Jon Stewart on media bias

I want to watch the Daily Show from after reading Jon Stewart commenting on the US news networks.

But the other [than Fox] news networks— you know they have this idea that they’re being objective. But news has never been objective. It’s always— what does every newscast start with? Our top stories tonight. That’s a list. That’s an object— that’s a subjective— some editor made a decision; here’s our top stories.

#1. There’s a fire in the Bronx.

#2. They arrested Martha Stewart.

Whatever— however you place those stories, is a subjective ranking as much as AFI’s 100 Best Films in the World is.

Google News offers the framework for a more democratic way to prioritise stories. Franchise is restricted, however, to Big Publications. Technorati - and others - offer similar services but extend the vote to all (blog) publishers. Unfortunately they currently only group by link, not by story.

[/media] posted at 22:48 #

GPS keeps on coming

Fast Company on the huge efficiency gains GPS is going to bring.

Struggling to imagine possible uses?

Qualcomm, which supplies satellite tracking and messaging services to 300,000 trucks across North America, is testing GPS truck-trailer locks that would allow cargo to be unloaded only at the correct location. Qualcomm routinely fields inquiries from people wanting to use GPS in new ways. A plasma-screen TV manufacturer wanted to install GPS tracking in each screen as an antitheft measure. A cattle rancher wanted GPS collars for his cows. Two school districts in Pennsylvania with GPS-equipped buses offer families an alert when the school bus is approaching, a system dubbed “Here Comes the Bus.”

Even farming won’t escape this revolution (although subsidies will slow adoption):

The Glenns got another surprise. Matching the fertilizer map with the next year’s harvest map, they saw that weak areas of fields aren’t helped much by fertilizer. But strong areas produce even more strongly with extra fertilizer. “We’ve cut our nitrogen use by 10% to 12% in the last few years, with the same yields or better,” Don says.

“And that’s environmentally friendly,” says Brian.

“And we’ve saved $5,000 or $6,000 in nitrogen costs, just on corn,” Don says. With their iPAQs, the Glenns use GPS the same way that the concrete companies do. Data gathered during the day — automatically, instead of scribbled in notebooks — is loaded into computers at sundown. Don now keeps track of how much every seed and drop of pesticide costs for every field, as well as how much the harvest brings — and he can easily call up a P&L statement on his laptop for every field.

The present may be looked back on as the time of the blind organisation.

[/technology] posted at 10:19 #

EU Myths

I went to the Euromyths site to see if they could pull a modern day Publius on me. They did not. There are, however, some useful examples of just how manipulative the British tabloid press are.

Myth number 1 - banning toy and sweet advertising Swedish style - was a disappointment. It still seems like a good idea.

[/media] posted at 17:24 #

AOL Journals - some history

Washington Post piece on AOL’s plans to bring blogging to their masses.

AOL will give members three ways to update their blogs — through an online template with blank boxes for text input, through AOL’s instant-messaging system or by telephone. The phone option will be available only to subscribers to the extra-cost “AOL by Phone” service, who will be able to leave voice messages that will be posted as MP3 sound files.

The blogosphere is self-filtering and so should only be strengthened by more participants, but many probably expected Usenet to handle a similar influx without problems 10 years ago. It did not.

[/technology] posted at 17:05 #

Dashboard - GNOME’s desktop agent

Ximian’s Nat Friedman is hacking up something extremely cool, Dashboard.

Here’s a sample scenario:

1. In an IM conversation with someone, they ask you about some project you’ve been working on.
2. The dashboard notices what you’re talking about and matches your latest design document for the project.
3. You say to your friend: “Check out my current design.” and drag and drop the document from the dashboard onto your IM window.
4. Gaim transfers the file to the other person.

Many of the required components for the above to happen are ready. Nat is receiving a lot of support and progress seems very swift.

Check out the screenshots of it integrating with (patched) versions of Evolution (email), Gaim (instant messaging), X-Chat (IRC) and Straw (RSS news reader).

Nat brings up a good point about the feasibility of this kind of cross-app desktop communication.

One important thing to realize is that it would never be possible to write something like the dashboard in a world where you can’t get the source code to your applications. This is the whole “basis for innovation” thing we’re always talking about.

And some say there is no innovation in open source applications.

Update:

IRC log of Dashboard demo at OSCON.

nat looks forward to doing some specialised backends for programmers

That sounds very interesting. Context-sensitive help in any development environment.

[/technology] posted at 17:15 #

The quickest way to send 2.8 terrabytes of data

Jim Gray, head of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center, calls his method TeraScale SneakerNet.

DP Are you sending them a whole PC?

JG Yes, an Athlon with a Gigabit Ethernet interface, a gigabyte of RAM, and seven 300-GB disks - all for about $3,000.

DP How do you get to the 7-megabytes-per-second figure?

JG UPS takes 24 hours, and 9 hours at each end to do the copy.

[/technology] posted at 16:28 #

Briefly

CTS - Combat Zones That See. High likelyhood that Baghdad will be a testing ground for some serious Big-Brother-tech.

The physical reality of what censorship entails is impossible to ignore when it is reported like this.

Skull vibrating headphones.

From the new Wired:

• DeLong has decided that we’re going to avoid deflation, so not to worry. I believe him - ‘peace of mind’ is all the justification I need for doing so.
• Brute forcing invisibility.

Grad student inadvertantly creates a treasure map for terrorists. Film title “The Dissertation” is available.

[/misc] posted at 23:58 #

No RFID for Wal-Mart, for now

Wal-Mart cancel RFID trial. By dramatically reducing demand and thereby keeping per-unit cost high, this could significantly slow the adoption of RFID. No need to microwave your new clothes for a little while longer.

Wal-Mart Stores has unexpectedly canceled testing for an experimental wireless inventory control system, ending one of the first and most closely watched efforts to bring controversial radio frequency identification technology to store shelves in the United States.

[/technology] posted at 23:48 #

Estonia high tech

After reading this Estonia has jumped up high on my ‘good places to hibernate in “low-cash” mode’ list.

Estonians do 80 percent of their banking on the Internet, while businessmen habitually negotiate and close deals by firing text messages to each other’s cellphones. Farmers are ordering broadband lines, and motorists on rural roads frequently pass blue information signs pointing them to the nearest place to access the Web.

Inside Tallinn’s medieval parliament and prime minister’s offices, cabinet ministers and legislators have gone completely virtual, conducting meetings, votes, and document reviews on their networked flat-screen computers.

“We’re the first paperless government,” says former Prime Minister Mart Laar, from the entrance to the courtyard of his old office.

In 2000, the parliament, perhaps inspired by their new gizmos, passed a law declaring Internet access a fundamental human right of its citizenry.

[/technology] posted at 23:48 #

More Google Weblogs

Good piece from the NYTimes containing some example uses of internal blogging. Of particular interest this about is Google:

Google, the provider of Internet search services, has become a big user of blogs for communication among its employees and managers - a result of the company’s acquisition of Pyra Labs, the creator of the Blogger Web log service, earlier this year. On one internal blog, called Google Love Notes, the customer service staff posts thank-you notes from users. One is from a woman who nursed her sick dog back to health after researching the illness on Google; the posting includes a photograph of the healed dog frolicking in a stream. Another came from a woman who was able to find a long-lost love through Google - and who happily reports that she wound up agreeing to marry the man’s brother.

“It’s a good pick-me-up,” Jason Shellen, a Blogger manager at Google, said of Love Notes.

[/technology] posted at 22:29 #

Phones with software defined radio due Q4 2004

CNET have a piece on Chip designers Sandbridge, who appear to be close to releasing software defined radio chips.

The White Plains, N.Y.-based company will begin shipping the chips this year to handset makers, and the first “world phones” will appear by the end of 2004, according to Sandbridge spokesman Jeffrey Schwartz.

“That’s three to five years ahead of what people thought,” he said.

No joking.

via gizmodo

[/technology] posted at 13:21 #

Catching up

Solar powered parking ticket machine.

Picture phones are being used as an always available camera, not for picture messaging. This ties up exactly with my personal experience.

Fetchart, more cool iTunes only software. The amazon.com searching and scraping backend must be fairly trivial to port though.

A dictionary of Nadsat - the dialect from Clockwork Orange.

Novel visualisation of the tax burden. This is immensely more persuasive than talking about percentages.

[/misc] posted at 13:33 #

Opsound delivers

Glenn Otis Brown points to the first example of a “collaboration across space and time … with no rights-clearing needed”. Possible because the original was Attribution-ShareAlike licensed.

This happened on Opsound, which last time I checked was mostly ambience. It’s good to see it developing.

[/misc] posted at 13:29 #

The Baroque Cycle

The new Neal Stephenson isn’t due until autumn but sounds good:

Daniel, Jack, and Eliza will traverse a landscape populated by mad alchemists, Barbary pirates, and bawdy courtiers, as well as historical figures including Samuel Pepys, Ben Franklin, and other great minds of the age. Traveling from the infant American colonies to the Tower of London to the glittering courts of Louis XIV, and all manner of places in between

Feel the research:

On Sir Isaac Newton’s temperature scale, where freezing is zero and the heat of the human body is twelve, it is probably four or five. If Herr Fahrenheit were here with one of his new quicksilver-filled, sealed-tube thermometers, he would probably observe something in the fifties.

[/misc] posted at 13:07 #

Microsoft Apps on Linux

One of the most interesting spread bets around is still open.

USA TODAY: Is there a scenario by which you would at some point consider porting Microsoft applications into Linux?

BG (Bill Gates): There’s no consideration of that at this point.

[/technology] posted at 00:33 #

Watching them watching us

OK, I‘m back now. Lots to catch up on. That was very annoying.

As predicted, here’s some citizen based pushback against the governmental monopoly on collaborative information gathering. GIA (Government Information Awareness).

The premise of GIA is that individual citizens have the right to know details about government, while government has the power to know details about citizens. Our goal is develop a technology which empowers citizens to form a sort of intelligence agency; gathering, sorting, and acting on information they gather about the government.

This image is from their sidebar and sums it up well:

They’ve thought this through to the point of having anonymous identities - required for anonymous sources to become trustable.

The system will accommodate information of almost any type, allowing users to sort through volumes of information which would otherwise be unusable. More importantly, the system allows for people to submit any information, while retaining anonymity, but while also being identified as a consistent source.

The Boston Globe have a good write-up.

As hosting these databases becomes standardised and affordable, forking will become possible. The possibility of a fork will provide similar benefits to the ones it brings to the development of Open Source. Focused but consensual management.

One benefit our - now excessively retrictive - copyright regime may bring us is the early realisation of the importance of publically owned and licensed data.

[/society] posted at 00:26 #

Political Campaigning in Mid 2003

Lessig suggests that “building a community around your candidacy” is going to be the future of electioneering.

American’s for Dean, are appealing for the Internet vote with astonishing persuasiveness:

Warm up your news aggregator’s coz here the feeds of the future: “A pugnaciously populist insurgent candidate defeats a tax-cut-empowered $200+-million-campaign-budget-wielding popular war time president with a social-nodal-RSS-conjoined-web-network run on open-source-software-fueled by smart-mobbing-net-campaign-adhocracies straight out of a Cory Doctorow Creative Commons tagged short story.”

Nocturnal can-do hacking ethos and gumshoe populist politics are the perfect patriotic fit. Special interest money committee formed candidates are itching for an expunging.

While Arnold Schwarzenegger has a slightly more traditional strategy:

“T3 is best seen as a $175 million campaign ad for Schwarzenegger’s bid to be California’s next Governor. Tough, buff Arnold helps kids, keeps bad machines from despoiling the environment and saves the state, all without spending the taxpayers’ money,” wrote Time Magazine movie critic Richard Corliss.

[/politics] posted at 13:47 #