rebecca's pocket
.: 2005 --> september
september
Help those affected by Katrina: Donate to the Salvation Army, the American Red Cross or the Mennonite Disaster Service.
@ Strengthen the Good has created a matching fund for donations to Red Cross 2005 Hurricane relief fund. My friend Alan Nelson will match readers' donations up to a total of $1000. Oops, make that $1,100, thanks to Chris at Political Musings. I mean, $1,350, thanks to Jake Richter. Nope, make that $1,550, since I'm kicking in another $200. Want to help? Double your donation by giving through Strengthen the Good, or add to the kitty so that we can raise the matching amount.
[ 09/01/05 ]
@ Chuck Taggart is an old-skool blogger who lives in New Orleans. I'm relieved to see that he evacuated before the storm hit and is now monitoring his beloved city from his temporary digs. He reports, "A guy named Michael is providing posts from his refuge in a highrise in the CBD. He has diesel-fueled generators and, amazingly enough, Internet connectivity." I'll be checking back with both blogs for eye-and ear-witness accounts of activity there. [more...]
Incidentally, this is the same Chuck whose Red Beans and Rice I so highly praised here a couple of years ago. His recipe is the number one hit on Google for the phrase.
[ 09/01/05 ]
@ When the rest stop near the United States' first Vietnam Veterans Memorial developed drainage problems, the State of Vermont designed a system that uses plants and organisms to clean wastewater, then pumps the treated water back to the toilets for reuse. I want one.
[ 09/01/05 ]
@ In Kabul, a troupe of actors is bringing Loves Labours Lost to a local audience and finding that Shakespeare is a surprisingly good match for Afghan culture.
Sabah-e Sahar, a famous Afghan filmmaker who plays the lead female role, says that the Afghan people will easily understand the motivations of these medieval characters. She says the traditional rules of Elizabethan England about love and modesty are very similar to the strict ban on affection in modern Afghanistan.
"Love is not new in this country," says Ms. Sahar, who has supported herself for years as a policewoman. "But you can't tell people, oh, I've fallen in love. There's lots of change from that black period until now, the Taliban period, when you couldn't even walk with your own husband in the street. In this time, we have lots of freedom. But love is still something you should keep secret."
[ 09/01/05 ]
@ A chasm grows in 'flat' world
If we live in an increasingly "flat" world where commerce and jobs can flow easily from Berlin to Beijing and New York to New Delhi, the world remains far from flat in income terms. As Americans celebrate Labor Day this weekend, enormous rich-poor income gaps continue to strain relations and resources. Indeed, one lesson may be that globalization isn't the great leveler of poverty that some hope.
But it doesn't appear to be the great destroyer of rich-country wealth, either.
[ 09/06/05 ]
@ Forbes: September 2005 Mutual Fund Guide.
[ 09/06/05 ]
@ Good News: Coffee may be healthy for you. Bad News: The recommended dosage is one cup of decaf a day.
[ 09/06/05 ]
@ Kristof: The Larger Shame.
Hurricane Katrina...underscores a much larger problem: the growing number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. [...] The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After declining sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Mr. Bush.
If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. That's right - the number of babies who died before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002 in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing.
[ 09/07/05 ]
@ It breaks my heart to think about the animals that were left behind after the September 11 attacks, and now in New Orleans. Fortunately, there are several efforts that have mobilized to try to rescue the pets that survived the storm.
Update: Here's a gallery of images of pets affected by Katrina. The Humane Society of the United States has more.
[ 09/07/05 ]
@ Things Hagrid The Half-Giant Would Say If He Served Jesus Instead Of Harry Potter.
[ 09/07/05 ]
@ The Perfect Burger. Apparently, the secret is...fat.
[ 09/07/05 ]
@ Today is the last day to contribute to our Katrina fundraising effort. If you haven't given already, remember, any amount will help.
[ 09/08/05 ]
@ Citizen Science: The Appalachian Mountain Club is using hikers to monitor climate patterns and plant life.
[ 09/08/05 ]
@ When 41-year-old chef Simpson Wong suffered a heart attack, he re-evaluated his actual food intake and realized he would have to redesign his menus to stay alive.
Recipes heavy with cream, butter and veal stock had to go. Although he never ate much, Mr. Wong realized that he tasted a lot during service, so much so that in the course of preparing 150 dinners he might consume 30 teaspoons of butter and countless grams of saturated fat.
If he wanted to keep cooking and stay healthy, he knew he would have to cook in an entirely different way.
[ 09/08/05 ]
@ 11 Tips to surviving a day job with your creativity intact.
Do the Lifeboat Exercise.
In his marvelous little Creativity Book, Eric Maisel suggests doing the Lifeboat Exercise once a day for three days in a row, but I find it works well as a life raft all year long. Find yourself a raucous bell, he says. Ring your bell loudly and shout, "Create!" Go to your workspace, set a timer for ten minutes, and work. When the timer goes off, shout, "All clear!" You’ve just made ten minutes progress on your creative work and fed the connection to your heart.
Create! (via 43 Folders)
[ 09/08/05 ]
@ I've located what seems to be a small number of scrapbooking blogs. Can any of my readers add to this list so I can add it to my portal?
[ 09/08/05 ]
@ I'm very pleased to announce that through your efforts, Strengthen the Good raised an unbelievable $10,000 for Katrina relief. Thanks to those of you who donated.
[ 09/09/05 ]
@ For those of you would still like to make a matched donation, Warner Brothers is matching donations to the Red Cross up to $500,000 through Ellen DeGeneres' website.
[ 09/09/05 ]
@ For those of you would still like to make a matched donation, Warner Brothers is matching donations to the Red Cross up to $500,000 through Ellen DeGeneres' website.
[ 09/09/05 ]
@ The September Project is a grassroots effort to encourage public events on freedom, democracy, and citizenship in libraries on or around September 11 (this weekend). Libraries around the world are organizing public and campus events, such as: displays about human rights and historical documents; talks and performances about freedom and cultural difference; and film screenings about issues that matter. Their blog can give you updates on activities happening around the world. (thanks, jay!)
[ 09/09/05 ]
@ Real Climate, a weblog published by working climate scientists, has posted a new essay: Hurricanes and Global Warming - Is There a Connection?
It is impossible to know whether or not this event would have taken place if we had not increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as much as we have. Weather events will always result from a combination of deterministic factors (including greenhouse gas forcing or slow natural climate cycles) and stochastic factors (pure chance). [...]
Yet this is not the right way to frame the question. As we have also pointed out in previous posts, we can indeed draw some important conclusions about the links between hurricane activity and global warming in a statistical sense. The situation is analogous to rolling loaded dice: one could, if one was so inclined, construct a set of dice where sixes occur twice as often as normal. But if you were to roll a six using these dice, you could not blame it specifically on the fact that the dice had been loaded. Half of the sixes would have occurred anyway, even with normal dice. Loading the dice simply doubled the odds. In the same manner, while we cannot draw firm conclusions about one single hurricane, we can draw some conclusions about hurricanes more generally. In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make - and possibly already is making - those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been.
[ 09/09/05 ]
@ I want to watch this show: the BBC's -- No Waste Like Home.
Presenter "Queen of Green" Penney Poyzer managed to reduce one family's household waste by 94% in just two weeks. She also helped them reduce food wastage by 60% and heating gas usage by 63% (which wasn't hard as they heated their house 24 hours a day at 28 degrees centigrade!!!). She managed to save the family of five £419 ($753) in two weeks the equivalent over a year of over £10,000 (nearly $20,000).
Wow. Is this going to be available in the US? Alt-e also links to Penney Poyzer's Energy Efficient Home.
[ 09/09/05 ]
@ NYTimes Money: How to prepare for an emergency.
[ 09/12/05 ]
@ On September 2, Rafe Colburn posted an email his mother received from a member of her church, a heartbreaking and inspiring account of caring for the first busloads of Katrina survivors as they passed through the town of Orange, Texas. In the comments to that post, Mrs. Colburn gives own account of volunteering. I hope you will read it all. It makes me wish I was there to help, and it makes me wish his mother — or her church — had a weblog. People like to disparage organized religion, and Christianity in particular, but it is impossible to read Mrs. Colburn's words about her faith and not see the power of faith in her life.
[ 09/12/05 ]
@ The Katrina Help Wiki is one way anyone can help. The Katrina People Finder is working to create a centralized repository so that those searching for loved ones don't have to comb through dozens of databases.
[ 09/12/05 ]
@ Harpers: The Uses of Disaster.
The events of September 11, 2001, though entirely unnatural, shed light on the nature of all disasters. That day saw the near-total failure of centralized authority. The United States has the largest and most technologically advanced military in the world, but the only successful effort to stop the commandeered planes from becoming bombs was staged by the unarmed passengers inside United Airlines Flight 93. They pieced together what was going on by cell-phone conversations with family members and organized themselves to hijack their hijackers, forcing the plane to crash in that Pennsylvania field.
The police and fire departments responded valiantly to the bombings of the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, but most of the people there who survived did so because they rescued themselves and one another. An armada of sailboats, barges, and ferries arrived in lower Manhattan to see who needed rescuing, and hundreds of thousands were evacuated by these volunteers, whose self-interest, it is reasonable to assume, would have steered them away from, not toward, a disaster. In fact, coping with the swarm of volunteers who, along with sightseers, converge on a disaster is part of the real task of disaster management.
[ 09/12/05 ]
@ An Autumn Summer reading list for IT managers.
[ 09/12/05 ]
@ A generation of young people raised on 9/11, the tsunami, and now Katrina have become supercharged social activists: Realistic Idealists.
An eighth grader... Hazel [Balaban], transformed a basement storage room in a Brooklyn homeless shelter into a library stocked with 5,000 volumes. At 13, she mobilized her fellow students to paint walls, hire librarians and design a functioning library-card system linked to a computer database. "We were floored," [her mother] said. "And it's not just Hazel. A lot of kids out there are like this. They are like C.E.O.'s of community service." [...]
Hazel is at the leading edge of a generation whose sense of community involvement was born four years ago on Sept. 11, 2001. [...] Encouraged by an increasing number of high schools with community service requirements and further motivated by college admissions offices looking for reasons to choose one honor student over another, teenagers are embracing social activism with the zeal of missionaries and the executive skills of seasoned philanthropists. Not only are more students participating, educators say, the scale of ambition seems to be continually increasing.
[ 09/13/05 ]
@ Unconscionable. "Wind-driven rain." The Christian Science Monitor offers a primer on homeowner's insurance to make sure this doesn't happen to you.
[ 09/13/05 ]
@ Bruce Schneier: Toward a truly safer nation.
The problem is that we all got caught up in "movie-plot threats," specific attack scenarios that capture the imagination and then the dollars. Whether it's terrorists with box cutters or bombs in their shoes, we fear what we can imagine. We're searching backpacks in the subways of New York, because this year's movie plot is based on a terrorist bombing in the London subways.
Funding security based on movie plots looks good on television, and gets people reelected. But there are millions of possible scenarios, and we're going to guess wrong. The billions spent defending airlines are wasted if the terrorists bomb crowded shopping malls instead.
[ 09/13/05 ]
@ Parke Wilde reports on a new study of "three-year-olds in 20 U.S. cities found that if mothers perceive their neighborhood as unsafe, their children tend to watch more television, but they are no more likely to be obese and do not spend any less time playing outdoors than children in safer neighborhoods." I'd be interested in seeing a study that includes suburban families, as well as urban families. I am under the impression that suburban mothers are amongst the most protective.
My suspicion with regard to suburban mothers who work is that children who are old enough to care for themselves, but too young to really be making decisions for themselves, are instructed to stay inside after school until a parent gets home. That would have a profound impact on the activities they choose, and the amount of exercise they get.
[ 09/13/05 ]
@ I'm not particularly impressed with Google's new Blog Search. It seems to be assembled from syndication feeds — probably a scalable approach — but one that omits anything that was never syndicated (read: early blog entries) and material from feeds that aren't archived somewhere. For example, a search for "mass amateurization" should bring up Tom Coates's wonderful (Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything... (it's the second result on regular Google). Instead, it brings up numerous references to his piece. His post, a blog entry, should be the first result. A search for the exact title of Tom's piece turns up ... no results at all. [more...]
Similarly, a search for blog history or weblog history on Google Blog Search brings up very little about the history of weblogs; even a search for those exact terms brings up a very mixed bag, with few authoritative results. By comparison, search regular Google for either term, (with or without quotes), and you will find a series of links on the subject, with my essay on the history of weblogs as the first result. [Note]
From a technology perspective (and speaking as a non-technologist), gathering material by subscribing to site syndication feeds probably makes sense. From a user perspective, waiting for Google to take me from a redirect page to the actual blog is a little annoying. More important, as implemented, it creates dodgy, not very useful results.
Google already indexes millions of pages a day. It would be trivial to identify 90% of all blogs: simply look for "blogspot" "typepad" "livejournal", /mt/ and other tell-tale URLs or embedded bits of code. (Presumably Google is already sorting out blogs from other publications that syndicate their sites.) Google should at least go back and try to index "historical" (read: pre-RSS and Atom) blog entries the old-fashioned way. Admittedly, over time, this issue will become less important — though some important and seminal material would still be lost. But right now, Google Blog Search results look to be practically useless.
Once it actually works, I'd like blog search to be more tightly integrated with regular Google search. Just as you can switch from a general Web search to a search of the News, I'd like to be able to easily switch my search from the Web or News to Blogs. Additionally, I'd like the option of removing blog posts from general search results.
Or is Google Blog Search a preliminary step in removing blogs from general Web searches altogether? I'm not sure that's the most useful solution to finding people the information they want — and it would simply destroy the nascent "market your product with a blog!" industry — but it would certainly do much to reduce the appeal of spam blogs.
NB. Usually a Google search will produce a series of links with excerpts from the referenced pages. However, my essay is accompanied by a short description that doesn't appear anywhere in the piece. Clearly the result of a little hand-tweaking based on the content of — not the words on — the page. Update: jjg writes to tell me that descriptions rather than excerpts in Google results happen when there's an entry for the page in Dmoz.
[ 09/14/05 ]
@ The Omidyar Network is matching Katrina donations. Double your giving power! (via rc3.org)
[ 09/14/05 ]
@ CSM: Africa's Peace Seekers: Kenyan General Lazaro Sumbeiywo.
Lazaro Sumbeiywo had spent the whole of his illustrious career focused on making war. When the phone rang in his office in October 2001, this towering son of a village chief was Kenya's top general. "I have an offer for you," he recalls the president saying, "and I order you not to refuse."
"I want you to find peace in Sudan," [then-President Daniel arap Moi] said.
[ 09/14/05 ]
@ Harlem School Introduces Children to Swiss Chard is a fascinating article about school meals at Promise academy. It's part of the Harlem Children's Zone, a 60-block area in central Harlem that aims to create a "tight web of social, health, and educational programs that will produce a next generation of college graduates.
Although seconds on main courses are not allowed - someone has to show children what a reasonable portion is - Ebony can fill her tray with a dozen helpings of vegetables or bowls of Romaine lettuce from the salad bar. Any time in the school day, she can wander into the cafeteria for a New York apple.
Perhaps no school is taking a more wide-ranging approach in a more hard-pressed area than the Promise Academy, a charter school at 125th Street and Madison Avenue where food is as important as homework. Last year, officials took control of the students' diets, dictating a regimen of unprocessed, regionally grown food both at school and, as much as possible, at home.
"Our challenge is to create an environment where young people actually eat healthy and learn to do it for the rest of their lives," said Geoffrey Canada, the teacher and author from the South Bronx who developed the Promise Academy.
[ 09/14/05 ]
@ I saw an advertisement yesterday that read: Your choice of grocery bags won't make a difference for the environment, but advice guru Umbra Fisk tells you what will. "Advice guru"?
[ 09/14/05 ]
@ CSM: Africa's Peace seekers: Ugandan Civilian Betty Bigombe.
When she arrived last year, two months after the February massacre, she began her one-woman peace effort with no official position or outside funding — just a history of trust among all sides. Hopes were high. The rebels seemed desperate — and willing to negotiate. International pressure was building on the government to end the war. But today, 1-1/2 years later, despite some near successes, the 19-year conflict rumbles on between essentially three factions: The rebels who've been branded terrorists by the US, and who've killed more people than Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hizbullah combined; Uganda's headstrong president; and profiteering Army officers who apparently manipulate their commander in chief to prolong the war.
To some, her style seems organic, even haphazard. One day, she'll be poring over maps with government soldiers to establish the boundaries of a cease-fire zone. Other days, she'll joke and flirt with a commander to persuade him to delay a counterattack long enough to let her get between the two sides. At times, she's the target of expletives and even death threats.
[ 09/15/05 ]
@ Who's the Smartest of Them All? is a peek at Hewlett-Packard Co. researcher Bernardo Huberman's work, mining email to find "undeclared experts" and automatically directing appropriate requests their way. It's a terrific article filled with terrific ideas. "Group aware" software will be next buzzword, especially if Huberman manages to build his enterprise knowledge harvesting machine.
Indeed, Huberman says he has a notion of ultimately "building an enterprise knowledge navigator" that would allow organizations to harvest all of the knowledge in people's heads, "and not just what's in documents that are stored on a server somewhere." [...] To that end, Huberman's team has developed a peer-to-peer system that automatically creates profiles of users based on those activities and stores them on their PCs. This way, users can reach so-called undeclared experts.
For example, if someone in an organization wants to know of a good restaurant in Beijing, the system will automatically send that user's query to only those employees whose profiles fit the request. Likely candidates could include people whose travel vouchers show trips to China or whose human resources records show Chinese language skills.
"This way, knowledge gets declared automatically," Huberman explains. "Some people call it social software. What we're trying to do is harness the power of the implicit. The idea that guides our work is to go and uncover all that implicit knowledge in order to gain an understanding and then to use it in interesting ways."
[ 09/15/05 ]
@ It isn't automatic, but did you know that del.icio.us now allows you to post a link for:username, and that link will appear on that user's page? If you are a social bookmarker, you can now send me a link by tagging it for:rebeccablood. I've cleared out my page, set up an RSS feed, and eagerly await your submissions. (hat tip to rafeco for the idea)
[ 09/15/05 ]
@ Nerd alert: Katrina: the Gathering.
[ 09/16/05 ]
@ CSM: Africa's peace seekers: the Congo's Petronille Vaweka.
"If you are facing someone who is violent, you must never use force," Ms. Vaweka recalls her grandmother saying. "The first thing is to put down all your instruments. Then look at them, right into the eye." [...]
Slowly by slowly, as some Africans say, peace is coming to this part of Congo. Negotiation by negotiation, Vaweka chips away at the assumption that force is the path to power. Starting five years ago as a lowly civil-society worker — and now as the province's top official — her determination to stand up for order, and for villagers, in a region where militias have run roughshod for years, is helping to roll back the rule of the gun.
[ 09/16/05 ]
@ A Little Weekend Reading: Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace. See ya!
[ 09/16/05 ]
@ Pre-qualifying RSS feeds with Firefox and SessionSaver. In which our RSS feeds become so numerous and unwieldy that we resort to reading them in browsers before deciding to subscribe.
[ 09/16/05 ]
@ Connecting the Dots:
Wading into recommender applications discusses the merits and philosophy of several music and film recommendation engines. Quite well done. (via dangerousmeta)
[ 09/16/05 ]
@ Hey, does anyone know why The Weblog Handbook has suddenly jumped from 2,000 to 423 (as of 12:30pm PST) on Amazon today? Is every university in the world teaching about blogs this year, or was there a media mention I'm not aware of?
[ 09/19/05 ]
@ Here's an old, but still very inspiring article about artist and social entrepreneur Bill Strickland, who is using his gifts to create hope for at-risk teenagers and displaced adults. [more...]
The source of it all is Strickland's single flash of insight on that long-ago Wednesday afternoon. "You start with the perception that the world is an unlimited opportunity," Strickland says. "Then the question becomes, 'How are we going to rebuild the planet?'"
The question may seem presumptuous, but plenty of people think that Strickland not only has the right to ask it, but that he has also discovered some of the answers. Although he isn't dealing in big numbers — his combined programs reach about 400 kids and 475 adults each year — Strickland is dealing in success: For the past five years, 75% to 80% of the high-risk high-school kids who've come to his after-school arts program have gone on to college. At the same time, 78% of the adults who graduate from his vocational program find jobs.
My husband saw Mr. Strickland speak this weekend. His programs are not only doing well, they are expanding, with one due to open in San Francisco soon.
[ 09/19/05 ]
@ Danish artoist/activists Claus Rohland and Jan Egesborg are plastering Bagdhad's diplomatic Green Zone with anti-war posters.
[ 09/19/05 ]
"None of the warring parties — neither US-led forces nor Iraqi rebels — present a solution to this war. The ultimate solution needs to come from ordinary people. It may sound naive, but we would encourage people to keep faith in themselves that a final solution rests with them."
[ 09/19/05 ]
@ The history, ethnicity, and aspirations of New York City can be tracked through the names of its newborns.
[ 09/19/05 ]
@ In the wake of the success of ABC's Lost and Desperate Housewives, television execs have produced a new season that is long on complex plotlines and short on tidy weekly endings. Remember kids, Steven Johnson says this is TV that makes you smarter!
Now that ABC's two monster hits have dominated TV ratings, writers in every genre of television are reporting that networks have thrown open the doors, even to the craziest ideas. [...] Writer Paul Scheuring says when he pitched a TV show two years ago about a mild-mannered engineer who gets himself thrown in jail in order to break out his wrongfully convicted brother, network executives said, "Next." Fox later greenlit the show, titled "Prison Break," after "Lost" became a huge hit.
[ 09/19/05 ]
@ Honestly, now that the city has been evacuated, where's the outrage? [more...]
1115.org: Bush signed an executive order suspending the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage law, in effect guaranteeing a wage cut for tens of thousands of workers who will eventually sweat to rebuild the stricken region. Just days later it was announced that no-bid contracts were awarded to Bush donors and supporters, Halliburton, Bechtel National, and Shaw Group. Not only were these lucrative contracts not subject to bidding, they were awarded on a "cost-plus" basis which provides a built-in profit regardless of how much is spent. And on the morning of Bush's New Orleans address, the New York Times reported that a bill in the Senate would allow the EPA to suspend all environmental regulations across the Gulf Coast and that the president's chief political advisor Karl Rove would be in charge of the government-wide reconstruction effort. ... It's already becoming clear who will sacrifice so that others will be rewarded.
Kartik's World: "While the bodies of New Orleans were still piling up, commercial contractors and developers swung into action on Capitol Hill. Florida's own Congressman, Tom Feeny, no stranger to developers' money, helped lead the charge. He and 34 other Republicans demanded the repeal of the Davis-Bacon labor law only days after the hurricane cut the heart out of the Gulf Coast area."
(via CJR Daily)
[ 09/20/05 ]
@ NYT: Help for Aging Parents, and for Yourself. The single most useful piece of information in this article may be the federal hot line for aging services: (800) 677-1116. The article says "it can direct you to all kinds of area services for the aging".
[ 09/20/05 ]
@ For my fellow Bill Strickland fans, here's a September 2005 article about his work which touches briefly on the centers he operates in San Francisco, Cinncinnati, and (soon) Grand Rapids, Michigan. If you are inspired by Strickland's work, read it, even though this is one of those articles where you wish the writer would just get out of the way. [more...]
The kids work here. This is not a daycare center. Your job is to expect kids to perform. But you can't just say it and you can't just teach it. You've got to show the way you think about the kids every moment you're with them. They see that fountain out in the front plaza, they eat the food in our dining room, and they know before a word is spoken how we feel about them.
We are not a poverty center. A poverty center looks like poverty; we look like the solution. A kid goes into that ceramics studio, he works with first-class equipment and materials. When he looks up on the shelves, he sees the work of world-class artists. You provide those kids with good things, you expect them to do good work, and don't worry, they'll do just fine. No big deal.
And according to the New Orleans Picayune, he'll be opening a center in New Orleans.
[ 09/20/05 ]
@ Awesome. 125 Ways to Make Money with a Typewriter, by David Seltz, 1952. (via robot wisdom)
[ 09/20/05 ]
@ When your records are online, how can you be sure who is confirming their own research, and who is stealing yours? One Find, Two Astronomers: An Ethical Brawl.
There is a long history of astronomers jealously guarding the coordinates of some celestial phenomenon while they try to figure out what it is, and of others trying to get in on the action. In 1930, when Pluto was discovered, the Lowell Observatory, home of the discoverer Clyde Tombaugh, withheld details of its location because they wanted to be the first to calculate its orbit.
Matthew Holman, a Harvard planetary astronomer, said that in the old days when the logbooks were real books sitting by the telescope, some astronomers would write down fictitious coordinates and objects to cover their tracks.
With electronic records, Dr. Brown said, "It's important for scientists to discuss what's O.K. and what is not."
[ 09/21/05 ]
@ I suppose you've seen the iPod Nano. Even I want one, or at least an opportunity to hold one. Technology and interface issues aside, I don't think they can go any smaller than this. At this size, the iPod Nano has an incredibly appealing form factor. Looking at it, you just want to pick it up and turn it around in your hands. Make it smaller and that will be lost — the Nano would become something utilitarian and forgettable like a thumb drive or a keychain (or a Shuffle). Going smaller would transform the iPod Nano from an appealing object to more clutter. A smaller iPod Nano would suddenly always seem too big.
[ 09/21/05 ]
@ Library Thing allows you to catalog your books online. How long before Amazon acquires it, or a similar site? What wouldn't they give to know — in addition to what you've bought from them — every book you own?
[ 09/21/05 ]
@ Last year, Amy Gahran published a wonderful guide called Blogging Style: The Basic Posting Formats. [more...]
My biggest argument with this style guide is the idea that link-only or mostly-links sites are somehow "lazier" than sites that consist of longer texts. Finding good links is time-consuming and requires a good eye. Wunderkammers are vastly underappreciated, possibly because they are so hard to do well. (My recent rediscovery of Robot Wisdom has reminded me of just how rich a link-only blog can be.) Writing short is hard — often harder than writing longer pieces.
I also disagree that the prospect of readers clicking away from a blog is to be avoided. As Meg Hourihan noted, blogs are elastic, not sticky. People come back over and over if they know they will be sent away to reliably interesting pages. Those issues aside, this is a useful starting text for any beginning blogger.
[ 09/21/05 ]
@ It's that time of year: Discardia starts tomorrow. (via RW)
[ 09/21/05 ]
@ A Life Philosophy in One Word: Read. [more...]
Censorship, it seems, is often birthed from a mating of ignorance and fear. Rarely do the book banners read what they want censored before jumping to the conclusion it is inappropriate. (Conservative groups do not have a monopoly on this technique, either. In Free Speech for Me — But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other, author Nat Hentoff writes that "the lust to suppress can come from any direction.") [...]
So I read The Drowning of Steven Jones, bawling my head off at the end, and reported back to the concerned parents. [...] They listened politely and proceeded to successfully lobby the local school board to get Greene's novel removed [from the eighth grade reading list].
Since that time, I mark Banned Books Week by reading a book that has been challenged or banned over the years.
The ALA's FAQ about Challenged and Banned Books, and The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.
[ 09/22/05 ]
@ Reporters San Frontieres has released a Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents, explaining, among other things, how to set up a blog and technical ways to get around censorship. The creators of the handbook warn that the tips are not intended for terrorists, racketeers or pedophiles who use the Internet to commit crimes. Um....
[ 09/22/05 ]
@ Science vs. Culture in Mexico's Corn Staple
The argument has exposed deeper chords that have been resonating here for two decades. At its center is a dispute over whether Mexico's embrace of free trade can coexist with age-old farming practices that form the fabric of rural life.
Like everyone here, Mr. Ramírez farms a small plot to put corn on his table. Following tradition, each household plants grain selected and saved from the previous year's crop. The practice has created a diversity of corn varieties, reflected in a palette of kernels from nearly white to wine red to blue-black, making Mexico a corn seed bank for the world. [...]
Then, radiating distrust of government assurances after a decade of free trade that has all but depopulated the Mexican countryside, he asked a familiar question here: "What is the government doing to make us self-sufficient?"
[ 09/22/05 ]
@ Unanticipated Consequences News: Passengers inside a JetBlue aircraft watched live coverage of the event while the plane circled southern California for hours.
Some passengers cried. Others tried to telephone relatives and one woman sent a text message to her mother in Florida attempting to comfort her in the event she died.
"It was very weird. It would've been so much calmer without" the televisions, Pia Varma of Los Angeles said after the plane skidded to a safe landing Wednesday evening in a stream of sparks and burning tires.
[ 09/22/05 ]
@ Men are dirtier than women. Ew, ew, ew, Braves fans. Sneeze into your elbow, and wash your hands!
[ 09/22/05 ]
@ Change the World: How to go from an Intovert to an Extrovert.
[ 09/22/05 ]
@ Kids today. In my day, it was pants that dragged on the ground. Never believe the "comfort" rationale. Muumuus are comfortable.
[ 09/23/05 ]
@ Interfaith coalition unveils public school Bible course.
The 41 contributors include prominent evangelical, mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish and secular experts.
Religious lobbies and federal courts have long struggled over Bible course content. To avoid problems, Bible Literacy's editors accommodated Jewish sensitivities about the New Testament, attributed reports about miracles to the source rather than simply calling them historical facts and generally downplayed scholarly theories — about authorship and dates, for example — that offend conservatives.
Educators know biblical knowledge is valuable — 60 percent of allusions in one English Advanced Placement prep course came from the Bible.
This sounds reasonable...but I doubt if it will satisfy the people who care the most about this.
[ 09/23/05 ]
A gay church in a battered neighborhood led by a black minister with AIDS may sound like something dreamed up by a politically correct screenwriter. But Unity is the very real, raucous spiritual home for hundreds who feel cast out by traditional churches, which for many people serve as the heart of the community and an extension of the family.
"There are churches here and there" that welcome gay worshipers, said Gerard Williams, an assistant minister who teaches the Sunday school course on homosexuality and the Bible at Unity, "but ain't nobody going to love you like we do."
(via screed)
[ 09/23/05 ]
@ A Little Weekend Reading: Trickle up economics: How low-tech, low-cost designs are helping the poorest farmers on Earth grow their way out of poverty. (PDF version, which has pictures of some of the devices.)
"The idea here is the ruthless pursuit of affordability," says James Patell, a Stanford business school professor who has worked with Polak on designing inexpensive tools. The litmus test for IDE products: The farmer can recover the cost of the device within one season. "We are firm believers in markets," Polak says.
Underlying the program is his belief that the basic problem of rural poverty in the developing world boils down to what happens on quarter-acre plots. Of the 1.1 billion people in the world who exist on $1 a day or less, he says, 75% live in rural areas and half eke out fragile livings cultivating small plots of land. Marginally boost their income, and power plants, clinics and schools will follow.
"So much development work is focused on macroeconomics and increasing GDP per capita." These large-scale government aid programs are doomed to failure because of corruption, bureaucratic sloth and, ultimately, the dependency they breed among recipients, says Polak: "Until the development community realizes that the solution to poverty lies in increasing the wealth of small-plot farmers, it will continue to fail."
(via dangerousmeta)
[ 09/23/05 ]
@ Most and least expensive housing markets. Lord. A down payment in one area will buy an entire house in the others.
[ 09/23/05 ]
@ John Tabin has created a page linking to syndicated versions of NYTimes Select columnists. Take that, the Man!
[ 09/23/05 ]
@ New Orleans Celebrity Chef Paul Prudhomme has come home to cook for the national guard. (via RW)
[ 09/23/05 ]
@ Raymond Carver: Principles of the Story (via dangerousmeta)
[ 09/23/05 ]
@ The Ultimate Investment Reading List.
[ 09/23/05 ]
@ George Monbiot has written an exceptionally smart article on peak oil and its consequences. His conclusions: We can't know when the peak is going to occur, and the crisis we face today is a result of inadequate processing facilities, not oil.
[ 09/27/05 ]
@ Um.... Resistant staph and flesh-eating bacteria are still rare, but on the rise.
[ 09/27/05 ]
@ Terrific. Blacks Join the Eating-Disorder Mainstream.
"Minority women are not getting treated," Dr. Striegel-Moore said. "It's very clear from my studies that black American women do experience eating disorders, but doctors and therapists still operate under the assumption that they don't; therefore they aren't prepared to deal with them clinically."
Paradoxically, said Dr. Striegel-Moore, the increased pressure on minority women to be thin has stemmed in part from companies' efforts to increase diversity in their advertising, with images of thin, beautiful Asian-, Hispanic- and African-Americans joining those of whites.
(via negrophile)
[ 09/27/05 ]
@ What would Shakespeare eat? A review of 6 cookbooks targeted at bookworms.
[ 09/27/05 ]
@ CSM: We swim in an ocean of media. [more...]
A new study bears that out, providing data to back up the feeling many have that they're immersed in some form of media nearly every waking moment. [...] Researchers watched the behavior of 394 ordinary Midwesterners for more than 5,000 hours, following them 12 hours a day and recording their use of media every 15 seconds on a hand-held device.
About 30 percent of their waking hours were found to be spent using media exclusively, while another 39 percent involved using media while also doing another activity, such as watching TV while preparing food or listening to the radio while at work. Altogether, more than two-thirds of people's waking moments involved some kind of media usage.
Can this be good for you? I say no.
On most days, I'm on the computer most of the day. And I continue working to strike a balance between a few reliable sources of good information, in the hope of cultivating a quiet, informed mind; and a wide variety of random sources, with the aim of maximizing serendipity and fostering innovative thinking.
As important as the information you have is what you do with it, and so I try also to carve out spaces for reflection in my day-to-day life. It's why I have my cellphone turned off unless I am expecting a call. It's why I turn on instant messaging only when I have a question to ask. It's why I check my email manually, and only once on weekend days. And often I still feel harried by the information coming my way.
[ 09/28/05 ]
@ What really happened in New Orleans. Plenty bad, but some reports of lawlessness were wildly exaggerated.
[ 09/28/05 ]
@ In an act of classic old-media cluelessness, the Author's Guild has sued Google Print for its plan to scan and catalog the contents of printed books. Be sure to read Google's response before you draw any conclusions. They plan to publish snippets, not whole books. It looks to me like they are operating well within the law. [more...]
Personally, I'm all for Google Print. If people searching the Web for information are pointed to a snippet from my book — they may buy it. More importantly, Google Print has given me a whole new way to ego-surf.
You know, someday people will look back at this whole "piracy craze" and shake their heads in disbelief. Next up: Author's Guild sues libraries.
[ 09/28/05 ]
@ Dark chocolate may be good for your heart! I'm having some.
[ 09/28/05 ]
@ I know some blogging experts advocate ghost-written sites for busy executives, but I do not. If a member of your organization is too busy to write for a blog, don't give them one. Set up blogs for other company employees. Invite the busy executive to post occasionally to a group blog. Hire a designated blogger to post in their own name. If your candidate (or CEO) does not maintain a blog, nothing will happen. But whatever points you may gain for "transparency" and "authenticity" via a ghost-written blog will be erased, with interest, once you are exposed as a liar. (thanks, jjg!)
[ 09/29/05 ]
@ Whoops! There Goes Another Pension Plan. By defaulting responsibility for their pension plans to the government, bankrupt businesses become prime acquisition targets.
[ 09/29/05 ]
@ Well said, and done, Judge Hellerstein.
[ 09/29/05 ]
@ Related: The Army Captain's plea to Senator McCain.
[ 09/29/05 ]
@ Study: Used books are $2 billion industry. There will always be a secondary market for things. Books, CDs, clothes, furniture. (via rw)
[ 09/29/05 ]
@ The WikiProject "Semantic MediaWiki" provides a common platform for discussing extensions of the MediaWiki software that allow for simple, machine-based processing of Wiki-content.
[ 09/29/05 ]
@ Did you know that detainees at Guantanamo Bay are staging a hunger strike? CJR Daily has a rundown on what is known and what the American press isn't covering.
[ 09/29/05 ]
@ CJR Daily on editorial product placement.
Revenue from product placement in magazine editorial copy -- that's stories and photographs, folks -- is expected to jump 17.5 percent this year to $160.9 million, and in newspapers, 16.9 percent, to $65 million. [...]
One proposal floated: Have staff writers compose story-like advertorials that would be indistinguishable from their regular copy. Another was to have Lexus cars appear in photographs that accompany articles.
Um.
[ 09/30/05 ]
@ Self-Destruction Defined: After Steve Jobs accused the music industry of getting greedy for wanting to charge more than 99 cents to download a song, Warner Music Group CEO claims they deserve a share of iPod revenues. Now another Warner exec is threatening to pull out altogether.
[ 09/30/05 ]
@ Audiologists are concerned that the iPod's "clean, clear sound" which can be played at any volume without distortion may hurt your hearing. (via dangerousmeta)
[ 09/30/05 ]
@ I didn't know Pete Townshend had a blog. He is posting his novel 'The Boy Who Heard Music' chapter by chapter on his site. (via class="sup" rw)
[ 09/30/05 ]
@ Writing to Learn. Stalking Economics in Its Natural State. Why do the keypad buttons on drive-up cash machines have Braille dots? (thanks, richard!)
[ 09/30/05 ]
@ Book recommenders: [more...]
What Should I read Next
Alexlit's Hypatia
Ratingzone.com
Gnod
Whichbook.net
BiblioTravel for identifying books set in distinct locales
Of these services, I think Gnod is the most interesting. A "self-adapting system", it recommends books, film, music....and people. Social Networking AI?
[ 09/30/05 ]