Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Seth Schoen: "The second thing that bothered me when I used XP was that codecs and viewers were constantly being downloaded automatically. That process was shielding millions of people from the intense politics surrounding the formats in which they receive and transmit data -- from the question of their legality or illegality, whether they are proprietary or not, what terms and restrictions attach to them, to whom they are available and for what purposes, whether they work well, who created them, why, and when, whether they will continue to be available and to whom and from whom, what and whose strategies they are a part of, with what and with whom they interoperate, under what conditions -- all invisibly submerged and putting the world of codecs and formats squarely under the power of marketing." [Hack the Planet] 9:57:47 PM    comment []

Army rebuilds networks after hack attack, by Frank Tiboni, Federal Computer Week. 5:36:03 PM    comment []

Weak in the Knees?. In commenting on a New York Times science story "The claim: Sex before an athletic event can hinder performance" ("Really?," Aug. 31), a reader made the point that the study only refers to the experiences of men. “The lack of research - and mythology - involving women reminds us that as a culture we still care little about what sex means for women, athletically or otherwise.” This is true of research on any health topic. Medical studies of women--and of minority groups as well-- are few and far between. Research subjects historically have been white males; women were excluded for trumped-up reasons eg. Protecting potential fetuses (there are many ways to ensure that research subjects are not and will not be pregnant), hormone fluctuations (medications should take into account women’s universal hormonal changes) and difficulty retaining women in trials (no one gave them the chance). In 1993, after a scathing government report, the National Institutes of Health mandated the inclusion of women and minorities in clinical trials. But while we’re waiting for the results…. Has any female athlete out there EVER heard a coach advise her team not to have sex the night before? I’d love to hear stories on this one. [Girl In the Locker Room!] 7:05:13 AM    comment []

Flight ID Rules Fuel Fresh Furor. A privacy advocate who is suing the government for allegedly forcing airlines to ID passengers is pressing to have his case aired publicly. Government attorneys, meanwhile, want the court to hear their arguments in secret. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News] 7:05:01 AM    comment []

iStabilize. iStabilize is a video stabilizer for MacOS X. iStabilize removes unwanted shaky motion from movies with respect to translation, rotation, and zoom. It is a complete movie player with editing capabilities and can read and write many movie formats. [Mac OS X Downloads - Video] [unmediated] 7:01:10 AM    comment []

Wikipedia versus Britannica Ed Felten's doing some empirical comparisons of the online Britannica versus Wikipedia, and Wikipedia's doing pretty good! Virtual memory: Wikipedia has a pretty good entry; Britannica has no entry for virtual memory, and doesn't appear to discuss the concept elsewhere, either. Verdict: advantage Wikipedia. Public-key cryptography: Good, accurate entries in both. Verdict: toss-up. Microsoft antitrust case: Britannica has only two sentences, saying that Judge Jackson ruled against Microsoft and ordered a breakup, and that the Court of Appeals overturned the breakup but agreed that Microsoft had broken the law. That's correct, but it leaves out the settlement. Wikipedia's entry is much longer but error-prone. Verdict: big advantage to Britannica. Overall verdict: Wikipedia's advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren't for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica's advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries. Who is at the very bottom of the eBay feedback rating list? This web page returns the ten most reputable eBay members and the ten least reputable ones. When I checked the page, it listed mario23g (with a feedback rating of -26) as the least reputable person on all of eBay, but I checked his page and it looks like he is no longer registered. The second worst, grannyvon10 (score of -19) earned her negative whuffie from a seller who says she didn't pay for 118 dolls she purchased. The third worst eBay member on Earth, according to this page, is jammin-garage (score -17), who has earned a bunch of complaints from people who say they've paid for stuff he failed to send them. Link Flowchart for CD ripping morality Here's a thought-provoking flowchart suggesting a moral process for deciding whether you should rip any given CD. Link (via Waxy) [bOing bOing] 7:00:00 AM    comment []