Entries Tagged 'the commons' ↓

As the World Bank recognized in its recent Poverty Study, local concerns must be targeted, providing roads and markets, sharpening the capacities of village governments, working to smooth social inequalities, and improving access to health and education services. The very definition of poverty is the absence of such quality of life indicators in civil society among rural populations.

via Aga Khan ‘pained’ by clash of ignorance, praises Obama approach | VANCOUVERITE.

Thank goodness for a little common sense! According to Reuters, Fox News (along with “Bill O’LIE-lly” as Al Franken refers to him) has lost the first round in its suit to silence Al Franken and his new book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them“. Ruling from the bench, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said

Obviously not a Bush appointee, Judge Chin made one honest mistake when he said:

The problem is that the people who are buying the book might be sophisitcated, but the morons who watch Fox and listen to the drivel spewing from their semi-literate “newscasters”, are obviously very easily confused and might purchase the book by mistake.

Oh wait: My bad… those ditto-heads would never buy the book if Rush or Bill or Anne didn’t order them to buy it. What was I thinking?

[Via TalkLeft]

Finally, some mainstream US attention to the story which Scoop.com, a New Zealand-based web news site and Bev Harris, author of the soon-to-be-published “Black Box Voting“, have been writing about for quite a long time.

The New York Times, Reuters, MSNBC, C|Net, The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post are all running stories about the flaws discovered in the Diebold Election Systems electronic voting machines. The flaws were discussed in a paper released yesterday by three researchers at Johns Hopkins University.The report does not mince any words, stating in the paper’s abstract:

But the morons just don’t get it. Hundreds of well-known computer science professors and researchers have voiced their concerns about paperless voting machines. The most basic issue is that there is no way to verify that the votes cast are the same as the votes recorded. To prove that the people who are responsible for implementing these systems don’t get it, we have this quote from David Heller, project manager for voting systems with the Maryland State Board of Elections:

The most basic problem is that they recounted the voting computer’s record of the ballot images and compared it against the voting computer’s tally of the vote. Great verification! And, without a paper trail, how do they know that the ballot images recorded by the computer are the same as the ballots cast by the voters? Say I cast my vote for Howard Dean. The computer shows me a ballot image which shows a big checkmark next to Dean’s name. I press the “Record My Vote” button and walk out of the booth confident that my vote counts. But, suppose that the machine has been programmed by an evil Republican, and after I press the button, it switches my Dean vote to a Bush vote, records a copy of the ballot image and adds my vote to the tally. When Bush wins my heavily Democratic district by a landslide, Mr. Heller and his crew come in, press a couple of buttons, and inform us that the computer agrees with itself. Recount over. Thanks for participating in democracy! It’s great to live in Saddam’s Iraq Bush’s America.

Unfortunately, Mr. Heller is the point-man in the State of Maryland’s recent purchase of US$55 million worth of Diebold’s flawed voting machines. Come next March’s primary election, us Marylanders will be entrusting the most important part of our democracy to the same sort of folks who brought us Enron & Tyco.

Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco told the Baltimore Sun “This is no way to develop vending machines, let alone voting systems… This is our democracy we’re talking about. There is an extra onus to ensure people have confidence in their votes.”

But, perhaps Ms. Cohn is being too naive about the true goals and objectives of this money-soaked political arena: maybe voting machines are just vending machines.

…and The Register is just another weblog, despite Orlowski’s rants about blogs being nothing but idle chatter. After all, one of the most basic definitions of a weblog comes from Rebecca Blood‘s oft-referenced essay, “Weblogs: A history and Perspective“, where she defines a weblog as “a website that is updated frequently, with new material posted at the top of the page.” Sounds like a description of The Reg’s front page to me…

Orlowski also complains about the poor quality of information found in most weblogs, but he’s got blinders on when he’s looking at his own columns and his home publication, since his own writing is full of fantasies and misstatements. It’s sometimes claimed that one of the big differences between weblogs and “real” journalism is the absence of editors in weblogs. Well, if there’s an editor going over Andy’s work, she should think about another profession.

For instance, a real journalist — not a fantasist like Jayson Blair, or a third-rate pop-culture ranter/Dennis Miller wannabe like Orlowski — wouldn’t put quotation marks around an inflammatory statement by Professor Larry Lessig if Lessig had never made that statement. A real journalist wouldn’t then go on to title and build his entire article around that misquote. Typical Orlowski straw man tactics.

This latest straw man is just like his previous rant about the “blog noise problem”, which sprang from a wishful interpretation of a statement by Google’s CEO. Andy bases his baseless comments on such eminent sources as “Chris Roddy, a politics and linguistics undergraduate at the University of Emory” (if you’d run this claptrap past an editor, you’d find out that it’s actually “Emory University“, Andy) who was writing on Slashdot, a site I love, but one which is hardly known as a bastion of objective reporting. (Another minor quibble, Andy: Mr. Roddy’s post contained no capitalization, so when correcting it for an article, a real journalist would have noted the alterations.)

The straw man for this article is in this statement:

First of all, why assume there are one million bloggers? I can’t seem to find any reliable source for this number, although Blogger reported it had exceeded 1,000,000 registered users in January; LiveJournal reports more than a million registered users, with nearly a half-million “active” users; other weblogging packages, such as Movable Type, GreyMatter, b2 and Radio Userland don’t make their numbers as readily available. So, I guess “one million” was just a nice big number for Andy to use — one which can’t be proven and can’t be refuted.

Second of all, why “generously” assume 100 pages per blog? I’m hardly the longest-term or most prolific weblogger, and I’ve managed to put together 187 entries in my just-shy-of-a-year writing this weblog, each of which has its own page, as well as being represented on monthly pages, category pages, comment pages and trackback pages. Some webloggers certainly have fewer pages and there are many who have far more pages, but if asked how many pages are on the average webloggers site, a real journalist wouldn’t pull a number out of his ass like Orlowski does.

Third of all, if you are going to make up numbers, at least check your mathematics when you operate on them: 1 million bloggers x 100 pages each = 100 million pages; 100,000,000 ass-pulled weblog pages divided by the 3,083,324,652 total pages in Google’s index doesn’t work out to “0.032 per cent of web content indexed by Google.” It works out to 3.2 percent of web content. 2 orders of magnitude, Andy! That’d be like taking his US$50,000 per year salary (just a guess) and reducing it to US$500 per year. (He’d still be overpaid.) If we use his numbers, that means that 1 out of every 33 pages on the web belongs to a weblog. With that kind of penetration, it doesn’t take any anomalies in Google’s PageRank to account for the (claimed) prevalence of weblog pages in search results.

But the biggest lie in the paragraph results from Orlowski’s shameless misquoting of a Pew Internet & American Life Project study entitled The Internet and the Iraq war. The study says nothing about blog writers, and its mention of blog readers, which Orlowski grabs onto, is more complex than his simple-minded quotation. Here’s the full quote:

Notice the phrase “early data” and the absence of the quoted phrase, “statistically insignficant”. Unlike Mr. Orlowski, the Pew folks understand that “statistically insignificant” indicates a conclusion, while claiming that it is “not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions” indicates the inability to draw a conclusion. That’s because, in their methodology, the Pew researchers report that their survey indicates a “margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.” Meaning that, instead of being insignificant, it’s indeterminate.

Sorry for the extensive entry, but pompous morons with axes to grind really piss me off. I know several other webloggers (Fred at Ochsenshirt.com, and Andrew Ó Baoill at funferal.com, for instance) have commented on Orlowski’s fantasies, but I haven’t seen any analysis of his math skills. I know The Reg prides itself on “biting the hand that feeds IT”, but as long as they give Andy a platform, they just bite.

Ernie the Attorney posted an interesting (as usual) entry yesterday regarding another unexpected effect of the internet’s incursion into our daily lives. In this case, the internet is affecting one of the cornerstones of our legal system: the impartial jury. As Ernie says,

Ernie speculates that jurors might have always been curious, but the print and broadcast media can’t cover every single trial. It was most likely the inaccessibility of information which kept jurors from doing their own research. But, with a broadband connection…

He also cites the “increasing prevalence of multi-day trials”*, where the jurors go to their homes at the end of the day with an admonition from the judge not to talk about the case. I suspect that it is the rare juror who keeps a spouse or a loved one in the dark about the events of the courtroom. It is even easier — and less likely to bring a scolding from a conscientious spouse — to type a defendant’s name into the Google toolbar.

But the most important point in this article is the observation that “When faced with a new disruptive situation, most organizations (and most people) don’t try to gain insight; they try to control the problem.” This is especially true when we are talking about the law. Congress is trying to control the spread of pr0n by restricting public access to nearly any material not suitable for minors. The Justice Department is trying to control the use of encryption on the internet. RIAA and MPAA are using legislation to try and control what their listeners can and can’t do with music and movies. None of these actions are enjoying great success. (Thank heavens!)

Meanwhile, a company such as Apple, by approaching its customers without heavy-handed restrictions, controls and caveats sells 1,000,000 songs from its new music store in one week. I don’t have firm numbers, but I am certain that this probably surpasses the entire download history of the major labels’ iron-fisted music “services”. There are other similar successes: in the open-source software arena, companies are making money selling service and support for freely available programs; Cory Doctorow’s novel “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” is currently ranked 4,481 in sales at Amazon, despite being freely available for download on the web.

Apple and Red Hat and Cory D. are certainly taking risks in jumping into these forms of business ventures, but what they are risking is their own fortunes. The situation with curious jurors is different, in that the risk is borne by the parties to the trial. It is the job of the attorneys and the court to limit the universe of knowledge about the parties to the narrow sphere of the issue at hand; lawyers are required to critically establish the veracity and reliability of all sources of evidence. The web undermines this because there are no filters between the keyboard and the rest of the world.

So, how can the courts relinquish control over the jurors’ research, while still maintaining the broadly-constructed rules for protecting defendants? As in so many other fields, it may be necessary to stop relying on “secrecy through obscurity.” Perhaps opening up all the data to the jury on specially-constructed websites will be the solution to incomplete or biased information. Perhaps judges and juries will deliberate together — the judge acting as an expert in the law, while the jury acts as the hand of justice. Perhaps we will have to rethink the voir dire process, since, in a highly networked society, the only people uninformed enough about cases will likely be those people least desirable for jury service.

I’m glad Ernie brought this up, and I hope its the beginning of some serious thought and discussion by the legal profession.

*I’m curious about Ernie’s statement about multi-day trials: are they truly on the increase? Is there research on this topic, or is it based on Ernie’s own observations?

In his entry entitled, “This explains it all…” David Weinberger refers to a recent Harris poll on “The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans 2003.” The results indicate that

Americans, as a whole, seem to be like the current occupant of the Oval Office in their religious faith and superstition. But what I want to know is how this compares to the rest of the world. How do our religious beliefs stack up against our allies, who are increasingly nervous about the religious fundamentalism in George W. Bush’s public statements.

According to this article in MSNBC/Newsweek [Google cache link]

I want the Harris people to use the same questions in Britain and France and Germany and Russia and China. I’d like to see the World Values Survey at the University of Michigan perform a study on their data comparing religious beliefs in the US and the rest of the world. I want to know if we really are still living in the Dark Ages.

Over at Legal MP3 Downloads, they’re maintaining a blog listing of free and cheap music downloads. The songs are usually in only one of the major formats: MP3, WMA, or Liquid Audio.

While there might not be an infinite selection, the front page lists over 70 cuts by artists from Lil’ Kim to Allison Kraus to Faith No More, to Australian star Paul Kelly.

I’m sure the selection will get even better as time goes on, and with more user suggestions. One thing I’d like to see… if it’s possible: a stream of the songs — from their original sites. This would be similar to what epitonic.com does with their Epitonic Radio.

[Via Frank Fields' FURDLog]

UPDATE: I heard from David Lawrence, at the Legal MP3 Downloads blog and he points me to an article (which I missed) where he discusses the original purpose of the site. In his e-mail to me, he says:

He’s got a clear purpose, a narrow focus, and that’s going to be what makes the site work. Good luck, David!

According to SpaceRef, all those CPU cycles donated by me and 4,000,000 other space geeks have produced at least 150 spots in the sky worth taking another look at.

I’ve been running the SETI@home screensaver on 3 computers for nearly 4 years now, and I still find it fascinating to pop up the application once in a while and watch it “chirping data”, computing “fast Fourier transforms” and “searching for pulses/triplets”. Whatever all that means…

What’s even more exciting about my participation in the project, is the way SETI@home has enabled scientists and researchers to consider projects which they never before would have had the computing resources to undertake. Projects like distributed.net‘s RC5 effort, Stanford’s Folding@home project, Evolutionary-Research‘s evolution@home and dozens of others are able to tap into the unused computing power of the world’s millions of personal computers.

Whether or not SETI@home’s re-analysis of the 150 or so hotspots turns up a real ET this time, it’s certain that this is just the beginning of truly cooperative research.

The “Patent Clause” of the US Constitution (Article I, Section 8, clause gives Congress the power “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” For a long time, the standard for what was patentable required the invention contain a “flash of genius.” In 1952, Congress lowered the standard to “nonobviousness” to a person of ordinary skill. In the early 1980s, the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) began issuing patents on animals and plants, and in the 1990s, it began issuing “business methods” patents.

The problem with all this expansion of patentable inventions is that the PTO relies on the person filing the patent to disclose evidence of “prior art” — earlier implementations of the invention which is being submitted for patent protection. No conflict of interest there, right?

This has led to some moronic patent approvals, including British Telecom’s patent (rescinded) on hyperlinking, Amazon’s “1-Click Checkout“, Forgent’s claim to have a patent on the JPEG file format, and so many others.

The past couple of weeks have brought another batch of idiocies to light. SBC (one of the Baby Bells) claims to have a valid patent on a “Structured Document Browser,” or what you and I (and any long-time Web-user) would call a framed navigation system; this is where the menus stay put, while the content of the page changes.

As I reported to LawMeme, a company called Test Central, Inc. has received a patent for a “…method of making tests, assessments, surveys and lesson plans with images and sound files and posting them on-line for potential users.” Non-obvious, right?

And a company called Acacia Technologies, is sending requests for licensing fees to companies providing streaming content. Acacia’s patent is for a “… system of distributing video and/or audio information [which] employs digital signal processing to achieve high rates of data compression.” That seems to include online radio, video, perhaps JPEG images and who knows what else.

The Los Angeles Times has a 2-part story (1, 2) about recent patent issues, including the patenting of crustless peanut-butter & jelly sandwiches and last year’s joke patent for a method of swinging on a swing, “…in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other.”

The “Progress of Science and the Useful Arts” is being stymied by such ridiculous patent approvals; companies with legitimate challenges to patents are discouraged by the exorbitant costs of defending themselves against patent infringement lawsuits. Part of the problem is defining exactly what an “invention” is. Is it something you yourself have created? Or is it just something you’ve file papers on?

Timothy Appnel has a very funny — and dead-on accurate — entry in his blog describing a potential Help Wanted ad for Hilary Rosen‘s soon-to-be-vacant position at the RIAA.