Monday, December 20, 2004

Ten things not to buy for Christmas. On Yahoo! News: Oddly Enough Reuters UK [NewsIsFree: Popular Items] 9:29:23 PM    comment []

Do-it-yourself anti-municipal broadband kit. To make it easier for state legislatures to pass anti-municipal broadband laws, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has a piece of anti-municipal broadband model legislation entitled the "Municipal Telecommunications Private Industry Safeguards Act". You can view the document here (Word format). (Continued at Muniwireless) [unmediated] 9:29:22 PM    comment []

Beijing reports top 10 intellectual property cases (China Daily) 1:44:29 PM    comment []

Bill pointed me at Iraqi Bloggers, In the News And Critiquing It, by Howard Kurtz, Washington Post. 1:44:24 PM    comment []

Okay, this is freakin' incredible. Check out the pictures and description of the Harbin Snow and Ice Festival in China. That's the sort of thing that makes me rethink ice. 9:43:46 AM    comment []

Who'd Buy the Public Domain for a Dollar?. Apparently a lot of bargain shoppers, according to USA Today (Hot off the shelf: DVDs for a dollar): According to Videoscan, the national point-of-sale tracking service, last week, 19 of the 50 top-selling DVDs were dollar DVDs from Genius Products, a leading supplier of budget videos. Compilation discs of Popeye cartoons and The Lucy Show episodes came in at No. 17 and No. 18, right below the Star Wars Trilogy and Dawn of the Dead [I suppose they mean the recent remake, not the original, which is also in the public domain]. And trip on this: "We get letters all the time from people, thanking us for making this great stuff available at such a low price," says Howard Balaban of Genius Products. "It's mind-boggling." Gosh, I wonder if there would be a market to have these works delivered straight to your TiVo via a BitTorrent hybrid? (Continued at The Importance of...) [unmediated] 7:28:21 AM    comment []

More on merit, cronyism and discrimination against those with families in the philosophy profession. A senior philosopher out West writes:The thread on TAR on "Philosophical Perspectives" and related issuesraises many very important and complex questions.  The roles ofinstitutional affiliation and "connections" are very significant invarious areas of our profession, although they sometimes work insubtle... [Leiter Reports] 7:27:56 AM    comment []

Virtual Trade Tough Nut to Crack. Blizzard makes noises about cracking down on real-money sales of items from the virtual World of Warcraft, but such transactions may impossible to stop. By Daniel Terdiman. [Wired News] 7:24:24 AM    comment []

Total Google Awareness, continued. Google-Watch appeals to the American Library Association http://www.google-watch.org/appeal.html I'm aware that the ALA is already involved with discovery and lobbying on this issue with the Justice Department over practices that grew out of the USA Patriot Act. But keep in mind that the scale of anything Google does is a million times larger than the scale of anything that involves discrete libraries, access to paper hard copy, and occasional subpoenas for specific information. Perhaps the scale of what Google does is even ten million times larger. ["me too", worth thinking about.] [Infothought] 7:24:00 AM    comment []

Ants Use Geometry to Navigate. On Discovery Channel Daily News [NewsIsFree: Popular Items] 7:23:46 AM    comment []

Rice University Computer Scientists Find a Flaw in Google's New Desktop Search Program. The glitch, which could permit an attacker to secretly search the contents of a personal computer via the Internet, is the kind of flaw that emerges when separate components interact. By By JOHN MARKOFF. [NYT > Technology] 7:17:20 AM    comment []

Teaching Evaluations. I shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds me, but here goes. It’s teaching evaluation season again. Students fill out forms at the end of class rating their teachers on a range of qualities, and we carefully tot up the numbers (or rather, some computer does). I think this is nice for the students, and, so that I get something useful out of it, I ask them specifically to comment on issues concerning teaching style and topics in the course (I had one topic in my contemporary moral issues course this term that I definitely thought didn’t work, and was interested to see if they agreed). My department prides itself on maintaining reasonable teaching standards, and we take the evaluations pretty seriously when it comes to merit raises. I should preface these negative comments by saying there is no sour grapes here: my evaluations tend to be good, in fact better than I think I deserve and better than any other mechanism of evaluation would produce for me. Here are some observations. [Crooked Timber] Good comments thread running, too .... 7:17:19 AM    comment []

A Toy With a Story. Jeri Ellsworth, a 30-year-old high school dropout and self-taught computer chip designer, has created a device that can run 30 video games, without changing game cartridges. By JOHN MARKOFF. [NYT > Technology] 7:16:43 AM    comment []

That Girl in the Locker Room! writes about Female Bloggers and Unruly Women Writing: That spirited feminine foursome at XX blog has a conversation going with readers about the dearth of female academic/political bloggers (quick, who comes after Wonkette?). I can think of a few. How about Eszter? 7:16:35 AM    comment []