Posts from — May 2003

Wag the dog?. The alleged truth about how Private Jessica Lynch was saved.
This is a pretty amazing story, coming originally from the BBC and now a front page story on the Guardian. There's a program on it on BBC on Sunday.

Story courtesy of Karlin Lillington, where I picked it up. [MetaFilter]

oh yes, this is nothing new, the social construction of facts and their provision to a certain audience for certain effects, which in this case actually seemed to work, i wonder how far this story will be distributed though?

The Personality Forge. The Personality Forge. Create an AI bot, and set it loose. [MetaFilter]

this somewhat follows the model that i and probably millions by now have thought could work, which is intelligence through simulation.

Is that a FireHose in your pocket, or are you glad to store me?.

It looks like a public mailbox, but Marc says Gizmodo says it's a 2,000 GB (two terrabyte, no?) FireWire drive. The challenge: try to find out anything about it, or to buy it.

While we're off the subject, this looks cool too.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

hmmm, i need one…

Student Loan Debt. Is student loan debt destroying your life? Loan indebtedness has increased 66% since 1997. It's hard to feel too sorry for Yale Law grads making $100,000+, but I know real people with salaries in the mid-40s making payments in the range of $1600/mo. (And that's over 30 years.) When will policymakers realize that this is going to have substantial consequences for our economy and quality of life? [MetaFilter]

the answer, when we tell them.

Brain Development.

Reading – Brain Development and why school is in such trouble.

Some conclusions:

• In Chaos Theory, we know that “Initial Conditions” are important. This graph shows us why. Only 150 word difference at 2 drives over time a huge differential. The effort to change these trajectories builds on a log scale. We can do a lot with a little when we are very young but by the time we are about 15 we are locked in. Most of the remedial work is done at school where it will have little effect. Especially by grade 4. The optimal time to ensure that your kids will do well is to read a lot to them from 4 MONTHS ONWARDS. You might say that this is ridiculous. A Baby can't comprehend at 4 months. But they build pattern recognition. Their vocab is built as a direct result of the vocab that you use with them. So read up a level all the time.
• To read to a 4 month old demands that you hold the baby as well. Touch is the other driver for development. We know that monkeys that are not touched and we know that orphans that are not touched develop very poorly. So reading to babies hits the two big drivers – vocab and touch.
• The revolution in development will come less from a revolution at school and more from our recognition that the optimal time to learn is before 6! 
• Infants and young children learn only one way – from play based experience – the opposite from how we teach at school.

[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]

This is precisely the kind of research that freaks parents out.  Apparently I'm behind in my reading to my 11 month year old and done with my six year old.  Never explicit realized the snuggling benefits of reading.  But it has to be said that while parents should be aware of early development drivers, simply doing your best is more than enough to raise great children and obsessive compulsion has a big downside.

My 11 month year old is experiencing a language explosion of Cambrian porportions.  Unfortunately or fortunately he thinks that all things dangerous are “hot.”  When he is inside, everything is “hot, hot, hot.”  When he is outside, everything is a “flower” and eats lots of dirt.

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

see ross's blog for more info, it seems an interesting enough topic, given the recent explosion of expectant mothers and dads.

Click here
If you used an IBM PC in the 1980s — if you used one a lot — you came to know, and perhaps love, the feel of the old IBM keyboards. They were solid. The keys moved. They clicked. Over time, as every aspect of PC manufacturing faced the grim reaper of cost-cutting, keyboards became flimsy and disposable pieces of plastic. The touch and feel of the old IBMs became a lost artifact of the early PC era.

So I was thrilled to read (on MSNBC, via Gizmodo) that somebody is still making a contemporary equivalent of those old keyboards. They cost about $50, or five to ten times the price of today's junky keyboards, but boy, I think it's probably worth it. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

yes, they are the best keyboards i think. I know that i have a few stashed away, but the problem is that they are now nearly impossible to adapt to anything other than a pc. Another great keyboard is the sun workstation keyboard from that era, mmmmm,.

Is there an analogy in the house?
People who create software are forever trying to explain their somewhat obscure disipline by offering friendly analogies. The most common one is that making software is like building buildings. Recently there's been some discussion of this notion, including an article on Kuro5hin suggesting that “the software construction analogy is broken.”

Maybe making software is more like politics, or writing laws. Or like writing music. Or like growing critters in vats. Or like…

Brian Marick and Ken Schwaber are trying to broaden the thinking in this area and are organizing an event at an upcoming software conference that they call the Analogy Fest: “The Analogy Fest is an attempt to manufacture serendipity, to create the circumstances in which clever people might have an 'Aha!' moment. We'll do that by having semi-structured, small group conversations about papers that draw analogies between software development and something else.”

Sounds interesting to me. I think they're still looking for more papers to make the event happen. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

hmm, well software production is cultural production. it is processual encoding, much like writing, but with slightly different assumptions about the audience. If the audience is a machine, then you have different assumptions, if the audience only understands certain relationships, then you have to write for those relationships, likewise languages, etc.

No, you're wrong! And I can prove it!. The National Priorities Project Database provides a dynamic, numbers and graphs comparison of federal and state spending from 1983 to today. Compare labor costs in Louisiana to military spending in Maine, or infectious disease spending in Idaho to hunger in Hawaii. For the political-thread MeFier in your life who has everything, but could use some actual data now and then. [MetaFilter]

is this one of those…. it is better not to know things?

Bad Reads: A Survey. …So draw near, gentle reader, as 50 leading lights on the literary, political, opinion-forming and media scene identify their worst reading experiences, confess their hatred of global superstars from Shakespeare to the authors of the Bible, and administer a good kicking to victims across the literary spectrum, from Jacques Derrida to JK Rowling [with Tolkien getting the most number of votes]. [Occasional Subversion]

yes, sometimes it is hard to know why some people have written some things, and it is even harder to understand why you are reading it.

Interconnection.org. Weaving a web of support around the globe. This site matches web designer volunteers with non-profits around the world. Seems like a good way to bulk up a portfolio while making a difference. [MetaFilter]

it does seem like a great idea, but i wonder if it will put some people who work on websites for these organizations in a tough place in a few years.