Category — General

Gadget Review » Asus S101 Ultra Slim and Trim Laptop

—– this looks pretty nifty to me.

Towards Humane Technologies: Biotechnology, New Media and Ethics (Paperback)

[From Amazon.com: Towards Humane Technologies: Biotechnology, New Media and Ethics: Naomi Sunderland, Phil Graham, Peter Isaacs: Books]

What are the ethical and political implications when the very foundations of life -things of awe and spiritual significance – are translated into products accessible to few people? This book critically analyses this historic recontextualisation. Through mediation – when meaning moves ‘from one text to another, from one discourse to another’ – biotechnology is transformed into analysable data and into public discourses. The unique book links biotechnology with media and citizenship. As with any ‘commodity’, biological products have been commodified. Because enormous speculative investment rests on this, risk will be understated and benefit will be overstated. Benefits will be unfairly distributed. Already, the bioprospecting of Southern megadiverse nations, legally sanctioned by U.S. property rights conventions, has led to wealth and health benefits in the North. Crucial to this development are biotechnological discourses that shift meanings from a “language of life” into technocratic discourses, infused with neo-liberal economic assumptions that promise progress and benefits for all. Crucial in this is the mass media’s representation of biotechnology for an audience with poor scientific literacy. Yet, even apparently benign biotechnology spawned by the Human Genome Project such as prenatal screening has eugenic possibilities, and genetic codes for illness are eagerly sought by insurance companies seeking to exclude certain people. These issues raise important questions about a citizenship that is founded on moral responsibility for the wellbeing of society now and into the future. After all, biotechnology is very much concerned with the essence of life itself. This book provides a space for alternative and dissident voices beyond the hype that surrounds biotechnology.

Armored truck robber uses Craigslist to make getaway

[From Armored truck robber uses Craigslist to make getaway | Top Stories | KING5.com | News for Seattle, Washington ]

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bank robbers…. they are class heroes aren’t they?

The Universe of Discourse : The Lake Wobegon Distribution is a tight little explanation using baseball that also maps well into the way i think of most of the blather about power laws and related seeming web 2.0 statistic, which is that if you really analyze what is going, you find out that really it isn’t quite what you think. My critique of the power law people is to generally say, if you arrive at a power law, you are likely asking the wrong questions and that if you asked the same question in a different population, you’d likely find the same thing which would in the end, show your power law as insignificant. This article makes a different argument about how most people think normal curves are normal, but it shows pretty clearly that most places we’d expect a normal curve we find abnormal variation especially outside of the center bell.

For a long time I was working on a dissertation looking at Open Source technologies. Today, I did not turn that dissertation in. That project has been shelved. Today I turned in the first draft of a dissertation on the Critical Political Economy of New Knowledge Technologies. I have a ton of research on Open Source things, but in the end, I looked at all that has been done in the last few years and decided descriptive sts work on open source technologies didn’t really interest me so much as much as cyberinfrastructures, e-social science, and virtual worlds. Which, I’ve been writing a good bit about in the last few years. So That’s what the dissertation is about and its in draft.

RIP Hayden Carruth 1921-2008

[From RIP Hayden Carruth 1921-2008 | MetaFilter]

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Sounds like a Gentleman that it would have been worth knowing. A sad day is this.

I have to say, that if you vote for the bail-out, I am not voting for you anymore. This bail-out benefits the wealthy in the short term and supposedly supports the rest of us long term, but that’s a fiction. This is Enron 2.0. We can support the rest of use in the long term by letting these behemoth companies fail, and for the wealthy to take the losses. The people who were invested in these companies can have basic pensions guaranteed through the government should they be in significant need. Otherwise, we have to let things fail. Go read the economist’s blogosphere.

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eeep….. this was post 5000 in the current blogging system.

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, [From Request for Urgent Confidential Business Relationship]

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perhaps the best representation of what is really happening.

History Hacker
Friday September 26th
8PM and Midnight
History Channel
(Right before and right after the first presidential debate)

[From The Sound of Electricity » NYC Resistor » Electronics, Hacking, Classes, and Workspace. ]

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This seems like it could be a good show, but alas i don’t have a tv.

In my books, CC By is the only free license.

[From When’s an OER not an OER? « Learn Online]
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In my books…. CC is just another copyright regime. Public domain is the only free content. If you don’t put it into the public domain, all you are saying is ‘restricted’. CC just says, under the terms of copyright, you can do x. Public Domain says, you can do x and whatever else you want. I also like artistic license of Perl, though it is a copyright license.

on another note, the post above has some really great content linked from it.