Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Yoga with thugs. Can prison inmates and hippies in sweat pants find serenity together? [Salon.com] 5:28:16 PM    comment []

How to change a daily train-trip into a romantic adventure?. More than 1 million people are using the train for daily transport in the Netherlands. A new Dutch dating site treinreizigers.nl created a simple but pretty smart dating formula to give the travellers a "second change" to get into contact with maybe the love of their life. Daily commuters as well occasional travellers can leave a free message on the dating site which can help to get in contact with tha special person that was spotted during a train ride. If a match is found, the person can contact the initiatorr of the message directly by e-mail. To see if someone is looking for you, treinreizigers.nl offer a simple but effective search engine tool. Just type in the day, time and place you spotted or talked to each other and the matching results will be pop-up on the page. Reading all the messages is also a lot of fun. Some messages are realy funny, sweet and strange. [Smart Mobs] 5:23:56 PM    comment []

Sony Ericsson hacker appeals imprisonment. The Hungarian man sentenced to three years in prison for industrial espionage after hacking Ericsson and Sony Ericsson intranets on Tuesday appealed that sentence. [InfoWorld: Top News] 5:23:43 PM    comment []

US at least seizes Zarqawi's laptop. Wanted terrorist is believed to have fled a February raid on foot, but agents got key computer files. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories] 5:21:30 PM    comment []

Faith-Based Initiative. Journalist Chris Hedges attended the annual convention of National Religious Broadcasters and writes about the political theology of Dominionism that unites different groups on the Religious Right in the new issue of Harpers Magazine. [WNYC New York Public Radio] 6:01:34 AM    comment []

As many of you will now know, today I was paid a... As many of you will now know, today I was paid a little visit by a hacker. I've removed some of the more personal information from the previous posting to protect the innocent but I've left the rest of the posting intact so that you can let "Daster" know what you think of his actions. Without wanting to sound over-dramatic, I think it's fair to say that over the past two years I've been through a lot. Few things, however, have been as upsetting as having my personal space invaded in this way. Thank you to everyone who's got in touch to offer their good wishes. I feel angry, violated, and very, very sad. The Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit are on the case, but in the meantime I'm going to have to think long and hard about whether I want to continue with this blog. I set up the blog to highlight the issues I'm interested in, to encourage debate and dialogue. But if it's going to be abused by thugs then frankly I'm not sure it's worth the hassle. Mr Daster has made his point. There are far easier ways to get a message across -- a polite e-mail usually does the trick -- but if it means he'll move on to terrorise someone else I'm prepared in this instance to highlight his concerns. Call it blackmail, but in the circumstances I feel I have little option. So, in what could be my last posting, I'm drawing attention to the plight of three Romanian journalists - Sorin Miscoci, Marie Jeanne Ion, Ovidiu Ohanesian and translator Mohammed Monaf, who have been kidnapped in Iraq. Their captors are threatening to kill them if Romania does not withdraw its 800 soldiers from Iraq by Tuesday. The Romanian president Traian Basescu has said officials are working to win the journalists' release but neither he or the prime minister has commented on their captors' demands. Read reports on their plight here, here and here. - Stuart [BEYOND NORTHERN IRAQ: STUHUGHESIRAQ@MAIL.COM] 5:59:44 AM    comment []

Mysterious Viruses as Bad as They Get. Some of the most basic questions about the Marburg virus epidemic, centered in Angola, have yet to be answered. By DENISE GRADY. [NYT > Science] 5:54:31 AM    comment []

head of department, day 89. Today is one of those days that’s full of meetings. Two with students anxious about their projects, one information meeting about the reorganisation of the arts and humanities faculty, and a meeting with the dean and the faculty director about The Future Of The Department. One of the most annoying things about the university “democracy” is the lack of clarity in the circulation of information and the vagueness of where decisions actually get made. Although now I’ve been doing this Head of Department thing for a couple of months I’m realising that a lot of the reason things appear to be messy and disorganised is that I don’t know the routines. It’s true that there’s no job description for a person in my position, and you’d think that that’s something a huge organisation like the university, with its 2000 or so employees and many many heads of departments would have thought of making, but no, I asked and there isn’t. On the other hand, it’s only now after two months that I can see the huge amount of work the secretary, the student counsellor and the head of our office do. We share this administrative staff with literature and linguistics, and previously I really didn’t understand what they did, apart from pay bills and book teaching rooms. Now we cooperate wonderfully, and thanks to them, largely, this head of department thing doesn’t seem as scary or time-consuming or unsurmountable as it appeared at the start. And yet, even assuming that I simply don’t yet know how to see how everything works, it does seem that the university “democracy” we supposedly have is rather illusory. We elect our president, and our deans, but only about 10% of staff and students vote. No wonder: the candidates’ programs are all more or less alike, if they even bother to say what issues they actually care about. More worrying is the, oh, see, I don’t even have the words to describe it, because it’s fuzzy, not obvious, but it just seems that a lot happens in the corridors, between people who know each other, rather than in the formal meetings. That’s social networking for you. It’s a great way of keeping power in the group, in an unobtrusive way. But ya know, I reckon I can learn to play the network. Hopefully in a few more months I’ll be able to see that this isn’t really the case. It’s just that I didn’t actually quite understand the system yet. (After all, I’ve only been an employee here since 1999, and I began studying here in 1990, with just 2-3 years elsewhere.) [jill/txt] 5:54:08 AM    comment []

Ex-Officials Say Bolton Inflated Syrian Danger. John Bolton clashed repeatedly with intelligence officials over warnings about Syrian efforts to acquire unconventional weapons. By DOUGLAS JEHL. [NYT > International] 5:53:40 AM    comment []

Tiny, Plentiful and Really Hard to Catch. The neutrino, a seemingly magical, highly elusive particle, may hold clues to the Big Bang. By KENNETH CHANG. [NYT > Science] 5:53:36 AM    comment []

OnTheCommons.org | The Conundrum of Making Money by Sharing. "The idea is not just to let people watch old TV programs and films, but to encourage anyone to use the old footage to make entirely new works." [unmediated] 5:51:28 AM    comment []

CNN Blog spam Google conspiracy theory (Nancy Grace). There's an accusation going around that CNN is engaging in a viral guerilla marking campaign, also involving lowering the Google rank of blogs which criticize CNN. See for example the coverage at MetaFilter and Wonkette  . . .  After spending too much time looking through the evidence, it's pretty clearly one guy who has a slightly askew take on CNN's Nancy Grace. The keyword-stuffing technique that's supposed to spam-poison the comments is there because the spammer thinks it helps his spam. Not as a devious rank-lowering trojan-horse. The proof, to the expert eye, is that some spam keywords are structured the way an amateur would think would matter in search (plus sign preceding the word). But a professional search engine optimizer would never bother doing it (of course, it could be a professional cleverly faking being an amateur ...) But a journalist reporting on this wouldn't see the difference.  . . . [Infothought] 5:46:34 AM    comment []