randomwalks/dj

Gauging from the first episode, which marks the beginning of the end, this season may be the most creative and richly imagined one yet.

Originally from NYT > Arts, on March 9, 2006 10:45 PM

Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in email.

-- Eliot Spitzer

Originally from Caterina.net, on March 9, 2006 10:44 PM

Bertha Lewis sells out for $500k.

Originally posted by yatta from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 10:44 PM

Originally posted by miyagawa from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 10:44 PM

I knew the oldies weren't dead.

Originally posted by axt from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 10:44 PM

Barry Bonds, Steroids, and Hypocrisy is far and away the most trafficed post on Hello, Typepad. Since the San Francisco Chronicle and Sports Illustrated published excerpts of an upcoming book that alleges an absurdly high amount of Steroid use on the part of Bonds and other athletes associated with Balco (including Hello, Typepad favorite Marion Jones), interest in this topic has peaked (see my measure map graph for this post, to the left) so I thought I'd just reiterate my opinion, because I'm stubborn like that.

If indeed Bonds is guilty of everything the Chronicle reporters say that he is, and more, he is at least behaving consistently. There's blood in the water around Bonds, but there's money too, and don't think for a second that reporters wouldn't be covering this story if there wasn't. We know this because it's been going on for twenty years and no one started talking about it until Jose Canseco came out with his book. What's more, Baseball didn't even have a real Steroids policy until three years ago.

The fans and press are exactly as hypocritical as Bonds himself in this case. As sad as it makes me that he clearly cheated, his behavior is a symptom, not a disease.

Originally from hello, typepad, on March 9, 2006 04:31 PM

As groundbreaking begins at the WTC site, the politics still swirl around the memorial... WNYC

Originally from Archinect.com Feed, on March 9, 2006 03:07 PM

The rant is several hundred words long, and it starts like this:

The NBA has a major fucking problem on its hands. And this problem is reflective of many issues the league, and the sport of basketball on the whole, faces. THERE IS ZERO RESPECT SHOWN TO REFS.

athetic outing in recent hoops tourneys tells you something. NBA players are so used to NBA-style calls and the inevitable bitching about the calls, that they have no idea how tohandle true, pure basketball refereeing. In the Olympics and international tourneys, the refs are from all across the world-- and they interpret rules literally. And the poor dumb Americans have yet to adjust. At the end, there's a call for a photo (or better yet, video!) of Rasheed Wallace getting ejected from the McDonald's All-Star (high school) game after he fouled out. Anyone know where such a thing can be found? I'd love to see it.

Originally from True Hoop, on March 9, 2006 03:07 PM

As long as we're talking about rants, let's not ignore this article at Sports-Central by Isaac Miller. It starts like this:

Guaranteed contracts have ruined the NBA. The NFL maintains a high level of competition because every player is always competing for his job. It seems unfair that an NFL team can just cut a player because they don't want to pay his salary, but it's better than what happens in basketball. In the NBA, free agents sign six- and seven-year deals for millions of guaranteed dollars. Then they put it into cruise control and collect their loot.

of the 10 highest paid players in the league are Allan Houston, Chris Webber, Stephon Marbury, and Brian Grant. These guys convinced teams to give them huge deals a long time ago, and now they are laughing all the way to the bank. Anfernee Hardaway, Grant Hill, Keith Van Horn, Jalen Rose, Eddie Jones, Tim Thomas, and Antonio Davis are all in the top 20 (all make over $13 million this year). That's 11 out of the top 20 highest-paid players in the league who don't deserve half of what they make, less in some cases.

Originally from True Hoop, on March 9, 2006 03:06 PM

New analyses suggest the statue-building settlers landed on the once richly forested island centuries later than thought – and quickly destroyed its resources

Originally from New Scientist - Latest Headlines, on March 9, 2006 03:06 PM

The device could one day allow paralysed patients to operate computers, and has huge potential in the computer game and entertainment industries

Originally from New Scientist - Latest Headlines, on March 9, 2006 03:06 PM

Like nearly everyone at TED2006, Jill Sobule was stirred by Al Gore's spectacular speech on the clear and present danger of climate change. The time for action is now, Jill thought. And so she wrote a song.

But since everyone else was so down about the impending collapse of ecological systems, which could lead to floods, drought, hurricanes, food shortages, mosquito overpopulation and species extinction (if we don't do anything to stop it), she decided to write a happy song about global warming.

And here it is. Written and performed first at TED. Recorded in Los Angeles. Al Gore loved it, and so will you: Jill Sobule's "Manhattan in January." Download the MP3.

Originally posted by June Cohen from TED Blog, on March 9, 2006 03:06 PM

It’ll take you 20 minutes to get through all of these, but Ray Ozzie’s Live Clipboard Screencasts are worth taking a look at if you’re interested in syndication, microformats, and mashup’s.

(via: Dave’s Wordpress Blog)

Originally posted by erik from [eriksmartt.com/blog], on March 9, 2006 01:19 PM

"Ten Club would like to promote the album through MySpace.....to do that, they would like to have my user name, which is "Pearl Jam" I don't know if i want to let MySpace go, just like that. I will now email the guy and see what he has to offer."

Originally posted by yatta from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 01:19 PM

Originally posted by wardo from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 01:19 PM

There's more ways than one to send a message. Like Hector Serrano Studio's fan txt. "When shaken, the fan’s integrated LEDs light up to display a message programmed beforehand by the user. (click on “products,” then on “fan txt”). The fan modernizes a centuries-old method of flirtatious communication. [via Product Dose]

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, on March 9, 2006 01:18 PM

Japanese media artist couple Mika Miyabara and Tatsuo Sugimoto's new concept for movie editing helps children understand the process of editing which has become too abstract since losing the actual film itself.

Movie Cards turns digital, abstract film material back into something tangible: paper cards.

1. Film your story with a digital camera.
2. Connect your camera to a computer with Movie Cards software installed.
3. The software will print out the movie cards. These small cards show the first image of each sequence taken from your camera.
4. Lay your cards on the table and arrange them in which ever order you want them to be.
5. Each card has a little QR-code or bar-code, so you can use a scanner or bar-code reader to beep-in your movie cards in the order you decided.
6. Preview on your monitor! Done.

The advanced concept of Movie Cards, enables you to print out each frame of your movie clips. The result looks very close to actually holding a film in your hand.

Since every frame has an individual bar-code printed next to the image you can edit the length of the clip by scanning the start and end frame of your sequence instead of cutting the film.

The developers also suggest to cut all of your desired frames and create a little flip-book.

Check also Cati Vaucelle's brilliant Moving Pictures : Looking Out! Looking In!.
Via PingMag.

Originally from we make money not art, on March 9, 2006 01:18 PM

Gladwell has a long and fascinating response to Freakonomics up on his blog, which includes this brilliant twist on the abortions-cause-the-crime-rate-to-drop argument:

For instance, the biggest drop in fertility in the U.S. came with the advent of the Pill in the mid-1960's. The Pill allowed lots of women who would otherwise have become pregnant not to become pregnant because they were poor, or didn't want a child, or lived in an environment where it was hard to raise children. But the fertility drop caused by the Pill didn't lead to a decrease in crime eighteen years later. In fact, that generation saw a massive increase in crime. The advent of abortion in the early 1970's, meanwhile, caused a far, far smaller drop in U.S. fertility but, Levitt argues, that drop is consistent with a fall in crime. In other words, the unwanted children whose births were prevented by the Pill would not have gone to become criminals. But unwanted children whose births were prevented by abortion would have gone on become criminals.

Originally posted by stevenberlinjohnson from stevenberlinjohnson.com, on March 9, 2006 01:18 PM

I'm not really a web forums type guy, but the light weight interfaces of bbPress and Vanilla do a lot to redeem the medium. Anyone got a preference from using them?

Also anyone have a mbox import script for importing old list traffic?

Part of the very slow, long running process of re-launching the Magpie site, and breaking my Sourceforge dependency.

Originally from Laughing Meme, on March 9, 2006 10:46 AM

Today visitors at Cebit will have a chance to see and play with Nokia Lifeblog 2.0. It is a major overhaul of Lifeblog which should improve and expand the product. I am looking forward to the increased metadata, promised speed improvements and more robust sync. The support for Audio notes, could bring a very interesting twist to liferecording. Getting a record of Calendar notes as metadata is great.

Since I left Nokia I have not seen it, so I am eagerly looking forward to upgrading, I just need to wait for the version compatible with older NSeries devices. I am still using my N90 Transformer and running Lifeblog and Y! Go on it. I am still Liferecording at similar pace. Today my Lifeblog has 17887 items in it, 11161 images, 4889 sms's, 30mms, 843 videos, 405 notes and 286 posts.

My big concrats to the team, who I know has worked extremly hard to improve the product.

Originally from ChristianLindholm.com, on March 9, 2006 10:46 AM

"This fun to use old-fashioned script comes with two fonts: Ballpark Script and Ballpark Swashes. Ballpark Swashes includes over 58 different swashes in place of characters, designed to attach to the ends of the Ballpark Script letters."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 9, 2006 10:45 AM

"RunFatBoy is an easy to use workout system designed for beginners. No more intimidating images of people with ripped abs. No more complicated medical jargon. Workout plans are automatically updated for you. You can adjust your plan if it's too intense."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 9, 2006 10:44 AM

A number of people have asked me what I think of the bestselling book "Freakonomics" written by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. On the front of the book, there is a glowing blurb by me which would suggest that I love it. On the other hand, chapter four of Freakonomics is devoted to the question of why crime dropped so dramatically in America—and particularly New York—in the 1990’s, and in that chapter Dubner and Levitt reach a very different conclusion than I do in "The Tipping Point." In fact, "Freakonomics" specially singles out for ridicule the theory of broken windows, which I suggest in the Tipping Point played a big role in New York City’s recovery. So what gives? Why do I love a book so much, if it contradicts my own book? Have I renounced the theories I put forward in the Tipping Point?

I have two answers. The first—obvious—point is that it is not necessary to agree with everything you read in a book to like that book. I have a number of problems with several chapters in Freakonomics, because I find the way in which economists approach problems occasionally frustrating. That being said, it’s very difficult to read Freakonomics and not find yourself saying "wow" every five minutes. I loved it.

Now for the long answer: what do I think of the substance of their crime argument? Is the Broken Windows theory central to the question of whether crime dropped, or isn’t it?

The Freakonomics argument starts off very much like the argument I make in The Tipping Point. The startling decline in crime in major American cities in the mid-1990’s is a mystery. No one predicted it. Everyone thought that high crime rates were a permanent feature of urban life. And the standard arguments to explain why crime falls don’t seem to work in this case. Levitt and Dubner go through all the usual explanations for crime decreases—a booming economy, decline in the crack trade, innovative policing strategies, tougher gun laws, aging of the population—and find only two that they think really matter. Putting more police on the street, they say, which happened in major cities all over the country in the early 1990’s, was a major factor. So were the soaring numbers of young men put away in prison in that same period. But neither of those two factors, they argue, are sufficient to explain the full magnitude of the crime drop. There has to be something else—and their candidate for the missing explanation is the legalization of abortion.

Levitt’s argument (and for simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to the argument from now on as Levitt’s) goes something like this (and keep in mind that I’m grossly simplifying it here). The huge declines in urban violent crime rates happen, more or less, eighteen years after the passage of Roe v. Wade. States that legalized abortion earlier than the Supreme Court ruling saw their violent crime rates fall earlier. When you look at falling crime rates, the reductions in violent behavior are almost all concentrated in the generation born after the legalization of abortion, not before. People undergo abortions, in other words, for a reason: because they are poor, or don’t want a child, or live in an environment where it is hard to raise children. An unwanted child has a higher chance, when he or she grows up, of becoming a criminal. By removing a large number of unwanted children, legalized abortion ended up lowering the crime rate. Levitt makes it clear that he’s not passing judgment on this. He’s not pro-abortion, as a result of this observation. He’s just explaining the way he thinks the world works. He also stresses—and this is because even more important—that he doesn’t think that crime fell in major American cities solely because of abortion. He thinks abortion is simply one of several factors—albeit a significant one—in the crime drop.

Is Levitt right that legalizing abortion has played a role in lowering violent crime rates? Levitt has a few critics, and he’s dealt with them pretty effectively, I think. (Check out Freakonomics.com) There are some other technical critiques of his work from fellow economists, that, I have to confess, I can’t follow. My own response is chiefly that I find the argument incomplete.. For instance, the biggest drop in fertility in the U.S. came with the advent of the Pill in the mid-1960’s. The Pill allowed lots of women who would otherwise have become pregnant not to become pregnant because they were poor, or didn’t want a child, or lived in an environment where it was hard to raise children. But the fertility drop caused by the Pill didn’t lead to a decrease in crime eighteen years later. In fact, that generation saw a massive increase in crime. The advent of abortion in the early 1970’s, meanwhile, caused a far, far smaller drop in U.S. fertility but—Levitt argues—that drop is consistent with a fall in crime. In other words, the unwanted children whose births were prevented by the Pill would not have gone to become criminals. But unwanted children whose births were prevented by abortion would have gone on become criminals. Why is this? I can think of some hypotheses. But they are just that: hypotheses. I would have been a lot happier with Freakonomics if the crime chapter had been twice as long—and spent more time explaining just what is so peculiar, in terms of crime rates, about births prevented by abortion.

But that’s a quibble. In the course of making his argument for the importance of abortion Levitt is also pretty dismissive of other, alternate, theories—especially the theory that I spend a lot of time on the Tipping Point, namely the broken windows idea.

It’s here, though, where I think Levitt’s argument is a bit unfair. Levitt concludes that there are three factors that matter the most in the crime drop—abortion, high rates of imprisonment of young men, and increased number of police officers. The last of these three factors he glosses over pretty quickly. But I think that’s a mistake, because what is increased police presence? Well, having more police on the streets than before means that law enforcement can be more aggressive and pro-active. It means officers can do a lot better job getting guns off the streets. It means that they can be much more vigilant than before. It means that they have the time and resources to start cracking down on the kinds of seemingly minor "lifestyle" crimes than might have gone ignored before. The kinds of things that I argue were so important in responding a civil environment in New York State—the crackdowns on graffiti and public urination and panhandling and turnstile jumping in the subway system—are all the kinds of things that police departments can do when they have more officers on the streets. In Freakonomics, Levitt pretends he has refuted the Broken Windows explanation. He hasn’t at all. In fact, to the extent that he concedes the huge role played by the expansion of police departments in the 1990’s, he tacitly supports the Broken Windows theory.

So why is he so anxious to discredit Broken Windows? One—understandable—explanation is that he makes his own argument more compelling by dismissing all other arguments. (I know all about this tactic. I do it all the time). But a deeper explanation, I think, has to do with the difference between the perspective of economics and the perspective of psychology. Levitt is very interested in the root causes of behavior, in the kinds of incentives and circumstances that fundamentally shape the way human beings act. That’s the kind of thing that economists—particularly behavioral economists—think a lot about. And rightly so: who we are and how we behave is a product of forces and influences rooted in the histories and traditions and laws of the societies in which we belong.

But there’s a second dimension to crime, and that is the immediate contextual influences on human behavior. If you talk to a police officer (or a psychologist) they’ll tell you what a "typical" murder looks like. It’s two men, drunk at a bar. They get in a fight. They step outside. One pulls a gun in anger and kills the other. You can prevent that homicide by creating a population of people who are less likely to get drunk and angry in bars. You can also prevent that homicide by decreasing the likelihood of either of those drunken men having a gun. Police-work is concerned, necessarily, with this kind of immediate influence on behavior, and one of the things that having lots more police did was to make it possible to reduce the number of guns on the street that could end as a cause for a homicide. Drunken young men still fight in bars in New York City. But now they fight with fists—which are a lot safer.

Freakonomics is a book about deeply rooted influences on behavior, because it’s a book written by an economist. The Tipping Point is a book, by contrast, about the kinds of things that law enforcement types—and psychologists—worry about, because it was written by someone who is obsessed with psychology. I prefer to think of Freakonomics not as contradicting my argument in Tipping Point, but as completing it.

One final point (just to complicate things even further). Since Tipping Point has come out, there have been a number of economists who have looked specifically at broken windows—and tried to test the theory directly. Some have found support for it. Others—particularly Bernard Harcourt at the University of Chicago—find it wanting. If you crave a rigorous critique of broken windows, read Harcourt. He’s every bit as smart as Levitt.

Originally posted by malcolmgladwell from gladwell.com, on March 9, 2006 10:44 AM

When you do as much heavy-editing in Movable Type as I do between this site, the Six Apart website, our internal blogs and others, you get really tired not having an easy path from the published blog back to Movable Type.

Nearly four years ago, I posted a silly little hack to have MT itself publish the entry's edit URL on the published blog, showing it only if you had a cookie that was set from a separate page. Later, I expanded this to include links directly into Movable Type for all editable content. Now, there are a couple of new tricks I want to share with you that I've been using lately and which have made my life a lot easier.

Using CookiePath to show administrative content

The first is an update to the cookie-based edit entry link technique thanks to the CookiePath configuration directive introduced in Movable Type 3.2. By setting:

CookiePath /

...in your mt-config.cgi, your MT user cookie will be set to the root of your blog's domain instead of subfoldered in your CGIPath. That means that you can use Movable Type's own login cookie to handle the entry editing link display in PHP.

That is to say, in entry context, you can do the following to insert a link to the entry's editing screen:

<?php
    if ($_COOKIE['mt_user']) {
        echo '<a href="'. $cgipath .
            '<$MTAdminScript$>?__mode=view&amp;_type=entry&amp;id='. 
            $entryid .'&amp;blog_id='. $blogid .
            '" title="Edit this entry">[edit]</a>';
    }
?>

At the top of that same template, you'll want to put the following:

<?php
    $cgipath =  $this->tag('MTCGIPath');
    $blogid =  $this->tag('MTBlogID');
    $entryid =  $this->tag('MTEntryID');
    $is_admin = false;

    if ($_COOKIE['mt_user']) { 
       $is_admin = true;
    }
?>

Now, anytime you visit the page, you will see edit links for each entry. Simple, but effective especially when you consider the wealth of other author-specific content you could put on not only your individual entry pages, but all pages (e.g. edit template, edit/delete/junk comments, shortcut links etc).

The Edit Bookmarklet

Of course, perhaps you want to avoid littering your pages with edit links for every piece of content. If so, you can instead create a bookmarklet which does the work for you.

First, let's start with the individual entry template. Insert the following code at the very top:

<?php
    if (isset($_GET['edit'])) {
         header('Location: <$MTCGIPath$>'. 
            '<$MTAdminScript$>?__mode=view&_type=entry'. 
            '&id=<$MTEntryID$>&blog_id=<$MTBlogID$>');
        exit;
    }
?>

Note: The code above is for templates using the Static publishing mode. If you're using the Dynamic publishing mode, you need to replace all MT tags <$MTBlah$> with the corresponding PHP/Smarty function: $this->tag('MTBlah'). See "Dynamic Publishing: PHP Architecture Overview" for more information on this. Below, for brevity, I'll show only the static template code.

Save, rebuild and drag the following link up to your browsers bookmark bar: edit this page in MT.

Now, navigate to one of your blog entries, click on the bookmarklet and you'll be transported to the MT editing page for that entry. If you're using Safari, as I am, and you put that bookmarklet within the first 9 bookmark slots on the bookmark bar, you can even use the Command-Number keystroke (e.g. Command-1 for the first bookmark) to get you there. Soooo easy.

Of course, the nice thing is that this works across installations as long as the template code is included in any blog's templates in that installation. With the same bookmarklet, I can quickly get into MT from the blog's published here at JayAllen.org, at Six Apart or any others I have rights to.

What's more, this technique isn't limited to editing entries. You could craft template code to send you from your main index to your blog's main menu:

<?php
    if (isset($_GET['edit'])) {
         header('Location: <$MTCGIPath$><$MTAdminScript$>'.
            '?__mode=view&_type=entry&blog_id=<$MTBlogID$>');
        exit;
    }
?>

You can make another bookmarklet (show entry comments) to show an entry's comments from an individual entry page, inserting the following code into your individual entry template:

<?php
    if (isset($_GET['comments'])) {
         header('Location: <$MTCGIPath$>'. 
            '<$MTAdminScript$>?__mode=view&_type=entry&blog_id='.
            '<$MTBlogID$>&id=<$MTEntryID$>&tab=comments');
        exit;
    }
?>

You could also use that same bookmarklet on your main index with the template code below (put in your main index template) to quickly get to the blog's full comment listing:

<?php
    if (isset($_GET['edit'])) {
         header('Location: <$MTCGIPath$><$MTAdminScript$>'.
            '?__mode=list_comments&blog_id=<$MTBlogID$>');
        exit;
    }
?>

These are the types of shortcuts and tools that make my life slightly more blissful and I'm sure you can extrapolate further. I'd love to hear some of your favorites or any other shortcuts you commonly use down below in the comments.

Originally from JayAllen - The Daily Journey, on March 9, 2006 10:43 AM

13-year old Stella Browne from New Jersey went missing on Monday has sent her mother a series of chilling text message describing her situation, reports Mobile Tracker. One of the messages reads: "Someone was following me and I just don't remember what happened. I just woke up in a basement. I'm scared." According to the Associated Press, the Jersey City police have classified Browne's disappearance as suspicious. "Browne went missing Monday morning after leaving home for school. Her mother said she's only received text messages from her daughter, and that she has not called nor is she answering her cell phone."

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, on March 9, 2006 10:31 AM

I guess I haven't read too many shareholders reports, but Warren Buffet's 2005 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders is honest, philosophical, and actually entertaining. [pdf] It's easy to see why Buffett has such a cult following. Read it. You'll enjoy it.

(On CEO compensation) "It doesn’t have to be this way: It’s child’s play for a board to design options that give effect to the automatic build-up in value that occurs when earnings are retained. But — surprise, surprise — options of that kind are almost never issued. Indeed, the very thought of options with strike prices that are adjusted for retained earnings seems foreign to compensation "experts," who are nevertheless encyclopedic about every management-friendly plan that exists. ("Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.").

(On the Berkshire Annual Meeting) "Kelly Broz (neé Muchemore), the Flo Ziegfeld of Berkshire, orchestrates both this magnificent shopping extravaganza and the meeting itself. The exhibitors love her, and so do I. Kelly got married in October, and I gave her away. She asked me how I wanted to be listed in the wedding program. I replied "envious of the groom," and that’s the way it went to press."

(via iwtytbr)

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on March 9, 2006 10:30 AM

The conference blurb said “It’s time to build The Attention Economy”. What’s that, I wonder? The shindig was certainly equipped with lots of people holding forth on the subject, so this was my chance to find out. I took to accosting total strangers in the hallways saying “What do you think about this whole ‘Attention’ thing?”...

Originally from ongoing, on March 9, 2006 10:29 AM

Lenovo's C100 is an attempt to overhaul I.B.M.'s staid and expensive line of business computers.

Originally from NYT > Technology, on March 9, 2006 10:29 AM

A retrospective-ish article on Michael Van Valkenburgh as he develops what could be "New York's third great urban landscape," (but who's counting?) Brooklyn Bridge Park: 85 acres along 1.3 miles of the Brooklyn waterfront. Metropolis |...

Originally from Archinect.com Feed, on March 9, 2006 10:28 AM

vadePD is an example PD patch and cocoa application that work together as a test video/3D OS X native application. The Paradiddle framework allows a Cocoa app to commuicate via udp to Pure Data and send/receieve variables.

Originally from unmediated, on March 9, 2006 10:27 AM

Jot is a program that lets designers, artists and animators directly annotate 3D computer graphics models (and animation) for stylized (NPR) rendering.

Originally from unmediated, on March 9, 2006 10:27 AM

"Hobbes and Rousseau argue about Dave Winer."

Originally posted by djacobs from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 10:27 AM

mcclure makes drawings with an exacto knife..

Originally posted by lauren_cornell from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 10:27 AM