Saturday, June 24, 2006

Wright Interviews Dennett and Wilson (Nadelhoffer). I just stumbled upon the following interesting interview by Robert Wright with Daniel Dennett--where Dennett discusses everything from Brights, evolution, and intelligent design, to his Russellian tea-pot agnosticism.  Wright's interview with E.O. Wilson--which contains discussions of several of the same issues as the Dennett interview--can be found here.  A number of Wright's interviews concerning the direction of evolutionary theory--with people ranging from John Maynard Smith and Steven Pinker to Arthur Peacocke--can be found over at Slate (see here). [Leiter Reports: A Group Blog] 3:48:24 PM    comment []

Beautiful babe on righteous rant Why Network Neutrality is a Necessity , by Anamda Congdon. No lies here. Technorati Tags: NetworkNeutrality - isen [isen.blog] 6:51:05 AM    comment []

An OU Alum at Microsoft Sounds Off. Here is an interesting quote in the Athens News from an Ohio University alum who now works at Microsoft: I'm trying to fathom a situation in which a serious breach of Social Security numbers could occur and not be discovered for 13 months, wrote one alum who works in fraud and compliance for Microsoft. How could this possibly happen without utter rank incompetence and a carefree attitude toward data security?... I hope your IT staff was fired.Now, that is pretty amusing. Reading the rest of the article is interesting as well. It is surprising to me that people are surprised... [Spire Security Viewpoint] 6:50:19 AM    comment []

Presentations and the Web. It's easy to put presentations on the web, just like it's easy to create them. Neither is easy to do well. I'd like to talk not only about good slide creation, but how to distribute a presentation in a useful way. It's not easy to create good presentations, even when you have good content. Simson Garfinkel pointed me to a great source on "The Design of Presentation Slides." It's based on actual research about presentation style and retention. It turns out that a full sentence headline, graphical representation of data, and conclusions to draw from the data presented is far more memorable than bulleted sentence fragments (right). This style also works well when the presentation is actually a presentation of some other organized thinking, such as a scientific paper, or progress report. When the presentation is accompaniment to something, I believe the research that says the headline sentence, data and conclusion style lead to better retention. What about when there is no other handout?  . . . [Emergent Chaos] 6:49:43 AM    comment []

Essay: The End of Authorship. Will Google's plans to create a digital universal library deprive the written word of its old-fashioned accountability and intimacy? By JOHN UPDIKE. [NYT > Books] The only answer, of course, is scribes. That's what we need to bring back Authorship and for the written word to regain accountability and intimacy. Scribes would do it. Yup. What's that? Scribes alienate authors from texts and, consequently, readers from authors? They kill Authorship and make authors unaccountable for their works? You've got a point there, you technophobe, Luddite, you. You should pass John Updike the news of your insight. 6:41:16 AM    comment []

Rex: Live-outlining. I've just witnessed an amazing thing. (This is besides the actual conference/unconference that Bloggercon is.) It's been amazing watching (projected on a screen in the front of the room) the real-time outlining by Doc Searls of all of the sessions. It's raw and unedited, but amazingly organized and concise. Back in the day, I attended a couple of conferences blogged by Heath Row, who is a machine when it comes to typing -- a transcribing machine. I was always in awe -- sort of like I am today with what Doc is doing today. But "outlining" adds a structure to transcription that perhaps appeals to the "GTD" (getting-things-done) in me. In GTD-speak, "a person needs to move tasks out of their mind and get them recorded somewhere." Watching Doc outline (which, I might say, is the first time I've "witnessed" someone outline in public) is opening my eyes to a very effective way to capture thoughts flying around a room and getting them started down the road to meaningful actions. Awesome. Technorati Tags: bloggercon, bloggerconIV, opml, outlining, docsearls [rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog] 6:37:39 AM    comment []

How the NSA did it. A former Internet expert for the FCC reveals how the National Security Agency most likely conducted its top-secret spying. [Salon] 6:37:38 AM    comment []

Watergate Echoes in NSA Courtroom. AT&T and Justice Department lawyers line up to try and kill a lawsuit alleging that the phone company cooperated in an illegal government surveillance program. AT&T's novel defense: We've done it before. Kevin Poulsen reports from San Francisco. [Wired News: Top Stories] 6:37:23 AM    comment []