USATODAY.com - A group of prominent African-Americans will begin
fundraising in earnest soon for a museum that will chronicle
everything from slavery to the Harlem Renaissance to November's
election of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, a black Chicagoan.
Grok Headline matches for Black culture museum moves forward (USATODAY.com)
Black youths learn to make the right moves (USATODAY.com)
Black youths learn to make the right moves (USATODAY.com)06/16/2004 05:26 AM USATODAY.com - DeKalb County is home to some of the nation's
wealthiest African-American neighborhoods, a shining star in a city
known as the Black Mecca. There are more than 98,000 students in
DeKalb schools, but just 27 of them attend Project Destiny School.
They are the toughest of the tough: This is where students come when
they're kicked out of alternative schools.
Google IPO Moves Forward08/16/2004 07:59 PM Google, the largest Internet IPO ever, with expected proceeds topping
$3 billion, is scheduled to price this week in one of the most closely
watched deals in years.
BBC online archive moves forward04/13/2005 10:26 PM The BBC online archive has launched in part. They won't be using DRM,
but they also won't be letting anyone from outside the UK see their
content.
ProNet: FeedMesh Moves Forward
ProNet: FeedMesh Moves Forward06/06/2005 12:12 AM eWeek's just published RSS Updates Moving Beyond Pings, a look at the
FeedMesh community. FeedMesh is an emerging format for sharing update
notifications between the various tools and services that generate
site updates and the clients, services, and applications that...
ICANN approval moves .eu domain forward
ICANN approval moves .eu domain forward03/23/2005 08:27 PM ICANN, the body that oversees technical matters related to the Net,
has approved the application from the European Registry of Internet
Domain Names to take the new top-level domain into ICANN's root files.
City-owned network moves forward
City-owned network moves forward07/16/2004 01:27 PM Cities interested in building their own fiber networks are closely
watching developments in Utah.
Ban On Corporate Cybersnooping Moves Forward In Australia
Ban On Corporate Cybersnooping Moves Forward In Australia06/23/2004 11:06 AM Here's a followup on a story from March about an
anti-cybersnooping law in New South Wales, Australia. The
government has now released a draft of the bill
that would make it illegal to surreptitiously spy on employee computer
usage, without "reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing." Once again,
studies have shown that such
snooping is actually bad for business. It makes people less
trusting, stresses them out and makes them less productive. That's
what you get when you treat all your employees as guilty until proven
innocent, I guess.
Senate Moves Forward To Allow Junk Faxes
Senate Moves Forward To Allow Junk Faxes07/23/2004 11:41 AM Last month we wrote about a controversial law that would roll back
many of the rules against junk faxes. It was a response to an FCC
ruling that probably went too far, that would have required written
permission to receive a fax from a business. The problem was that
this meant no one could ever call a business and ask for something to
be faxed to them. So, Congress came up with a bill that overruled
that and said businesses could fax with verbal permission too. The
problem, of course, is that junk fax companies have already been known
to alter call logs or lie about "permission" and this could make it
easier to get away with that. A compromise bill would have
limited the time frame to 48 hours in which a company would be
allowed to fax someone after a verbal request, but the bill was passed
via committee with the
time limit being seven years. The version that went
through basically says any company you have had contact with over the
past seven years is now allowed to fax you. Of course, part of the
reason the bill moved forward without any discussion or amendments is
because of some sort of childish procedural issues by some Senators
who cared more about making each other look bad than about actually
figuring out what's best for the country.
Rexek Inc. Moves Forward With AT&T Networking Solution
Rexek Inc. Moves Forward With AT&T Networking Solution06/22/2005 02:42 AM Rexel Inc. has awarded AT&T a $3 million contract for networking
services in the United States. The three-year contract, which extends
and expands an existing agreement, calls for AT&T to integrate many of
Rexel’s U.S. branches. [PRWEB Jun 19, 2005]
Legislation Moves Forward on Electronic Medical Records
Legislation Moves Forward on Electronic Medical Records07/22/2004 02:55 PM A new bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, along with other
recent initiatives, shows that the federal government may be ready to
act on electronic health records.
California Senator Moves Forward With Plan To Ban Gmail
California Senator Moves Forward With Plan To Ban Gmail04/22/2004 06:52 PM Following up on already
announced intentions (and apparently ignoring everyone who
explained why this is a terrible, terrible idea), California Senator
Liz Figueroa has introduced a bill
to ban Gmail saying that - even though Google is upfront about
scanning emails to offer contextual advertising and it's a choice of
the user - it should be illegal. Her complaint is that Google will
use email contents as a "direct marketing opportunity." I hadn't
realized that there was anything illegal about direct marketing. If
we're going to go after direct marketers there are an awful lot of
direct marketing practices that I would target before a perfectly
useful, perfectly upfront company's email client.
ICANN Moves Forward with an Additional sTLD Applicant
File-trading penalties legislation moves forward09/09/2004 02:50 PM WASHINGTON - Legislation that would expand the definition of criminal
file-trading over the Internet was approved Wednesday by the U.S.
House Judiciary Committee.
Anti-Spyware bill moves forward despite doubts
Anti-Spyware bill moves forward despite doubts06/24/2004 10:44 PM The anti-spyware bill we reported on last week dubbed the Safeguard
Against Privacy Invasions Act (Spy Act, for short) has picked up
steam, clearing the committee in the House this morning with a 45-4
vote.
Google, Overture Trademark Case Moves Forward
Google, Overture Trademark Case Moves Forward09/03/2004 08:03 PM The providers of search-based advertising have a tough road ahead
following a court ruling in GEICO's trademark-infringement case, legal
experts say.
Sony-Samsung LCD Joint Venture Moves Forward
Sony-Samsung LCD Joint Venture Moves Forward03/08/2004 11:20 PM Samsung Electronics Co. and Sony Corp. moved ahead on their plans to
build a foundry for the production of TFT-LCD products for LCD TVs.
Instantiations WindowBuilder Moves Java Swing and SWT Interoperability Forward
Misunderstanding Trademarks: American Blinds Suit Against Google Moves Forward
Misunderstanding Trademarks: American Blinds Suit Against Google Moves Forward03/31/2005 04:50 PM It seems that this issue isn't going to die any time soon. While one
court has said that Google
didn't do anything wrong to Geico in allowing companies to sell
ads based on the keyword Geico (something that Geico is still
fighting), another one has denied Google's
request to dismiss an almost identical case from American Blinds.
There are two issues here, and both of them should end up in Google's
favor. First, this is simply not a violation of trademark.
The purpose of trademark law is not that you have total control over
your trademark -- just that others cannot use it in a way that
confuses people into believing that they are you or acting on your
behalf. Throwing up ads based on keywords is a situation where people
know that these are competitive ads. It's like saying that Coke could
never use the word Pepsi in one of their ads. Second, even if
these ads did violate trademark law, it would not be Google's
fault. Google did not place the ad. It would be the fault of the
person or company that placed the ad. On both fronts, Google should
have a very strong claim against American Blinds, but apparently it
wasn't enough for a summary judgment. As John Battelle points out, if
the court eventually does decide to misunderstand the purpose of
trademark law (a la the
French), this could end up at the Supreme Court to settle the
differences in lower court rulings. Of course, the question now is
whether or not Dave
Pell will be buying Google ads on the phrase "American Blinds."
Courts asked to consider culture (USATODAY.com)
Courts asked to consider culture (USATODAY.com)05/25/2004 06:48 AM USATODAY.com - Santeria priest Ernesto Pichardo thought it was a good
thing when fellow members of the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye began
to leave the bodies of sacrificed chickens near the trees and bushes
of Hialeah, Fla., the congregation's hometown, during the 1980s.
'New spirit' lifts Baghdad's Iraq Museum (USATODAY.com)
'New spirit' lifts Baghdad's Iraq Museum (USATODAY.com)05/04/2004 06:39 AM USATODAY.com - One year after looters stole some of its most prized
antiquities, the Iraq Museum in Baghdad is undergoing a top-to-bottom
restoration that its leaders hope will make it one of the premier
museums and research centers in the world.
Poll shows some look forward to reading spam (USATODAY.com)
If you look at the lessons of
history, it's easy to conclude that:
People change only when they must, or when a change is
both very easy and very compelling
When they do, reluctantly,
change, people change their behaviour first, and their beliefs and
values only much later, if at all
Fast, enduring change has
been wrought not by political
revolution (which usually replaces one despot with another, and takes
a
century or more of agonizing, small change to get any real traction),
by war, or by broad change in social attitudes (which, even in
egregious cases like slavery and disenfranchisement of women, takes
centuries of sustained effort to become entrenched), but rather by new
innovations and technologies. The agricultural revolution and the
industrial revolution were both driven by new, frightening,
counter-cultural, and initially very unpopular innovative
technologies.
Clay Christensen in The Innovator's
Dilemma
explains that the undoing of most Fortune 500 companies has come about
when new competitors unexpectedly began to devour their markets,
sneaking up on them by stealth, often by accident, but always
because of a new technology. And Bucky Fuller echoed this when he said
that "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To
change something, build a new model that makes the existing model
obsolete."
Could we apply these lessons to
invent technologies
that, like the technological inventions that ushered in the
agricultural and industrial eras, might usher in a new, post-consumer,
post-capitalist, post-corporatist, post-population-explosion,
post-environmental-destruction human culture? That means giving up on
attempts to bring about political, social, economic and educational
reform, and instead focusing strictly on what Christensen calls
'disruptive innovation' and what technophile Fuller calls 'a new
model', to undermine instead
of trying to overcome the
culture that threatens us all with catastrophic extinction.
Some definitions are in order:
Innovation is
an
invention or discovery with useful applications. Examples: The wedge,
agriculture, trade, the engine (steam-powered and later,
electrically-powered), solar and wind energy
Technology in the broad sense is
any useful application of innovation. Examples: Spears and
arrowheads (applications of the wedge), selective breeding of plants
and animals (application of agriculture), money and credit
(applications of trade), industrial and automotive machinery
(applications of the engine)
I have posited before that, as the systems thinking chart above
illustrates, the two root causes of our culture's destructiveness and
unsustainability are overpopulation and overconsumption. It may seem
crazy to think that we could invent some new, innovative technologies
that, without any social, political, educational or economic help,
would transform our culture (behaviour first, beliefs and values
later)
so dramatically that they would solve these huge, intractable
problems.
But imagine you were the inventor/discoverer of monoculture
agriculture, showing the first few unbelievers of your new
technologies
that, after three million years of
doing so, the only life they knew, they would never have to hunt or
gather again?
Or imagine you were the inventor of automation and the assembly line,
trying to convince people that you can achieve orders-of-magnitude
improvements in productivity by
having people work in the service of machines?
Both these improbable, radical new technologies succeeded quickly,
ubiquitously, extraordinarily, in part because they were easy, the
path
of least resistance in very troubled times, and in part because people
realized that there really was no other choice.
Is the possibility
of us now launching a third human cultural revolution, by inventing
technologies that encourage and enable us to live better with fewer
humans and less 'stuff', really any more incredible than the
success of
these previous two revolutions?
And, even more importantly, is it so hard to believe
that, with the ingenuity and interconnectedness of six billion people,
we could invent technologies
that would, for the third time, transform our culture quickly and
utterly?
Well, maybe it is. But it seems to me foolish not to at least try.
I don't have all the answers, but I think I have the problem-sol
ving process that could allow us, together, to find them. And I
have some interesting ideas to get the process going. For example:
What if we
started
providing the necessities of life free? Food, clothing, shelter,
information, music, literature, recreation, education, health care.
Just started giving them away, and getting them free from others in
return.
What if we
created
a new currency that would monitor our spending on non-renewable and
polluting resources? And then those that voluntarily minimized such
spending, kept their personal ecological footprint small, and
boycotted
socially and environmentally irresponsible companies' products and
services, would get some kind of wearable award, a kind of reverse
status symbol.
What
if we created
sustainable living standards for communities that would allow them to
be Certified Green if their ecological footprint was less than, say,
50% of their total area.
What if we
invented a safe, easy, highly reliable, free form of birth control
that
you'd only have to take every five years, without a doctor's
prescription, and which ideally also protected you from
STDs?
What if we got
scientists to designate non-essential consumption and indebtedness as
dangerous and unhealthy addictions, as forms of mental
illness?
What if we
invented reconfigurable, space-efficient homes with multi-functional
rooms, so that 400 s.f. per person would seem huge? And what if we
built them underground, energy self-sufficient, surrounded by large
virtual digital 'windows' that made them look bright and airy, so that
the land above could return to its natural state? And what if that surface land was
protected as commonwealth land, owned by no one, in
perpetuity?
What if
we modeled solar energy collectors on nature's perfectly-evolved
model, the tree?
Well, you get the idea. I think my problem-solving process, applied to
one problem at a time, and engaging as many people and as many ideas
as
possible, could work.
Instead of just blogging and
worrying and conversing in aimless,
isolated small groups, what if we instead spent some of that time,
that
million
hours a day, focusing together, collaboratively on specific unsolved
problems?
Imagine what we could accomplish together
by learning, listening, understanding, organizing, thinking ahead,
reaching out, brainstorming, designing, experimenting, challenging,
and
deploying collectively-developed solutions. We don't need to get
together physically to do
this, and with the right preparation and the right team working on it,
is there really any limit on what we might accomplish?
Microsoft moves to put legal disputes to rest (USATODAY.com)
Microsoft moves to put legal disputes to rest (USATODAY.com)04/13/2004 07:28 AM USATODAY.com - The software giant brought closure to another
resource-sapping legal dispute. It also added a potent weapon to use
against its most threatening rival, the open-source-code Linux
movement.
As I was reading Edward
Hall's The Hidden Dimension
I began to realize how staggeringly differently each of us perceives
the world. Hall speaks mostly about differences in perception between
six different human 'cultures' -- the Germans, French, British,
Americans, Japanese and Arabs. But his ideas find echo in Jeff
Masson's
books about the huge variability of animal intelligence and emotion
due
to differences in sense acuity, evolutionary needs and
environment,
and made me realize just how intelligent animals that are able to
learn
our languages must be
--
their entire sensory mechanism, the way they perceive everything, the
way the neurons of their brains are commensurately ordered, is
utterly,
perhaps unimaginably different from ours.
These ideas also resonate with some of the findings of leading
educators and linguists that we learn
in completely different ways, and that communication is a maddeningly
imprecise and largely futile process, a never-ending 'raid on the
inarticulate' as TS Eliot put it.
I've concluded that if we ever develop the technology to be able to
put
ourselves in another's brain, and tap in directly to what they are
thinking, perceiving and feeling, we will likely be astonished at how
alien the experience will be.
Aside from explaining how easy it is to misunderstand each other, and
just how 'alone' we really are, what does all this mean? I think it
has
six very important implications:
Stories are the essence of all communication:
They are effective as a means of conveying information and persuading,
because they allow each of us to internalize and enrich what the
story-teller is relating from our own perspective, and hence fill in
some of the space in the vast chasm of perception and understanding
between each of us. Such communication is fraudulent, even subversive.
But it works. Throw out your Powerpoint slides and your slick,
rigorous
analyses, and just tell stories. Induction trumps deduction.
We need to reclaim the arts for the people: Art,
which Hall tells us has been around as a means of communication and
"making sense" of the world three times longer than language, has a
depth and texture much richer than written languages, and is far more
important as a means of conveying ideas and emotion, and of changing
minds, than we recognize. Not surprisingly, much 'primitive' art told
a
story, rather than depicting things scientifically. Except for music
and film and musical theatre, which have been stolen from the people,
dumbed down, robbed of their creative variety and coopted and
perverted
for commercial purposes, the arts -- visual arts and architecture and
sculpture and theatre and dance and even photography -- have become
elitist, 'unpopular' activities. Their very recent inaccessibility
represents, if we can recover from it, a huge opportunity for us
to
better connect with and understand each other, learn and become richer
as human beings.
Our art can tell us how we differ, and therefore
who we are: There are huge clues in art to our differences of
perception, and hence huge possibilities for understanding, in
studying the differences
in all our creative processes and productions. Example: Much Inuit
art,
Hall says, shows Picasso-like depictions of what cannot be seen from
one place, or one time, or even in some cases seen at all, because the
visual homogeneity of their environment has led them to promote other
compensatory sense perceptions and to 'paint them in' to their visual
representation, which is not, as in our culture, a purely reflective,
raster-like representation. As another example, Hall points out that
perspective and proportion are relatively new innovations in visual
art, suggesting that 'modern' man parses what he sees far more
literally and contextually and 'scientifically' than even Renaissance
man did.
Western society is returning to its natural, oral
tradition:
The popularity of cellular phones, and instant messaging that 'mimics'
oral language in style and tempo, among those in their teens and
twenties, signals a rejection of the recent cultural dominance of
stultifying, unnatural written language, in favour of oral language.
Watch a teenager use either of these media and you'll see how quickly,
by a whole series of successive approximations, clarifications and
restatements they achieve a rich, powerful emotional communication.
This generation doesn't read the newspaper, and doesn't care that much
about the communication of intellectual concepts. That may be because
oral language is more right-brained, and more concerned with sensation
and emotion, where written language is more left-brained, more precise
and considered, concerned with logic and concept. The most important
cultural evolution in the next generation will therefore probably be a
huge increase in oral fluency and sensitivity (practice makes
perfect).
If we're going to save, or even change, the world, we'll do it by
telling great, infectious stories, orally. Bloggers and print
journalists: our time has past -- We're condemned to the margins of
the
future world.
Knowledge is viral and has negligible 'stored' value:
When I predicted that Knowledge Management would evolve into Social
Networking and that centralized repositories would give way to
Personal
Content Management systems, I may not have been radical enough in my
thinking. About a decade ago, some brilliant soul (can't remember who,
and Google doesn't help, but just to prove my point I bet one of my
readers reminds me who it was) said "I keep my knowledge in my
network". In other words, forget about storing stuff anywhere. If it has value, it will
be floating around on the tip of someone's lips right now. No
one needs to write it down, no one needs to put it in a database or on
a website or in a book. It will always be out there, in the air,
spreading like a virus and, if it's good, returning often to visit,
without ownership, without 'copyright', being enriched as it's
re-told.
The core competency for the next generation will be a great memory.
Librarians will be out. Actors will be in.
Design that is counter-cultural
creates anxiety:
There is an enormous tension as the new designs of our culture -- in
the West, skyscrapers, SUVs, privatized public spaces, 'family' rooms,
'portable entertainment' devices -- begin to change how we behave, and
who we are, while at the same time we push back against these same
designs because they offend our culture -- at once separating and
crowding us in unnatural ways, putting 'road-blocks' that fragment our
communities, isolating us from nature and from each other, forcing us
to adapt to awkward and unintuitive tools. This tension between
'efficient' design and 'natural' culture is perhaps the most important
front in the ever-enlarging and now global war between corporations
(and their artefacts) and people.And this tension is even greater
where Western design confronts other
cultures' norms, layering cultural dissonance on top of resentment of
Western economic and political imperialism.
Hall also presents some interesting, if over-generalized, observations
about differences between the people of the six countries he studies.
They explain why a closed door or a private office has a completely
different meaning in Germany, the UK and the US, why the French would
never tolerate the sell-off of public space that is occurring in the
US, why the Japanese find Western room layout (and the Arabs find
Western ceiling heights) claustrophobic, and how the difference in
these six peoples' 'intimate' (0-18"), 'personal' (18-48"), 'social'
(4-12') and 'public' (>12') distances cause so many
misunderstandings and conflicts. Tellingly, Hall's generalizations are
often debatable, but his anecdotes, being stories, are entertaining
and
compelling.
The Starbucks logo,
shown above, is highly offensive to people in many Arab countries,
where the depiction of the human form (and not merely the naked female
form) is considered sacrilegious and profane. Starbucks' insistence on
displaying it in its stores in those countries has been a major bone
of
contention, and is a lightning rod for anti-American
sentiment.
Percentage of black students graduating in engineering is rising (USATODAY.com)
builtforthefuture.com/reuseit/contestants.php track this
site | 5 links
The Fight Between Sharing Culture And Owning Culture
The Fight Between Sharing Culture And Owning Culture06/22/2005 02:17 AM It seems that museums are finally starting to realize that the digital
age represents a real opportunity for them to reach many new people by digitizing their
offerings and sharing the culture they represent across a much wider
audience than a physical museum allows. It seems that many museums
are having trouble figuring out how to digitize their collections, and
would welcome help in doing so. However, another story points out how
that can cause problems when the people involved get stuck on
intellectual property issues. Apparently some people who created 3D
digital versions of Michelangelo's David are freaking out that if
they share the digitization without some form of copy protection
people might (gasp!) share it without permission. Wait a second... isn't
that what they should want? That would allow them to share the
cultural wonder with many, many more people, and allow them to
experience it in ways never possible before. That's a good
thing, not something to be worried about. However, in an age
where people seem to think that every idea, concept, software or piece
of data needs to be "owned" and locked up, apparently it's the natural
response -- and that's unfortunate for every culture.
FORWARD : Forward Forum
FORWARD : Forward Forum01/12/2004 01:52 AM his party's candiates can not be trusted with the war on terror .. Ed
Koch, former mayor of New York, lifelong Democrat? .. announced last
week .. very true
forward.com/issues/2004/04.01.09/oped1.html track
this site | 4 links
Show me a culture that despises virginity and I'll show you a culture that despises childhood
Looks like all those pastel
PSPs Sony was showing at E3 were just a tease. According to an
interview in Japanese game magazine Famitsu, Sony claims the
various color PSPs were "just for reference. We plan to make the
system black." I wouldn't worry too much, though. I'm sure if the PSP
does well at all, color models will start showing up in no time at
all. Read
[IGN via Portagame]
Chris Abraham: Evil Man in Black and His Evil Black Suitcases Tackled by the Good Guys
No one who has read The Boondocks
has a neutral opinion about its writer, Aaron McGruder. You either
love
him or hate him, or vacillate between the two extremes. The
twenty-something radical leftie is working on a Simpsons-style
animated
series that will air, ironically, on Fox, probably next year, and as
the New Yorkerreported last
month,
he's managed to outrage almost everyone of every political stripe,
including other cartoonists who say that he's gotten lazy (the strip
is
now drawn by Jennifer Seng, though McGruder still does the writing),
and that he's relentless to the point of being tedious and unfunny. He
is the most banned cartoonist in history, with many of the 300+ papers
carrying the strip having cut it at one time or another. But as I
think
the above strip from last week shows, McGruder's biting wit has lost
none of its edge, and demonstrates a fearlessness that goes beyond
even
what Doonsbury and Bloom County achieved.
Grok Description matches for Black culture museum moves forward (USATODAY.com) GrokA matches for Black culture museum moves forward (USATODAY.com)
Black culture museum moves forward (USATODAY.com)
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
As I was reading Edward
Hall's The Hidden Dimension
I began to realize how staggeringly differently each of us perceives
the world. Hall speaks mostly about differences in perception between
six different human 'cultures' -- the Germans, French, British,
Americans, Japanese and Arabs. But his ideas find echo in Jeff
Masson's
books about the huge variability of animal intelligence and emotion
due
to differences in sense acuity, evolutionary needs and
environment,
and made me realize just how intelligent animals that are able to
learn
our languages must be
--
their entire sensory mechanism, the way they perceive everything, the
way the neurons of their brains are commensurately ordered, is
utterly,
perhaps unimaginably different from ours. 
Looks like all those pastel
PSPs Sony was showing at E3 were just a tease. According to an
interview in Japanese game magazine Famitsu, Sony claims the
various color PSPs were "just for reference. We plan to make the
system black." I wouldn't worry too much, though. I'm sure if the PSP
does well at all, color models will start showing up in no time at
all.