I am a crotchety old man about graffiti. 99.9% of them — and, as usual, all my statistics have been authenticated by having been made up — impose an adolescent narcissism. But I also think: (a) I don’t really understand the cultural positioning behind it, (b) some of it is public, rebellious art, and (c) it’s not like the commercial exploitation of public space is so great.

So, the documentary Bomb-It looks very interesting. (The initial trailer is meatier than the new one.) (Thanks to RageBoy for the link, for this follow-up, and for posting the beautiful poster.)

[Tags: graffiti bomb-it art ]

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The Declaration is obviously a remarkable document, part philosophy, part legal document, part performative, part a moral accounting, part beautiful rhetoric. It’s good reading, although I do tend to skip the long middle that lists the particular complaints and justifications.

Here are some resources:

Text
Wikipedia
US Archives
Facsimile
With annotations of our failure to live up to it
Lightly annotated to show draft changes
Martin Luther King’s Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam
Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese Declaration of Independence

[Tags: july4 declaration_of_independence ]

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Tim Bray blogs about the head of ISO pooh-poohing the concerns about the way that Microsoft’s OOXML document format was strong-armed through his organization.

[Tags: standards odf ooxml tim_bray microsoft ]

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Nicholas Kristof has a terrific column today about how the donation of a goat to a family in Uganda ultimately led to one of the children, Beatrice, earning a degree from Connecticut College, and beginning a path of service for her community. It’s a wonderful story, the point of which is what Jeffrey Sachs calls the “Beatrice Theorem” of development economics: “small inputs can lead to large outcomes.”

Well, yes, of course. In fact, small changes have determined the success or failure of us all. And I have no misgivings whatsoever about this past Channukah having given our children certificates announcing that Oxfam had given goats in their name. Yes, I am a goat-giver, and proud of it.

But…

…I’ve noticed in business writing in particular the frequency of what we can call the Fallacy of Examples (a type of Fallacy of Hasty Generalization). You read some story about a successful CEO as if we should learn from his (yes, usually it’s a him) example. But we are struck by examples frequently because they’re exceptional. As exceptions, examples are the last thing you want to learn from.

Not always, though. Sometimes examples are typical. That’s different. The trick is determining which are which.

An even when you can, you’re still not done. Is Beatrice and her goat an exception? Yes. That’s why her story is so inspiring. As an exception, it may be exactly what we should not be emulating. After all, if she’d won the lottery, we wouldn’t think that giving lottery tickets to the poor is a sensible approach to the problem of world poverty. But, even though Beatrice is an exception, the typical effect of donated goats (and other such small-ish gifts) may be quite good.

That’s why the Fallacy of Examples is a fallacy. Reasoning from examples doesn’t always lead to false conclusions. The reasoning just isn’t enough to tell you what the valid conclusions are.

And in the absence of valid conclusions, here’s Kristof’s list of ways to donate goats or their equivalents. And here’s Oxfam’s program. And, because it’s the Internet, here’s samizdata’s warning that goats cause poverty. [Tags: philanthropy nicholas_kristof beatrice goats ]

Ethanz brilliantly contextualizes this post. Thanks, Ethan!

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http://www.koreus.com/video/telephone-portable-mais-popcorn.html

Yikes.

Anti-yikes

[Tags: cell_phones mobiles pop_corn brain_cells ]

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I’m enjoying my Amazon Kindle ebook reader, albeit while accidentally pressing the “next page” button as often as everyone else (did they beta test this thing all on the thumbless?), and whining about the rest of the annoyances about which you should not even get me started. Nevertheless, it works fine for pleasure reading and I like carrying a whole bunch of books among which I can switch rapidly. And despite its ugly DRM heart, you can upload books from the Net in PRC, MOBI, or text formats.

But, when it comes to books I read for research, it’s about as effective as it would be as a boat anchor.

First, the note-taking and highlighting are jokes.

Second, it (usefully) lets you repaginate on the fly, but (annoyingly) doesn’t know the original page numbering. How am I supposed to cite a page in a reference? It should let us ask nicely about which physical page the current text came from.

Third, there’s no bibliographic tool.

Obviously, Kindle was not designed for researchers. I understand that, and I would have made the same marketing decision. But for Kindle 2.0, it’d just take some software. (Well, and a change to the Kindle book format to capture the original page numbers.)

There’s a bunch of skeptical Kindle links here.

[Tags: ]

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Zachary McCune, who is at the Berkman Center, became an “ambassador” for One Web Day. To rev up for it, he did an anthropological study on himself by going without the Net for one day. He’s blogged his odyssey.

As an example, here’s what Zack wrote at 12:22:

I decide it’s high time I got my daily intake of news. I imagine my fingers crawling over the keyboard to open up nytimes.com, wired.com, boingboing.net, and boston.com in different tabs. I imagine opening up facebook to “friend” Barack Obama. Does he (or one of his nameless intern/aides) check out your profile before he friends you? I will need to wait to find out.

I remember that I am going to interview the “Plain White T’s” tomorrow. I note that I would be wikipediaing “plain white t’s” at about this time.

I realize that every time I use wikipedia, I end up clicking through to an average of three other articles. So for every wikipedia entry I don’t read today, I am actually not reading four wikipedia articles.

A single tear falls down my cheek.

And at 1:20, amidst all the urges to google this or click on that, he has a quieter moment:

I begin to realize that the internet shapes my sense of self, in that I may be directed by ads, emails, stumbles, or traditional hyperlinks, but I am still an arbiter of what I consume.

The internet suddenly seems to not be a space I inhabit but rather a (re)structuring of my self as a sort of data flaneur.

Oh, just read the whole thing yourself! It’s wonderful.

[Tags: berkman zachary_mccune onewebday ]

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From gigbert (via Paul English (email)):

looking for a monkey who can bang on my keyboard to try to find the one random sequence of characters that is not yet taken as a domain name

The gig offers $100.

[Tags: humor monkey dns ]

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A thoughtful overview of the Global Voices Summit from Evgeny Morozov. Also, see Joi Ito.

[Tags: global_voices ]

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My Windows Vista Ultimate 64 installation is now telling me that my license will expire in 14 hours. This is confusing since the Control Panel tells me that Vista is activated and gives me a product number.

I tried to use the Windows support chat, but when I entered the n-digit product number, it told me the support period was up…yet another indication that my product is indeed activated.

So, I called telephone support, hoping they wouldn’t charge me the required $59. After asking me too many questions, they transferred me to Windows Activation, with the instruction — and this is the part I like — to answer the telephonic robot’s questions:

Yes
Transfer me
Transfer me
Transfer me anyway

That worked fine, except after telling me that it was transferring my call, the robot hung up on me.

Sigh.

So, I tried to get the Activation Support center’s phone number, but for that you have to use the Windows Activation program on your PC … which isn’t where it’s supposed to be … because I already activated my product.

Another call to Windows Support, another round of answering questions, and they actually gave me the number for U.S. Windows Activation: 866-740-1256.

Unfortunately, that group was unable to help. They gave me the phone number for the first tech support group.

I only use my Vista machine for home accounting and for games. Is Microsoft purposefully trying to discourage casual users like me?

Eventually, a tech support person told me that the problem is that I installed Service Pack 1 in January or February. If you did, you have to uninstall it (find Windows Update and click on Installed Updates. Select the service pack and uninstall it. Then, when that doesn’t work, you’ll have to uninstall it by hand.) I’ve spent two hours uninstalling and trying to reinstall:

- Don’t forget to run the System Update Readiness Tool.
- Don’t forget that the System Update Readiness Tool doesn’t have a file name that’s intelligible by users
- Don’t forget that when you run the System Update Readiness Tool, it will call itself something else. I think.
- Don’t forget to run sfc /scannow. (Didn’t work? Run it as admin.)
- Don’t forget to run msconfig and turn off the right start-up programs.
- Don’t forget to yes, transfer me, transfer me, transfer me anyway.

[Tags: vista microsoft ]

The next day, someone called from Microsoft to make sure that my problem was resolved satisfactorily. Ten minutes later, his manager called to make sure that the guy who checked on whether my problem was resolved was himself courteous and thorough. I told both of them that Naveen - the tech support person who solved my problem - was fantastic, but the first five people I talked with ought to be taught what Naveen knew about diagnosing my problem.

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Do barefoot cultures have a word for stubbing their toes?

[Tags: puzzle ]

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Matthew Burton on working with the people who are our government…

[Tags: government democracy matthew_burton ]

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Would we not then be YouTubers?

(Amazingly, the query youtuber “coach potato” only turns up 4 hits, none of which are making this bad joke. Am I getting my Google syntax wrong??)

(And if it’s not clear why it’s a joke at all, look up “tuber.” See? Hahaha.)

[Tags: humor media youtube ]

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Very funny nerdy YouTube, via Dave Winer.

[Tags: humor ]

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Conference coverage like this and this makes me sorry that Ethan Zuckerman is chairing the Global Voices meeting instead of live blogging it. We need an “and,” not an “or” here. Clearly it’s time that Ethan cloned himself.

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman global_voices pdf ]

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You can now pre-order BradSucks’ new album. And why wouldn’t you? (You can answer that question by giving it a listen…) [Tags: bradsucks music ]

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Jyri Engestrom, whose company, Jaiku, was bought by Google, is talking about “Nodal Points: The emerging real-time social Web.” About four years ago, I heard Jyri talk about “social objects:” at Reboot, a talk that really stuck with me. Now Jyri works on social tools at Google.

Nodal Points is an homage to William Gibson, he says, and especially to a character who can predict the future by seeing patterns in human amounts of data.

Jyri says that social networks don’t explain why people are connected socially. He talks about the importance of social objects — objects that connect people in a social network. “Good web services allow people to create social objects that add value.” Mobile devices can help because they provide sensors that let us capture more data. This will be increasingly true.

Then we need to think about the verbs that people perform on objects. E.g., Flickr’s aggregation of what people have done with your photos. We should be surfacing the available actions.

“Social peripheral vision” lets you see what’s next. If you are unaware of other people’s intentions, you can’t make plans. “Imagine a physical world where we have as much peripheral information at our disposal as in WoW.” Not just “boring update feeds.” Innovate, especially on mobiles. We will see this stuff in the next 24 months. Some examples: Maps: Where my friends are. Phonebook: what are people up to. Email: prioritized. Photos: Face recognition.

Structurally, there are “object lockers” and on top of that a set of “activity aggregators.” “What’s key is filtering out what’s irrelevant.” Pattern recognition matters … hence, nodal points. “It’s not that different from Web search,” except the query is constant and consists of contextual parameters, e.g., who is copresent in the space, what’s in the calendar. “Imagine it’s all funneled into one big query” that runs constantly.

Detecting nodal points: “What should I be aware of that’s happening around me? Was what just happened significant to someone on the network.” And then deliver it to people at just the right time, perhaps via push. “Discovery is becoming social.” “It is the end of the era of search,” i.e., of querying for stuff. From browser to search to share (citing former ceo of paypal). From pagerank to “facerank” where what counts is friends in common, physical proximity, shared taste, shared objects.

He points to OpenID (identity), OAuth (authorization), and OpenSocial (interoperability).

Whe you develop a social service, your questions shoudl be: What is your object? Whare are your verbs? What are your nodal points?

Are we creating echo chambes?
An empirical question. Still open. In my own experience, no. We can build into the software the ability to prompt you with what would be interesting to you even though you would never have thought so. [heavily paraphrased]

[Great talk. And undoubtedly giving insight into Google's plans for socializing its software.] [Tags: reboot10 reboot jyri_engstrom social_networks google ]

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I don’t usually post photos of me, for obvious reasons if you’ve ever seen me in person. But this one by Euan Semple is un-non-postable.

[Tags: photos ]

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David Isenberg shows a fiber optic cable with 864 fibers. Each can carry 155 frequencies that each can carry 10 gigabits. That means three of the fibers can carry the entire busy hour traffic of the USA. If everyone on the planet had a phone and was making a call at the same time, that one cable could carry it, and 100 of the fibers would still be dark. [I'm sure I screwed up some of the numbers, perhaps seriously. Sorry. I'm multitasking because I decided this afternoon that my after dinner talk — entirely new — needs slides.] “The answer to the question ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’, the answer is ‘How many do you want to dance on the head of a pin?’.”

[Tags: reboot08 broadband david_isenberg ]

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I was having breakfast in the lobby of the lovingly eccentric Fox Hotel in Copenhagen this mrning, wondering why the staff didn’t answer the particularly loud and annoying phone that rang the entire time.

When I heard the same electronic ringing tone in the elevator, and then in the hallway outside my room, I thought that perhaps one of the hotel alarms had been triggered.

When I got into my room and heard it I realized I’d set the wake-up alarm on the cellphone strapped to my hip.

My only question is: On whom can I blame this? I’m thinking Dick Cheney, and I’m open to suggestions for possible causal chains. [Tags: i_am_an_idiot dick_cheney ]

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Jacob Kramer-Duffield at the Berkman Center explains the significance of Google’s new ability to search the copyright renewal notices for books published between 1923 and 1963. Publishers of those books had to file a renewal notice to hold on to their copyrights. It’s been very difficult to determine whether those notices were ever filed, so, when in doubt, we’ve assumed that they’re protected, even though most of them undoubtedly are not. This is known as the “orphaned works” problem.

But, thanks to a gargantuan effort by a whole bunch of people — thank you! — that information has been digitized and Google can search it. Google Book Search and The Open Content Alliance will use this list to provide open access to works that otherwise were kept out of the hands of the public because their copyright status just couldn’t be determined.

Project Gutenberg, The Universal Library Project, and the Distributed Proofreaders deserve a lot of credit, praise, and hosannahs for accomplishing this task. [Tags: open_access copyright google open_content_allilance project_guetnberg universal_library_project distributed_proofreaders ]

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I received two Chase Quicken Visa credit cards yesterday. Neither were numbers I currently hold. So, I called their support line.

They told me that my current Citi credit cards had been bought by Chase, and would expire as of June 29, even though they’re marked as continuing into 2010.

The support guy couldn’t answer the most basic questions, including which new card number mapped to which old card number. So, I got Citi on the line while I escalated the Chase call. With one support person in each ear, I discovered that my two Citi cards were not being transferred, but an old Citi Quicken card was. And what about that second Quicken account for which I had received a new card? The Chase person explained that this was a card for an account that I had closed two years ago.

Why did they send me a card for a closed account? The Chase person said it was done automatically. So, presumably, thousands of cards have gone out with no indication that they’re for closed accounts. Was it a simple mistake, is Chase hoping that we’ll call the 800 number listed on the sticker on the front, thus re-activating accounts we’d closed?

I have now canceled my every single Chase Quicken account. (I don’t even use Quicken any more.) And I’ve asked for an acknowledgment in writing that I have done so. [Tags: cluetrain chase_bank credit_cards ]

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Scott Bradner has a terrific column on the FCC’s idea that it will make some spectrum available for free Net access, so long as it’s censored. If the naughty bits can’t be stopped by filters, then the FCC wants the carriers to block it using other means, e.g., perhaps by blocking encrypted data?

I don’t know why the FCC thinks that it has the mandate to censor the Internet. And if they do, why don’t they insist on a morally pure telephone network? Why do they think the Internet consists of content instead of people communicating? And why does the FCC care so much about boobies?

More info: The company behind this. The .doc file with the FCC text. Reuters. M2Z comment (type “m2z” in “filed on behalf of”). DailyWireless.

[Tags: fcc ]

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Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School and Ned Gulley of MathWorksMathLab are giving a Berkman talk called “The Dynamics of Collaborative Innovation: Exploring the tension between knowledge novelty and reuse.”

Karim begins by looking at research by Meyer on the airplane’s hidden collaborative history: It didn’t spring whole cloth from the brow of the Wright brothers. E.g., Chanute served as a hub for pre-Wright research and innovation. The Wright brothers actively corresponded with him. Once the Wright brothers patented their inventions, innovation moved to Europe (which is why so many of our aviation terms are French … l’fusilage, anyone?).

Ned talks about the contest MathLab (where he works) runs every six months– sixteen times so far — designed to encourage the free flow of ideas. It’s a week-long open collaborative competition for MATLAB programmers. Entries are displayed, scored, and ranked immediately. Anyone can modify anyone else’s code and resubmit it as their own. The leader is determined objectively by putting it through some hidden tests that judge its efficiency. (They don’t make the optimization suite public because they don’t want people to “game” it.) The prize is a t-shirt or baseball cap, although the real prize is reputation.

Ned shows a graph of entries and processing times. It’s quite a dramatic set of cliffs. On the other hand, there are lots of dots representing people who make “improvements” that aren’t improvements. This may be people with bad ideas or people whose ideas happen not to work the way MATLAB prefers.

The winning entries on average have contributions from 30 people. Ned says that when some code leaps ahead, you’ll see “splash” as tweakers try to improve it marginally, often making it marginally worse.

Q: In the commercial realm, what happens when an early innovator patents it?
You don’t get collaborative innovation.

People name their entries, and sometimes sell social signals with them: “Tweakfest” or “I wish I knew how this works.”

Ned says that if a chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg, then a hacker is only code’s way of making more code.

Karim talks about some statistical analysis of entries into the contest. He looks at how many lines an entrant borrows and how many times the entry’s reused. There is a power law distribution: A few lines are used thousands of times, but most are used zero to three times. His analysis shows that when it comes to entries that become leaders, borrowing pays off more than novelty.

Q: Have coders evolved in these games?
Yes. More collaborative. And more sophisticated in their gaming of the contest.

Topcoder.com uses this model to develop code solving practical problems. [Tags: berkman Karim_Lakhani ned_gulley collaboration ]

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Nicole Simone interviewed me about what I’ll be talking about at ReBoot. It’s posted here.

[Tags: reboot nicole_simon babbage infohist ]

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This is a video of a nice moment: Obama addressing his staff after clinching the nomination. [Tags: obama ]

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The Berkman Center has posted a video (also available as an mp3) of me and Persephone Miel interviewing Willms Buhse and Tina Kulow. Willms is one of the editors of a German anthology, Enterprise 2.0: Die Kunst, loszulassen. (Disclosure: I contributed a chapter.) We talk about how Enterprise 2.0 is being received in Germany, given the inevitable cultural differences.

Unfortunately, because I insist on dressing like a 12 yr old going to summer camp, my polo shirt creates a hypnotic moire pattern, so please shield the eyes of your household pets.

[Tags: enterprise_2.0 willms_buhse tina_kulow persephone_miel germany business web_2.0 ]

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From an email from Matthew Burton, one of the co-founders of Speechology.org:

Speechology is an archive of political debates and campaign advertisements, all of which are subject to fact checking by our users. We created Speechology because we were tired of watching politicians fudge the truth in ads and dodge questions during debates.

YouTubes. Ratings. Comments. Tags. What’s not to love?

There’s not a lot of content at the site yet. It’ll be interesting to see if useful analysis and fact-checking emerges.

[Tags: politics ]

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Yes, that’s how devout Americans are. Even a bunch of our atheists believe in God.

[Tags: religion atheism improbable_results ]

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From Martin Oetting comes a link to an article in Der Spiegel (in German), which he summarizes:

A small German municipality joined a Euro project in which road signs and all types of visible regulation of the inner-city traffic are abandoned in seven towns across Europe. Instead, all drivers, cyclists and pedestrians are asked (or expected) to more consciously pay attention to everyone else and negotiate the right of way and how and where to park “on the go” - for a more fluid and less rule-driven approach to traffic.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous regulation ]

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Stowe Boyd, responding to Nick Carr’s provocation in The Atlantic that argues that “Google is making us stupid,” anticipates some of a piece I’ve been thinking about writing for a few months: The sort of long-form argument that some say the Web is killing is vastly over-rated. It’s actually difficult to find books that are long arguments (not multiple illustrations of one point, but an argument that develops over the course of multiple chapters) that don’t go off the rails relatively quickly. And, yes, I include Immanuel Kant in this. Darwin’s Descent of Man is an exception.

I meant to get around to writing about this. I still do.

[Tags: stowe_boyd nick_carr ]

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From BoingBoing comes this hilarious set of Amazon reviews of $500 audio cables from Denon. Best of all, BoingBoing points to the tags people have associated with the cables.

Oh, market conversations! What claims and brands won’t you take apart?

[Tags: market_conversations denon everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I’m working on a talk for Reboot, a very fun conference in Copenhagen. Because it’s an after-dinner talk, and because it’s a bunch o’ geeks, I plan on talking in a hugely preliminary way about some of what I’ve been researching for the past few months. I’m assuming the audience’s preemptive forgiveness. Also, with luck, they’ll all be a little drunk. At the moment, my talk is called “Babbage’s Noise,” mainly because I like the way it sounds.

I’m still trying to pick a thread through the morass o