conflux
The O'Reilly Network: openp2p.com
Code + Law: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig"I think that when these cases eventually work their way to the Supreme Court (if the companies that are being sued are around long enough to push them to the Supreme Court), the court will actually restore balance to this discussion in a way that will help protect innovation in the space. But now the real danger is that the recording industry has succeeded in its objective, which as Hillary Rosen (president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America) said, is to guarantee that no venture capitalist invests money in new modes of distribution unless Hollywood signs off. Well, that's to reinforce an old model of creativity that I think the Internet has the opportunity to destroy."
"Joel Klein, the former antitrust chief for the Justice Department, on Wednesday was named chairman and chief executive of the U.S. division of German media giant Bertelsmann. In his new job, Klein will help Bertelsmann fulfill its plans for keeping Napster the leader of music sharing on the Internet as it prepares to unveil a subscription service."
"Consensus within the Internet industry suggests these guerrilla tactics will prove too much for the litigious RIAA. Jon Davis, founder of online music site iCrunch.com says dealing with thousands of online hackers creating decentralised sharing utilities will end in defeat, even for the Big Five."
"Clarke agrees and suggests the music industry rethink its tactics. "Gnutella would be very hard to shut down," he says. "I basically think that this can't be stopped and that eventually people are going to have to change the way they think about intellectual property.""
10:41 PM 0 comments
Media Guardian
Prophets of doom at online news profits"Leaning down from the stage, Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation, made it clear that the honeymoon with online news was over. "I just don't see how you can make money out of it."
Since that comment, at an annual meeting last November, many other media bosses have started to wonder whether they will ever make money online. After years of worrying that their business would be eaten up by upstarts staffed by twentysomethings, the new era finds them wondering whether they will ever recoup the millions invested in new staff, new technology and new advertising."
redux [01.22.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"The first era of newspaper experiments on the Internet, fueled in part by the fear that the Web would devour profits, is over. A new era of newspaper experiments on the Internet, fueled in part by the fear that the Web will not generate profits, has begun.
Where will it lead?"redux [01.26.00]
"It's that time of year for me again. As one of the 30 judges of the annual Editor & Publisher EPpy Awards (which honor the best Web sites of the newspaper and news industries), I've spent a lot of time in the last few weeks poring over newspaper sites.
In a nutshell, here's what I've noticed: Over the years that I've been volunteering as an EPpy judge, news sites have grown to be more comprehensive and feature more and better content. But comprehensive, while an admirable trait, is not always enough to get users to make visiting and using a site a habit."
"As nearly every week brings word of a new round of layoffs and cutbacks in new media, current and former online staffers, executives and industry analysts are surveying the wreckage and wondering whether the reluctant, often testy romance between media companies and the Internet has come to an end. My God, was it all ... just ... a meaningless fling?
The consensus so far? Media companies have begun some serious retrenchment and rolled back a number of initiatives, but they have not yet begun a full-scale retreat from the online medium. While the Holy Grail of online publishing -- a profitable business model -- remains elusive, the quest continues."redux [02.02.00]
"A"We're certainly not reducing our coverage of news," said Nicol, when E&P asked him about the letter. Several hundred employees work for MSNBC.com, which shares bureaus with NBC News to complement newsgathering efforts.
For MSNBC.com, the past year had some months with record profitability, but other months fell short. Although planning is not completed, targeted cuts will be made in travel and entertainment, freelance expenses, and other discretionary spending, Nicol said. Some open positions around the company will be eliminated, but hiring will continue for critical positions."
"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"
8:11 PM 0 comments
Salon
Gates decries "market failure" in global fight against disease"Gates, speaking on a panel with U.N. health officials, said he was shocked by the small amount of money going into research and treatment of diseases in the world's poorer countries.
"There is a real market failure here -- a failure of visibility, a failure of incentives, a failure of cooperation that has led to a very disastrous situation," he said."
redux [12.21.00]
"One of the salient facts about the globalizing culture of high tech, symbolized by the increasingly monocultural Silicon Valley, is its remarkable provincialism. It's a provincialism akin to that of the interstate highway traveler and the air traveler: the culture of highway rest stops and airport shops is "global" in only the thinnest of senses, its primary function being to conceal the cultures of the globe rather than to engage or cultivate them. This function is carried to a new extreme by the almost solipsistic isolation and immobility of the cybertraveler, which can be compensated for only through an intense (and often foregone) inner effort to reach out imaginatively and sympathetically.
What has led Gates to break through some of the provincialism of the high- tech culture appears to have been his responsibility (shared with his wife, Melinda) for billions of philanthropic dollars."
redux [11.03.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"As the "Creating Digital Dividends" conference drew to a close in Seattle recently, the final speaker arrived and started asking skeptical questions. The premise was that "market drivers" could be used "to bring the benefits of connectivity and participation in the e-economy to all of the world's six billion people," according to conference materials, but the speaker would have little of it.
"I mean, do people have a clear view of what it means to live on $1 a day?" the speaker, William H. Gates, asked. "There's no electricity in that house. None.""
Pacing the room, waving his hands, he conjures up an image of an African village that receives a computer.
"The mothers are going to walk right up to that computer and say, My children are dying, what can you do?" Mr. Gates says. "They're not going to sit there and like, browse eBay or something. What they want is for their children to live. They don't want their children's growth to be stunted. Do you really have to put in computers to figure that out?"
9:28 PM 0 comments
The New York Times Magazine
Look at Brazil [requires 'free' registration]
"Since 1997, virtually every AIDS patient in Brazil for whom it is medically indicated gets, free, the same triple cocktails that keep rich Americans healthy. (In Western Europe, no one who needs AIDS treatment is denied it because of cost. This is true in some American states, but not all.) Brazil has shredded all the excuses about why poor countries cannot treat AIDS. Health system too fragile? On the shaky foundation of its public health service, Brazil built a well-run network of AIDS clinics. Uneducated people can't stick to the complicated regime of pills? Brazilian AIDS patients have proved just as able to take their medicine on time as patients in the United States."
" Brazil is showing that no one who dies of AIDS dies of natural causes. Those who die have been failed -- by feckless leaders who see weapons as more alluring purchases than medicines, by wealthy countries (notably the United States) that have threatened the livelihood of poor nations who seek to manufacture cheap medicine and by the multinational drug companies who have kept the price of antiretroviral drugs needlessly out of reach of the vast majority of the world's population."
redux [08.09.00]
The Observer How Dr Dre sings out for the Big Six
"Dre v Napster is the musical sideshow of the bigger war over ownership of intellectual property, ranging from ditties to DNA. In my last column, I described how the Clinton administration blocked South Africa's purchasing of low-cost drugs to stem the spread of Aids. To protect the right of Glaxo-Wellcome to embargo cross-border sales of AZT which don't meet the company's terms, Clinton threatened South Africa with trade sanctions under the World Trade Organisation's Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (Trips).
Today I can report that one nation has finally displayed the huevos to stand up to America's bully-boy enforcement of WTO dictat: the US."
"But then, hypocrisy is the oxygen of the new imperial order of thought ownership. Every genteel landlord of fenced-in intellectual real estate began life as a thief. Under WTO and US law today, how many products built on the ideas of others could never have made it to market? As Isaac Newton would say now: 'If I see further than others, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants too dumb to patent their discoveries'."
"When AIDS exploded onto the world health scene in the 1980s, Brazil was hit nearly as hard as Africa. But while the rate of AIDS in adults in Africa today is 20 percent, in Brazil it's less than .06 percent, thanks to aggressive campaigns encouraging condom use.
But this success is skewed dramatically towards the male population.
In the beginning of the '80s, studies showed that 25 men to 1 woman in Brazil had AIDS, while today the ratio is 2 men to 1 woman."
""I believe that only when Brazilian women stop being so emotionally submissive they'll get the power of saving themselves," Alves said. "I wouldn't trust chauvinist Brazilian men to be in charge of avoiding giving women HIV infection.""
10:13 AM 0 comments
Online Journalism Review
Soul-Searching Time at Online News Units"As nearly every week brings word of a new round of layoffs and cutbacks in new media, current and former online staffers, executives and industry analysts are surveying the wreckage and wondering whether the reluctant, often testy romance between media companies and the Internet has come to an end. My God, was it all ... just ... a meaningless fling?
The consensus so far? Media companies have begun some serious retrenchment and rolled back a number of initiatives, but they have not yet begun a full-scale retreat from the online medium. While the Holy Grail of online publishing -- a profitable business model -- remains elusive, the quest continues."
"A"We're certainly not reducing our coverage of news," said Nicol, when E&P asked him about the letter. Several hundred employees work for MSNBC.com, which shares bureaus with NBC News to complement newsgathering efforts.
For MSNBC.com, the past year had some months with record profitability, but other months fell short. Although planning is not completed, targeted cuts will be made in travel and entertainment, freelance expenses, and other discretionary spending, Nicol said. Some open positions around the company will be eliminated, but hiring will continue for critical positions."
redux [06.13.00]
"The most-credible Internet news sources are Web sites run by network or cable TV outlets or national newspapers, according to a new survey. Such well-known Internet names as America Online, Netscape and Yahoo! ranked higher on credibility than lesser-known sites."
"Among news media, continuing a trend, the Pew poll found key segments of the nation's news audience, particularly younger and better-educated Americans and those seeking financial information, are turning increasingly to the Internet."
""Increasingly, news organizations that are going to be successful have to offer news on a 24-hour basis..."redux [04.20.00]
"Traditional news outlets are feeling the impact of two distinct and powerful trends. Internet news has not only arrived, it is attracting key segments of the national audience. At the same time, growing numbers of Americans are losing the news habit. Fewer people say they enjoy following the news, and fully half pay attention to national news only when something important is happening. And more Americans than ever say they watch the news with a remote control in hand, ready to dispatch uninteresting stories. To some extent, these trends are affecting all traditional media, but broadcast news outlets -- both national and local -- have been the most adversely affected. "
"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."
7:57 PM 0 comments
The New York Times
Mining the 'Deep Web' With Specialized Drills[requires 'free' registration]
"In fact, traditional search engines have access to only a fraction of 1 percent of what exists on the Web. As many as 500 billion pieces of content are hidden from the view of those search engines, according to BrightPlanet.com, a search company that has tried to tally them. To many search experts, this is the "invisible Web." BrightPlanet prefers the term "deep Web," an online frontier that it estimates may be 500 times larger than the surface Web that search engines try to cover. And that uncharted territory does not include Web pages that are behind firewalls or part of intranets.
To dig deeper into the Web, a new breed of search engine has cropped up that takes a different approach to Web page retrieval. Instead of broadly scanning the Web by indexing pages from any links they can find, these search engines are devoted to drilling further into specialty areas — medical sites, legal documents, even Web pages dedicated to jokes and parody."
redux [12.19.00]
"WHICH OF THESE activities occupies more of your time: foraging for food or surfing the Web? Probably the latter. We're all informavores now, hunting down and consuming data as our ancestors once sought woolly mammoths and witchetty grubs. You may even buy your groceries online.
But in an odd sort of way, Internet shopping has brought us full circle. According to researchers in the US, the strategies you use when you surf the Web are exactly the same as the ones hunter-gatherers used to find food. You may be plugged into the information superhighway, but deep down you're still a caveman."
"The research presented here suggests that people who use the Web as an information resource to support their daily work activities engage in a range of complementary modes of information seeking, varying from undirected viewing that does not pursue a specific information need, to formal searching that retrieves focused information for action or decision making. Each mode of information seeking on the Web is distinguished by the nature of information needs, information seeking tactics, and the purpose of information use. The information seeking tactics characterizing each mode were revealed by recurrent sequences of browser actions initiated by the information seeker. Thus, undirected viewing is characterized by starting and chaining actions; conditioned viewing is characterized by differentiating, browsing, and monitoring actions; informal search is characterized by differentiating and localized extracting; and formal search consisted of systematic, thorough extracting.
Overall, the study suggests that a behavioral framework that relates motivations (the strategies and reasons for viewing and searching) and moves (the tactics used to find and use information) may be helpful in analyzing Web-based information seeking. The study also suggests that multiple, complementary methods of collecting qualitative and quantitative data may be integrated within a single study to compose a more nuanced portrayal of how individuals seek and use Web-based information in their natural work settings."
"Our exploratory user study on the use of a major portal site in Belgium shows that a category of "skeptical Internet users" has abandoned searching the web. The skeptical Internet user has made a return-on-investment evaluation of his Internet experience, and has come to the conclusion that the return on some sites is just not worth the investment of his personal time and energy."
"The skeptical Internet user did not come to the Internet because of his innovative attitude. His motivation is not to learn and use the Internet. Instead he is motivated by the Internet's promise of offering value: comfort of living, entertainment, getting things done in a more convenient way. While he did get some of that, he also got a lot of discomfort: long download times, navigational and structural complexity, inconsistency, unpredictable behavior, disappointing value."
7:20 PM 0 comments
MSNBC
Technology won’t stop music piracy"The battle over music piracy is like the war on drugs: You can’t win it, but you can fight it forever, and spend millions on the battle."
"WE’RE NOW ENTERING the next phase in the recording industry’s fight for the control of music distribution. In this phase, the recording industry tries and fails to control distribution of copyrighted content with technology. Today I’ll tell you why that’s good news for IBM, why it’s a doomed strategy and why it’s the best they can hope for."
""Right now, Napster is very important and popular for millions and millions of people, so the central question is whether technology like this can actually stop music from showing up on Napster, and the answer is, of course not," says Sheirer. "This is still the pre-Napster thinking about [digital rights mnagement] from the middle of 1999. It's not what the industry needs, and frankly, I don't think it is what the industry is looking for anymore.""
"Scheirer says that DRM technologies are simply misguided as a whole. In a Forrester report last September, Scheirer said that record companies should avoid strategies based on controlling content, and that they would be wise to instead deliver content the ways that consumers want it."
redux [09.21.00]
"It is pointless for music companies to try to outlaw Napster-like file sharing with expensive lawsuits, according to a report published today by Forrester Research."
"The music giants would do better to steal back their markets by offering quality alternatives to pirating software, it claims.
According to Forrester, music publishers stand to lose as much as $3.1bn by 2005 as online music piracy increases. "You have to beat pirates at their own game, otherwise record companies could sustain large losses," said Eric Scheirer, analyst at Forrester and author of the report.
Peter Beverley, vice chairman at Magex, Natwest's Digital Rights Management (DRM) business, added: "The legal process on its own won't solve the piracy problem and nor will digital management technology. Instead you need to offer products that are worth having."
redux [05.02.00]
"The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway. There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers. And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt."
8:48 PM 0 comments
Internet World
Nielsen on Usability: The Seven Sins of Copy Protection Tools"Copy protection makes things harder to use, and people hate it. Early phonograph records had printed licenses that forbade their resale. People believe, no matter what the fine print says, that if they buy a thing, it's theirs. Books can be given away after use. Software can be used on both desktop and laptop. A CD can be taped and played in the car. A magazine can be read for free in the library. People need to share data among the many devices they own. Any content payment scheme that doesn't allow for the time-honored ways people actually use information is doomed and should be rejected."
"Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task. Such a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the entire world economy, making billions of new winners and new losers. We will be extremely lucky if by 2030 we are prepared to end scarcity without massive social turmoil, including riots, civil unrest, and world war. If we are to find a peaceful path to an era of plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW, transforming the industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text, audio, and video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be replaced by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models and expertise for other industries, which will need to change when their own inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication ten or fifteen years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would send us in exactly the wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that the law and some fancy footwork with industrial cartels can maintain our current economic structures, in the face of a hurricane of positive technological change that is picking them up and sending them whirling like so many autumn leaves."
redux [12.17.00]
"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."
"At the Internet Archive, a nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco, a small group of engineers backed by a philanthropist are trying to create a new paradigm for access to archival material, in this case historical film from my own archives. By doing this, we're making a concrete move toward building an IP preserve."
redux [07.27.00]
"The original rationale for copyrights and patents was to foster artistic and practical creative work by giving a short-term monopoly over certain uses of the work. This monopoly was granted to an individual or corporation by government. The government's power to grant a monopoly is corrupting. The biggest owners of intellectual property have sought to expand it well beyond any sensible rationale."
"This chapter outlines the case against intellectual property. I begin by mentioning some of the problems arising from ownership of information. Then I turn to weaknesses in its standard justifications. Next is an overview of problems with the so-called "marketplace of ideas," which has important links with intellectual property. Finally, I outline some alternatives to intellectual property and some possible strategies for moving towards them. "
"Intellectual property is supported by many powerful groups: the most powerful governments and the largest corporations. The mass media seem fully behind intellectual property, partly because media monopolies would be undercut if information were more freely copied and partly because the most influential journalists depend on syndication rights for their stories."
"Another problem in developing strategies is that it makes little sense to challenge intellectual property in isolation. If we simply imagine intellectual property being abolished but the rest of the economic system unchanged, then many objections can be made. Challenging intellectual property must involve the development of methods to support creative individuals."
8:37 PM 0 comments
The New York Times
Rethinking Internet News as a Business Proposition[requires 'free' registration]
"The first era of newspaper experiments on the Internet, fueled in part by the fear that the Web would devour profits, is over. A new era of newspaper experiments on the Internet, fueled in part by the fear that the Web will not generate profits, has begun.
Where will it lead?"
"It's that time of year for me again. As one of the 30 judges of the annual Editor & Publisher EPpy Awards (which honor the best Web sites of the newspaper and news industries), I've spent a lot of time in the last few weeks poring over newspaper sites.
In a nutshell, here's what I've noticed: Over the years that I've been volunteering as an EPpy judge, news sites have grown to be more comprehensive and feature more and better content. But comprehensive, while an admirable trait, is not always enough to get users to make visiting and using a site a habit."
redux [02.02.00]
"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"
11:35 PM 0 comments
The Guardian Unlimited
Filipinos rally to oust the president: C U @ the revolution"Millions of ordinary Filipinos, communicating with each other via mobile phone text messages, swarmed on to the streets of the capital, Manila, in scenes reminiscent of the 1986 uprising which ousted the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos."
"Most people heard about the planned swearing-in of Ms Arroyo via the text messages, the same means that galvanised a spontaneous uprising on Tuesday evening, when Mr Estrada's impeachment trial collapsed after he bullied and bribed senators to block the admission of vital evidence."
"The text message doing the rounds late last night said it all: "I guess we've won again."
redux [11.29.00]
"NPR's Eric Weiner reports on the latest in the effort to unseat Philippine president Joseph Estrada. Filipinos send 30 million cell phone "text messages" daily- more than anywhere else in the world. Activists are using the technology to organize rallies and respond instantly to the latest corruption charges. (5:19)"redux [07.07.00]redux [07.09.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Muslim insurgents battling Philippine troops in the south have a new weapon. When the shelling and gunfire let up, they send a barrage of scathing insults to Manila's forces by cell phone.
"There is a text war among the MILF and our forces," said Brig. Gen. Eliseo Rio Jr., referring to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the larger of two rebel groups fighting for an independent state. "Our soldiers are texting insults to the MILF. And the MILF are sending the insults back." ."
"Sending e-mail on mobile phones, has also taken off in richer parts of the world: Europe, especially in Scandinavia, and in Japan and other East Asian countries, particularly among teen-agers. But in the Philippines, where incomes are far lower, it is even more popular. And it has spawned an entire subculture, complete with its own vocabulary, etiquette and tactical uses. It has become particularly popular here, in large part because text messaging is cheap while traditional telephone service is spotty and Internet access by computer is expensive."
"From South Asia to South America, one hears tales of isolated rural poverty yielding to connected economic development, courtesy of Internet connections. Poor families in India and subsidence-level villages in Africa may get online with used 386s and marginal connections – the Net reaches parts of the Congo via shortwave radio – but once online, they are connected to information about clean water and health, to global markets and income.
Indeed, from my experience, it is clear that in many instances poor people are adopting the Internet because they are poor. Computers and the Net are enabling the world's less affluent to plug into global communication for less cost than conventional telephony or even postal service. In some places, the Net is the only means for communication."
"Until a brilliantly sunny day when the Internet reached this Ashaninka Indian village in central Peru, tribal leader Oswaldo Rosas could think of few benefits modern life had brought his people.
Poverty and disease had debased and decimated them since British missionaries brought the first link to the outside world 81 years ago. As recently as the early 1990s, communist guerrillas had forced some Ashaninka into slavery. Even after the Peruvian army defeated the insurgents, life in this thatched hut settlement with no electricity or running water remained a grueling struggle.
It still is, but as the incongruent buzz of a computer fired up in Rosas's hut--now doubling as a tribal cybercafe--the somber 30-year-old leader could not repress a smile. "This," he said, pointing to the machine, "is the first real chance they have ever given my people.""
""Calep, 15, who hovered by the humming unit covered with a brightly hued Indian blanket here in Marankiari Bajo, would agree. His village computer, he said, has brought "the hope that I won't be poor for the rest of my life."
Calep wants to be a computer programmer. He is not naive enough to think one computer will be his ticket out of poverty. But he is not cynical enough to rule it out.
"I've never gone very far from my village, but I've [chatted] with kids [on the Internet] in places like Canada," he said. "Now I think anything is possible.""
redux [05.14.00]
"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."
11:03 AM 0 comments
Wired News
From Living Large to Just Living "While the layoffs and closings are real, a study released Friday confirms the IT sector is still growing in Silicon Valley. Not at the wild and crazy pace of early last year, of course. But growing nonetheless.
So a techie caught in the great dot-com crash probably won't have much of a problem getting a new job.
But the rest of the folks who rode the wave and started to think all administrative assistants make 80 grand and get catered lunch every day are in for a dose of reality -- if they haven't been handed their lunch already."
[requires 'free' registration]
"The report also illustrated the diversity of high-technology employment in the valley, where job growth continued despite the collapse of the dot-com industry in the second half of last year.
Growth in software-related companies continued to top the list, with 30,000 new jobs last year. The semiconductor industry added 4,900 jobs and bioscience added 3,100. "
"IT'S UGLY OUT THERE, but how bad is it, really? We asked some of our peers how they were coping with the crisis in the web industry. Below, they tell their stories in their own words. At the end, you can share your experiences."
redux [10.05.00]
"God, this stuff makes me crazy. Last Monday, a big headline across the cover of the San Jose Mercury News read, "Dot-coms are facing tough times." Similar stories ran that day in the Wall Street Journal, as well as on Reuters and the Associated Press. "
""The significance of these layoffs is minuscule," says Mat Johnson, market strategist for the San Francisco-based investment bank Thomas Weisel Partners. "There is massive job churn in this economy, and people are getting rehired faster than they're getting laid off. It's more of a commentary on the companies, because a lot of these dot-coms have not been viable in the marketplace. But from what we can see, Internet job creation has continued to maintain a heady pace."
Beyond the headline-grabbing layoffs, what's more relevant to the financial markets is that Web business models are facing a new, healthy scrutiny."
9:10 PM 0 comments
MSNBC
Filter THIS!"The American Library Association has decided to file a lawsuit challenging a new federal law that would require filtering in public schools and libraries."
"The ALA has been vocal and active about free speech issues. Five years ago, it joined a successful challenge to the Communications Decency Act, which would have regulated Web content deemed harmful to minors had the Supreme Court not declared it unconstitutional. And most recently, it filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Napster case, arguing that shutting down the service could have chilling consequences for any entity that catalogs information for others to use, including libraries and search engines."
redux [04.09.00]
"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.”
redux [11.24.00]
""The public focus has swiveled to the Internet and away from libraries," said Donna Dinberg of the National Library of Canada. While interest in the library help desk is declining, free commercial Web help services such as Ask Jeeves, Webhelp.com and Yahoo are thriving.
With all these commercial online reference services, will librarians become obsolete? Dinberg wants to shift the info-power back to her domain.
"We know that libraries can provide authoritative information, both online and offline," she said. "And we feel that the only thing stopping us is the fact that patrons aren't coming to the library much anymore."
A new project is attempting to make the library an even more vital research source than ever before. The Library of Congress and its partner libraries are launching a pilot project to bring librarians' expertise to the Internet by forming a global reference desk that is available 24 hours, seven days a week."
redux [06.29.00]
"Intelligent software agents promise to traverse and organize information spaces for us, alert us, remind us, call for a refrigerator repair-person, communicate with each other ... to fundamentally alter how we accomplish many of our daily tasks. These red-hot and revolutionary software critters have a lot to learn from their closest human peers: librarians. As I read and think about how intelligent systems reason, search, classify, and filter information, I'm struck repeatedly with how librarians do exactly these same tasks. Both act as information mediators for the end user: both negotiate information spaces and retrieve information relevant to a particular user or goal. Librarians have been efficiently accomplishing many of the tasks at which the artificial intelligence community is now working to make software agents competent. Therefore, the development of software agents can be informed by a look at how human information agents do their work.
This paper will examine the characteristics of agency, the work of librarians as information mediators, the differences between human and software agents, the possible tasks for software agents in libraries, and speculate on the future of human and software agency."
9:58 PM 0 comments
Salon
Turn off the Internet!"That's right. There's a convenient new villain in the California energy crisis, and it's not the utility companies that can't meet demand, crying bankruptcy and begging for a bailout by the government. It's not the greedy oligopoly of power generators cashing in on the state's failed, half-baked deregulation scheme. It's not even the environmentalists, whose green-friendly regulations make building a power plant in California about as easy as trying to raise venture capital for an e-tailer in 2001. Nor is it the conservation-clueless customers who can't even be bothered to turn off the lights when they leave a room.
No, it's the Internet."
"This paper is an attempt to evaluate the potential influence of the emerging "Internet economy" on the nation's forecasted energy use and related carbon emissions. Our analysis shows small but significant differences in projections from just three modest changes in assumptions about the Internet and/or information-based economy. Other changes that could be important include reduced inventory and warehousing, reduced building construction, changes in other materials utilization, a greater trend toward outsourcing of energy services, and greater improvements in energy efficiency made possible by the new economy. Although the scale of impact for these initially analyzed effects is small, expansion of the scope of inquiry, as suggested by other recent analyses, may open up new and fruitful areas of research."
redux [12.07.00]
"Now that we're fully in the throes of the ritualistic consumer frenzy that is the holiday shopping season, probably the last thing on most Net shoppers' minds is what impact all that clicking to buy has on the environment. The truth is, even policymakers, social scientists, environmentalists and engineers don't really know for sure. Researchers are only now beginning to study what e-commerce means for the Earth. The first major conference on the topic, the Joint Symposium on E-commerce and the Environment, in October in New York, brought together 100 researchers from the likes of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Ford Motor Co. to compare notes on everything from e-commerce and energy consumption to land use.
"Everyone is just starting to wake up and realize that e-commerce might have environmental effects that we aren't aware of," says H. Scott Matthews, a researcher with the Green Design Initiative, a faculty and student research group at Carnegie Mellon University that is conducting one of the few major studies of the issue."redux [09.12.00]
"Some of the major concerns of e-commerce systems are the electricity used for infrastructure and the energy and packing materials used for product delivery. Reductions in inventories and waste represent significant opportunities for environmental savings. This project is intended to assess the system-wide effects of the new economy and to analyze policy options for reducing environmental problems.
The project is analyzing specific case studies of logistics networks, inventory and manufactoring changes. In addition, we are estimating the overhead cost of the internet"
"The new-millennium energy crisis in the U.S. can be traced to the effects of deregulation, a lack of new generating capacity in recent years, and an antiquated distribution system – not to mention the unanticipated demands of the Internet Economy. An average office building with a computer on every desk but no significant network facility uses between 4 and 5 watts of electricity per square foot, according to Ed Quiroz, a regulatory analyst at California's Public Utilities Commission. If that building has a server farm and a network operations center, it sucks from 90 watts to 100 watts of energy a square foot or more. Or consider this: According to Mark Mills, an energy researcher with ties to the utilty industry, a Palm handheld device connected wirelessly to the Internet has the appetite of a refrigerator, consuming 1,000 kilowatt hours a year.
But estimates of the Net economy's power requirements vary. The fact is, no one knows for sure how much demand for energy will climb in coming years. Mills and colleague Peter Huber estimate that businesses that rely on digital equipment – personal computers, networking equipment, plants that produce high-tech gear and telecommunications networks – consume 13 percent of U.S. electric power. That figure will rise to between 30 percent and 50 percent of the nation's energy needs by 2020."
redux [08.24.00]
"The emerging new economy created by the Internet is producing more than just a business revolution -- it is also generating enormous environmental benefits. The Internet can turn buildings into websites, and replace warehouses with supply-chain software. It can turn paper and CDs into electrons, and replace trucks with fiberoptic cable. This means significant energy savings, and perhaps a very different type of economic growth than we have seen in the past."
"There's already evidence of a sudden shift in the American energy diet. While the nation's economy grew by more than 9 percent in 1997 and 1998, energy demand stayed almost flat in spite of very low energy prices, marking a major departure from recent historical patterns.
Part of this trend can be attributed to the growth of information technology and e-commerce. For example, for each book sold, the online retailer Amazon.com uses just one-sixteenth the energy to operate its buildings that a traditional bookseller uses. Internet shopping also uses less energy to get a package to your house. Shipping a 10-pound package by overnight air -- the most energy-intensive delivery mode -- uses 40 percent less fuel than the average roundtrip drive to the mall. Ground shipping by truck uses just one-tenth the energy of a trip by car to the store."redux [07.23.00]
"A whole industry of cybergurus has enthralled audiences (and made a fine living) with exuberant claims that the Internet will prevent wars, reduce pollution, and combat various forms of inequality. However, although the Internet is still young enough to inspire idealism, it has also been around long enough to test whether the prophets can be right."
"But might it reduce energy consumption and pollution? The Centre for Energy and Climate Solutions (CECS), a Washington think-tank, has advanced just such a case, based largely on energy consumption figures for 1997 and 1998. While the American economy grew by 9% over those two years, energy demand was almost unchanged—because, the CECS ventures, the Internet “can turn paper and CDs into electrons, and replace trucks with fibre-optic cable.” No wonder one enthusiastic newspaper headline begged, “Shop online—save the earth.”
"Sadly, earth-saving is harder than that."
"When it opened in 1928, the former R.R. Donnelley & Sons' Lakeside Press plant on the near South Side of Chicago embodied the splendor and sweat of the old economy."
"Now, the building is on the verge of becoming a bellwether for the new economy."
"Across the country, real estate investors are turning obsolete manufacturing plants and warehouses – as well as derelict office buildings and failed retail centers – into so-called telecom or carrier hotels. Instead of packing the buildings with crates, lathes or die casters, companies this time around jam them with racks of switches, routers and generators. Once brick-and-mortar icons of heavy industry, the structures are being rehabbed to house the backbone of the Internet Economy."
"These structures were built to house heavy machinery, so they usually feature floors that can support more than 125 pounds per square foot; high ceilings that provide clearance and ventilation for telecom-equipment racks; and space for generators to take over in case of power outages. The Lakeside Technology Center, for instance, has more than 80 generators and stores 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel to run them."
"Generally, upgrades require bringing in huge power supplies – the Lakeside Center could use up to 96 million megawatts – as well as state-of-the-art heating and air conditioning systems."
redux [07.05.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Read-Rite's milling machine is indicative of a long-running, but accelerating problem: the nation's electrical power supply system is not up to the task of meeting the digital economy's needs. While the utility industry has historically prided itself on delivering fairly stable power 99.9 percent of the time, today's computerized economy is demanding even fewer interruptions and a much steadier current.
That is because electricity is more than just energy for computers -- it is the medium they use to do their job. Rapid, minute changes in voltage represent the ones and zeros that make up digital information.
Those patterns are ultimately translated into a human voice during a phone call, a calculation during a banking transaction, a dose of radiation during cancer therapy or a photo of a new baby e-mailed to scattered relatives. Any disruption in the power supply that compromises the processor's ability to manage those voltages can lead to lost data or system crashes."
"As California's tech-savvy businesses and households plug into an increasingly wired economy, the state's power system is sputtering like a frayed electrical cord."
"Computers consume about 13% of the nation's power, according to EPRI Corp., a Palo Alto research and development group that studies the utility industry.
The Internet's borderless community also is taxing U.S. power suppliers because about 80% of online traffic comes through this country.
To handle all the Internet action, businesses are turning entire offices into warehouses for the powerful computer servers and peripheral equipment needed to navigate networks. These so-called ''server farms'' consume 10 to 12 times more power than the traditional office building filled with human workers. "
10:09 PM 0 comments
The Register
Video games make good kids evil"Stopping kids from playing video games makes them nicer people, according to a US study out today.
The research from Stanford University suggests that aggressive behaviour can be reversed by cutting the time children spend playing video games or watching TV"
"In a culture of couch potatoes where TV quiz shows pass for brain teasers and how-to books "for dummies" fly off the shelves, it can be hard to reconcile the notion that the human species is smarter than ever.
But if IQ tests are any measure -- and even critics say they have some value -- then there is evidence people are making mental gains. For the past two decades, researchers have collected information showing that IQs around the world rose steadily over the past century.
The rise has been too swift for genetics or evolution to explain. And researchers cannot precisely say what's driving the phenomenon. But many suspect that the very same TV-watching, video-game-playing cultural trappings we blame for "dumbing us down" may also be partly responsible for raising our IQs."
10:19 PM 0 comments
Nando Times
The power of e-mail"Nicole Thompson's third-graders can tell you all about the penguins and killer whales that populate Antarctica. They know about the months of darkness that grip Iceland each year and the fine tea that grows in Darjeeling, India. The Greenbriar Academy children have learned those facts - and countless more about countries large and small - thanks to a simple e-mail message from Thompson that has raced around the globe and brought more than 20,000 responses in six weeks.
It's crazy, just crazy," Thompson said. "At most, I thought we'd get about 2,000 replies.""
"Email will become the killerer app. It continued to work when all else failed. Communication - not consumer storefronts - is the core value provided by the net and email is the star. The best things on the net make things easier and faster. Seems simple, but many of the failed business propositions of the past year seemed to go in the opposite direction."
redux [02.04.00]
"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."
"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."
9:55 PM 0 comments
NPR: All Things Considered
Questia"Later this month and new online service called Questia will debut. It will provide a library containing 50,000 volumes of literature, scholarly journals and texts. The company hopes to eventually reach 250,000 volumes in the next three years. Questia is targeted mostly to students and will allow them to cross-reference, footnote and do a bibliography all online. Robert talks with Troy Williams, the CEO and President of Questia Media, about the new company and what it has taken to get started. (5:30)"
redux [06.15.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"When Carrie Larkworthy, a student at Harvard University, is faced with a research project, getting a book out of the library is the last thing on her mind. Instead she sits in her dormitory room and logs onto the Web, starting with Harvard's online system for searching and retrieving journal articles. "I hate the library, so I try to avoid it," Ms. Larkworthy said. "It's such a big facility that you have to search through.""
""...But new efforts are afoot to change that. Several companies are racing to put the full texts of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, old and new, on the Web."
"These electronic library projects are not attempts to compete with the budding electronic book industry, which offers books for downloading to handheld devices and is focused on popular fiction, like Stephen King's recent Web-only novella, "Riding the Bullet," and on other newly published trade books. The library projects have very little to do with the debate over the promise or pitfalls of gadgets that let people read novels electronically from the comfort of their beds.
In fact, the new effort to build an electronic library is not about reading at all. It is about the power of electronic searching."redux [04.09.00]
To partially answer the questions raised in the title of this paper -- "Who is going to mine digital library resources? And how?" -- today’s end-users are not capable of mining today’s digital libraries, let alone the more comprehensive digital libraries of the foreseeable future."
"Today’s attention to database creation and better search engines fails to address a critical consumer need. Better digital libraries and more powerful search engines will not get quality materials into the hands of the end-user. Developers of digital libraries must work with content experts to develop an array of information products that help users identify and understand the available resources."
"The conference demonstrated that there is a great deal of interest and activity in digitization within the museum and library communities. Of the approximately 100 participants who completed conference evaluations, 75 percent said they are currently engaged in digitization activities and another 15 percent are planning such activities. Over 80 percent found the conference "very relevant" to their needs and virtually all of the attendees who responded to the follow-up evaluation stated that they had made contacts that will be valuable to them in their future endeavors concerning digital libraries. Comments included phrases such as "consciousness-raising," "a hotbed of inspiration," "it gave us our first 'sophisticated' project idea" and "[my colleagues have not] grasped the enormity of what is going on in the realm of digital libraries. With the background provided by the substance of Web-Wise, I have improved my chances of influencing policy decisions at my museum." Many participants encouraged IMLS to convene more conferences on this topic."
"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""
9:29 PM 0 comments
The New York Times
In Weird Math of Choices, 6 Choices Can Beat 600[requires 'free' registration]
"Choice is good. And the more choices, the better.
This simple American credo lines the shelves of grocery stores with 162 varieties of breakfast cereal, turns ordering a cup of coffee at Starbucks into an Olympic challenge, makes selecting a phone company an enterprise requiring a business degree and supplies dating services with an endless stream of hopeful customers.
It also underlies the way many economists think about human behavior. Human beings, according to traditional economic theory, are rational creatures who, faced with a choice, weigh the costs and benefits of each option and pick the one they prefer. And the more options people are given, the theory goes, the more satisfied they will be.
Yet in an article published last month in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, two social psychologists dispute this view, arguing that at some point, multiplying the number of alternatives people are given becomes counterproductive."
redux [01.02.00]
"Choices are supposed to be liberating. "Freedom of choice" is the economist's favorite tonic, the libertarian's ideal, the classic liberal's alternative to revolution. But are we in danger of overdoing it? Can there be such a thing as too much choice?"
"I relish my freedom as much as anyone. But my freedom isn't equivalent to the breadth or quantity of my choices. You and I need freedom to make the significant choices--such as what we stand for, to what and to whom we're going to commit our lives, and what we want by way of a community and a society. Too many small choices only divert our attention from these bigger ones, robbing us of the time and energy we need to exercise true freedom. Yet the new technologies, combined with increasing middle-class prosperity and disdain for public institutions, are making fetishes out of tiny choices. Unless we choose what kinds of choices we want to be faced with--both as individuals and as a society--we will soon drown in a rising tide of inconsequential options."
"Besides Becker?s "economic approach", the concept of economic man underlies most of the current economic theory. In effect, mainstream microeconomics relies on the assumption of a rational consumer, i.e. an utility maximizing human being."
"The most significant criticism to rational consumer choice arises from empirical evidence. Most empirical validation does not seem to support the assumptions made in economic analysis. In other words, it does not seem that consumers behave in the way that economic analysis supposes. One reason for this contradiction is that economic analysis takes only a partial, fragmentary look at human behavior."
redux [01.02.00]