Posts from — September 2003

Several types of social structures.

Schools back and Rob Adams has brought us a great outline of what he's up to in one of his classes.  I sure wished they taught this stuff when I was in college!  All we had was Byte magazine!

Analyzing Communities.

The fall semester has begun here at CMU, and I'm taking a class in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) from Bob Kraut. This semester, the class is focusing on Designing Online Communities and Bob is co-teaching it with Paul Resnick, a recommender systems (think Amazon.com ratings) expert who is visiting from the University of Michigan.

[roBlog dot org] [Marc's Voice]

this looks like it will be a good class, more people should be teaching similar classes.

Shifting IT Jobs.

Robin Miller takes a closer look at the “problem” of IT jobs shifting away from the US to other countries like India and concludes:

There is a digital divide between the developed markets and the emerging markets. The opportunity lies in crossing this chasm and creating disruptive innovation for technology's next markets.

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

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The key is to specialize and provide services that only you can provide or a smallnumber of people can provide, thus increasing your worth to local groups. I mean you have to think about your global-local equation now instead of your local equation for employability, which isn't hard to think about. More or less if you are doing a job that anyone can do, and someone can do it cheaper, then someone might get to do that job cheaper, but if you are doing a job that few can do, and you provide the added benefit to the company by being one of those people, then they won't get rid of your job, unless of course the whole system becomes overburdened by people like you at which point they just close down because of lack of profit.

lots more info on emergic

got books?. A few years ago I realized something strange and was just recently reminded of it (thanks, K). My parents don't really own any books. Neither does my sister (and brother in-law). I guess I was just used to that growing up. But it's odd. (That's not entirely true, my Dad buys a lot of computer books that he never reads. And my Mom has a small collection of cooking books. But that hardly counts.) Personally, I have too many books…. [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

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ahh yes books are my abrosia, they feed and nourish me in a particular way that satisfies an appetite. I own books, alot of books, and i frequently get more books so that on most topics that interest me, which is quite a few topics, i have quite a few books. I like to think of the interests of a person as interpretable from their book collection.

Back to Plain Text for Multi-recipient Email?

I think that one solution to spam would be to revert to plain text as the standard email format.  No HTML, no attachments.  Spam filters would be much harder to fool in such a world, and of course plain text email will not have viruses and worms in it.

People who want to send pictures, or fancy-looking documents, or spreadsheets would have to use a different protocol.  But that protocol would not have a “cc” function.  To get a picture or a spreadsheet to a large list, you would have to direct them to a web page.

So, my spam solution is this:  reconfigure email servers so that a sender can either send email that includes attachments or send email to multiple recipients, but not both.  If you want to send email to multiple recipients, you must use only plain text, with no attachments.  If you want to send email to just one recipient, then use HTML and attachments to your heart's content.  If you want to send HTML and attachments to a lot of people, set up a web page, and use the email to point to the web page.  Or use some other protocol.

Would that work?  See Frankston.  See also Gillmor.  See also Mayfield.

[Corante: Bottom Line]

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no, all email should be plain text without atttachment, adding attachments opens the door to one to one virus transfer. join the campaign for ascii email,

pomes and places are going away soon

Do you know why we 'are supposed to' work 8 hour days?
Do you know why we no longer put children to work?
Do you know why you have workplace protections?

no?

well maybe you should.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/september96/labor_day_9-2a.html history of laborday

http://www.iisg.nl/~w3vl/ -labor history

http://www.ilo.org/public/english/ international labor organizations

http://www.afscme.org/otherlnk/whlinks.htm women's labor history

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for me in the last few years, there has been three days that i don't 'work', Labor day, Veterans Day, and Memorial Day. I don't work because I think the history behind these days is far more significant than people note, and the people who fought and won to bring about these holidays should not be forgotten, though they also should not be nostalgized.

this is handy, you can try the cms and the admin features before installing.