Very interesting PBS Frontline special. Very interesting watch. Silly streaming Win Media Player format. It's to bad I can't download it or watch it on my media server or TV. Comments soon to come.
frontline: rumsfeld's war: watch the full program online PBS
I must say I'm not the collector type, but when I saw the wacked out design of this 1976 Fishing Machine I had to drop $3 on it. I'm a sucker for wacked out design. The funniest thing is it still works and casts beautifully. It has the oddest feature on top too, a "range finder" that when switched on stops the cast and about 35 feet or so. Perfect for casting into those tricky little nooks and crannies. :)
The Onion | Republicans Urge Minorities To Get Out And Vote On Nov. 3
There's a lot of people who were wishing apple's big announcement would be a video playing iPod, but over at macworld they take it a step farther in this hilarious, ridiculous and geeky romp through how to make your photo iPod into a video iPod, sort of.
"Downtown is both the name and the location for a new luxury condo designed by uber designer Philippe Starck. The former 40-story headquarters for banker JP Morgan has been transformed into 326 Starck-designed residences. In addition to the usual NYC condo luxo amenities, there's a Starck Park, a 5,000 sq. ft. roof park that looks out over the NY Stock Exchange. They should have called it the Starck Exchange..."
MoCoLoco: Alta: "The ideal city bicycle.
balcony (1280x1024)
This robot does it all. Schmoozes for money AND drinks beer. How could robotics surpass this. It has all been done.
 Officials fear news of the missing explosives could be used in combination with unrelated pictures of burning stuff to sensationalize news articles. |
Last week, a Fox News Channel producer sued Bill O'Reilly for sexual harassment, alleging that the cable host pressured her into phone sex. What do you think?I like my news sprinkled heavily with sarcasm. Thank you Onion.
"This is just another example of the liberal media's bias against self-destructive, narcissistic, screaming sexist assholes."
Andy Vaughn
Clerk"He wasn't sexually harassing her. He was just looking out for her, like he's doing for all of us, all the time."
Jonathan Warren
Announcer"Whether Andrea Mackris' claims are true or false, one thing is certain—that woman is never working for the vast right-wing conspiracy again."
Curtis Fletcher
Systems Analyst
This clip may be a little old. But it cracks me up every time with it's Monty Python style british humor. Enjoy.
I suddenly have the need to travel to Pennsylvania. I'm reminded of the post apocalyptic visions of 'Mad Max', Stephen King's 'The Stand' and '28 days'. To be riding a bicycle on a four lane divided highway, silence, weeds growing through cracks. It would be a very eery and spiritual thing indeed.
This is May. May doesn't like cameras, not even camera phones.
All hail gross green Shrek twinkies!
In news completely unrelated to anything a giant sunfish has washed up on a New Zealand beach. Categorize under wacky, weird, fun, bizarro.
"In the beginning was the command line" has probably been online for free for years, but I just discovered it after reading today's Slashdot interview with Neal Stephenson. Which is by the way a brilliant read. And I do mean that. His Snowcrash is one of my favorite sci-fi books. I remember when I was first introduced to his work when I picked up a copy of "In the beginning was the Command Line" I was immediately insensed and read it straight through without ever putting it down. Keep in mind it's not very long.
I can't wait to get my hands on this. Stephen King has been working toward the completion of his seven book 'Dark Tower' series since perhaps as early as 1970 when he was 22. Many have called the Dark Tower series his opus and even more wondered if it's completion would ever come, especially since he was very nearly killed in a road side accident in 1999, but the series is now complete and I won't be able to get my hands on a copy of it fast enough.
It use to be Nike was an ever present fixture in the media I paid attention to. So you can imagine my shock when I realized they bought up their competitor Converse back in July.
And with Converse helping to drive up sales, industry watchers say Nike is likely to duplicate this success by acquiring other brands.Link: Latest Business News and Financial Information | Reuters.com
John Horan, who publishes the trade magazine Sporting Goods Intelligence, lists youth sporting goods company Burton and outdoor clothing retailer Patagonia as two possibilities.
...
To diversify its product offerings, Nike paid about $305 million for the nearly 100-year-old Converse. So far the bet has paid off.
For the quarter ended Aug. 31, sales from the company's non-Nike brands grew 64 percent to $434.5 million, with Converse making up about three-quarters of that amount. Total revenue rose 18 percent to $3.6 billion, with Converse contributing four percentage points of that increase.
On a side note converse is doing a bit of participatory marketing. Yes "paticapotory marketing" that's what I said. I could call it "viral marketing" as some do, but that implies everyone involved is some kind of degenerate. One of the many reasons I don't think highly of much of the advertising industry, but that's another issue altogether. Anyway, judge for yourself.Like Converse, this site belongs to you, it is what you make of it. Enjoy the creativity of others. If you get the itch, create something yourself. With every contribution, this site will evolve and grow. How big? That's entirely up to you.I like the sentiment, I just wish the website wasn't one big closed flash app so I could link to the right page or some of the videos.
This is a really silly post, but what the heh. It's Sunday.
School House Rock - Pirates & Emperors (6.7mb QT)Pirates and Emporers is a pitch-perfect send-up of the "Schoolhouse Rock" musical civics cartoons of the 1970s -- easily the most-compelling educational materials aired on US TV -- in which the dark history of US international policy (funding terrorists, arming atrocity-mongers) is set to jaunty music and simple animation.
Via Boing Boing: Schoolhouse Rock that tells it like it is
The Toilet Online - Leave It To Bush! (Macromedia Flash Animation)
William Gibson: "Why?
Well, I finally broke down and got a camera phone. It was not my intention but since I'm paying for the data already and the camera phone was only $30 more than a regular phone I went a head and did it. With this setup I can apparently send unlimited pictures straight from my Sprint phone to my Blogger.com blog without any problem. The picture on the right is my first test. Yeah, it's rainy here.
 |
"The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit all began as sparkling edifices, the fulfillment of the dreams of their architects and developers.
Their end did not come suddenly, as part of some natural disaster or war. Instead it resulted from an accumulated lack of basic aesthetic sensibility. A small thing left broken here, an indiscretion of taste there, until a preponderance of damage equals an insoluble situation. What was revered becomes scorned.
Abandonment and vandalism follow and the damage becomes irreparable."
— from Detroit Institutes of the Arts
Shrinking cities are a cultural challenge to us. In the Shrinking Cities project, architects, academics and artists investigate recent developments in Detroit, Ivanovo, Manchester / Liverpool and Halle / Leipzig - and make suggestions.Link: The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit
Shrinking cities is a project (2002-2005) of the Federal Cultural Foundation, under the direction of Philipp Oswalt (Berlin) in co-operation with the Leipzig Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the magazine archplus.
— from shrinkingcities.com
Rio is a fascinating place of contrast. This is way off the current events radar. It is in fact from back in early April of this year and does not in fact have much to do with my primary interests, but it was such a fascinating glimpse into the modern world of Rio I had to post it.
I just stumbled upon a great Buckminster Fuller web site full of video clips and couldn't help but share.Universal access to all knowledge is possible, and it's not aEarlier version of the speach available in QuickTime (121 mb QT)
non-profit goal. Index the whole damn thing -- it's a business
for AMZN (let's sell all the books, let's sell everything),
Altavista, (let's index all the web), etc.
26MM books in the Library of Congress -- more than 50% out of
copyright, most out of print, a tiny sliver in print. A digitized
ASCII book is about 1MB, so this is about 26TB, which costs about
$60K and takes up one bookshelf.
Google announced that it will digitize in-print material and
out-of-copyright works (like AMZN's thing).
It costs $10/book to scan -- they're digitizing all the books in
the Library of Alexandria, and they're going this in China, too.
A group in Toronto is doing a robot-scanner that will bring the
cost in the industrial world -- where labor is more expensive --
to scan books for $10. At $10 per, that $260 Million to scan all
the books.
Brewster is scanning all the books that are out of copyright, and
is trying to get at all the stuff that's out of print but still
in copyright -- the orphans. It's 8MM books, most of the 20th
Century.
We're suing Ashcroft in the Supreme Court for the right to bring
out-of-print, in-copyright books to the net.
We can print a book for a dollar -- it costs Harvard Library $2
to loan a book.
We've got book mobiles in India, Egypt, Uganda elsewhere printing
books for a dollar each.
Scan a book for $10, put it on the net, download it and bind it
for $1.
--
How much audio is there?
2-3MM discs (78s, LPs, CDs) produced in the history of the world.
Lots of people aren't well-served by music publishers. Some rock
bands sell records but allow tape-trading of their live
performance. We've got 700 bands' live performances online --
including all of the Grateful Dead.
Online record-labels need help: we offer unlimited
storage/bandwidth forever for free to anyone releasing material
under a CC license. There should be no penalty to giving stuff
away.
Classical music: we need a good classical music collection. If
you know anyone in a symphony we're looking to digitize their
stuff at hi-rez.
--
Moving images
100-200K theatrically released films in the history of the world,
half are Indian.
600 films in the US are not in copyright -- we've got 300 on the
web to download, watch, cut up, do what you will.
Thousands of non-theatrical films (educational films, etc) in the
Prelinger Archive.
We're recording 20 channels of TV 24h/day at full rez. We've got
a petabyte of TV from Russia, UK, Arab world, etc.
--
We've got a DMCA exemption that allows us to digitize and rip
software. It's a disgrace that the software industry opposed
this.
We've got a web-archive going back to 1996.
This is growing at one Library of Congress per month.
--
Preservation and access
We've got copies of this in SF (on the San Andreas fault), with
mirrors in Egypt and Amsterdam.
We're adding cool search stuff, like Recall.
--
Will we do this?
Dunno -- lots of business oppos here. 4 companies have already
spun out.
This requires coop between govt, nonprofit and for-profit
entities.
--
UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE CAN BE OUR GREATEST
ACHIEVEMENT.
==
With less than a month before the presidential election, an Associated Press test article declaring President Bush the winner was picked up by WBAY.com's automated system. The article was not recognized by our web host's system as a test message.WBAY-Coverage You Can Count On: Correction: President Bush Did Not Win Election on October 7
The mistake was picked up by a discussion group on Daily Kos, prompting a phone call that alerted us to the problem. Our web host, WorldNow, removed the story in less than five minutes. The article appeared on WBAY.com for 35 minutes.
WBAY apologizes for the error, and we took quick action to correct it.
It occurs to me after rereading the Wired article The Long Tail and my earlier post on it that I overlooked the most obvious and interesting part. The end of the long tail is missing, forgotten, and un-addressed. The new economic frontier is not only in the "long tail" represented by "hybrid retailers" and "pure digital retailers" (pictured above), but in the last forgotten leg where the minimum threshold is nearly zero. In broadband connectivity this is called "the last mile". Usually the last mile is the most costly and the most complex, but that does not mean a marketplace for the last mile of intellectual property is impossible and indeed it may prove to be the most important part of the revolution.
The bigger problem with defining file-sharing as anarchy is that it focuses on what's absent -- central control; rather than what is present -- strong and shifting networks of cultural influence.In my opinion it is important to note that while new peer-to-peer systems are seemingly anarchical, they are not and we need to move beyond this shallow understanding and study how they embrace the "semingly anarchical interests of masses" and turn them into a viable and even traditional product.
After a brief historical period dominated by mass media, we're seeing a revival of folk culture, with new forms of peer cultural sharing and creation -- file sharing, blogging, mashups. The trend has been growing since the advent of cheap photocopiers and cheap videocameras, and accelerating with cheap distribution and improved tools for sharing taste and collaborating.
The portrayal of culture as anarchy is a Romantic notion, shaped by the ideal of the artists as lone rebels or dissident cliques. That concept itself is the result of the mass media dominance. Artists see themselves as an embattled minority, then their work gets co-opted into mass media (Lennon's Revolution selling sneakers).
With the rise of mainstream folk culture, though, the interesting structural observation isn't the lack of central control. It's the emergence of networks of influence that are shaped by taste, by opinion, by identity, by personal connection, by mentorship.
Vaidhyanathan laments the lack of community formed around Napster. But that was just immaturity. We're just inventing tools for groupforming around shared preferences and collaborative creation. Flickr has cool tools for building groups around sharing pictures. If Napster was allowed to live, if music-sharing were legal, we'd see faster growth of social software around music.
Read the original postBookBlog: Anarchist in the Library
If we can establish a peer system for the legitimized, legal and open sharing of intellectual works suitable to the masses we could slowly create the critical mass necissary to draw popular culture back out of the recess of the dark net to the open web where collaboration and debate around music and cultural artifacts can fulfill the promise of a renasaince of innovation and culture expected of this great new medium.
We don't need the permission of incumbent media corporations to build these new systems. The content is already out there it just needs a marketplace.
Very cool, very fun.
Topobo is a 3D constructive assembly system embedded with kinetic memory, the ability to record and playback physical motion. Unique among modeling systems is Topobo?s coincident physical input and output behaviors. By snapping together a combination of Passive (static) and Active (motorized) components, people can quickly assemble dynamic biomorphic forms like animals and skeletons with Topobo, animate those forms by pushing, pulling, and twisting them, and observe the system repeatedly play back those motions. For example, a dog can be constructed and then taught to gesture and walk by twisting its body and legs. The dog will then repeat those movements and walk repeatedly.
Wired just published an amazing article by Chris Anderson, Wired's editor and chief about the cultural and economical shift to a more diverse array of books, movies, and music. In short a huge surge in cultural diversity.What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see 'Anatomy of the Long Tail'). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: 'The biggest money is in the smallest sales.'
...
When you think about it, most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another. Google, for instance, makes most of its money off small advertisers (the long tail of advertising), and eBay is mostly tail as well - niche and one-off products. By overcoming the limitations of geography and scale, just as Rhapsody and Amazon have, Google and eBay have discovered new markets and expanded existing ones.
This is the power of the Long Tail. The companies at the vanguard of it are showing the way with three big lessons. Call them the new rules for the new entertainment economy.
Rule 1: Make everything available
If you love documentaries, Blockbuster is not for you. Nor is any other video store - there are too many documentaries, and they sell too poorly to justify stocking more than a few dozen of them on physical shelves. Instead, you'll want to join Netflix, which offers more than a thousand documentaries - because it can. Such profligacy is giving a boost to the documentary business; last year, Netflix accounted for half of all US rental revenue for Capturing the Friedmans, a documentary about a family destroyed by allegations of pedophilia.
Rule 2: Cut the price in half. Now lower it.
...
Rule 3: Help me find it
In 1997, an entrepreneur named Michael Robertson started what looked like a classic Long Tail business. Called MP3.com, it let anyone upload music files that would be available to all. The idea was the service would bypass the record labels, allowing artists to connect directly to listeners. MP3.com would make its money in fees paid by bands to have their music promoted on the site. The tyranny of the labels would be broken, and a thousand flowers would bloom.
Putting aside the fact that many people actually used the service to illegally upload and share commercial tracks, leading the labels to sue MP3.com, the model failed at its intended purpose, too. Struggling bands did not, as a rule, find new audiences, and independent music was not transformed. Indeed, MP3.com got a reputation for being exactly what it was: an undifferentiated mass of mostly bad music that deserved its obscurity.
The problem with MP3.com was that it was only Long Tail. It didn't have license agreements with the labels to offer mainstream fare or much popular commercial music at all. Therefore, there was no familiar point of entry for consumers, no known quantity from which further exploring could begin.
economics of scale vs. micro economics
breadth adds depth?
Peer based (broadband) culture increases cultural capacity exponentially over broadcast culture. Therefore the "long tail" does not mean the death of hitmaker culture in fact hitmaker culture may even increase. The breadth of culture may increase the overall capacity of of world culture, thus creating a richer and more diverse global society.
broadband = diversity = health
Instead of US political, cultural, economical ideals dominating the world view perhaps the inverse is happening and the US is getting swept up or reabsorbed into other economic, ideological, and cultural systems. Perhaps the age of cultural imperialism is dead.
The Library of Congress today is making awards totaling more than $14.9 million to eight institutions and their partners to identify, collect and preserve digital materials within a nationwide digital preservation infrastructure. These awards from the Library will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the winning institutions in the form of cash, in-kind or other resources. The institutions will share responsibilities for preserving at-risk digital materials of significant cultural and historical value to the nation.Among these are the awards are a consortium created by UIC and one created by University of Michigan. The information follows.
· Lead institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, Graduate School of Library and Information Science and National Center for Supercomputing Applications.Digital Preservation Awards
Partners: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Tufts University Perseus Project, Michigan State University Library, and an alliance of state library agencies from Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Subject: This project will develop criteria for determining which digital materials to capture and preserve, as not all digital material can or should be preserved. These materials will include sound and video recordings, historical aerial photography, Web-based government publications from the partner states, and primary and secondary historical materials made available by the Perseus Project. Amount of award: $2,753,451.
· Lead institution: University of Michigan Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.
Partners: The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut, the Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the Henry A. Murray Research Center at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard, the Electronic and Special Media Records Service Division of the National Archives and Records Administration and the Harvard-MIT Data Center.
Subject: These institutions will create a partnership to identify, acquire and preserve data used in the study of social science to ensure that future generations of Americans have access to this vital digital material that will allow them to understand their nation, its social organization and its policies and politics. Examples of data that will be preserved are opinion polls, voting records, large-scale surveys on family growth and income, and focused studies on effects of events such as factory closings or the need to care for aging parents. Together the partners will build a shared catalog, adopt a common standard for describing survey data and develop strategies for ensuring that the data remains available for analysis. Amount of award: $2,182,332.
There are many information-processing problems that can only be solved by the joint action of large communities of computers each running a sophisticated machine learning algorithm, where those algorithms are not subject to centralized, global control. Examples are routing of air traffic, control of swarms of spacecraft, routing of packets across the internet, and communication between the multiple processors in a modern computer. There are also many instances of natural systems that address such problems. Examples here are ecosystems, economies, the organelles within a living cell.Thoughts: The capacity for a centralized system to solve widespread complex problems such as the distribution of wealth or the creation and propogation of ideas is very limited indeed. These things require continually new and improved systems that promote "collective intelligence". While ebay and google have proven centralized means are possible for the selling of physical goods or finding of ideas (ideas as expressed in words) perhaps a marketplace to promote the creation of propogation of ideas (intellectual property) as expressed in rich media (video, image, music) can only be created through a collective intelligence system like a wiki or P2P?
Such problems can be addressed with the emerging science of ``COllective INtelligence'' (COIN), which is concerned with the design of a multi-agent system where:
- Agents are ``selfish'' in that they act to try to
optimize their own utilities, without explicit regard to cooperation
with other agents.
- There is a well-specified global objective, and we are confronted with the inverse problem of how to configure the system to achieve that objective.
It would certainly be productive to entertain the cons of a wiki-based architecture. Hopefully, any points raised here can be satisfactorily addressed by some other contributor.
You're requiring that anyone who wants to contribute media learn a new interface (editing a wiki). It's easy for us web-heads, but markup languages and long text forms could scare many people who simply play music and want to share it with the world. Ease-of-use is (IMO) the biggest impediment to CC metadata adoption and license-aware music sharing online; it's important to focus on the end-user in such a system. -- Ian Spivey
Perhaps alternate interfaces could be adopted to edit the wiki? For example, data could be imported back and forth between the wiki and an easier to edit website. -- Anthony
Humanity faces a global crisis in the governance of knowledge, technology and culture. The crisis is manifest in many ways.Read on:
- Without access to essential medicines, millions suffer and die;
- Morally repugnant inequality of access to education, knowledge and technology undermines development and social cohesion;
- Anticompetitive practices in the knowledge economy impose enormous costs on consumers and retard innovation;
- Authors, artists and inventors face mounting barriers to follow-on innovation;
- Concentrated ownership and control of knowledge, technology, biological resources and culture harm development, diversity and democratic institutions;
- Technological measures designed to enforce intellectual property rights in digital environments threaten core exceptions in copyright laws for disabled persons, libraries, educators, authors and consumers, and undermine privacy and freedom;
- Key mechanisms to compensate and support creative individuals and communities are unfair to both creative persons and consumers;
- Private interests misappropriate social and public goods, and lock up the public domain.
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Green Map System is a global eco-cultural movement, energized by local knowledge, action and responsibility.
Green Maps are locally created maps that chart the natural and cultural environment. Using adaptable tools and a shared visual language of Green Map Icons to highlight green living resources, Green Maps cultivate citizen participation and community sustainability.
What do I like about this? It's activist, it's green, and most of all I love it because it creates awareness by "making visible the invisible". That is to say it makes urban green systems and green areas visible in a whole new way.
"Lydia Polgreen describes her experiences going from a weekend cyclist to a daily commuter through the streets of New York."
When bruce sterling speaks I read, if for no other reason than for the pure enjoyment. The man has both beautiful words and a beautiful mind even if this is not an entirely realistic proposal, it is a beautifully spirited one.
'SF writer Bruce Sterling is guest-posting on the global-eco-tech blog Worldchanging today and thinks we ought to marry the Internet and the United Nations. 'The UN has cumbersome rules, no popular participation, and can't get anything useful done about the darkly rising tide of stateless terror and military adventurism. The UN was invented to 'unite nations' rather than people. The Internet unites people, but it's politically illegitimate. Vigilante lawfare outfits like RIAA and MPAA can torment users and ISPs at will. The dominant OS is a hole-riddled monopoly. Its business models collapsed in a welter of stock-kiting corruption. The Net is a lawless mess of cross-border spam and fraud. Logically, there ought to be some inventive way to cross-breed the grass-rootsy cheapness, energy and immediacy of the Net with the magisterial though cumbersome, crotchety, crooked and opaque United Nations.' It's obviously part tongue in cheek, but it does make you think.'
