Posts from — September 2003

i have books, food, and a flashlight, I'm set! but other people have somewhat different needs, so check to make sure your ok, cause wunderground said that it will affect the burg to some extent.

well i don't know if this is really worst posting, but it is a first, i just made the most popular of the day listing for radio userland, my referrers look fairly normal except for a few extra hits do to misspelled research article. which is strangely popular, and i don't know why, but thanks for reading.

“Academic Freedom Bill of Rights”. The fury of the ex-smoker towards smokers is matched only by the fury of the ex-New Leftist towards anyone to… [The Leiter Reports: Editorials, News, Updates]

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well, this Academic Freedom Bill of Rights looks a lot like a removal of rights of academic freedom, sure it seems fine and good on the outside but really it is more of an excision of judgement and knowledge from those that should be allowed to put forth that knowledge and judgement. The point of education is for students to learn, and if all they are learning is their media/state-sponsored opinions which is certainly what they seem to want to learn instead of having those beliefs challenged and contested by others with different beliefs, then it seems that the the academic rights that this establishes is not the right to freedom but the right to oppression.

What labor shortage?. Experts at Wharton find that conventional wisdom about the impact of a smaller baby bust and an aging population of boomers is misleading–if not outright wrong. [CNET News.com - Front Door]

We will not have a labor shortage. Productivity increases make it more likely that high unemployment may continue for some time until employers realize that making people work 80 hours a week to maintain that productivity is harmful. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

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Given the lack of mass consciousness and the focus on the individual, this is an obvious situation, people don't know to collectively bargan or to stop exploiting themselves for their own benefit, that really benefits to a much greater way the people they work for. Professionalization of the work force is one aspect of it, another is the systematic underpayment of jobs so it requires some people to work overtime. oh i could go on and on, but this is a really big problem/issue that needs to be brought to the attention of those people who have been trained to think strategically instead of communally about their own position in the labor pool. I've recently been reading Ulrich Beck's work on this.

Soon to be the Software-Developing World. Dan Gillmor is back from Africa with a column on Open source in the developing world. Here's the conclusion: …this may be one arena where Microsoft simply can't compete, fairly or not. Barring a dramatic change in attitude, product and price from the world's largest software company, open source is plainly the way developing nations should move. They literally can't afford to do otherwise…. [Joho the Blog]

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I'm very much surprised that we don't see more coverage of the internationalization of the software industry. Not in the job migration, but in the job growth and job specialization. having 1000 programmers that are willing to work on a project is not super-common, but it is more common than it once was, and with national projects, it might get even more common…..

AoIR now has a Cafepress store, nifty. Some fun swag.

Innovating in a Connected World.

I recently read Bhaskar Chakravorti's book “The Slow Pace of Fast Change: Bringing Innovations to Market in a Connected World.” There is an interview with him in Ubiquity [link via Viswanath Gondi]. A few quotes:
[E M E R G I C . o r g]

BloggerCon IRC details. I just posted BloggerCon IRC details over at the BloggerCon 2003 Weblog.

This includes a link to my experimental simple OS X IRC client written in Python & PyObjC. (Currently it's so simple it only lets you into #bloggercon…) [Epeus' epigone]

Keynote vs. the Web. I see that Sam Ruby has posted his excellent slide set from the Seybold show; they are about as thorough and concentrated an introduction to the syndication universe as anything I䴜ve seen anywhere. I won䴜t be posting either my slides or those by Bill Humphries, because Keynote won䴜t let me. That䴜s kind of a pity; Bill had a storyboard-style session showing how you actually do this stuff, with tons of screenshots of getting the job done in Radio, Moveable Type, Blogger, and so on. I had provided a sermon on Why You Should Care about RSS with lots of cute pictures, and a historical overview of the road from the roots of syndication through to the Atom project. But as near as I can tell, there䴜s no way to export from Keynote to HTML. It䴜ll do PDF but there is just no way I am gonna post a 6.7MB chunk of dumb electronic paper. Hrumph. [ongoing]

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keynote lets you export to pdf and export to quicktime, either of which is preferable to the web for most presentations… keynote documents are xml though…. schema is here so it really is not so much of an issue of “it doesn't” as “no one has made it” there is a keynote tools group at opendarwin

is IT really a solution to poverty?. [infosophy: socio-technological rendering of information]

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another good question from mentor….

IT cannot solve anything. People create poverty, not technologies, access to technologies and/or usage of technologies cannot as such change anything, though inarguably it can raise the standard of living, but that usually means only that a segment of the population has increased earning capacity, it may even mean that the poor are relatively more poor than they were before the technology acquisition. This is not to say technologies don't help, but it is to say that they are not a simple solution to a complex problem, and poverty is complex.