Posts from — September 2006

Average home has more TVs than people – Yahoo! News:
NEW YORK – The average American home now has more television sets than people. That threshold was crossed within the past two years, according to Nielsen Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said.
—–

this is sad….

New York Times Ad:

The National Council of Churches makes a statement, that I agree with.

Random Walk in Learning: Problem of Being an Expert and Having Expertise:
Is expertise pure “social-fact”, a socially recognised procession of a collection of “scientific fact” as in positivism, or a connection of nodes including other experts, databases or organisations?
—-
I’ll respond on corante sometime today, but… neither is true. expertise is not a fact, expertise is the process of developing and maintaining a base level of knowledges and practices. Without maintenance, you lose expertise, there are many people who were experts, just as there are scientific papers that contained ‘facts’. In the end, expertise is about learning and learning is a process that does not have an end of having ‘learned’ something that becomes an object, and thus a fact, instead learning is about the process of coming to be in the world and constructing ways of interacting with the world. expertise then… is not a social fact or an institutional fact, but it is a collaborative process.

Canadian Was Falsely Accused, Panel Says – washingtonpost.com:
Some crucial questions about the incident remain unanswered, at least publicly. Over the repeated objections of O’Connor, the federal government censored much of the testimony given during the proceedings as well as some of the final report. O’Connor’s report said a federal court should be asked to decide whether to disclose some of the censored items.

——

what part of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and ‘due process’ won’t our freedom loving(sarcasm) governments ignore?

Opinions: ‘Baby bomber’ by Josephine Wall | Prospect Magazine October 2006 issue 127:
Google made obsessively tracking progress of my bad joke an easy task. A week after the solicitor’s letter, the controversy had appeared in 35 newspaper articles. Ten days later and my quote had appeared on nearly a thousand websites. An online store started selling t-shirts depicting tiny swaddled babies strapped to rockets, with proceeds to Mumsnet and the NSPCC.

——

The article is funny until the end when you realize… that people are now self-censoring their own political and economic humor in order to avoid legal harassment.

The Blog | Max Blumenthal: Sen. John Cornyn Meets the Racist Right | The Huffington Post:
On Tuesday, September 18, inside the Dirksen Senate Office building, Republican Texas Senator and Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Citizenship Chairman John Cornyn spoke at a conference entitled, “Defending the Homeland: America’s Immigration Crisis.” The conference was organized by the Rockford Institute, publisher of Chronicles Magazine, and was moderated by its president, Thomas Fleming.

———-

is it just me… or do people find it extremely problematic when politicians support racism? i mean… didn’t racism go out with the advent of modern biological sciences? geeze, this guy needs to be booted from the senate for not supporting the constitution, discrimination clause… in the first place, and second.. for stupidity that has led to chronic ignorance.

Free Wikis for Educators:
Adam Frey and the gang at Wikispaces want to give away 100,000 free wikis to educators and I think we should help them meet their goal, don’t you? You can create a public space that is open to anyone, a protected space where anyone can see the work but only members can edit, or a totally private space where only wiki members can work. in other words, there’s a flavor for every taste.
—–

wikis are evil.

Gabe Wachob: RIP Rob “lilo” Levin:
Rob Levin (aka “lilo” or “somegeek”), the head of PDPC and the leader of the Freenode IRC network, passed away today after being hit by a car while riding his bike. The news came to me through a global notice on freenode at 14:18 pacific time today.

We’ll miss you, lilo…

—–

I’ll add my sentiment to Gabe’s. I only knew Rob online, but we had some nice conversations and I tried to help him when i could. Lilo always tried to do the right thing, though sometimes that was difficult. He was a good guy and this is really a sad day. I wish his family the best in these tough times.

Crumbs! Web site gives archivists food for thought – Yahoo! News:
The British Library may have raised academic eyebrows when
it decided that a Web site with this mission statement should
be archived among those that may be of social significance,
stamping it a modern classic of British popular culture.

———

archiving cultural website, whodathought.

links for 2006-09-16:
GNU LilyPond – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Free music transcribing software (tags: music software wikipedia gnu) LilyPond, music notation for everyone (tags: application design audio free freeware gnu language mac macintosh macosx mediawiki mt music open_source opensource osx script software…
—

This is pretty cool