The New York Times Magazine The Eroded Self
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"A liberal state should respect the distinction between public and private speech because it recognizes that the ability to expose in some contexts aspects of our identity that we conceal in other contexts is indispensable to freedom, friendship, even love. Friendship and romantic love can't be achieved without intimacy, and intimacy, in turn, depends upon the selective and voluntary disclosure of personal information that we don't share with everyone else. Moreover...privacy is also necessary for the development of human individuality. Any writer will understand the importance of reflective solitude in refining arguments and making unexpected connections: in an odd but widely shared experience, many of us seem to have our best ideas when we are in the shower. Indeed, studies of creativity show that it's during periods of daydreaming and seclusion that the most creative thought takes place, as individuals allow ideas and impressions to run freely through their minds without fear that their untested thoughts will be exposed and taken out of context. "

"We are trained in this country to think of all concealment as a form of hypocrisy. But perhaps we are about to learn how much may be lost in a culture of transparency -- the capacity for creativity and eccentricity, for the development of self and soul, for understanding, friendship and even love. There is nothing inevitable about the erosion of privacy in cyberspace, just as there is nothing inevitable about its reconstruction. We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. What we need now is the will."

The Sunday Times MI5 builds new centre to read e-mails on the net
"MI5 is building a new £25m e-mail surveillance centre that will have the power to monitor all e-mails and internet messages sent and received in Britain. The government is to require internet service providers, such as Freeserve and AOL, to have "hardwire" links to the new computer facility so that messages can be traced across the internet.

The security service and the police will still need Home Office permission to search for e-mails and internet traffic, but they can apply for general warrants that would enable them to intercept communications for a company or an organisation.

The new computer centre, codenamed GTAC - government technical assistance centre - which will be up and running by the end of the year inside MI5's London headquarters, has provoked concern among civil liberties groups. "With this facility, the government can track every website that a person visits, without a warrant, giving rise to a culture of suspicion by association," said Caspar Bowden, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research."

Salon Twilight of the crypto-geeks
"Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cultlike following among the technologically minded and author of the classic "Snowcrash," has given an over-long, hugely digressive -- and brilliant -- speech. After many, many turns and a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets around to saying that the best defense for one's privacy and personal integrity turns out to be not cryptography but, what do you know, "social structures." He is not explicit about the exact nature of these structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every sort of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties. The slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social trust. The circles widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a trusted space.

Stephenson is making a point about code: Without a sociopolitical context, cryptography is not going to protect you. He singles out PGP for criticism, saying that relying on the encryption scheme is like trying to protect your house with a fence consisting of a single, very tall picket. A slide shows the lone picket rising into the sky, a bird considering it with bulging eyes."

Feed Daily
"PRIVACY'S a funny thing. The word itself never appears in the Constitution, or in the Bill of Rights, or in the Declaration of Independence, and still most Americans believe that, like their other freedoms, the right to privacy is inalienable. And there's something to that belief. Judge Brandeis made the first attempt to codify personal privacy rights in 1890, when he famously wrote that people have "the right to enjoy life – the right to be let alone," and juries, journalists, private citizens, and public figures have been wrangling over that notion of privacy the right to be let alone ever since. With Wednesday's release of a videotape documenting the horrors at Columbine High School, the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department has, probably unwittingly, reinvigorated this long-running debate."

Salon Wazzup, Elián!
" The Associated Press photo was splayed across newspapers and magazine covers across the nation -- little Elián, screaming with fear, as an FBI trooper points a gun in the direction of his head. Once the picture became a sensation, it was merely a matter of time before someone online turned it into a parody; and sure enough, someone did, animating the Elián photo to the soundtrack of the popular Budweiser "Wazzup!" commercial.

Within hours, the smart alecks behind the parody were engaged in a legal tiff with officials from the Associated Press, who forced them to take the site down. Now, however, the satirists appear to be winning concessions from a "chastened" AP."

""We do care about free expression, and being in the position of seeming to suppress it is something that has given me some second thoughts about how we responded," Tomlin says. "I read my note on the Web now, it certainly looks every bit as heavy-handed as some of my critics have said it was. I don't think that's the right way to start a thoughtful debate about what's appropriate and what's not.""

peterme.com Late-ish night memetics thoughts. Excuse any logical leaps.

""We had 5000 hits by the time I came in Wednesday, and by 10 a.m. it was 20,000. Before noon it was almost 100,000, and by Wednesday night we had 600,000 hits."

"So, you know, there's gotta be something of sociological import in the development, publication, and reception of the Elian Wazzup video. It's such a remarkable crystallization point of the Now of pop culture. The development points to how almost natural satire is becoming in modern discourse as a method of communicating ideas. The publication demonstrates the ease and speed with which fairly normal Joes can create and distribute their ideas. The reception illuminates the awesome capability of the internet to foment a literal overnight phenomenon (I must have received at least 4 links to the page... ). The cease-and-desist letter provides a classic example of how The Old Ways just wont work any more. Most delightfully, this is a story of how two schmucks were able to turn the government (Janet Reno's minions), the press (AP photo), and Big Corporations (Anheuser-Busch) on their heads with a bit of creative splicing. And don't forget, there are dot coms filled with venture capital and dozens of employees that would kill for those hit numbers. "

redux [02.05.00]
Reason Magazine Copy Catfight
"There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you've written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision... On one hand, as information has grown more valuable, copyright and trademark law has become increasingly restrictive. At the same time, there has been, in the words of MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, an "explosion of grassroots, participatory culture," a new high-tech folkway that not only draws on pop culture but appropriates from it more easily than ever before, and disseminates itself on a wider scale."

redux [04.15.00]
MIT Technology Review Freedom—Or Copyright?
"Once upon a time, in the age of the printing press, an industrial regulation was established for the business of writing and publishing. It was called copyright. Copyright’s purpose was to encourage the publication of a diversity of written works. Copyright’s method was to make publishers get permission from authors to reprint recent writings.

Ordinary readers had little reason to disapprove, since copyright restricted only publication, not the things a reader could do. If it raised the price of a book a small amount, that was only money. Copyright provided a public benefit, as intended, with little burden on the public. It did its job well—back then.

Then a new way of distributing information came about: computers and networks. The advantage of digital information technology is that it facilitates copying and manipulating information, including software, musical recordings and books. Networks offered the possibility of unlimited access to all sorts of data—an information utopia.

But one obstacle stood in the way: copyright. Readers who made use of their computers to share copyright infringers. The world had changed, and what was once an industrial regulation on publishers had become a restriction on the public it was meant to serve."

BBC News Cloning cattle reverses ageing
"Six cows cloned in the US show signs of being biologically younger than their actual age, scientists announced on Thursday.

Scientists remain unsure why this has happened or whether a longer lifespan will result. But they believe the finding will have a profound impact on the use of cloning for medical purposes. "

"They hope that in the future cloning will enable a patient's own tissue to be used to grow compatible transplant tissue which would also be youthful."

redux [04.04.00]
Wired New Answers to Age-Old Question
""In order to come up with drugs, we need to understand [the aging] process. Before we didn't know where to aim our gun, but now we have a model," said Danith Ly, lead author of a study published Friday in Science that identified one common element in aging tissues throughout the body. "We've provided a general marker for identifying aging, and a model for explaining the process."

"The researchers examined 6,800 genes associated with aging by using DNA microarrays, or chips, to look at gene-expression patterns. The scientists placed bits of DNA from known genes on a fingernail-sized chip and exposed it to fluorescent light, highlighting the active genes.

Only 61 out of the 6,800 genes studied lit up, indicating that only a small number of genes are active in the aging process. That narrows the playing field for researchers. "

redux [02.04.00]
The New York Times Magazine The Recycled Generation
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"After stuffing every cow egg with its little spud of human DNA, Sawyer prepares the next step. She gives the cells a zap of 120 volts. The jolt of electricity effectively fuses man and beast into a single biological fate. After one final step, this . . . this thing will believe it has been fertilized and, if all goes well, begin cleaving, or dividing, in the bubbling, momentous arithmetic of life lifting off the pad: 2 cells, 4 cells, 8 cells, 16 cells, 32 cells --"

Eurekalert! New fertility technique to help women have own genetic baby from donor egg
""A major advance in a fertility treatment technique may one day help some women using donated eggs to have a baby that would carry nearly all her own genes instead of those of the donor.

A combined team of French, Spanish and Italian fertility experts report today (Thursday 27 April) in the journal Human Reproduction* that they have developed a novel method of membrane fusion which would allow the nucleus from the egg of an infertile women to be successfully transferred into the cytoplasm of a donor egg from which the nucleus had been removed. As the nucleus carries most of the genes, transferring it to an enucleated donor egg means that the infertile woman would give birth to a baby who would be almost entirely genetically her own as well as her partner's."

The Third Culture The Coming Transformation in Human Life and Society in the Post-Genomic World
"Although there hasn't been any shortage of stories on genes in the press, public dialogue hasn't even begun to seriously consider how radically genetic technologies will alter human life and society — and probably all much sooner than we think."

"My bet is that feasible technologies to retool human life will put us face to face with the basic dilemma of deciding what it means to be human within two decades."

The New York Times Microsoft Management Tells Workers There Will Be No Breakup
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"As some industry executives declared that a government move to break up Microsoft could inject new competition into the software business, Microsoft's top management confidently assured its 34,000 employees on Tuesday that there is no chance the company will be split up."

"And to further calm any anxious workers, Microsoft told them they would all receive new stock options to shield them financially from the recent slide in the company's stock price."

""This company, which has done so many great things for consumers and for the American economy over the last 25 years, will not be broken up," Ballmer said."

Dan Gillmor Microsoft's Ballmer won't consider possibility of breakup
"IT had been a long couple of days for Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft Corp., when we met for dinner Tuesday evening. The company's stock price was down more than 12 percent in the wake of a disappointing sales outlook and weekend news reports that government antitrust enforcers want to break up the company.

Ballmer had been up late Monday night working on company business, including a rally-the-troops memorandum to the company's employees. On Tuesday, he and his management team handed out several billion dollars worth of new options to the employees.

At a small Italian restaurant a few miles from the Microsoft campus, I pulled a newspaper from my travel bag and pointed to the front page. A chart showed how much revenue comes from Microsoft's operating systems business as opposed to applications software and other units.

So, I asked Ballmer with a smile, which one of those companies do you want to run after the breakup?"

"Along with the standard-issue defense of Microsoft's ethics and business practices, topics on which we have long agreed to disagree, Ballmer offered what he plainly believed was a compelling reason not to do anything so drastic as a breakup. Simply put, the technology users of the world need Microsoft, because it takes a company of this size, talent, direction, patience and deep pockets to solve some kinds of problems and invent some kinds of products.

"Big, complicated innovation is very hard to do,'' he said. In developing Windows over the years, Microsoft has needed its multifaceted perspectives -- from the view of users, developers and others -- and its deep talent pool. The PC industry coalesced and grew around Microsoft's Windows standard, he said, and people need to remember that."

Wired Breakup Good for MS?
"But while Microsoft laments, a number of antitrust experts and business analysts are arguing that a breakup could well be a good thing for Microsoft, its shareholders, and consumers. Or, at least, a better thing than a consent decree in which Microsoft agrees to curb its suspect behavior, generally considered a lighter punishment.

The thinking goes like this: If Microsoft and the government enter into a consent decree, the DOJ will have to scrutinize Microsoft's every move for years to come, micro-managing the company's business strategy at every turn. The government will essentially be in the software business -- the greatest fear of Microsoft's supporters.

If the company is broken up, however, the new units can forge ahead on their own, relatively free from federal handlers.

"Essentially, Judge Jackson would be in the shorts of Microsoft for as long as the consent decree exists," said Glenn Manishin, an antitrust attorney at Patton Boggs in Washington, and a vocal proponent of a Microsoft breakup. "If they break up the company, however, the court rules, then walks away.""

Doors of Perception The design challenge of pervasive computing
"What happens to society when there are hundreds of microchips for every man, woman and child on the planet? What cultural consequences follow when every object around us is 'smart', and connected? And what happens psychologically when you step into the garden to look at the flowers - and the flowers look at you?"

"The signs of such a change are there for all to see. Enlightened managers and entrepreneurs understand, nowadays, that the best way to navigate a complex world is through a focus on core values, not on chasing the latest killer app. (This picture illustrates the core values of the French train company, SNCF). Business magazines are full of talk about a transition from transactions, to to a focus on relationship. We are moving from business strategies based on the domination of markets, to the cultivation of communities. The best companies are focussing more on the innovation of new services, and new business models, than on new technology per se. They are striving to change relationships, to anticpate limts, to accelerate trends." [via idvilla]

redux [04.13.00]
The New York Times A Chip in Every Pot
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"Russell Robertson was grappling with an unusual assignment.

As an industrial designer, his mission was to figure out how kitchen appliances will be designed when, as he put it, "the fridge talks to the coffee pot."

His eyes twinkled as he spoke, but he was not kidding about the basic concept. In fact, while the idea may have once sounded ridiculous, predictions of the advent of such devices are now becoming almost clichéd."

"But predicting whether a technology will be adopted is critical for companies that want to succeed, or even survive, in the marketplace. The ones that can figure out what will be deemed useful, superfluous or downright ridiculous will win. And today, as tiny, wireless computer systems are being perfected and the Internet is allowing the distribution of data in seconds, dozens of appliance manufacturers are betting that some sort of pervasive-computing devices will come to be considered as necessary as a telephone. The trick, for them, is to figure out which ones."

""But one of the main reasons that companies with new products stumble, Professor Utterback said, "is that they fail to appreciate or investigate the marketplace." Many companies simply ask, "What can we do with the technology?" And once they determine what they can do, he said, they assume that people will want it."

IBM Systems Journal At what cost pervasive? A social computing view of mobile computing systems
"With the advent of pervasive systems, computers are becoming a larger part of our social lives than ever before. Depending on the design of these systems, they may either promote or inhibit social relationships. We consider four kinds of social relationships: a relationship with the system, system-mediated collaborative relationships, relationships with a community, and interpersonal relationships among co-located persons. In laboratory studies, the design of pervasive computers is shown to affect responses to social partners. We propose a model of how pervasive systems can influence human behavior, social attributions, and interaction outcomes. We also discuss some implications for system design. "

Hive Distributed Agents for Networking Things
"Hive is a distributed agents platform, a decentralized system for building applications by networking local system resources. This paper presents the architecture of Hive, concentrating on the idea of an ``ecology of distributed agents'' and its implementation in a practical Java based system. Hive provides ad-hoc agent interaction, ontologies of agent capabilities, mobile agents, and a graphical interface to the distributed system. We are applying Hive to the problems of networking ``Things That Think,'' putting computation and communication in everyday places such as your shoes, your kitchen, or your own body. TTT shares the challenges and potentials of ubiquitous computing and embedded network applications. We have found that the flexibility of a distributed agents architecture is well suited for this application domain, enabling us to easily build applications and to reconfigure our systems on the fly. Hive enables us to make our environment and network more alive."

The Standard Yournamehere.com
"It's a little-known fact: A poorly chosen name is why most dot-coms fail! Ever heard of the Bahoo Web directory? No? Think: If a single letter can transform the no-name "Bahoo" into an internationally recognized, billion-dollar brand, what a difference carefully selecting all the letters in your name could make!"

"Take a word that describes your venture – "scam," for instance – and append any of the following: -as, -ia, -ic, -ion, -isis, -ium, -on. Using our example, we get "Scamisis," which you've got to admit sounds like one high-class Web site. Unlike your naming consultancies, this process may or may not rely on "Indo-European roots," "morphemes" or other book learnin', but you've gotten this far without resorting to smarts, so why start now?"

Salon The name game
"...the choice of Agilent was immediately greeted with snorts of derision. "The most namby-pamby, phonetically weak, light-in-its-shoes name in the entire history of naming," declared Rick Bragdon, president of the naming firm Idiom. "It's like a parody of a Landor name. It's insipid. It's ineptly rendered ... It ought to be taken out back and shot."

Steve Manning of A Hundred Monkeys, a San Francisco naming firm, was also appalled. "What a crummy name," he says. "It sounds like a committee name. 'Who's your competition?' 'Lucent.' 'Well, we want to play off Lucent -- only we're agile. I mean, if you wanted a name like that, I could come up with that kind of name in about four seconds."

"Welcome to big-league corporate naming, a Pynchonesque netherworld of dueling morphemes, identity buckets and full-scale linguistic sabotage. What was once a diverting sideline for mild-mannered grad students has become an increasingly lucrative and increasingly cutthroat profession, as blue-chip consulting firms schedule raids on college English departments and linguistics nerds scramble to shift their focus from the syntax of negation in the Anatolian languages to the murkier precincts of corporate identity."

Enormicon Welcome to eNormicom!
"Have you ever said to yourself, "I wish our company had a more dynamic name"? Or, "If only our logo was more expressive"? Or, "Is our tagline catchy enough?"

If so, eNormicom's patented Image Bucket Program™ is the answer. With the dramatic paradigm violence occurring in today’s internet space, it is crucial that your brand have a scalable, balanced, people-focused e-dentity.

ENormicom’s robust Image Bucket Program™ can give you the real-time channel reconfiguration that your brand needs. All it takes is a little e-magination. Step inside our office and let us show you… "

The New York Times When Villages Go Global: How a Byte of Knowledge Can Be Dangerous, Too
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"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.

Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites. "

"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.

"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."

Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

The Freedom Forum Katz: geek and proud
""It's appealing to me," Katz added, "that people who have always been perceived as outcasts, marginalized, different, have all of a sudden become the only people who understand how the world works. And you can see it's freaking out the rest of the world."

"These kids have done something unprecedented in the world, which is they have created this rich, diverse and critically important universe almost by themselves — without help or support from any of these other institutions. What they've done is now becoming one of the most significant social institutions in the world, and everyone else is trying to figure out what's happened."

"This is the first time I can think of that a culture of kids understands so much more than any adults about something so important. Sometimes I think if you're not 15 or 16, you're already beginning to fall behind in this culture.""

Grist Earth Day Turns Thirty
"If, in the 30 Earth Day celebrations we have held since 1970, the human population and economy have become any more respectful of the Earth, the Earth hasn't noticed.

The planet is not impressed by fancy speeches. Leonardo DiCaprio interviewing Bill Clinton about global warming is not an Earth-shaking event. The Earth has no way of registering good intentions or future inventions or high hopes. It doesn't even pay attention to dollars, which are, from a planet's point of view, just a charming human invention. Planets measure only physical things -- energy and materials and their flows into and out of the changing populations of living creatures.

We have among us die-hard optimists who will berate me for not reporting the good news since the last Earth Day. There is plenty of it, but it is mostly measured in human terms, not Earth terms.

Earth Day is beginning to remind me of Mother's Day, a commercial occasion upon which you buy flowers for the person who, every other day of the year, cleans up after you. Guilt-assuaging. Trivializing. Actually dangerous. All mothers have their breaking points. Mother Earth does not soften hers with patience or forgiveness or sentimentality. "

Salon Living in shimmering disequilibrium
"Wilson's belief that the hope of humanity lies in traditional religionists adopting more science and environmentalists appealing more to humankind's spiritual impulses comes at a crucial moment for the environmental movement. The hard truth is that the condition of the environment is far worse on Earth Day 2000 than it was on the first Earth Day in 1970.

But the worst-case scenario is that by the end of the century we would be living in a still changing and increasingly hostile physical environment. We would have an impoverished world with great inequities remaining in quality of life and an enormous opportunity cost for what we've done in the 21st century.

The truth of the matter is that all the changes we make render the planet less suitable, not more suitable, for human beings. It's a fundamental distinction to be made between scientific environmentalism on the one hand and nonscientific, ideological- or religious-based anti-environmentalism or indifference on the other. This is what arguments about the environment -- as they are still with us at this Earth Day -- basically consist of. "

Reason Earth Day, Then and Now
"Earth Day 1970 provoked a torrent of apocalyptic predictions.

Three decades later, of course, the world hasn't come to an end; if anything, the planet's ecological future has never looked so promising. With half a billion people suiting up around the globe for Earth Day 2000, now is a good time to look back on the predictions made at the first Earth Day and see how they've held up and what we can learn from them. The short answer: The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong.

More important, many contemporary environmental alarmists are similarly mistaken when they continue to insist that the Earth's future remains an eco-tragedy that has already entered its final act. Such doomsters not only fail to appreciate the huge environmental gains made over the past 30 years, they ignore the simple fact that increased wealth, population, and technological innovation don't degrade and destroy the environment. Rather, such developments preserve and enrich the environment. If it is impossible to predict fully the future, it is nonetheless possible to learn from the past. And the best lesson we can learn from revisiting the discourse surrounding the very first Earth Day is that passionate concern, however sincere, is no substitute for rational analysis. "

The Freedom Forum Ananova's virtual-newscast debut: We'll wait for 2.0
"The British creators of Ananova, the world’s first virtual newscaster, say she will revolutionize the way all of us get our news."

"Cybercaster Ananova’s first words, on April 19, were interesting enough: “Hello, world. Here is the news — and this time it’s personal.”"

"I found that I didn’t object to the idea of you, [Ananova], — the idea of a computer reading me the news — probably in the same way that people did not object a generation ago to Reuters' bringing them stock quotes on a special desktop machine. That machine was clunky, too. But it got better. Much better. And so, I believe, will you."

The Third Culture A new kind of object: From Rorschach to Relationship
"I have studied the effects of computational objects on human developmental psychology for over twenty years, documenting the ways that computation and its metaphors have influenced our thinking about such matters as how the mind works, what it means to be intelligent, and what is special about being human. Now, I believe that a new kind of computational object — the relational artifact — is provoking striking new changes in the narrative of human development, especially in the way people think about life, and about what kind of relationships it is appropriate to have with a machine. Relational artifacts are computational objects designed to recognize and respond to the affective states of human beings–and indeed, to present themselves as having "affective" states of their own. They include children's playthings (such as Furbies and Tamagotchis), digital dolls that double as health monitoring systems for the homebound elderly (Matsushita's forthcoming Tama), sentient robots whose knowledge and personalities change through their interactions with humans, as well as software that responds to its users’ emotional states and responds with "emotional states" of their own."

"By accepting a new category of relationship, with entities that they recognize as "sort-of-alive", or "alive in a different, but legitimate way," today's children will redefine the scope and shape of the playing field for social relations in the future."

George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System
"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."

John M. Lawler Metaphors We Compute By
"I'm going to talk today about metaphors. Everybody here has heard and used the word metaphor plenty in the course of your educational experience (and the amount of educational experience in this room is pretty staggering, so that makes lots of uses of the word). To quote a famous sage, "It's a common word, something you use everyday." It generally gets stored in memory with all the other stuff you learn in literature classes, like simile, plot, characters, rhyme, meter, and so on. And then it gets forgotten, or at least not looked at often, until and unless you do something literary. I'm here today to suggest that in fact there is a human phenomenon (which I will call metaphor, though what name you give it doesn't really matter much) that is much more important to everybody than all this would imply."

The New York Times Open-Source Software Arouses Researchers' Curiosity
[requires 'free' registration]
"WHEN technology stocks took their sharp tumble last week, many companies appeared to lose one of their most important assets -- the ability to lure talented employees with options. To attract and hold the best, you have to offer the chance to strike it rich.

Or do you? What are we to think when the best of the best -- the elite programmers that industry wisdom deems 100 times more productive than the typical competent coder -- donate their precious time to develop software anyone can use without charge? That is the puzzle the open-source movement, most famous for the Linux operating system, presents to economists."

"While its development looks like a marketplace, open-source software itself is a classic public good. You can use it without contributing to its maintenance and without paying a cent to all those programmers who created and improved it.

Hence the economic puzzle. As Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School and Jean Tirole of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ask in a recent paper: "Why should thousands of top-notch programmers contribute freely to the provision of a public good?"

Salon Finland -- The Open Source Society
"Why Finland? In the 21st century, there's hardly a nation in the world that doesn't want to be a role model for the information society. What made Finland so special? Was it an accident of history, the luck of the draw, or some more complex intersection of cultural evolution and the activist will of an entire people? More to the point, was it possible that the deep structure of Finnish civilization encourages an open-source way of life?"

redux [03.04.00]
The Washington Monthly Reboot! How Linux and open-source development could change the way we get things done
"Imagine a scale with all the advantages of a proprietary model on the left and all the advantages of an open-source model on the right. Pretend everybody who wants to solve a problem or build a project has a scale like this. If it tips to the left, the proprietary model is chosen; if it tips to the right, the open model is chosen. Now, as connectivity increases with the Internet, and computer power increases exponentially, more and more weight accumulates on the right. Every time computer power increases, another household gets wired, or a new simulator is built online, a little more weight is added to the right. Having the example of Linux to learn from adds some more weight to the right; the next successful open-source project will add even more.

"Perhaps the next boom in open source will come from the law; perhaps from drug X; perhaps it will be something entirely different. Although it's difficult to tell, it is quite likely that the scale is going to tip for some projects and that there will be serious efforts at open-source development in the next decade. Moreover, it's quite likely some of these projects will work."

EE Times Free 32-bit processor core hits the Net
"A loose-knit organization called OpenCores is offering a free 32-bit processor intellectual-property (IP) core in a move that could undermine such commercial IP licensors as ARM and MIPS."

"...analysts say the offering, and others like it, may eventually alter the semiconductor IP landscape as radically as Linux"

Jim Tully, EDA analyst with Gartner Group's Dataquest subsidiary in Egham, England, said, "Who's to say that this couldn't evolve into something the industry could use? Before Linux came along, who would have said that [the Linux phenomenon] could happen?" Tully said, "People will be paranoid about [OpenRISC's] background, its provenance, its quality. On the face of it no one would want to look at it, but no doubt people will download free cores and try them out in low-risk situations. If OpenRISC works, it could migrate up."

Editor and Publisher Online Newspaper Sites Must Adjust To Life Without 'Editions'
"An online news site is more akin to a wire service than a printed publication, because it can (and should) publish news on around-the-clock basis. While the notion of "editions" still prevails at many news sites, the trend is more toward a constant publishing cycle, where news is published whenever it breaks.

Newspaper Web sites are in a period of transition, as more and more of them move into publishing news throughout the day instead of posting stories at specified times. While the idea of publishing Web "editions" is a comfortable one for a newspaper company, editions are really counter to the nature of the Internet publishing medium. Ideally, a news Web site will publish news without a set schedule."

The Washinton Post On Web, Newspapers Never Sleep
"As the journalistic precincts of cyberspace turn increasingly competitive, newspapers are transforming themselves into 24-hour news machines, in part by asking their print reporters to do double duty. The result has altered a tradition-encrusted newsroom environment that has never had to deal with round-the-clock deadlines."

""You're building a relationship with a new generation of young people for whom newsprint holds no magical qualities," said Ken Paulson, executive director of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University."

The Round Table Group Young Adults Most Often Get Info From Net - Study
"Young adults say the Internet, not newspapers or television, is their number one source of information, a Round Table Group survey has found.

Fifty-nine percent of Internet users in the 18- to 24-year-old age group say that their household gets more "useful information" from the Net than from newspapers; 53 percent say they receive more information from the Internet than from TV.

Fully 84 percent say that their household is more likely to use the Internet to find useful information than to go to the public library. For specific questions, 68 percent are more inclined to consult the Internet than turn to a newspaper and 67 percent are more likely to go to the Net than rely on television. "

Online Journalism Review What the Pulitzers Missed: What makes a Newspaper a Newspaper? Welcome to the 21st Century, Joseph Pulitzer, where ya been?
"In the wake of this year's Pulitzer awards and the various complaints and gripes about who should have been recognized, we would like to suggest a dig deeper into the psyche of the Pulitzer policy: the question of why online news publications were not allowed to submit applications. The answer, according to the rules of the Pulitzer committee, is that only "newspapers" may apply."

"...what makes a newspaper? It's daily, it's printable, it's news, commentary and reporting and is, ostensibly, read by someone. Merriam Webster defines a newspaper as "paper that is printed and distributed usually daily or weekly and that contains news, articles of opinion, features, and advertising.""

Editor and Publisher Online The Race to Extend Print Circulation Digitally, Globally
"Imagine a day (not too terribly far in the future) when you are traveling, and you stop in at the United Airlines Red Carpet Club at the airport in Anchorage, Alaska. You show your membership card and request a copy of today's Miami Herald, your hometown paper. You grab a cup of coffee, sit down, and the desk clerk delivers your paper (printed, that is) in a few minutes.

Or you're on an extended business trip to Toyko, longing for news from home. You can simply log on to the Internet and view your hometown paper's Web site. Or you can walk to a nearby newsstand, insert your credit card into a news kiosk machine, request today's New York Post, and wait while a high-speed printer reproduces the current edition on 11- by 17-inch paper."

redux [02.02.00]
First Monday Interactive Features of Online Papers
"According to McAdams, who helped create the Washington Post's online service, "A journalist with little online experience tends to think in terms of stories, news value, public service and things that are good to read, but a person with a lot of online experience thinks more about connection, organization, movement within and among sets of information and communication among different people". Journalists today must choose. As gatekeepers they can transfer lots of information, or they can make users a smarter, more active and questioning audience for news events and issues. Making users smarter means involving them in a collaborative experience; i.e. interaction ”

Chicago Tribune Compliance Minus the Consultant
"NetCompliance is programmed to eliminate people. Compliance consultants, specifically.

In the old economy, NetCompliance would have been a bricks-and-mortar company, sending people to workplaces to advise companies. But in the world NetCompliance envisions, software will replace the consultant.

"Our quest is to be the consultant killer," said co-founder Krish Krishnan. "

The Christian Science Monitor 'Personalization' industry launches movement to regulate itself
"In a move designed to head off government attempts to legislate privacy protection for Internet users, a group of 26 Internet companies and brick-and-mortar businesses Wednesday announced the creation of an international industry advocacy group called The Personalization Consortium."

"While the Consortium is at least making the right noises about privacy, there were rough spots during the press conference that pointed to potential problems and future conflicts with privacy advocates."

Alertbox Personalization is Over-Rated
"Web personalization is much over-rated and mainly used as a poor excuse for not designing a navigable website. The real way to get individualized interaction between a user and a website is to present the user with a variety of options and let the user choose what is of interest to that individual at that specific time. If the information space is designed well, then this choice is easy, and the user achieves optimal information through the use of natural intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. In other words, I am the one entity on the world to know exactly what I need right now. Thus, I can tailor the information I see and the information I skip so that it suits my needs perfectly."

News.com Can Napster be stopped? No!
"The obvious question is, Can anything be done to stop the free trade of music on the Internet? To the amazement of many, the answer is likely to be no.

The first reason for this is that the cat is out of the bag. Every multimedia PC in existence is capable of converting a music CD to a digital MP3 file. This means that more than 100 million encoding devices already exist that can convert the more than 50 billion CDs floating around the world into digital files. It's unlikely that we will recall either the PCs or the CDs. Could we produce new CDs that are "un-rippable"? This is unlikely if you want them to work in the more than 200 million CD players that already are on the market."

Wired Napster Takes a Nap
"Napster addicts in need of a music fix were stifled Monday by the unavailability of the company’s servers.

Starting around 7 a.m. PDT Monday, servers and home pages for Napster, a popular service that allows Internet users to exchange MP3 music files, have been unavailable and disconnecting users."

"The vulnerability of Napster’s servers points to an advantage that distributed software like Gnutella may have in the long run -– no single IP destination controls the operation of the file-sharing."

Wide Open News Pro-Napster Hackers Hit Metallica
"Hell hath no fury like a Napster fan spurned, it seems. Hot on the heels of Metallica's major legal action against the developer of the MP3 track finder, the band's Web site was hacked over the weekend.

A Napster buff sneaked onto the the rockers' server and replaced the site's minimalist www.metallica.com homepage with the equally minimalist 'LEAVE NAPSTER ALONE'. "

The Christian Science Monitor Napster — the music distribution system of the future
"llicit or not, the changes wrought by Napster may be more difficult to undo. An entire generation of music-listeners has learned that there's a better way to get the music they want - and even if government manages to stomp it out, the memory will remain."

"Freedom of information does not necessarily have to mean the end of compensation for the companies that produce and market music - or the artists who initially wrote and performed the songs."

redux [03.25.00]
Salon Artists to Napster: Drop dead!
" Ask singer-songwriter Aimee Mann what she thinks of Napster, the ingeniously simple and wildly popular tool for exchanging MP3 music files, and you get a very concise response: "Artists should get paid for their work." It's a time-honored notion, but one that seems to be getting lost amid the Napster buzz."

The New York Review of Books In the Name of Humanity
"What is to be done when hundreds of thousands of people in a hitherto little-known region of the world are hounded from their homes, massacred, or starved to death in a brutal civil war, or even in a deliberate act of genocide? To our credit, we no longer turn away from the face of evil, but we still don't know how to control it. As the new century dawns, one of the biggest problems for international organizations and their member governments is to learn how to react to the great human emergencies that still seem to occur regularly in many parts of the world.

A well-run, democratic sovereign state, with a respected constitution, legislature, and executive, a judicial system, law enforcement, and police, and a standing or reserve army, is usually prepared to deal with evil. Such a state can be expected to forestall potential disasters within its territory and to react swiftly to those it cannot prevent. The constitutional system provides for accepted and allotted responsibility and speedy and effective decision-making; and the resources of the state are likely to be adequate for emergency action. Such constitutional systems have usually taken centuries to evolve; they often fall short of their obligations, but their citizens on the whole support them.

The so-called "international community" is anything but a constitutional system. As far as it is organized at all, it is an institutional arrangement, unpredictable and slow to act. It usually responds only when disaster has already struck and when its members, usually in the UN Security Council, can agree to take action. Even then, since the UN has no standing forces or substantial resources of its own, its action, if it can be agreed upon, is likely to be too little and too late. "

redux [03.24.00]
Civilization Magazine Supercivilization and its Discontents
"A profound shift of geopolitical power lies ahead, one that will dominate the century to come--and it has hardly been noticed, let alone analyzed. This massive change will trigger turbulence around the globe, with a high potential for violence. To prevent or mitigate such effects, we need to understand the framework of geopolitical power as it takes shape in the 21st century. Think of it as a master conflict of supercivilizations.

A civilization is an entire, all-encompassing way of life; a supercivilization might be described as a way of life that is shared widely across cultures, languages, religions, ethnic groups, and states. And while many civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history, there have, so far, been only two supercivilizations.

Today a new supercivilization is pushing, elbowing, swaggering --some would say bullying--its way onto the world stage, threatening both the agrarian and industrial supercivilizations.

This third supercivilization will soon give billions of people the power to communicate with one another, whether to buy and sell goods, create art, organize political protests, invent new religions and ideologies, engage in terrorism, learn how to make biological or chemical weapons, or create or alter life-forms.

How should the fast-emerging knowledge-based supercivilization of tomorrow interface with the lifeways of yesterday? How might we minimize the conflicts that face us? This question, still largely unasked, will find its way onto the screen of every world leader--indeed, every alert human being--in the decades to come. The answer will determine just how much turbulence and bloodshed the world experiences in the century ahead as we make the transition from a bisected to a trisected geopolitical system on the planet."

MIT Technology Review Freedom—Or Copyright?
"Once upon a time, in the age of the printing press, an industrial regulation was established for the business of writing and publishing. It was called copyright. Copyright’s purpose was to encourage the publication of a diversity of written works. Copyright’s method was to make publishers get permission from authors to reprint recent writings.

Ordinary readers had little reason to disapprove, since copyright restricted only publication, not the things a reader could do. If it raised the price of a book a small amount, that was only money. Copyright provided a public benefit, as intended, with little burden on the public. It did its job well—back then.

Then a new way of distributing information came about: computers and networks. The advantage of digital information technology is that it facilitates copying and manipulating information, including software, musical recordings and books. Networks offered the possibility of unlimited access to all sorts of data—an information utopia.

But one obstacle stood in the way: copyright. Readers who made use of their computers to share copyright infringers. The world had changed, and what was once an industrial regulation on publishers had become a restriction on the public it was meant to serve."

Civilization Magazine Branded Knowledge: Copyrights and Wrongs
"Today our telephone lines and cable lines are getting longer and fatter and are crying to be filled up with news and movies and songs--this is what made Time Warner's content so irresistible to America Online. Felix Rohatyn, the former investment banker and current U.S. Ambassador to France, recently declared that "intellectual property ... is what the 21st century is going to be all about." By 1997, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance, copyright industries contributed some $350 billion to America's gross domestic product; since then, moreover, companies with a capital base of copyrighted material have grown roughly twice as fast as the overall U.S. economy.

In the new information economy, intellectual property has a crucial economic advantage. While its research and development costs--the months a film crew spends on location, the years of testing a software design-- are steep, the marginal costs of each videotape or software download are relatively small. Once enough units are sold to cover initial costs, the price delivers almost pure profit. Hence the logic of continually reaching new markets--in a word, globalization."

redux [02.05.00]
Reason Magazine Copy Catfight
"There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you've written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision... On one hand, as information has grown more valuable, copyright and trademark law has become increasingly restrictive. At the same time, there has been, in the words of MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, an "explosion of grassroots, participatory culture," a new high-tech folkway that not only draws on pop culture but appropriates from it more easily than ever before, and disseminates itself on a wider scale."

The New York Times A Chip in Every Pot
[requires 'free' registration]
"Russell Robertson was grappling with an unusual assignment.

As an industrial designer, his mission was to figure out how kitchen appliances will be designed when, as he put it, "the fridge talks to the coffee pot."

His eyes twinkled as he spoke, but he was not kidding about the basic concept. In fact, while the idea may have once sounded ridiculous, predictions of the advent of such devices are now becoming almost clichéd."

"But predicting whether a technology will be adopted is critical for companies that want to succeed, or even survive, in the marketplace. The ones that can figure out what will be deemed useful, superfluous or downright ridiculous will win. And today, as tiny, wireless computer systems are being perfected and the Internet is allowing the distribution of data in seconds, dozens of appliance manufacturers are betting that some sort of pervasive-computing devices will come to be considered as necessary as a telephone. The trick, for them, is to figure out which ones."

""But one of the main reasons that companies with new products stumble, Professor Utterback said, "is that they fail to appreciate or investigate the marketplace." Many companies simply ask, "What can we do with the technology?" And once they determine what they can do, he said, they assume that people will want it."

Wired Honey, There's a Bug in My Car
"Bugs that lurk in computer systems around the world are poised to leap into the new era of post-PC computing -- and that could spell trouble for technology consumers and security experts.

Manufacturers are starting to equip a range of products from cars to refrigerators with programmable computer chips and Internet access -- and since everything that's connected can become infected, the new world of computing will hold invisible threats."

redux [02.03.00]
NetFuture The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers (Part 2)
"The subtitle of this series of articles is "Why We'd Be Better Off without the MIT Media Lab". Let me broaden that here. What we'd be better off without is every organization that pushes purely technological "solutions" as if they were what could make us better off.”

The Standard The Age of Access
"Think of waking up one day only to find that every aspect of your existence has become a purchased affair, that life itself has become the ultimate shopping experience.

The capitalist journey, which began with the commodification of material goods and places, is ending with the commodification of human time and duration. E-commerce and networked ways of doing business are giving rise to the "Age of Access," a new economic era as different from industrial capitalism as the latter was from the merchantilist era that preceded it."

The Standard From Selling Goods to Commodifying Relationships
"Instead of thinking of products as fixed items with set features and a one-time sales value, companies now think of them as "platforms" for all sorts of upgrades and value-added services. In the Age of Access services and upgrades are what count. The platform is merely the vessel to which these services are added.

In a sense, the product becomes more of a cost of doing business than an item in itself. The idea is to use the platform as a beachhead, as a way of establishing a physical presence in the customer's home or place of business. That presence allows the vendor to begin an ongoing "relationship" with the customer."

Salon GM's e-mobile magnate
"On a weekly basis, there are over a half a billion hours of eyeball time that customers spend in their vehicles. I used to live in the Bay Area and I'm well aware of the traffic patterns there; some days you might be stuck for a couple hours. If you can make your time in the vehicle more efficient by conducting activities and services over the Web, all of a sudden your life can be more efficient. That's really our goal."

redux [03.30.00]
BusinessWeek Weblining
"You may think that getting graded A, B, or C ended with graduate school. Try getting Sanwa Bank to waive its $20 fee on your bounced check. Customer reps are trained to treat everyone politely. But your luck will depend on a little letter that pops up on a screen as soon as your name is punched into a computer, or when your e-mail arrives at Sanwa's server. If that letter is a ''C,'' customer reps don't exactly hustle on your behalf. That's because machines whirring at Net-speed have lumped you--often in seconds flat--with other customers whose accounts don't make much money for the bank. But if you score an ''A,'' you're right up there with the cream: Customers who generate hefty profits get bounced-check waivers, no questions asked. And B's? They're harder calls. They actually get to negotiate with the rep before their case is decided."

"Scientific or not, high-powered computing increases the incentive for businesses to Webline customers by making human behavior appear predictable. Visa International, for example, is using neural networks to build up elaborate behavioral profiles. Over months, these systems--which emulate the learning power of the brain--track a person's behavior online and off, then match it against models of similar personality and behavior types to predict how people will act in the future. The initial incentive was to recognize and thwart fraud. Now Visa is testing the software with 12 member banks in an effort to anticipate loan defaults. ''This gives us smarter data, and with Web-based technology, we can get that to our member banks in real time,'' says Martin Izenson, a director in Visa's risk management and security group."

Salon The Ralph Reed-Redmond connection
"Instead of discreetly pulling the levers of power, Bill Gates' company is on public display as brazenly trying to buy its way into a presidential candidate's graces. Instead of beginning to repair the months-long trial's damage to its public credibility, Microsoft has yet another public relations fiasco on its hands (and just when memory of the company's infamous "Astroturf"-style lobbying plans was finally beginning to fade!). Instead of capitalizing on the statesmanlike images of Gates appearing on Capitol Hill right after the antitrust verdict without complaining about it, Microsoft is right back at square one as the Clumsiest Company in Washington."

Mercury Center: Dan Gillmor's ejournal Microsoft's Latest Hired Gun: Ralph Reed
"...it may take infinite shamelessness for a company that is so progressive with its own employees -- and in the causes Bill Gates supports when he's giving his own money -- to be paying big money to the poster child for the forces of intolerance, ultra-right maven Ralph Reed. Reed's job, according to various news reports, is to lobby George W. Bush, the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee.

Of course, it's possible to argue that Reed is just another lobbyist, no longer executive director of the Christian Coalition. He's just another hired gun, and therefore a reasonable ally. So Microsoft is merely following the modern standard of behavior -- what's acceptable is what you can get away with.

Plainly, Microsoft sees this case as a fight to the death. On the other side is nothing all that important, just the rules of competition in the Information Age, and maybe the rule of law itself."

Nature Science: Update Spreading like wildfire
"Nobody likes change. Even when the advantages are clear, sometimes the sheer effort involved seems too much. Industries and social structures seem to be no different. Some predictions imply that the microelectronics industry will be able to go no further with silicon-based chips a few decades from now. fuel reserves will surely dictate that the automobile industry can’t forever churn out vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine. Yet neither seems ready to capitulate to the newer technologies on the horizon.

But eventually, something gives. The pressure for change seems to pass some threshold, and a new technology spreads rapidly through society. Who could have imagined, for example, that the compact disk would so suddenly eclipse the long-playing record? Now a team of Spanish scientists has modelled this kind of change in a socio-economic environment. As they explain in the journal Physical Review E1 , their model might help forecasters predict how and when such transformations will occur."

USA Today AOL to newspapers: Your future is online
"America Online's president sees home entertainment and communications as a collection of boxes. The TV set is the ''tell-me-a-story box.'' The personal computer - ''the manage-your-life box.'' The CD player? ''The give-me-a-mood box.''

The roles for those machines may be quickly evolving and the lines between them blurring. But Bob Pittman still sees plenty of room in American life for the newspaper out in the mailbox."

"In remarks that were part pep talk, part cautionary tale, he said practitioners of the written page can thrive in the new communications age if they are aggressive about getting their content online and don't defy a consumer-driven Internet culture that wants more and more at little or no cost."

redux [03.21.00]
Online Journalism Review A Post-Mortem, With Great Prejudice, of the Online Journalism Conference
"The choice of Sacks as primary attraction of a journalism seminar -- he's senior vice president and general manager of America Online -- was controversial enough to make one editor of Online Journalism stay home in protest. Yet it was strangely invigorating to hear this smug megacorporation executive lecture on his own importance, and how all journalists will play by AOL/Time-Warner's rules from now on, because, as Sacks said, "We're the biggest guys. We're big, and we're bad."

""If our goal was to publish bad magazines, by the way, we could have done that without a $120 billion merger." Before Sacks finished, he had happily proclaimed, "We do no original news," and described the new world of reporting as "an integrated consumer experience." Gives you an idea about how AOL might cover a famine."

redux [03.19.00]
Project Cool Trib Gets It ... And Does It
"Another mega-deal. More mega-media. But it is a creative, new media move? Yes, it is.

In the digital world, the significance of this deal is that it will push the envelope of change on how to cover, produce and present news in a multimedia world of print, television, online, and other formats.

"Despite having a past history (something that seems to make a company suspect in the realm of new media), The Tribune has been a model for the future, starting a few years ago when the name of the company was changed from the "Chicago Tribune Newspaper Company" to "The Tribune Company." The signal was loud and clear, internally and externally, that this would be a media company -- not merely a company that controlled printed products. "

Salon Japanese firm developing tool to track stray grannies
"Johnny: "Mom! Grandma's missing again!"

Mom: "Don't worry, dear, the satellite will find her.""

"According to Reuters, a Japanese company has come up with a new way to track down grandmas, grandpas and anyone else who forgets where he or she is supposed to be, by using a satellite-based global positioning system and cellular technology."

Applied Digital Solutions What is Digital Angel?
"The Digital Angel™ transceiver can be implanted just under the skin or hidden inconspicuously on or within valuable personal belongings and priceless works of art. When implanted within the human body, the transceiver is powered electromechanically through the movement of muscles. It can be activated either by the "wearer" or by a remote monitoring facility."

Wired A High-End Learning Portal
"Sorting through the wealth of education courses and materials on the Internet to find reliable information may seem like an unfathomable task.

A new knowledge venture is uniting some of the most prestigious universities and cultural institutions worldwide to address one of the greatest challenges in distance learning: finding a reputable online education."

"Columbia University initiated the for-profit partnership with the London School of Economics, Cambridge University Press, the New York Public Library, the British Library, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History."

redux [03.16.00]
The Guardian Students on silicon campus
"Universities are dead. Campuses are defunct and everyone gets their degree online. Welcome to the future. Or is it? It's a spectre that haunts the education system, and it is already sending ripples of change through the world's learning communities."

The Seattle Times Mike Eisenberg teaches UW's doctors of data overload how to recognize what's valuable
"For years, colleges cranked out the people who create information or create machines that spew it. But where are the guides? Who can weed through this stuff to decide what's valuable?

Eisenberg has this vision of Lucy and Ethel in a famous "I Love Lucy" episode. But instead of chocolate candy coming at them faster and faster on the conveyor belt, it's information."

"Eisenberg trains his students to see information as soon as they open their eyes. Traffic. Weather. News. Instead of being overwhelmed, they think: How can I organize it? How does the information flow? How can I pull out what's valuable and leave the rest behind?

Some of The Information School's graduates will be librarians. The need is growing and the prestige rising.

But others will go into business with titles such as "information architect" and "business intelligence manager." They'll tackle Web site content and complex database systems. They won't all be librarians, but they will all have a librarian's "helper-sharer gene""

SiliconValley.com Librarians are heroes of Net censorship fight
"HEROES OF FREEDOM: They are champions of some vital principles, "the unsung heroes of the fight for free expression, intellectual freedom and access to the Internet.''

"Librarians help us find things. They help us read. They help us learn. And lately they've been fighting the good fight for their patrons' right to have access to the unfiltered resources of the newest information resource -- the Internet.”

The New York Times Magazine Exiles on Main Street
[requires 'free' registration]
"If drug dealers drove minivans, this is the kind they'd drive. I'm in a black-on-black, top-of-the-line Dodge Grand Caravan ES, with phat spoilers, muscle grillwork, road-hugging fog lights and 10 Infinity speakers blasting out alternative rock. I'm in my element weaving through the suburban streetscape of Bethesda, Md. I'm hunting for a parking spot, passing by the Ancient Rhythms furniture gallery, the Outrage Cafe and Terra Cognita, a Material Culture-type store that sells tribal rugs, folk art and kilims. Parking is supposed to be easy in the suburbs, but it's always tough in a retail hub like Bethesda. My eyes narrow with that sharp, hungry look I used to get when I lived in Manhattan, hunting for an apartment or on rainy evenings desperate for a cab. Finally, I spot an empty space up the street in front of Three Dog Bakery, which makes fat-free apple-oatmeal biscuits, cheese and herb treats and gourmet carob chips -- for dogs. "

O'Reilly Network Jon Katz: Book Publishers Still Don't Get It
"I think interactivity involves many, many things. It involves the way the company is structured. It involves whether people are listening to their customers or paying attention or interacting with them. Publishing is one of those institutions that's almost medieval. You have a handful of people cloistered in New York, and nobody knows how they make decisi