The FAA has created a Google Map mash-up site listing the location of every single military installation in the USA. What a nice favor to, uh, law abiding airline pilots terrorist splinter cells and crazy white power militias.
Still, it's a pretty good mash-up. Check out SeeAndAvoid.org to play with it.
Seen on my pal Noah's Danger Room blog.
My friend Alice just published a great article in FirstMonday (an online peer-reviewed academic journal) about the persistence of moral panic over the sexual vulnerability of kids and teens online -- from the great cyberporn panic of 1996 to the tizzy in a teapot over MySpace predators today.
The article's especially timely, given the recent news that Verizon, Sprint and TWC will now be monitoring the bits they carry, and blocking users' access to newsgroups that have been identified as child porn destinations.
Now, I'm against child pornography in all forms, but I hardly think an ineffective witch hunt (honestly, how many microseconds will it take for the pervs to create a viable workaround?) is sufficient justification to destroy the legislatively-enforced protection that ISPs have against culpability for the actions of their users, and to further erode what little privacy we have left in this country.
What's next -- the telcos being held responsible for monitoring the content of our private phone conversations? Oh, wait a second...
From Alice's article:
Thus, I conclude that the furor over MySpace is disproportionate to the amount of harm produced by the site. Indeed, the furor over online predators seems also to be disproportionate. Rather than focusing on nebulous “predators,” it seems that parents, teachers, and social workers should emphasize identifying and preventing abuse in specific, local community settings.
Word to the mothaf*cka, Alice!
Just spotted this on the street in NYC's financial district. I'm no expert on the semiotics of baseball cap colors, but it's pretty clear to me that only women and art students would wear the Hillary hat, and only old guys driving big American-made sedans would wear the McCain hat. Whereas the neutral, patriotic white and blue Obama hats would probably appeal to a much larger segment of the population.
The question is -- do the colors reflect anything meaningful about voter demographics? After all, the brilliant thing about the market (in theory) is that its foremost incentive is to match supply as closely as possible to demand. Were the pink McCain hats returned unpurchased to the manufacturer? Did the brown Obama hats connote too much racial affiliation? Or are the manufacturers just hedging their bets?
Those of you who know me (and a very few others) know I've been drawing comix on and off since the puberty years. I just started a new strip, called "Liberty," on the Village Voice website. It'll be a weekly (we're not sure what day yet, so stay tuned).
Below is the first panel of the first strip:
(thanks for the hook-up, Mike!)
UPDATE: There's a bit of a political struggle at the Voice site over whether this strip will continue to run. How very exciting. Either way, I'll let you know.
If you believe that the Google search habits of a couple hundred million Americans indicate the nation's relative interests and preferences (there are good arguments for and against this premise), you may be interested to know that Obama's been consistently more sought-after than Clinton.
Here's a chart of Google searches on the two terms over the past year (bear in mind that "clinton" covers both the nominee and the former president, while "obama" can't mean much else than, well, Obama.)
Incidentally, they both beat McCain.
Al Gore was interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air yesterday. I have to say, even 8 years after the Great Debacle, I'm still weeping. Somewhere less than a Planck's-length away, there's a parallel universe where he's been in office for two terms, and I'll bet everyone there is having a much better time.
At any rate, I thought it was interesting that, apropros of a question regarding environmental policy and the climate crisis, Gore invoked Internet regulatory policy (such as 'net neutrality and open standards, though he didn't use the terms) as fundamental to the democratic process, and therefore as imperative tools in combating the global crisis. Wish I had a direct quote, but NPR doesn't post transcripts for some reason.
I know, it's wonky, but you've got to love a guy who can see effective communications policy as a vital element of human survival. Also, just for the record, he was warm, thoughtful and well-spoken. When he slipped into a Southern-y drawl while discussing his dad, it seemed like a genuinely unconscious shift, not the kind of hamfisted put-on we're used to. I dunno, maybe it's for the best he's been able to speak honestly from the sidelines, rather than being shackled to a party line in the White House.
Well worth a listen. Here's the link.
Today, I gave the students in my Copyright class their second take-home exam (due next week). I don't really need any more grading work than I already have, but I'd be curious to see your responses and feedback. So have at it.
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Congress has just passed new intellectual property legislation, containing the following stipulations:
- Copyright terms have been extended to author's life +100 years (or 150 years, in the case of works for hire)
- Copyright protection has been granted for the following:
- apparel designs
- interior design concepts
- myspace/"pimp my site" templates
- movie/tv/book/game plots
- databases
- recipes for food and drinks
- funny walks
- swimming styles
- new instrumental timbres
- public documents, such as laws and election tallies
- Possession of "infringing" copyrighted material, in any quantity, is a federal criminal offense, punishable by up to $200,000 and 9 months in jail per infringing item
- IP owners are permitted to engage in liability-free "limited surveillance" and "proactive neutralization of pirating tools and materials" if they have a reasonable suspicion of piracy.
President Rice has yet to sign the bill, although she is expected to make a decision any day. She can approve it, exercise a "line item veto" over certain elements, or veto the bill in full.
Please write two letters to the editor of your local newspaper, one explaining why it's imperative that Rice sign the bill, and one explaining why it's imperative that she veto it in part or in whole. Each letter should be approximately 800-1000 words long.
One of the great challenges for "traditional" news media in the age of configurability is to retain the benefits of editorial oversight while unlocking the extraordinary communicative power of database-driven information. The problem, of course, is that databases put power into the hands of the user, undermining the myth of perfect control over meaning production that characterized many 20th century media.
The other problem, which is far more pragmatic, is that, if everyone's presenting the same database to end users, there's very little opportunity to create a vector of differentiation between information sources; does it all boil down, like the war between Google and Yahoo, to a question of interface and "value-added" content and services?
Maybe it does. But "interface" means more than just choosing the color and placement of buttons on a dashboard. It also means making an ideological or expositional statement through the juxtaposition of information sources -- the same way a traditional newspaper does by choosing the "most important" stories for the front page, or the way a mash-up producer does by choosing two or more songs that create new meanings together through aesthetic or linguistic friction.
All of which is to say, I think the New York Times has done a really nice, elegant job (in an incredibly short turn-around time) of presenting the contents of Hillary Clinton's long-sought and newly-released White House schedules. Their dedicated micro-site offers static images of each schedule page (redactions and all), searchable by page number, date, and, most importantly, keyword. They have also editorially chosen "selected dates" which they feel may have some broad relevance or are in some way exceptional -- such as the day of her speech on women's rights in Beijing, or the day her husband admitted to his affair with "that woman."
Of course, there are still plenty of things to be done (editorial content could be written for every page or recurring subject; more complex search algorithms could be included, permitting queries such as "how many days of vacation did Ms. Clinton take?"), but considering the accelerated time frame, this is great stuff. The fact that the Times would trust its readers to engage the information on their own terms, with their own agendas, indicates that the company is really prepared to address the needs of its users in the 21st century.
FWIW, this also throws some light on Sulzberger's much-maligned claims last year that he didn't "care" whether the NYT would have a print edition in 5 years.
My friend Arnie, with the assistance of the state of Hawaii, just launched two sites pegged to the fiftieth state's 50th anniversary: a general-purpose site called StatehoodHawaii.org, and a Web 2.0 social-networky site called fifdififdi.com (think phonetically).
The sites are pretty cool. Lots of archival photo/video (much of it licensed under Creative Commons 3.0), plus tons of Web 2.0 features -- geotagging, social networking, blogs and so forth. Nice work, man. Wish I was Hawaiian.
Ulrike Reinhard just posted a bunch of video and MP3 of the DIY Media Festival from a few weeks back. Really good conversations and presentations, by a holy host of remix and participatory culture luminaries.
Maybe the best clip is Henry Jenkins proclaiming, "I am an Obama boy!"
Link: sevenload.com
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