Posts from — March 2004

This Saturday, March 20. Global day of action

Bring the troops home now!
End colonial occupation from Iraq to Palestine and everywhere!
Money for jobs, education, healthcare and housing – Not war!
Stop the attacks on civil rights and civil liberties

A quick scan of the national ANSWER website shows demonstrations will be taking place this Saturday in over 35 countries and 175 cities!

Here in L.A., we've distributed thousands of flyers, hundreds of posters, have dozens of endorsing organizations, and report backs indicate this could be a sizable demo.

If you live in LA, check the ANSWER LA website for logistics. Speakers include Ron Kovic and Fernando Suarez, as well as Radical Teen Cheer. There will be an opening rally at the assembly point, as well as after the march, with speakers and music by 6-7 bands.

[Politics in the Zeros]

——-

ok, while i think the global day of action is important, i just want to say that in certain places we have a responsibility to the people that we occupy that we don't abandon the creation of a law-based state and let bandit kings take over. everything else is cool, but really, if we pull out of iraq and afganistan we are creating a disaster area. it is irresponsible.

tonight has been hectic, between packing, cleaning, writing, thinking, and all that, one server is acting up, i had to drive into the office twice to fix it, once because i thought i had a brilliant fix, that broke it worse, and second once i realized i'd broke it worse. well, when i come back from this trip to dc, i'm replacing that server, its old, i have the replacement and that will be that.

Deans can count. Erik Duval, on measuring the quality of academic communications:

What we really ought to try and measure includes more subtle things,
like

• how useful was this publication for others?
• how much effect did it actually have on the field?
• etc.

Well, maybe not all researchers have that preference, but the people
who administer academia sure do. William Arms, in his article Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing on the Web, quoted the saying “Our dean can't read, but he sure can count”…

[Seb's Open Research]

——-

i doubt anyone really wants to measure relevancy…. why? people have, and the curve isn't pretty at all… it is conic section, where a few things are the canon and then it slopes steeply away in short order, most papers never are cited again. only some books are frequently used, in short, there is alot of irrelevance, and in part this is how it should be when there are specializations in which there are less than 20 practitioners worldwide.

This is how PowerPoint was born. Background on Microsoft PowerPoint: “Although now a Microsoft product, PowerPoint was originally developed by Bob Gaskins, a former Berkeley Ph.D. student who envisioned an easy-to-use presentation program that would manipulate a string of single pages, or “slides”. [...] PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 and was originally only available for the Apple Macintosh, and only in black-and-white. It generated text-and-graphics pages that a photocopier could turn into overhead transparencies.”

I didn't realize that PowerPoint was first a Mac product, in the same way as Excel was. And that originally PowerPoint was not a Microsoft product. [Universal Rule]

——

great little story on wikipedia. just how much innovation in major companies is created by the purchasing of other companies? just read oligopoly watch…. there you'll see that acquisition is innovation.

Regulators Meet on Proposal to Brand Microsoft a Monopolist: “On Monday, top antitrust regulators from the 15 nations in the European Union will gather here in the Centre Borschette, a bunkerlike building a stone's throw from the headquarters of the European Commission, to discuss a draft ruling that finds Microsoft guilty of abusing its dominance in operating software.” [Universal Rule]

——

well this proposal, if it occurs, would not remove their monopoly power, it would only allow competition in one industry. that is the wrong way to go. eu should demand that microsoft create a new company for their media tools.

Move Over Doctor Draft, Meet the Geek Draft. Well, there’s no danger of this before the election… ‘Special skills draft’ on drawing board / Computer experts, foreign language specialists lead list of military’s needs The government is taking the first steps toward a targeted military draft of Americans with special skills in computers and foreign languages. The Selective Service System has begun the process of creating the procedures and policies to conduct such a targeted draft in case military officials ask Congress to authorize it and the lawmakers agree to such a request. Richard Flahavan, a spokesman for the Selective Service System, said planning for a possible draft of linguists and computer experts had begun last fall after Pentagon personnel officials said the military needed more people with skills in those areas. Spotted via Brian Leiter… [Discourse.net]

Uberfunk showed me Ecto, GeekTool, Colloquy, and the latest eye-candy version of Desktop Manager. [Hack the Planet]

——

i don't have much use for most of these, but desktop manager is just what i wanted.

Graduate WebShop: The Impact of the Internet on So …. Graduate WebShop:
The Impact of the Internet on Society June 6 11, 2004

University of Maryland College Park
Application deadline for best consideration: April 5, 2004

The Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland is hosting the 4th annual graduate student workshop or WebShop. Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, up to 50 graduate students and 20 leading scholars and experts who study the behavioral aspects of information technology will discuss current issues and research. Dr. Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland's Computer Science Department is on board to help the WebShop by building bridges to the human computer interaction community.

Student participants will receive up to $350 as a travel support grant as well as room and board. Students will develop original research projects as the basis for their thesis, dissertation, or other publication.

Topics include, but are not limited to: Social Networks, Computer Graphics and Navigational Skills, Inequality/Digital Divide, Public Access and Usage, and Social Capital Implications. Please access the WebShop web page for the latest information about the WebShop and the invited participants.

Please find application information here.

I attended this last year and it is quite good.

[Netwoman]

——-

i don't do behavioral research except by inference. but this will probably be pretty good.

US Govt seeks comprehensive net monitoring rights. ITVibe – among many others – reports that “The US Justice Department has filed a petition this week to the Federal Communications Commission which requests that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) grant easier access to the FBI and other government agencies… [InternetPolicy.net]

——-

well, i hope there is a public comment period for this… because it shouldn't happen….

DARPA wants to change TCP/IP. The military agency that funded the creation of TCP/IP, the protocol on which the Internet is based, is no longer happy with it, according to an article by Joab Jackson in Government Computer News: “…Flaws in the basic building blocks… [InternetPolicy.net]

——-

i think most of the ideas expressed here are either false or will yield more insecure networks, esp. the dynamic networking idea….