Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Iran Declares Its Nuclear Plan Nonnegotiable [New York Times: International News] 8:42:54 PM    comment []

Did the CIA give Iran the bomb? Extracts from New York Times reporter James Risen's new book. James Risen on the bungles that led to a spectacular intelligence fiasco. [Guardian Unlimited] 8:42:19 PM    comment []

Chinese cyber cops. "Shenzhen police plan to equip all Shenzhen Websites and electronic bulletin board systems with two virtual policemen icons on the main pages to maintain order in cyber space",the Shanghai Daily reports.When people click on the "two virtual cops and ask questions about information safety,real policemen will answer their questions immediately.Internet users may also learn information about the Internet laws and regulations and some typical Internet criminal cases from these two virtual policemen."The two dummy policemen were made to remind Netizens the Internet is protected by the law.People should pay attention to their behaviour when they are surfing on the Net," a senior official of the Shenzhen cyber police told China Youth Daily." Cyber police to guard all Shenzhen Websites [Smart Mobs] 8:42:01 PM    comment []

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists. Frequent Make contributor Tom Owad just published a mind-blowing how-on on his website explaining how to mine Amazon's wish list database to uncover "subversives." Using a pair of 5-year-old computers, two home DSL connections, 42 hours of computer time, and 5 man hours, I now had documents describing the reading preferences of 260,000 U.S. citizens. I downloaded all the files to an external 120 GB Firewire drive in UFS format. The raw data occupied little more than 5 GB. I initially wanted to move all the files into a single directory to facilitate searching, but as the directory contents exceeded 100,000 items, the speed became glacially slow, so I kept the data divided into chunks of 25,000 wishlists. Next comes the fun part – what books are most dangerous? So many to choose from. Here's a sample of the list I made. Feel free to make up your own list if you decide to try some data mining. Send it to the FBI. I'm sure they'll appreciate your help in fighting terrorism. Link [Boing Boing] 8:41:48 PM    comment []

Fine critique of the Brockman approach at The Edge, this year on "What's your dangerous idea?" by Dave Pollard. It's called Blinded by Science: What's Your Dangerous Idea? and you can go read the critique; I'll quote the positive portion, in which he lists some truly dangerous ideas that are actionable: Our civilization is in its final century [John Gray]. No civilization lasts forever, and there is no political, economic, social, educational, religious or other 'solution' that will make the members of any civilization suddenly and radically change their behaviour. We do what we must do, and nature will do what she must to compensate for our excesses, and, since... Nature always bats last [Kenny Ausubel],  the world will go on just fine after we are gone.  The crowd is always wiser than the experts [James Surowieki]. No elite, no godlike president or junta, no priest or CEO, no crack team of managers or consultants or global thought leaders can make better decisions, or predict the future better, than all of us together in our collective wisdom. Leadership of all kinds is a dysfunctional vestige of an era in which that collective wisdom could not readily be tapped. The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred [George Bernard Shaw]. If you really think that anybody really understands what another person has said, do an experiment after the next presentation you attend and ask attendees one-on-one immediately afterwards what they got out of it. You'll be astonished. You never change things by fighting the existing reality [Bucky Fuller]. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.  Show, don't tell [Derrick Jensen]. This is a key answer to the malaise of our education system, and to the ineffectiveness of 'knowledge management'. We learn much more from observing than from listening or reading, and we learn even more by trying it ourselves, hands on. Human beings will be happier only when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again [Kurt Vonnegut]. The way we live today isn't the way human beings were meant to live, and deep inside we know it. That doesn't mean throwing away technology, it means interacting with those in your community (human and non-human) in deep, authentic, synaesthetic ways we have forgotten. People will listen when they're ready to listen and not before [Daniel Quinn]. Probably, once upon a time, you weren't ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don't preach. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new. No one is in control. This is two dangerous ideas in one, though I'm not sure if anyone has realized this explicitly. The first idea is that because no one is in control, the appearance of control that governments and corporations and their handmaidens in the media try to convey is all illusion: This world is far too complex for even the most powerful and complicitous elite to be able to steer or direct. That is the liberating idea: Don't worry about fighting the 'bad guys', because they're just caught up in the flow like all the rest of us. The second idea is that because no one is in control, everything is out of control. That is the terrifying, personal responsibility-burdening idea: No one can stop global warming, biochemical warfare, [your worst nightmare scenario here]. So now what do you do? [How to Save the World] 8:40:36 PM    comment []

A Vote for Honest Voting. Wisconsin Technology Network: Electronic voting machines must be open-sourced. Among the 15 bills governor Jim Doyle signed into law on Wednesday will require the software of touch-screen voting machines used in elections to be open-source. This is hugely important, a breakthrough in the scandalous voting-machine situation that has left millions of Americans unsure if the machines they're using are casting ballots as the voters wanted. Let's hope this spreads nationwide. [Dan Gillmor's blog] 7:16:03 PM    comment []

Jack Handey's latest New Yorker magazine piece. "You will never know what it’s like to work on a farm until your hands are raw, just so people can have fresh marijuana." -- http://www.newyorker.com/shouts/content/articles/060109sh [Philip Greenspun Weblog] 7:15:55 PM    comment []

From Benton Headlines: SUBSIDIZING THE DIGITAL TELEVISION TRANSITION [SOURCE: Center for American Progress, AUTHOR: Mark Lloyd] [Commentary] Why is George Will concerned about the transition to digital television? Will is apparently outraged at the loss of rugged individualism that he claims has led the GOP to declare TV a ^?collective right.^? Lloyd is more concerned that Congress could cut funds for food stamps and school loans but provide subsidies for television viewers regardless of income. It might surprise Will to know that James Madison, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin, among others, actually formulated a philosophy of government subsidies to encourage communications. While the Founding Fathers were generally united against a standing army or entanglement in foreign disputes, they built a vast and robust communications system, the Post, under the control of government. And they subsidized the carriage of newspapers even to the territories. But then the Founding Fathers were subsidizing a republic of engaged, communicating citizens, not a society of individual consumers. Perhaps Congress might reconsider a set of policies that does not respond only to the influential and wealthy voices of the various segments of the communications industry, but actually considers what would best develop a republic of engaged citizens. * The Inalienable Right to a Remote [Commentary] George Will's inspiring column from 12/08/05. 1:22:04 PM    comment []

Web’s never-to-be-repeated revolution, by James Boyle, in the Financial Times. We are too close to the web to understand it. And those who lost money in the dotcom boom greet any celebration of the web the way a person with a hangover greets a mention of the drink of which they overindulged. The knowledge of shameful excess produces a renunciant puritanism. No more tequila or web romanticism for me! That is a shame, because there are three things that we need to understand about the web. First, it is more amazing than we think. Second, the conjunction of technologies that made the web successful was extremely unlikely. Third, we probably would not create it, or any technology like it, today. In fact, we would be more likely to cripple it, or declare it illegal. Why is the web amazing? Because of what people have built on it. Some might remember when the most exciting sites on the web had pictures of coffee pots in universities far away. (“See,” one would proudly say to a neophyte, “the pot is empty and we can see that from here! This changes everything!”) But now? When is the last time you looked in an encyclopedia? When is the last time that your curiosity – what is the collective noun for larks? Is Gerald Ford alive? Why is the sky blue? – remained unsatisfied for more than a moment? (An “exaltation”, yes and look it up for yourself.) Much of that information is provided by volunteers who delight in sharing their knowledge. Consider the range of culture, science and literature – from the Public Library of Science and Wikipedia, to Project Gutenberg and the National Map. The web does not bring us to the point where all can have access to, and can add to, the culture and knowledge of the world. We cannot ensure global literacy let alone global connectedness. But it brings us closer. Why is the web unlikely? Prepare for a moment of geek-speak. For most of us, the web is reached by general­purpose computers that use open protocols – standards and languages that are owned by no one – to communicate with a network (there is no central point from which all data comes) whose mechanisms for transferring data are also open. Imagine a network with the opposite design. Imagine that your terminal came hardwired from the manufacturer with a particular set of programs and functions. No experimenting with new technologies developed by third parties – instant messaging, Google Earth, flash animations . . . Imagine also that the network was closed and flowed from a central source. More like pay-television than web. No one can decide on a whim to create a new site. The New York Times might secure a foothold on such a network. Your blog, or Wikipedia, or Jib Jab need not apply. Imagine that the software and protocols were proprietary. You could not design a new service to run on this system, because you do not know what the system is and, anyway, it might be illegal. Imagine something with all the excitement and creativity of a train timetable. 1:21:48 PM    comment []

Iran 'trying to build nuclear bomb'. World: Secret services document seen by Guardian details web of front companies and middlemen. [Guardian Unlimited] 6:30:36 AM    comment []

Outspoken Chinese blogger censored by Microsoft. [Boing Boing] 6:29:58 AM    comment []

Misbehavior in Second Life game punished by exile to "the corn field". In the Second Life online game/world, misbehavior is suspended by banishing miscreants' characters to "the corn field," a vast star-lit field of corn cut off from communication with the rest of the world (a reference to the classic Twilight Zone episode, "It's a Good Life"). The existence of the cornfield was only rumored until recently, but now the prison's existence has been made public and documented. "Sometimes when someone is suspended for a short time they are sent to the cornfield," Linden Lab's Senior VP of Community and Support wrote on the official Second Life discussion forums yesterday, adding that building the cornfield didn't require any significant development work and reassuring the community that "Once someone is permanently banned they are no longer welcome in Second Life, anywhere, including the cornfield." As promised, Nimrod Yaffle was teleported into the middle of prison simulator, finding a tractor in front of him and the eerie rows of corn. "I was laughing the whole entire time I was there," he told me. "But in a way, I was also worried that the children of the corn were going to get me...it would be great if the Linden's made scripted children there." Yaffle was disappointed at the "insanely slow" pace of the tractor, and bored by the only channel available on the televisions--a presentation of the 1940 film "Boy in Court," about a troubled teenager on probation trying to avoid a life of crime. Link (via Waxy) [Boing Boing] 6:29:29 AM    comment []

Linked to more distantly last night, here's (the other) Rex's list of Best Lists. Although I'll continue to add lists as they come in, it looks like List of Lists: 2005 is winding down. As a final punctuating coda to the year, here are my Top 20 Lists of 2005: 1) Mug Shots Of The Year from The Smoking Gun 2) Top 100 People from USA Today's Pop Candy 3) The Year In Ideas from New York Times Magazine 4) 100 Most Annoying Things from Retro Crush 5) The Best Links from Kottke.org 6) Top Viral Videos from iFilm 7) Top 20 Public Domain Files from Public Domain Torrents 8) Year In Review from Week In Review 9) 100 Most Annoying People from Am I Annoying 10) The Year In Swag from The Onion A/V Club 11) Top 50 Music Videos from DoCopenhagen 12) The Year In Corrections from Regret The Error 13) Top 10 Baby Names from Babycenter 14) 10 Sexiest Geeks from Wired News 15) Best Cast & Dogs from Dogster / Catster 16) Words of the Year from Merriam-Webster's 17) Banished Words from Lake Superior State University 18) Google Zeitgeist from Google 19) 10 Grossest Things We Saw On TV from Entertainment Weekly 20) Top Cryptozoology Stories from Loren Coleman [Fimoculous.com] 6:28:50 AM    comment []

After Hunter S. Thompson. Anita Thompson, the widow of Hunter S. Thompson, has announced plans to become the co-editor of a magazine expected to make its debut next month. By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER. [NYT > Books] "The Woody Creeker" since you asked. The magazine takes its title from Woody Creek, the Colorado community where the Thompson property is, and Ms. Thompson said it was intended to celebrate the oddities and richness of the locale. 6:28:22 AM    comment []

The Cute Factor.   Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others. Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire. The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession. The greater the number of cute cues that an animal or object happens to possess, or the more exaggerated the signals may be, the louder and more italicized are the squeals provoked. (New York Times ) [Follow Me Here...] 6:28:16 AM    comment []