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Wednesday, October 19, 2005 |
CommonCensus and the Megalopolis.
 The CommonCensus Map Project asks a simple question: which city in your general region do you most identify with, culturally? From that question -- answered by over 16,000 people, and counting -- CommonCensus is building a cultural footprint map of the United States. The results are both fascinating and not terribly surprising: culture has much more to do with major cities than with political boundaries. Cities like Boise, Idaho, Denver, Colorado, and Minneapolis, Minnesota dominate cultural lives well outside of their home states; regions with multiple big cities in close proximity, such as along the northern east coast of the US, find that their footprints are much smaller, even if the populations are far larger.
I have two major observations about the resulting map. The first is that, for the most part, the "cultural influence" regions more-or-less map to television coverage. . . . . The second is that there's an interesting parallel here to the "megapolitan" areas demographers and sociologists have identified in the US.
. . .
As interesting as this map is, I think one of Europe could be more surprising. There, the political boundaries are traditionally seen as roughly aligning with cultural boundaries. But is that really so? Do border communities identify more with the major cities of neighboring countries than with their own? How fractured are the European nations, internally? Do cultural footprints map to language, or is economics a greater pull?
I wonder what politics would be like if representation was based on the CommonCensus regions, rather than on state boundaries.
(FutureWire also links to the CommonCensus project, and has its own useful observations.)
[WorldChanging: Another World Is Here]
10:34:07 PM 
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A Puzzle About Defining Theoretical Terms [Thoughts Arguments and Rants]
In cases where there are no realisations, we might think it is natural to say the terms of the theory don't denote. That's, after all, exactly what we want to say about the phlogiston theory. But there are large variations in this class. Some theories are not even close to being true. Other thoeries just about make it. The latter type do establish denotations for their theoretical terms.
10:30:53 PM
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U.S. Regulators Require Two-Factor Authentication for Banks.
Two-factor authentication is coming to U.S. banks:
Federal regulators will require banks to strengthen security for Internet customers through authentication that goes beyond mere user names and passwords, which have become too easy for criminals to exploit.
Bank Web sites are expected to adopt some form of "two-factor" authentication by the end of 2006, regulators with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council said in a letter to banks last week.
Here's more details.
This won't help. It'll change the tactics of the criminals, but won't make them go away. I've written about that already (the short version is that two-factor authentication won't mitigate identity theft, because it's not an authentication problem -- it's a problem with fraudulent transactions), and also about what will solve the problem. [Schneier on Security]
7:05:41 PM
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DVD Jon Lands Dream Job Stateside. Michael Robertson, the bold but oft-sued genius behind MP3.com and Linspire, brings the iconic and frequently prosecuted Norwegian media hacker to California for his latest venture. This should be interesting. By Annalee Newitz. [Wired News]
8:51:06 AM
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declining grades.
 Norwegian universities converted to a new grading system a few years ago, using letters instead of numbers, and at the same time the standard undergraduate degree was chopped from a four year cand. mag. to a three year Bachelor degree. Now they find that grades assigned to MAs are worse than they used to be for the old hovedfag, as the graph of grades given throughout Norway last year shows.
My impression is that more students expect to do an MA than expected to do a hovedfag. It’s a shorter degree in total, though our expectations that the students write a research thesis is almost the same - they’re only spending a year on the thesis now, against a year and a quarter previously. Well, in practice most spend far more than a year, they have great difficulties in completing it, partly, I suspect, because quite a lot of MA students really don’t want to spend a year writing a thesis. There are probably other forms of education or training they’d be a lot happier with. I mean, look at those statistics: 20% of MA students get an E or actually fail? And that’s not even counting the huge percentage of MA students who never finish.
There are a lot of students at university who don’t really seem to want to be at university, who don’t put a lot of work into their studies and/or who I’d imagine would be far happier doing something else. [jill/txt]
8:41:59 AM
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Constructive feedback.
Not sure how it happened, but I find myself subscribing to the email feed of Tom Hespos' OnlineSPIN ("Controversy Served Fresh Daily") from MediaPost Publications. And appreciating it.
Tom is a funny guy, and he gets How It Works. For example,
Over a Chinese food lunch, I solved all of the Digital Rights Management woes of all online research companies who release information online (eMarketer, Jupiter, Forrester, etc.). Here's the gist of it:
1) Completely fabricate 50% of your releases. ("Mobile Devices Reach 15.7% of U.S. Adult Population," "Google Unknown Brand to 74% of Internet-Connected Men," etc.)
2) Release all reports to the Internet-At-Large
3) Announce that a certain percentage of reports on your site have been pulled out of your ass.
4) Simultaneously announce that a subscription entitles you to know which reports are real and which are fake.
You'll note that this takes care of the problem of what levels of detail need to be released to potential customers in order to give them enough of a "flavor" to actually PURCHASE the research. You can give them the whole thing! Except that they don't know whether it's fake or not...
This strategy also has the added benefit of creating situations in which freeloading agencies and marketers will base entire presentations and marketing plans on erroneous intelligence, which will result in funny stories for industry insiders to mull over at the bar after work.
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
Doc concludes with some musings and advice of his own.
8:41:41 AM
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James Cascio: Disaster Response in a Box, Revisited.
 Jeremy gave a quick pointer to SkyBuilt Power's Mobile Power Station (MPS), and it really does look like a WorldChanger's dream: combining modular solar panels, wind microturbines, batteries, and plug-ins for fuel cells and biofuel-friendly diesel engines, the MPS can generate a constant 150 kilowatts, can operate both off-grid and in parallel with grid power, is rugged enough to be dropped via parachute, and requires so little maintenance that a solar/wind unit has been operating continuously without being touched for over a year.
The MPS and the inevitable competitors will see abundant use in the post-Katrina era. But thinking of the MPS solely in terms of stand-alone power misses its greater potential. The MPS is the final component needed to create the distributed disaster response kit. If we put the pieces together, we could have a system that provides both short-term and long-term support for a disaster-struck community's power, water and communication.
We've covered a number of the other components before, and they're worth linking to again:
The Net.Relief.Kit is a communications hub built specifically for relief work, combining voice and Internet satellite links with a WiFi hub. It's not meant for long-term use, but as a ready-to-go communication system for immediate-response workers.
Inveneo provides similar services, but over a wider range and longer period of time. Inveneo is built to link into a local GSM network and provide Internet and voice communications across an otherwise unserved region -- all using Free/Open Source tools.
A single MPS would provide more than enough power to run the reverse-osmosis water purification kit now in operation in the Maldives. 100 watts is enough to purify 500 liters of brackish or disease-laden water every day.
If the water is really polluted -- or in such limited supply that otherwise unusable sources, such as urine, must be considered -- NASA's Water Recovery System is available for relief work, and can purify 35 gallons of water from any source in a day, with a power requirement of just under a kilowatt.
Alex's Beyond Relief essay covered in some detail just how and why we need to rethink the way we engage in disaster and emergency relief efforts.
I'm less enthusiastic about the fact that the CIA has invested in SkyBuilt Power, however.
That the US government would be interested in such a system is hardly surprising -- the field applications for military units are fairly obvious. And an investment by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, doesn't necessarily mean anything more than the government wanting to make sure that the company continues to operate. But the reputation and history of the CIA is such that many of the groups and places most apt to need a system like this are likely to resist the offer simply due to the CIA's involvement. How do you think the residents of the areas hit by the massive earthquake in Pakistan earlier this month would respond to discovering that the odd-looking box plugged into the hospital and water pumps was "built by" the CIA, for example?
Even though the CIA/In-Q-Tel investment is likely to be essentially innocuous, amounting to little more than a regular client for specialized versions, it will probably be enough to trigger suspicion in many around the world. If so, it's unfortunate; the MPS is in many respects something right out of a WorldChanging post, and there are many places around the world where such a system would be transformative.
SkyBuilt, in their material about the MPS, draws an analogy with the PC as a platform. The open architecture makes is possible for other vendors to build add-on components, confident that they'll work together properly. If we're lucky, the MPS will have another parallel to the PC world in the near future: the open architecture will mean that clones and work-alikes and more feature-rich competitors (or at least competitors without the CIA baggage) will spring up all over.
[WorldChanging: Another World Is Here]
8:35:19 AM
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