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May 12, 2007
ambient devices keynote talk
(infosthetics @ Ambient Information Systems Workshop) some conceptual ambient displays from David Rose's keynote talk this morning: a Sailing Zone display using multiple needles to display the ideal situation to go out sailing (they then all point towards the middle), a thin electronic display built inside a wallet, & several new electronic display designs based on the Weather Watcher, but more geared towards different user profiles, such as bloggers or sailers.more notes about these applications & his interesting talk in general after the break.
[link:ambientclock.com & experiencecurve.com]
Nikon 18-200mm Drop Test
That's a lot of people dropping a $700 lens
bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by djacobs to photography dj-reblog - more about this bookmark...
NYPD Recruits Scrape By in an Expensive Metropolis
The recent $10,000 bump in rookie firefighters' pay is probably a hot topic of conversation at Cosmo's Diner on 23rd St. That's where police recruits often gather before and after their days at the police academy in Gramercy. The new contract between the FDNY and the City leaves new members of the NYPD in the dust, earning only an annual salary of $25,100 during their first six months of duty. Once officers graduate from the academy, their pay rises to $32, 700. The attractiveness of a career that offers a full pension after 20 years on the job, however, quickly pales when one has to contemplate getting by in New York on close to minimum wage. The New York Times looked at a few new recruits and their difficulties getting through lean times:
Mr. Gonell, Mr. Ferrari, Ms. O’Connor and Mr. Torres, along with several other recruits, said that they knew being a police officer would never make them rich, but that their desire to join the force outweighed the financial hardship. But now, four months into their training at the Police Academy, and with graduation less than two months away, several recruits said that they had greatly underestimated just how difficult it would be to make ends meet. Student loans have gone unpaid. Credit card debts have mushroomed. Parents have been tapped, repeatedly and exhaustively, for emergency funds, extra bedrooms and leftovers. “After my mom cooks for me, I spread it out,” said Mr. Gonell, 25, who lives in the Bronx. “Rice and chicken, rice and chicken. I’m going to fly out of here eventually, that’s how much chicken I eat.”O'Connor, who attended law school at Notre Dame and was a paramedic in Queens, is gutting it out with the help of her roommate. Torres was making much more money working as a police officer in Burbank, CA, but the Brooklynite knew that Burbank is not NYC and came home. There are other stories in the Times' article detailing penny-pinching habits that recruits have resorted to and the lengths that NYPD trainees have to go––even as single parents and holding masters degrees––to graduate to the lowest rung of the department's ladder. (NYPD Times Square, by lachance at flickr)
Edwards Campaigns To Make Memorial Day An Antiwar Statement
Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is calling on his supporters to turn this year's Memorial Day into a day of antiwar activism, saying that the best way to honor the troops is to demand an end to the Iraq war.
Air Baron
You got Kirilenkoed!
High Cost of Free Tools
"Adobe and Microsoft have always had better tools, ... in large part because their platforms require tools - that's a big part of their business model. ... If you choose a platform that needs tools, if you give up the viral soft collaboration of View Source and copy-and-paste mashups and being able to jam jQuery in the hole that used to have Prototype in it, you lose what gave the web its distributed evolution and incrementalism."
When Splitting the Check Gives You a Splitting Headache
How I missed the NYT piece about splitting the check at celebratory restaurant meals I'll never know. Serious Eats friend Megnut was all over it, but somehow we missed it. Well, there's no use crying over spilled wine.
Why I am so chagrined is that piece spoke to me in so many ways. As a nondrinker I have been burned so many times it has probably cost me enough money over the years to pay for my son's college tuition for a year. A few years ago at a dinner for a colleague retiring from a trade committee, I remember being asked to pony up $200 for a dinner featuring many expensive bottles of wine, of which I had nary a drop. What was especially galling was that many of the people at the gathering were just going to expense the dinner, while I, as a freelancer, was going to have to reach into my own pocket to pay for a lot of wine I didn't drink and couldn't afford.
I don't have much of a poker face, and I'm sure I looked positively stricken as I reached into my pocket to fetch a credit card. I just felt too embarrassed to say anything, though everyone at the table knew both that I don't drink and that I had no entity to hand in an expense report to be reimbursed. And the fact is I regard all of the people assembled at the gathering to be caring, sensitive, kindly people. This was just a blind spot for all of them.
Just as I was about to place my credit card in the check folder, a famous food writer who worked for a very large media company came to my rescue. "This is ridiculous, Ed. This is an expensive dinner, and you don't even drink. I'm buying your dinner." I assumed she was going to expense my dinner and her own, but I was just so relieved and thankful I didn't even bother to ask if that was going to be the case.
But from that moment on I vowed to overcome my embarrassment and discomfort and speak up at these occasions. And my friends, family, and colleagues, who are a generously spirited lot, have all responded with understanding words and gestures of support. I still have to bring up the subject myself, but it's a small price to pay to avoid feeling taken advantage of.
The alcohol?no alcohol situation is easy to understand and do something about. When one person orders foie gras and caviar while another orders a cheeseburger and french fries, that is a more difficult issue to grapple with. I almost feel in that case that the fancy-pants orderer must step up and volunteer to pay extra for the luxury items. But if it's a matter of one person ordering the $20 pork chop and another ordering the $28 rack of lamb, that is a check I will comfortably split. It's all a matter of degrees. There are no absolutes here, are there? Are there other nuanced tactics for dealing with this situation?
Billions Of Dollars In Oil Money Missing In Iraq
Between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels a day of Iraq's declared oil production over the past four years is unaccounted for and could have been siphoned off through corruption or smuggling, according to a draft American government report.
Using an average of $50 a barrel, the report said the discrepancy was valued at $5 million to $15 million daily.
May 11, 2007
Video: Kosbees, episode 1
"is that legal?" "it's satire."
Rumor: uprgaded Mac laptops now, LED subnotebook later
The MacBook Pro gets new chipset, while the elusive MacBook Pro Thin will debut with a backlit-LED display later this year.
Majority At World Bank Want Wolfowitz Out
A majority of countries on the World Bank board believe Paul Wolfowitz should resign as President of the World Bank, bank board sources from rich and developing nations said on Friday.
"It is now very clear that a majority of members think Mr. Wolfowitz must resign," said one board source from a developing country, which received instructions from its capital this week not to support Wolfowitz's continued leadership.
number one smokers
az élet azért jó, mert újra lehet kezdeni Latinovits Zoltán, Emlékszem a röpülés boldogságára, Budapest, Magvet?, 1985, p. 36.
New Baghdad Journal
Steve Mumford is back from Iraq (thankfully) and has posted a new installment of his Baghdad Journal on artnet.com.
The new piece describes getting back to Iraq via Kuwait and introduces us to some of the interesting characters (journalists and bloggers) that he meets along the way. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the very black humor of Caleb Schaber:
[…] a very tattooed blogger, artist, musician and bartender who once ran for mayor of Seattle and writes for something called the Northern Nevada Newswire. He shows off his latest tattoo: a dotted line around his neck, with the inscription “cut here” (also in Arabic, helpfully, on the back) […]
I saw Steve a few weeks ago at Postmasters and he told me he had been embedded at the 86th Combat Support Hospital (AKA the Baghdad ER). I’m assuming in his future installments we’ll read and see more of that.
Foie gras ducks don't wear shoes so neither should we
Regina Schrambling over at Gastropoda:
Probably the most idiotic letter I have ever read in a newspaper came from the soft-headed woman whimpering about foie gras who said she would not want a feeding chute jammed down her throat, therefore ducks should be spared. By that logic, the fact that ducks would not want shoes rammed onto their webs means humans have to give up footwear. Aren’t there online forums where this kind of nincompoopery can go hide?
She has no permalinks so I've quoted the whole thing here. Of all the anti foie gras arguments, I too find the anthropomorphological one the least compelling.
35% of Ground Zero Is Zero
I may no longer be New York’s number one public servant—as I was on the day our city was attacked in the most disgusting act of mass murder our country has ever known—but I’ll always be the number one fan of the greatest baseball team in the history of the world, the New York Yankees.
I’ve loved the Yankees since I was a little boy. I hoarded every Joe DiMaggio bubblegum card I could find. My friends and I took the subway up to the Bronx every chance we could. Nobody cheered harder for Mickey and Whitey and Yogi, and if a kid wearing a Dodgers cap happened to wander into our neighborhood, you better believe we jumped him. You had to be a tough little SOB to be a kid in those days. I remember one boy who I went to school with, a Brooklyn fan, loved to go on and on about Mantle, calling him “Mick the Hick,” and all that. Just so happens, his family’s liquor store burned down one night, and he and his Mom and his Dad had to live on the street ‘til the social workers came and took him away. Hey, they weren’t called the Bums for nothing!
All of which is why it’s so hurtful to me to hear these vicious rumors swirling around about the four World Series rings I own, one for each of the Yankees’ four World Championships during my term as Mayor.
The “controversy” apparently stems from the fact that I haven’t paid taxes on these rings, which are collectively worth roughly $200,000. And in the “technical sense,” that’s true. I haven’t paid taxes on them. But for very, very good reasons.
In 1996, the Yankees won their first World Series in almost twenty years. For all of us who grew up in the 1940s and 50s, the idea of going twenty years without a World Championship was literally like a vision of Hell. So when Charlie Hayes squeezed that pop-up for the final out, I guarantee you, no one in that stadium was thinking about the taxes they had to pay on their World Series rings, except possibly Darryl Strawberry. Even next season, when George Steinbrenner and Joe Torre themselves handed me my ring as a show of gratitude for all I had done for the city, the incredible warmth generated by that fantastic comeback victory over the Braves was still palpable in the streets of New York, and I wasn’t about to sully that magical moment for our city by putting a price tag on transcendence.
In 1998, the Yankees won 114 games, then steamrolled the Rangers, Indians and Padres to win the Championship in the most dominant fashion since Babe Ruth wore pinstripes. This was the greatest team that any of us have seen in our lifetimes, the gold standard of modern baseball. And when you’re that dominant, some rules just don’t apply. Tax rules, for instance. I admit it: I personally told every member of that team that they didn’t have to pay taxes on their World Series rings. Now this may not be, strictly speaking, “legal,” but when you win more baseball games in a single year than any team ever, you get to write your own ticket in some respects. So when I received my souvenir ring from the ’98 team, I wasn’t about to show them up by paying taxes on it myself.
In 1999, the Yankees again dominated the post-season, going 11-1 on the way to another World Championship over the Braves. God as my witness, I literally did not realize that I had a World Series ring from this season. I have no memory of receiving one, and if George and Joe and Brian had offered me one as a gift, I would have turned it down multiple times before accepting in order to spare them any embarrassment. But according to our inventory, I apparently have one. The only conclusion I can reach is that the ring was included in a suitcase of memorabilia that Bernie Kerik dropped off at Gracie Mansion one night, asking me to “just hold onto it for a little while,” which of course I did. And of course, less than two years later, our city was struck by the terrible events of September 11th. And after that day, all New Yorkers learned that there were far, far more important things than who might have asked whom to hold onto what, for whatever reason.
In 2000, the Yankees prevailed over the Mets in the first “Subway Series” the city had seen since my boyhood, and it did not disappoint, with the Yankees prevailing in five closely-fought games. When George and Joe presented me with my 2000 ring—that one I remember, because I tell you, it’s really a beauty, with a diamond the size of my son Andrew—I carefully weighed the pros and cons of declaring it on my tax returns. And while reporting the gift might have been the “by-the-book” option, I had other things to consider, namely, the fact of the Subway Series.
As Mayor, I always had to walk a delicate line. While I was and am an unabashed Yankee fan, in my public capacity, I’m also the Mayor of the Mets, as well. And while I may have suspected that Bobby Valentine was a deeply amoral and despicable human being, and that Turk Wendell was a goddamn ferret-loving freak, they were still my citizens. And so while I can delight in the Yankees’ victory and ride in their victory parades as a fan, I have to be more circumspect as Mayor. Had I declared that 2000 ring on my taxes, wouldn’t it have been a slap in the face to the Mets, who already had suffered the misfortune of encountering an incomparably better team in the World Series? I wasn’t about to put it down in black and white that “New York is a Yankees city! Screw you, Mets!” Because we’re all New Yorkers. And that’s a fact that was never driven home so fully as on that horrible morning when we watched those burning bodies plummeting from our raped and wounded—but still beloved!—Twin Towers.
So no, I haven’t paid taxes on those rings. And I’m not going to. Because the Yankee pride they represent belongs to all of us. As a city, we’ve paid enough already, in blood and tears and misery and medical costs from all the lung cancer. (I swear, the best knowledge we had said that the air around the site was safe; Bernie Kerik oversaw the study himself.) I’m not going to let the Village Voice and Al Qaeda win this round.
So let’s go Yankees in 2007. And God help us should we ever be attacked again, particularly at a time when we’re vulnerable and exposed by my absence from public office. Because who knows how great the devastation might be, besides me?
Rudy Giuliani dresses like a total slut, and is running for President.
The Raw Story | Former Powell aide says Bush, Cheney guilty of 'high crimes'
A former top State Department aide to Colin Powell said today that President Bush and Vice President Cheney are more deserving of impeachment than was Bill Clinton.
Giuliani Tries to Clarify Abortion Stance
Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani yesterday sought to quell a growing controversy over abortion that has disrupted his presidential campaign. Restating his support for abortion rights, he asked Republican voters to look beyond that issue to the totality of his platform and record.
Street artist Banksy gets the New Yorker treatment with a...
Street artist Banksy gets the New Yorker treatment with a profile in this week's issue. "The graffitist's impulse is akin to a blogger's: write some stuff, quickly, which people may or may not read. Both mediums demand wit and nimbleness. They arouse many of the same fears about the lowering of the public discourse and the taking of undeserved liberties." Complex tracked down the alleged photos of Banksy mentioned in the article. Print magazine recently wrote a piece on Banksy as well. (link)
The Onion interviews Acceptable.tv
American Idol for YouTube shows is a pretty decent summary of the concept
Evening Post: Stressing over Banksy
via GrammarPolice, April 29, 2007:
Cue Alanis
Courtesy of Crooked Timber. There's also news of a hilarious attempted theft. I believe that one of Banksy's collectors (or someone who's considering buying?) reads this blog; hope this news isn't too stressful to read.
Posted by Kriston | Link | Art | Comments (1)
The accidental ingestion of a $62 burger
After my friend had finished her meal, she was then presented with a $75 check. A mix-up at New York's BLT Burger results in the accidental ingestion of the $62 Japanese Kobe Burger rather than the $16 American Kobe Burger. Yikes!
? Twitter vs. Blogger redux
Regarding the Twitter vs. Blogger thing from earlier in the week, I took another stab at the faulty Twitter data. Using some educated guesses and fitting some curves, I'm 80-90% sure that this is what the Twitter message growth looks like:
These graphs cover the following time periods: 8/23/1999 - 3/7/2002 for Blogger and 3/21/2006 - 5/7/2007 for Twitter. It's important to note that the Twitter trend is not comprised of actual data points but is rather a best-guess line, an estimate based on the data. Take it as fact at your own risk. (More specifically, I'm more sure of the general shape of the curve than with the steepness. My gut tells me that the curve is probably a little flatter than depicted rather than steeper.)
That said, most of what I wrote in the original post still holds, as do the comments in subsequent thread. Twitter did not grow as fast as the faulty data indicated, but it did get to ~6,000,000 messages in about half the time of Blogger. Here are the reasons I offered for the difference in growth:
1. Twitter is easier to use than Blogger was and had a lower barrier to entry.
2. Twitter has more ways to update (web, phone, IM, Twitterific) than did Blogger.
3. Blogger's growth was limited by a lack of funding.
4. Twitter had a larger pool of potential users to draw on.
5. Twitter has a built-in social aspect that Blogger did not.And commenters in the thread noted that:
6. Twitter's 140-character limit encourages more messages.
7. More people are using Twitter for conversations than was the case with Blogger.What's interesting is that these seeming advantages (in terms of message growth potential) for Twitter didn't result in higher message growth than Blogger over the first 9-10 months. But then the social and network effects (#5 and #7 above) kicked in and Twitter took off.
Quick Hits: Only One Remains; No High Five
Photo of shaved Mets players in San Francisco by AP/Ben Margot
- It looks like only one player hasn't agreed to have their head shaved in the shave-fest for the Mets. Almost everyone in the Mets clubhouse is in on the head shaving. Even Mets GM Omar Minaya got into the act. While Aaron Sele won't be shaving his head until tomorrow (he's taking family photos today), Jose Reyes is undecided on the fate of his hair. At least Willie Randolph is a little forgiving on Reyes' desire to keep his hair, "He doesn’t have a regular ’do, he’s got a little style to it. It’s more of a decision to make." Who's doing all the clipping for the team? Centerfielder Carlos Beltran. Bald heads - perfect for playing baseball in the summer.
- If you're going to run onto the field at Yankee Stadium, don't expect Hideki Matsui to give you a high five. Last night in the 9th inning, two fans ran onto the field at the stadium. One fan ran towards the Yankee leftfielder with his hand up, apparently looking for a high five. Matsui just nudged him aside and the fan was later tackled and arrested. The other fan was arrested near home plate. Both were charged with disorderly conduct, interfering with a sporting event and criminal trespass.
<My Own Private Reality> exhibition of new media art at Edith Russ Haus, Oldenburg
The exhibition includes the work of: # Angie Waller # Annina Rüst # Cory Arcangel # Exonemo # Human Beans # Jillian Mcdonald # Jonah Brucker-Cohen / Mike Bennett # Les Liens Invisibles # Marisa Olson # Miranda July / Harrell Fletcher # Nick Cro
Junk food should look like junk food
I wish we could go back to the good old days when junk food looked like junk food, healthy food looked like healthy food, and there wasn't a whole lot of confusion. Coke is now offering Diet Coke Plus, fortified with vitamins and minerals, and further bluring the line between junk food and "healthy" food. [via The Ethicurian]
Would the Real Tom Colicchio Please Stand Up?
One of these men played in a Major League record 2,632 consecutive baseball games. The other is Tom Colicchio. Sean from Midtown writes: "Which is which?! Or would that be, “which is ‘Wich?!?”
What To Eat This Weekend In New York
This weekend abounds with serious eatin' opportunities for local New Yorkers. Saturday's double header line-up starts with the Brooklyn Pig Fest from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. at the Tobacco Warehouse at Brooklyn Bridge Park. The all-you-can-eat menu will include 3 whole hogs, BBQ ribs and chicken, sausage, slaw, beans, rolls, and of course, beer.
Still hungry? Chase your pig with some crawfish at Crawfish in the Cove, a full on crawfish boil with all the fixins, beer and hurricanes. Proceeds go to the Common Ground Relief Collective dedicated to aiding and rebuilding New Orleans.
After you've celebrated Mother's Day with Sunday brunch, stroll through a street fare with Buddha Drinks Fanta's visual field guide to New York City street fair fare.Oy. I'm full just thinking about it.
All the details after the jump.
THE DETAILS
Brooklyn Pig Fest
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn
1:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Advance tickets: $75
Tickets at the door: $85
Tickets available at: www.brooklynbrewery.comCrawfish in the Cove
Saturday, May 12, 2007
2420 FDR Drive Service Road East (@22nd Street), Manhattan
5:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Advance tickets only: $50
Tickets available at: crawfishny.org
Gastropoda Pulls No Punches
Regina Schrambling's blog Gastropoda is a viciously entertaining read. Here's the least vitriolic (but still pointed) item from today's line-up:
At least once a day a news item makes me think of that old saying, "Figures lie and liars figure." The latest was the "study" correlating the incidence of obesity in different cities with the recipes run in local newspapers. I admit I have a dachshund in this fight, but really, can this actually be true at a time when everything you read says newspapers are going the way of the Walkman? Somehow I suspect fast junk, microwavable garbage and the obsolescence of walking have had more of an iPod impact than the most calorific concoction ever printed under my byline. Besides, everybody knows reading is good exercise. So, for that matter, is cooking.
Interactive Tax Graphic
How much money are you putting in to the Iraq War and national debt interest payments? I'm in for more than I'd prefer.
Eating Organic On A Food Stamp Budget
My friend, Rebecca Blood, is 2 weeks into her month long project of eating on a food stamp budget while maintaining her and her husband's normal standard of eating - organic food and one alcoholic drink with every dinner. Her budget: $74.00/week or $320.80/month, the USDA "Thrifty" standard for a family of 2 adults, aged 20-50 years.So far, so good! She came in under budget in week 1, and based on her photos documenting the project, it certainly looks like they are enjoying some tasty and filling meals.
Backing up is hard to do
Smart folders, encrypted disk images, and importing keychains can help if you lose the data on your Mac... and your regular backups.
'Life Cycle'
Rhizome Terms: Animation, art world, Audio, community, digital, exhibition, Flash, Generative, interact, Internet, net.art, network, public space, Shockwave, social space, Software, space, Virtual, virtual reality
Artist Terms: art, belgian, blog, digital, european, flash, flash greetings, image, interactive, internet art, Laure-Anne Jacobs, life cycle, mixed media, news, photography, pixel, software, sound design
On Friday May 4th at 8 p.m., the Antwerp International Press Centre Flanders shows the virtual exhibition 'Life Cycle' by the artists Laure-Anne Jacobs (imaging) and Missfit (sound design). 'Life Cycle' is the fourth edition of a virtual exhibition series of the online art project Anina.be. The new exhibition presents the life cycle of people in digital imaging and sounds. The exhibition 'Life Cycle' contains two parts. The first part – In the City – shows the visitor the confrontation between the daily live in the city with contemporary or recent world events. All these images are digitally mastered. The second part – Flash Greetings – shows the life cycle of the human being with ten portraits, also digitally mastered. The models who are showed in Flash Greetings get also the possibility to spread their portraits as virtual greeting-cards into their online communities and the internet. Flash Greetings has an obvious interactive undertone, with online visitors getting the opportunity to pick up images from a moving screen, puzzling together a portrait and explore the virtual installation, following his own route. As a result, the exhibition becomes a personal experience for each visitor. Anina.be is an initiative of Laure-Anne Jacobs. For the first time, she shows her own work on the virtual platform. Anina.be wants to create an interaction between artists from different disciplines, but also an interaction between the art and the public. For this edition, Laure-Anne Jacobs created a cooperation with sound artist Missfit (pseudonym for Aernoudt Jacobs), who created sound-effects for the images.
A brief history of the tshirt, specifically the ironic tee....
A brief history of the tshirt, specifically the ironic tee. "Whether you choose to admit it or not, chances are a critical reserve of self-esteem rests somewhere near the middle of your T-shirt drawer. For within this darkened, hidden quarter lies dormant a secret weapon so witty, so elusively allusive, or just so damn hip it finds itself swathing your chest on only the most important occasions." (link)
McCartney says "Beatles coming online soon"
Paul McCartney sure is making the rounds in the news lately, but this time he talks about the Beatles and when they're going to be bringing their music online.
It's a jungle (of Apple predictions) out there
UBS analyst Ben Reitzes has some predictions about Mac, Apple TV, and iPhone sales numbers, in addition to being fascinated by "ecosystems."
Brooklyn Blogfest notes
Went to the Old Stone House this evening to attend Brooklyn Blogfest. I had forgotten to RSVP, in fact I didn't know you had to RSVP from the postings about it, so after a few minutes of stand by I was let upstairs into the packed room. The event was created last year by Louise Crawford, of Only The Blog Knows Brooklyn, and she invited a great selection of local bloggers among them Brownstoner, No Land Grab, Gowanus Lounge, Atlantic Yards Report, CreativeTimes, and Steven Johnson from Outside.in. I've just made a "blidget" of Outside.in's coverage of my zip code.Many of the bloggers mentioned should be represented in the headline flow. Themes covered were the opportunities created by the failure of mainstream media to cover local issues,the importance of blogs covering the Ratner development, blogging in areas that are gentrifying, and Brownstoner's somewhat cautionary account of trying to make a go of it his site as a full time gig. I introudced myself to Flatbush Gardener whom I very pleased is listed on GardenVoices.
May 10, 2007
Museum-piece Gameboy shoes
Mmm ... no.
These were created strictly as a museum exhibit, and are on display in museums across the UK.
I think I either dreamed these in a nightmare, or they've been around for ever, and I've posted them before. Either way, please don't let me see them again, k gg thx?
Profile by Ken Auletta of Walt Mossberg, the WSJ's technology...
Profile by Ken Auletta of Walt Mossberg, the WSJ's technology columnist. It was interesting reading Mossberg's opinion of the Sprint/Samsung UpStage. A couple friends of mine were testing this phone before it came out and it was one of the most poorly designed technology products that I've ever held in my hand. Who knows if the iPhone will actually be worth a crap, but Steve Jobs must rub his hands together with glee when he sees his competitors come out with stuff like this. Mossberg was too easy on it. Auletta has previously profiled Barry Diller, Pointcast, Andy Grove, and Nathan Myhrvold for the New Yorker. (link)
Han Solo carbonite chocolate bar how to
This is too cool: instructions on how to make a Han Solo in carbonite chocolate bar. Looks just like when Jabba dipped him at the end of Empire, but more delicious. [via BoingBoing]
A Times editorial weighs in on chefs and debt
The New York Times offers an editorial today about Chefs Topped With Debt and accuses school administrators of viewing students as administrators to "little more than dollar signs."
The art of non-verbal attraction
PsyBlog has just published a couple of short articles on non-verbal communication, one examining a common myth, and the other looking at how it indicates attraction between people who've just met.
The first article is on the research that debunks the myth that '93% of communication is nonverbal'.
Just the precision of those sorts of statements make me suspicious. To quote the wise words of comedian Vic Reeves "88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot".
The second article examines a study that looked at the dynamic patterns of non-verbal communication when men and women met for the first time, and looked at how these patterns were related to attraction.
Contrary to many previous findings, attraction was predicted by patterns of synchronisation and not simple mirroring of body language. What emerged were rhythmic structures of movement synchrony - patterns of bodily movement people adopted. In common with previous research, Grammer et al. (1998) found it was women who tended to start and control these patterns. Indeed, the more interested a woman was in a man, the more complicated these patterns became.
There's more on this impressive study in the PsyBlog article.
Link to article on myth of non-verbal communication.
Link to article 'The Nonverbal Symphony of Attraction'.
Arcade Fire Fans vs Radio City Security
Last night Arcade Fire and The National played their third New York show of the week, and the first show of the inaugural High Line Festival (which kicked off at Radio City Music Hall). David Bowie, co-founder and curator of the festival and Arcade Fire's #1 fan, was in attendance but didn't perform with the band as expected. He also didn't announce the kick off to the festival - nor does he seem to know what the High Line actually is. Ah, rock stars. The real story seems to be one that took place off-stage. The Gowanus Lounge has a full report on the fights that broke out and "the manhandling of at least one fan by Radio City security" at last night's show.
"It all started late in the show when Arcade Fire's Win Butler urged the audience to come up to the stage. "Jesus Fucking Christ," he said. "Come up here. What can they do to you?" What they could do, it turned out, was rush you, jump you, beat you and drag you from Radio City in a headlock...The action kicked off between Rows AA and GG in the aisle between the 300 and 400 section of the orchestra when someone took Mr. Butler at his word and pushed past ushers...At that point, about a half-dozen employees descended on him, trying to stop him. They pushed him into the seats and we saw at least one (and possibly more) of the Radio City security employees punching the concert goer...seeing someone who's done nothing wrong other than try to get near the stage getting jumped and punched rather fucks with our concert experience. We wouldn't say it was a savage beating, but security was punching the gentleman. After the show, we approached a supervisor and asked why excessive force had been used. She told us to mind our own business and denied that anything improper had happened."Tuesday night at United Palace Theater, Win Butler also invited the entire audience up on stage with the band and everything seemed to go smoothly. While a rush of fans towards the stage may get the security on guard, this has happened before without anyone getting hurt - punching fans (and denying it!) is a little bit out of control. More photos from the show last night, below.
Photographing the Fish Market of the Early '80s
Almost two years after the Fulton Fish Market relocated to Hunts Point, a new book documents the market of days gone by. South Street, published by Columbia University Press, is a collection of photographs by Barbara G. Mensch, who began taking pictures of the fish market when she first moved to a nearby loft in 1979. The photographs are haunting and intricate, whether they document piles of dead fish on the street or a fishmonger taking a smoking break.
“These are not the usual off-kilter snapshots of the hurly-burly around the stalls, the marketmen staring own at their fish, taken unawares: there is an eye contact, a commitment to see and be seen, a complicity between photographer and subject that makes all the difference,” writes essayist Phillip Lopate in the book's introduction.So why was the old market – the largest in the Western Hemisphere, the largest on the Atlantic Coast, the oldest wholesale fish market operating continuously in one spot – such a compelling landmark? Lopate explains: “The older it got, the more its funky, handmade ways of doing business seemed a precious last vestige of historic Gotham.” Some more recent photographs of the Fulton Fish Market: Some by Kerfuffle & Zeitgeist and MacRonin47 has a Flickr set of the fish market's last day.
Harry Potter = Luke Skywalker. Also, entire industries created by...
Harry Potter = Luke Skywalker. Also, entire industries created by Harry Potter are due to come to an end with the publication of the final book. (link)
Fun with Digg's API
"Digg's api was released about a week ago a while ago, and since that time, various flash projects have surfaced, probably due to that pesky contest. But I don't have any flash experience, so PHP, here we come. We're going to make various tag clouds, a Reddit clone, Reddit/Better RSS feed, and a live diggs app."
Using the Permaculture Zone Principle for Getting Things Done
Cultivating your home: Permaculture zones for getting things done. An Australian permaculture expert applies the "zone" principle to work and life. "Zone 1 can only be as big as your reach and attention. [...] When there is some task you want to remember to do, or get motivation to start, just put it in zone 1 – places your hands and eyes naturally reach – and tasks will seem to just ‘complete themselves’ for you. [...] Zone one is precious; so don’t waste it on storage."
? kottke.org banned from Technorati top 100?
Since swearing off Technorati a couple of years ago, I've been checking back every few months to see if the situation has improved. The site is definitely more responsive but their data problems seemingly remain, at least with regard to kottke.org; Google Blog Search gives consistently better results and easy access to RSS feeds of searches.
Technorati recently introduced something called the Technorati Authority number, which is a fancy name for the number of blogs linking to a site in the last six months. Curious as to where kottke.org fell on the authority scale, I checked out the top 100 blogs list. Not there, so I proceeded to the "Everything in the known universe about kottke.org" page where a portion of that huge cache of kottke.org knowledge was the authority number: 5,094. Looking at the top 100 list, that should put the site at #47, nestled between The Superficial and fishki.net, but it's not there. Technorati also currently states that kottke.org hasn't been updated in the last day, despite several updates since then and my copy of MT pinging Technorati after each update.
Maybe kottke.org has been intentionally excluded because I've been so hard on them in the past. Or maybe it's just a glitch (or two) in their system. Or maybe it's an indication of larger problems with their service. Either way, as the company is attempting to offer an authentic picture of the blogosphere, this doesn't seem like the type of rigor and accuracy that should send reputable media sources like the BBC, Washington Post, NY Times, and the Wall Street Journal scurrying to their door looking for reliable data about blogs.
Update: As of 3:45pm EST, the top 100 list has been updated to include kottke.org. The site also picked up this post right away, but failed to note a subsequent post published a few minutes later..
The Arcade Fire
May 09 2007 -- Canadian rock band Arcade Fire performs at Radio City Music Hall in New York, NY as part of the High Line Festival.
Engadget reports that over 200 million Nokia 1100s have been sold
I've written about this phone before - when it was picked as the billionth phone Nokia sold (in Nigeria), when Nokia announced that they had sold 100 million of them a little over a year ago, and when commenting on the amazing growth of subscribers in Africa.
Yeah, we work so hard on fancy high-end super phones. But, let's not forget the hundreds of millions who just want to be part of this Hyperconnected Age.
A voice-SMS phone is then more than enough.
Link [hat-tip to Peter B]: Nokia's 1100 handset: over 200 million served - Engadget:
You heard right, this low-end candybar has put the 100 million iPods, 50 million RAZRs, 10 million Chocolates, and 115 million PlayStation 2 consoles to shame in terms of sheer units moved.I think the Nokia 3300-series phones also sold over 100 million. And now the Nokia 1600 is selling briskly. What about the seven phones just launched in India. Will any of these be the next to top the Nokia 1100?
Buckwheat Crêpes
Wandering Chopsticks has a great post on buckwheat crêpes that starts off with a trip to a friend of a friend's favorite Parisian crêperie—the directions going something like "In the Latin Quarter by the Saint Michel metro, past the Easy Internet, look for the Tunisian bakery but don't go inside the bakery, there's a window on the outside corner where they make crepes. But you don't want the old guy, or the really young guy, but the third guy."—and ends with a short video demonstration of how to make some without a griddle or crêpe pan.
I myself prefer sweetened wheat flour crêpes (crêpes sucrées) to those made of buckwheat (the savoury crêpes salées, or galettes), but will never turn a good crêpe of any kind down. What fillings go into your favorite crêpe? [via Tastespotting]
In accordance with David Chang's wishes, I'm not really talking about...
In accordance with David Chang's wishes, I'm not really talking about this but I will briefly direct your attention to the following: Momofuku Noodle Bar is moving to a bigger location down the street and a new restaurant called Momofuku Ko, presumably with less seats, will take its place, making for a total of three Momofuku restaurants within a 2 block area. (link)
La Cucaracha & The Boondocks Vs. Don Imus!
This is like Marvel Team-Up!
Our boy Lalo Alcaraz is also a huge fan of Aaron McGruder. Enter The Beandocks!
Administration Withheld E-Mails That Show Rove's Involvement In Attorney Scandal
The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove's, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. The withheld records show that D. Kyle Sampson, who was then-chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, consulted with White House officials in drafting two letters to Congress that appear to have misrepresented the circumstances of Griffin's appointment as U.S. attorney and of Rove's role in supporting Griffin.
Edwards Adviser Joe Trippi Slams Iraq Compromise Strategies As "Baloney" | TPMCafe
Trippi on the race
Amit Singh talks about Mac OS X Internals and MacFUSE
In the latest episode of the Technometria podcast, Google's manager of Macintosh Engineering talks about his book and MacFUSE.
Photo gallery of heavy metal bands from the early 80s....
Photo gallery of heavy metal bands from the early 80s. These aren't glossy magazine photos...they're snapshots from the crowd, backstage, and at the afterparties. (link)
It’s Rickey’s Damn Ball!
So Rickey had a good day, right? Rickey went to a ballgame the other night, and Rickey caught a foul ball. And that’s real good, because Rickey never caught a foul ball before. Now Rickey’s made lots of catches in his Hall of Fame career, and all of them were great, because Rickey makes great catches. But Rickey never caught a foul ball in the stands as a spectator. That was a special moment for Rickey, almost as special as when Rickey won a World Series, but not as special as when Rickey became the greatest of all time.
So you can imagine how Rickey felt when he turns on his brand new Visio HD television to ESPN2, and sees those goofy chumps Mike and Mike making fun of Rickey. Mike and Mike make it sound like I took the ball out of the hands of some kid, like Rickey’s some sort of chump that has nothing better to do than upset kids and steal things that don’t belong to Rickey.
So let’s get some things straight. First of all, of course Rickey’s going to catch the ball instead of the kid. Rickey’s taller than the kid, by at least two feet. Scientists call that Natural Selection. And even if that wasn’t the case, Rickey’s got great ups. That ball was Rickey’s the minute it left the bat, and everyone knew it.
Second, Rickey is a fan of the kids. Rickey loves signing autographs for kids, taking pictures with kids, and even slipping kids some extra cash when folks aren’t looking. Hard to believe, even for Rickey, but Rickey was a kid once upon a time. Rickey knows being a kid is hard work, especially since you can’t make any money as a kid. Rickey remembers doing chores as a kid to get enough money to buy himself some ice cream on the weekend. Rickey cleaned a lot of gutters and pulled a lot of weeds for that Rocky Road, and Rickey don’t want anyone else to do that, too. Rickey’s a fan of hard work, but he’s also a fan of the kids. That’s why Rickey offered an autographed ball to the kid that was next to Rickey when that great catch was made. Rickey doesn’t want anyone to leave empty handed. Rickey is a people person, and that includes kids.
So to all those gum-flapping jibber-jabbering fools like Mike and Mike - the ball was hit to me! Damn right it’s my ball! And Rickey did what Rickey always does when the ball is hit to Rickey! He catches the damn ball! Rickey’s gonna break it down for you. Rickey got the ball, so Rickey’s happy. The kid got an autographed Rickey ball, so you know he’s happy. The press gets another story about Rickey, so they’re happy. So shut up about Rickey, Mike and Mike! Stick to talking about stuff you know, like nothing!
Pay Rickey!
The Long Take
Quick Post
A collection of great, long tracking shots with explanation.
World's smallest praying mantis!
From a reader!
So my friend posted this picture and I just had to send it over to you. I fell in love with your world's smallest pancake when you first posted it, and have been enjoying small things ever since.
Thank you Serenity! Love the little PM!
Shuna's Knife Skills Class Comes to NYC
Friend of Serious Eats, Shuna Fish Lydon, is bringing her knife skills class to New York City. The class costs $68 and will be held Thursday June 21, 6:30 - 9 p.m. at a Upper West Side location. Sign up now to secure a spot. Still undecided? Check out Shuna's description of the class.
The Thrill Of Fear
I did something with Björk's new album Volta that I haven't done in a long time: I didn't download a leaked copy or receive an advance cd, and I bought it the day it came out in a record store. I did that for three reasons:
1) Novelty and nostalgia. I still buy cds here and there, but it's been quite a while since I purchased one without being extremely well acquainted with its contents. In fact, Björk's 2001 album Vespertine was among the last that I experienced without knowing exactly what I was getting into. I suspect that my disappointment with that record had a lot to do with feeling burned by my monetary investment -- for the longest time, I only really liked "Hidden Place," "Unison," and "Cocoon," but I've recently discovered that I do enjoy at least three or four others from that album, and hey, Medulla isn't so bad either. It's my fault, really -- I was being arrogant and stubborn, and I made no effort to meet her halfway when it became clear that she wasn't going to give me exactly what I wanted.
2) It didn't leak in full until very late in the game. I can hold out for a couple weeks, but ultimately, my will is not very strong.
3) I was thoroughly wowed by the songs I heard in advance of its release. Since I wasn't very into Medulla or Vespertine, my expectations were fairly low -- all I was hope for was at least a couple good upbeat dancey numbers. My wish was granted immediately: "Earth Intruders" rekindled my faith in her and prompted me to reexamine the previous two albums, and "Innocence" surpassed my wildest dreams by being more or less EXACTLY what I've been wanting from her for all this time. "Wanderlust" didn't leave a strong first impression when I saw her perform it on Saturday Night Live, but the youtube clip of the aggressive electro-punk number "Declare Independence" from Coachella kinda blew my mind.
Now that I have the record and have been listening to it for a couple days, I'm fairly certain that those are the four best cuts on Volta, but I'm not at all disappointed about that. How could I be? Those four songs are brilliant, and some of the best material that anyone has released this year. The other selections aren't bad, either -- "Vertebrae By Vertebrae" and "I Know Who You Are" have their charm, and I'm learning to appreciate "The Dull Flame Of Desire" and "My Juvenile" despite the mildly aggravating presence of Antony Hegarty. Volta may not be on the same level of consistent greatness as Debut, Post, or Homogenic, but it's a strong piece of work, and a welcome return to eclecticism after two albums that were weakened somewhat by their adherence to gimmicky high concepts.
Björk "Innocence" - As I mentioned earlier, "Innocence" is the song I've been wanting from Björk for a long time now, and I suppose what I mean is that musically and lyrically, it is basically the third part of a trilogy which also includes my two favorite tracks in her discography, "Big Time Sensuality" and "Alarm Call." This is the Björk that I love the most: Upbeat, courageous, optimistic, and in full control of her neuroses. "Big Time Sensuality" confronts the future with enthusiasm, "Alarm Call" is defiantly unafraid of the world and its inhabitants, and "Innocence" conquers fear by embracing its thrill. The message is essentially the same in each song, but her authority increases as she goes along -- "Big Time Sensuality" is a youthful song about faith and risk, and "Innocence" has the perspective to understand the mechanics of overcoming anxiety. Whereas her declarations in "Alarm Call" seem like surprising self-revelations, her words in "Innocence" seem directed outside of herself, as a bit of advice for the listener. It's Björk in life coach mode: "neurosis only attaches itself to fertile ground where it can flourish;" "fear is a powerful drug -- overcome it and you think you can do anything!;" "fear of losing energy is draining." The best thing is that she's absolutely correct, and though she is extraordinarily hopeful in her encouragement, she doesn't lose sight of the immense difficulty and painful work involved in fighting our worst impulses. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)
Executed man's last request honored -- pizza for homeless - CNN.com
Executed man's last request honored -- pizza for homeless -- after cheapass prison officials reject the request. What's the matter with those people?
It's not a quirk, it's a feature
Prof Richard Wiseman tackles some of the quirkier findings in the psychological literature in a New Scientist article which has been made freely available online.
The article accompanies the launch of Wiseman's new book, Quirkology, which apparently looks at these sorts of curious research studies in more detail.
He's also created a very impressive inattentional blindness demonstration video on YouTube. Simple but very cool.
Presumably the gorilla in the background is a nod to Daniel Simons and Chris Chabris' classic study of the effect, published, rather brilliantly, under the name 'Gorillas in Our Midst' [pdf].
It's the only psychology experiment I've ever come across that used a man in a gorilla suit. Unsurprisingly, it won an IgNobel prize, but is actually a valuable contribution to our understanding of the mind.
Link to NewSci article 'A quirky look at our quirky species'.
Link to cool inattentional blindness demo.
May 9, 2007
Shozu, and being done when there's nothing left to remove
More from my long notes tail.
For a while I wanted to write a long article on Cognima.
Who?
The guys who brought us Shozu, that's who.
Cognima had a really complex, operator-focused image posting solution that really never went anywhere (as far as I know).
WIth Shozu, they cut away all that extra, whittling down to the main feature that folks wanted. That's why their service is so robust and smooth - it's backed up with years of experience and a strong platform.
Now, they can slowly add features as they need them, since they likely have a whole tool-chest of dropped features from the original system. And, if you've noticed, they don't rock the boat that often, having added only a few extensions since their 'launch'.
Interesting position to be in. Just thought I'd point it out. If you want a longer article, feel free to add below.
On another note, they used to distribute some cool CDs called 'Music to Replicate Data By'. Great idea.
The “you” in Youtube is you
Dear politicians of all stripes:
Everything you have ever said is on Youtube. Please adjust your behavior accordingly.
Thank you.
James Jean interviewed
The Little Chimp Society has an interview up with the inimitable James Jean (previously).
The Art Dorks are back
When the Art Dorks website closed its doors, we were saddened by the loss of a great online resource into the the world of weirdo art — lowbrow, pop surrealism, or whatever you want to call it. But the website has relaunched, and while it no longer sports its impressive newsfeed/links portal, it has been reborn as a pretty darn stylish showcase for the Art Dorks collective — a group of talented deviants who include Chris Ryniak (whose art is shown here), Brendan Danielsson, Justin DeGarmo, Heiko Müller, and many more.
Beirut
Paul Collins of Beirut climbs down from the stage into the audience at the Bowery Ballroom, New York, NY.
Amazon's running a contest to see which town in the...
Amazon's running a contest to see which town in the US orders the most copies of the final book in the Harry Potter series. Towns in Virginia, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Georgia seem to dominate the rankings so far. (link)
A good day for the world. The Encyclopedia of Life is launched.
Those of us in Monterey for TED2007 this year watched in awe as E O Wilson unveiled his inspiring TED Prize wish to create an Encyclopedia of Life. (You can see his talk here... or download it in HD.)
In Washington DC this morning, we saw the first big step toward granting the wish. Five major scientific institutions, backed by a $50m funding commitment led by the MacArthur Foundation, announced the launch of a major global effort to launch the Encyclopedia. The press conference included a video message from Britain's Environment Minister David Miliband who said the "full weight of the British government" was behind the project. Ed Wilson told journalists today's announcement was a dream come true.
As Ed hinted in his speech back in March, this broad-based effort to plan the launch was already underway. But I am proud to tell you that members of the TED community, inspired by Ed's wish, played a key role in realizing what happened today.
In particular I'd like to salute the effort of Avenue A-Razorfish who in three short weeks were able to visualize a stunning design for the Encyclopedia and incorporate it in a video that is the centerpiece of the newly launched website. Please take a couple minutes right now to watch this video. It does a spectacular job of explaining the purpose and vision behind the Encylopedia. It is here at www.eol.org. This work was done entirely pro bono, and is a wonderful example of the TED Prize at work. Everyone at the launch today was blown away by it.
The video includes spectacular photography some of it contributed by TEDster Frans Lanting. And the website itself was contributed by an individual inspired by Ed's wish. Programmer Ray Ratelis owned eol.org, a valuable web address which he freely contributed to the project.
Many more TEDsters are meeting next month to assist the project in brainstorming its architecture, technology and design. It's proving an exhilarating example of the power of collaboration.
There are already many stories up online about the Encylopedia. Here's the official announcement.
Cheney is playing 'bad cop' in Iraq
For months, President Bush has been playing the good cop with Iraq, gently prodding and coaxing along Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. But under pressure to turn the situation around, Vice President Dick Cheney has been sent in to play bad cop and deliver the message in blunter fashion to Maliki face-to-face.
Megnut is a house of lies
Why must I turn this website into a house of lies1? You no doubt are wondering where the results of the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Search are, since I promised they'd appear yesterday. Well, will you accept the excuse that my mother's in town visiting and so I haven't had time to wrap everything up? I hope so. Because it's true. Results sometime after she heads home later this week.
I know it's only 2007, but this is the headline of...
I know it's only 2007, but this is the headline of the decade. For a story about people crossing a tightrope strung across the Han River in South Korea, AP came up with this masterpiece: Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo. (link)
Jeffrey Feldman: Cheney's Contempt for Thomas Jefferson
One of the principles we hold dear in the United States is freedom of the press--an idea Thomas Jefferson listed in his 1801 Inaugural Address as one of the basic concepts on which this nation was founded: About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people -- a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety. (read Jefferson's address here and a full discussion here) Dick Cheney, apparently, has no time for Jefferson. In his press "availability," today--part of his surprise visit to Baghdad--the Vice President let it be known that there are rules he defines and that the press must follow. In other words, Dick Cheney believes in freedom of the press, so long as they do what he says. For a long time, many in the Vice President's press corp have been doing just that--following Cheney's rules and, as a result, forfeiting Jeffersonian principle in the process. But not today. Hats off to Associated Press reporter Tom Raum, who asked a question of Cheney, today, that apparently broke the rules--a question about "benchmarks" in Iraq. Raum's question was the first of the day--both its wording and Cheney's response are telling: QUESTION: Mr. Vice President, did you hear anything today that makes you believe that the benchmarks that have been set up are getting met any quicker than earlier? And if so, is there any possible (inaudible) tie the performance at meeting these benchmarks to getting funds from Congress, as some Democrats have suggested? And General Petraeus, you said a few weeks ago in Washington that regardless of how things went, it would take an enormous commitment of time and effort on the part of the United States before things are stabilized. Do you still believe that? THE VICE PRESIDENT: I'm not sure that was consistent with the rules, Tom, but what the heck. You got the first one, so we'll go with it. With respect to the question of benchmarks, we still believe that it's important that funding for the supplemental for operations here in Iraq not contain conditions that limits either the flexibility of our commanders on the ground in Iraq or interferes with the President's constitutional prerogatives as Commander-in-Chief, which is the general principle that we've adhered to and it's one of the reasons the President vetoed the original bill. I do sense today a - I think a greater awareness on the part of the Iraqi officials I talked to of the importance of their working together to resolve these issues in a timely fashion. I think they recognize that it's in their interest as well as in our interest that they make progress on the political front just as we deal with the security issues. So, it would seem that the "rules" reporters were asked to follow--and which Raum broke--was not to ask Cheney about benchmarks or negotiations on the supplemental bill from Congress or holding Iraqi's accountable for progress. All these, of course, are pretty much the only topics on everyone's mind. But Cheney has his rules, and he reminded Raum--not unlike a homeroom teacher reminds her kindergarten class--that breaking the rules is not OK. Cheney then responded anyway--responded with the all-too-familiar rhetoric that any interest of Congress in Iraq is somehow equivalent to gagging and tying our "commanders" on the ground, and that the only person who can talk to the commanders is the Commander-in-Chief. You're not a commander? Well, then, you don't have a say. A ridiculous and feeble argument from America's symbol of violence and arrogance--Dick Cheney. But Raum broke Cheney's rule. He chose in that moment to remember Jefferson's principle instead of following Cheney's dictum. We can only hope that more reporters follow suit. (cross posted from Frameshop)
Long Range Eye Tracking for Advertisers
holy_calamity writes "A Canadian firm has launched a device that can track the gaze of multiple people from up to 10 metres away. Originally developed at Queen's University, Ontario, they hope to sell it to advertisers to allow them to monitor how many people look at their ads. Admittedly they are trying more benign stuff too like better hearing aids, but I doubt that will make up for movie posters that make a song and dance whenever you glance their way." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
11 Spring Street Update Advertising Cometh
Another milestone has been reached in the gentrification of the corner of Spring and Elizabeth: the arrival of advertising signage. It only took a week from the time the plywood went up (presumably to protect the building from graffiti while it was being cleaned), for marketers to begin using the spot to broadcast their own messages. And what do those messages entail? Ads for bands, of course-- but also for luxury condo sales. That feels appropriate, doesn't it, given the future purpose of the building? It's still a little bit sad to see the art replaced so quickly with commerce. C'est la vie! Related: 11 Spring Pictures at Streetsy 11 Spring Update at Curbed
The Biggest Yankees Fan...Tom Brady?
How do you get Boston Red Sox fans in a tizzy? Well, being a Yankee fan seems to do the trick. We have to wonder how those in Beantown feel about New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady wearing a Yankees hat. That's what Brady was caught doing yesterday in the West Village with his girlfriend, Gisele Bundchen. If we were Red Sox fans, we wouldn't get our panties in a bunch just yet. Think logically - the best way to not get attention in New York would be to wear the hat of a local team. Brady obviously can't wear the hat of the Giants or Jets, although both could use a championship quarterback. He could have gone with a Mets hat, but they're in first. No bandwagon climbing for Brady. Plus the Mets have too many hats to choose from. Maybe he's just friends with Derek Jeter, who frequents the sidelines of Brady's alma matter, the University of Michigan (where Jeter was set to attend with a baseball scholarship). Or maybe, just maybe, Brady really is a closet Yankees fan. No matter what his allegiances, Gothamist assumes that Patriots will still love their three-time Super Bowl Champion and two-time Super Bowl MVP.
Quote of the Day
"It's like high school. As celebrities we're sort of like the popular kids. Everybody wants to know our business."
--- Cameron Diaz, to Today's Meredith Vieira, on all the talk of her and Justin sharing a peck on the red carpet for the "Shrek the Third" premiere
Five minutes with Petra Boyton
Dr Petra Boyton is a social psychologist, researcher, author, broadcaster, blogger, and award winning sex educator.
She's an advocate for evidence-based sex education, amid the largely sensationalist media coverage of the subject, and a tireless campaigner for sexual equality, having worked to improve media sex coverage both in the UK and internationally.
As well as conducting extensive research into sexual attitudes and behaviours, she also promotes the public understanding of social and health science research through her teaching, writing and broadcasting.
Petra has kindly agreed to talk to Mind Hacks about her work, motivations and current interests in the world of sex research.
Why sex research?
There are two reasons why I got interested in sex research. Firstly I was always very interested in research methods and keen to evaluate whether lab-based psychology studies could make sense outside that context, as well as assessing flaws within different social research methodologies. Obviously that would make me fairly dull and so I thought one way to liven this up would be to look at how sex was studied and go from there.
Secondly when I was at school I wanted to work in a family planning clinic but I got told to stop showing off (I also got told I wasn't up to going to university). So there was definitely an interest in sexual health from an early age.
I'm interested in researching sex now for several reasons. It's an area where there's still a lot of ignorance, fear, stigma and taboo. There's an increasing amount of pressure on us to be sexual and yet still a lot of unanswered questions.
Within sexual health there's a lot of need to understand why people are taking risks, as well as a need to show how sex research is both important and a relevant area of study. Sadly there is some pretty poor sex research out there - often coming from commercial companies - and that needs to be challenged.
What book would you recommend to make someone enthusiastic about sex research?
Rather than a book I'd recommend a visit to the Kinsey Institute's website that outlines different areas of studying sex and the Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology which has lots of useful free online courses. Both of those sites have links to other great resources, online reading and books.
Sex is one of the most under-researched of human behaviours. What do you think needs to happen for sex research to be taken more seriously?
I think sex research is taken seriously in some areas now, but not all. For example sexual health research, studies on sexually transmitted infections (including HIV) and sexual problems have been taken seriously although those that are quantitative in nature (e.g. trials or epidemiological research) tend to have a higher profile than qualitative research.
There is now a lot of money available for sex research on sexual dysfunction since drug companies can see the opportunity for profit - and that has led to some researchers taking money to produce research that isn't as always as ethical or robust as it should be. What does need to happen to improve sex research is a more critical approaches to funding and ethics, a willingness to embrace a wider range of methodological approaches, and training of staff to complete such research sensitively.
Sadly at the moment we're seeing sex 'research' misused by PR companies so there are 'sex surveys' galore in the media. That gives a poor impression of sex research, alongside the unqualified 'sexperts' in the media. Sex researchers need to show good practice and to challenge some of the dodgier approaches out there.
I think within science there's still a prejudice amongst some towards studying sex - partly because of people's sexual hangups, and partly because 'good science' is not supposed to be about social issues or things we're all interested in and know a bit about.
I remember someone saying about me in a blog 'she's writing about sex and she actually understands science'. We need to show that we're completing rigorous and robust research - and also have research with measurable and effective outcomes. That should show the wider scientific community, media and the public that sex is a legitimate area of study.
What are the main difficulties in conducting your research?
There are issues of funding. Often the public want to know things like 'how do you fall in love?' or 'how do you know you've met your perfect partner?' which are interesting questions but ones that aren't at the top of the research priority list.
That's partly because funding is limited to key areas, and also because many sex researchers want to be taken seriously and so won't take on topics or questions that could make them seem lightweight.
There are problems with drug company funding - if you are willing to complete research into sexual functioning problems then there is cash for you. Although there are issues about your own academic freedom and conflict of interest that arise as a result.
Often there are problems with accessing the public as obviously this can be a very sensitive area and you need to be sure you've got the right people doing research appropriately. Many people want to talk about sex, but you have to be careful to ensure you get the right participants and also treat them respectfully.
We have seen examples in the developing world in trials for HIV drugs and similar where the training and support of researchers and ethical treatment of participants is not what it should be. So there are problems with some studies/researchers giving others a bad name.
There are issues of method - quantitative approaches tend to be favoured - at least within the health area of sex research. There are still some outdated views of methodologies circulating within the discipline, and evidence based practice isn't always observed.
Finally there's the issue of how to go about sex research. As with any other area of study you're under pressure to often do work as quickly and cheaply as possible so investigations that require more expensive kit - such as brain scanners or thermal imaging - may be less easier to use than questionnaires.
There are some concerns that ethics committees can be more skittish the more invasive sex research might be, and it is interesting that this is a key area where we're becoming increasingly 'hands off' in our methodological approaches. The public tends to assume sex researchers spend their time watching people having sex or fitting them with probes, whereas you're more likely to be doing an online interview or questionnaire.
I'd like to see the opportunity to explore a wider range of methods, and training to ensure we can study all aspects of sex in a sensitive manner.
What are you excited about at the moment?
There's some very interesting work coming out about how our ancestors had sex - it's causing a lot of debate as some scientists are rather upset about the idea our ancestors might have had sex for pleasure, may not have been monogamous and perhaps had a different interpretation of gender than we do now.
I wouldn't say I was excited about this, but I am concerned about the debate on HIV and circumcision for men in Africa. A number of trials suggest that routine circumcision of men can reduce HIV prevalence. Many global health organisations are encouraging we now explore this option.
However there's a growing body of medics opposed to male circumcision who're fighting this on the grounds of disapproving of circumcision per se, whilst practitioners like myself are more concerned of any programme that targets men in countries where women's social position is seriously disadvantaged. That debate is set to run, but in the meantime the concerns about the spread of HIV continues.
Name three under-rated things
Sex education. Whenever I do a public science event people start asking me questions about the science of sex, but pretty quickly start wanting to know 'am I normal?', 'what's female ejaculation?', 'how do you know if you're a sex addict?', 'can men orgasm without ejaculating?' You quickly become aware that there are masses of sex questions people have because they've not recieved good quality sex education and don't know where to get objective advice about sex from now.
Knowing your history. You can't study anything in social science without understanding historical and cultural issues. This is particularly the case in the study of sex where there's a trend towards reductionism - just studying hormones, the brain or behaviour. To really understand sex you need to understand history, culture, global differences and sex as an holistic issue rather than just one issue. Otherwise it just doesn't make sense.
Being reflexive. I don't think it's the place of social scientists to be 'objective'. I don't think you can be objective but you can be transparent. That means thinking about the work you're doing, piloting your research, getting feedback from others and constantly trying to work out how you can do better. It also means talking to people you're studying - and getting them to feed back on or shape the research you are doing. That's often discouraged in research either due to poor training or lack of time, but it is essential.
Ann Romney Gave To Planned Parenthood During Husband's Pro-Choice Years
Former governor Mitt Romney's wife, Ann, gave a $150 donation to the abortion-rights group Planned Parenthood in 1994, at a time that Romney considered himself to be effectively "pro-choice," the Romney campaign confirmed today. Campaign spokesman Kevin Madden said Mrs. Romney has no recollection of the circumstances under which she donated the money.
Top Chef 3: Miami Vice
Eater just posted the press release for the upcoming third season of Top Chef, set to premiere on June 13th at 10 PM EST. I loved the first season, most of which I saw in a marathon before the finale, and tuned out the second, but I think I might actually watch this one through!
Big changes: The show is now located in Miami and set at the beachfront Fontainebleau Hotel, which I'm guessing means we're going to be seeing fresh fruit, seafood, Latin influences and bikinis galore. Padma fans, please shut your mouths and stop drooling all over your keyboards in anticipation, it's very unattractive. Also Ted Allen of Queer Eye fame is joining the show as a judge. Either someone at Bravo liked what they saw of his panel appearances on Iron Chef America, or they're trying desperately to keep the QEftSG flame alive somehow.
Small changes: Allen and last season's runner-up Marcel Vigneron will be keeping blogs on Bravo's site, joining those of Tom Colicchio, Padma Lakshmi and Gayle Simmons. I bet Marcel's will be the most entertaining of the bunch and can't wait to read it! Less exciting: Bravo is going to start doing "mobisodes"—video interviews with the guest judges you can only watch on your web-enabled cellphones. I have a master's degree in nerd and I still wouldn't bother. I'm not typing urls with my phone's teeny keyboard for anything less than super juicy unaired scenes, Bravo. Try harder next time.
Let's Chat about Phil Spector's Nipples
I'm trying not to pay too much attention to the Phil Spector trial -- truth be told, I'm too busy obsessing over the legal proceedings of Peter Braunstein, the firefighter impersonating rapist journalist -- but I had to pass along this gem. The following is a transcript of a voicemail that the Beatles producer left for his ex Dorothy Melvin. Dot testified earlier this week that Phil, on trial for allegedly murdering actress Lana Clarkson, pulled a gun on her and tried to rape her three times 14 years ago. He also left her a series of bizarre VMs like this:
Sorry I'm late calling, chief, but I had some trouble with my nipple ring. Um, don't worry about the competition. Let the competition worry about you. All right, I cannot be replaced by a machine, unless it learns to uh, drink, f--k, [inaudible], right. Okay, keep smiling Dorothy, uh, but no so much that you begin to wonder if you're mentally f--king unbalanced. And I expect a return call, but be very careful of what you say to me, because nothing you say to me is worth your life. Goodbye, Dorothy!Clearly the guy is a madman, which is the point. But I was more shocked about the reference to the 67-year-old, 'fro loving freakazoid having "trouble" with his nipple ring.
It caused me to eat my lunch twice today.
'Broke Chefs' Wisdom from Serious Eaters
There's a great conversation going on in Ed's post "Would-be 'Top Chefs' Are Broke Chefs." Some insight from the folks talking there:
- Work in the food industry before you decide to go into culinary school.
- The American Culinary Federation has an apprenticeship program that might be worth exploring.
- "Are you kidding? Cooks are the poorest people in New York. That $10 an hour is gross, not net .... so do the math on that."
- The Midwest Culinary Institute at Cincinnati State College might be an option: $3,000 for a certificate, about $6,000 for a two-year degree.
- "One of the things that irks me is that since the food channel started they have made chefs into rock stars. Kids want to be a chef because it is cool. It is only cool if you bust your ass 70 hours a week and make a name for yourself. Sometimes not even then."
"I personally know several CIA trained cooks who are working for 15/hour at backwater restaurants, and several non-schooled cooks who are locally famous."
Got something to add? Some guidance to give to someone just starting out or making a career change? Head on over »
Fortunate Insight
When Matt Haughey first described his new site Fortuitous, which just launched two weeks ago, I was particularly excited because this is a new blog that's actually downright necessary. You see, while there's lots of "Ten Steps for Making Another Boring Web App" articles on Digg, there's very little that's written from the perspective of anyone who's focused on community or content, and even less information that's being shared by those who've actually made something that's had enduring success.
It's hard to take time to write this stuff up -- I always intend to, and just end up being too busy to do it justice. (I haven't been home for more than 3 days straight in about two months.) Other folks I talk to struggle because they're in a part of the web world that's more competitive, and they don't want to give away insights to their competitors. But there are some bits of insight that seem small in retrospect that would have been a godsend if I were just starting up something new today, and that seems to be the area of Matt's focus.
I helped a little bit with some editing on Living online, with web apps, and Matt graciously let me contribute a little bit to How to talk to the press, and what I realized is that I love sharing these little bits of information. I wouldn't pretend that I'm an expert on these topics, and I am certain Matt's not claiming to be one. On the other hand, there are some things you only learn through experience, and it's about time those lessons had a home.
Tiger Woods is playing the best golf of his career (and...
Tiger Woods is playing the best golf of his career (and possibly anyone's career) and he's not getting credit for it because he's not winning huge against a vastly improved field. "Woods of the '90s played against great talent hindered by a lack serious training; today, Woods plays against great talent enhanced by serious training. The slack is largely gone, as is the reasonable expectation of double-digit victory." He's also come back after slumps due to swing tinkering, marriage, and the death of his father. (link)
White House Reinforces Support For Guilty Wolfowitz
Embattled World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz deserves a "fair process and a fair hearing of the facts" surrounding his involvement in arranging a promotion and pay package for his girlfriend, the White House said Wednesday. The comments from presidential counselor Dan Bartlett came as the international lending institution's 24-member board edged closer to a decision on Wolfowitz's fate.
White House Reinforces Support For Guilty Wolfowitz
Embattled World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz deserves a "fair process and a fair hearing of the facts" surrounding his involvement in arranging a promotion and pay package for his girlfriend, the White House said Wednesday.
The comments from presidential counselor Dan Bartlett came as the international lending institution's 24-member board edged closer to a decision on Wolfowitz's fate.
Perl, Cocoa, OS X goodness
Jeremiah Foster, O’Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog: “Camel Bones is an Objective-C to Perl bridge which means you can use the underlying OS X system from perl to develop applications.”
Fresh Direct Expanding to Other Side(s) of the Park?
We got a tip this morning (based on a post here) that Fresh Direct will soon begin delivering to the several new zip codes further south and east of Prospect Park than they've delivered to date. We just spoke with Fresh Direct and here's the more detailed breakdown by zip code:11230 - full coverage
11210 - partial coverage
11229 - partial coverage
11226 - full coverage
11223 - partial coverageAs if Brooklynites didn't have enough reasons to be jealous of those who live in Victorian Flatbush this time of year! We're expecting a full press release to come out by the end of the day which will (hopefully) include more specifics about the boundaries of the new delivery zones. On a related note, our contact at FD alerted us to another cool piece of news: The company is now using 100% post-consumer use recycled materials for their boxes.
Photo by Frank Lynch
Couric Draws Worst News Ratings For CBS Since 1987
t surely wasn't what CBS dreamed about when Katie Couric was hired: the "CBS Evening News" last week recorded its smallest audience since 1987, and probably many years before that. It also didn't help that the average of 6.05 million viewers came at the beginning of the important May ratings "sweeps."
May 8, 2007
Yowzers!
The school sells Kool-Aid pickles from the popular red flavor family at its fund-raisers. “They’re easy to make a gallon,” Ms. Williams said. “You pull the pickles from the jar, cut them in halves, make double-strength Kool-Aid, add a pound of sugar, shake and let it sit — best in the refrigerator — for about a week. The taste takes to anything. A while back I made a mistake and bought a jar of pickle chips instead of halves or wholes. Came out fine. This whole Kool-Aid pickle thing is going so good, you wonder why somebody hasn’t put a patent on them.”
This article from the NYTimes sure was an interesting read! I can't wait to make some Kool-Aid pickles of my own!
Laugh Tracks
I remember reading somewhere that the laugh tracks that they use on most TV shows are sometimes 50 years old, and that [cue spooky music] you're laughing along with dead people. And I was just idly sitting here thinking, really? Is it true? Or is it an urban myth? I just can't believe that laughing then and laughing now are exactly the same.
Not sure when this happened, but the New Yorker has...
Not sure when this happened, but the New Yorker has posted the huge profile of Bill Clinton that David Remnick wrote for the magazine back in September 2006. Yes it's long, but well worth the effort. Related: a NY Times crossword puzzle with clues provided by Clinton. (link)
Pages Are the Problem
The names we give things can be so important because they can cause so much havoc. The fact that we call the basic organizing unit of a Web site a “page,” as in “Web pages,” has made the lives of Web designers immeasurably more challenging, and it’s a disservice to those coming to the Web from the world of print, too.
I’m not going to propose an alternative to the term page here — I may as well tape a “kick me” sign on my back if I’m going to venture in that kind of folly. I just thought it would be useful for me to articulate the confusion that I’ve seen that’s arisen from this particular terminology.
You Say Page, I Say Page
A Web page and a printed page are so materially different from one another that it’s almost ridiculous to use the same terminology to describe them. It’s nearly as counter-intuitive as using the terms “episode” (for a television show) and “issue” (for a magazine) interchangeably.
When Web designers think of a page, we tend to understand that it’s a page in name only, and that in fact its true nature is as a container for content, features and behaviors. But the idea of a page has such a deeply rooted connotation in centuries of printed matter that Web novices tend to think of Web pages as simply finite blocks of text and images, with functionality and interactions as only superficial garnishes.
Early On(line)
The term burdens the digital page with the false expectation that it will share many similarities with a printed page, where a more accurate term might clean the slate. For someone who works in print, either as a content author or a designer, this semantic fuzziness can be a difficult hurdle to overcome, both because it’s an unfamiliar interpretation of the page concept, and because it’s an evolving and not always knowable idea — even to those of us so-called experts..
Web pages as a concept are still incredibly young and immature, such that Web designers barely understand what they’re capable of ourselves. We never know if we’ve created a truly successful Web page unless it’s been tested and tested again: in different browsers, under different conditions, before different audiences. And in many, many cases, we bear a burden to teach the user how to use our pages and their contents.
In the world of print, though, a page is a relatively straightforward construct, and learning what makes for a successful page is also relatively straightforward. In fact, the author or designer of any page can bring to bear centuries’ worth of prior art and practices when they develop a page. That is, creating a printed page can be done intuitively, with the benefit of knowledge that, as Don Norman might put it, is already out there, ‘in the world.’ There’s no need for a print designer to worry about teaching a reader how to turn a page, forward or backward, for example.
This pre-existing knowledge is a trap for print designers working online, and clearing the trap is one of the most challenging things about becoming comfortable with the medium. A lot of Web design today barely escapes the traditional confines of a digital translation of a printed page. But it’s also a trap for Web designers, too. It’s too easy to forget that the defining characteristics of a Web page are in continual flux; we’re creating new innovations regularly, and the pages of today are materially different from the pages of tomorrow.
Jeff Veen: "Today, a completely redesigned version of Google Analytics...
Jeff Veen: "Today, a completely redesigned version of Google Analytics is launching, bringing a lot of the simplicity and data visualization techniques we learned building Measure Map to a whole new scale." They aren't switching everyone right away (no love for me yet) but you can read this post and get an idea of what to expect. Also: sparklines! (link)
For Kids By Kids
The Gap's new clothing line... Kids love it, because it's made by kids, halfway around the world.
Measure Map team reinvents Google Analytics
When Google acquired Measure Map from Adaptive Path last year, we were sad to see our team go, but we were excited about what they might be able to do with Google’s ever-growing portfolio of interesting products.
It took some time, but it was worth the wait: Our team’s thorough rethinking of Google Analytics has finally launched — check out the demo of their new design. Congratulations to the Measure Map team, and we look forward to seeing what you’ll do to top this one!
Out to dinner with friends: split the check evenly or...
Out to dinner with friends: split the check evenly or not? "I find if you don't split it evenly, and everyone pays 'what they owe' many people will pay much less than they owe, forgetting tax and tip. Then they avert their eyes while the generous ones pony up the extra bucks." (link)
DTrace for Ruby 1.8.6
Earlier this week we released a patch that adds DTrace capability to Ruby 1.8.5. We chose 1.8.5 because it’s what we’ve been using in production, though 1.8.6 is the latest stable release.
It now brings me tremendous pleasure to release a patch against Ruby 1.8.6. You’ll find it in the same repository as the other patch:
- The full Ruby 1.8.6 source with DTrace probes (http://svn.joyent.com/ruby-dtrace/ruby-1.8.6)
- Diffs (http://svn.joyent.com/ruby-dtrace/patches)
The probes are the same for the 1.8.5 patch. We will be building 1.8.6 binaries shortly and you’ll find them in the same place as the 1.8.5 binaries.
The patches for 1.8.5 and 1.8.6 are released under the same license as Ruby.
Enjoy!
Directory of the earliest Blogger users from 1999. A surprising...
Directory of the earliest Blogger users from 1999. A surprising number of those blogs are still regularly published, although few of them still use Blogger. (link)
Rails Lessons
I’ve been talking recently to traditional Java EE shops about “Web 2.0” in general and modern Web development frameworks in particular and Rails in particular particular. What I’ve ended up saying (speaking only for myself, this isn’t Sun dogma) is along these lines: “Rails isn’t going to sweep the other Web technologies away. But those other technologies are learning its lessons; so it’s worth checking out.”
One symptom is the flow of new frameworks crossing my radar as regular as clockwork, advertising themselves as Rails-beating. I’m prepared to believe that some might be; Rails was the first to hit its particular sweet spot, but the ecosystem has lots of room for invention and growth.
This week, I was particularly taken by the cheery charms of the lift Web Framework, whose pitch begins “lift is yet another web development framework...” They say it performs 6 times faster than Rails (not five, not seven, but six). Must be good, then.
? Twitter's not growing so fast after all
This morning I posted a comparison of the growth in messages with both Blogger and Twitter. The Twitter data was based on information collected by Andy Baio in a post that was widely read in the blogosphere. In the course of looking at the Twitter data, neither of us noticed that from Nov 21, 2006 to Feb 4, 2007 and March 9, 2007 to the present, the Twitter post IDs had the same last digit, indicating that the data is not strictly sequential. If you look at Twitter's public timeline, the Twitter post IDs skip around by multiples of 10.
Anil suggested via email that could be an artifact of database sharding and lo and behold, if you take off the last digit of the post ID, they seem to become sequential again, more or less. He's going to ask the Twitter gang about it.
For right now though, the parts of this morning's post that rely on Twitter data from the above dates is incorrect. Basically, all of it. Here it is in all caps: WRONG WRONG WRONG ERROR ERROR, F-----, WOULD NOT BUY DATA ANALYSIS FROM AGAIN. In hindsight, it seems obvious that the data was incorrect...that sort of growth seems impossible, especially when Twitter was having all sorts of scaling problems. Anyway, good thing this is just a blog and not a refereed journal, eh? Big thanks to the commenters in the other post for pointing me toward the error. More as I have it.
Update: Email from Biz Stone, who works for Twitter. He says:
There's truth in the essence of what you're talking about here -- Twitter updates *are* coming in faster and furiouser than Blogger updates. However, the way we number Twitter updates has switched back and forth a few times which pretty much screws up the exactness of your analysis.
We have been doubling the number of active users about every three weeks for a sustained period of months now which is definitely contributing significantly to more and more updates. Also, active users of Twitter a measured by how many times they update per day (at Blogger it was per month). So activity in general at Twitter is crazy by comparison.
We're going to start digging in to more data visualization, user patterns, etc in the coming weeks so if there's anything you think we should be looking at specifically please let us know!
So we'll have to wait a few weeks for an accurate look at this stuff. (thx, biz)
Famous Bike Gloves
An about.com writer found my bike glove picture on flickr and emailed me for permission to use it in his article. This is almost as exciting as when our sock monkey was featured on NYPL's Summer Reading website a few years ago.
A whole new experience for Google Analytics
Posted by Jeff Veen, UI Design Manager
A year and a half ago, we released Google Analytics as a free service to help people measure the success of their Web sites. In that time, the response has been fantastic - hundreds of thousands of sites across the Web have access to this powerful analysis previously only available to the enterprise.
Now, we're taking the next step: making that analysis even more accessible and easy to use. Today we're announcing a complete redesign of Google Analytics.
We started over a year ago with dozens of interviews with power users, those new to analytics, and everyone in between. They told us they needed their data organized in a more intuitive way. They wanted to be able to see traffic trends in context with more explanation of what the numbers mean. And they needed tools to help them communicate what they'd found with others. This research fed months of development and design iteration to create a totally new user experience.
We've been working on this since I blogged about the Measure Map acquisition. Since then, we've collaborated with the combined team from Google and Urchin Software to bring user-centered design to their strong development skills. I couldn't be more pleased with the results.
You can find out more at the Google Analytics Blog and be sure to check out this demo for more details.
Party like it's 1999!
We've launched what must be the 2nd or 3rd most requested Flickr feature: Send to a Friend.
You can send your own stuff (public and private, safe or moderate) or share public content from other people. Look for the "Send to a friend" link in the footer of every page.
Keith McNally Takes a Groundless Swipe at Bruni
I have profound respect for Keith McNally's abilities as a restaurateur, but his open letter to Eater and the New York Times alleging that Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni is sexist is simply way off base.
McNally notes that Bruni has never given a female chef three stars and is therefore sexist, and furthermore that this alleged sexism is the reason Bruni gave McNally's latest restaurant, Morandi, and its chef, Jody Williams, a bad review.
On a zillion levels this is preposterous.
First, anyone who has ever dined with Bruni (I have had a couple of meals with him in the company of women) would tell you he adores women.
Second, can anyone point to a female chef in New York who has been reviewed by Bruni and given short shrift by him as a result of their gender? Sexism is still a fact of life in restaurant kitchens all over the country. I have written about this topic often while noting that other cities, such as San Francisco and New Orleans, seem more hospitable to women chef-restaurateurs. This doesn't mean, however, that McNally is barking up the right tree.
Third, it is clear that this is a thinly veiled broadside aimed at Bruni and the Times because Bruni had the audacity to give Morandi and Williams, a one-star review. I actually liked Morandi more than Bruni did. But Bruni's negative review had everything to do with the food and service there and nothing to do with sexism. And it seems irresponsible and disingenuous for McNally to suggest otherwise.
Can San Francisco Make Low-Income Neighborhoods Desirable? "Over twenty San Francisco neighborhoods have little or no sidewalk drug dealing because such activities have been “contained” in the Tenderloin.
an Franciscans would never accept a policy that forced people of a specific race to endure a disproportionate amount of crime, so why perpetrate such disparate treatment based on people’s economic class?"
Sexism in the kitchen
Today Eater posts a letter from New York restaurateur Keith McNally claiming Times dining critic Frank Bruni has an unremittingly sexist slant. The proof? His failure to issue anything more than one star to a restaurant helmed by a woman chef. The issue of women chefs in the kitchen, both their number and their comparative fame to their male counterparts, is important to me. Ed and I have discussed this issue a lot, especially the number of female chefs in New York City versus San Francisco. But I'm not sure McNally is correct here.
First you need to look at the types of places that get three and four stars in New York: they're high-end gastronomic temples, not cozy small restaurants like Prune and The Spotted Pig. The New York four stars are all French (Daniel, Le Bernardin, Jean George), Frenchish (Per Se), or Japanese (Masa). Neither French nor Japanese kitchens are known for their, um, let's call it open-mindedness. That's not to say a woman can't be head chef at any of these places, but if you look at the places women do run, they tend to be more in the school of Alice Waters California/New American places. And as long as four stars at the Times goes to places in the traditional fine-dining model, it's unlikely women will start getting four stars in New York anytime soon. After all, how many women were awarded four stars when Ruth Reichl was reviewing for the Times?
Of course, that doesn't address the question of whether the Times should be more open to what three and four star dining experiences should be. And it doesn't explain why San Francisco has women running large, fine dining establishments (Boulevard, Jardiniere) in greater numbers than New York, places that would garner two stars at least from Bruni if they were in New York. (Though to be fair, all the San Francisco four stars also have men as head chefs.)
What Keith McNally is calling the disease is really a symptom of a much larger problem. Frank Bruni may or may not be sexist, but when you look at what he's reviewing, it's hard to find a large number of restaurants chefed by women that's he's overlooking, or failing to properly credit. The real problem here is the real problem in the rest of the working world: women, for all their education and talent, don't rise as high as men. Whether you want to blame the glass ceiling, sexism, life choices like taking time off for children, the government for not providing maternity leave and child care, or plain old female "opting out," it's everywhere you look. Number of women partners in top law firms. Number of women deans at universities. Number of women CEOs of Fortune 500s. Or number of women chefs running nice restaurants. Frank Bruni hardly seems like the problem, but I admire Keith McNally for raising the issue because I think it's an important one. And I'll be interested to see if/how the Times and Mr. Bruni respond.
comments are open
Gelato, Italian Style, at Grom
Upper West Siders had a new store to flock to this weekend: Grom, a gelato shop that opened on Broadway between 76th and 77th Streets. There were lines, and our own Joe Schumacher braved the UWS foodies and sweet-toothed for a taste.
I ordered a small luna rosso, which was the flavor of the month. It was quite good --dense and creamy. It was also expensive --$4.75 plus tax for that a small cup. That cup, by the way, is made of biodegradable paper, unlike the plastic cups used by Il Laboratorio del Gelato on the Lower East Side.However, Joe warns that the $4.75 might prohibit people from being regulars. The Grom concept is that its gelatos are made in Italy, then shipped to its shops where they are "creamed on the spot," according to the company website. The Food Section adds, "All the sorbets are made of 50 percent fruit and 50 percent San Bernardo mineral water from the Italian Alps, and the company has acquired land where it is planting its own melons, strawberries, peaches, pears, and figs." More Grom-analysis from Eater. Photograph by Cititour
Variations of the Letter M - Metro Bits - mic-ro.co(s)m
Logos from subway/metro systems around the world
NYU ITP Spring Show 2007
NYU ITP Spring Show 2007.If I was in New York this week, I’d be going to this. Today and tomorrow.
Chop Shop
Following what Johnny recently said about t-shirts making the perfect canvas for illustrators, I give you Chop Shop. While their designs aren’t submitted by fans as in the case of t-shirt giant Threadless, what separates Chop Block from its competitors is that they design and sell posters on their site, in addition to t-shirts. Stop by the site now and catch a short interview with in house illustrator/designer Jay Hillyer.
2006 is the year the wine market went mad
2006 might be remembered as the year in which the wine market went mad. "At these record levels, some wine is literally too expensive to drink. Advisers tell clients that the index of wine prices at auction performs better than stockmarket indices. Hoping for a windfall, a few individuals and some investment trusts move in. Cases of rare wine disappear into temperature-controlled cellars, only to return to the market when the speculators think a sufficient profit can be made." I remember being surprised when I learned lots of wines bought at auction are cellared and then resold, never drunk. Seems a shame, like those folks that own a beautiful sports car and never drive it.
iPhone to be subsidized or not? We're getting dizzy trying to answer
Will the iPhone be subsidized by AT&T or not? Yes? No? Maybe? Reply hazy, try again? The theories are all over the map, but recent reports say that the answer is "probably not."
Jeff Yang on Angry Asian Men
My fellow journalistic Jeff _ang goes deep on the subject of Angry Asian Men. If Imus turned the table onto Black masculinity, Cho has turned the table onto Asian American masculinity. In this instance, pop culture and racial profiling and free speech issues are coming together in a much different way. Big props to Mr. Yang for exploring the subject in such a great way. A must-read. Here's a taster:One might say that it's been an annus horribilis for the Asian American man. From the racist rantings of Kenneth Eng, to the conviction of Hmong American Chai Vang in the shooting of six fellow hunters, to last month's horrific murder spree at Virginia Tech, events seem to have conspired to swing perceptions of Asian males to the point where any sign of aberration is being transformed into evidence that we represent a simmering danger, a repressed wellspring of vitriol and violence waiting only for the right trigger to burst forth.
Actual aberration, or imaginary: One of the truly strange signatures of the media analysis around the Virginia Tech tragedy is how blurred the line became between reality and creativity. In the wake of the murders, pundits provided line-by-line critiques of a handful of plays that killer Seung-Hui Cho wrote, trying to find within them harbingers of the horror he would unleash. They compared movie stills to poses Cho struck in his video testament, hoping to identify cinematic inspiration for his violence, and reported breathlessly on Cho's love of computer games, even suggesting that he used them for "training" purposes.
The art-as-evidence phenomenon quickly extended beyond Cho: In Cary, Ill., on April 23, high school student Allen Lee was arrested for "disorderly conduct" and removed from school after submitting an essay that his teacher said contained disturbingly violent content -- despite telling students that the assignment was to write a creative work depicting strong emotions, on which there would be "no judgment and no censorship."
Around the same time, in Fort Bend, Texas, another Chinese American student was arrested and expelled from Clements High School after parents of classmates informed authorities that he'd created gaming maps based on the school for the tactical combat game Counterstrike. A search of his bedroom revealed five decorative swords and a hammer, which was enough for the police to declare him a "level 3 terrorist threat."
The hammer may have been what sent the police over the edge. After all, such a tool featured prominently in one of the most widely seen images from Cho's video "manifesto," a self-portrait in which he's grimacing at the camera and holding a standard claw hammer over one shoulder.
But the height of absurdity was reached with the controversy around the April 22 episode of HBO's mafia epic, "The Sopranos," featuring Ken Leung as Carter Chong, a mentally unbalanced Asian American youth who erupts in a spasm of violence. Comparing it to the Virginia Tech massacre, pundits called it an "eerie," "astoundingly awful coincidence." Media blurbalists wrinkled their brows and tsked at the "torn from the headlines" parallels.
Post-Wolfowitz scenarios | FP Passport
So what happens next? A senior world bank executive who wishes to remain anonymous outlined the following two scenarios to Passport and agreed to let us publish them.
Hip-Hop Generation Protests Sarkozy Election in France
At massive demonstrations by hip-hop generationers turned loose water cannons and fired tear gas yesterday. Sarkozy, you might remember, was the government official whom many African and Arab immigrants blame for creating a hostile environment for youth of color. This anger erupted into the riots of late 2005 when two project youths died in police custody.CRS riot police charged several hundred anti-Sarkozy protesters on the Place de la Bastille where some had daubed ``Sarkozy 2007 = Hitler 1933'' on the column in the center of the square. Police tear-gassed protests in the southern cities of Marseille and Toulouse, and there were incidents in Lyon, Lille, Rennes, Bordeaux and Nancy, National Police spokesman Patrick Hamon said by telephone.
...Politicians including Azouz Begag, one of two Muslims in the French government until he quit last month, blamed Sarkozy for raising tensions by referring to youths who stoned his car as ``rabble'' shortly before the 2005 riots.
Earlier, Sarkozy said he'd clean out neighborhoods with a ``Karcher,'' a brand of high-pressure hose. Those comments followed policy decisions such as the abolition of community police forces and reinforcement of baton-wielding riot police.
``The worst thing he did was to get rid of community police,'' Guy-Serge Pungumbu, 24, a brother of Yves Pungumbo, said. ``It means our only contact with police is identity checks or riot police.''
Suburbs Quiet
At the Grande Borne, a housing project south of Paris where police were fired on during the 2005 riots, groups of youth gathered on the streets while vans filled with riot police slowly did their rounds.
Malik Amadu, 20, a semi-professional soccer player drove by, playing a hip hop song about how the suburbs will erupt with Sarkozy as president.
``With Sarkozy it means even more controls, more repression,'' he said. ``We'll never be left alone. I hope it will be calm tonight but I can't guarantee it.''
On Feb. 27, Segolene Royal, the Socialist whom Sarkozy defeated in the second and final round of voting yesterday, laid a wreath to the two boys, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore, in their home town of Clichy-sous-Bois and met with AC Le Feu, a community group formed after the riots.
Sarkozy, who crisscrossed France in his quest to be president, never campaigned in any of the suburbs that are largely populated with immigrants from North and sub- Saharan Africa. Rivals such as Royal and centrist Francois Bayrou mocked him for never going.
`Violence, Brutality'
``My responsibility today is to launch an alert about the risks of this candidacy and the violence and brutalities that will start in the country, everyone knows it but nobody says anything,'' Royal told RTL radio May 4.
Sarkozy ``ran a campaign based on the denigration of others,'' said Mohamed Chirani, president of Votez Banlieue, a voter-registration drive founded after the riots, in a telephone interview.
? Growth of Twitter vs. Blogger
Further update: The Twitter data is bad, bad, bad, rendering Andy's post and most of this here post useless. Both jumps in Twitter activity in Nov 2006 and March 2007 are artificial in nature. More soon.
Update: A commenter noted that sometime in mid-March, Twitter stopped using non-sequential IDs. So that big upswing that the below graphs currently show is partially artificial. I'm attempting to correct now. This is the danger of doing this type of analysis with "data" instead of data.
--In mid-March, Andy Baio noted that Twitter uses publicly available sequential message IDs and employed Twitter co-founder Evan Williams' messages to graph the growth of the service over the first year of its existence. Williams co-founded Blogger back in 1999, a service that, as it happens, also exposed its sequential post IDs to the public. Itching to compare the growth of the two services from their inception, I emailed Matt Webb about a script he'd written a few years ago that tracked the daily growth of Blogger. His stats didn't go back far enough so I borrowed Andy's idea and used Williams' own blog to get his Blogger post IDs and corresponding dates. Here are the resulting graphs of that data.1
The first one covers the first 253 days of each service. The second graph shows the Twitter data through May 7, 2007 and the Blogger data through March 7, 2002. [Some notes about the data are contained in this footnote.]
As you can see, the two services grew at a similar pace until around 240 days in, with Blogger posts increasing faster than Twitter messages. Then around November 21, 2006, Twitter took off and never looked back. At last count, Twitter has amassed five times the number of messages than Blogger did in just under half the time period. But Blogger was not the slouch that the graph makes it out to be. Plotting the service by itself reveals a healthy growth curve:
From late 2001 to early 2002, Blogger doubled the number of messages in its database from 5M to 10M in under 200 days. Of course, it took Twitter just over 40 days to do the same and under 20 days to double again to 20M. The curious thing about Blogger's message growth is that large events like 9/11, SXSW 2000 & 2001, new versions of Blogger, and the launch of blog*spot didn't affect the growth at all. I expected to see a huge message spike on 9/11/01 but there was barely a blip.
The second graph also shows that Twitter's post-SXSW 2007 growth is real and not just a temporary bump...a bunch of people came to check it out, stayed on, and everyone messaged like crazy. However, it does look like growth is slowing just a bit if you look at the data on a logarithmic scale:
Actually, as the graph shows, the biggest rate of growth for Twitter didn't occur following SXSW 2007 but after November 21.
As for why Twitter took off so much faster than Blogger, I came up with five possible reasons (there are likely more):
1. Twitter is easier to use than Blogger was. All you need is a web browser or mobile phone. Before blog*spot came along in August 2000, you needed web space with FTP access to set up a Blogger blog, not something that everyone had.
2. Twitter has more ways to create a new message than Blogger did at that point. With Blogger, you needed to use the form on the web site to create a post. To post to Twitter, you can use the web, your phone, an IM client, Twitterrific, etc. It's also far easier to send data to Twitter programatically...the NY Times account alone sends a couple dozen new messages into the Twitter database every day without anyone having to sit there and type them in.
3. Blogger was more strapped for cash and resources than Twitter is. The company that built Blogger ran out of money in early 2001 and nearly out of employees shortly after that. Hard to say how Blogger might have grown if the dot com crash and other factors hadn't led to the severe limitation of its resources for several key months.
4. Twitter has a much larger pool of available users than Blogger did. Blogger launched in August 1999 and Twitter almost 7 years later in March 2006. In the intervening time, hundreds of millions of people, the media, and technology & media companies have become familiar and comfortable with services like YouTube, Friendster, MySpace, Typepad, Blogger, Facebook, and GMail. Hundreds of millions more now have internet access and mobile phones. The potential user base for the two probably differed by an order of magnitude or two, if not more.
5. But the biggest factor is that the social aspect of Twitter is built in and that's where the super-fast growth comes from. With Blogger, reading, writing, and creating social ties were decoupled from each other but they're all integrated into Twitter. Essentially, the top graph shows the difference between a site with social networking and one largely without. Those steep parts of the Twitter trend on Nov 21 and mid-March? That's crazy insane viral growth2, very contagious, users attracting more users, messages resulting in more messages, multiplying rapidly. With the way Blogger worked, it just didn't have the capability for that kind of growth.
A few miscellaneous thoughts:
It's important to keep in mind that these graphs depict the growth in messages, not users or web traffic. It would be great to have user growth data, but that's not publicly available in either case (I don't think). It's tempting to look at the growth and think of it in terms of new users because the two are obviously related. More users = more messages. But that's not a static relationship...perhaps Twitter's userbase is not increasing all that much and the message growth is due to the existing users increasing their messaging output. So, grain of salt and all that.
What impact does Twitter's API have on its message growth? As I said above, the NY Times is pumping dozens of messages into Twitter daily and hundreds of other sites do the same. This is where it would be nice to have data for the number of active users and/or readers. The usual caveats apply, but if you look at the Alexa trends for Twitter, pageviews and traffic seem to leveling out. Compete, which only offers data as recently as March 2007, still shows traffic growing quickly for Twitter.
Just for comparison, here's a graph showing the adoption of various technologies ranging from the automobile to the internet. Here's another graph showing the adoption of four internet-based applications: Skype, Hotmail, ICQ, and Kazaa (source: a Tim Draper presentation from April 2006).
[Thanks to Andy, Matt, Anil, Meg, and Jonah for their data and thoughts.]
[1] Some notes and caveats about the data. The Blogger post IDs were taken from archived versions of Evhead and Anil Dash's site stored at the Internet Archive and from a short-lived early collaborative blog called Mezzazine. For posts prior to the introduction of the permalink in March 2000, most pages output by Blogger didn't publish the post IDs. Luckily, both Ev and Anil republished their old archives with permalinks at a later time, which allowed me to record the IDs.
The earliest Blogger post ID I could find was 9871 on November 23, 1999. Posts from before that date had higher post IDs because they were re-imported into the database at a later time so an accurate trend from before 11/23/99 is impossible. According to an archived version of the Blogger site, Blogger was released to the public on August 23, 1999, so for the purposes of the graph, I assumed that post #1 happened on that day. (As you can see, Anil was one of the first 2-3 users of Blogger who didn't work at Pyra. That's some old school flavor right there.)
Regarding the re-importing of the early posts, that happened right around mid-December 1999...the post ID numbers jumped from ~13,000 to ~25,000 in one day. In addition to the early posts, I imagine some other posts were imported from various Pyra weblogs that weren't published with Blogger at the time. I adjusted the numbers subsequent to this discontinuity and the resulting numbers are not precise but are within 100-200 of the actual values, an error of less than 1% at that point and becoming significantly smaller as the number of posts grows large. The last usable Blogger post ID is from March 7, 2002. After that, the database numbering scheme changed and I was unable to correct for it. A few months later, Blogger switched to a post numbering system that wasn't strictly sequential.
The data for Twitter from March 21, 2006 to March 15, 2007 is from Andy Baio. Twitter data subsequent to 3/15/07 was collected by me. ?
[2] "Crazy insane viral growth" is a very technical epidemiological term. I don't expect you to understand its precise meaning. ?
(Comment on this)
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: The Met Costume Institute Gala
Best Impression of White Grace Jones Cate Blanchett Most Likely to Play Yogurt in Spaceballs 2 Valentino Most Innovative Spider-Man 3 Marketing Technique Kirsten “Tarantula Head” Dunst For many, many more heart-stopping pics from the Gala, click ahead! Best Dress to Get Your Surprise Period In Claire Danes Best Ashley Olsen Impersonation Elizabeth Berkley Hottest Pimps Iman and David Bowie Prettiest National Geographic Cover Girl Mira Sorvino Most Cockroaches Per Square Inch Mischa Barton Best Impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall Anna “Two Weeks” Wintour Classiest Areola Slippage Lindsay Lohan Most Likely to Collapse Under the Weight of Feathers Mary-Kate Olsen Sexiest Collapsed Organ Pose Renee Zellwegger Lampshadiest Kate Spade Prettiest Flapper Kate Bosworth Flappiest Dresser Kirsten Dunst And Finally, Our No Sarcasm, Favorite Drop-Dead Gorgeous Dress of the Night Cameron Diaz Tags: Entertainment, Kirsten Dunst, Cameron Diaz, Anna Wintour, Renee Zellwegger, Cate Blanchett, Claire Danes, David Bowie, Iman, Mischa Barton, Lindsay Lohan, Mary-Kate Olsen, Ashley Olsen, Kate Bosworth
Sarah Silverman's Puppy Love
Filed under: Awards/Awards Shows TMZ.com: TMZ has obtained video of Sarah Silverman giving her dog a mouth-to-mouth kiss, allegedly to promote new gig as host of the MTV Movie Awards. The video, shot for the "Best Kiss" segment of the show, has Silverman moving toward her small black dog,... Read more
Prince to play long stand -- and study Bible
Read full story for latest details.
White House: Guilty Wolfowitz Should Keep World Bank Job
The White House said on Tuesday the World Bank could continue to be effective with embattled World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz in charge. "We believe that the World Bank can continue to be an effective development institution with Paul Wolfowitz as president," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.
Kelly Clarkson @ The Today Show
America’s first Idol Kelly Clarkson performs her hit single “Never Again” on The Today Show on Tuesday morning in New York City. Kelly, 24, is set to begin her next tour with an appearance at the Live Earth Show at Giants Stadium July 7. Check out the video of Kelly’s “Never Again” performance below and watch “Walk Away” from her second album “Breakaway” here Kelly Clarkson - “Never Again” The Today Show, 5/8
Today in Brooklyn: Tuesday, May 8
A Wild-Hearted Night
Catch a screening of the X-Rated version of the adrenaline-filled David Lynch classic Wild at Heart at BAM tonight, then lob a question at screenwriter Barry Gifford, who will be on hand after the show to discuss the film and sign copies of his new book Memories of a Sinking Ship.
7 pm, BAM Rose Cinemas, Fort Greene. $10 general admission, $7 for members.Call It Scatology
Billed as a "night of intellectual bathroom humor," tonight's party at Galapagos Art Space celebrates the publication of Dave Praeger's new book Poop Culture: How America is Shaped by its Grossest National Product. You're either into this kind of thing or you're not. But you can't complain: The event's free. We're just not so sure we'd be sampling the hors d'oeuvres.
7-11 pm, Galapagos, 70 N. 6th St., Williamsburg; 718-782-5188.
Is Rosie Playing Games?
Rosie O' Donnell - COME ON DOWN! You're the newest name in the competition to replace Bob Barker.
Yes, our beloved Rosie, who will be taking her big mouth off The View at the end of this season, is said to be in the running for the job of new host of The Price is Right. Word is that Ro would love to help little old ladies spin the big wheel, and that the producers of TPIR are not so happy with the other names currently up for the job.
I had heard that Dancing With the Stars' John O' Hurley was the front runner, with the likes of George Hamilton, Mark Steines, Todd Newton and Mario Lopez (what?) also being considered.
One (of many, I'm sure) person not so happy with the thought of Rosie giving away years of free turtle wax? Retiring pencil-thin microphone holder, Bob Barker. He is "adamant that Rosie not get the gig," sources say.
I kinda think she would be good. But really, as long as there's Plinko, I'll be watching.
May 7, 2007
Panel: Wolfowitz broke World Bank rules
Read full story for latest details.
Quote of the Day: Parass Hilton
"I think I get in more trouble just because of who I am... The cops do it all the time. They'll just pull me over to hit on me. It's really annoying. They're like, 'What's your phone number? Want to go to dinner?' "-- Paris Hilton to Harper's Bazaar in their June issue
Blech! Blah! Puke! Ick! Uck! Yuck! Just go away, Parass!
King Herod's Tomb Found
Archaeologists have found King Herod's tomb. I can't wait to see inside.
The Moses Revisionists vs. Caro, Part MCL
Four months after the opening of three much mulled-over Robert Moses exhibitions, the debate over his legacy shows no signs of waning. Yesterday’s NY Times delved yet again into the morass, this time wondering whether the two perspectives are simply creatures of their cultural moments – a city embroiled in decay vs. a city experiencing a growth spurt. Here’s Power Broker author Robert Caro’s take:
“I understand each age looks through its own prism,” he said a few days ago. “But the revisionists are not coming to grips with this man.”Caro, whose biography of Moses portrayed a racist, arrogant bureaucrat who, essentially, bulldozed his way through the lives of poor and working-class New Yorkers, hasn’t flinched in recent months as historians - like Columbia historians Kenneth T. Jackson and Hilary Ballon - have sought to cast the achievements of Moses in a different light.“It’s a mesmerizing narrative,” [Ballon] said. “Caro stimulated a great discussion, and there’s a human truth there: Powerful people become undone by their power. But the book is far from definitive and misjudges history. It’s absolutely evident to me that ‘The Power Broker’ is symptomatic of a time and a zeitgeist. In the community of historians, there’s been brewing a sense of discontent.”There's more:“When I read of the heroic building of the 1930s, I brought to mind the stalled projects of our day," Professor Ballon said. "It’s easy enough now to realize that New York hasn’t fallen down, as Caro thought. Look at this resurgent city. It’s spectacular."The piece zigs and zags through an issue that has been debated to death – and returns to the revisionists' claim that Moses helped build the foundations of today’s thriving metropolis (beaches, parks, highways, cultural institutions), how the city needs another master builder and how Moses’ racism was "a product of his time.” The pool-cooling incident is recounted and so is the idea that Moses’ legacy, inadvertently, is that he “created great beaches for poor people,” according to NYU urban policy and planning professor Mitchell Moss. One of our favorite parts is when Caro is asked about the Cross Bronx Expressway and he quotes from page 19 of his dog-eared book:“To build his highways, Moses threw out of their homes 250,000 persons — more people than lived in Albany or Chattanooga, or in Spokane, Tacoma, Duluth, Akron, Baton Rouge, Mobile, Nashville or Sacramento. He tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods.”And there's this gem, again from Caro: “It’s a compliment, really, that they are still debating my book as if it was new.”
Congestion Pricing Countdown: Permits, Park & Rides
Residential parking permits in Long Island City and Brooklyn Heights? Park and Ride areas near train stations? Eliminating government parking placards? The NY Sun has a look a what the Bloomberg administration is considering to "sweeten" the congestion pricing proposal as it works to gain support for the plan (it's up for consideration in 6 weeks) and it includes all of the above. Reporter Annie Karni writes:
Residential parking permits could be established in Brooklyn Heights, Upper Manhattan, Long Island City, and other neighborhoods surrounding Manhattan's central business district — a concession to those communities that would discourage drivers from approaching the edges of tolled Manhattan and clogging up their streets to avoid paying the $8 congestion fee. The city in the past has opposed residential parking permits on the basis that visitors would be unable to find parking. Permit parking has been used for years in cities such as Boston and Washington. In those cities, cars without permits can park for two hours or less.Car owners, what do you think? And in a move that almost sounds like a response to government parking abuse website Uncivil Servants, the city is also allegedly looking at parking placard abuse. As for Park and Ride's, our guess is that these would be in the outer boroughs, though it would be funny to see the city buying space in Manhattan for parking facilities. The Partnership for New York City released a survey that finds "That Lack Of Access To Mass Transit Is Not the Reason That Most New Yorkers Drive."The poll, which was conducted between March 12 and April 4, 2007, found that just 17 percent of drivers take their cars into Manhattan’s CBDs because of inaccessible or inconvenient mass transit options. Additionally, only 10 percent of drivers say that they avoid mass transit because it is too slow. In a clear indication that saving time is not a primary reason for driving, 61 percent of drivers say that mass transit would be as fast or faster than driving. That view is shared by 66 percent of drivers from both Queens and Brooklyn.Give the F an express train maybe?
No matter how many times I see the photos, the...
No matter how many times I see the photos, the proximity of the runway to the beach at the St. Maarten airport amazes me. (via gulfstream) (link)
We're close on the best chocolate chip cookie search
Remember that best chocolate chip cookie search back in March? Well I'm happy to tell you I'm close, very close, to having a follow-up post for you. Alas, I'm out of time today. So tomorrow I will have an update for you. I hate to tease like this, but I just wanted everyone to know that hope is not lost, and the end is in sight!
Presidential campaign trail winds through the Googleplex
Posted by by Andrew McLaughlin, Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs, and Elliot Schrage, VP, Global Communications and Public Affairs
Though the first votes won't be cast in the presidential election for another eight months, the 2008 campaign is already in full swing. There are lots of important issues at stake in this election, including a host of thorny policy issues surrounding the Internet and the continued growth of the U.S. technology industry. Since all of us -- consumers, businesses, and political leaders -- will have to address those issues in the coming years, we've invited all the presidential candidates to come visit our headquarters in California and share their ideas in town hall-style meetings with our employees.
In February we were honored to host Sen. Hillary Clinton on campus for the first candidate visit, and last Friday we welcomed Sen. John McCain as our second visitor. We're flattered that the other candidates have responded positively to our invitations, and we're working to schedule their visits over the next few months.
Just as the Internet poses interesting policy questions, it also helps empower citizens with more information. So, to help potential voters learn more about the candidates and their views on the issues, we've posted the complete, unedited videos of these candidate talks on YouTube. Take some time to check out Sen. Clinton's talk and Sen. McCain's (as well as a special interview that Sen. McCain did with YouTube's CitizenTube).
Unleash the power of Unicode on your Mac
Use the Character Palette, the Keyboard Viewer, and TextEdit to find, type, and convert special characters and non-Latin scripts.
Announcing Slideshow 2007 (Web User Edition)
We've launched an improved version of the Slideshow.
Here's the feature comparison:Old Version -- sucks
New Version -- rules!You wanted bigger photos!
You wanted to see titles + descriptions!
You wanted to see your photos on a black background!
Well, check this out.
DTrace for Ruby is available
In previous posts we’ve mentioned we’re working on a full Ruby DTrace provider set for Ruby 1.8.5. We’ve finished a solid base set of probes and it is ready for general consumption.
The subversion repository is at http://svn.joyent.com/ruby-dtrace.
The repository contains:
- The full Ruby 1.8.5 source with DTrace probes (http://svn.joyent.com/ruby-dtrace/ruby-1.8.5)
- Diffs (http://svn.joyent.com/ruby-dtrace/patches)
- Binaries (http://svn.joyent.com/ruby-dtrace/binaries/solaris)
- Examples (http://svn.joyent.com/ruby-dtrace/examples)
There are 3 binaries for Solaris provided here:
- ruby-x86: Standard GCC build
- ruby-CSK: Coolstack compliant build intended to drop into Coolstack 1.1
- ruby-CSW: Blastwave drop-in binary
The warning regarding the ruby-CSW binary is that it breaks with Blastwave tradition of using Sun Studio. Instead, GCC (/usr sfw) was used, due to various build issues with Ruby 1.8.5 and Sun Studio that are not related to the DTrace patch. The build name has been changed to Solaris 2.8 to ensure that extensions continue to work. You’re better off using the csw binary for debugging only until we can get a fully compliant build (coming real real soon).
Probes
The probes that are currently in Ruby-DTrace
Probe name Descriptionfunction-entry Probe that fires when a Ruby method is entered.function-return Probe that fires when a Ruby method returns.raise Probe that fires when a Ruby exception is raised.rescue Probe that fires when a Ruby exception is rescued.line Probe that fires for every line of Ruby executed.gc-begin Probe that fires right before a GC cycle begins.gc-end Probe that fires right after a GC cycle finishes.object-create-start Probe that fires directly before a Ruby object is allocated.object-create-done Probe that fires when Ruby is finished allocating an objectobject-free Probe that fires every time a Ruby object is freed.ruby-probe Probe that can be fired from Ruby code (see below).Arguments
Probe args[0] args[1] args[2] args[3]function-entry Ruby class Method name Source file Line numberfunction-return Ruby class Method name Source file Line numberraise Ruby class Source file Line number -rescue Source file Line number - -line Source file Line number - -gc-begin - - - -gc-end - - - -object-create-start Ruby type Source file Line number -object-create-done Ruby type Source file Line number -object-free Ruby type - - -ruby-probe Arbitrary string - - -Ruby Tracer Module
Included with the patch is a built-in Ruby module called Tracer. Tracer provides one method, Tracer.fire(str), which will fire the ruby-probe, setting
args[0]to the string you pass in.We will continue to add and refine probes, will be blogging about some more examples, and we are accepting requests for additional probe points (just email jason at joyent dot com). We will be developing patches against 1.8.6 in the near future.
? Mystery graph
I'm working on a longish post for later today (or early tomorrow) about this graph:
More soon.
YouTube - "Seven is Exploding"
A major Italian network has aired a special about the inexplicable collapse of WTC 7. (Even NIST has yet to supply an answer, and nearly seven years after the crime!) For the sake of our republic, it is critical that this story break through into the MSM.
OpenID at Work
On both the Internet and behind the firewall, the identity problem gets uglier every year. How many passwords do you have? If you’re in IT, how much pain do you go through getting your all your apps to share a notion of who someone is? There are a lot of smart people working on these problems, but progress has been crushingly slow. We’re doing a little something with OpenID this week that won’t turn the world inside out but I think shows that progress is possible.
OpenID (see my previous write-up) is a cheap-and-cheerful easy-to-implement way to bind an identity to a URI. It allows a Web site talking to a browser to look at the URI and reliably ask its server to confirm (or not) that the person behind the browser has OpenID rights to the URI. It’s simple, straightforward, and it works.
Unfortunately, at the moment, it isn’t good for much, because the OpenID might be pointing at a server that’s evil or silly. It’s good enough for blog comments and that’s about it.
Sun’s an Internet company and so the Identity cabal here really likes OpenID’s notion of using a URI for an identifier. The experts here think there’s a whole lot more to the identity problem than that, but it still feels like a good start. (Bear in mind that one of Sun’s most successful product areas is Identity software, in the directory and access-manager space). So we’re doing an announcement today that says, more or less, “We like OpenID and we’re going to start supporting it more.”
What’s more interesting is that we’re rolling out an OpenID provider at (last time I looked)
openid.sun.com, but with a twist: You can’t get an OpenID there unless you’re a Sun employee, and if someone offers an OpenID whose URI is there, and it authenticates, you can be really sure that they’re a Sun employee. It doesn’t tell you their name or address or anything else; that’s up to the individual to provide (or not). The authentication relies on our Access Manager product, and it’s pretty strong; employees here have to use those crypto-magic SecureCard token generators for serious authentication, passwords aren’t good enough.The applications are obvious; if anyone wants to offer deals or special treatment online to Sun employees, well, that’s easy now. (I know of at least one company named after a fruit whose online store offers a nice Sun employee discount based on knowing a “secret” URL; this would have to be a much better alternative).
I suspect there are a few other problems like that. At last Java One I was talking to a CIO from a big community college with tens of thousands of students, and literally dozens of external partners who wanted to be able to verify that someone behind a browser was in fact a student; this would take care of that cheaply, neatly, and safely.
What’s probably more interesting in the big picture is that
openid.sun.comshows that OpenID can be put to work on something with actual business value.The technology is pretty interesting too. Our Access Manager product is a big, mature, enterprise-scale offering, but that group really hadn’t imagined an application like this, so there was quite a bit of engineering involved in getting it to talk OpenID to the Web at large. But it works now, and I’m hoping one of the developers will blog the details. It’ll be open source, of course.
This does not mean the Identity nut has been cracked, in the big picture. But I’m a huge fan of solutions to big problems that start out small, simple, and efficient; this qualifies.
Basso admits Puerto involvement in face of DNA test
Eurosport | Basso had crisis of conscience
Ivan Basso came clean today. At a hearing with an Italian anti-doping prosecutor, the defending Giro d'Italia champion admitted his involvement in blood doping.
Basso, 29, told Ettore Torri of the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) he was in fact involved with Spanish Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes, and said he would cooperate with the ongoing CONI investigations. Facing a likely DNA test to confirm or deny his involvement with the doping ring, Basso looks likely to be suspended from all racing for 2 years, and from ProTour teams for an additional 2 years.
Italian cycling federation head Renato Di Rocco:
The head of the Italian cycling federation Renato Di Rocco applauded Basso's decision to collaborate, telling the Gazzetta dello Sport, "Ivan has done exactly what everyone asked of Pantani, and Marco didn't do; now, we ask in the name of cycling to not leave Ivan Basso alone."UCI president Pat McQuaid:
"Most of all I am very sad that a talented rider like Basso seems to have been involved in some illicit practices," he said. "On the other hand I'm trying to look at this news in a more positive light. Our constant efforts, with our other cycling partners, to put cyclists under pressure are paying off."Right now it's not easy to break the rules," he added.
Basso is expected to hold a press conference tomorrow to make a public statement.
AP Sports quotes Basso's lawyer that no further bombshells are expected: “ ‘This kind of activity was carried out individually,’ Martelli said in a telephone interview. ‘He never saw or heard of other riders.’ ”
Also:
Gazzetta dello Sport (in Italian) | Basso confessa: "Tolto un peso dalla coscienza"
CyclingNews | Basso confesses his involvement in Operación Puerto
Foreign Policy nerdcore staffers
The Foreign Policy - "your portal to global politics, economics and ideas" - is not perhaps the dry and fusty place you might first assume it to be...
Ding!
(Via women_dev, thanks)
oakland crime maps VI: public, indexed data
Things have been generally quiet on the Oakland crime scraping front since we released Modest Maps and I demonstrated some potential display ideas for the crime report records I'm borrowing from the Oakland PD. Here, I describe how I've chosen to make the data public in a purely-RESTful way with indexes.
The small demo at that second link above hooks up to a quick database-driven web service written in PHP, and making it live drove home the point that hosting live databases is tedious and unsatisfying.
Meanwhile, Tom Coates is drumming away about natives to a web of data, Matt Biddulph is telling information architects about RDF and API's, and Mark Atwood is releasing S3-backed MySQL storage engines. Putting these threads together suggests an interesting, or at least more durable, way of publishing pure data on the web. The MySQL engine is an interesting stake in the ground, but it hides its data and its index (the two primary components of a relational database) behind the usual MySQL server process. The contents of storage aren't open to data consumers, ditching many of the cost and scale advantages of a service like S3 by piping it all through your annoying old DB server. Tom and Matt already have the data-on-the-web bit covered, so I'm going to do something about the index.
Indexes to a database table are exactly what they are to anything else: a faster way to look up information than scanning through it all in order. It's how you jump straight to the "M's" in the phone book without a lot of paging back and forth. The most popular style of index is something called a binary tree. Imagine looking for a particular word in the dictionary: you open the book up to some page in the middle of the book, check to see whether your word is before, on, or after the current page, and then move back and forward in the book in large chunks of pages until you've found what you're searching for. This is generally much faster than starting at "A" and turning single pages to find your word. A binary tree works the same way.
Indexes are rarely exposed, even on good web-of-data citizens. Both Flickr and Twitter make it somewhat difficult to move through giant lists, though not anymore difficult than other sites. Meanwhile, the databases quietly running these services are wildly denormalized and indexed like crazy, making it possible to rapidly generate those long, long lists.
For the crime reports, I started by just getting the data up and public. It's at predictable URL's, like these:
- http://data.crimespotting.org/ Oakland-2007-05-03-MURDER.html
- http://data.crimespotting.org/ Oakland-2007-05-01-VEHICLETHEFT.html
- http://data.crimespotting.org/ Oakland-2007-01-01-ROBBERY.html
If you are looking for crimes on a particular date with a particular type, you just ask for a guessable URL. This is in effect the primary key: the natural, internal storage format for the data. Most common types of crime happen on most days, so the majority of date/type combinations should Just Work, and a simple HTTP 4XX error tells you when there is no match. I've chosen to publish in XHTML format for two reasons: the markup is highly semantic, making it simultaneously machine-readable and human-readable. Realistically, I'll be adding JSON and POX pages soon.
Unfortunately, if you're looking for a particular case number, or crimes at a particular location, it would require hunting through every page of crimes. In database terms, this is known as a table scan, and is something to be avoided at all costs. Instead, I've created a set of indexes to the data, demonstrating the key trade-off: an index helps you find what you want, but takes space to store and time to calculate. Following the Case Number link above takes you to a page with a long, nested list on it, a binary search tree. The idea is that you enter looking for a particular case number or range of case numbers. You start by comparing the one you want to the one at the top of the page. If they match, you're done. If yours is smaller, you proceed to the first nested list. If it's larger, you proceed to the second. Eventually, you arrive at the number you want and get back a pointer to one of the date/type pages above where that particular case number can be found. For example, searching for case number 07-015248 gets you Oakland-2007-02-22-ROBBERY.html.
I've also chosen to use b-trees for latitude and longitude, but these will soon be replaced: r-trees are a similar format more suitable to two-dimensional information used by geographic systems such as PostGIS.
In a database, this link-following and tree-climbing process happens very quickly on a single server, ideally in RAM with a minimal number of disk hits. In the scheme I use, a lot of the processing overhead is offloaded to smarter clients: Flash or Ajax apps that know they're looking at an index, and understand a thing or two about traversing data structures. Disk access is replaced by network access. The information is chunkier (longer lists, fewer requests) to minimize network overhead as much as possible, but it's certainly not going to be as speedy as a connection to a real database. There's a short list of reasons to do this:
- A "database" that offers nothing but static file downloads will likely be more scalable than one that needs to do work internally. This architecture is even more shared-nothing than systems with multiple database slaves.
- Not needing a running process to serve requests makes publishing less of a headache.
- I'm using Amazon Web Services to do the hosting, and their pricing plans make it clear that bandwidth and storage are cheap, while processing is expensive. Indexes served over HTTP optimize for the former and make the latter unnecessary. It's interesting to note that the forthcoming S3 pricing change is geared toward encouraging chunkier blocks of data.
- The particular data involved is well-suited to this method. A lot of current web services are optimized for heavy reads and infrequent writes. Often, they use a MySQL master/slave setup where the occasional write happens on one master database server, and a small army of slaves along with liberal use of caching makes it possible for large numbers of concurrent users to read. Here, we've got infrequently-updated information from a single source, and no user input whatsoever. It makes sense for the expensive processing of uploading and indexing to happen in one place, about once per day.
I'm reasonably happy with this so far, but I haven't yet written a smart client to take advantage of it. The near-term plan is to replace the two latitude/longitude indexes with a single spatial index, and then revisit the whole thing after I have an idea of how complicated it is to consume.
Getting Naked for Bklyn Fotog
Photographer Spencer Tunick takes pictures of nude people, and lots of them (like this crowd in Lyon, France, which he captured a few years back). On Sunday, though, he drew his biggest pool of subjects yet: More than 18,000 people willingly went full-monty for Tunick's shoot in Mexico City's main square. The Brooklyn-based artist had hoped to break his previous record of 7,000, the number of volunteers he'd photographed in Barcelona back in 2003, but he was pleasantly surprised by the apparent tendency among Mexico City residents to "treat the naked body as art." As far as we know, Tunick hasn't done a similar large-scale shoot in his home borough; NYC has put up quite a few legal barriers to his projects. No word yet on the Mexican government's reaction.
18,000 Mexicans Strip for Artist's Photo [NY Times]
Brooklyn Photographer PlansShoot with 7,000 Nude Models [Bklyn Eagle]
I was telling a friend this weekend about an article I'd...
I was telling a friend this weekend about an article I'd read long ago about Larry Wall approaching the development of Perl as if it were a natural language. I think this is the article in question. Perl, the first postmodern computer language and a conversation with Larry Wall also touch on Perl and linguistics.
Update: Here's the original post to comp.lang.perl.misc by Wall. (thx, marc) (link)
Poor farmers could benefit by change to organic farming
Poor farmers who go back to traditional agricultural methods would not have to spend money on expensive chemicals and would grow more diverse and sustainable crops if they switched to organic farming. And "if their food is certified as organic, farmers could export any surpluses at premium prices." A new study shows that a switch to organic could help the world's poor, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
Obama: U.S. must help automakers shift to greener cars
Read full story for latest details.
Mayor Bloomberg's plan for a "greener" and "greater" New York...
Mayor Bloomberg's plan for a "greener" and "greater" New York City includes congestion pricing for Manhattan south of 86th Street. "It's naive to suppose that congestion isn't itself costly. Sitting in traffic, a plumber can't plumb and a deliveryman can't deliver. The value of time lost to congestion delays in the city has been put at five billion dollars annually." (link)
May 6, 2007
Beirut + Members of the Arcade Fire
May 6, 2007 -- Members of the Arcade Fire share the stage with indie-folk-Balkan band Beirut at the Bowery Ballroom, New York, NY. Photo by Kathryn Yu
Spring Fling at NYU
NYU's ITP department runs a highly-regarded new media art graduate program in which the students meld immersion into deep media theory with intense hands-on programming and design. The art produced in the program tends to be socially- and form-conscious, and is often quite entertaining. In fact, the otherwise 'serious' department sometimes describes its huge East Village loft as a 'funhouse' and it certainly looks like one at the end of each semester, when the best student projects are put on display. On May 8th and 9th, the space will be overrun by projects ranging from low-bit music and video to eco-friendly installations. There will even be a pair of robots spewing celebrity gossip! Highlights include Lumen, an artificial bioluminescent deep sea creature displayed in consideration of unseen and alternative energy sources; Experimental Devices for Performance, Andrew Schneider's series of wearable prosthesis meant to augment performances; and News Brews, Benjamin Brown's 'hack' of taste receptor-systems to evaluate public 'taste' for news about certain world regions, which in turn brews coffee plucked from those parts of the world. While Zach Layton and Jeff Sable consider the topology of sound, Tristan Perich's 1-bit sound and video series find abstract beauty in the complex simplicity of signals. Visitors can also sink their teeth into Michael Ang's comparison of human and insect aesthetics, and whet their appetite for future projects by reviewing the trailers for Kati London's thesis project, an upcoming festival of artists' consumer-related interventions. The show's website thoroughly documents the many projects that will be on display, and the cumulative impression is one of the ITP show as a touchstone for innovation and new artistic currents. - James Petrie
Musical graffiti
Two projects presented at the Mobile Music Workshop paper session were related to graffiti culture.
Audio Bombing, by Mike Fleming, Kang Chang and Kyle Millns from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, uses magnetic audio tape as its medium. Here's how the system should work: after having recorded on a cassette any information you want, you remove the tape and cut out the segments to be used. Then take your tape segments and go tag whatever you want in urban space. You can listen to the tag by running an augmented playhead spray over the magnetic tape.
Since the graffiti is less visually obstrusive (a thin black strip), it can infiltrate spaces traditional graffiti can not such as office buildings, under tables, elevators, schools, coffee shops, etc.
The prototype consists of a hacked cassette player. The casing was removed, the play head dismantled from the circuit board to allow it to function externally.
The second project dealing with graffiti and sound is Chia-Ying Lee's Sonic Graffiti: Spraying and Remixing Music on the Street. The system enables artists to create and geo-tag music in the urban space with real spray cans. A sound cap has to be snapped on the top of spray cans to spray out sounds and manipulate sound with gestures. A controller is used for listening to the music with earphones when creating, and positioning sounds. A recording part collects sound samples from the city, or records vocal performances.
The guys from Audio Bombing were not arrived at STEIM yesterday when i looked for them so i don't know how far they are in the implementation of their project. Chia-Ying Lee was there and explained me that she is going to do a trial of her tagging system at the end of June in Taipei.
Business Week names Apple most innovative
Once again, Business Week has named Apple the most innovative company in the world. Are they even trying any more?
More Than One Night in Jail For Paris
It's a tabloid Saturday jackpot as a Los Angeles County judge sentenced "celebrity" Paris Hilton to 45 days in jail. Superior Court Judge Michael Sauer agreed with prosecutors who felt that Hilton's driving with a suspended license (she was busted for DUI on September 7, 2006, ordered to go to alcohol education this past February, and then was pulled over yet again in late February) deserved jail and sentenced the infamous sometimes New Yorker to 45 days in jail. Both the Post and Daily News put her on their covers and detailed yesterday's hearing. From the News:
When a prosecutor asked if she read the license suspension notice that was mailed to her from the DMV, she replied, "I have people do that for me." The hotel heiress said she didn't read her plea agreement either. "I just sign what people tell me to sign," she said. She looked genuinely confused when the prosecutor told her she "waived her rights" when she pleaded no contest to the boozerelated driving charge in January. Her publicist, Elliot Mintz, tried to take the fall, testifying that he told Hilton it was okay to drive after 30 days for "work-related" purposes. He claimed he was misinformed.Worst advisers and lawyers in the world! Judge Sauer said the signed document from her January incident was the "smoking gun," "She signs it, she carries it in her car for two months. In my opinion, she knew her license was suspended." He called Mintz "worthless" as well and said, "I can't believe that either attorney did not tell her that the suspension had been upheld. She wanted to disregard everything that was said and continue to drive no matter what." Her lawyers tried to arrange for a work release program, but Sauer held firm and demanded that she report to the Century Regional Detention Center b June 5. The AP has a description of jail - did you know Daryl Hannah (after being arrested for activism) and Michelle Rodriguez (probation violation) both served a few hours there? Rodriguez was supposed to serve 60 days, but was released shortly after because of overcrowding! Hilton's lawyers will appeal, with head attorney Howard Weitzman saying, "I'm shocked, I'm surprised and really disheartened in the system that I've worked in for close to 40 years.. I think she's singled out because of who she is." Ya think? And in truly classy fashion, Hilton's mother Kathy said to the prosecutor, ""I want your autograph. This is pathetic," and then said to no one in particular, "I can't believe all the money we spent on this." Kathy Hilton also accused a deputy of touching her breast. LA City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's statement, "City Attorney Delgadillo believes today's ruling sends a clear message that in the City of Los Angeles, no one is above the law."Free Polls - Take Our Poll While we're no fans of Hilton, it is interesting that she's quite possibly headed to the slammer while other celebrity drivers who have killed people, such as Rebecca Gayheart, Brandy, and Matthew Broderick (in Ireland) haven't faced jail time. We guess the DA's really want to make people realize drunk driving and driving with a suspended license isn't hot. Another celebrity who has many run-ins with the police lately: Busta Rhymes, who doesn't have many fans in the NYPD. And community service has been popular for celebrities in NYC - Boy George and Naomi Campbell have both worked for the Department of Sanitation. Photograph of Paris Hilton, accompanied by her father, outside the LA Municipal Court by Damian Dovarganes/AP
VH-1 to air "Kosbees," a House of Cosbys spinoff
created by the original creators and airing on Acceptable.tv, VH-1's user-driven show by the Channel 101 guys
A Manifesto for Data Literacy
Design principles for user data: "It's Your Data. It should always be visible. Using data in a service should be a tangible experience."
R-Tree
Python implementation of an R-Tree, useful for spatial indexing.
21st Century Professions
I realized something recently, spurred by a mailing list discussion of David Weinberger’s new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, which is about how the digitization of information is breaking down our old orders.
Here’s a paraphrase of what I wrote to the mailing list (edited so you don’t need the context):
We have to recognize that the practice of experience design is miscellaneous.Unfortunately, standard thought around design work is rooted in a typical, and, I would argue, retrograde, notion of what a practice and/or discipline is. Most organizations are stuck in classic mid-19th to 20th century thinking, borne of a manufacturing economy, where optimization arose when people were as interchangeable as the parts of the machines they built.
21st century work is going to have to be much more synthetic, mixed-up, and uncertain, largely because of the forces that Weinberger points to in his book.
I think it’s a key reason why experience designers have had such a hard time defining their work. It escapes definition.
And you know what, that’s a good sign.
As Bruce Sterling said on his blog (in response to an conversation I had with (gasp!) GK VanPatter):
“this is the enterprise of the future: if you can explain what you are doing with any conventional terminology, you’ve already been outsourced to India.”(I find this also follows on Todd’s earlier post on job titles.)
(Oh, and Andrew Hinton’s talk at the IA Summit, which, happily, he’ll be sharing (in some form) at our UX Week in August.)
Nice story about Beliefnet (need Times Select)
Keeping Faith in a Venture Built on Faith - New York Times is an interesting essay about beliefnet and how it has survived boom and bust to acheive moderate success.
The Minisode Sounds Promising
Youtube and its siblings have introduced the world to the 3 to 5 minute video and big media has noticed. Last week Sony announced they would start to produce 3 to 5 minute versions of old tv shows for the web. Some of the early shows will be TJ Hooker and Charlie's Angels.
Neither of these shows should have been 60 minutes in the first place, so I'm totally behind this. Sure, it's blatant money-grubbing but these shows will be fun to watch (assuming they're supported by advertising and don't cost money).
That being said, I'd rather see big media companies making original, well-produced minisodes. While there's some great comedy coming out of Acceptable TV and Super Deluxe, the production quality is (intentionally) low. I want to see something more.
The beauty of releasing content on the web is the lack of a programming schedule; shows don't have to fit into a grid. I see this as an opportunity to cut costs on critically acclaimed shows that didn't work with the traditional model, like Arrested Development. If the show had come back for a fourth season on the web, they could have done 30 ten minute episodes. This would have shaved costs significantly and their young viewer base would likely have followed (I know I would have).
It seems just a matter of time before big media tries something like this. Asynchronous content delivery allows for so many options and we're likely to see some great innovation over the next couple years. I have a feeling some of the riskier ideas out there might survive just a little bit longer.
BYTES of the BIG APPLE - New York City Department of City Planning
geo data downloads, can never find this one either
NY Times on Electric Bikes
Not nearly as surprising as seeing a Biomega in Design Within Reach, but today the New York Times ran a story on electric bikes. While good (any mainsteam coverage of bike commuting is good), the article missed the sport-utility bike market being built by companies like Clever Cycles, Xtracycle, Surly, and custom builders like Sycip and Vanilla.
We agree that cyclists are finding that bikes are, “a viable option for commuting, shopping and other local trips” especially with a long tail, rack, and motor assist.
As I noted in my Bettie Delivers post, if the attention the Bike Hugger Bettie gets is any indication of a national trend, we expect more cyclists to use their cars a lot less, if at all.
For more on electric bikes, check Electric Bikes Northwest ebikes.ca, a bike v. Prius, and Todd’s thougts on motors and bikes.
Jeffrey Feldman: Keep Cheney Away from U.S. Diplomacy
A Symbol of Everything Wrong With Bush Era, Cheney's Visit to Middle East Can Only Make Things Worse
Similar to Ariel Sharon's disastrous and oft-discussed visit to Jerusalem's Temple Mount (Sep 28, 2000)--a symbolic slap in the face that led to an escalation in Middle East tension--Dick Cheney's upcoming "diplomatic" visit to the Middle East will be nothing more than a provocation resulting in yet another explosion of violence. More Americans and more Iraqi's will die as a result of his trip.
If the Bush administration was serious about saving lives, building U.S. credibility in the world, involving regional allies, and ending the Iraq occupation--then they would put Dick Cheney back in his hidden location, lock the door from the outside and throw away the key.
Cheney should not be allowed anywhere near Middle East diplomacy. Any diplomatic effort that involves Dick Cheney will result in one thing and one thing only: more violence, more failure, more death.
An Icon of Violence
Of all the people in the world, today, there is not a single person who symbolizes the arrogance, violence and deceit of the Bush era more than Vice President Dick Cheney.More than just a failed leader, Cheney has become an icon of violence--a man whose name and face are synonymous with the an authoritarian view of politics rooted in the ignorant idea that unilateral force can sow everlasting peace.
There have been other icons of violence in history, but Cheney is the most dominant in today's world. Even more than Bush, who has become a symbol of a failed Machiavellian prince, Cheney iconic status is built on his soulless bureaucratic tenor, his relentless commitment to long-since-debunked propaganda, and his constant repetition of doomsday scenarios predicting nuclear Holocaust. Al this means that Cheney did not happen up on his iconic status by chance. He created it himself.
Is there anyone in America--anyone in the world--who does not know this about Dick Cheney? No. We all know it. Even in the vile and twisted tangle of the Bush White House, they all know what Cheney symbolizes in the world. They all know that no person is more hated, more distrusted than Dick Cheney. They all know that the world is waiting--hoping--not for Dick Cheney to take on a greater role in the mess of the Iraq occupation, but for Dick Cheney to just go away. Far, far away.
Despite all this, next week the White House will send the icon of violence on a diplomatic mission to the Middle East--ostensibly, in Dana Perino's words, to "follow-up" on the diplomacy of the recent meetings in Sharm el Sheikh.
What a ridiculous idea. What a foolish idea.
Dick Cheney's visit to the Middle East will do to that region what saltwater does to an open wound, what gasoline does to an open flame. Cheney's visit will bring more pain, more flames, more bombs, more lost limbs, more piles of corpses, more puddles of blood, more destroyed Iraqi hopes, more destroyed U.S. military families.
Cheney's visit will send diplomatic efforts backwards, not forwards. It will destroy alliances, not build them.
The first step to ending the mess in Iraq is not to give Cheney a greater role, but to strip him of any role whatsoever.
U.S. Diplomacy Needs A Team Symbolizing Hope
The only real way for U.S. diplomacy to succeed in the Middle East would be for the Bush administration to send a symbol of hope to the region to build confidence and restore broken ties. But who, if anyone, can the Bush administration tap do fill that role? Is there anyone at all who has the symbolic clout to fill those shoes?Possibly, although unlikely.
Former Secretary of State James Baker, for example--while not exactly a symbol of U.S. peace making, still retains somewhat of an image of as honest diplomat as a result of his prior work in the region and his efforts on the Iraq Study Group.
But beyond Baker, it is hard to imagine someone in the Republican Party ranks who has the image, the experience and knowhow to make this happen.
The only solution, then, might just be to build a diplomatic team of powerhouse diplomats whose combined experienced and symbolism would be enough to breathe life into the corpse of Bush's diplomatic effort. This symbolic team would need to function outside of the morass of distrust and suspicion created at every turn by Rice, Cheney and the rest of the Bush team.
Such a symbolic team was once assembled to give Bush advice in January 2006, although that advice was quickly ignored.
Now would be the time to go back to that file, back to that list of people and offer them use of Airforce 2 while Vice President Cheney takes a break to spend more time with his family (or whatever they need to say to get Cheney out of the spotlight).
Diplomatic Capital Unused By Bush
The end result of swapping this symbolic team of diplomats for Dick Cheney would be that the United States would diminish the prominence of its most infamous icon of violence and start drawing on its untapped reserves of diplomatic capital. This would be a hard choice to make for the Bush administration, but it would be possible.In the past, the Bush team has always seen America's symbolic diplomats as fodder for PR scams foisted on the public. The greatest example of this approach, of course, was the use of Colin Powell to sell the invasion of Iraq in a UN general assembly speech. Rather than seeing Powell as a symbolic giant capable of brokering peace, the Bush administration used him--burned up his reputation to close the deal on a propaganda campaign that hoodwinked Congress and vast sections of the public.
But in politics it is never too late. Even with his reputation still charred from that speech, Powell would be an asset to a diplomatic mission--if he were paired with Albright, Cohen, Baker and the like.
Imagine such a team of giants? The result would be a step in the right direction instead of the daisy cutter explosion of a visit from Cheney.
Cheney simply has to be kept far away from anything that even remotely smells of diplomacy--in the Middle East and everywhere else.
It would be a small step, but the end result would be more than a few lives saved.
(cross posted from Frameshop)
Amazon S3's new pricing is higher for small files, but I didn't
Amazon S3's new pricing is higher for small files, but I didn't bother to do the math; any file smaller than 53.6 KB will cost more to upload or download.
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