End of Alaska 262 [Flickr]
Stewart posted a photo:
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September 15, 2007
Summer pastime
Summer pastime
Originally uploaded by schickr.
Where's the Next Chinese Rapper? HipHip.Cn's Rap Challenge, Deadline Oct. 8th, 2007
HipHop.cn is hosting a contest to find China's next rap star. Winner receives 100,000RMB worth of prizes (which is roughly $13,000). The contest rules state that you are supposed to download HipHip.cn's original beats - so it sounds like they don't want you to use your own beats which I think is really annoying, but maybe they're afraid of legal issues if people used another person's beats? Then you need to upload a video recording by Oct. 8th, and the public will decide the winner. I assume this means they will engage their online audience - so I can't wait to vote!
So far the only good rap artist who has a Chinese background is Jin, but he's Chinese-American (who's now also known at The Emcee). I would love to hear a truly original Chinese rapper - one who isn't trying to mimic the US, or trying to be "down." But one who creates their own hybrid style, fusing the US and Chinese cultures, and spitting lyrics with deep analysis and social commentary. I can't wait to vote! -tricia
Technorati Tags: challenge, china, contest, hip-hop, hiphop, music, rapper, vote, winner
iPhone Dev Team releases free GUI unlocking app, AT&T weeps (Updated 2x)
Hopeful iPhone owners around the world, rejoice! The iPhone Dev Team has released what you've all been waiting for: a free, 100 percent GUI iPhone unlocking app.
Clinton Picks Up Support of Wesley Clark, Debbie Stabenow
Hillary Clinton's campaign announced some big endorsements today, one from retired Army General and former presidential candidate Wesley Clark, the other from Michigan U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow.
"Never before have so many Americans had our well-being so closely tied to world events," Clark said in a statement on his PAC's Web site. "Our economic and national security has become more complicated than ever before, and we deserve a leader who draws on wisdom, compassion, intelligence and moral courage — in short, we need Hillary Clinton."
"Hillary Clinton has the experience required to walk into the Oval Office on day one and start delivering the type of change our country needs," Stabenow said in a Clinton campaign press release. "She understands the challenges facing our working families, and she has fought her entire life to make sure they have the tools they need to achieve the American Dream."
Anti-War Films
Anti-War Films. A list on Wikipedia.
One-Fifth of Retail Copies of Microsoft Office Are for Mac
From a CNet story on Vista’s slower than expected adoption rate:
Retail sales of Office products from January through June were roughly double those of Office 2003 during its first six months on the market and up 59.6 percent from Office sales for the first six months of last year. […]
While much of the sales were for the new Office 2007, Swenson said just over 20 percent of all boxed copies of Office were Office for Mac. Swenson credited the large number of people switching to Macs as part of the reason for the spike in Mac Office sales.
That doesn’t mean Mac Office account for one-fifth of Office’s total sales — the corporate enterprise market doesn’t buy boxed retail copies of Office — but it’s still impressive, especially considering that the current version of Mac Office is rather old and doesn’t run natively on Intel Macs. (Thanks to Alex Merz.)
Brain stem may be key to consciousness
An article in this week's Science News discusses whether the brain stem may play a more central role in consciousness than it's usually given credit for.
It focuses on children with hydranencephaly, a where the cortex fails to develop in children and instead, the space is filled with cerebral spinal fluid.
Typically, affected children survive only a few months after birth, but those that do survive seem to remarkably more conscious than you would guess based on theories that suggest the cortex is where all the action happens to support consciousness.
Swedish neuroscientist Bjorn Merker wrote an article [pdf] in February's Behavioural and Brain Sciences journal arguing that these cases suggest we need to rethink our ideas about how the brain supports conscious thought, and perhaps, even consciousness itself.
Merker argues that the brain stem supports an elementary form of conscious thought in kids with hydranencephaly. It also contains auditory structures capable of preserving hearing in someone without a cortex. In contrast, optic nerve damage in hydranencephaly frequently impairs vision, regardless of what the brain stem does.
Self-awareness and other "higher" forms of thought may require cortical contributions. But Merker posits that "primary consciousness," which he regards as an ability to integrate sensations from the environment with one's immediate goals and feelings in order to guide behavior, springs from the brain stem.
If he's right, virtually all vertebrates—which share a similar brain stem design—belong to the "primary consciousness" club. Moreover, medical definitions of brain death as a lack of cortical activity would face a serious challenge. At the very least, physicians could no longer assume that individuals with hydranencephaly don't need pain medication or anesthesia during invasive medical procedures.
Link to Science News article 'Consciousness in the Raw'.
pdf of BBS article 'Consciousness without a cerebral cortex'.
September 14, 2007
Six Apart get a new CEO
For some of you, this might be just another press release for just another Silicon Valley company (see quote and link below). For me, I see and feel a ton of things at once (hey, I won't get sappy on you).
I first met Barak in early 2004,* when Six Apart was a teensy company, before blogging swept the mainstream. We were introduced to him via Marko Ahtisaari, a personal friend of Barak's Neoteny collegue, Joi Ito.
Our little team was building a product called Lifeblog and we were starting to do some partnerships, get a feel for the field (a long story I'm willing to tell for a few beers), and make sure we did things in the proper way (another long story I'm willing to tell for a few beers).
From then on, I worked with Barak and Loïc, his counterpart in Europe, on bringing Nokia and SIx Apart closer together. The two of them were key in introducing me to a whole new world that was booming back then, a world that put individuals in the Web, a world newly-labeled to give meaning to what we were all doing, a world of people I admire for their creativity, sense of fun, and long stream of trend-breaking products.
I can say that I would not be doing what I do today - building Ovi.com - if it weren't for Barak and the people he so expertly led.
Thanks and I wish him the best.
Link: Six Apart - Press:
Six Apart, the world’s leading independent blogging services and software company, today announced that Christopher J. Alden has been appointed Chairman and CEO. Alden succeeds Barak Berkowitz, who has served as Chairman and CEO since January 2004.
Mena, the co-founder of Six Apart, says a few things on this. Also, Chris, the new CEO, looks back on how he got there.
*Heh heh, I just remembered that Barak and I sort of crossed paths at an earlier time, via his media agency Krause and Taylor. I wrote a few press articles for them, when Barak was running Omnisky, a cutting-edge mobile internet service. For laughs, here's a now quaint article, from 7 years ago or so, in which I mention Omnisky.
Modern Cellar wine storage pieces!
We finally found some wine racking and furnishings that we think are outstanding in form and function. Whether you’re looking to store just a few bottles or more than a few dozen, you’re sure to find something to fit your needs from the folks at Modern Cellar, whose creations we’re very proud to feature in our store. Go to the store to store some wine…
Search Plugin! Search API?
As we look at search, we are always looking for ways to empower our users. One of the things that we have used internally for years is a browser search plugin, and now we would like to share that with you. There are a bunch more things related to search that we would like to [...]
Michael Lewis on a new way in which insurance companies...
(link)The logic of catastrophe is very different: either no one is affected or vast numbers of people are. After an earthquake flattens Tokyo, a Japanese earthquake insurer is in deep trouble: millions of customers file claims. If there were a great number of rich cities scattered across the planet that might plausibly be destroyed by an earthquake, the insurer could spread its exposure to the losses by selling earthquake insurance to all of them. The losses it suffered in Tokyo would be offset by the gains it made from the cities not destroyed by an earthquake. But the financial risk from earthquakes -- and hurricanes -- is highly concentrated in a few places. There were insurance problems that were beyond the insurance industry's means. Yet insurers continued to cover them, sometimes unenthusiastically, sometimes recklessly.
The Education of a Columnist
Examiner column for September 17.
In today’s Examiner, I wrote the Power Profile on Dan Mote, and taking on the role of reporter instead of columnist was an education. Columnists are, by definition, presenting a slanted point of view; it’s “opinion,” after all. A reporter needs to be objective and check facts. It’s a much harder job than you’d think!
This column will be, in a way, the flip side of the Profile of Dr. Mote. The previous sentence reveals the first difference between a column and an article: Dr. Mote is a University President, and has earned his title. A reporter, however, treats all subjects equally. In the Profile, the quoted student is called “Murray” and the President is “Mote,” rendering every contributor equal in rank. In a column I can pay deference to people’s titles.
Also not included in any reporter’s work is mention of the hurdles jumped in finding people to interview, then checking the text of the transcribed words, and checking all facts. It will be no surprise to you that the hardest part of interviewing Dr. Mote was driving around the Beltway from Virginia to College Park. That took about 90 minutes each way, with many frustrating, absolutely mystifying delays. I don’t normally drive in rush hour, so this was an education in itself!
Next I needed questions that would be interesting. We focused mostly on students, but when it was over, I wished I had asked more questions about his own academic work—which is impressive. He has 300 publications. 300! As an academic with few publications, I really wanted to know how he viewed himself: is he more administrator or more scientist?
What also never make it into print are all the checks and cross-checks of wording and statistics. The University of Maryland’s Director of the Office of University Communications is Millree Williams, and he and I were on a first name basis as emails flew back and forth. He was there for the interview, and there to correct facts and terminology and to give me an encouraging word now and then. He was the liaison through which I obtained Dr. Mote’s Five Tips for Success, which I think are words to live by. Thanks, Millree!
The most frustrating part of writing a portrait based on interviews is trying to capture the spirit as well as the letter of the subject. When Dr. Mote was talking about the mission of the university, he waxed eloquent about how “miraculous” it is that this country has “designed an educational system that reaches students at the optimum age when they’re ready to change. I never cease to marvel at the transformation that happens when a student gets a higher education.”
There was awe in his voice as he praised our educational system, and I felt his continued amazement at the beauty of the model. I was able to include part of that moment, but not all of it due to space limitations.
And so I return to the business of being opinionated, a job I enjoy. But I will carry with me my favorite moment as a reporter—the moment Dr. Mote reminded me of the miracle of education.
Power Profile of Dan Mote
This is my debut as an Examiner reporter, September 17.
“Drop by my office to shake my hand,” President Dan Mote told the new freshmen at the University of Maryland the day before classes started, and by early afternoon two young women in shorts and flip-flops had shown up at his office door. “We're here to shake hands with Professor Mote,” they told his assistant, who advised them to return at a time when he wasn't tied up in a meeting.
“We'll be getting a steady stream of freshmen from now on,” she said with a sigh, clearly accustomed to Mote's random invitations.
The book-lined president's office is not an ivory tower for Mote, who says he enjoys his position not for its status or power, but because it allows him to see the effect a University of Maryland education has on students. It's the place from which he has launched plans to change the University's physical plant and student culture.
Mote, 70, was recruited nine years ago to help put the 35,000-student College Park campus on the map. Although part of an 11-school group known as the System of the University of Maryland, only the College Park and Baltimore campuses have the legal title of “University of Maryland.”
At the time of his hiring, U.S. News and World Report ranked Maryland 30th among public research universities. By 2005 it had moved up to 18th, with the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Virginia holding down the top two spots. Among national universities, Maryland now ranks 54th out of the 262 institutions rated by U.S. News.
Although Mote has clearly accomplished the task of increasing Maryland's visibility, he does not take the rankings too literally. “It's nice to be ranked well,” he said, “but it is logically impossible to avoid bias if there is more than one variable in the ranking system.”
Mote takes more pride in “changing the way we see ourselves. We look at ourselves in a more positive way. I worked hard to get people to stretch their talents and to encourage the thought that we are a world class institution.”
Part of changing the way the university sees itself is improving the infrastructure. Within a year of taking the reins, ground was broken on a series of projects ranging from classrooms and laboratories to a performing arts center and a sports complex -- the biggest building boom in the university’s history.
Mote was also interested in changing the student culture. He actively seeks out the advice of students as he works to improve the university, offering to take them out to lunch if they call ahead and make an appointment. According to student newspaper reporter Sara Murray, this has only had limited success. “Students want to talk about tuition, and Dr. Mote has a lot of different interests he has to juggle. It's the nature of his job to be stuck in the middle.” But his lunch invitations meet with student approval. “Everyone likes free food,” Murray said.
Mote's vision was initially met with some skepticism. He replaced a popular president who previously had been a longtime faculty member at College Park. Not everyone was happy to see an “outsider” brought in, even one with three decades experience as a scientist and academic. But Jackson Bryer, professor emeritus of English literature, said Mote has “more than overcome this difficult beginning.”
“He seems to have established very good rapport both with the state legislature and with individual donors,” Bryer said. “I have also found him, on a personal basis, a warm and engaging man who is unreservedly an enthusiast about the University of Maryland…He has won over pretty much the entire University community.”
Mote just returned from the People's Republic of China, a partner with the university in financing and supporting the Research Park adjacent to the campus. He thinks it's critical to prepare students “to live in the globalized world. They may live here but do business abroad, or live abroad and do business here.”
Mote's next goal is a redesign of Maryland's program to help students fit into this globalized world. “Everything is on the table, including the core curriculum,” he said. “How this plan turns out will reflect who we are.” Mote predicted that the core experience of an undergraduate will include more international study, increased numbers of interdisciplinary subjects, and more technology. He said it will also include a redesign of the graduate school, something Mote views as a turning point for the university.
This is heady stuff, but Mote said what continues to inspire him most are the young people in his charge. “I never cease to marvel at the transformation that happens when a student gets a higher education. The changes are all-encompassing and include establishing an identity, values, and responsibilities.”
Students often aren't aware of how their choice of school will change their lives, he said. “Seventy percent of university graduates live in the state of their alma mater for at least 10 years, and 80 percent of students who go out of state for higher education never return to their state, so students really need to think about where they want to live in the future.”
Additionally, students are often unprepared for “the richness of opportunity” awaiting them. Never again will they have the chance to experience similar “personal growth, opportunity for research with faculty members, opportunity for international study, and potential to build personal relationships.”
Mote compared the college experience to a football game. A team can't play lackadaisically for the first three quarters, get serious in the fourth, and still expect to win the game. Freshman year, he said, is the moment when “the game has started.” But that doeasn’t mean students need to find a major field their first year. “Having a bit of uncertainty is a good thing,” he said.
To expose future students to what lies ahead, the university hosts its annual open house, Maryland Day, the last Saturday of each April. More than 80,000 people attended last year -- incoming freshmen, their families, area high school students, members of the College Park community -- to gather information on more than 400 school-based programs. “It's very welcoming,” Mote said, “and includes 8,000 faculty and student volunteers.”
Mote sees himself not as a figurehead, but as someone who helps instill “a sense of value and purpose” in the university community he oversees -- a community now global in scope. “There is a partnership among industry, government, and the university today that there wasn't fifty years ago,” he said, “so a university president's responsibilities have broadened considerably.”
However broad the scope of his job description, his thoughts always return to his love of the academic world and this period of time in a student's life. So students would be well advised to drop by and shoot the breeze. In the office of the university’s president, every day is Maryland Day.
Coudal Partners’ Layer Tennis
At long last, the return of the game formerly known as Photoshop Tennis:
We’re just about ready to roll with Layer Tennis and we’re sure you’re going to find that it has been worth the wait. If you are going to be screwing around on Friday afternoons this Fall (and who isn’t?) make sure you’re screwing around somewhere with high-speed web access.
First match, Friday 24 September: Shaun Inman vs. Kevin Cornell, with commentary by yours truly. I can’t wait.
delicious is four today
Delicious is four years old today. Happy birthday! We've obviously got some big things coming soon, but to commemorate the occasion, here are some early screenshots I recently uncovered; one picture is probably within the first one hundred bookmarks saved.
Eating hyperlocal in NYC
In New York Local: Eating the fruits of the five boroughs, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik goes hyperlocal and lives to tell us about it:
You go local in Berkeley, you’re gonna eat. I had been curious to see what might happen if you tried to squeeze food out of what looked mostly like bricks and steel girders and shoes in trees. I wanted to do it partly to see if it could be done (as an episode of what would be called on ESPN “X-treme Localism”), partly as a way of exploring the economics and aesthetics of localism more generally, and partly to see if perhaps the implicit anti-urban prejudices lurking in the localist movement could be leached away by some city-bred purposefulness. If you could eat that way here, you could do it anywhere.
Each day I get less and less interested in localism, perhaps in direct correlation to its rise in popularity and its growing army of fanatics.
comments are open
Chris at Six Apart
It would be an understatement to say that it’s been a while since I’ve posted to Mena’s Corner. Personally, I’ve needed to take an extended break from corporate blogging and luckily this break was enabled by the great work our teams have done on the various product blogs.
However, it just wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t take the time to wake up the corner and personally write a post about some Six Apart related news that we’re announcing today. In brief, Chris Alden (who has served as EVP and GM of our professional division – basically, the Movable Type and TypePad businesses) is going to be the new Chairman and CEO of Six Apart, having been handed the reins by Barak Berkowitz.
When Barak officially joined Six Apart as our CEO in July of 2004 (he’d been acting CEO since January), I wrote in great length (my God, it’s five printed pages!) about the reasons we wanted him to be a part of the company and what it meant to Ben and I on professional and personal levels.
Naming Barak as CEO brought on a new phase for the company and for Ben and me personally. While it was a really tough decision for both of us when I handed over my CEO reins to Barak, we knew that it was a necessary step to take the company to the next level. Barak helped Ben and me to expand our own ambitions for the company and to really see how Six Apart could grow the blogging industry as a whole, and since he joined the company as CEO, that’s what he and Six Apart have continued to do. And for that, we’re incredibly appreciative.
In the post I wrote three years ago about Barak, one of the stories I told about him was when he did the wiring in our old San Mateo office:
At our office, we had phone cables running up and down walls and doorframes and across the floor. This mess was around for months until one day Barak came to work with a T-shirt, some tool-belt type thing and some device to do phone wiring. During the course of the afternoon, Barak installed our phone lines and cleaned up the office. … The fact that Barak will do this sort of grunt work is why he fits in at Six Apart.What’s worth noting is that when I talk to people who have read my post, the above anecdote always sticks in their mind most clearly: that Barak is a guy who’s willing to be hands-on at any job at the company, and whatever he does, he’s going to dive in and do a good job at it. For people who know Barak, I think that’s something that really rings true about his character and personality, and it’s certainly one of the things we’ve appreciated most over the years.
And now, today.
We’re incredibly excited about what Chris will be bringing to his new role at Six Apart. As GM of our Professional Division, he’s led, inspired and motivated an amazing team that has injected a new passion and life into Movable Type 4.
While Chris will be the first to admit that reinvigorating and building Movable Type 4 was a group effort that involved his entire team at Six Apart as well as the outside community, I couldn’t help but be blown away by how Chris made us all feel the energy around the product.
While Ben and I were lucky to be able to contribute in small ways to the development of Movable Type 4, it wasn’t until we saw Chris present a preview of the product at our internal weekly company meeting that we understood just how exciting the launch was going to be (and frankly how much the product had grown). Over the past couple of years, it’s no secret that Movable Type hasn’t had the attention it deserves; that was just the reality of having such ambitious (and good) goals and a relatively small team to accomplish them.
To see the glow of Movable Type come back not just as a glimmer, but as a full-on spotlight, literally gave me goose-bumps, and the result—Movable Type 4—is the best version of Movable Type we’ve ever created at Six Apart.
It’s a really exciting time for Six Apart and I continue to have great faith in what we’re accomplishing. As I realized myself, being a CEO is a big job, and Barak has filled it for four years of hard work as we all built this amazing company. He moves on, but will continue to be a valuable advisor to us all. The Six Apart that’s empowering millions of people to express themselves wouldn’t be what it is without Barak, and for that I’m incredibly grateful.
--
Here is Chris's post on the transition.
Map of the Day: Lower Manhattan, 1660 Vs. Present
You can see how similar or different Lower Manhattan is against the 1660 Castello Plan map at this Yahoo Maps page. The map used is the 1916 re-draft of the original map; the Castello map is super-imposed over the same streets of today. You can manipulate the opacity of the map and realize "Hey, so that's what 400 years of landfill looks like!" We've looked at the 1660 map before, but in the context of flooding.
Radar expands sharing
Radar, which focuses and helping groups of close friends share photos mostly on phones has added a new sharing feature. While Radar's focus is still allowing small groups to share their private moments, Radar now allows you to share those photos that you don't mind everyone seeing. They've got the necessary widgets and stuff to make this easy too.
I invested in Radar because I think that the small group co-presence sharing is different from "publishing" like this blog and that this market is still underserved. However, I do think that there are some moments we all want to share and think this shift is a good direction for Radar.
It will probably get me to use it more too since I tend to be... *cough* slightly more "open" than the average person.
Read more about it on their blog.
Comment - TrackBack
This New Yorker article on light pollution makes mention of...
This New Yorker article on light pollution makes mention of the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale, which is a measure of how bright the stars are in a particular part of the sky.
(link)In Galileo's time, nighttime skies all over the world would have merited the darkest Bortle ranking, Class 1. Today, the sky above New York City is Class 9, at the other extreme of the scale, and American suburban skies are typically Class 5, 6, or 7. The very darkest places in the continental United States today are almost never darker than Class 2, and are increasingly threatened. For someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is not the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, a hundred and seventy-five miles away. To see skies truly comparable to those which Galileo knew, you would have to travel to such places as the Australian outback and the mountains of Peru.
2004 Domaine de la Noblaie, Chinon “Les Chiens-Chiens” Cab Franc
For American palates, this will be an unusual wine. But it’s highly typical of the Chinon style of Cabernet Franc, and we think it’s delicious. Made by the precocious 24-year-old winemaker, Jerome Billard, this is a lighter bodied wine but with aromas and flavors in spades. Lots of cloves and all-spice, and black raspberries and some smokiness to it.Doggonit’, gimme some Chiens-Chiens for $16.99
Video of a Japanese game show where contestants have to clear
Video of a Japanese game show where contestants have to clear hurdles while running on threadmills. There's something Sisyphean about their task. No word on whether any of the contestants were able to take off.
(link)
Mac Rumors’s Preview of Ambrosia Software’s WireTap Studio
Impressive stuff. Stores your original recordings in a library:
Another related feature is lossless editing. No matter how many changes you’ve made to the recording, you can always go back to the original recording (at the highest quality). This feature is similar to how Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture applications work on digital photos, keeping the originals intact while you apply edits over time.
The LivePreview feature has to be seen to be believed.
Friday Shoeblogging
Those new to the blog are probably unaware of my devotion to the One Perfect Sneaker, the Converse Jack Purcell. (I still wish I'd bought these.)
I bought the above pair a couple weeks ago on eBay, but when they arrived, they turned out to be the wrong size! (The box was mislabeled. Oh noes!) Luckily the seller (DesignerAthletic) was able to exchange them for me, and my right-sized pair arrived yesterday.
Are they, or are they not, the perfect autumn sneaker? They're teal-frackin'-velvet, people! I am going to wear them with an orange corduroy skirt and a fuzzy brown sweater over a teal t-shirt and be blissfully happy scuffling through the falling leaves.*
*For those readers in Australia, I suggest buying a pair now and waiting to wear them until your autumn.
Report: Shaheen To Run Against GOP Senator Sununu In New Hampshire
Big news out of New Hampshire: A new report says that former governor Jeanne Shaheen has decided to seek a rematch against vulnerable incumbent GOP Senator John Sununu. This morning's Union Leader says it has the story:
Former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen will be a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2008, the New Hampshire Union Leader has learned.The Democratic former three-term chief executive is expected to issue a statement today addressing her political plans. While it's unclear exactly how the statement will be phrased, sources say Shaheen has decided to seek the seat held by Republican John E. Sununu, who defeated her in a bitter 2002 contest...
Shaheen, who served as governor from 1997 to 2003, lost to Sununu by a 51 to 47 percent margin five years ago after polls had shown her with a narrow lead heading into the final weekend of the campaign.
Polls show that Shaheen is already leading by landslide margins against Sununu, who's been badly weakened by his support for the Iraq War. Her entry into the race, should this report be true, adds greatly to the considerable woes facing the GOP as they ponder the Senate map for 2008.
Republicans are already dealing with the retirement of Senator John Warner, whose seat is now being targeted by popular former governor Mark Warner, as well as the near-certain resignation of Senator Larry Craig and the mounting vulnerability of multiple GOP incumbents due to Iraq. Making matters worse for the GOP, they are being forced to defend many more Senate seats than Dems are, meaning Dems will have more resources to pour into top tier races. Shaheen's presumed entry adds one more such race to the list.
10 May 2008: Pangea Day
When she was awarded the 2006 TED Prize, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim expressed a wish: a global acceptance of diversity, mediated through the power of film. (Watch her speech.)
The project is taking off, and its ambition level is spectacular. On May 10, 2008, Pangea Day, sites in New York City, Rio, London, Dharamsala, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Kigali will be video-conferenced live to produce a 4-hour program of powerful films, supplemented by visionary speakers, and global musicians.
The purpose: to use the power of film to promote better understanding of our common humanity. A global audience will watch through the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones. Yes, of course, movies alone can’t change the world. But the people who watch them can.
To start the process, a short Pangea Day trailer (2:30 min) has just been given front-page exposure on YouTube, inviting anyone to submit their films. Pangea is seeking films "that provoke, entertain and inspire". "Images are powerful to divide, but also to unite", says the trailer. Here it is:
September 13, 2007
blog all dog-eared pages: the structure of scientific revolutions
I first heard the term "paradigm shift" in high school (journalism camp, 1994, oh yeah). It gets used a lot these days, especially in the field of web technology, where every new web service, development framework, and business plan is a game changing paradigm shift. Curious where the term originated, I was led to Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a 1962 essay seeking to explain changes in scientific belief over time. Kuhn's central argument is that progress does not happen by slow accretion of ideas over time, but by periods of stable work ("normal science") punctuated by crisis and rapid change ("paradigm shifts"). Crises are brought about by an accumulation of problems closed to normal scientific work, and are resolved through gestalt shifts that change research agendas and dominant theories.
The book also includes a 1969 postscript that flips the impact of the book on its head a bit. I've always seen the essay's argument as broadly applicable to other fields, but Kuhn says he developed it by applying the lessons of other fields to science.
Page 208, on applicability:
To one last reaction to this book, my answer must be of a different sort. A number of those who have taken pleasure from it have done so less because it illuminates science than because they read its main theses as applicable to many other fields as well. I see what they mean and would not like to discourage their attempts to extend the position, but their reaction has nevertheless puzzled me. To the extent that the book portrays scientific development as a succession of tradition-bounds periods punctuated by non-cumulative breaks, its theses are undoubtedly of wide applicability. But they should be, for they are borrowed from other fields. Historians of literature, of music, of the arts, of political development, and of many other human activities have long described their subjects in the same way. Periodization in terms of revolutionary breaks in style, taste, and institutional structure have been among their standard tools. If I have been original with respect to concepts like these, it has mainly been by applying them to the sciences, fields which had been widely though to develop in a different way.On to the meat of the book...
Pages 2-3, on what is scientific:
The more carefully they study, say, Aristotelian dynamics, phlogistic chemistry, or caloric thermodynamics, the more certain they feel that those once current view of nature were, as a whole, neither less scientific nor more the product of human idiosyncrasy than those current today. ... Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded.Page 5, on normalcy:
Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend most all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community's willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable cost. Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. Nevertheless, so long as those commitments retain an element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research ensures that novelty shall not be suppressed for very long.Page 20, on the coincidence of intelligibility and paradigm boundaries:
Both in mathematics and astronomy, research reports had ceased already in antiquity to be intelligible to a generally educated audience. In dynamics, research became similarly esoteric in the later Middle Ages, and it recaptured general intelligibility only briefly during the early seventeenth centrury when a new paradigm replaced the one that had guided medieval research. Electrical research began to require translation for the layman before the end of the eighteenth century, and most other fields of physical science ceased to be generally accessible in the nineteenth.Page 55, on discovering:
Clearly we need a new vocabulary and concepts for analyzing events like the discovery of oxygen. Though undoubtedly correct, the sentence, "Oxygen was discovered," misleads by suggesting that discovering something is a single simple act assimilable to our usual concept of seeing. That is why we so readily assume that discovering, like seeing or touching, should be unequivocally attributable to an individual and to a moment in time. But the latter attribution is always impossible, and the former often is as well.Page 76, on crisis and retooling paradigms:
So long as the tools a paradigm supplies continue to prove capable of solving the problems it defines, science moves fastest and penetrates most deeply through confident employment of those tools. The reason is clear. As in manufacture so in science - retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived.Page 88, on introspection during crisis:
It is no accident that the emergence of Newtonian physics in the seventeenth century and of relativity and quantum mechanics in the twentieth should have both been preceded and accompanied by fundamental philosophical analyses of the contemporary research tradition. Nor is it an accident that in both of these periods the so-called thought experiment should have played so critical a role in the progress of research. As I have shown elsewhere, the analytical thought experimentation that bulks so large in the writings of Galileo, Einstein, Bohr, and others is perfectly calculated to expose the old paradigm to existing knowledge in ways that isolate the root of crisis with a clarity unattainable in the laboratory.Page 122, on the suddenness of paradigm shifts:
Paradigms are not corrigible by normal science at all. Instead, as we have already seen, normal science ultimately leads only to the recognition of anomalies and to crises. And these are terminated, not by deliberation and interpretation, but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch. Scientists often speak of the "scales falling from the eyes" or of the "lightning flash" that "inundates" a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution.Pages 150-151, on generational shifts:
How, then, are scientists brought to make this transposition? Part of the answer is that they are very often not. Corpernicanism made few converts for almost a century after Copernicus' death. Newton's work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for more than half a century after the Principia appeared. ... And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die."Page 164, on choice of problem:
Unlike the engineer, and many doctors, and most theologians, the scientist need not choose problems because they urgently need solution and without regard for the tools available to solve them. In this respect, also, the contrast between natural scientists and many social scientists proves instructive. The latter often tend, as the former almost never do, to defend their choice of a research problem - e.g. the effects of racial discrimination or the causes of a business cycle - chiefly in terms of the social importance of achieving a solution. Which group would one then expect to solve problems at a more rapid rate?
Oops: iPod classic v. semi-truck
Our iPod classic underwent an accidental stress test today, and managed to come out (mostly) alive. A MacBook that went through the same test, however, was not quite so lucky.
Edwards' Full Ad Criticizing Bush During Speech
Here's the full ad John Edwards ran on MSNBC faulting Bush during the speech:
SVNRepository.com
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Tired of "Perl is dead" FUD ?
Yeah, me too. But I'm a capitalist, so I like to see what people are writing checks for. As I'm fed up with the various unsubstantiated claims, I've whipped up a little graphic of job posts on Dice that will hopefully cheer you up. I'll try to keep it updated regularly. If nothing else, it'll give us all something to watch as we're overtaken by our Ruby and Python overlords.Read more of this story at use Perl.
GameStop having to 'rethink' their shop layout
In interviews last week, Mr. DeMatteo and Bob McKenzie, GameStop’s senior vice president for merchandising, said they saw new customers as playing a more important role in their nearly 5,000 stores worldwide.
“There is a real breadth of properties now appealing to a much broader audience than we’ve seen before,” Mr. DeMatteo said.
“Honestly, we are having to retool the way we think of things in our stores in terms of merchandising, layout and also customer service because it is no longer only the hardcore gamer walking in who knows exactly what he wants.”
What, no more gum in the shabby carpet? No more fluorescent lighting? No more crappily-organised shelves, dust-covered promo boxes, crap third-party periphs piled up high?
Maybe no more sarcasm from me would be appropriate too. But it's about time coming, this stuff, I tell you what. Game shops, generally, are shocking. The only one that should be allowed to get away with it is CEX, and that's because it's geekcore.
The top 100 greatest beatdowns in history, most of them...
The top 100 greatest beatdowns in history, most of them related to sports. #1 is Secretariat's 31-length victory at Belmont, the footage of which is well worth a look if you haven't seen it. That horse so totally pours it on down the stretch that it gives me goosebumps every time I watch it. (thx, david)
(link)