Hello! You’ve reached Adam Feldman’s blog. I’m a computer science and business student at the University of Michigan. Take a look around and please enjoy my musings. If you want to learn more about me, here’s my resume. I’m currently working on Reason, a web startup that’s making news better.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

Doug Engelbart talks about how he taught his kids to ride a bike:

It turns out, you don’t have to steer if you just get a gentle, even back and forth see-sawing motion going with the handlebars as you roll along, the back and forth motion usually corrects the tilting soon enough and you won’t fall. In fact, someone with little or no bike riding experience at all can just see-saw their handlebars as they pedal and mostly not fall.

So this is how Doug taught kids to ride. First he would show them how he could see-saw his handlebars back and forth while he pedaled slowly on his bike. Then he would ask them to try the same thing as he walked alongside, holding onto the bike loosely just to help it maintain a reasonable speed, and to keep it/them from falling when they over- or under-corrected. As long as they kept moving forward and see-sawing the handlebars, they would naturally start to get a feel for this direct relationship between tilting, steering and untilting, and gradually start refining the motions, and pretty soon off they’d go.

I thought it was pretty cool.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

A requirement for completing the Senior Camper Program at Camp Champions is to write a mission statement. It is a statement that is as short or long as you like where you present yourself. You explain who and what you are and want to be in life. It is meant to be a living document, something that you update and change as needed. The mission statement isn’t necessarily something for the everyday, but it is a powerful reminder for when you inevitably drift off course in some area. Something too few people do is really think deep about, let alone write about, the kind of person they would like to be. While this sounds entirely like an advertisement, I give a huge amount of thanks to Camp Champions and Boy Scouts for giving me the tools to reflect about the kind of person I am and I want to be. After writing the mission statement during the final trip of the last year of the Senior Camper Program, the elder senior campers read it aloud in front of the entire camp before all of the papers are gathered together and burned in the final fire.

Out of everything in my life, it is the learning I have done from my parents, Boy Scouts, Camp Champions, and Emery High School that has most influenced my statement below.

Without further ado, my mission statement as of July 2009:

Carpe diem – Seize the day! My name is Adam Reuben Feldman, and I live by this maxim. Our lives are defined by the choices we make, and here I present some of the choices I have made. I have made a choice to enjoy my life, and I will not stray from this. Given an opportunity, I will do everything in my power to seize it. I will educate myself so I can best accomplish what I wish to. I will never stop learning. My goal in life, and my passion, is creating. I will make new things, both physical and virtual. I will own my own business. I will avoid procrastination. I will do my best to live a balanced life. As we live in a messy world, I will work to prevent, and bring order to, chaos. In my own way, I will make a difference. I will not cease to live with respect, integrity, honor, and dignity. I will be thoughtful, kind, and considerate. There is no option but for me to take total responsibility for my actions. I will be faithful, especially as a family member, friend, and husband. I will forge strong connections to those I love most and work my hardest to keep these connections strong. I will use my passion to empower those around me. It is my love for my fellow man and woman drives me to live each day how I do. We can live free and die, or live in fear and die afraid of our own shadow. I have chosen the former – to reach out and take risks. My name is Adam Reuben Feldman, and Carpe diem is my maxim.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

I just dialed into a customer’s computer with Copilot to install pdf writing software. I tried printing a web page in Internet Explorer 7 and instead I got 30 pages of HTML. Microsoft’s support site had info on fixing this problem for IE4 and nothing else. After some googling, it turns out the fix was to re-enable IE as the default browser or uninstall AOL. Seriously guys, what kind of bug is this. It is crap like this that drives me away from Windows. Gahh I cannot stand it at all. Dealing with issues such as that are such a total waste of time. My Mac has problems from time to time as well, but nothing like that.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

Our Israel trip is coming to a close. We, the Emery HS Class of ’09, spent 4 years or more looking forward to this trip. Every year we watched a class leave, every year coming closer ourselves to being that group. The trip finally came, and now its almost over, and we have to finally fully accept that we’re leaving Emery for good. I think it’s nice that we have the trip to ease our removal from the community for both us and the people we love back at home. This has come up constantly in our conversations on the trip, and always has at home: how sad it is that we must leave a loving place that we love coming back to everyday.

As a fitting cap on some of our experiences at Emery and on the trip, we had an amazing discussion yesterday. There was a group of college students at our hotel who work with the middle- and high-school Christian youth group Young Life. A few Emery students started talking with them Friday night and were shocked to be faced with that which we have been warned would happen but we did not want to acknowledge: anti-Israel teachings. The Young Life group had just spent a week in Bethlehem working at a Bible college there and interacting with Palestinian Christians. They had attended two lectures by Palestinian professors talking about the Palestinian situation. Some of the main issues focused on were refugees and the border wall. The Emery students, who were very concerned, spoke with Mr. Dow, who arranged a discussion Saturday afternoon with the Young Life group. It wasn’t mandatory attendance for us Emery students, but most attended.

Emery and the Young Life Group together

===============

6:15pm Saturday, Emery and Young Life sat down in one big circle of chairs 15 feet from the shore of the Kineret. Mr. Dow led the discussion and Yossi spoke as well. What Dow presented was the content of our Zionism class condensed into 45 minutes, with a focus on the issues most concerning to the Young Life group. I found it very cool that what we learned in the classroom was able to be simply picked up and moved out into real discussion of the issues. The discussion consisted mostly of Young Life students asking a few questions and Dow and Yossi giving a general explanation of the Jewish viewpoint and specific answers to the issues raised by the Palestinian professors. Below is a sampling of content from the discussion from Mr. Dow and Yossi:

It is important to keep in mind the audience for this talk–the Young Lifers. Mr. Dow started by explaining his and Yossi’s bias. Both have backgrounds in Jewish education. Mr. Dow studied medieval Jewish and Arab history as an undergraduate and Yossi has a formal background as a Jewish educator. While he is more left-wing and Yossi more right, there is a “divergent overlap” where our discussion mostly took place. That is, Jewish responses to many of the basic issues behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are agreed upon by many Jews. Next, there is the idea that the Jewish case for Israel can be made entirely with non-Jewish sources. An important source in this category is “From Time Immemorial” by Joan Peters. She was a CBS correspondent who set out to write a book about the conflict expecting that the book would be pro-Palestinian, After she finished with the British sources, she saw how the British did things such as give 70% of mandatory Palestine to the Arabs–Transjordan–and how boats of Jewish Holocaust refugees were turned away from the shores of the Mediterranean as new Arab immigration was secretly allowed. The explanation given is the new discovery of oil there.

One of the biggest issues in this conflict is names. Both sides are guilty here. During my trip to Israel, I’ve seen maps of Israel made by religious Jews who use names other than the West Bank and Gaza for those areas. Nevertheless, the origin of the word Palestine is important. It comes from the Romans, who sought to erase from history any record of Jews having been in Israel after the Jews fought them more successfully than any other group in history. The name Palestine comes from the Philistines, a group that no longer existed at the time.

In this conflict, propaganda is often used. In it, the rhetorical strategy of the half-truth is most powerful. A lie is easily disproven, but a half-truth is most difficult to respond to. A. M. Rosenthal, a New York Times writer, once said that to understand history, you have to look at the entire loaf of bread, and not just the last few slices (“History is a loaf, not slices of bread”). The issues in the conflict are more than 61 years old, or 161 years old. They are 3000 years old – as old as Jewish history. Half-truths come up a huge amount in regard to the issue of refugees. There were about 400-600,000 Arab refugees after 1948.While there are of course cases where Arabs were mistreated in the war, the Jewish policy was that Arabs could stay and become citizens. To be completely honest, of course some Jews were delighted to see them leave though. Why did they leave? They did because the Arab states threatened them and said that if they stayed, they would be considered traitors to the Arabs. Their Arab brothers then took all of them and put them into refugee camps. Why? Because accepting the refugees and integrating them into society is a de facto acceptance of the existence of a Jewish state. If the refugees aren’t in camps, then they aren’t a problem that can be used as a negotiating tool. There is no doubt that there are humans suffering in camps, and of course no Jew likes this. However, the suffering does not continue due to Jewish negligence. Information about this can be found in issues of the Economist from 1947, notably generally an anti-Jewish magazine. As well, there was a roughly equal number–400-600,000–of Jewish refugees from the Arab world who were forcibly kicked out when Israel was founded. They came to Israel and were integrated into the new state.

In our Emery Zionism class, we used a Dow mnemonic device called the “Seven 7s” that covers much of the history behind the conflict. They are:

• 70
  • 2nd temple destroyed
  • Jewish government destroyed, diaspora begins
    -Zionism begins. The word refers to tzion – the hill where the City of David was built. It’s the notion of returning there.
  • Non-Jewish sources for this: the Roman writer Josephus’s book “Destruction of the Jews” and the Arch of Titus in Paris celebrating the destruction of the 2nd temple.
• 7th century
  • Islam founded
  • Sharia (Islasmic law) has the concept of a dhimmi–non-believer. There are suras–verses–in the Quran that explain how the Jews and Christians are to be expected as people of the book. However, they are hated at the same time because while they are monotheists, they don’t accept Mohammed as a prophet. Dhimmis were second class citizens in Arab countries with the Pact of Umar.
• 1897
  • The first Zionist congress took place in Basel, Switzerland, organized by Theodor Herzl after he witnessed the Dryfus affair.
• 1917
  • WWI ends, British control of Palestine begins with the defeat of the Ottoman empire.
  • The half-truth that Zionism is simply an extension of colonialism and imperialism can be addressed here: In reality, the Jews had nothing to do with Britain taking control of the area. The Allies won the war and the spoils included the Ottoman empire, and Britain took Palestine.
  • The British make the Balfour Declaration that looks upon with favor the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
  • No Palestinian movement at this time – the people in Israel saw themselves as Arabs
  • Around this time, Transjordan is created.
• 1937
  • Peel Partition Plan is proposed by the British Peel Commission. It offers to split mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Jews accept, the Arabs say no.
• 1947
  • The U.N. Partition Plan is proposed after the newly formed United Nations takes control of mandatory Palestine. The Jews accept, the Arabs say no, they will not accept a Jewish state.
• 1967
  • The Six-day war is fought and Israel gains control of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Desert, and Golan Heights. Israel later returns the Sinai and its oil reserves to Egypt to complete a peace agreement.

Another important point is that many Palestinians and Arabs cannot bring themselves to accept the existence of a Jewish state, and so they continue to fight. It is because of this fact that the Israeli border fence is necessary. Yossi has family who was killed by PLO terrorists. This kind of thing really happens here. The family was gunned down in their car within the border of Israel. The fence is meant to help protect the lives of Israeli citizens. Of course it has had some negative effects on Palestinian life, but terrorism cannot be accepted.

The PLO is the Palestinian Liberation Organization. It is the predecessor to the organization that runs Palestinian lands today, the Palestinian Authority. Its charter explains how it wants to destroy the State of Israel and end the Israeli occupation. It was founded in 1964, whereas the Israelis didn’t take over the West Bank or Gaza until 3 years later, in the 1967 in the Six-day war.

There are a lot of people surrounding Israel who simply want to destroy the place. The top 1/3 is vulnerable to Katyusha rocket attacks from Hizbollah in Lebanon. The bottom 1/3 is vulnerable to Qassam rocket attacks from Gaza. This is a country where only the middle 1/3–including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem–is safe. How can Israel not seek to end the fear of 2/3 of its population that a rocket could fall anytime on their home.

===============

In a few days we’ll be meeting with the David Project, a group that supports Israel advocacy by college students on campuses. I’ve heard them speak before, but it is now that I am fully convinced of their relevancy.

Our Israel trip is coming to a close, and I am excited to have had such an amazing experience here in this beautiful, amazing land.

Gaza Rocket Ranges

Hezbollah Rocket Ranges

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

Photos from this day

Shenit metzada lo tipol: Masadah will not fall again

Am yisrael chai: Israel lives!

We relived Masadah.

We woke up at 3 to leave at 4 to climb the snake path up Masadah. I can never forget this experience. We climb up in darkness in the starlight. The climb was difficult, but not long – only an hour. We begin touring as the false sunrise hits us. Unfortunately there were clouds so we couldn’t see the sunrise. We start our day in the oldest beit knesset, synagogue in the world – 2000 years old! We pray – shema, amidah, aleinu, kaddish. Yossi (our excellent tour guide from Alexander Muss) told us about tefillin and a message to learn from them.

The story was that Yigal Yadin (archaeologist, Chief of staff in war of independence, dad discovered Dead Sea Scrolls) was on a train headed to Tel Aviv to use a special camera on a package he had with him from the archaeological dig. A russian immigrant was asking everyone to put on tefillin. An orthodox woman was sitting across from him. yigal was a prominent man, and everyone knew he was a secular jew. The Russian came up, and yigal asked him how he came to Israel, since at this time Russian accents were rarer in Israel. The Russian told a story of how he asked the Soviets to leave the country to return to his homeland Israel, and instead was tortured by the KGB and sent to a gulag, only to be hurt more there by guards and his fellow antisemitic prisoners. yigal asked him if he wrapped tefillin everyday there, and the Russian said yes. yigal then wrapped teflillin on the train. The Russian then moved on, asking the next person to wrap tefillin, with no idea who he had just spoken with. After the train arrived, the woman who had been sitting across from him came up to him in tears. She told him how she knew who he was, and she hadn’t wanted to bother him just to rub shoulders with a famous man, but she had to tell him her story. She told how her husband was fighting in the 1967 war in an area with snipers in caves. They were losing and didn’t know where the fire was coming from. Her husband simply ran out into the open to draw fire. Now his fellow soliders could eliminate the enemy. They then ran to her husband, overwhelmed by his bravery. They asked him for his last request, as he was dying from his wounds. He asked them all to wrap tefillin everyday. The woman told Yigal how to her his putting on tefillin helped to fulfill her husbands dying wish. Yigal then told her how the package he was carrying was actually the world’s oldest known pair of teflillin, from Masadah. [another source for the story]

Yossi said how the teflillin found at the site were the same as we use today. He also told us how the tefillin on the arm has 1 internal box, while the head one has 4. It is a reminder in a way that while us jews can have different ideas in the mind – Essenes, Saducees, Pharisees, Zealots – Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox- or any other mental division – we must always act as one.

We looked at the mikveh and heard a story of how a orthodox rabbi came and measured the dimensions of the mikveh there and found it to be perfectly kosher. Wow. What a tradition we have, with traditions that have remained constant for millenia.

We spent an hour discussing, as if we were the Siccarri, the sect of jews at Masadah, what we would do if we were in their situation, with 15,000 romans ready to rape and kill us. We did this in one of the giant water cisterns at the site (12 of them together stored enough water for 1000 people for over 2 years).

This was the most powerful part of my experience at Masadah. We went to the place where Israeli military men and women say their special Masadah oath. Shenit metzada lo tipol: Masadah will not fall again, a metaphor for Israel will not fall again. Usually, they do the oath as the completion of a 3 day hike in the desert. We stood there and shouted it, one word at a time. At this spot, our words echoed back perfectly. The first bit of the echo is just noise, but then our word comes back fully understandable. it was unbelievable. it was as if it was not just the echo, the scientific explanation, but that the spirit of those from Masadah was crying back to us. We then yelled am yisrael chai, Israel lives. I never want to forget that moment.

Yossi told us a few stories about that chant, that pledge.

Yossi told how he once had a group at the railing doing the chant, and an Israeli fighter was flying in the area doing maneuvers. The pilot saw the students at the railing, where he likely also did the oath at one time. He told us how the pilot then flew low, so low that the group could see the pilot in the cockpit. The pilot then rocked his wings up and down in a salute and jetted back up. Awesome!

There was a tank commander in the Golan Heights in the 1967 war. There were 8 tanks left, with a total of 40 shells, facing 750 Syrian tanks. They started to retreat, but were told that they were all that stood between themselves and Haifa and Israel falling. The men kept leaving, but with shells and bullets falling, he tackled his men and yelled at them to remember the pledge that made on Masadah – shenit metazada lo tipol. His own tank men went into their tank, inspiring the other men. They moved up and attacked the Syrians. With extraordinary effort, every single one of the 40 shells hit a Syrian tank – this does not happen! The tanks were moving in a column, and tank 41 was intimidated and turned around. Israeli reserve tanks then unexpectedly came into the battle and chased the Syrians, and more acts of heroism followed.

On Masadah, we all picked up 2 rocks. One is for me, and the other is for me to give to someone else to bring back to Masdah. The rocks are not ours, but belong to Masada.

I brought a rock from Auschwitz to Masadah. I placed it in a spot overlooking the ravine where we yelled.

This day was simply an awesome, awesome experience. It was beautiful, and I’m looking forward to the day I return.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

PHOTOS FROM TODAY
A funny video.

There was far too much for a tweet, so now it’s time for my first blog post about my senior Israel Trip. Today we started with a hike on Mt. Eitan. Sataf is an area that was terraced by the Judaens thousands of years ago. They built elaborate irrigation systems in the dry land by tapping into the water that flowed in springs deep within the rocky mountains. We hiked through this pretty area and entered a cave where a spring was flowing.

Our next adventure was more caving: Hezekiah’s Tunnel. We lived the Bible. This is a tunnel described in the biblical sources that matches reality perfectly. We went through most of this 300 meter tunnel in such complete darkness we couldn’t see the hands in front of our faces. It was just simply awesome to do.

We finished the day by visiting the Kotel, the Western Wall. No words are needed here except it was a powerful experience. The wall is important for different reasons to everyone. For me, it is the history of the place and the significance of my connection to it that draws me.

It just *feels good* to be in Israel. Yes, this is partially because I’ve just visited death camps and mass graves from the Holocaust in Poland, but also because of the stunning history of the land here and my connection to it. There is so much history here, interspersed with a modern nation. It’s awesome.

Check out the pictures and shalom!

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

I’ve been busy lately. Even for a second semester senior, school is a never-ending burden. I also had my Model UN conference a few weeks ago (Outstanding Delegate for the third year in a row, yes!) and attended BBYO’s International Convention last weekend. As well, for the past few weeks, I’ve been putting all of my free time into development work on FUSElit.net. FUSElit is a site where you collaboratively write stories online. Between reviewing Python and learning Django, and managing the other project members working on design and marketing, I’ve been doing plenty. I’m hoping to do a technical post on developing FUSElit soon.

I’ve been posting fun stuff to tumblelog.pamiproductions.com regularly! It’s the fun stuff link at the top!

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

This post is part of a series of essays I will be posting.

“Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell ‘em, ‘Certainly I can!’ Then get busy and find out how to do it.”

–Theodore Roosevelt

As far back as I can remember, the thrill of learning has excited me. To gain new insight, to take two juxtaposed concepts and fuse them into one, to discover what had been previously unknown to me (and then to share it!)–these are the pleasures I seek. At the same time, I am fascinated by how so many people do not seek knowledge.

Early on, I found joy in learning. I can clearly remember, for instance, in the first hours after I learned to read, ecstatically gazing from the car window at shapes that suddenly had further meaning. Now I had the skill I needed to begin my journeys in earnest.

With the new millennium, I became a news junkie. I followed science, technology, business, and world news daily from that point forward. I discovered Tom Clancy novels, finishing the whole series within a year. I began to read national and international newspapers with my parents and discuss articles, first for content, then for criticism. I relished my new perspectives on the world.

Over time, I became more interested in technology. I would spend hours on the web, learning ever more about how our modern world works. At first, my interest stemmed from curiosity; as I matured, my interest evolved into a quest to discover how all the new things I was learning could be utilized.

In 2003, I discovered my artistic media–digital video, audio, and image–and started my video production business, PAMI Productions, to capitalize upon my technical interests and hone my skills. PAMI has been the commercial outlet for the application of much of the technical knowledge I have collected.

Over the next few years, I invested time in better understanding how I could create useful web-based tools. In 2005, I conceptualized and then designed with my high school’s student government an online hub for clubs and student groups to organize their activities. In 2006, I launched EmeryCentral.com. The site has only seen moderate success, but the lessons I learned in managing and marketing the project and building the system, not to mention the services it has provided for student leaders to manage their clubs, have been invaluable.

In spring 2008, I started working on my next web application, a tool that would put the power of users to work collecting data to help economists calculate the amount of carbon used in food and product life-cycles.

In fall 2008, I began exploring the potential use of wikis (collaboratively editable websites such as Wikipedia) to preserve the institutional memory of groups in which I am active, such as my high school’s student government and the local chapter of the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, the Jewish youth group in which I am active. A recurring problem has been how to best preserve the mountains of work put into planning events and projects, as well as the evaluations of their success, for those that follow. Collaborative, open wikis seem to be a compelling solution.

As a result of these experiences, I discovered in myself a passion for applying my abstract interests and technical skills to everyday problems faced by the communities of which I am a part. It is my curiosity that drives me to learn so that I can create. To me, it is natural and exciting to stitch together technology and my management and leadership roles to build more productive organizations.

An all too common behavior that confounds me is not seeking out knowledge, whether in daily life or outside of school. I cannot understand why some do not search for knowledge, why some are not curious, when there is so much to be gained. To inspire others to learn and to educate, I organized mock presidential and vice-presidential debates and elections for the primaries and the general election. I started blogging in 2008 and focused on writing educational, yet accessible posts. Ultimately, I aim to utilize and share my knowledge to improve the communities of which I am a part.

Whenever another person teaches me, I feel compelled to pass it along. I love sharing what I know for others’ benefit. Along these lines, I spent years in Scouting focusing not only on advancing in rank, but on educating younger Scouts in the skills that older members had taught me just a few years before. In giving back to the Scout troop, I hope to repay my debt to those who did so much in helping me earn the Eagle Scout Award. As I continue as an adult leader in Boy Scouts, I hope to inspire a desire for learning in others.

My love of learning is what has directed all the activities I have pursued, and it is part of why I look forward to school each day. My transition from consuming to applying, creating, and sharing knowledge has been enjoyable and fascinating. Learning how to learn has been the most important skill that I have worked to master. My pursuit of knowledge, along with the goal of sharing it with others, makes every day brighter. To that end, I intend to continue seeking out ways to improve organizations and effectively leverage the potentials of the amazing technology of our time.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

This post is part of a series of essays I will be posting.

In the summer of 2007 I attended an international B’nai B’rith Youth Organization (a Jewish youth group) three-week summer experience called Kallah. Kallah focused on learning about the vast spectrum of Jewish thought, ritual, culture, and Judaism’s perspective on modern issues. In attendance was a wide array of Jewish teenagers from all over the U.S., and a few from Bulgaria. As a part of that experience, we participated in an exchange program with a nearby Orthodox Jewish camp, Camp Morasha.

My expectations for the first part of the program, their visit to our camp, were very low. I anticipated a boring evening where the culture gap would prevent much interaction. I was pleasantly surprised at how great the evening went–everyone had a good time, and everyone gained something from the discussions that, while focusing on our differences, also highlighted our similarities. These were also your mostly typical American teenagers.

The next evening we visited their camp. I still consider that night to be one of the most eye-opening nights of my life. We arrived after dinner and joined them for live music and dancing, albeit with men and women separated as per Orthodox tradition. The dancing that night, dancing that was closer to sprinting around the room for fifteen minutes at a time playing crack the whip, dancing where it was okay to let yourself go and be consumed by the energy of the room, dancing that demonstrated such a passion for life, this was the way to celebrate living!

From that evening, I gained an even greater respect for traditional Orthodox customs. Yes, when a typical group of teenage boys decides to dance to techno, they will be wild and have fraternal fun. It does not, however, even approximate the experience that we had at Morasha. Separating the men and the women can make for an amazing time like it did for us that night. It can remove the awkward atmosphere of men and women dancing and reduce it to a simple night of fun. The experience enlightened me to the parts of Orthodox culture that, while superficially may seem outdated and very conservative, actually arise from a very cognizant understanding of human behavior very deserving of respect.

Contributing to diversity are my array of technical creative skills, my experience in Boy Scouts, and my love of learning. I bring to the table experience in videography, video editing, graphic design, DVD production, web design and development. In Scouting, I am one of the few to earn Eagle Scout. My love of learning is what has shaped everything I do, from choosing to participate in Scouting to spending an hour reading world, science, and technology news daily for almost the past decade.

Diversity makes for much more interesting and engaging learning.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

I went along as a counselor-ish person on my school’s freshmen trip to Big Bend National Park! To go I had to write an essay that was reviewed by our Head of School. Seven seniors went on the 9th grade trip and two on the 10th grade trip.

Everyone–teachers, administrators, students, and seniors–had an amazing time. Although there was some excitement–a student was lifeflighted in stable condition after tripping on the sand dunes and being in intense pain for awhile because of a prior surgery that left a bar in his chest–everyone grew closer together and more comfortable around each other, while enjoying the outdoors, fulfilling some of the main goals of the trip.

• Pictures from the trip: adamfeldman.smugmug.com
• The tribute video slideshow: http://vimeo.com/2928146 or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHQp7y73a38

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

The new WhiteHouse.gov is already live (broken links and all). Check out this big difference (via http://codeulate.com/?p=24):

Obama’s two line robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

Bush’s robots.txt (too long to put here – 2324 lines).

In a way it says something about the two administrations commitment to transparency and openness.

———-

Tag clouds of various inaugural speeches (via ReadWriteWeb).

———-

Was Condi Rice the first African-American President today?? A Constitutional law scholar answers.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

So here’s what’s happened so far:

• Flight from Houston to Denver on United to make our connection on Frontier to San Francisco took off 50 minutes late. Our connection time in Denver: 50 minutes! Michael & I sprinted through two terminals and somehow made it!! Our flight was supposed to take off at 5:55 and we boarded at 6:05 as they closed the door. We were sooooo happy and exhausted.
• Got into line for the keynote around 10:30pm. We were 11-13th in line. Chilled with a lot of awesome people (I’ll get links up to everyone’s site/twitter later). A few are below, more to be added later:
1. The Flappie guys from TastyApps came by with t-shirts, buttons, and stickers!
2. Met plenty of people such as a guy from TUAW, @adamjackson, @alexbrooks, @deedeewarren.
• Got our tent set up right on the sidewalk. Surprisingly no cops came by the whole night to tell us to take it down! Michael got 3-4 hours of sleep, I got two. It was freezing outside–I’m a Houstonian, I don’t like 40 degree weather!!
• Got into Moscone around 7:15-ish. It was waaarmmm inside! . Got seated around 8:50
• Nothing of note at the philnote. I impulsively bought iWork today, we’ll see how much I end up liking it!
• Visited some booths afterwards then napped for 4 hours

More Macworld news later!

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

While I cannot possibly be as emotional as this plea to leave a certain someone else alone, I can request that everyone read Steve Job’s letter posted today on the Apple PR website and move on. Spoiler: He’s doing just fine now.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

Annnnd He’s Back! I’m headed off to Macworld and CES tomorrow (today….). I will be camping out before the keynote on the streets of San Francisco starting around 10pm or so. I’ll be twittering this whole week, along with the 495834958 other twitter-ers attending the tradeshows. I’ll get some pictures up during the show, and video later! I am super excited.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media.

Edit: clarified in some places and added more info.

I like to be really productive when I work, and I like to know what the heck is going on. At the same time, I am not the best at remembering my long list of things to do or places to be off the top of my head. While I found paper lists to be useful to a point, I found that tools on my computer made managing my life super easy. Over time I’ve adopted various portions of David Allen’s Getting Things Done action management method.

I am a dedicated mac user (and a switcher!), and I’ve found a ton of great mac apps that streamline my time on the computer, where I spend the majority of my time working or playing (and alternatives can be found for Windows as well!).

Email

Moving from my ISP’s email to Gmail was like crossing the Iron Curtain. Suddenly I had tons of storage space and was able to access my email through an excellent user interface. As well, search became useful! Today I use my email as my primary inbox for tasks and information, especially because of my iPhone’s constant presence.

Calendering

The logical next step was towards maintaining a good personal calendar, and a great option was only a link away at Google Calendar. After switching to a mac laptop, I moved to Apple iCal, but I back up my calendar to Google Calendar using the excellent utility Spanning Sync.

Tasks

The hardest part of getting organized for me was finding the right task management software. I knew that paper just did not work for me, though I love using my moleskine notebook for notetaking when I attend conferences or otherwise go to hear speakers.

I didn’t begin a trusted GTD system until found an app that I liked. I tried way way way way way way way way way way way too many GTD apps (Note: a number of those are cross-platform). Eventually I settled on iGTD, which is free and was excellent until the sole developer stopped work. I jumped ship to the $80 OmniFocus and have been in heaven ever since. While it certainly is not perfect, I’ve finally settled into a system I can trust to keep me organized and on task.

Knowledge

I’m someone who tends to collect tons of random information that I want to keep. Right now everything is fairly spread out and hard to combine into something useful, but I have permanent links in Safari and Firefox, reference links for the future in delicious (thank you pukka!), whole website pages in Evernote (cross-platform with a webapp!), and DevonThink Pro for the miscellaneous knowledge that I forget two seconds after committing to the database (router config settings anyone?). I also use a password manager for all of my logins for websites, FTP servers etc.

Scrivener is my choice of software for creative or academic writing of all sorts–term papers, blog posts, and the like. Pages and Bean work great for most school assignments and random files full of text. Bookends is a fairly good bibliography management utility (yes, it formats all your works cited pages for you! ☺).

For school notes and anything else that works better in outline form, I use the great (mac-only)OmniOutliner (by the OmniGroup like OmniFocus).

Also, I finally committed myself to having “current projects,” “files,” and “school” folders on my Desktop with everything filed fairly neatly.

Putting It Into Practice/Conclusion

I like to believe that when I work on anything, I am proceeding at the fastest possible pace my mind and body are capable of (okay, okay, three hours of sleep slows me down, but not much). I know where everything is, I know what I need to do and when I need to do and when it’s due, and I have all of the tools to do everything as fast as possible.

I want to end with a special shoutout to the most amazing application of all, quicksilver. Quicksilver allows me to launch any file or app from the keyboard in seconds. But, it can do so much more, from moving or appending text to files to sending emails, viewing and editing my bookmarks, opening links, to controlling iTunes or my FTP client or the operating system…. Learn it, love it, live it mac users. Windows users, check out this list here for some poor alternatives ☺.

I hope you can be successful with your quest to be productive.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

A NASA dude made a great presentation on why we explore . Take 5 minutes and read it!!!
I also put it up on scribd.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

Dear Fellow Seniors,

I cannot stand when you sit around stressed out from college apps or schoolwork or life at home and say “wow, I’m so ready to go to college and get out of here!” Think about what you’re saying. Really what you mean is “wow, I’m so ready to go to college and get out of here and leave all of the friends I’ve known for 4-13 or more years and my family and go someplace at least a few hours away so I’ll be happy!” It doesn’t make senese to me. Yes, we’re all maddeningly stressed over where we’re going to be next year, and maybe because of schoolwork or because we’re still doing college apps (the latter two for me). Everything will be calmer after January 1-20 or so, and you can relax a lot until April. So, don’t say you want to leave everyone behind, unless you really do. I know I don’t want to leave.

With Love,

Adam Feldman

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

Here I address these issues curtly and incompletely. Others have written at length on the topics here, but I wish to add my thoughts to the mix.

Although we often say this, we often forget it: life is all about balance. For everyone who takes advantage of the possibilities of the net, there is a constant dialectic: balancing time spent communication via the web with “real world” communication and activities, and also balancing participation and consumption.

It is so easy to use the Web to communicate with five, ten, even twenty people all at once, more or less comfortably–the web allows one-to-many and many-to-many communication easily and clearly. Email, especially as it is used in business, allows a person to dispense with the niceties of human interaction in favor of expedient, efficient communication.

In contrast, real world communication is much slower to handle gobs of people either all talking at once to each other, say in a meeting, or all communicating with one key person such as a CEO. It is also slower because the social niceties, in particular small talk, are more necessary for what our society defines as proper social behavior.

The same holds for teens, the group often both lauded and denounced for its embrace of the internet. Teens are lauded for their adaption to new tools, for embracing the modern paradigm shift in communications. Yet, they are denounced for the very social problems listed above: real world, vocal, physical interaction is reduced in favor of fairly impersonal means of communication. Certainly there is no doubt of the impersonality of text-based tools such as email and instant and text messaging, where emoticons are necessary to deliver the intonation of what is said.

Further balance is needed in mediating media consumption and active participation. I, for example, consume almost entirely through the web, watching below 5 hours of TV a week. Although these two types of consumption may seem different, both are generally passive–I simply consume and do not synthesize the information actively through utilizing it. Reading and discussing a newspaper around the kitchen table with parents or blogging about current events or your knowledge are, however, more active, participatory activities. In them, you are required to internalize, analyze, and reformulate the information for critical discussion. Doing only one or the other is not necessarily good–fully active participation implies a lack of relaxation in consumption while fully passive consumption implies a lack of critical thinking in consumption. Balance is necessary here as well.

Our modern communications tools are not leaving us anytime soon–heck, I would be miserable without the speed and efficiency of information consumption we have today. We can embrace all of these technologies, activities, and “traditional” practices and proceed to balance them for the best outcome for us.

Authors note: Shelly G. had me write this.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• Great article on reverse-engineering the iTunesDB file format.
• Suggestions for pretty metrics.
• Tutorial on my favorite photoshop effect: tilt-shift!
• Nice primer that gets you thinking about corporate design.
• More design stuff: great logo designs deconstructed.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

My grandfather just reminded me of a great addition to my post on citizen journalism. As I was watching the TV news on Wednesday, the talking head was interviewing Hossam Hamdan and an ACLU lawyer (the preceding link is the transcript, search it for for “Hamdan”).

The issue was that Naji Hamdan, an American citizen from the UAE, had been imprisoned by proxy in the UAE for the U.S.A., and has not been charged with a crime by the United States. Complicating the issue is how the UAE has a record for torture, a record in clear conflict with U.S. policy.

I took issue with how the interviewer, Tony Harris, worked to shape the interview. He did a lot of presuming (Harris’s own word) and continually cut off Hossam Hamdan and the lawyer. He created his own story in the course of the interview instead of focusing on the who, what, when, where, why, and how that could be provided by the interviewees. Harris worked to promote a specific connection and push his own very specific conclusions and agenda, that of Hamdan to terrorist organizations, at the expense of neutrality.

Here’s a quote that churns my stomach whenever I read it:

[Harris speaking] …But Sam, one more question quickly for you. Your brother, it is my understanding, runs an auto parts store where he is shipping containers all over the world. He is a devout Muslim who travels overseas a lot. Now I am not drawing >any conclusions from that but I am wondering if in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks do you understand why the federal government would be interested in learning everything it can about your brother’s trips and business dealings?…

Citizen journalism combats this by promoting diversity in the news, long a goal of American media regulation. This is just one more reason citizen journalism rocks.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

I’ve been following the recent attacks in Mumbai. I first heard the news on CNN, but the best way to keep up has been online. What always amazes me is the dedicated cadre of Wikipedians who constantly update Wikipedia with the latest news (aside from Wikinews’s excellent coverage). Fifty minutes after the attacks started Wikipedia had a page on the attacks up and four hours after a page on the previously unknown Deccan Mujahideen.

As well, CNN throughout the day has shown MMS videos, witnesses via Skype videochat, and discussion of the Mumbai bloggers keeping connected during the Mumbai curfew over the net and via services such as Twitter.

I like this trend. I love our continually-developing participatory culture. I think that ultimately it is for better, as consumers’ competition with traditional content producers can only result in increased product quality. The MSM (mainstream media) is beginning to embrace citizen journalism. For example, readers on CNN.com can now submit stories through iReport (with a disclaimer about the news being unvetted).

Any discussion of citizen journalism requires a discusion of its legal implications. In the United States, journalists are protected from disclosing their sources in thirty states. There is no legal precedent yet for whether bloggers, who increasingly break major news before the MSM, can be classified is journalists and thus be under those same protections. Only time will tell, but I am hopeful.

EDIT: Additional info from CNN on the ongoing Twitter use during the Mumbai crisis. I agree with CNN’s assessment that the wisdom-of-the-crowds nature Twitter is both its greatest asset and handicap. From the article:

As blogger Tim Mallon put it, “I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.

“During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly differing estimates of the numbers killed and injured – ranging up to 1,000.”

What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted.

A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media.

Someone tweets a news headline, their friends see it and retweet, prompting an endless circle of recycled information.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

“The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand.” (1). Currently, most all content on the web is written for human consumption and understanding. It is currently very, very difficult for software such as search engines to extract from context clues what exactly the page or data it is looking at means, or what the data is related to. Various efforts have been underway to deal with this problem so that computers can better organize and information on the web. These efforts include RDF, which is a essentially a markup language designed for the purposes of building out the semantic web. The purpose of RDF is to allow for a “formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.” (2).

The reason that the development of the semantic web is so useful and cool is that it will allow for much, much, much easier use of the myriad amounts of data published on the web. As I mentioned above, the issue that computers have when looking for information on the web is that they cannot tell what context the data is. A computer may see tabular data in an HTML page, but it has no idea if the data is baseball stats or a listing of physical constants on a physic teacher’s website. Yes, context can be determined by keywords, but an even better way to define what the data represents is doing so formally using a technology such as RDF. Then, if a company such as Google reads a webpage, it can know exactly what the data presented is, and then provide better search results related to that page. As well, now someone can easily re-use the data for their own purposes, using something akin to Yahoo! Pipes, without depending on the author of the webpage having created an API or RSS feed to share the data. Screen-scraping becomes easy.

Further Reading:

• Microformats
• Comments and links on Slashdot

References

1. http://www.w3schools.com/semweb/default.asp
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

Shoutout to David Bowie’s Space Oddity!

Attention world: As my Twitter says (and will say for the next two weeks), I’m logging off. Absolutely no digg, reddit, slashdot, google reader, twitter, google news, feeds in gmail, etc. I just blocked digg and reddit in firefox. Yes, there will be a blog post here next week, but it’s for class. Why am I subjecting myself to this?

1. Can Adam survive? He’s not sure, so we’ll see.
2. If I want to tech my school’s musical again (new job for this one: audio effects and clicktrack!), and manage to get my college applications done, I need to buckle down.

Goodbye internet, cya on the 20th! May the lulz be with you!

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

Anyone else see any humor in my having an obnoxiously long title for this post?

Personal computers only were really invented in 1976 with the release of the Apple I (and it was the Apple II that really made the market take off starting in 1977). The organization that incited this was the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of hobbyists in Silicon Valley in the mid-’70s who can be called responsible for bringing computing to the masses. Before this, computers were huge machines reserved for businesses or universities, and not devices that just anyone might have in the home. This group was all about sharing their designs and ideas. Even before them, the culture existed. I cannot give salient examples, but the open culture has always existed in parts of the tech world.

Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project (which led to the creation of GNU/Linux) in 1983, 2 years before Windows was first released (but after MS-DOS was around). Unix has been open-source since its creation. Linux has technically been around since 1991 when Linus Torvalds released the kernel), but Unix (specifically BSD Unix, the “free,” non-AT&T version) has been around since 1977. Unix was one of the, if not the, first powerful, free, complete operating/time-sharing system, and Linux was intended to be (and is) a compatible replacement for it, and is now even better and more capable for use by individuals for day-to-day computing.

The original code in Windows that handled the networking was taken right out of Unix. And, the modern (post-2000) Mac operating system is based upon Unix and mostly compatible with Unix and Linux software programs! Both software companies have benefitted from free operating systems in huge ways.

• See this previous post for examples of major open-source projects today.
• See the first paragraph of this previous post for more on the open-source movement.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

Student mindsets according to my physics teacher

Do only two mindsets exist in students in schooling: the “Middle School” and “College” frames of mind?

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

I voted!

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

The Philosophy

Something I think is a really cool offshoot of the kind of thinking that characterized the free speech movement of the ‘60s is the Free culture movement, which supports the “permission culture.” From Wikipedia: “The movement objects to overly restrictive copyright laws, or completely rejects the concepts of copyright and intellectual property, which many members of the movement also argue hinder creativity.” From these ideas came the Copyleft movement, which supports licenses that use copyright law itself to “remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions” (Wikipedia). It advocates for licenses such as the GNU GPL and Creative Commons licenses that include the Share-alike clause

Arduino

From the free software and permission culture came the open hardware movement as well, exemplified in the Arduino microcontroller platform. What makes the Arduino project unique is that its plans are licensed under a Creative Commons license, so anyone can take the design and improve upon it. Technically, the microcontroller is useful in a wide range of applications because of its inexpensive cost ($50 to buy, less to build yourself), extensibility, and support for standard open-source programming tools. It is useful for people from artists making interactive projects to teachers teaching electronics.

The potential for open hardware projects like this are awesome, and the business models that could be built around them are very compelling even though the designs are free. As this article from Wired discusses, the business model revolves around producing quality versions of the hardware while using the power of the community to improve the product, like any commercial open-source company does. Hardware projects with similar licenses to Arduino include the open-source car and to some degree, the telephony solution Asterisk and the self-replicating protyping machine the RepRap.

Who cares?

The permission culture has shown it is ready for prime time. Openness is here to stay, and technophiles have embraced it. Why don’t you?

See also:

• Arduino’s CC license
• Open-source Philosophy
• General info on open knowledge
• Can’t forget Linux – your friendly neighborhood open-source operating system!
• Google search for “open source hardware”

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

The interview. A must-see.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

My new favorite GMG comic:

http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/post/56184387

For those of you who have no idea what garfield minus garfield is, go check it out now!

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

Edit: Aaron and I are having a very nice conversation in the comments on the post. Check it out! I love it when conversations are actually possible without breaking down into personal attacks!

No, FOSS software is not related to piracy:

http://ewsnewmedia.wordpress.com/2008/10/18/harmful-programs/

My response is below the article. I apologize in advance for its rambling and somewhat incoherent qualities. I just had to interupt college apps to respond. One of my next long posts will be that, but in full form with lots of wonderful Wikipedia links like usual.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

HTML and CSS are the presentation languages of the web. A programmer may build an application in Python or Java, or make their website more beautiful or fun using Javascript, but ultimately all that these languages do is allow for abstracted, automated editing of a page’s HTML and CSS.

HTML

HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, started as the sole language for making a website using Tim Berners-Lee’s WWW system, the system that became the web as we know it today; when you made a page on the net, you wrote HTML to define the content, layout, and design of the page. Note that HTML is not a programming language, but a markup language–you use it to describe how something should look, and the computer interprets it and renders a page onto your screen. Wikipedia says it best: HTML “provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document — by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on…”

Making a well-designed layout for a webpage was difficult because the only way to position elements such as images and text was to place them into tables with hidden borders. As well, much of the HTML code was redundant. There was no way to write one line that made every single link bold and green; you had to specify attributes of page elements individually for each element. To make a single link bold and green, you would write it as <strong><a href="http://woot.com" color="green">Woot</a></strong>. Please note that the use of the color attribute is deprecated; style should be used instead, but I’m using the old-fashioned example on purpose.

Edit: To clarify, the more important reason not to use tables for layout is that if you do, you are essentially marking all of your content as tabular data when it is not, thus making life harder on search engines. (Thank you: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/everything_you_know_about_CSS_Is_wrong/)

CSS

In 1996 CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, was unleashed upon the web (although full support in the major browsers took another 3-4 years). CSS allows for the separation of form and content in web design. That is, you can write the content of your webpage then structure it using HTML, and then define the actual layout and colors and font and what links do when your mouse passes over them using CSS. Wikipedia always says it best: CSS is “used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language” such as HTML.

Now if you wanted all links to be green and bold, it only took one CSS statement ( a{color: green; font-weight: bold;} ) (note how I don’t even need to wrap all of my HTML links in the <strong> tag, I just use CSS). Web design became much easier because instead of structuring the page using tables, CSS could be used to position page elements either relative to the edges of the window or other elements, or absolutely using coordinates on the page. More complex designs became possible, and webpage maintenance easier.

Standards

Today, as always, the W3C, the World Wide Wide Consortium, manages these two languages, as well as the varied ecosystem of dialects that have sprung out of HTML such as XML and all other technical standards related to the web. XML is Extensible Markup Language, and it allows people to make their own languages with their own tags. Major use example: RSS and podcasting.

Tags

As you may already know, HTML is written as a collection of tags. For example, all HTML pages start with the <html> tag and end with </html>. All tags that “open” a statement are written as <tag> and all that close it are written as </tag>. With the exception of a few self-closing tags such as </ br> (which makes horizontal rules), always close your tags!

When you write posts using Wordpress, you can always switch between the visual editor and HTML editor. All that the visual editor does is translate your clicks and words into HTML. If you do try the HTML editor, it works the same way, but you can see the code changes your actions make. The tags you will find most useful are the <a> tag, which is for links (a standing for anchor), the <p> tag, which denotes a paragraph, the <h1>–<h6> tags, which allow for headers to be inserted into a page, and the <ul> and <ol> tags, which allow for bulleted and ordered lists (and don’t forget your <li> tag too!).

The W3C has an excellent HTML primer that will do far better than I ever could at teaching HTML.

The Future

To me, the best feature coming out of the W3C’s work is the <canvas> tag. This tag allows for animations like those made in Adobe’s proprietary Flash software and played in Adobe’s proprietary Flash player to be done using open standards and tools.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

Look closely:

Look closer:

I am scared:

Source:http://bread-and-honey.blogspot.com/2008/10/wtf-broccoli.html

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

No person can harbor any doubt that piracy is rampant on the Internet. Powerful tools such as BitTorrent allow the rapid sharing of files with ease. Sites such as the Pirate Bay allow BitTorrent users to find the files they seek. Limewire is still in widespread use. Media organizations looking to protect their rights are working as hard as ever. Ars technica, a technology news website, has an excellent article on the statistics provided by organizations such as the RIAA and MPAA on piracy. The article takes an in-depth look at the reported losses due to piracy and finds that the numbers are grossly inflated.

In my opinion, the media industry is being absolutely ridiculous in its attacks on piracy. While I agree that copyright holders have some right to enforce their ownership of works, the industry needs to embrace the Internet. The history of media has shown that while new mediums can have adverse affects on the incumbent media, like that of television on radio, the incumbent media can easily adjust their business models in response and then profit further, like radio’s embrace of the music industry after TV became the dominant entertainment medium. Media consumers are the media companies’ customers. Attacking these customers with accusations only further alienates them, no matter how true these accusations are. A better tactic would be to invest the necessary capital to move the anachronistic music industry into the age of YouTube, Garageband, and Facebook and thus attract customers back to the licit portions of the industry.

While some in the media industries have slowly embraced the power of the Internet, the laws have not been updated in such a way as to allow consumers to take advantage of the Internet using their media. For example, while digital music sales have taken off, there is no way for consumers to create content that utilizes that media and post it on the Internet. Copyright law, as it always has, favors the copyright holder. I do not wish to dispute that balance of power. Rather, in the age of the Web, I say that laws need to be updated so that consumers can pay some reasonable fee and utilize a song in a way that does not fall under fair use in a YouTube video or on their Facebook. Fair use evaluation today is too arbitrary, and the process too protracted, to allow for the embrace of the Internet. I exhort the media industries to wake up from their slumber and realize that they are in an age that could either be golden in the quality of its media production or gloomy in the lack of the ability of consumers to create new works using the user-empowering technologies of our age.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

I would like to return again to the issue of TANSTAAFL–There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. In the last post in the series, I discussed where money is needed. Now, I would like to give a simple overview of how that money is acquired. When I refer to companies here, I mean organizations whose primary role is to provide some service over the Internet.

Venture Capital

VC “is a type of private equity capital typically provided to immature, high-potential, growth companies in the interest of generating a return through an eventual realization event such as an IPO or trade sale of the company. Venture capital investments are generally made as cash in exchange for shares in the invested company” (Wikipedia). Besides the traditional banks providing VC, some organizations have sprung up from people who were successful in businesses who are now looking to do VC funding with the money they made. One of those, and one of my favorite companies, is Y Combinator. They are slightly different in that they provide seed funding, which is the initial infusion of cash for startups and traditionally the riskiest for the loaner. One of my favorite startup blogs is that of Paul Graham, who works with the company. A great website that focuses on tech startups and the ecosystem that funds them is TechCrunch.

Advertising

Much of the web is funded by text and other ads. HowStuffWorks has an excellent explanation of how web advertising works. Google’s revenue consists almost entirely of income from their ad programs. Google’s ads are particularly interesting because they revolve around textual analysis of your search queries and the content of webpages on which Google’s ads are shown. Site owners are most commonly paid by advertisers by the click-through rate–how many people click on the ad–although many other more complicated systems exist.
A potential issue for the web is the prevalence of tools such as the free Firefox plugin Adblock and other similar tools for other browsers that block ads from appearing in your webpages by blocking known ad servers.

Other Methods

• Many websites offer premium or subscription services. For example, Wordpress.com offers free blogs that are feature-limited and occasionally show advertisements. For a fee these limits and annoyances can be lifted (or you could also go to Wordpress.org and download the software they use free and install it on your web server and customize it to your hearts content like I did). Of course, the free accounts are useful for hooking users into the site and allowing them to become comfortable enough with or find enough of a need for the service so that they are more likely to pay for it.
• Donations often fund open-source projects and some topical personal sites.
• Some corporations will fund open-source projects through either infusions of cash or employee time if the projects are important to them. Notable here is Google and all of its open-source efforts.

Who Uses What

• Any company with another revenue stream obviously may fund their homepage or other web presence through those monies. Among others, companies and startups will use primarily three sources of funding: venture capital, advertisements, and paid services.
• Individuals or small groups funding sites primarily for pleasure and not profit will generally fund their costs through their own monies, donations, and advertisements.

Advertisements and Me

I could care less about advertisements on the web. Although I could probably increase my perceived browsing speed by using Adblock, I feel no compulsion to use Adblock or Saft to block advertisements from distracting me from my web browsing, because they don’t distract me whatsoever. Over the past ten years or so, I’ve learned to totally ignore and mentally filter out any advertisements and to easily and accurately discern content from advertising. I surmise that the fraternal ability to this is how well I am able to filter out noises around me when reading or otherwise concentrating on a task.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

In general I care more about the instrumental rather than lyric qualities of the music I listen to (I tend to ignore the lyrics, I know, very shallow). However, for many of the songs I really like, I have found something really deep and special in the lyrics.

Handlebars by Flobots

A recent addition to my list, the song has inspired me with a lot of thoughts about society, government, and the world over the past few months since I first heard the song. Listening to the song is a powerful experience, but I first truly understood it once I watched
the music video.

Everytime We Touch by Cascada

This song is one of my favorites to go crazy to because of its instrumental qualities. It’s “Everytime we Touch,”, what more can be said??

It’s All About The Pentiums by Weird Al Yankovic

It’s me! It’s a funny tech song and I love the somewhat insider nature of the humor and how Weird Al’s parodies are well put together.

99 Red Balloons by Goldfinger

While the picture painted by this song is bleak, this song has always pushed me into a thoughtful state in which I contemplate the nature of the world. This song is really what made me see what a mad world we live in.

You Gotta Tap by Audiobody

Audiobody produces by far my favorite instrumental songs. While You Gotta Tap has some lyrics, to me it’s all about the sound of this song. The band was first introduced to me in the video above – the famous Diet Coke & Mentos experiment. More often than not, when I’m driving home from school alone, I’m jamming out and enjoying being alive to some loud Audiobody.

Mad World by Gary Jules

There are a ton of versions of the song between the original Tears for Fears version, Jules’ cover that he made for inclusion in Donnie Darko, and one of my personal favroties, the 2004 a capella cover by the Yale Whiffenpoofs. Also, I have a powerful conviction that we are truly in a mad world, however much sense we think we see.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

I photoshopped this a few months back….

CCTV: For the Greater Good

Original image source: uniplex.net

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

One of my favorite acronyms must be invoked here: TANSTAAFL – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. There’s a price behind everything, especially in the tech world (and free/open-source software is no exception). I would like to give a shameless plug for donating to FOSS developers and explain the costs behind using the web.

FOSS developers are awesome, awesome people to me. They, for various personal reasons that are often not monetary, spend lots of their time creating, maintaining, and improving the universe of software that is FOSS. They work on projects from operating systems (Linux and Unix) to databases (MySQL, SQLite) to programming languages (Python), PHP, Perl) to web servers (Apache) to web software (Drupal-powers EmeryCentral, Wordpress, phpBB) to word processing (OpenOffice and Abiword) to photo editing (the GIMP). There are FOSS applications in every domain that there is a need in (including niches such as amateur radio). The quality of the work is so good for much of the software that it surpasses anything else produced commercially, and thus the operating system and web server that power most of the Internet and the hardware that runs it (Linux and Apache) are community-built, as well as many of the web software tools that let you utilize the Web. My simple plea is that you occasionally donate $5 here and there to the projects that have allowed the Web to flourish and grow with the freedom and pace that it has.

(Readers familiar with developing and deploying websites should skip ahead)

For anyone who does not know what expenses go into making a website or developing FOSS software (which is done using the Internet to coordinate team members spread all over the globe), this is to give you a basic overview. To have a website, you obviously need a server) connected to the Internet. You will usually pay to have a server located in a datacenter with hundreds or thousands of other servers and powerful air conditioning and multiple redundant power sources and Internet connections, or you may share space on a server with other users using virtualization. Web-hosting space is available from $5 a month upwards, but to have a site support thousands or tens of thousands of views a day quickly becomes expensive because of the amount of work the server needs to do and the amount of bandwidth) that is needed.

To cover expenses that are inevitably incurred, sites (be they homepages for a FOSS project, a blog, a news site, or any other site) will pursue a number of solutions that will be discussed in my next post: advertising and subscription services.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

On September 28 2008 SpaceX’s “Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed launch vehicle to reach Earth orbit from the ground!”. On Wired.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• Interesting statistics on technology usage by college students: 1% have landlines, 99% have Facebooks
• Today is the 25th anniversary of the night when Stanislav Petrov saved the world from nuclear annihilation in the darkest days of the cold war.
• A biologist reviews the new Intelligent Design textbook.
• Mollom, a free (for low usage) service for protecting websites from spam through the combination of content analysis and captchas.
• An analysis of malicious SSH login attempts with some great recommendations on how to best protect your systems.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

I am so damn excited for the future. I look at where we are today with tech, and back into the past at where we came from, and then finally at the ideas incubating in academia and industry, and chills run down my spine at the thought of where we will be in 2, 5, 10, 20 years. My favorite anticipation is of ubiquitous (read: 99% coverage over the continental U.S.), speedy Internet access.

The coolest part of this pervasive access would be that every single device could have network access. Now, I do not envision any desk lamps, microwaves, or washing machines with direct access to this network, but they could (and should!) have access via mesh networking through a gateway of some sort in the home.

The effect of this network omnipresence on media will be massively profound. Yes, the dystopian future of Epic 2015 is a distinct possibility that must be managed, but I think that through proper regulation (by both the government and the people), the advantages of ever-present access far outweigh the horrors. My favorite exception beyond simple global Internet access is the combination of that access with other services such as location through GPS. The iPhone and the Android G1 come closest today to providing the kind of access and services envisioned. Applications beyond those already available on the Internet include those that would take advantage of the built in camera and the location awareness. Viewing media on these rich-content devices will be a pleasure, but producing geotagged media on-the-go through applications that share the information quickly with your contacts and friends for everyone’s furtherance are just awesome.

There are a number of technologies currently in development that could begin the process of truly universal wireless access, including WiMAX and LTE. Both standards are designed to be able to work over a range of frequencies. A particularly valuable piece of the spectrum that companies developing and planning to deploy these standards wish to use is the 700 MHz band (also know as the UHF band). This band is extremely valuable because according to some estimates it would possibly allow for network towers with a range twice that of current cell phone towers (although frequency availability would still be an issue, but still the number of towers needed would be vastly less than is needed with the frequencies currently apportioned to cell phone providers). One other not so new but currently mostly underutilized standard is IPv6, which is needed because otherwise there would not be enough Internet Protocol addresses for every device to have one.

Please also see this alternate viewpoint on why we should fear ubiquitous Web access.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

Hurricane Ike News Coverage Media Analysis. Completed following this assignment prompt for a class I am currently taking on media literacy and new mediums. 

For more analyses, see the Hurricane Ike blog series by Jonathan Coffman, a self-described “social media professional”.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

Meta-Commentary

Source: http://mentalfruition.com/random/bloody_hell.jpg

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

Hurricane Ike is a prime example of the advantages of our ever-increasing interconnectedness through the Internet and wireless services like cell phones (and hopefully eventually, ubiquitous Internet through WiMAX).

Facebook & Twitter

Pre- and post-storm, these three services helped everyone stay connected and informed about each other in ways not possible just a few years ago. The usefulness of Facebook is obvious: the quick and easy way to update your friends about how you are doing (or to complain to your friends around the country) was, and is, to update your Facebook status. Anyone can do this via text messaging from their cell phone, as well as respond to Facebook messages and Wall posts, Many people can browse all of Facebook from their phones, Blackberries, and iPhones too. And, of course, people have slowly regained access to laptops, making updates, and especially checking your friends, as easy as usual.

An especially awesome service that has become hugely popular with the web-savvy crowd has been Twitter. Twitter explains itself best:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Twitter is an example of a Microblogging service. You can update your Twitter account using text messages, their regular and mobile websites, and multiple iPhone applications. My favorite feature is the Twitter Facebook app that automatically changes your Facebook status to your latest Twitter update; both the status and Twitter fulfill the same concept of microblogging, but Twitter is a better-designed service (though oft-plagued with reliability issues). One last cool Twitter feature is that any developer can connect to the software using its API to create cool new services and software such as the Facebook app and their own Twitter search engine. Twitter is a perfect example of a Web 2.0 site.

Texting

Cellphone texting was and is hugely useful during disasters such as Ike. I used it pre- and post-storm to first wish everyone safety, and then after to check in with people. Cellphone companies recommend that during disasters, it is best to use text messages instead of voice to communicate, because otherwise the cell towers become overloaded (It’s not as much of a problem now, a few days after the storm, but I still have been getting more “All circuits are busy, try again later” messages when I try to make calls than I ever have before). AT&T (and the other providers as well I’m sure) sent out public health and safety messages on behalf of government agencies such as the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) reminding people to not use generators indoors and to drink bottled water only. Texting was extremely useful to everyone for person-to-person communication, and with its market penetration, texting really makes the mass dissemination of urgent information in a crisis easier than ever before in history.

A random note: What I found especially intriguing was how for the first 8 hours after the storm, I had better cell service in my house than for the next few days. I think some cell tower sites have backup power supplies or generators that last for the length of most normal power outages, but obviously this storm pushed the backups far beyond the time they would be needed for normally.

Websites & Blogs

For anyone with mobile Internet access, the hands-down, easiest way to stay informed was through the websites of major news channels here in Houston¹. All news sites had mobile versions of their websites set up, and some even offer text message alerts to your phone. Many news channels set up oft-updated (and easily updatable for them) blogs.

1: For more on why the Internet is best, see the “Evaluation” section of my Media Portfolio assignment on Hurricane Ike news coverage

Automated Phone Systems

As all Emery High School students know, automated phone systems are a useful way to notify a large group of people in an emergency about events such as school closures. The EWS website was updated throughout the storm as well. What is notable about phone systems is how today, anyone can set up one of these systems using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and Asterisk (open-source telephony software). Telephony services which used to be the purview of the telephone companies only can now be done by anyone on the cheap. Wow.

Email and other services

Email played a huge role for emergency services in this disaster. Most communications within the emergency management offices, and between themselves and other offices and the media, were done using email. They most likely were not using public Internet access lines, or switched over to as the city lost power, special emergency wireless links. Email is most convenient for the quick dissemination of both time- and non-time-senstive communiques.

One other notable media service was the simulcast of many TV stations’ coverage on FM and AM radio stations. One of the more low-tech, but most reliable, ways to stay informed. Also relevant to a discussion of radio’s role is my aforementioned media portfolio assignment.

Looking Ahead

There will be more disasters. According to many seismologists, California is past due for a large earthquake, and we all know that the hurricanes are relentless. For the next times, for everyone in the country, people need to be more aware of the multitudes of various resources available to them. News stations need to inform viewers in high risk areas; everyone needs to be informed and prepared.

With knowledge of the myriad methods of communication, we can sit secure on the eve of a storm knowing we won’t be subjected to one of our greatest fears: not knowing what’s going on.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

Sorry for the random Dr. Strangelove reference, I just love it too much. Before we get started, here’s a video that will blow your mind – Flobot’s handlebars (on YouTube)! Watch it 2-3 times and look at all of the symbols and the storyline deeply.

Beyond the sites many of us use daily – YouTube, Google, some of us Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Fantasy Sports, and maybe CNN, there are a ton of awesome and useful tools out there on the Interweb. I will catalogue a number of my favorite tools on the net for you and talk about the significance of what I consider the coolest part of Web 2.0: collaboration!

Google docs

Google Docs is a powerful tool for creating and editing text documents, spreadsheets, and slideshow presentations (“Powerpoints”) collaboratively. In this case, collaboratively means that you can edit a document at the same time 1, 2, 3, 5, or 20 other people are! I love using Google Docs for any class project where I need to write something with other people. Of course the web-based document editor doesn’t have anywhere near the power of a computer program on your desktop, it is suitable for 90% or more of a student’s work. The presentation creation features don’t allow for anything near as cool as Keynote does on the Mac transition-wise, but its great for showing a presentation in a pinch like we did in class yesterday. The spreadsheet feature is surprisingly awesome because not only does it support some in-cell functions, but you can even use it to create forms (like a grade survey on where to do prom, or a signup form for who will bring what food to a class party). Other collaborative web-based word processing suites exist. An especially good one with some interesting business tools is Zoho.

Basecamp, Google Sites, Wikispaces

If you need to collaborate on a big (or small) project involving a lot of (or just a few! )documents or todo’s, there are many options on the web. I can highly recommend Basecamp and Google Sites. So far, Wikispaces seems like another powerful and well-built tool as well. Each is suited towards slightly different styles of working and collaborating. Experiment and see which you think will work the best for you. The order of them in the title is a rough spectrum from most to least structured.

digg, reddit, and delicious

I purposely did not capitalize the names because that is how they are written in the sites’ respective logos. These are each examples of quintessential Web 2.0 websites, because they exemplify the social web. These sites depend on their communities of users to define the content on the site. digg and reddit are social news sites where the users submit links to news articles, pictures, and anything else and then vote for which links they like the best. The articles which achieve the most votes the fastest¹ make it to the front page – the users control the content on the site! delicious (officially formerly del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking website where users submit links and tag them. Many users use the site to find articles on particular topics, to find “hot” news articles, or just to organize their own bookmarks better using the tagging features.
1: A highly simplified explanation, they use some complicated alogirthms to prevent gaming of the system.

So why should I care?

You should care because all of these tools will make your life easier at one point or another. You won’t have to drive to a friends house to do a project, or email a document back and forth 30 bajillion times to get something done. You can better manage your college application process, or just finish a group research project with less stress. You can utilize the bored masses on the Internet to find and identify the funniest and best content on the web for you.

All of these tools, and more out there (see the links at the end of this post) allow for totally new methods for the creation, management, discovery, organization, and storage of media. Check them out, they really do make a difference.

A few of my other favorite tools on the web include Google News, Facebook (of course), and Google Reader.

Major shoutouts to Markdown for making the formatting for this easy, and Showdown for turning my Markdown into HTML for Wordpress.

Author’s note: For those of you who are wondering why I combined Web 1.5/2.0 web-based tools and Web 2.0 “social” collaboration in one blog post on seemingly somewhat unrelated sites, it is because everything here does fit the definition of collaborative tool. I do recognize that I might have muddied the waters a bit, but my goal is simply to introduce people to the breadth of the best-of-show tools on the web.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

This will be the first post in a series about web browsers, and will dabble in history and include some usage tips and fun stuff. First up is the new kid on the block, Chrome. 

For anyone who regularly follows tech news on the web, it’s been impossible to miss the madness over the (premature) announcement of Google’s Chrome web browser. I’m not going to repeat any of the facts here (for those, see any of the links at the end of this post). 

What I want to discuss, in compact form, is why this browser is so significant, and where it fits into the plethora of browser options that already exist. Firstly, here is a list of the major browsers for the majority who is unfamiliar with most of these beyond Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari:

Basically, Chrome is a web browser designed for the newest generation of web technologies and the newest websites. It is designed to be speedy and to ensure that the browser itself does not interfere with the user’s browsing.

Simply interesting is how the other features announced for Chrome so far are ideas pioneered by other browsers. From the Opera Browser, comes the “radical” tab and address bar locations and the home tab “speed-dial feature.” From Firefox  comes the “awesome bar.” Also, on the more technical side, both the Chrome and Firefox teams have put huge amounts of work into writing revolutionary Javascript engines for their products (V8 and Spidermonkey). This work is what brings you increased performance when using most modern websites such as Gmail and Facebook. The Google Team does admit that their aim is to take the best of the browsing world and combine into one über-product. 

There is much more to be said, but for now, here are a few good articles on Chrome:

• The comic book used to introduce Chrome
• On Wired
• Chrome can be downloaded here
• On the averted legal crisis
• Mozilla’s view on Chrome (via slashdot)
• Opera’s take on Chrome
• Chrome Pros and Cons

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.