Monday, March 14, 2005

Ideas for Privacy Reform. EPIC just published a very good paper by Daniel Solove and Chris Hoofnagle that offers suggested proposals for privacy reform in the wake of all the recent privacy breaches (ChoicePoint, Lexis/Nexis, Bank of America, DWS, etc.). [Schneier on Security] 11:25:48 PM    comment []

Useit.Com: Lower-Literacy Users. The main and most obvious advice is to simplify the text: use text aimed at a 6th grade reading level on the homepage, important category pages, and landing pages. On other pages, use text geared to an 8th grade reading level. [Tomalak's Realm] 8:44:39 PM    comment []

Can Papers End the Free Ride Online?. As the battle for advertising dollars intensifies, newspapers are looking for new ways to make money, including charging the visitors to their Web sites. By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE. [NYT > Business] 6:09:20 AM    comment []

A Family Tree in Every Gene. The idea that human races are only social constructs has been the consensus for at least 30 years. But now, perhaps, that is about to change. By ARMAND MARIE LEROI. [NYT > Opinion] Um, yeah: this means that what we think of as race will have to change. Look, it's not as though anyone (anyone I know) denies that people have ancestors, or that each person has a specific set of ancestors. Everyone also seems to think that the ancestors of some of us have some specific heights, skin coloration, nose widths and lengths, and so on. It'll be fun to see how the rhetoric changes as we learn more about genetic pools. I expect something along the lines of what we've seen in the last decade regrading early childhood education, in which someone urges the importance of a practice on the grounds that a child's brain is still developing and that doing this or that makes an actual difference in the brain (as though there should be any question about that point). We have lots of talks about genetic relationships coming, and the stretch and make something do the work of the concept of race will be no small effort. 6:07:32 AM    comment []

Orwell rolls over in his grave. Today's New York Times features an important investigation on the U.S. government's increasing production and distribution of fake news stories to TV news networks across the country. Any doubt that the current administration yearns for a bigger, better Pravda can be put to rest with some of the mind-boggling hypocrisies chronicled here. Remember last month how the Government Accounting Office (GAO) said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials"? Well, on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget told all executive brand agencies to ignore the GAO findings because they failed to distinguish between propaganda and "purely informational" news segments. "Purely informational"?!? Have you seen any of these things? The Times has posted one of the "news" stories (known in the trade as "video news releases") online, the entire point of which is to spread the "news" that "new, better" airport security is now in place, including a "top-notch workforce" made of thousands of people "leaving impressive careers and good jobs to take up the war on terrorism."  You can actually see a couple of the people the "reporter" interviews moving their eyes from left to right as they read their lines! Kelly Ryan figures prominently in the story since some of her psuedo-reporting was the first to draw controversy. Her role is worth mentioning because it reflects the mentality of everyone involved in this elaborate conspiracy. On one hand, Ryan insists that video news releases and journalism are "almost the same thing":  "I just don't feel I did anything wrong," she said. "I just did what everyone else in the industry was doing." But when asked if Ryan would have used one of her fake news stories if she were a local news director, she replied, "Absolutely not." If any readers of this blog have access to more government video news releases, please let me know and we'll see that they get online. These videos are in the public domain, yet hard to find. [Stay Free! Daily] 5:58:46 AM    comment []

Wes wonders whether, Perhaps this is a hint about what's beyond desktop search: Peter "MeMeMe" Merholz couldn't make it for his own "How to Leverage Solipsism" panel, so he sent the Veen to sub for him. Baaaad move, Peter. A theme that keeps coming up is that social networks are not useful per se (let's kick Friendster some more), but social networks to enable some other activity, like photo sharing, are great (let's pimp Flickr some more). So far I think leveraging solipsism is the same as the cornucopia of the commons: getting people to input or tag data for their own use and then aggregating it for other purposes. Perhaps this is a hint about what's beyond desktop search. Tags, tags, tags. There's a need to allow people to organize (tag) information to fit their own mental organization, even if it isn't their information. Tagsplosion. [Hack the Planet] 5:57:32 AM    comment []

Paying Tribute to Mac's Daddy. A well-attended memorial service for Jef Raskin, Apple employee No. 31, illuminates many dimensions of the man credited with giving birth to the Macintosh computer. [Wired News] 5:56:23 AM    comment []