Thursday, August 05, 2004

Very Different Birds of a Feather. Jim Edmonds, Scott Rolen and Albert Pujols have formed a modern-day murderer's row in St Louis, defining the best team in the National League. By By LEE JENKINS. [The New York Times > Sports] Yeah, Baby! 10:11:50 PM    comment []

Iran adopts tougher line on Internet. Reporters Without Borders is expressing concern about the Iranian authorities efforts to gag the Internet, the trial of a theology student for a message posted on a news website and a proposed law that would throttle online dissent. "The authorities recently took a tougher line with online publications and we saw censorship being stepped up since the legislative elections in February," the organisation said. "Now they seem to be going a step further by directly targeting cyber-dissidents and by preparing a bill that would give a legal basis for cracking down." Read details in Reporters Without Borders, via Zescoop. [Smart Mobs] 10:08:30 PM    comment []

Torrentocracy: P2P, Tivo, RSS, GPL!. Torrentocracy is a "technology of cooperation" applied to TV viewing, combining RSS, bittorrent, TV, MythTV (the Linux Tivo-like project), licensed under the GPL. (Thanks, Samuel!) [Smart Mobs] 5:19:42 PM    comment []

News.Com: FCC lets TiVo users share shows. But the government ended up granting TiVo the regulatory reprieve. The FCC said at its meeting Wednesday that TiVo's security system will be "appropriate for use" when receiving digital TV signals broadcast over the airwaves. [Tomalak's Realm] 8:24:07 AM    comment []

Onion Routing Averts Prying Eyes. The Navy built a networking technology, called onion routing, to mask the online activities of intelligence employees. Now open-source programmers are using the same system to let users surf the Web anonymously. By Ann Harrison. [Wired News] 8:21:31 AM    comment []

The Crooked Timber Blog Discusses Netflix. Professor Henry Farrell on the very popular blog CrookedTimber.org wrote a couple of interesting bits about the psychology behind Netflix. His first post talks about why we sometimes keep movies, unwatched, for months: Movies that we’ve rented sometimes sit there for two or three months before we watch them, or eventually, reluctantly, decide to send them back without seeing them. To my shame, this happens most often with the interesting, difficult films with sub-titles. I suspect that this is because we’re accustomed to thinking of DVDs as stocks rather than flows. Because we have physical possession of the DVD, we’re disinclined to give it back until we’ve actually watched it. Henry's second post includes an e-mail from Hunt Stilwell that takes this discussion to a deeper level. Hunt references research into movie viewing (click here to view the research paper), which breaks most movies into either a "vice" or "virtue" film: In fact, I think our experience does a pretty good job of replicating an experiment by George Lowenstein and colleagues on intertemporal decision making. In that experiment (a link to the paper is below), participants were allowed to choose films, some of which were “vice” films (e.g., “Armageddon” or “The Mask”), with others being “virtue” films (e.g., “Schindler’s List” or one of your foriegn films with subtitles). Participants made the choices either in a sequence, meaning that the viewings would be in the immediate future, or made them all simultaneously, meaning that some of the viewings would be delayed. Participants who made the choices in a sequence tended to pick mostly vice films, while participants who made the choices simultaneously picked many more virtue films. He goes on to explain that me might just be participating in a huge experiment: I’ve always had a problem with the “virtue/vice” distinction applied to films in the Lowenstein paper, because there really isn’t much of a difference between the cost associated with the two types of films. I suppose the wasted time makes for a cost difference, but I’m not sure that’s enough. However, the pattern is the same. The fact that Netflix demonstrates this so well, and even replicates an actual experiment, lends me to believe that Netflix is really just a big social psychology experiment, and those of us who’ve subscribed are all unwitting participants. Heheh. I can't believe someone put that much effort into a research paper on the psychology behind deciding to watch a serious, artsy movie vs. a mindless action flick. :-)   Thanks to Lisa (Cadence90.com) for sharing this story. [Hacking NetFlix] I find that awfully interesting, sensible, and even explanatory. 8:21:24 AM    comment []

F.C.C. Supports Surveillance Rules on Internet Calls. Internet phone calls should be subject to the same type of law enforcement surveillance as cell and landline phones, federal regulators said. By By STEPHEN LABATON. [The New York Times > Technology] 8:15:39 AM    comment []

Chords for Change. For the last 25 years I have always stayed away from partisan politics, but this year the stakes have risen too high to sit the election out.  By BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. Our goal is to change the direction of the government and change the current administration come November. Like many others, in the aftermath of 9/11, I felt the country's unity. I don't remember anything quite like it. I supported the decision to enter Afghanistan and I hoped that the seriousness of the times would bring forth strength, humility and wisdom in our leaders. Instead, we dived headlong into an unnecessary war in Iraq, offering up the lives of our young men and women under circumstances that are now discredited. We ran record deficits, while simultaneously cutting and squeezing services like afterschool programs. We granted tax cuts to the richest 1 percent (corporate bigwigs, well-to-do guitar players), increasing the division of wealth that threatens to destroy our social contract with one another and render mute the promise of "one nation indivisible." It is through the truthful exercising of the best of human qualities - respect for others, honesty about ourselves, faith in our ideals - that we come to life in God's eyes. It is how our soul, as a nation and as individuals, is revealed. Our American government has strayed too far from American values. It is time to move forward. The country we carry in our hearts is waiting. [The New York Times > Opinion] 8:13:39 AM    comment []

Copyright in Eight Years. So today copyright scholar Joe Liu at Boston College asked a room full of law professors an interesting question. What did we think copyright would look like in 8 years? Here were some of the main categories of predictions (some contradict):... [Lessig Blog] 8:11:18 AM    comment []

New Sounds. For this New Sounds "From the Vaults," which first aired back in May of 1992, spend an hour with composer, choreographer, and vocalist Meredith Monk, for a guided tour through her mammoth work, Atlas, commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera. [WNYC New York Public Radio] 8:11:12 AM    comment []

First lady fights back!. In this exclusive new scene by Tony Kushner he is confronted by Laura Bush, who claims Dostoevsky for conservatives, defends her husband's poetry and extols his "vividness." [Salon.com] 7:56:33 AM    comment []