the first session, "Digital Pearl Harbor: A Modern Disaster Scenario." I infer that this deals with what happens when the money system comes under attack.
Well, the money system already is under attack for anybody in the class formerly known as "Middle" who has children, according to The Two Income Trap, a jaw-dropping empirical study of 2200 U.S. families that went bankrupt. Here's an excerpt from the book:The families in the worst financial trouble are not the usual suspects. They are not the very young, tempted by the freedom of their first credit cards. They are not the elderly, trapped by failing bodies and declining savings accounts. And they are not a random assortment of Americans who lack the self-control to keep their spending in check. Rather, the people who consistently rank in the worst financial trouble are united by one surprising characteristic. They are parents with children at home . . . Our study showed that married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts. A divorced woman raising a youngster is nearly three times more likely to file for bankruptcy than her single friend who never had children. These are the bedrock citizens who play by the rules in the wealthy United States. Then there's the undeveloped world, but the Future of Money Summit ain't goin' there either. [isen.blog]
4:49:51 PM 
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Spurred by a note from the politech list, I'll pause to point out here that
it is false that
hotel room keycards are routinely encoded with personal information which
can be easily harvested by thieves.
See the fine write up on
hotel key cards at snopes.com.
12:39:02 PM
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Phoenix Rising: Online Learning's 600-Pound Gorilla
Tangos With Textbook Publishers. By Ann Kirschner, in Publishing Trends.
Without some of the hyperventilating ("central nervous system for students
and faculty" is, I'm betting, not the reporter's objective take and turn of
phrase -- I smell marketing oils), here's the deal: UofPheonix is
vertically integrated as producer and distributor of education content, and
now they want to cut traditional textbook publishers out of the deal. They
don't want whole textbooks, just pieces, that they can supplement with
content they own. The (digital) mass is then distributed to boatloads. (The
scale factor is considerable when comparing the leverage of Pheonix with
any more traditional university.) So, says the guy from Pearson, academic
freedom and intellectual integrity are traded in for profit.
Good to know about this.
9:37:35 AM
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I'm too busy this week to keep up with all the juicy weblog gossip and topics du jour, so I'll just point you to Blogger threatened by lawyer. I'm too busy this week to keep up with all the juicy weblog gossip and topics du jour, so I'll just point you to Rogers Cadenhead's coverage at his Workbench blog of this emerging story:
Atrios, the pseudonymous publisher of the liberal political weblog Eschaton, has been contacted by the attorney of National Review contributor and weblogger Donald Luskin, who warns that "further legal action" will be taken if weblog entries and user comments about Luskin are not removed:
You recently linked to Mr. Luskin's October 7, 2003, posting on his website entitled "Face To Face With Evil," in which he chronicles his attendance at a lecture and book signing presented by Paul Krugman. You chose the unfortunate caption "Diary of a Stalker" for your link. More importantly, your readers, in responding to your invitation to comment, have posted numerous libelous statements regarding Mr. Luskin. Picking up on the theme you introduced, several have made false assertions that Mr. Luskin has committed the crime of stalking. Such a statement constitutes libel per se, an actionable tort subjecting both the author and the publisher to liability for both actual and punitive damages. Atrios has written entries critical of Luskin on Oct. 7 and Oct. 10, which of course makes him responsible for anything anyone else wrote about the incredibly thin-skinned Luskin on his Web site.
He's been called a stalker by Paul Krugman and Glenn Reynolds also, so read them now before Luskin spends thousands of dollars to scrub the Web clean of figurative insults. [Workbench]
[Radio Free Blogistan]
6:51:53 AM
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Twilight of the dorks?. Geeks and nerds produced the art and science that define the modern age. But now that everybody's climbing on the dork bandwagon, where's the rage and resentment that fueled their creativity going to come from? By Ian R. Williams, at Salon.com.
6:45:03 AM
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E-Vote Software Leaked Online. For the second time this year, software used in an electronic voting system has turned up on the Internet. This time, the company is Sequoia Voting Systems. By Kim Zetter. [Wired News]
6:37:07 AM
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