Aram Squalls

My horrible secret

Lou Dobbs is about to air this, so I figured I'd beat him to the punch. All this time, I've been telling people I was born in the Swiss Alps, and am therefore a legitimate cheese inspector. Actually, I was born in Kenya, where they don't have cheese. I hereby resign my commission.

Glenn Beck freakout remix

Glenn Beck's Wednesday on-air freakout about vampires has already been remixed into an awesome rockabilly song/video. It's a must-watch.

Previously:
Bill O'Reilly f-bomb remix
Christian Bale flameout remix

Thriller flashmobs

Michael Jackson is dead, and America the world is celebrating the man who more or less invented the music video by getting together for impromptu Thriller flashmobs, then uploading the video to YouTube. It's kind of cool that we can collectively preserve the his cultural memory from the ground up, rather than relying on the dainty official hagiographies we're bound to see on MTV and network news.

I was lucky enough to walk into one of those flashmobs tonight. Here's my video. Rest in peace, oh gloved one. You rocked a lot of worlds.

Previously: Indian Thriller: Hooray for Hybridization!

A quick and easy guide to Iranian twitter spoofing

For the past week or so, many supporters of e-speech and civil liberties around the globe have been spoofing their Twitter accounts to make it harder for the Iranian government to police and censor tweeting from within their own country. As any reader of this blog knows, Twitter and YouTube have been vital to the organization, amplification and dissemination of Iranian protest movements in the wake of last week's contested elections.

(Incidentally, this strategy has its down side: it makes it more difficult for casual observers -- and the mainstream media -- to ascertain that a given source of information is actually an eyewitness, rather than an external spreader of disinformation. You need to decide for yourself whether this is a worthwhile tradeoff; I think it is.)

My friend [redacted] sent me this email outlining the latest, greatest ways in which you can do your part for free speech and protected dissent, if you so choose:

Are you worried about what is happening in Iran? Are you on Twitter? Read below for some things you can do to assist demonstrators in Iran. If you are not on Twitter, you can still help: skip to the bottom of this email for instructions on emailing these instructions to others.

What can you do on Twitter to help demonstrators in Iran?

Security forces are reportedly hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches. If you are on Twitter, you can set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3:30 and this will add more noise to the system and make it harder to conduct these kinds of searches.

Three basic steps you can take to make this tactic even more effective:

1) If you are not a Persian/Farsi speaker (or writer), find some random Persian/Farsi text and paste it into your Tweets. The Advanced Search feature in Twitter contains a search by language feature and the Iranian security forces may start to refine their searches to only look for Persian/Farsi Tweets in Tehran.

2) Use the tags #Tehran and #IranElection in your Tweets. Again, Iranian security forces may attempt to refine their searches using these terms.

3) Tweet early, Tweet often: This tactic will work better the more you Tweet. Set a reminder in your calendar, tie a string around your finger, do something to remind yourself to Tweet as much as possible.

Some ideas for "advanced" steps:

1) Use GoogleMaps (or an Iranian gazetteer like this: http://www.fallingrain.com/world/IR/) to find locations all over Iran and randomly reset your location as often as possible.

2) Plot imaginary trip through Iran and change your location using this method.

3) Alternate between the two previous techniques--try and randomize your traffic as much as possible.

New Biggish Idea: Pandora for Politics

I spent Saturday at Columbia University, attending a mini-conference devoted to the subject of the disintegrating news industry and the future of the American public sphere. Despite never once getting called upon in 6 hours of hand-raising, and having to listen to some less-than-informed comparisons between the news industry and the music industry, it was a pretty interesting event, and I met some very smart and cool people.

One of the interesting ideas that came out of the conference was generated by me and Jack Balkin, in response to a talk by Bruno Latour about the negative effect of "attention deficit" on civic participation. In its essence, the idea is this:

THE PROBLEM:

• It's difficult for even a civically-engaged person to develop confident opinions about a broad range of political issues, mostly due to our limited attention and resources.
• This difficulty is exacerbated by (a) the dwindling resources of the professional journalism industry, and (b) the increasing [perceived] partisanship of the mainstream media, which reduce both salient information and the vital bond of trust between information-seekers and providers
• The result is increasing homogenization/polarizing of platforms, and civic disengagement

A SOLUTION:

• A recommendation engine for political facts/opinions/news that captures and reflects the underlying value systems that drive civic engagement by individuals, and delivers customized political information to those who seek it

The reason I cited Pandora specifically at the conference (when I finally stopped waiting to get called on and just started talking) is that I believe its tag-based database infrastructure, which charts the relationships between the intrinsic qualities of songs, rather than between their audiences, provides a promising alternative to more traditional collaborative-filtering recommendation techniques. Whether applied to music or politics, collaborative filtering tends to have an "echo chamber" effect, reinforcing the "tyranny of the majority" and supporting traditional generic categorizations. In politics, its effect would be to provide obvious recommendations that already match the reductionist platforms of the two major parties for most users. A Pandora-style architecture, on the other hand, would have the plasticity and nuance to deliver counter-intuitive news and information. Just as the music site now offers recommendations that fall outside of people's established generic preferences, a political version might offer Republican points-of-view to Democrats (or vice-versa) much more frequently, and accurately to the needs of individual users.

The problem with adopting the Pandora model whole-cloth would be its reliance on experts; its database is populated by a team of highly-specialized music analysts, who apply their expertise to the coding process. Clearly, to put a political recommendation engine in the hands of such "experts" would be problematic for several reasons -- the most important of which would be that they would provide the same reductionist coding as a collaborative-filtering engine, being steeped in the dominant Manichaean political framework. Much more useful (not to mention more robust, less expensive, more timely, etc) would be to crowdsource the database generation using a process similar to Wikipedia's.

So, in short, the political engine would use:

• Wikipedia-style data generation and management
• Pandora-style database architecture and processing
• Newsreader-style, queryable front-end..? (not so sure about this part yet)

The other benefit of this system would be that the degree of complexity introduced by processual firewall between data generation and database analysis would limit the potential for hacking, google-bombing, SEO, or whatever you want to call "tipping the electronic scales." In other words, if well-designed, it would be very difficult for a third party to pre-determine the opinion and data retrieved by any given individual -- just as Pandora is more or less immune to record label promotional efforts (they could, of course, accept payola and hack their own database, but founder Tim Westergren is vociferously against such meddling, even if it would save his business from going under).

Clearly, there's even more to it than this (the idea kind of sprung wholly-grown like Athena), but these are the rudiments. I've discussed it with a few smart people in the past 2 days, and everyone thinks I should try and build it... Comments? Suggestions?

Text-searchable Obama Inauguration Video

I've been happy to hear Obama pledging a more transparent government, and glad to finally have a commander-in-chief who knows how to use teh Google. But there's nothing better for democracy than citizens taking technology into their own hands to up the ante.

Delve networks just released a text-searchable video of Obama's inauguration speech. Try it out, and tell me this country wouldn't be a better place if every minute of C-Span was available this way.