The Liberator Magazine | Blog

Did the Trayvon Martin shooting really take place?

2012-04-18T12:30:00.000-04:00

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

It begins like a scandal. As if a bomb has been dropped on a peaceful, rural setting. In one moment, life as usual; in the next, the resurrection of Jim Crow. The tranquility of yesterday is suddenly pierced by an unthinkable crime. Outrage is seen everywhere. Next come the calls for sobriety and objectivity. The best technologies are implemented to reconstruct the shooting. Massive amounts of speculation and analysis converge on the events. 3-D graphics are used to calculate bullet trajectories. Witnesses are demanded and even if all they have to say is that they heard a gunshot.

Yet none of this has very much to do with serving justice, as it is not the intention of the media to try suspects or protect victims. The media is there to provide entertainment and empty information. This is why—with time—the focus veers away from the concrete to an exultation of the entire situation itself. Proceedings and developments begin tripping over one another as they vie for visibility. The persons involved become stock characters in a melodrama. The passions of the audience are exploited and before long, the underlying issues of racism or criminality become eclipsed by the barrage of information about racism or criminality. The story itself becomes the primary fixation not the issues fueling it similar to when an animal in the path of a speeding car becomes entranced by the luminosity of the headlights, forgetting the reality behind them.

The whole system of news crawls, headlines, 911 tapes, images, interviews, pundits, and protest footage generates a superstructure of confusion. Any conceivability of the original crime becomes ungraspable. A deluge of information yet everything remains tentative and uncertain. We know so much that we know nothing at all. The story exhausts itself; there are no new details, development stalls. The story collapses under its own weight and falls into the sea of the mundane that already surrounds everyday life. It is here that the event loses all significance and becomes merely one more bit of data. Even when the murder is tried successfully in court, the perpetrator found guilty and sentenced accordingly, the implications of the original crime are forgotten. The same is true if the courts fail and let the criminal go free: either we will have already lost all interest or we will riot and then lose all interest. Months later some of us will look back and wonder—did the Trayvon Martin shooting really take place?

Everything is a Remix Part 4 / Intellectual Property: "System Failure"

2012-03-14T04:30:00.000-04:00

Everything is a Remix is a great 4-part series produced by Kirby Ferguson, a New York-based filmmaker, about the nature of creativity. This is the final installment.

Part 4 / System Failure: "Our system of law doesn't acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren't so tidy. They're layered, they’re interwoven, they're tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality... the system starts to fail."

On the value of solitude in 2012

2012-02-17T05:00:00.001-05:00

The Rise of the New Groupthink
(SOURCE: NYTimes)

[...] {related: David Foster Wallace, On Reading}

Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

One explanation for these findings is that introverts are comfortable working alone — and solitude is a catalyst to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, introversion fosters creativity by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.” In other words, a person sitting quietly under a tree in the backyard, while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his head. (Newton was one of the world’s great introverts: William Wordsworth described him as “A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”)

Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence. “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,” Picasso said. A central narrative of many religions is the seeker — Moses, Jesus, Buddha — who goes off by himself and brings profound insights back to the community.

Culturally, we’re often so dazzled by charisma that we overlook the quiet part of the creative process. Consider Apple. In the wake of Steve Jobs’s death, we’ve seen a profusion of myths about the company’s success. Most focus on Mr. Jobs’s supernatural magnetism and tend to ignore the other crucial figure in Apple’s creation: a kindly, introverted engineering wizard, Steve Wozniak, who toiled alone on a beloved invention, the personal computer.

Rewind to March 1975: Mr. Wozniak believes the world would be a better place if everyone had a user-friendly computer. This seems a distant dream — most computers are still the size of minivans, and many times as pricey. But Mr. Wozniak meets a simpatico band of engineers that call themselves the Homebrew Computer Club. The Homebrewers are excited about a primitive new machine called the Altair 8800. Mr. Wozniak is inspired, and immediately begins work on his own magical version of a computer. Three months later, he unveils his amazing creation for his friend, Steve Jobs. Mr. Wozniak wants to give his invention away free, but Mr. Jobs persuades him to co-found Apple Computer.

The story of Apple’s origin speaks to the power of collaboration. Mr. Wozniak wouldn’t have been catalyzed by the Altair but for the kindred spirits of Homebrew. And he’d never have started Apple without Mr. Jobs.

But it’s also a story of solo spirit. If you look at how Mr. Wozniak got the work done — the sheer hard work of creating something from nothing — he did it alone. Late at night, all by himself.

Intentionally so. In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors:

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me ... they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone .... I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

And yet. The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

[...]

SOME teamwork is fine and offers a fun, stimulating, useful way to exchange ideas, manage information and build trust.

But it’s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted. They’re also more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress, the flu and exhaustion. And people whose work is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long to finish it.

[...]

MY point is not that man is an island. Life is meaningless without love, trust and friendship.

And I’m not suggesting that we abolish teamwork. Indeed, recent studies suggest that influential academic work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than by individuals. (Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from separate universities, appear to be the most influential of all.) The problems we face in science, economics and many other fields are more complex than ever before, and we’ll need to stand on one another’s shoulders if we can possibly hope to solve them.

But even if the problems are different, human nature remains the same. And most humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.

To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

Before Mr. Wozniak started Apple, he designed calculators at Hewlett-Packard, a job he loved partly because HP made it easy to chat with his colleagues. Every day at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., management wheeled in doughnuts and coffee, and people could socialize and swap ideas. What distinguished these interactions was how low-key they were. For Mr. Wozniak, collaboration meant the ability to share a doughnut and a brainwave with his laid-back, poorly dressed colleagues — who minded not a whit when he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real work done. (source)

"African Astronomy prior to European colonization" / Dr. Thebe Medupe

2012-02-10T05:00:00.000-05:00

Info: "Dr. Thebe Medupe, South African Astronomical Observatory. In a journey that has stretched from the coastline of Namibia to the steamy jungles of Ghana, across crocodile infested lakes and the deserts of Northern Kenya, the cliff-side dwellings of the Dogon in Mali and onto the mysterious archaeological sites of the Egyptian Sahara, this lecture (and the film Cosmic Africa / purchase here) explores Africa's ancient astronomical history. By shedding new light on traditional African astronomy, and in turn global understanding of the world's oldest science, acclaimed African astronomer, Dr Thebe Medupe of the South African Astronomical Observatory, will look at celestial beliefs from different parts of the African continent and how some of these ancient African perceptions link with current scientific knowledge." (source)

The strange fruit in Georgia tonight / "More macabre than anything on tv"

2011-09-22T00:01:00.000-04:00

"I regard it as a legalized lynching ... first of all Mr. Davis, very bravely, in the morally upright fashion he's always conducted himself with around me, said to them, without equivocation, that he didn't kill officer MacPhail ... he didn't even have a gun on him ... and had nothing to do with officer MacPhail's death ... that he urged people to go deeper into this case ... so they can see two things ... that Troy Davis did not kill officer MacPhail ... but that he wants folks to ... bring about the end of the death penalty ... It's worse than any film experience, more macabre than anything on tv."
-Mr. Davis' lawyer

"Troy Davis maintains his innocence in his last statement before execution"
-Washington Post

The scene was both "macabre" and "grotesque" just two and a half years after the stunning video of Oscar Grant being killed in Oakland, both because of the action being carried out and the spectacle made of it. As Amy Goodman reported "live from death row" I couldn't help but think of Grant. This, the antithesis to Jay-Z's 31st century futuristic fly shit.

RELATED on liberatormag.com
Eden Jeffries / "Sow Seeds, Of Strange Fruit" [ode]

"Troy Davis, I have been where you are"
-Lawrence Hayes, Saved from death row, used to do drops on drug spots in his neighborhood

"This is DemocracyNow. DemocracyNow.org."
-Amy Goodman (live at DemocracyNow.org)

"We are believe in America. We believe in the justice system ... We are a praying people ... and we're so grateful tonight."
-Roslyn Brock, NAACP Chairwoman, Response after an early rumor was circulated that Davis was granted a stay of execution

"The coroner's van will be coming out shortly ... media will be able to move up and get video of that van."
-Prison official announcing the 11:08 pm death of Troy Davis

"Everyday we lose people in it, but we stay committed to the spirit of a country that says no one like Troy Davis is gonna happen again ... Look at the kind of human they killed. It will be one of those spirits that we talk about for the rest of our lives ... as we move toward, not only the total abolition of the death penalty, but also to an America we can believe in as far as human rights ... I had stayed away from ... If you see how grotesque this gets, I don't even think Rick Perry would want to attest to a sight like this ... the lawyers shouldn't put that on themselves, but on the system ... I think we should not look at this as the death of the truth ... we cannot honor him if we let people forget about him ... he will usher in a new stage in the abolition movement ... people, including his family, with continue fighting forever ... this is an abolition of something evil, like slavery ... that cannot be defended in any way shape or form ... Capital punishment is usually on page 30 ... I think it's a grotesque act that we invite people in to see this ... I think the Supreme Court wanted to come out of this looking as if this was something so evil that they had to take time out to consider it finally."
-Amnesty International spokesman, Post-execution interview on Democracy Now

Thank you very much, as we go out with Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit". [Thanks news team], and all the folks that made this broadcast possible. I'm Amy Goodman, live from death row in Jackson, Georgia [fade to Ms. Holiday].
-Amy Goodman

"Digital Age Drives Rally to Keep a Georgia Inmate From Execution"
-NY Times

"everybody know niggas aint gon do SHIT but complain about this troy davis shit on twitter..no protests, no riots. RFT"
-@Wooaahh_Dere

"This Troy Davis story is so sad.. There will def b some riots cuz people r furious."
-@TheReal_Lori

"Creativity isn't magic" / Kirby Ferguson's Everything Is A Remix [film]

2011-09-15T12:01:00.000-04:00

Everything is a Remix is a great 4-part series produced by Kirby Ferguson, a New York-based filmmaker, about the nature of creativity. The final installment is due this fall. The beauty to me, by the way, is discovering (and appreciating) the magic of the non-magic.

Part 1: The Song Remains The Same / Remixing is a folk art but the techniques are the same ones used at any level of creation: copy, transform, and combine. You could even say that everything is a remix.

Part 2: Remix Inc. / An exploration of the remix techniques involved in producing films. Part Two of a four-part series.

Part 3: The Elements Of Creativity / Creativity isn't magic. Part three of this four-part series explores how innovations truly happen.

Botched paramilitary police raids: An epidemic of 'isolated incidents' / Cato Institute report + Google Maps refutes notion that Aiyana Stanley-Jones case was an aberration

2011-08-15T13:01:00.002-04:00

This map from the CATO Institute -- a part of their research project "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America" -- illustrates the combined power of reporting and data visualization. It also highlights a truly disturbing trend -- the increasing militarization of the police force in this country and also refutes the notion that tragedies such as the case of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, a seven-year-old girl who was killed during a SWAT raid on her home in Detroit last year are aberrations.

Cato Institute Uses Google Maps to Show Botched SWAT Raids
(SOURCE: Fast Company)

The Cato Institute has put together something it calls a Raid Map, using Google Maps to show all the paramilitary raids done by government agencies that haven't quite worked out the way they should have. Or, as the Cato Institute puts it, "botched." The different colored pins signify different ways each raid went wrong, from the deaths of officers and innocents, through mistaken identity, to overuse of force, and you can isolate the data by state, year and type of cock-up, should you so wish. "Defenders of SWAT teams and paramilitary tactics say such incidents are rare," says the Institute. "The map below aims to refute that notion" -- as do the recently reported, tragic shooting deaths of a 7-year-old girl in Detroit and this guy's dog. Just think how much more refuting the map could have done had they opened it up to crowdsourcing. (source)

"If a widespread pattern of [knock-and-announce] violations were shown ... there would be reason for grave concern."
-Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy (Hudson v. Michigan; June 15, 2006)

Robots of Brixton / "The 1981 South London riots but through the eyes of robots some 70 years later" [short]

2011-07-27T12:01:00.002-04:00

This rich, conceptual animation from architectural student Kibwe Tavares reimagines the 1981 riots in the Brixton neighborhood of South London, but through the eyes of robots some 70 years later. The film reminded me of a documentary by the Black Audio Film Collective, Handsworth Songs, that also uses archival news footage from the riots to paint an image of struggle, memory and conflict in Britain in the 80s in Afro-Caribbean communities.

Creative Statement:
Brixton has degenerated into a disregarded area inhabited by London's new robot workforce - robots built and designed to carry out all of the tasks which humans are no longer inclined to do. The mechanical population of Brixton has rocketed, resulting in unplanned, cheap and quick additions to the skyline.

The film follows the trials and tribulations of young robots surviving at the sharp end of inner city life, living the predictable existence of a populous hemmed in by poverty, disillusionment and mass unemployment. When the Police invade the one space which the robots can call their own, the fierce and strained relationship between the two sides explodes into an outbreak of violence echoing that of 1981.

Songhai: Sustainability for Africa

2010-11-21T12:01:00.009-05:00

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

When I heard about media producers Bruktawit Tigabu (Ethiopia) & Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu (Nigeria) recently I immediately thought about Songhai Center in Benin as well as the United African Alliance Community Center in Tanzania, which we've already covered. I realized our mistake in that we hadn't yet dedicated a space here to share what Songhai is all about. Let's set the record straighter. While the previously profiled UAACC is a broadly focused educational project with radio stations and music production studios, Songhai Center, founded by a Father Godfrey Nzamujo (a black Dominican priest), is strictly about sustainable agriculture and technology. Together, these two community based organizations have the complimentary DNA fundamentals of a true African renaissance; UAACC is the "liberal arts University" to Songhai's "institute of agriculture and technology".

Songhai is a land-based organization in Benin, West Africa whose stated mission is to: "Aspire to develop alternatives allowing Africans to stand on their feet through agricultural entrepreneurship, in an integrated development framework enhancing agriculture, industry and services. This development is centered, above all, on human development, the realization of local resources and the appropriation of foreign techniques and technologies."

Below is a three-part documentary that demonstrates some of the fundamental concepts and aims of the Songhai Center.

In summer 2003, Design that Matters and four members of the MIT Kinkajou design team conducted an extensive field study in Mali and Benin. The objectives of this study were to broaden their network of collaborators among local communities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), [and] test a prototype educational tool developed by the student team... These notes show two things: One, they illustrate the sophistication of Songhai; Two, they illustrate the great opportunity being taken advantage of by MIT but not, say, Howard University, Florida Agricultural And Mechanical University, or Tuskegee University. Here are some excerpts from the MIT team's observations on Songhai:

From the Songhai website: "The Centre Songhai is principally involved in agricultural training, research, and production for sustainable livelihood in Africa. Founded... in 1985, the Center has been managed by Africans since then. The Center's aim is to create the conditions for improving the lives of Africans, the great majority of whom live in rural areas.

"Centre Songhai is a world leader in innovative development programs, including integrated farming, biomass gasification, microenterprise and IT for rural communities. Father Nzamujo, the 1993 Africa Prize Laureate, is a visionary and an inspiring educator. Songhai has established partnerships and student exchange programs with a number of US universities (Wake Forest, SUNY-Oswego, Colorado State) and has close ties with universities and technical schools across Africa.

"Songhai's headquarters are at Porto-Novo in the Republic of Benin. Songhai's partnership now extends to organizations in Europe, America, Asia, and Africa. Songhai promotes agricultural entrepreneurship among the youth in Africa. This is done within an environment where appropriate and positive human values are regarded as essential elements. These young africans are trained to become responsible citizens in their communities; socio-economic entrepreneurs, men and women with initiative and creativity, ready and able to meet the social and economic challenges of the future. This means that, in addition to the knowledge and skills our students acquire at the Center, we also train them to develop a strong desire for change and for a better life. Songhai's training model for human development can be adopted and applied in any part of the world."

[...] At this morning's meeting with Songhai director Frere Nzamujo, in addition to the Kinkajou and various other potential DtM projects, we discussed potential applications for Light Up the World's one-watt LED lamps. Rural community lighting is the most obvious application, and Songhai does work with solar lighting systems for their training centers in regions not connected to the grid. A less obvious application, and the one that was the most immediately compelling to Fr. Nzamujo, was the use of LUTW lamps in Songhai's fish and poultry hatcheries. A reliable source of low-power lighting would allow them to increase the growth rates of fish larvae, and would encourage their chicken to lay more eggs. The fact that an LED bulb has an average lifespan of 20,000 hours--that's almost three years of continuous use--made it an attractive alternative to incandescents and fluorescents.

[...] We left three LUTW lamp sets with Fr. Nzamujo for testing in their hatcheries. They are looking forward to contacting David Irvine-Halliday and his colleagues at LUTW, and they have promised to send us details and data from their various test installations on the farm.

[...] Centre Songhai was a gold mine for potential DtM design challenges. They also have the facilities and trained staff necessary to build and test many existing DtM prototypes. Finally, they have an extensive network of collaborators both with in West Africa and abroad, with whom they can exchange ideas and disseminate successful new designs.

[...] We collected a trunk-load of preliminary data on a number of potential DtM design challenges, including this prototype palm nut shelling machine, based on a Nigerian design and currently in development at the Centre.

[...] Fr. Nzamujo also asked DtM to look into continuing the development of a low-cost reduction gear for their various agricultural-processing equipment. Shown below is an expensive reduction gearbox imported from the US, alongside a less expensive gear set built at Songhai, made from a gearbox salvaged from a Peugeot 504.

[...] According to Nzamujo and the staff at Centre Songhai, the toughest problems--"casse-têtes" or literally head-breakers--also involve agricultural production. Songhai is committed to developing methods for micro-production of agricultural goods, in other words, tools for adding value to the raw produce of rural agriculture. These include shelling machines, peeling machines, juice-making machines, seed presses, cotton separators, coffee roasting machines, etc. The idea is to allow rural communities to capture more of the value of the goods they produce, and also to reduce their vulnerability to fluxuations in the international prices for raw goods.

[...] For example, in terms of a specific project, both Centre Songhai and MVV in Kemon are looking for machines to shell both sunflower seeds and sesame seeds. In both cases, there is currently no alternative to the current system of small-scale local production in the village which involves laboriously shelling both kinds of seeds by hand. Sunflower oil in particular is a nutritious and valuable commodity. Presses for the shelled seeds exist; a shelling machine would be an invaluable complement.

[...] Another specific project is a machine to peel manioc (cassava), a starchy tuber grown throughout the tropics as a food staple. Maniocs come in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes; as with sunflower seeds, the only means of peeling the stuff at the village level is by hand.

[...] Given that the Centre Songhai is well served with electrical outlets, and many of the offices have computers, the trainees were initially skeptical of the the Kinkajou [projector's] utility. Early recommendations included adding the ability to play video cassettes and computer files.

[...] Bill arrived ten or fifteen minutes into the demonstration, and pointed out that the Kinkajou would be a useful training tool for two Songhai centers in northern Benin, and their outreach programs in local villages. The discussion then moved onto more technical aspects of power requirements and the possibility of local manufacture.

[...] This morning, we met with Songhai director Frere Nzamujo and Léonce Sessou, the head of communications. They were impressed with the rugged design, and the fact that the projected image was still visible on the wall of Nzamujo's office, even though it was still pretty bright in the room with all the daylight coming through the blinds. They are interested in running a pilot test with the projector at their rural training centers in northern Benin and Nigeria. These discussions will continue via email once we get back to the US. (source)

Monty Python on hospital birthing

2010-11-20T12:01:00.002-05:00

This clip appeared the same year of my birth (1983). It is a satire of modern birth by comedy troupe Monty Python from "The Meaning of Life". When a friend sent it to me earlier this week, I immediately thought about my own childbirth and my mom's decision to refuse an epidural and pitocen. It was her (successful) attempt (sans laying on her back) to have a natural birth in an environment hostile to that idea. Anywho, this is the best satire of modern birth that I have encountered. As the person who sent it to me stated, "it would be funny were it not so true... and things have only gotten worse since then!"

Chamillionaire on technology, authenticity and failure

2010-10-30T12:01:00.083-04:00

Apparently, Chamillionaire has been making the rounds at tech meetings and conferences captivating audiences with his stories and ideas of his entrepreneurship and how he is navigating this music industry and trying to give his fans what they want. Here is an interesting interview he did with "This Week in Venture Capital", with a summary reprinted in Fast Company.

What Tech Entrepreneurs Could Learn From Chamillionaire
(Source: Fast Company)

"A lot of people do what they have to do. You want to get yourself to a position where you can do what you want to do."
-Chamillionaire

Last night I co-hosted a dinner at Soho House in Los Angeles with some of the most senior people in the media industry with executives from Disney, Fox, Warner, media agencies and many promising tech & media startup CEO's. The topic was "the future of television & the digital living room."

With all of the knowledge in the room the person who stole the night wasn't even on a panel. I had called on Chamillionaire from the audience and asked him to provide some views on how artists view social media, why they use it and where it's heading. He was riveting.

He stood up, grabbed the mic and gave a heartfelt overview of his experiences in experimenting with new technologies to build relationships with his audience, get feedback on his product quality, and to market his music all the way to the top of iTunes. To stay the crowed was "wowed" was an understatement. He received that only round of applause of the evening.

While many were floored by his insights, I wasn't in the slightest. I've known Chamillionaire for a couple of years and I've never been at a tech event where he HASN'T upstaged everybody with his marketing insights.

So it was my great pleasure to host Chamillionaire on This Week in VC this week talking marketing, entrepreneurship, old media and, of course, music. We also talked about getting more young African Americans interested in entrepreneurship & technology. I hope many of you can take the time to watch the interview--I promise he doesn't disappoint. You can click the image above or this link.

Here are some take away's:

1. On failure, trial-and-error & confidence

He did a lot of experimenting early in his career. As a teenager he experimented with writing & producing his own rap music and received a lot of feedback from elders that he had a talent with words.

He began producing and selling "mixtapes" of his music. He studied the errors that other people had made and tried to improve on them. He made many of his own mistakes. But he was street smart and hustled. He started selling the mixtapes out of his trunk and even gave away some of his music. He wanted to create awareness for himself to generate marketing buzz and demand and then get the retail stores to pay wholesales prices for his cds.

"All the failures that people get so scared of is what I did. It made me confident about what would work. Confidence doesn't come from being a 'know-it-all,' it's because I've done this 10 times already."

What things did he experiment in the early days when there was no Facebook, Twitter or even MySpace to promote oneself? He used online services such as SHOUTcast, which was online radio that allowed him to play his own songs, interrupt a song, do a commercial break and connect with fans. [It sort of reminds me of the new generation of innovation that is happening around user-controlled terrestrial & Internet station Jelli.]

2. Authenticity

I asked Chamillionaire why he thinks he connects so much with people at tech conferences. How does he always wow a usually skeptical crowd? He said that he finds that people here are often speaking in big words or jargon--and that doesn't connect with a lot of people. Cham studied early in his career how to hold the microphone, how to project his voice, how to watch the audience and pay attention to what interested them.

He said that he noticed a lot of tech entrepreneurs don't speak into the mic, don't project their voices with confidence and aren't necessarily paying attention to the mood or energy of the audience. I had written a blog post on exactly this--how to not suck at group presentations--and what he said reminded me a lot of this post.

3. Marketing Innovation

Too many entrepreneurs are great product or technology people and lack the knowledge, skills or even desire to figure out how to market their products or themselves cleverly. Some other entrepreneurs who went down the MBA, consulting or banking routes without working at a startup are certainly book smart but haven't always refined the street-smart skills needed to be an effective entrepreneur.

Chamillionaire has tried so many marketing angles that when new technologies emerge he has a strong sense on how to use them to best marketing himself and his business. In his early career he realized the importance of email lists. He would do anything he could to capture people's email addresses because he knew that they served as a valuable tool for future marketing purposes.

His email list became his power. He would occasionally give away free music in exchange for email addresses. He created his own domain and gave out email address with the name@chamillionaire.com nomenclature. This was in the 90′s. It created viral buzz because other fans saw the email address and wanted to know how they got it. He was trailblazing.

He would try initiatives like announcing that a new cd was going to drop at new year's. He had a website and put up a timer / countdown for the new year's release. People would then call stores and ask if they had his album. He would get a call from the stores asking about a new album coming out. He created demand. Sometimes he didn't even have the product when he announced it but the hype would get him focused on what he had to produce.

There are many analogies here for software development. I often tell teams that you need to create product deadlines that are semi-public (or maybe board commitments) that help you focus on shipping product. You may have to cut scope but nothing gets you more focused and the creative juices flowing than a deadline staring you in the face.

Businesses like TopSpin Media now professionalize campaigns for musicians to capture email addresses, build social-media audiences and sell products directly to consumers (and many other artist-to-fan direct initiatives). Cham learned this on his own because he had to--he didn't have a label. So when Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Ustream and other social websites became popular he has ideas for how to use them to authentically build a relationship with his audience.

4. Customer Feedback

Chamillionaire regularly seeks public feedback from his fan base. In the early days that was from releasing mixtapes. More recently it has been by putting free early releases of songs for free on Twitter. He said that the labels have a standard marketing plan that they say has worked in the past for other musicians. Cham is very skeptical of the one-size-fits-all approach

He said he learned what his fans wanted through the trial and error process.

"Not everything works for everybody. I tested so many things to see what works. Labels just had a marketing plan for everybody. but it didn't work for everybody--it was just a plan ..."

What is good? There are a million opinions about what is good. I just wanted to know what people wanted to hear from ME."

5. Raising Capital

The VC equivalent for musicians is getting signed by a major label. I have always told entrepreneurs that to get VC interest you need scarcity value (in addition to a great product). People want what they can't have and VCs are no different. The most potent entrepreneur is the one that doesn't NEED your money.

So cheeky Chamillionaire went to Universal wearing the tags from every other label he had visited. While this blunt approach wouldn't work with VCs a more subtle version actually does. What Cham said to Universal in his initial meeting was that he wasn't wearing all of the other label tags just to rub them in Universal's face, he wanted to make a statement:

"I just want you to know that I'm perfectly comfortable leaving here without a deal."

6. On JFDI (play on Just Do It)

Chamillionaire talked a lot about social media. We talked initially about ustream [10]. The labels said he could do live streaming himself but they didn't want him to stream any music or videos since ustream wasn't paying them. Reminds me of how the networks today announced they were blocking their video content from being shown on Google TV [11]. Universal tried to push him to another site that had cut a deal with the label. He was frustrated because he wanted to be where the fans were:

"I was just trying to give the fans what they wanted and what they wanted was ustream."

He did it anyways and didn't ask for permission. By putting up his music free on ustream he ended up driving his song to the number one spot on iTunes (which obviously generates money).

"It would be successful and after it was successful nobody would say anything."

This was obviously music to my ears since my personal philosophy that I've written about is "it's better to beg for forgiving than to ask for permission."

7. On What Next?

First, Chamillionaire is up front about the fact that he is trying to get out of the label contract he has with Universal and he's holding back from producing music until he does. He said that most artists "chase checks" and he actually wants to do what's right for his audience. He says that labels impede on your creativity, don't allow experimentation and flexibility. He's holding back for now, but he's clearly studying what's going on in technology

"I look at Zynga and all the games they have and how addicting it is and I think "there's got to be a way to connect. A way to do music this way."

We also spoke a lot about "free" as a metaphor to build future value. He spoke about his Grammy-winning song Ridin'(as in Ridin' Dirty) and how the labels wanted to extend life of song by getting somebody famous to remix the song. Cham had other ideas. He got people to do bootlegged mixtapes in new york, france and new zealand. He wanted to be bootlegged even more. The song spread globally.

He was fine with the bootleg--it helped build and audience and helped him globalize. It allowed him to do big shows down the line in places like Norway & Dubai. Anyone who knows the industry knows that artists make way more money by performing and selling merchandise than off of their albums (where the studio prevails). So it was almost like Chamillionaire already knew the Zynga model--give away the game and sell other things. He actually did it before Zynga was huge.

I told you this guy was smart.

"I can do so much more than rap with the rest of my life. there's so much more in this world. I know that young people who look up to me are watching a show like this and they're paying attention. I want to start feeding this stuff out so that the younger generation will start getting it and paying attention to this stuff " [technology, marketing, business].

"I'm learning so much, I'm so advanced--ahead of so many other people, I don't know a better way to serve my music [than by mastering technology]. I study it every day."

8. On African American Youth?

Chamillionaire would like to see more young, urban, african americans aspire to things other than basketball or rap.

"They're trained to think that it's "the only way out."

It bothers him. He wants people to know that it's cool to be knowledgeable about business and technology.

"Technology is power. It's so hard to do it in an over-saturated rap market. I just want to do the right thing and tell young people straight what they need to do."

"They say the 'game is to be sold and not to be told.' Well I just 'tell it.' If you're a young & up and coming rapper and you don't know what tunecore is--you should know it."

"The future of the world is in the palm of the tech community."

(source)

The Psychology of Cyberspace

2010-10-25T12:01:00.002-04:00

I've always looked at the Internet with ambivalence. On one hand, I see the Internet as an amazing tool for research, outreach and entertainment. Nothing in the history of mankind has offered us such a comprehensive portal for communication and knowledge as the Internet. Before it, I found information exclusively through books like almanacs, encyclopedias, and the like. Once I got my first 56K modem, I was immersed in mining all of the hidden information and openness the Internet has to offer.

Soon though, it seemed that a sort of monopoly was occurring as social interaction migrated to sites like Facebook and website searches were filtered by Google. I started to feel that not only was it going to take more effort to surf the net "freely" but also that the Internet was becoming a more dominant force in my life. Checking emails several times a day, looking at photo albums of "friends" whom I hadn't contacted in years (or even gotten to know very well, for that matter). There was also the idea that my ability to concentrate was being affected. The speed with which I was able to browse different pages without much dedication surprised me and so I went hunting (i.e., googling) for some sort of answer to this mild paranoia. What I found was an online book called The Psychology of Cyberspace by John Suler (companion site).

The Psychology of Cyberspace (2004) is one of those sites that hearkens back to the "medieval" times of the Internet -- before Wikipedia -- when you'd find a highly informative page that was virtually all words; no pictures, no videos, no advertisements, just good old-fashioned "sharing". The sight is actually an online book that seeks to demystify the Internet and account for the effects of its presence. There are chapters on "Addiction to Computers and Cyberspace", "Personality Types in Cyberspace", "Hypotheses on Online Text Relationships", even "Online Gender Switching" and much, much more. A favorite chapter of mine is the "Online Disinhibition Effect" which deals with users' sense of anonymity and invisibility and even the notion that we create online personalities that may conflict with our "real" selves.

At this point, I think anyone who's been using the Internet for the last 5-10 years will have thought about at least some of the topics that are covered on the site. It's a very comprehensive study that may give us some insight into what the Internet might be doing to human psychology.

From DNA test to African citizenship

2010-10-23T12:01:00.001-04:00

Earlier this year a friend and I were sitting in her kitchen in Cape Town talking about DNA testing. She asked why Black Americans feel the need to find out what country in Africa we're from. She felt that wherever you're born is where you're from. I didn't understand how she didn't understand but I guess just like schools in the states hardly mention Africa, most schools in Africa aren't teaching about the long-lasting effects of the Atlantic slave trade. We all have a lot to learn about each other. This article made me think of that conversation. It's good to see the diaspora (re)connecting.

Reclaiming the Middle Passage: Isaiah Washington becomes first to use DNA Testing to gain Citizenship to an African Nation (Sierra Leone)

(Source: Sweet Sierra Leone)

26 April 2010

Earlier today American actor Isaiah Washington held back tears of joy as he became the first to use DNA testing to gain citizenship to a nation in Africa. Mr. Washington explained that since the young age of 9, he had long dreamed of one day discovering his African past. Before today's official ceremony Isaiah had been adopted into a mende family back in 2006 and the title chief GondoBay Manga bestowed upon him. He started a foundation that bears his mende name and they recently completed a school project for over 200 students.

In his acceptance speech Isaiah spoke of a burning desire to positively represent Sierra Leone and to contribute to the nation's development. He thanked his wife and three children who could not be with him at the ceremony. He also thanked his mother for having passed on her DNA therefore allowing him to trace his temne/mende roots. While he doesn't think that change will happen overnight Isaiah believes that Sierra Leone is well on its way to reclaiming its past glory as the Athens of West Africa.

Also present at the Citizenship Ceremony was the Minster of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Internal Affairs, the Vice President, the Mayor of Freetown and several Parliamentarians and Chiefs. A production team from the California based African Channel was on hand to document Isaiah Washington's life long journey to find his ancestry.

When asked if he was aware of other African Americans who had taken the DNA tests with links to Sierra Leone, he mentioned the likes of Maya Angelou, and Rev. Jesse Jackson. When I asked if he had heard of the rumor that first lady Michele Obama was also of Sierra Leonean ancestry, he smiled, stating that if that were so that it would be most incredible to have the first black first lady be of our ancestry.
Isaiah Washington shares Joseph Opala's beliefs that the majority of African Americans in the United States, particularly those from the rice plantations in the Gullahs and elsewhere in the south could be 95% if not 100% Sierra Leonean ancestry. Finally when asked if he had any political aspirations in Sierra Leone, he expressed that his interest lay only in national development, and sent a special Independence message to Sierra Leoneans saying "Ah know say man dem noh gladi, but ah day try for make dem gladi". I couldn't help but smile. (source)

The power of Visual Thinking

2010-10-15T12:01:00.005-04:00

Info graphics have become particularly popular these days as a way of educating the public about particular issues, both complex and simple. Using pictorial language to communicate certainly is not a contemporary innovation. (There is a good book review over at kintespace of Afrikan Alphabets that goes way deeper than what this dude is speaking of) I, personally, love words, text and typography. Texts can be powerful both formally and conceptually. But, graphics can be incredibly useful in describing or breaking down issues for a mass audience or as a way of working through solutions in a more visual and accessible way. Not all people are visual thinkers, so this method of communication will fall short for some. It's an interesting article, nothing too new, but it got me thinking about the history of writing systems and language and the complexity with which those systems addressed broader principles than simply a form of communication.

Clive Thompson on the Power of Visual Thinking
Source: Wired Magazine

When I went online to shop for a laptop this summer, I faced a blizzard of choices. Was an ultralight worth the price, or would a heavier model do? Did I need a big screen, or would it make the computer a pain to lug around? As I flipped from page to page reading screenfuls of specs, the options baffled me. So I picked up a different thinking tool: a crayon.

Using one of my son’s Crayolas, I drew doodles of all the laptops and covered them with little icons depicting the pros, cons, and cost of each. When I stood back and looked at the pictures, the answer leaped out. I could now “see” at a glance which deal best fit my needs and pocketbook (13-inch MacBook Pro with 8 gigs of RAM).

In essence, I used “visual thinking”—drawing pictures to solve a problem. And if you believe the visualization experts, a new language of pictures may be precisely what we need to tackle the world’s biggest challenges.

My crayon experiment was inspired by Dan Roam, a visual-thinking guru and author of The Back of the Napkin. Roam argues that our culture relies too heavily on words: Our school systems—and political systems—are designed to promote people who are verbal and eloquent. And text tends to encourage us to describe our problems as narratives or linear lists of facts.

But dynamic, complicated problems—like global warming and economic reform—often can’t be boiled down to simple narratives. They’re systems; they have many little parts affecting one another. In those situations, drawing a picture can clarify what’s going on. “Words,” Roam says, “won’t save us.”

For example, during the health care debate, President Obama couldn’t seem to communicate how the heck reform would work, no matter how many speeches he gave.

So Roam drew a series of witty napkin pictures illustrating the relationships between various health care players—doctors, insurers, patients—which he sketched on either side of a seesaw to show that what benefits one often hurts the other. Within a few weeks, nearly 300,000 people had viewed the images; many emailed Roam thanking him for finally explaining the reform. (Even members of Obama’s staff called, asking for help with future communications.)

“If you want everyone to have the same mental model of a problem, the fastest way to do it is with a picture,” says David Sibbet, a visualization expert who has spent the past three decades consulting for large firms. He often works as a “keynote listener,” sitting in on meetings and drawing infographics to depict the issues raised. These images provoke aha moments far more often than typed or verbal summaries.

Unfortunately, picture-drawing is considered childish, which is partly why visual thinking has taken a backseat to verbal agility. But that may be changing, because the Internet has boosted the utility of imagery.

Consider the Google Maps mashups that highlight patterns in neighborhood crime or political donations, or the explosion of online animations that dissect public affairs (like the series RSA Animate). Even humor these days regularly employs visual tools, such as the charts at GraphJam or the satirical flowcharts in this very magazine.

But if we really want to unlock visual thinking, our digital tools have to evolve; they’re still too dominated by the keyboard. We need iPad-like surfaces the size of posters so we can sketch out concepts, share them with others, and mull them over until patterns emerge. The computer got us this far; the crayon might get us even further. (source)

Facebook in real life [video]

2010-09-13T12:01:00.004-04:00

{via _Max-B}

I'm still cracking up over this sketch that took on Twitter. This is the Facebook version.

David Foster Wallace: on Reading

2010-09-12T12:01:00.003-04:00

"Reading requires sitting alone by yourself in a quiet room... I have friends -- intelligent friends -- who don't like to read because they get, it's not just bored, there's an almost dread that comes up I think, here, about having to be alone and in having to be quiet and you see that when you walk into most public spaces in America it isn't quiet anymore, they pipe music through... it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet --ever -- any more..."

I came across this interesting bit from famed author David Foster Wallace after reading one of his (long) essays entitled E Unibus Pluram: Television and American Fiction wherein he meditates on the difficulty (if not the impossibility) that fiction writers have when it comes to competing with television in the attempt to entertain/stimulate/etc. American audiences.

In the video, he discusses the distaste many Americans have for reading "serious" works of literature as opposed to more "commercial" books.

DFW wrote two novels, The Broom and the System (1987) which was was a mild success and Infinite Jest (1996) which has pretty much been elevated to "Great American Novel" status. The second book is a 1,079 page (including footnotes) giant of what can briefly be described as meticulous and grandiose writing.

Sadly, DFW committed suicide in 2008, but a posthumous novel entitled The Pale King is due out some time soon.

Decentralize: Facebook alternatives

2010-08-05T00:01:00.027-04:00

Now that Facebook is seeing some backlash from it's privacy policies, a number of folks are racing to create a sort 'anti-facebook' platform that will supposedly protect your private information while giving users within their social groups or 'cells' ultimate control. Diaspora is one such platform to arise and has gotten attention because of the over $200,000 the four developers have raised on Kickstarter.

It will be interesting to see if these smaller platforms will be able to carve out a niche of users or if they we will simply become in engulfed in the media machine they are trying to combat. It seems though, that no matter how much folks complain about Facebook, we still use it. Because if you're willing to give a little something up to the interweb, it still can be a useful tool if you're intentional about it.

Better Than Facebook? Fed up with Facebook's commercialism, four NYU students have created an open source, peer-to-peer alternative: Diaspora.

(SOURCE: Yes! Magazine)

We’ve known all along that Facebook was more of a commercial machine committed to corporate advertisers than a benign platform that respects individual users. The problem was, most of our friends and acquaintances were already on Facebook. The site has lots of cool features, and there was no serious alternative to migrate to.

But, as Facebook's appetite for maximum profits kicked in, we knew there would eventually be a reckoning. The uprising began when Facebook instituted a new set of changes that make it harder and more confusing to protect your personal information on the site. Users had to opt-out of the default policy—which granted Facebook generous access to your data—rather than a more reasonable opt-in policy.

Then there were the site’s privacy policy statement. At 5,830 words, the Facebook policy is thousands of words longer than those of Flickr, Twitter and MySpace. And if you really want to protect your personal information, it’s been pointed out, you have to wade through 50 settings with more than 170 options. It didn’t help that founder Mark Zuckerman was openly disdainful of the very idea of personal privacy. [ARTICLE CONTINUES...]

"Rocks of Ages" / An interview on crystals and energy with Ras Ben

2010-06-11T08:10:00.005-04:00

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

{image via Flickr}

An Interview with Ras Ben, author of Rocks of Ages and Rocks of Ages: Anu Edition
by Stephanie Joy Tisdale

Liberator Magazine: When did you discover crystals? How did you begin to learn about them and what has been the most interesting part of your journey?

Initially, I was taken hostage by the mineral nation because it was never my intention nor in my wildest imagination that I would work with crystals and sacred stones. When my Queen and I met, we were into vegetarianism. We were vegetarian caterers working with an elder named Kibwe Bey. There was another elder in town -- Washington, DC -- named Jertha Love who was a spiritual leader in the community. Jertha Love was hosting a spiritual retreat that involved a series of workshops, and the participants were fasting for the duration of the retreat. The final workshop was on crystals. After the crystal workshop, they were going to break their fast and they asked us to do the food. So while we were there preparing the meal, they said come and sit in on the last workshop. Now, the retreat was outside of DC out in the elements. And I have always been a woodsman and like to be in the elements. I was really taking this as an opportunity to be in the woods. I wasn’t trying to be inside listening to someone talk. But the elders insisted. So I sat there, and it was interesting, but it didn’t really grab me. But at the end of the session, the elders’ wife, Jertha Love’s queen, had us circle up and she shared a powerful prayer -– asking that the mineral nation come into all of our lives and work with us. And about 6 months later, I caught what my Queen calls "crystal mania".

I was dreaming about crystals, all of my money was going into crystals, and it was creating imbalance in my life. So I said, I kinda need to flip this around; so I started selling crystals as a way of making money -- a little hustle to make some money so I could get the crystals that I wanted. And what I came across was that there was a great not-knowing about crystals in our community. And this was in the 80’s when the whole New Age thing, Shirley McClain and all of that was going on. So, one day, I was vending at African Liberation Day and this brethren came up to my table and asked "What’s this got to do with Black People? What’s this got to do with I-n-I?" And you know what, I didn’t have nothing to tell him. I didn’t have anything to say. You know, I was vibing on the stones, I really liked them and had to have them, but I didn’t have anything to say. So I said "wow, I got to do some ra-search". So I did, and I started making little flyers "Crystals in Ancient Egypt", "Crystals in the Bible", "Crystals and Melanin". And within a year, I ended up with maybe 15 flyers on crystals and different subjects as they relate to I-n-I as a people. And one day someone came up to my table and they read all my literature and they said "You should write a book my brother." And I said "you know what, I am." And that was all the inspiration I needed. And I did, it was an 8-year project. I started in 1992, and the 1st edition of Rocks of Ages came forth May 5th, 2000. An expanded Anu Edition came forth October 13, 2008.

Liberator Magazine: What are the main differences between your first book and this one? Is the first book a prerequisite for this one?

The 1st Rocks of Ages’ title is a play on words -– evoking the spiritual stability of the song Rock of Ages while surveying the use of crystals and sacred stones throughout the ages. Anu edition builds on this, but carries it a little further by exploring the nature and structure of time itself -- the Ages according to the Anu. The Anu are Africa’s primordial ancestors that seeded high-cultures throughout Earth. The progenitors of monolithic and megalithic architecture, hieroglyphic writing, agriculture and other legacies of culture left a very important contribution for this time -- intricate calendar systems. According to ancestral traditions and cultural cosmology, what time is it? How can we align ourselves with the flow of space-time now? Rocks of Ages: Anu Edition addresses these important questions by exploring the time keeping systems of the Ancient Kemites, Maya/Olmec, Dogon, Zulu and other Anu cultures. The 1st Rocks of Ages is not a pre-requisite; everything in the 1st edition is in Anu Edition, plus more. It is Anu Edition for Anu Age.

Liberator Magazine: What are some of the things that people should know about crystals but don't?

A crystal is any material that has an organized molecular structure. Matter comes together in one of two basic ways: amorphous (random, chaotic molecular configuration) or crystalline (organized, patterned molecular configuration). Take water for example. It can freeze as either ice (amorphous) or a snowflake (crystalline). The organized molecular pattern of the frozen snowflake displays a beautiful symmetry, balance, and complex organization. So, crystals tend to be natural embodiments of beauty and natural (divine) order, known by we as Maat. But what is more important is that organized molecular structures tend to have energy potential. That means that crystals tend to be able to super-conduct, conduct, semi-conduct, resonate, generate, or transform various frequencies within the electro-magnetic spectrum. All modern technologies are based on the energy potential of crystals. For example, quartz crystal semi-conducts power frequencies (electricity); this energy potential is used to express the binary code at the heart of all computer processing. Ruby crystals organize light rays into a coherent beam. This energy potential is used to make lasers found in CD and DVD players. Quartz crystal is a resonator of radio frequencies; this energy potential is used in all broadcast communication including cell phones, radio, and television. The quartz in the receiving device can be set to resonate at a specific frequency that allows it to tune into a specific station or receive a call without interference from other calls.

Liberator Magazine: How important is crystal science to the everyday life of an African person? What are some everyday life realities that it addresses? What illnesses, mental or emotional challenges and other issues does it address?

We use crystal technology everyday living in modern Babylon, but we don’t recognize it as such. Now, just as Babylon takes whole grain wheat and "enriches" it, making it a disease-producing non-food called "white flour" -- just as Babylon takes the iron and zinc-rich super nutritious sugar-cane and "refines" it to make a toxic drug called "white sugar"; so too does Babylon take nature’s crystals and "refine" them into the modern technological gadgets I just mentioned earlier. But just as we should eat whole grain and avoid enriched wheat products; just as we should sweeten life with agave nectar and avoid refined sugar, so too should we use crystals in their natural state and avoid technologized crystals. "Technologized" crystals tend to emit harmful radiations that disrupt our internal frequencies and cellular energy systems, causing a wide range of issues. Too much cell phone, computer, TV, radio vibes can cause headaches, confusion, stress, depression, and autoimmune issues, even cancer. And mother earth produces a crystal that in its natural state is a perfect counter-balance for several maladies facing humanity in this time, particularly the ones mentioned.

Liberator Magazine: What are those who have not incorporated the use of crystals in their lives missing out on? How would you suggest one begin their personal journey into this?

The greatest gift the mineral nation has to offer is a strong inner knowing, a strong intuition. If you see a crystal, and you have no idea what it is, maybe just know its name. But you may have an unexplainable attraction to it. Go for it. Get it. And you may be inspired to do something with it, like putting it under your pillow or wearing it in your head wrap; lying it across your heart or place it in a particular corner of your house. Go for it. Do it. Because more than likely you will get a favorable response. Insight into a particular challenge may be gained; painful emotions may be released; blockages preventing prosperity may be banished. So you receive a double blessing -– the crystal energy harmonized your energy, but beyond that you may learn to trust that inner-voice more. The opportunity for you to go into yourself, tune into the stone, and have the divine intelligence of creation speak to you on how to best use that stone is a great way to connect with the divine inside. And why that is important is because these are the final times. We have to be in tune, when that voice says come, we must come. Our connection with our 1st mind has to be so strong in these times. Or our ancestral mind, so when they say something in our heavens, we have to have such clear inner-communication, that when we get that message to do what we got to do, we do it without 2nd thought. And working with the crystals is one of the best ways to tap that inner knowing.

Liberator Magazine: As a father, husband, educator and African man in America you have to face unique challenges. How has your journey through these sciences impacted the roles that you play in your life? How might they influence African men in America in particular? What are your suggestions for ways that Brothers who are dealing with severe oppression in America can incorporate these insights?

Know this: everything in creation -– from the most-subtle energy to the densest form of matter -– everything is ultimately a vibrational frequency. So we live in a omniverse where everything is vibrating energy. A key to gain self-determination and mastery of one’s destiny is to gain control of the vibrational frequencies within ourselves as well as within our environment. Biblical scripture tells us that this is not a battle of flesh and blood (a physical battle) but of spiritual (vibrational) wickedness in high and low places. So we must gain control of our vibes. Once we do this, we can summon the protection we need; we can attract the prosperity we need; we can have mastery over our thoughts, emotions, words and actions and counter-act the remote-control reactions Babylon has programmed into us that tend to leave us economically disempowered with broken families and feeling oppressed. In nature, God created three things that seem to have tremendous power over vibes and energy. One is chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is a green pigment found in plants that has the ability to take solar radiations and transform it into food and nutrition for the plant. Another thing is melanin. Melanin is a golden, brown, or black pigment found in humans. Melanin is to the human as chlorophyll is to the plant. Melanin has the ability to take solar radiation, sound frequencies, and other forms of energy and transform it into food and nutrition for the body. The third thing in nature is quartz crystal. Chlorophyll is to the plant as melanin is to the human as quartz crystal is to the entire planet. I’ve already mentioned some of the energy potential of quartz. The more we work with chlorophyll by eating phyto-nutrients from plants; the more we empower our melanin by reestablishing a sacred relationship with the Sun; the more we work with sacred quartz from the earth, the more empowered we will be to control our vibes and master self-determination.

Liberator Magazine: What other cultural groups utilize crystals? What relationship does this science have with ancient/modern Africa?

The ancient Kemites literally adorned themselves from head-to-toe with crystal. Crowns of nobility often had crown jewels of malachite, lapis lazuli, azurite, and meteorites. Sandals often had carnelian buckles. Sacred Stones were an intricate part of priestly initiation as chronicled in the Kemetic Book of Coming forth by Day (Book of the Dead). Biblically, sacred stones can be found from Genesis to revelation; starting with the breastplate of Moses adorned with 12 sacred stones in a circuit of gold with meteorite shoulder buckles. The Ark of the Covenant actually contained a powerful meteorite that was the "Covenant" stone (Bet-el/Betyl) of Israel, comparable to the Black Stone at the heart of the Ka’aba in Mecca -- the covenant stone of Islam. Fast-forward to Revelations, which opens (2nd chapter) with "The Prophecy of the White Stone" and later depicts the New Jerusalem as a city made of 12 sacred stones with pearly gates. The kingdom of the Ba’kongo in the Kongo river basin also worked extensively with sacred stones. They had an intricate science of making n’kisi –- talismans and amulets made with crystals to invoke healing, protective powers. Many Africans-in-America have this ancestral connection of sacred stones through their Ba’kongo lineage. This is what Rocks of Ages is about. Exploring these traditions in-depth to awaken these ancestral connections.

Google as Photographer [visual art]

2009-12-07T23:43:00.001-05:00

So, somebody thought that it would be a cool idea to go through Google's Street View feature to see which captures were the most eye-catching, and create a collection out of it.

Here's a link to a gallery of some of the images Jon Rafman curated. Of his collection and overall process, he writes:

"One year ago, I started collecting screen captures of Google Street Views from a range of Street View blogs and through my own hunting. This essay illustrates how my Street View collections reflect the excitement of exploring this new, virtual world. The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I acknowledge that this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering.

Street View collections represent our experience of the modern world, and in particular, the tension they express between our uncaring, indifferent universe and our search for connectedness and significance. A critical analysis of Google’s depiction of experience, however, requires a critical look at Google itself.

Initially, I was attracted to the noisy amateur aesthetic of the raw images. Street Views evoked an urgency I felt was present in earlier street photography. With its supposedly neutral gaze, the Street View photography had a spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer. It was tempting to see the images as a neutral and privileged representation of reality—as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social context other than geospatial contiguity, were able to perform true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions.

The way Google Street View records physical space restored the appropriate balance between photographer and subject. It allowed photography to accomplish what culture critic and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer viewed as its mission: “to represent significant aspects of physical reality without trying to overwhelm that reality so that the raw material focused upon is both left intact and made transparent.”

This infinitely rich mine of material afforded my practice the extraordinary opportunity to explore, interpret, and curate a new world in a new way. To a certain extent, the aesthetic considerations that form the basis of my choices in different collections vary. For example, some selections are influenced by my knowledge of photographic history and allude to older photographic styles, whereas other selections, such as those representing Google’s depiction of modern experience, incorporate critical aesthetic theory. But throughout, I pay careful attention to the formal aspects of color and composition.

Within the panoramas, I can locate images of gritty urban life reminiscent of hard-boiled American street photography. Or, if I prefer, I can find images of rural Americana that recall photography commissioned by the Farm Securities Administration during the depression.

I can seek out postcard-perfect shots that capture what Cartier-Bresson titled “the decisive moment,” as if I were a photojournalist responding instantaneously to an emerging event.

Other times, I have been mesmerized by the sense of nostalgia, yearning, and loss in these images—qualities that evoke old family snapshots.

I can also choose to be a landscape photographer and meditate on the multitude of visual possibilities.

Or I can search for passing scenes that remind me of one of Jeff Wall’s staged tableaux.

Although Street View stills may exhibit a variety of styles, their mode of production -- an automated camera shot from a height of eight feet from the middle of the street and always bearing the imprimatur of Google—nonetheless limits and defines their visual aesthetic. The blurring of faces, the unique digital texture, and the warped sense of depth resulting from the panoramic view are all particular to Street View’s visual grammar.

Many features within the captures, such as the visible Google copyright and the directional compass arrows, continually point us to how the images are produced. For me, this frankness about how the scenes are captured enhances, rather than destroys the thrill of the present instant projected on the image.

Although Google’s photography is obtained through an automated and programmed camera, the viewer interprets the images. This method of photographing, artless and indifferent, does not remove our tendency to see intention and purpose in images.

This very way of recording our world, this tension between an automated camera and a human who seeks meaning, reflects our modern experience. As social beings we want to matter and we want to matter to someone, we want to count and be counted, but loneliness and anonymity are more often our plight.

But Google does not necessarily impose their organization of experience on us; rather, their means of recording may manifest how we already structure our experience.

Street Views can suggest what it feels like when scenes are connected primarily by geographic contiguity as opposed to human bonds.

A street view image can give us a sense of what it feels like to have everything recorded, but no particular significance accorded to anything.

These collections seek to convey contemporary experience as represented by Google Street View. We are bombarded by fragmentary impressions and overwhelmed with data, but we often see too much and register nothing. In the past, religion and ideologies often provided a framework to order our experience; now, Google has laid an imperial claim to organize information for us. Sergey Brin and Larry Page have compared their search engines to the mind of God and proclaimed as their corporate motto, “do no evil.”

Although the Google search engine may be seen as benevolent, Google Street Views present a universe observed by the detached gaze of an indifferent Being. Its cameras witness but do not act in history. For all Google cares, the world could be absent of moral dimension.

The collections of Street Views both celebrate and critique the current world. To deny Google’s power over framing our perceptions would be delusional, but the curator, in seeking out frames within these frames, reminds us of our humanity. The artist/curator, in reasserting the significance of the human gaze within Street View, recognizes the pain and disempowerment in being declared insignificant. The artist/curator challenges Google’s imperial claims and questions the company’s right to be the only one framing our cognitions and perceptions." (source)

Ebooks, piracy, and mass education

2009-11-21T02:37:00.000-05:00

Will local libraries be forced to revolutionize themselves to survive? Will your friends be able to email you every book you ever wanted? Will books become more affordable than ever?

My attitude towards [ereaders and ebooks] has been changing recently as I've thought about the possibility of them helping make books more accessible. Of course for traditional publishers, especially small ones, this has all sorts of scary connotations. But if ereaders make it easier to share a copy of [Revolutionary Suicide] with my homie, and make it more convenient for him to actually read, should we be mad?

There's been [a lot of talk] about Digital Rights Management technology, but it seems inevitable that, given a handful of years, that will prove futile. It looks like the PDF format is primed to become the MP3 of books; such a widely used format for presentation text that it will be impossible to control. Given that ereaders view PDF files just fine, it's no surprise that most pirated books are in PDF format.

The wack-a-mole analogy seems accurate to me. Try to stop some internet community from sharing a book and ten more communities will probably make it available. No wonder two of President Obama's most historic appointments are going to be his [Copyright Czar] and [Cybersecurity Czar].

Remember that scene in The Matrix where we first see Neo (aka Mr. Thomas A. Anderson) making a sort of "e-drug" deal, exchanging a disk for "two grand"? In the real world they say "knowledge is power"; those disks Neo was slangin might symbolize it pretty soon.

(SOURCE: New York Times) With E-Readers Comes Wider Piracy of Books: Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction writer, was perusing the Web site Scribd last month when she came across digital copies of some books that seemed quite familiar to her. No wonder. She wrote them, including a free-for-the-taking copy of one of her most enduring novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”

Neither Ms. Le Guin nor her publisher had authorized the electronic editions. To Ms. Le Guin, it was a rude introduction to the quietly proliferating problem of digital piracy in the literary world. “I thought, who do these people think they are?” Ms. Le Guin said. “Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?”

This would all sound familiar to filmmakers and musicians who fought similar battles — with varying degrees of success — over the last decade. But to authors and their publishers in the age of Kindle, it’s new and frightening territory.

For a while now, determined readers have been able to sniff out errant digital copies of titles as varied as the “Harry Potter” series and best sellers by Stephen King and John Grisham. But some publishers say the problem has ballooned in recent months as an expanding appetite for e-books has spawned a bumper crop of pirated editions on Web sites like Scribd and Wattpad, and on file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire.

“It’s exponentially up,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, whose Little, Brown division publishes the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer, a favorite among digital pirates. “Our legal department is spending an ever-increasing time policing sites where copyrighted material is being presented.” (continue reading)

Google Voice invites

2009-10-14T19:05:00.005-04:00

{via Google Images}

I have some [Google Voice] invites available for regular Liberator blog commenters (I know who you are). Drop a comment if you'd like one. I'm still a little creeped out about having a huge archive of text and voicemail messages, so I delete most of mine. But aside from that, GV has been a great tool in helping me keep my communication organized, especially since [I gave up] on carrying a super phone on my hip.

@ Face[book]

2009-09-21T08:34:00.011-04:00

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

@ Face[book]: This has been on my mind for a while. Facebook has totally changed my life. It's part shrine, part totem, part communion, part vanity. What's funny is that there are so many focused, amazing people that I know who refer to the changes in their facebook status updates like they are the focal point of their day. What's also funny is, at times, I am one of these people.

Here's the thing: We don't do it in person. We're not necessarily attention starved, we tend to be very busy individuals with plenty on our to-do lists. Nonetheless, our FB updates and uploads are a focal point of our day.

I remember a time when I didn't have an e-mail address or even a cell phone. I graduated high school having only used my e-mail sparingly. By the time I started school in 2001, I was just getting more comfortable using the computer and frequenting my email (since this seemed like a more popular mode of communication).

By the time I started Facebook, it was awesome. I got a chance to connect with people that I might not see or hear from otherwise. But I also gained an opportunity to indulge in some self-affirmation too. A lot of it. At first, it was innocent...a mobile upload here, a comment there. But now, now its just as routine as checking my e-mail. My status updates? Hopefully profound quotes that will go down in the history of me-isms.

A shrine, indeed. To myself but also to others: family, friends and various inspirations.

Not long ago I contemplated deleting my page. I still think it might be necessary but something also makes me think I'd be losing my connection to other people, artificial or otherwise.

I'm thinking Facebook is more like online reality show. I get to observe the interesting happenings in the lives of those around me. During the wee hours of the morning, In a car ride after Live From Planet Earth in Brooklyn, we laughed and joked about the nuances of Facebook. The constant changes and the little things we get to observe.

Some of the most brilliant people that I know still mention their Facebook updates in conversation: "Yeah, because like on my Facebook status I wrote...did you see it?" As though missing these anecdotes means I missed some profound aspect of their existence. And maybe I did, who knows.

Either way, the fact that so much focus and energy is put into these musings, comments on the pages of others, relationship status and the like is definitely a phenomenon in and of itself.

I'm not sure what it all means but I can admit that I continue to divulge unnecessary information, share personal experiences with the whole wide web, and peek nosily into the life and times of many distant associates who are my Facebook friends.

Second Skin. Escaping reality... [film]

2009-09-16T23:10:00.006-04:00

WHY?: The trailer for this new film looks interesting. It's about folks who play ["massively multiplayer online games"] (MMOG). Just so happens the whole thing is up on [Ninjavideo]. Trailer after the break.

Every issue of Jet on Google Books

2009-09-15T15:46:00.005-04:00

Yes, you heard that correctly: http://links.liberatormagazine.com/jet

WHY?: There are the immediate questions regarding Google taking over the world, and our history in the process. For today, however, I'll leave those questions for tomorrow and enjoy this huge chunk of John H. Johnson's body of work.

Spreading "Jelly"

2009-08-25T16:54:00.005-04:00

{via Flickr}

{throwback | liberatormagazine.com}

A couple of weeks ago, NPR Morning Edition highlighted "Jelly", a semi-weekly gathering of freelancers of various ilk (graphic designers, web developers, photographers, musicians) at someone's house to work on different projects together. Since freelancers usually work from home, Jelly offers them the social interaction they'd get at a typical work place without the stress and monotony of reporting to an office every day.

When I heard about Jelly, it reminded me of the idea of mobilization vs. organization. Although the idea of gathering at someone's house to engage each other in meaningful dialog is nothing new, maybe it's something we need to bring back. A good example of this is the Jena 6 case.

Yes, it's nice that thousands of people showed up to rally in Jena, La. this weekend and that the rally sparked memories of and comparisons to the civil rights marches and rallies of the 1960s. But I wonder how many of them would be willing to meet regularly to discuss how to keep this issue and many, many others (taxes, health care, police brutality, Iraq, living wages, fallout from Hurricane Katrina, take your pick) that affect our livelihoods in the public consciousness? How many of those people would be willing to meet with people in their communities, to come up with effective ways to imbue their communities with real political staying power? To do all this without the fervor of a large crowd, without the presence of news reporters, photographers, videographers and some so-called Black Leader sermonizing (or as my dad would put it, "speechifying") on the mount?

Maybe our dear Liberator readers could start hosting semi-weekly or monthly Liberator "Jellys" (Jams? Preserves?) in their cities in the vein of true organization, so that mobilization, while important, isn't our only means of flexing our collective political muscle.

Kenya telecom wants to require SIM registration.

2009-07-16T16:08:00.004-04:00

WHY?: Do we want to allow global corporations to control the freedom of African communications? Much of Africa has already leapfrogged the west in terms of adopting new communications technology (from hardly any phones to almost everyone with a cell phone, without even going through the phase of land lines America had to go through). There is absolutely no evidence that suggests allowing unregistered SIM cards contributes to higher crime rates over time. Most Africans I know want the freedom to take a SIM out of one phone and put it in another without any hassle whatsoever.

Phoenix use iphone as drum machine.

2009-07-09T11:39:00.006-04:00

WHY?: Whether or not you're a fan of Phoenix, if you're a fan of music you'll probably appreciate seeing an iphone used as a drum machine in a live studio session.

Challenges to modern writing + publishing

2009-06-08T15:07:00.006-04:00

{via Flickr}

(SOURCE: Wired) Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature: 1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot. 2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow. 3. Intellectual property systems failing. 4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized. [...]

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.

13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.

15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.

16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.

17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast. (source)

Homeless and connected.

2009-06-01T14:47:00.009-04:00

(WSJ) Like most San Franciscans, Charles Pitts is wired. Mr. Pitts, who is 37 years old, has accounts on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. He runs an Internet forum on Yahoo, reads news online and keeps in touch with friends via email. The tough part is managing this digital lifestyle from his residence under a highway bridge.

"You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper," says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. "But you need the Internet."

Mr. Pitts's experience shows how deeply computers and the Internet have permeated society. A few years ago, some people were worrying that a "digital divide" would separate technology haves and have-nots. The poorest lack the means to buy computers and Web access. Still, in America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses.

New York City has put 42 computers in five of the nine shelters it operates and plans to wire the other four this year. Roughly half of another 190 shelters in the city offer computer access. The executive director of a San Francisco nonprofit group, Central City Hospitality House, estimates that half the visitors to its new eight-computer drop-in center are homeless; demand for computer time is so great that users are limited to 30 minutes.

Shelter attendants say the number of laptop-toting overnight visitors, while small, is growing. SF Homeless, a two-year-old Internet forum, has 140 members. It posts schedules for public-housing meetings and news from similar groups in New Mexico, Arizona and Connecticut. And it has a blog with online polls about shelter life.

Cheap computers and free Internet access fuel the phenomenon. So does an increasingly computer-savvy population. Many job and housing applications must be submitted online. Some homeless advocates say the economic downturn is pushing more of the wired middle class on to the streets.

Aspiring computer programmer Paul Weston, 29, says his Macintosh PowerBook has been a "lifeboat" since he was laid off from his job as a hotel clerk in December and moved to a shelter. Sitting in a Whole Foods store with free wireless access, Mr. Weston searches for work and writes a computer program he hopes to sell eventually. He has emailed city officials to press for better shelter conditions.

Lisa Stringer, who runs a program that teaches job and computer skills to homeless and low-income residents, says some students who can't even read or write save money to buy computers at Goodwill. "It's really a symbol in today's society of being OK and connected," she says. She sometimes urges homeless students to put off buying laptops until their living situations stabilize.

Staying wired on the streets takes determination. Electricity and Internet access can be hard to come by. Threats, including rain and theft, are a problem.

Robert Livingston, 49, has carried his Asus netbook everywhere since losing his apartment in December. A meticulous man who spends some of his $59 monthly welfare check on haircuts, Mr. Livingston says he quit a security-guard job late last year, then couldn't find another when the economy tanked.

When he realized he would be homeless, Mr. Livingston bought a sturdy backpack to store his gear, a padlock for his footlocker at the shelter and a $25 annual premium Flickr account to display the digital photos he takes.

One recent morning, Mr. Livingston sat in a cafe that sometimes lets customers tap its wireless connection, and shows off his personal home page, featuring links for Chinese-language lessons.

Mr. Livingston says his computer helps him feel more connected and human. "It's frightening to be homeless," he says. "When I'm on here, I'm equal to everybody else."

For Skip Schreiber, 64, an amateur philosopher with wispy white hair who lives in a van, power is the biggest challenge to staying wired. Mr. Schreiber tended heating and ventilation systems before work-related stress and depression sidelined him around 15 years ago, he says.

For his 60th birthday, he dipped into his monthly disability check to buy a laptop, connected it to his car battery, and taught himself to use it. "I liked the concept of the Internet," says Mr. Schreiber, "this unlimited source of opinion and thought."

Mr. Schreiber later switched to a Mac because it uses less juice. He keeps the fan and wireless antenna off when possible and cools the laptop by putting it on a damp washcloth. He says that by using such tricks, he can keep the laptop battery going for 16 hours, if he avoids videos.

In the van, stacked with toolboxes, electric gear and bedding, Mr. Schreiber shows the contents of his laptop, including the complete California legal code and files on thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to the psychologist Philip Zimbardo. Mr. Schreiber says writings about human behavior and motivation help make sense of what has happened to him.

"No one creates themselves as a homeless person," he says. "We make the choices we can with what we're offered."

Michael Ross creates his own electricity, with a gas generator perched outside his yellow-and-blue tent. For a year, Mr. Ross has stood guard at a parking lot for construction equipment, under a deal with the owner. Mr. Ross figures he has been homeless for about 15 years, surviving on his Army pension.

Inside the tent, the taciturn 50-year-old has an HP laptop with a 17-inch screen and 320 gigabytes of data storage, as well as four extra hard drives that can hold another 1,000 gigabytes, the equivalent of 200 DVDs. Mr. Ross loves movies. He rents some from Netflix and Blockbuster online and downloads others over an Ethernet connection at the San Francisco public library.

One evening recently, Mr. Ross lay down on his sleeping bag and watched an X-Men cartoon on the laptop, listening through headphones over the roar of the generator. When he travels downtown, he takes all the gear with him for safekeeping. His backpack bulges with cords and bubble-wrapped electronic gadgets. Mr. Ross says he doesn't notice the weight.

Mr. Pitts, the poet who lives under a bridge, keeps a mental list of spots to charge batteries and go online, including a deserted corner of a downtown train station and wired cafes whose owners don't mind long stays and lots of bags.

When he was evicted from his apartment two years ago, Mr. Pitts says, "I thought: My existence and my life don't stop because I don't have a place to live."

He bought a Toshiba laptop. When it died, he bought a used Dell. Last month, that one expired, too, with a cracked screen. Now he checks email and posts to his Internet forum on homeless issues, from computers at libraries, college campuses and a laptop stashed behind the counter of a coffee shop by a friend.

Before the Dalai Lama visited a soup kitchen here a month ago, Mr. Pitts researched the Buddhist leader on Wikipedia and copied the text onto his iPod, to read in bed under the bridge. "I'm under my blanket, under a tarp, reading Dalai Lama this, Dalai Lama that," he says.

Mr. Pitts expects to soon scrape up the money for another computer. He figures he can get one for less than $200. (source)

New socialism?: global collective society.

2009-05-26T17:32:00.007-04:00

"Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods."

(Wired) Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort of communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.

Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright license and the rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are two more steps in this shift. Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine have added weight to this great upheaval. Nearly every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to harness community action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.

We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there's rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it's not unreasonable to call that socialism.

In the late '90s, activist, provocateur, and aging hippy John Barlow began calling this drift, somewhat tongue in cheek, "dot-communism." He defined it as a "workforce composed entirely of free agents," a decentralized gift or barter economy where there is no property and where technological architecture defines the political space. He was right on the virtual money. But there is one way in which socialism is the wrong word for what is happening: It is not an ideology. It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation. It is a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.

In his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody, media theorist Clay Shirky suggests a useful hierarchy for sorting through these new social arrangements. Groups of people start off simply sharing and then progress to cooperation, collaboration, and finally collectivism. At each step, the amount of coordination increases. A survey of the online landscape reveals ample evidence of this phenomenon.

I. SHARING

The online masses have an incredible willingness to share. The number of personal photos posted on Facebook and MySpace is astronomical, but it's a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of photos taken with a digital camera are shared in some fashion. Then there are status updates, map locations, half-thoughts posted online. Add to this the 6 billion videos served by YouTube each month in the US alone and the millions of fan-created stories deposited on fanfic sites. The list of sharing organizations is almost endless: Yelp for reviews, Loopt for locations, Delicious for bookmarks.

Sharing is the mildest form of socialism, but it serves as the foundation for higher levels of communal engagement.

II. COOPERATION

When individuals work together toward a large-scale goal, it produces results that emerge at the group level. Not only have amateurs shared more than 3 billion photos on Flickr, but they have tagged them with categories, labels, and keywords. Others in the community cull the pictures into sets. The popularity of Creative Commons licensing means that communally, if not outright communistically, your picture is my picture. Anyone can use a photo, just as a communard might use the community wheelbarrow. I don't have to shoot yet another photo of the Eiffel Tower, since the community can provide a better one than I can take myself.

Thousands of aggregator sites employ the same social dynamic for threefold benefit. First, the technology aids users directly, letting them tag, bookmark, rank, and archive for their own use. Second, other users benefit from an individual's tags, bookmarks, and so on. And this, in turn, often creates additional value that can come only from the group as a whole. For instance, tagged snapshots of the same scene from different angles can be assembled into a stunning 3-D rendering of the location. (Check out Microsoft's Photosynth.) In a curious way, this proposition exceeds the socialist promise of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" because it betters what you contribute and delivers more than you need.

Community aggregators can unleash astonishing power. Sites like Digg and Reddit, which let users vote on the Web links they display most prominently, can steer public conversation as much as newspapers or TV networks. (Full disclosure: Reddit is owned by Wired's parent company, Condé Nast.) Serious contributors to these sites put in far more energy than they could ever get in return, but they keep contributing in part because of the cultural power these instruments wield. A contributor's influence extends way beyond a lone vote, and the community's collective influence can be far out of proportion to the number of contributors. That is the whole point of social institutions—the sum outperforms the parts. Traditional socialism aimed to ramp up this dynamic via the state. Now, decoupled from government and hooked into the global digital matrix, this elusive force operates at a larger scale than ever before.

III. COLLABORATION

Organized collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements of ad hoc cooperation. Just look at any of hundreds of open source software projects, such as the Apache Web server. In these endeavors, finely tuned communal tools generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousands of members. In contrast to casual cooperation, collaboration on large, complex projects tends to bring the participants only indirect benefits, since each member of the group interacts with only a small part of the end product. An enthusiast may spend months writing code for a subroutine when the program's full utility is several years away. In fact, the work-reward ratio is so out of kilter from a free-market perspective—the workers do immense amounts of high-market-value work without being paid—that these collaborative efforts make no sense within capitalism.

Adding to the economic dissonance, we've become accustomed to enjoying the products of these collaborations free of charge. Instead of money, the peer producers who create the stuff gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction, and experience. Not only is the product free, it can be copied freely and used as the basis for new products. Alternative schemes for managing intellectual property, including Creative Commons and the GNU licenses, were invented to ensure these "frees."

Of course, there's nothing particularly socialistic about collaboration per se. But the tools of online collaboration support a communal style of production that shuns capitalistic investors and keeps ownership in the hands of the workers, and to some extent those of the consuming masses.

IV. COLLECTIVISM

While cooperation can write an encyclopedia, no one is held responsible if the community fails to reach consensus, and lack of agreement doesn't endanger the enterprise as a whole. The aim of a collective, however, is to engineer a system where self-directed peers take responsibility for critical processes and where difficult decisions, such as sorting out priorities, are decided by all participants. Throughout history, hundreds of small-scale collectivist groups have tried this operating system. The results have not been encouraging, even setting aside Jim Jones and the Manson family.

Indeed, a close examination of the governing kernel of, say, Wikipedia, Linux, or OpenOffice shows that these efforts are further from the collectivist ideal than appears from the outside. While millions of writers contribute to Wikipedia, a smaller number of editors (around 1,500) are responsible for the majority of the editing. Ditto for collectives that write code. A vast army of contributions is managed by a much smaller group of coordinators. As Mitch Kapor, founding chair of the Mozilla open source code factory, observed, "Inside every working anarchy, there's an old-boy network."

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some types of collectives benefit from hierarchy while others are hurt by it. Platforms like the Internet and Facebook, or democracy—which are intended to serve as a substrate for producing goods and delivering services—benefit from being as nonhierarchical as possible, minimizing barriers to entry and distributing rights and responsibilities equally. When powerful actors appear, the entire fabric suffers. On the other hand, organizations built to create products often need strong leaders and hierarchies arranged around time scales: One level focuses on hourly needs, another on the next five years.

In the past, constructing an organization that exploited hierarchy yet maximized collectivism was nearly impossible. Now digital networking provides the necessary infrastructure. The Net empowers product-focused organizations to function collectively while keeping the hierarchy from fully taking over. The organization behind MySQL, an open source database, is not romantically nonhierarchical, but it is far more collectivist than Oracle. Likewise, Wikipedia is not a bastion of equality, but it is vastly more collectivist than the Encyclopædia Britannica. The elite core we find at the heart of online collectives is actually a sign that stateless socialism can work on a grand scale.

Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities socialize some resources and individualize others. Most free-market economies have socialized education, and even extremely socialized societies allow some private property.

Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, it can be seen as a cultural OS that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of communitarian technology is this: to maximize both individual autonomy and the power of people working together. Thus, digital socialism can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates.

The notion of a third way is echoed by Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who has probably thought more than anyone else about the politics of networks. "I see the emergence of social production and peer production as an alternative to both state-based and market-based closed, proprietary systems," he says, noting that these activities "can enhance creativity, productivity, and freedom." The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.

Hybrid systems that blend market and nonmarket mechanisms are not new. For decades, researchers have studied the decentralized, socialized production methods of northern Italian and Basque industrial co-ops, in which employees are owners, selecting management and limiting profit distribution, independent of state control. But only since the arrival of low-cost, instantaneous, ubiquitous collaboration has it been possible to migrate the core of those ideas into diverse new realms, like writing enterprise software or reference books.

The dream is to scale up this third way beyond local experiments. How large? Ohloh, a company that tracks the open source industry, lists roughly 250,000 people working on an amazing 275,000 projects. That's almost the size of General Motors' workforce. That is an awful lot of people working for free, even if they're not full-time. Imagine if all the employees of GM weren't paid yet continued to produce automobiles!

So far, the biggest efforts are open source projects, and the largest of them, such as Apache, manage several hundred contributors—about the size of a village. One study estimates that 60,000 man-years of work have poured into last year's release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have proof that self-assembly and the dynamics of sharing can govern a project on the scale of a decentralized town or village.

Of course, the total census of participants in online collective work is far greater. YouTube claims some 350 million monthly visitors. Nearly 10 million registered users have contributed to Wikipedia, 160,000 of whom are designated active. More than 35 million folks have posted and tagged more than 3 billion photos and videos on Flickr. Yahoo hosts 7.8 million groups focused on every possible subject. Google has 3.9 million.

These numbers still fall short of a nation. They may not even cross the threshold of mainstream (although if YouTube isn't mainstream, what is?). But clearly the population that lives with socialized media is significant. The number of people who make things for free, share things for free, use things for free, belong to collective software farms, work on projects that require communal decisions, or experience the benefits of decentralized socialism has reached millions and counting. Revolutions have grown out of much smaller numbers.

On the face of it, one might expect a lot of political posturing from folks who are constructing an alternative to capitalism and corporatism. But the coders, hackers, and programmers who design sharing tools don't think of themselves as revolutionaries. No new political party is being organized in conference rooms—at least, not in the US. (In Sweden, the Pirate Party formed on a platform of file-sharing. It won a paltry 0.63 percent of votes in the 2006 national election.)

Indeed, the leaders of the new socialism are extremely pragmatic. A survey of 2,784 open source developers explored their motivations. The most common was "to learn and develop new skills." That's practical. One academic put it this way (paraphrasing): The major reason for working on free stuff is to improve my own damn software. Basically, overt politics is not practical enough.

But the rest of us may not be politically immune to the rising tide of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collectivism. For the first time in years, the s-word is being uttered by TV pundits and in national newsmagazines as a force in US politics. Obviously, the trend toward nationalizing hunks of industry, instituting national health care, and jump-starting job creation with tax money isn't wholly due to techno-socialism. But the last election demonstrated the power of a decentralized, webified base with digital collaboration at its core. The more we benefit from such collaboration, the more open we become to socialist institutions in government. The coercive, soul-smashing system of North Korea is dead; the future is a hybrid that takes cues from both Wikipedia and the moderate socialism of Sweden.

How close to a noncapitalistic, open source, peer-production society can this movement take us? Every time that question has been asked, the answer has been: closer than we thought. Consider craigslist. Just classified ads, right? But the site amplified the handy community swap board to reach a regional audience, enhanced it with pictures and real-time updates, and suddenly became a national treasure. Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.

Who would have believed that poor farmers could secure $100 loans from perfect strangers on the other side of the planet—and pay them back? That is what Kiva does with peer-to-peer lending. Every public health care expert declared confidently that sharing was fine for photos, but no one would share their medical records. But PatientsLikeMe, where patients pool results of treatments to better their own care, prove that collective action can trump both doctors and privacy scares. The increasingly common habit of sharing what you're thinking (Twitter), what you're reading (StumbleUpon), your finances (Wesabe), your everything (the Web) is becoming a foundation of our culture. Doing it while collaboratively building encyclopedias, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents, with people you don't know and whose class is irrelevant—that makes political socialism seem like the logical next step.

A similar thing happened with free markets over the past century. Every day, someone asked: What can't markets do? We took a long list of problems that seemed to require rational planning or paternal government and instead applied marketplace logic. In most cases, the market solution worked significantly better. Much of the prosperity in recent decades was gained by unleashing market forces on social problems.

Now we're trying the same trick with collaborative social technology, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldn't solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.

We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective? The force of online socialism is growing. Its dynamic is spreading beyond electrons—perhaps into elections.(source)

FCC claims right to search any home with wireless

2009-05-24T14:49:00.002-04:00

"You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it."

(Wired) That’s the upshot of the rules the agency has followed for years to monitor licensed television and radio stations, and to crack down on pirate radio broadcasters. And the commission maintains the same policy applies to any licensed or unlicensed radio-frequency device.

“Anything using RF energy — we have the right to inspect it to make sure it is not causing interference,” says FCC spokesman David Fiske. That includes devices like Wi-Fi routers that use unlicensed spectrum, Fiske says.

The FCC claims it derives its warrantless search power from the Communications Act of 1934, though the constitutionality of the claim has gone untested in the courts. That’s largely because the FCC had little to do with average citizens for most of the last 75 years, when home transmitters were largely reserved to ham-radio operators and CB-radio aficionados. But in 2009, nearly every household in the United States has multiple devices that use radio waves and fall under the FCC’s purview, making the commission’s claimed authority ripe for a court challenge.

“It is a major stretch beyond case law to assert that authority with respect to a private home, which is at the heart of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure,” says Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Lee Tien. “When it is a private home and when you are talking about an over-powered Wi-Fi antenna — the idea they could just go in is honestly quite bizarre.”

George Washington University professor Orin Kerr, a constitutional law expert, also questions the legalilty of the policy.

“The Supreme Court has said that the government can’t make warrantless entries into homes for administrative inspections,” Kerr said via e-mail, refering to a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that housing inspectors needed warrants to force their way into private residences. The FCC’s online FAQ doesn’t explain how the agency gets around that ruling, Kerr adds.

The rules came to attention this month when an FCC agent investigating a pirate radio station in Boulder, Colorado, left a copy of a 2005 FCC inspection policy on the door of a residence hosting the unlicensed 100-watt transmitter. “Whether you operate an amateur station or any other radio device, your authorization from the Commission comes with the obligation to allow inspection,” the statement says.

The notice spooked those running “Boulder Free Radio,” who thought it was just tough talk intended to scare them into shutting down, according to one of the station’s leaders, who spoke to Wired.com on condition of anonymity. “This is an intimidation thing,” he said. “Most people aren’t that dedicated to the cause. I’m not going to let them into my house.”

But refusing the FCC admittance can carry a harsh financial penalty. In a 2007 case, a Corpus Christi, Texas, man got a visit from the FCC’s direction-finders after rebroadcasting an AM radio station through a CB radio in his home. An FCC agent tracked the signal to his house and asked to see the equipment; Donald Winton refused to let him in, but did turn off the radio. Winton was later fined $7,000 for refusing entry to the officer. The fine was reduced to $225 after he proved he had little income.

Administrative search powers are not rare, at least as directed against businesses — fire-safety, food and workplace-safety regulators generally don’t need warrants to enter a business. And despite the broad power, the FCC agents aren’t cops, says Fiske. “The only right they have is to inspect the equipment,” Fiske says. “If they want to seize, they have to work with the U.S. Attorney’s office.”

But if inspectors should notice evidence of unrelated criminal behavior — say, a marijuana plant or stolen property — a Supreme Court decision suggests the search can be used against the resident. In the 1987 case New York v. Burger, two police officers performed a warrantless, administrative search of one Joseph Burger’s automobile junkyard. When he couldn’t produce the proper paperwork, the officers searched the grounds and found stolen vehicles, which they used to prosecute him. The Supreme Court held the search to be legal.

In the meantime, pirate radio stations are adapting to the FCC’s warrantless search power by dividing up a station’s operations. For instance, Boulder Free Radio consists of an online radio station operated by DJs from a remote studio. Miles away, a small computer streams the online station and feeds it to the transmitter. Once the FCC comes and leaves a notice on the door, the transmitter is moved to another location before the agent returns. (source)

The 2012 Apocalypse: And How to Stop It

2009-05-24T14:30:00.004-04:00

Nikki commented: "I actually am not that impressed with Pinchbeck or these "transformations" he is touting. I think the Mayan system is completely valid and the answer most likely does lie in an understanding of the math itself. And I doubt these NASA scientists will ever reach as far as to look for the answer there, esp. considering that they consider the new era to be primarily connected to machines and man-made grids. So it seems they are interested in the tangible framework of this prophetic math and not the delving into the actual details (material and spiritual) that support that framework."

(Wired) For scary speculation about the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists. But that’s exactly what a group of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms.

Entitled "Severe Space Weather Events — Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts," it describes the consequences of solar flares unleashing waves of energy that could disrupt Earth’s magnetic field, overwhelming high-voltage transformers with vast electrical currents and short-circuiting energy grids. Such a catastrophe would cost the United States "$1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year," concluded the panel, and "full recovery could take 4 to 10 years." That would, of course, be just a fraction of global damages.

Good-bye, civilization.

Worse yet, the next period of intense solar activity is expected in 2012, and coincides with the presence of an unusually large hole in Earth’s geomagnetic shield. But the report received relatively little attention, perhaps because of 2012’s supernatural connotations. Mayan astronomers supposedly predicted that 2012 would mark the calamitous "birth of a new era."

Whether the Mayans were on to something, or this is all just a chilling coincidence, won’t be known for several years. But according to Lawrence Joseph, author of "Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization’s End," "I’ve been following this topic for almost five years, and it wasn’t until the report came out that this really began to freak me out."

Wired.com talked to Joseph and John Kappenman, CEO of electromagnetic damage consulting company MetaTech, about the possibility of geomagnetic apocalypse — and how to stop it.

Wired.com: Do you think it’s coincidence that the Mayans predicted apocalypse on the exact date when astronomers say the sun will next reach a period of maximum turbulence?

Lawrence Joseph: I have enormous respect for Mayan astronomers. It disinclines me to dismiss this as a coincidence. But I recommend people verify that the Mayans prophesied what people say they did. I went to Guatemala and spent a week with two Mayan shamans who spent 20 years talking to other shamans about the prophecies. They confirmed that the Maya do see 2012 as a great turning point. Not the end of the world, not the great off-switch in the sky, but the birth of the fifth age.

Wired.com: Isn’t a great off-switch in the sky exactly what’s described in the report?

Joseph: The chair of the NASA workshop was Dan Baker at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Some of his comments, and the comments he approved in the report, are very strong about the potential connection between coronal mass ejections and power grids here on Earth. There’s a direct relationship between how technologically sophisticated a society is and how badly it could be hurt. That’s the meta-message of the report.

I had the good fortune last week to meet with John Kappenman at MetaTech. He took me through a meticulous two-hour presentation about just how vulnerable the power grid is, and how it becomes more vulnerable as higher voltages are sent across it. He sees it as a big antenna for space weather outbursts.

Wired.com: Why is it so vulnerable?

Joseph: Ultra-high voltage transformers become more finicky as energy demands are greater. Around 50 percent already can’t handle the current they’re designed for. A little extra current coming in at odd times can slip them over the edge.

The ultra-high voltage transformers, the 500,000- and 700,000-kilovolt transformers, are particularly vulnerable. The United States uses more of these than anyone else. China is trying to implement some million-kilovolt transformers, but I’m not sure they’re online yet.

Kappenman also points out that when the transformers blow, they can’t be fixed in the field. They often can’t be fixed at all. Right now there’s a one- to three-year lag time between placing an order and getting a new one.

According to Kappenman, there’s an as-yet-untested plan for inserting ground resistors into the power grid. It makes the handling a little more complicated, but apparently isn’t anything the operators can’t handle. I’m not sure he’d say these could be in place by 2012, as it’s difficult to establish standards, and utilities are generally regulated on a state-by-state basis. You’d have quite a legal thicket. But it still might be possible to get some measure of protection in by the next solar climax.

Wired.com: Why can’t we just shut down the grid when we see a storm coming, and start it up again afterwards?

Joseph: Power grid operators now rely on one satellite called ACE, which sits about a million miles out from Earth in what’s called the gravity well, the balancing point between sun and earth. It was designed to run for five years. It’s 11 years old, is losing steam, and there are no plans to replace it.

ACE provides about 15 to 45 minutes of heads-up to power plant operators if something’s coming in. They can shunt loads, or shut different parts of the grid. But to just shut the grid off and restart it is a $10 billion proposition, and there is lots of resistance to doing so. Many times these storms hit at the north pole, and don’t move south far enough to hit us. It’s a difficult call to make, and false alarms really piss people off. Lots of money is lost and damage incurred. But in Kappenman’s view, and in lots of others, this time burnt could really mean burnt.

Wired.com: Do you live your life differently now?

Joseph: I’ve been following this topic for almost five years. It wasn’t until the report came out that it began to freak me out.

Up until this point, I firmly believed that the possibility of 2012 being catastrophic in some way was worth investigating. The report made it a little too real. That document can’t be ignored. And it was even written before the THEMIS satellite discovered a gigantic hole in Earth’s magnetic shield. Ten or twenty times more particles are coming through this crack than expected. And astronomers predict that the way the sun’s polarity will flip in 2012 will make it point exactly the way we don’t want it to in terms of evading Earth’s magnetic field. It’s an astonoshingly bad set of coincidences.

Wired.com: If Barack Obama said, "Lets’ prepare," and there weren’t any bureaucratic hurdles, could we still be ready in time?

Joseph: I believe so. I’d ask the President to slipstream behind stimulus package funds already appropriated for smart grids, which are supposed to improve grid efficiency and help transfer high energies at peak times. There’s a framework there. Working within that, you could carve out some money for the ground resistors program, if those tests work, and have the initial momentum for cutting through the red tape. It’d be a place to start. (source)

RealNetworks: MPAA Is ‘Price-Fixing Cartel’

2009-05-19T09:11:00.005-04:00

"RealNetworks is upping the ante in litigation seeking to prevent it from distributing DVD-copying software. The company argues the Hollywood studios are a “price-fixing cartel” that have no right to prevent consumers from duplicating the movie discs."

(Wired) The Seattle-based electronics concern is making the argument in a bid to convince a federal judge to lift the distribution ban of its RealDVD software (.pdf) that allows consumers to make copies of the discs to their computer hard drives. The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Hollywood studios, and others, sued RealNetworks last year, claiming the software is illegal because it circumvents technology designed to prevent copying.

But RealNetworks, in counterclaims filed late Wednesday, maintains that the studios, as a collective, have illegally crafted a licensing scheme called the Content Scramble System licensing agreement that prevents the fair-use copying of DVDs. It is the first time the studios, in conjunction with the DVD Copy Control Association (which licenses the CSS code) have been accused of anti-trust practices in a lawsuit.

The CSS code is licensed to DVD-player manufacturers so electronic companies can acquire the keys to unscramble Hollywood’s encrypted DVDs. The code is designed to prevent unauthorized copying of movie discs.

“The CSS agreement is being used to extend a legally granted monopoly over content into separate markets – to prevent competition from technologies that would allow a copy of content for fair use purposes. But making the making of a copy of a studio DVD is authorized fair use under the Copyright Act,” RealNetworks wrote U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in a court filing.

That said, RealNetworks has gargantuan legal hurdles to clear before it can prevail on its claim, which includes allegations the companies colluded against RealNetworks to banish its DVD-copying software.

For starters, RealNetworks’ argument that consumers have a “fair use” right to make copies of their DVDs for personal use is a claim the federal courts have never embraced. The reason is the 10-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which clearly bans circumventing encryption technology designed to prevent copying.

Hence, for good or bad, fair use is not a part of the legal equation, at least as far as the DMCA is concerned. RealNetworks, however, maintains the DMCA does not apply because the company is not circumventing technology. It claims the CSS license it acquired allows for copying DVDs – an issue at the center of the case and a proposition the studios staunchly reject.

What’s more, it’s possible the so-called cartel of studios is immunized from anti-trust allegations under what is known as the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, where the Supreme Court has said that competitors (in this instance the studios) have the First Amendment right to band together to advocate for their interests. Without such immunity, there likely wouldn’t be trade associations, according to Los Angeles copyright attorney Ben Sheffner, who writes the must-read Copyrights & Campaigns blog,

“In the RealDVD case, I expect one of the studios’ defenses (though certainly not their only defense) will be that, to the extent that they cooperated or made any agreements regarding copyright enforcement, such cooperation or agreements are immunized under N-P as legitimate anti-piracy activities,” Sheffner said in an e-mail. “I also expect them to argue strenuously that — contrary to what Real alleges — there was no agreement among them not to deal with Real.”

Fred von Lohmann, a copyright attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agreed that “this will be one of their arguments. But whether the court will buy it is another.”

The studios said RealNetworks’ counterclaims are a ploy.

“While we have not yet had a chance to examine RealNetworks’ new antitrust allegations fully, they appear to be based on significant factual and legal errors, and an attempt to distract attention away from the issue of RealNetworks’ misconduct and the injunction issue pending before the court,” Glenn Pomerantz, an MPAA attorney, said in an e-mail.

Patel, the judge in the case, also presided over the Napster trial. Anti-trust issues raised in that case went by the wayside. Among them were allegations that the record labels colluded to delay the sale of digital audio files to extract more money from music fans. The theory was that the music industry didn’t quickly adopt digital sales because it wanted to sell CDs, thus forcing consumers to pay for an entire CD instead of individual — and cheaper — digital songs.

But let’s assume RealNetworks prevails on its anti-trust claims, that the CSS licensing agreement should be null and void. Would consumers be better off? They might not unless the DMCA is changed.

If the DMCA is left intact, the individual studios — even if barred from being a collective — would still encrypt their DVDs to prevent copying. The DMCA would still make it unlawful to circumvent encryption technology designed to prevent copying.

A likely result would be that the studios might each encrypt their DVDs differently. That might result in consumers having to purchase several DVD-playing machines to unscramble discs from different studios.

So even if RealNetworks is right on the anti-trust issues, it does not necessarily result in the company being able to market its DVD-copying software. Instead, RealNetworks should lobby to change the DMCA. (source)

Real life Twitter [lol]

2009-04-30T14:13:00.005-04:00

Cheril N. Clarke put it best in the comments right here on The Liberator Blog, in response to our question, "Why Do People Twitter?" (link):

"It depends on how you use it. I find Twitter useful particularly when I'm preparing for an event. For example, if I'm going to a conference or expo and am curious about who else might be there I will do a search in Twitter to see who else is talking about it. That will let me see who else is attending and what other people are expecting. It may prompt me to send a person a message before the event to introduce myself.

Another way that has recently come in handy is to follow the "trending topics." It was through that time-line that I found about about the Amazon.com fiasco w/LGBTQ books (#AmazonFail). There are other ways to use it so that it is not a self-centered waste of time.

I really don't care to know what people are doing every single minute of the day.

There are two types of people on Twitter, business minded people and those who want to tell you what they just ate, where they're located, how long the train is taking to come. It's up to the user to choose which group they'd like to be a part of."

Scientists invent brain-to-twitter interface.

2009-04-29T11:41:00.003-04:00

(Neural Interfaces Technology Research & Optimization Lab) The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. “The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually,” says Williams. “And what your brain does is, if you’re looking at the ‘R’ on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.’ And you see a momentary change in brain activity.”

Wilson, who used the interface to post the Twitter update, likens it to texting on a cell phone. “You might have to press a button four times to get the character you want,” he says of texting. “So, this can be a slow process at first.”

[...] While widespread implementation of brain-computer interface technologies are still years down the road, Wadsworth Center researchers, as well as those at the University of Tübingen in Germany, are starting in-home trials of the equipment. Wilson, who will finish his PhD soon and begin postdoctoral research at Wadsworth, plans to include Twitter in the trials.

Williams hopes the Twitter application is the nudge researchers need to refine development of the in-home technology. “A lot of the things that we’ve been doing are more scientific exercises,” he says. “This is one of the first examples where we’ve found something that would be immediately useful to a much larger community of people with neurological deficits.” (source)

Meditate to ease your matrix blues?

2009-04-28T10:15:00.003-04:00

I've found that as a young man, one of the most valuable things I have is a father who understands the modern world enough to know that you can live in it and not be of it. Often, he'll show me this by simply applying the wisdom he's learned to the modern world. That right there has made up for about 40 percent of everything I know (I'd attribute the other 40 percent to my mom, 10 percent to the rest of my family (and some friends) and the last 10 percent to my formal education).

Now there are different types of teachers we encounter in life. Some are teachers who totally disconnect from modernity in order to perfectly preserve an old way. But the most valuable teachers of mine have been those souls who've sacrificed total disconnection and the peace that comes with that, for a dual existence of modernity and tradition. This type of teacher is able to walk with you and relate to you in a way that the disconnected cannot. And because this type of teacher is also a preserver of tradition (perhaps not as strongly as the disconnected masters) he or she is able to create sort of hybrid lessons that communicate wisdom in a most effective manner for younger generations born into modernity from day one.

For example, take this article my pop sent me recently on a book that just came out, called "Wisdom 2.0", about applying ancient wisdom to computer culture in order to manage stress. I imagine the author wouldn't have a book deal unless there are people out there who really would buy a book like this -- committed riders of the wave of modernity who take the complications of modern society and invent more complicated solutions (that they can profit off of, by the way) that more often than not end up creating even more complicated problems, instead of utilizing tried and true methods. Oh yeah, that email:

"Ooooooooommmmmmmmmmm... insert transcendental drone here :0) Think I read sumwhere that they're buildin treatment facilities 2 house all the Facebook, Twitter, Bebo (etc.) addicts az we speak... (err...read) soez perhapz u better start wearin dark shadez n a fake mustache before loggin on..."

He goes on to suggest some real therapy -- coming back home this summer and hitting the lake for some fishing. Then signs the letter:

"Yer ol' theivin -- but honest bout it -- Pa."

Everyone should have a person in their life who REALLY knows them, and helps keep them centered. You can't do it alone. And no matter how much wisdom someone has, if they don't KNOW you individually, their wisdom don't always rub off on you right. Ideally, for a young man, a father, should be like a customized mentor, tweaked precisely to the specifications that you need to help you avoid the bullshit as much as possible and carry out your primary functions in life.

(Reuters) Zen and the art of emailing: [...] The average person sits at a computer for several hours a day and uses e-mail more than 50 times and instant messaging 70 times. And if the person interrupted by email happens to be at work, it will take 16 minutes and 33 seconds on average to get back to what he or she was doing previously, according to the book.

But avoiding technology is not the answer, Gordhamer writes. Instead, he presents ways to regain control of it.

"The trick is to be 'consciously' rather than 'constantly' connected," according to the book.

Gordhamer, who teaches stress-reduction techniques to individuals and groups, suggests that readers incorporate Eastern meditative practices to help ease the frantic anxiety produced by the high-speed techno-culture.

Using many Zen Buddhist and Sufi parables, the book recommends a "middle way" approach for the modern worker, with a range of activities like breathing exercises and five-minute meditations to increase focus and awareness.

There's even a session on insomnia and a quick guide for "mindfulness" emailing, in which readers are advised to sit upright, take deep breaths and slow the pace of communication, or delay sending the message for a day or two.

"Every time we look inward to our level of presence," Gordhamer writes, "we are shifting from the habitual and unconscious to the creative and conscious." (source)

On ninjavideo.net, and virtual community.

2009-04-20T14:10:00.009-04:00

"I love this game. I love it so much. We all do. My community is the most important thing in the world to me and what we've built here is my crowning achievement. Never before in my experience have I seen so many people come together from around the world to put forth such a concerted effort to provide for each other the way I see the Ninjas do. I ask that it's respected at the very least... that it's acknowledged as a valiant effort... even if at the end of the day you're struck with a 404 or God forbid... forced to utilize a Flash Alternate."
~Phara, "Ninjavideo.net"

E-piracy is an interesting phenomenon. As mentioned the other day in the post about the Pirate Bay founders being found guilty in their trial (link), the strategy being employed by corporate media and their law experts are turning more and more otherwise law abiding people into ideological opponents of the capitalist entertainment industry.

A bastion of ideological resistance has been Ninjavideo. The folks who run the site don't share television shows and movies just to share them. They come right out and say that they share them to build a community of resistance -- ideologically, politically, economically, socially, virtually -- to the status quo. And, judging by the fact that they are getting 150,000 visitors a day to their site -- many who participate in forum discussions and donate money to support the site -- they've done a hell of a job so far. Every time I show someone the site, their first words are, "how is this legal?"

But they continue regardless. Their coding/hacker skills have ENABLED them to program all sorts of unique backend features to their site, allowing them to stay under the radar, because other websites are prevented from stealing their content and spreading it around the net. Unlike other Internet TV "services" that try and run away from ownership of their links by claiming they are just indexers of content (a tactic that got the Pirate Bay founders a guilty verdict), you can only get Ninjavideo content from one place, Ninjavideo. And they proudly take responsibility for it. Their most recent manifesto reads like a journal entry from Che Guevara in a virtual Sierra Maestra. Partake:

Ninjavideo MAINSITE UPDATE - HUGE NEWS o_0: No one knows more than the Admins of NinjaVideo that early Fall season was Ninja's heyday. And no one is more crippled by the problems that affect the site more than us either. We love our baby. We've dedicated our lives to it... to a movement that we tried to establish via it... to a community that we've built behind it. Sleepless nights, too many cigarettes, blinding hours of coding, chat after chat, drama after drama... Ninja has become so much to so many people... and it is with great pride and a bit of trepidation that we launch our newest incarnation of the NinjaVideo Helper. One that we pray stays stable for a considerable length of time.

The newest applet will be asking you to type in a captcha code. It is not case sensitive and is an inbuilt feature necessary in the running of the newest backend. As I type this, videos are all being reuploaded on both New Release Movies and the current lineups. You should be seeing instant and super fast buffering. However... I ask that you wait a couple of seconds after entering the captcha and pressing play. We're still banging out the kinks of this new system. Essentially the page is gathering info and it's not as instantaneous as we would like it to be just yet. Also... if you don't have a divx window appear after entering the code... I would suggest refreshing and trying again. We're still learning as we go along on our end as well.

So what can I say? This site is a behemoth and it tries to service over 150,000 UNIQUE visitors daily. And we're still a handful of twenty-somes with an obsession for online media. Many of you don't know our history... but put it this way... Ninja came up 2 weeks before the biggest DivX player in the game completely shut down. And while they threw their hands up and gave up... we've thrown trick after trick after trick at our backend in order to survive. When triple digit servers didn't work, we invested into quadruple digit servers. While people race into my forum to scream and rant and criticize because me and my partners are abrasive and a bit "funny" with our personalities... we pay out more in monthly costs than most do in mortgages.

/sighs sadly

I love this game. I love it so much. We all do. My community is the most important thing in the world to me and what we've built here is my crowning achievement. Never before in my experience have I seen so many people come together from around the world to put forth such a concerted effort to provide for each other the way I see the Ninjas do. I ask that it's respected at the very least... that it's acknowledged as a valiant effort... even if at the end of the day you're struck with a 404 or God forbid... forced to utilize a Flash Alternate.

Once again... and as always... Dead1ne is a GOD. And you know what... we're all pretty good at this. So to my partners... my friends... my fam and my community... I love you f'ckers. This go is for you.

We're back... and we're still killing it.
~Phara~

Pirate Bay found guilty of copyright violation.

2009-04-17T19:33:00.005-04:00

The four founders of The Pirate Bay BitTorrent site have each been found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and fined $905,000 each ($3.62 million total). But the question of copyright remains an open dialog -- a very heated one at that.

Cory Doctorow of the popular technology and "stuff blog" Boing Boing compared the strategy of the corporate lawyers to that of the modern world trying to fight sickness with strong and stronger antibiotics. Essentially he says that by attacking the pirates head on and trying to crush them [instead of dialogging with them -- sound familiar?] they are turning a "relatively benign symbiote (the original Napster, which offered to pay for its downloads if it could get a license) into vicious, antibiotic resistant bacteria that's dedicated to their destruction."

Similar to what happens with a Youtube video that someone requests be taken down, with the internet in general it seems that, each time you try and shut something down, it becomes more and more popular. People begin to fight on ideological grounds. Doctorow goes on to say:

"With each successive takedown, the entertainment industry forces these services into architectures that are harder to police and harder to shut down. And with each takedown, the industry creates martyrs who inspire their users into an ideological opposition to the entertainment industry, turning them into people who actively dislike these companies and wish them ill (as opposed to opportunists who supplemented their legal acquisition of copyrighted materials with infringing downloads)."

Anonymizing services like iPredator (http://ipredator.se) have sprouted up providing totally anonymous file sharing to users willing to pay a few bucks a month for it.

Think tanks like Piratbyrån have formed with the mission to "support people opposed to current ideas about intellectual property -- by freely sharing information and culture." They've even invented a new term -- Kopimi -- to represent the ideological stand against copyright law. Kopimism essentially is a legal notice encouraging people to share content. Or as they put it, it's "Designed to be the opposite of copyright, a kopimi notice specifically requests that people copy the work for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial."

Personally I'm fascinated by the lines being drawn here as it relates to business and commerce and standing up to capitalism. As a black person in America I personally feel more excitement about the fresh ideas and protests against capital that these folks are creating than I do about the wave of excitement about Barack Obama being elected as president, for example. I'll take a Swedish white boy on my team before a brainwashed black stock broker any day.

Wired has a pretty good summary of the trial and the verdict:

(Wired) The Pirate Bay Guilty; Jail for File-Sharing Foursome: Four men connected to The Pirate Bay, the world's most notorious file sharing site, were convicted by a Swedish court Friday of contributory copyright infringement, and each sentenced to a year in prison. Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström, who was accused of funding the five-year-old operation.

In addition to jail time, the defendants were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures, for the infringement of 33 specific movie and music properties tracked by industry investigators.

Sunde, The Pirate Bay's spokesman, announced the news over Twitter Friday morning before the verdict was official. He remained defiant, and offered comfort to supporters. "Stay calm — Nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or file sharing whatsoever. This is just a theater for the media."

The two-week trial, which ended March 2, was a joint civil and criminal proceeding that pitted the entertainment industry and the government against the four defendants, who each faced up to two years in prison. In addition, motion picture and record companies sought $13 million in damages for the 33 movies and music tracks at issue.

The verdicts are a significant symbolic victory for Hollywood, the record labels and the rest of the content industry that claims online piracy costs them billions of dollars in lost sales.

"The Pirate Bay has claimed all the time that their activities are legal," Henrik Pontén, a lawyer who represented the film and computer game companies in the trial, told the Swedish media. "Now that it has been proven illegal we presume that they will stop."

The Pirate Bay crew, though, has vowed to continue running the site whatever happens, and claims that it is secured from a forced shutdown through a network of distributed servers located outside Sweden.

For now, the attention brought by the highly-publicized trial has only made The Pirate Bay more popular. The site has swelled to some 22 million users. And thousands of Pirate Bay fans have flocked to sign up for its new $6 anonymization VPN service, which allows torrent feeders and seeders to conduct their business in private without leaving a trace of their internet IP addresses.

And since the trial began, membership in Sweden's copyright reform Pirate Party has grown 50 percent, while its youth affiliate is now the second largest in Sweden.

Even if The Pirate Bay is ultimately shuttered, dozens of other illicit BiTtorrent tracking services are easily accessible.
The defendants are expected to appeal, and they remain free pending further proceedings.

The defense largely hinged on an architectural point. Because of the way BitTorrent works, pirated material was neither stored on, nor passed through, The Pirate Bay's servers. Instead the site merely provided an index of torrent files — some on its servers, some elsewhere — that direct a user's client software to the content.

But prosecutor Håkan Roswall argued successfully that the defendants were culpable anyway, citing past prosecutions of criminal accomplices. In a Swedish Supreme Court decision from 1963, he noted, a defendant who held a friend's coat while the friend beat someone up was considered culpable.

The verdict could shatter Sweden's reputation as a safe haven for content piracy, coming just weeks after a new law that took effect that allows content owners to force internet service providers to reveal subscriber data in piracy investigations.

But supporters of copyright reform hope that the trial will energize Swedish youth.

One minute after the judgment was public Friday, Sweden's Pirate Party issued a press release claiming: "The verdict is our ticket to the EU Parliament," referring to the election that takes place in the beginning of June.

The party's top candidate, Christian Engström, comments: "Sweden has now outlawed one of our most successful ambassadors. We have long been a leading IT nation but with these kind of actions we will be left behind and become dependent on other nations' arbitrary views".

Reached by e-mail after the verdict, defendant Gottfrid Svartholm Warg's sole comment was: "Like a dog!" — the condemned Josef K's final words in Franz Kafka's The Trial.

In a web-only press conference held two hours after the verdict, Sunde was more upbeat, invoking Hollywood in explaining why he still believes The Pirate Bay's crew will ultimately prevail.

"We see this as a film," he said. "This is the first set-back for the heroes. ... In the end we know that the good guys will win, as in all movies." (source)

Filtering fear. [twitter]

2009-04-17T13:56:00.003-04:00

As we become adults more and more we filter out things in our days that speak to our weaknesses and insecurities. In this, be like a child

In response:
sophistiphunk said "yes! because we don't want to hurt. we don't want to be afraid. but this is when we learn/grow the most. we must be childlike."

These are "Twitter Thoughts", just some random thoughts or questions we post on Twitter, and people's answers to our thoughts or questions. Sometimes insightful. Sometimes not.

Why do people twitter (twit, tweet)? [twitter]

2009-04-17T13:28:00.007-04:00

Why do people twit? Do we think we are tapping into some evolved collective energy? Or are we just a disconnected and lonely generation?

In response:
BLACKsoulfulEYE said ""Twitter is an energy."

Brian Vickers said "Finally...............I'm not the only one to speak out on dat! I feel like we're BOTH the most "short attention span" and "I want attention"-driven based society ever!"

Dominique Cyance Suttles said "twitter is pretty wack ive had it for about a month now and im just not feeling it why not use facebook its way more useful and quick and makes more sense"

Thembi Mashinini said "I agree &also tht we r lonely disconectd wth ourselvs... I HATE TWITTER! somthn isnt rite bout it... Thn again fb holds the same undercurrent... Hhmm"

Esta Naomi Muganda said "lonely, nosy, in a rush, disconnected. Yep..Then again I don t like facebook any better.."

These are "Twitter Thoughts", just some random thoughts or questions we post on Twitter, and people's answers to our thoughts or questions. Sometimes insightful. Sometimes not.

Martyrs for e-piracy?

2009-04-16T16:18:00.006-04:00

A challenge for musicians and copyright holders to start speaking for themselves instead of letting industry lawyers do their bidding for them.

(Wired) Pirate Bay Verdict, Pirates Win Either Way: A win-win situation. That's what author Anders Rydell, who wrote a book about the Swedish piracy movement, calls the pending verdict in The Pirate Bay trial, due in on Friday. Four men associated with the defiant BitTorrent tracking site are on trial for contributory copyright infringement. Rydell followed The Pirate Bay for two years and he's certain that no matter what, the pirates will come out on top. If they win, it will be a sign that file sharing is not illegal. If they lose, they'll be martyrs. Wired.com spoke to Rydell about the trial outcome.

Wired.com: What would you say this trial is actually about?

Rydell: On one level it's about a small technical detail, and about how much responsibility a service provider should take for illegal use of the service provided. But there is a wider and more symbolic aspect, where a whole young generation is on trial. This is a generational issue, a conflict between different ways of looking at and spreading culture.

Wired.com: Did anything about the trial surprise you?

Rydell: I was surprised that The Pirate Bay site didn't clearly state their ideals and their view on copyright -- the unlimited spreading of culture and media information. They seemed to hold back and avoid the issue. I think they feared it would be considered proof of intent to facilitate copyright infringement and that they would be judged on that. Personally, I think it was a mistake. The courtroom would have been a perfect arena to express their views.

Wired.com: Instead, they appeared a bit gutless?

Rydell: Yes. I think many people were disappointed, though their motives are understandable on a personal level. They risk being in debt for the rest of their lives.

Wired.com: Musicians and songwriters have kept a low profile. What's your opinion on that?

Rydell: I think it's a huge credibility problem for the record companies that their spokesmen almost always are lawyers. At least in Sweden, they're up against non-profit pirates driven by ideological beliefs. The lawyers are professionals; they speak on their clients' behalf and get paid for doing so. In an argument, the pirates always win the credibility contest. But I think we're missing out on an important aspect: The copyright holders need to start arguing their case.

Wired.com: What do you expect will be the outcome of the trial?

Rydell: Most people think that the defendants will be convicted in the district court. Here, the main focus is usually the question of intent, but the problem is the technical evidence, and to show that there has in fact been a main crime. During the trial, it wasn't made clear whether the BitTorrent files used as evidence actually came from The Pirate Bay.

On a larger scale, the outcome of this trial won't be able to stop the ongoing development. File sharing has made it easier to access culture, and business models are being adjusted to fit the new reality. I'm convinced that the business models will change faster than the laws. In the end, we'll have legislation with no real function, except for scaring people.

Wired.com: What would a conviction mean for The Pirate Bay?

Rydell: Probably nothing, since the servers are not located in Sweden. I actually think this a win-win situation for The Pirate Bay. If they're convicted, they'll be martyrs and the "piracy" movement will continue working for what they believe in, even more strongly. If they win, the signal to the public is that file sharing isn't illegal and The Pirate Bay will basically have achieved its goal. On a personal level, of course, they can lose and be in debt for the rest of their lives.

Wired.com: Do you see any signs of a compromise between the copyright industry and the pirates?

Rydell: It's important not to oversimplify; there is no strict line between two sides. Swedish studies show that half the musicians are file-sharing illegally themselves. Many musicians, filmmakers and artists are annoyed that the copyright organizations tend to speak for all of them, while they themselves may feel closer to the piracy movement. Recently we've seen new services, such as the music streaming service Spotify, that many pirates like and use. But the strong copyright organizations, like American film companies, have no plans to compromise.

Wired.com: Why has Sweden become such a hot spot for piracy?

Rydell: Sweden is historically a country of engineers. We have a long tradition of export-based industry, with companies like Ericsson, Volvo and Saab. In the early '90s the country suffered one of its worst economic crises, and a lot of that industry disappeared. Politicians decided that IT was the thing that would bring us out of the crisis. Millions of Swedes got PCs through their jobs and the government made heavy investments in broadband infrastructure before even knowing what it was good for. So Sweden got a very good internet and communication system early on.

Wired.com: Why did you write your book?

Rydell: Sam and I started working on the book after the raid against The Pirate Bay in 2006, and realized early on that the Swedish piracy movement was unique; it was the first time that pirates stood up for their ideals and expressed a will to change the system. (source)

Clone wars.

2009-04-10T11:51:00.000-04:00

Palm Pre = a cool thing.

A reality where humans and human thought has been quantified by a cell-phone company = a bad thing.

The complexities of the right to privacy.

2009-04-04T15:44:00.002-04:00

(Wired) It's Time to Drop the 'Expectation of Privacy' Test: In the United States, the concept of "expectation of privacy" matters because it's the constitutional test, based on the Fourth Amendment, that governs when and how the government can invade your privacy.

Based on the 1967 Katz v. United States Supreme Court decision, this test actually has two parts. First, the government's action can't contravene an individual's subjective expectation of privacy; and second, that expectation of privacy must be one that society in general recognizes as reasonable. That second part isn't based on anything like polling data; it is more of a normative idea of what level of privacy people should be allowed to expect, given the competing importance of personal privacy on one hand and the government's interest in public safety on the other.

The problem is, in today's information society, that definition test will rapidly leave us with no privacy at all.

In Katz, the Court ruled that the police could not eavesdrop on a phone call without a warrant: Katz expected his phone conversations to be private and this expectation resulted from a reasonable balance between personal privacy and societal security. Given NSA's large-scale warrantless eavesdropping, and the previous administration's continual insistence that it was necessary to keep America safe from terrorism, is it still reasonable to expect that our phone conversations are private?

Between the NSA's massive internet eavesdropping program and Gmail's content-dependent advertising, does anyone actually expect their e-mail to be private? Between calls for ISPs to retain user data and companies serving content-dependent web ads, does anyone expect their web browsing to be private? Between the various computer-infecting malware, and world governments increasingly demanding to see laptop data at borders, hard drives are barely private. I certainly don't believe that my SMSes, any of my telephone data, or anything I say on LiveJournal or Facebook -- regardless of the privacy settings -- is private.

Aerial surveillance, data mining, automatic face recognition, terahertz radar that can "see" through walls, wholesale surveillance, brain scans, RFID, "life recorders" that save everything: Even if society still has some small expectation of digital privacy, that will change as these and other technologies become ubiquitous. In short, the problem with a normative expectation of privacy is that it changes with perceived threats, technology and large-scale abuses.

Clearly, something has to change if we are to be left with any privacy at all. Three legal scholars have written law review articles that wrestle with the problems of applying the Fourth Amendment to cyberspace and to our computer-mediated world in general.

George Washington University's Daniel Solove, who blogs at Concurring Opinions, has tried to capture the byzantine complexities of modern privacy. He points out, for example, that the following privacy violations -- all real -- are very different: A company markets a list of 5 million elderly incontinent women; reporters deceitfully gain entry to a person's home and secretly photograph and record the person; the government uses a thermal sensor device to detect heat patterns in a person's home; and a newspaper reports the name of a rape victim. Going beyond simple definitions such as the divulging of a secret, Solove has developed a taxonomy of privacy, and the harms that result from their violation.

His 16 categories are: surveillance, interrogation, aggregation, identification, insecurity, secondary use, exclusion, breach of confidentiality, disclosure, exposure, increased accessibility, blackmail, appropriation, distortion, intrusion and decisional interference. Solove's goal is to provide a coherent and comprehensive understanding of what is traditionally an elusive and hard-to-explain concept: privacy violations. (This taxonomy is also discussed in Solove's book, Understanding Privacy.)

Orin Kerr, also a law professor at George Washington University, and a blogger at Volokh Conspiracy, has attempted to lay out general principles for applying the Fourth Amendment to the internet. First, he points out that the traditional inside/outside distinction -- the police can watch you in a public place without a warrant, but not in your home -- doesn't work very well with regard to cyberspace. Instead, he proposes a distinction between content and non-content information: the body of an e-mail versus the header information, for example. The police should be required to get a warrant for the former, but not for the latter. Second, he proposes that search warrants should be written for particular individuals and not for particular internet accounts.

Meanwhile, Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School has tried to reinterpret (.pdf) the Fourth Amendment not in terms of privacy, but in terms of security. Pointing out that the whole "expectations" test is circular -- what the government does affects what the government can do -- he redefines everything in terms of security: the security that our private affairs are private.

This security is violated when, for example, the government makes widespread use of informants, or engages in widespread eavesdropping -- even if no one's privacy is actually violated. This neatly bypasses the whole individual privacy versus societal security question -- a balancing that the individual usually loses -- by framing both sides in terms of personal security.

I have issues with all of these articles. Solove's taxonomy is excellent, but the sense of outrage that accompanies a privacy violation -- "How could they know/do/say that!?" -- is an important part of the harm resulting from a privacy violation. The non-content information that Kerr believes should be collectible without a warrant can be very private and personal: URLs can be very personal, and it's possible to figure out browsed content just from the size of encrypted SSL traffic. Also, the ease with which the government can collect all of it -- the calling and called party of every phone call in the country -- makes the balance very different. I believe these need to be protected with a warrant requirement. Rubenfeld's reframing is interesting, but the devil is in the details. Reframing privacy in terms of security still results in a balancing of competing rights. I'd rather take the approach of stating the -- obvious to me -- individual and societal value of privacy, and giving privacy its rightful place as a fundamental human right. (There's additional commentary on Rubenfeld's thesis at ArsTechnica.)

The trick here is to realize that a normative definition of the expectation of privacy doesn't need to depend on threats or technology, but rather on what we -- as society -- decide it should be. Sure, today's technology make it easier than ever to violate privacy. But it doesn't necessarily follow that we have to violate privacy. Today's guns make it easier than ever to shoot virtually anyone for any reason. That doesn't mean our laws have to change.

No one knows how this will shake out legally. These three articles are from law professors; they're not judicial opinions. But clearly something has to change, and ideas like these may someday form the basis of new Supreme Court decisions that brings legal notions of privacy into the 21st century. (source)

Friendly laser fire wounds US soldiers in Iraq.

2009-04-04T15:41:00.004-04:00

(Wired) Soldiers Blinded, Hospitalized by Laser 'Friendly Fire': An American soldier was blinded in one eye and three others required medical evacuation out of Iraq in a series of laser "friendly fire" incidents, the U.S. military has disclosed. These injuries are caused by the misuse of dangerous green-laser dazzlers.

Since November 2008, a single unit in Iraq "has experienced 12 green-laser incidents involving 14 soldiers and varying degrees of injury. Three soldiers required medical evacuation out of Iraq and one soldier is now blind in one eye," writes Sgt. Crystal Reidy, from the 3rd Sustainment Command (Expeditionary), or ESC.

Captain Russell Harris, a Troop Commander with 3rd ESC reports that his troops have suffered "temporary blindness, headaches and blurred vision,” as a result of laser incidents. Others describe severe, 48-hour migraines after lasing.

These types of laser injuries appear to be common when units first deploy to Iraq, and may be the result of inadequate training; soldiers may assume that the lasers are harmless and use them without due caution.

It is not clear what type of laser was involved. In 2006, the Army's Rapid Equipping Force reportedly acquired 2,000 green lasers for use at checkpoints, as a tool to warn oncoming drivers to stop. Although they are said to be safe for eyes, the unspecified lasers are also described as being fifty times the power of normal red-laser pointers. (Green light is far more effective than red for dazzling.) MSNBC noted in 2006 that troops were trained not to use the laser closer than 75 yards, as this "would cause eye damage."

Noah and David Axe reported some time ago on the Marine Corps' struggle to get laser dazzlers; one source estimated that up to fifty civilians had been killed because of the lack an effective warning device. And instead of getting the CHP laser dazzler they asked for, the Marines' top brass stepped in and sent them the GBD-III, or Green Beam made by BE Meyers.

The problem is that the GBD-III is not intended to dazzle. The makers call it "the most powerful military grade visible lasers available" to be "used for weapon aiming or marking targets for fire support." They quote a Nominal Ocular Hazard Distance (NOHD) of 1,460 meters: In other words, the GBD-III laser can potentially cause eye injuries if used on anyone up to almost a mile away. (By contrast the CHP laser dazzler has an NOHD of 45 meters.) And it's easy to see how accidents could happen with this type of laser without thorough training.

“We are all U.S. soldiers, you would never point your rifle at another soldier, don’t point your laser,” says a Sergeant in the 3rd ESC who experienced a laser incident.

Things might be about to get a lot worse. There are a number of lasers under development for the "Counter Rocket, Artillery, Mortar," or CRAM role, detonating or destroying incoming rounds before they are a threat. Unfortunately, laser light scattered off the target may cause eye damage to anyone in the area, and the Army has issued two contracts to develop technology for safer lasers. These are a "High-Power 2.1 Micron Fiber Laser" from Advalue Photonics Inc and a "Fiber-Based, Reduced Eye-Hazard Laser" from Q Peak Inc.

"To date, the solid lasers involved have employed either neodymium (Nd)- or ytterbium (Yb)-doped media.... All operate in the 1000-1100-nm wavelength region, which, because the wavelengths are invisible but are transmitted to the retina, leads to a significant operational concern about eye safety in real-world uses. Even minimal reflections from targets or debris can exceed the eye-safety limit," notes the proposal from Q Peak.

The new lasers would be "retina safe" — any eye damage would be confined to the surface of the eyeball which is far less serious and need not result in permanent blinding.

Air Force personnel have had laser eye protection for some years. It may be time to start issuing it a lot more widely. (source)

The child psychology of Terminator's creator.

2009-04-04T15:12:00.005-04:00

I've always viewed apocalyptic robotic science fiction from afar -- with a telescope. This narrative that interests me because it involves the human characteristic of self-destruction, but that seems so foreign to my reality. In my head, I always imagine that if something like this goes down I'll be somewhere far away from it all by then. I figure, there's gotta be enough warning signs to give me a head start. I just can't imagine watching the T-1 Prototype (link) being created in real life, and me -- hearing the news -- choosing to remain in the society that creates it.

(Wired) Creator James Cameron on Terminator's Origins, Arnold as Robot, Machine Wars: I first remember being aware of geopolitics during the Cuban missile crisis. When I was 7 or 8, I found a pamphlet for fallout shelters on the coffee table in my family's house in Ontario, and I remember thinking, "What's this about?" I had the sudden sensation that my coddled existence was a facade. Something dark and terrifying lurked behind it.

I've been fascinated ever since by our human propensity for dancing on the edge of the apocalypse. So when I wrote the first Terminator outline around 1982, I was just working out my childhood stuff. It was also born out of the science fiction movies and literature I grew up with. For the most part, they were warnings—about technology, about science, about the military and the government. You couldn't escape those themes or the fear of nuclear holocaust.

The idea of a hit man from the future trying to change past events was certainly not new. What I thought was cutting-edge was deciding to not have the Terminator be a guy in a robot suit. That's how it was typically done. But a flesh-covered endoskeleton? That was new. So for me it was all about how we could develop stop-motion animation and puppetry to create a true robotic endoskeleton. The team at visual-effects house Stan Winston Studio jumped into it and made it work.

Casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as our Terminator, on the other hand, shouldn't have worked. The guy is supposed to be an infiltration unit, and there's no way you wouldn't spot a Terminator in a crowd instantly if they all looked like Arnold. It made no sense whatsoever. But the beauty of movies is that they don't have to be logical. They just have to have plausibility. If there's a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don't care if it goes against what's likely.

I don't think anything resembling The Terminator is really going to happen. There certainly aren't going to be genocidal wars waged by machines a few generations from now. The stories function more on a symbolic level, and that's why people key into them. They're about us fighting our own tendency toward dehumanization. When a cop has no compassion, when a shrink has no empathy, they've become machines in human form. Technology is changing the whole fabric of social interaction. We're absorbing our machines in a symbiotic way, evolving to become one with our own devices, and that's going to continue indefinitely.

I kind of turned my back on the Terminator world when there was early talk about a third film. I'd evolved beyond it. I don't regret that, but I have to live with the consequence, which is that I keep seeing it resurrected. I'm not involved in Terminator Salvation. I've never read the script. I'm sure I'll be paying 10 bucks to see it like everybody else.

Meanwhile, the original film was recently selected for preservation by the National Film Registry. So there's a good possibility that when the machines actually do take over someday, The Terminator will still be in existence. And the machines can have a good electronic laugh about that. (source)

By maximizing profits, the industry killed the album.

2009-04-04T14:56:00.004-04:00

If analog -- or even all physical media -- becomes luxury, then obviously digital becomes pedestrian. Wired writes about the radio in the clouds -- Celestial Radio (link).

What's interesting to me in technological evolution is that when one wants to hang on to outdated technology (which gets more expensive to maintain the older it gets because more and more cheap, powerful, disposable technology is being built every day) you then become the snob.

The bourgeoisie antique collector paying a premium to hold onto a technology that the consumer world has abandoned. Romantically this makes sense -- some things, like the pop of vinyl, are worth paying for to some people. But does it make sense politically? As a person trying to be as anti-consumerist as I can be, I wonder. Ironically, it seems, the luxury of being able to afford (in time, energy, or currency) to maintain outdated technology may very well become a way to resist consumerism.

(Portfolio) The Future of Music: Record Labels Get Real. After years of blaming the internet for their woes, the major labels are starting to face the music— and see the problem as one they made themselves.

To be sure, the death of the album does not mean that the music industry itself is over. Parts of it are actually thriving. “The financing of artists with the intent of making money off their music?" predicts Dave Goldberg, a former Capital Records executive and founder of the company that became Yahoo Music. "That’s going to do quite well.” Goldberg is now a VC at Benchmark Capital in Menlo Park, California. Steven Masur, the managing director of Masur Law, a law firm that specializes in new media issues, notes that “there’s not a problem with the live industry. Live is doing great.” Publishers are also getting rich, monetizing music by placing it in television commercials, on mobile phones, and in movies. The money is there, it’s just not coming from the individual consumer.

Nor will the record companies themselves die. "They have massive catalogs of valuable copyrights," observes Pete Rojas, a new-generation music entrepreneur and the CEO of RCRD LBL, a network of online record labels and blogs. But eventually it all comes down to those individual listeners, and the pricing structure for music has fundamentally changed, says Rojas. Individual listeners, in the age of the free internet download, are less and less willing to buy music. So there's a mismatch, says Rojas, between “what the market values music at and what the major labels need to get paid” in order to stay "major."

Traditionally, the majors blame the internet for devaluing music, but the most forward-thinking in the business are starting to reverse this equation. “In a way, the CD is what destroyed the music business,” says Joe Mardin, a musician, producer, arranger, and engineer. Mardin grew up in the music business; his father was Ardiff Mardin, the legendary producer of Hall & Oats, Norah Jones, Aretha Franklin, and others. “People were buying millions of CDs to replace their catalog," says Mardin, explaining how industry greed ended up killing the Golden Goose. “There was this imperative that started to emerge: 'You must fill up a CD with as much music as possible,’” Mardin says. “The rest was filler. You ended up with albums that were one or two hits and a bunch of wanna-be hits.” The record industry itself killed the album, trying to maximize profits.

"The very concept of the album itself, a consecutive body of work designed by the artist to be experienced in its entirety, has been lost," explains Caraeff. And as a result, the traditional labels are contracting radically, morphing into a much humbler business. "The labels will survive," Mardin predicts, "but with much smaller margins and sales." And that might not be such a bad thing for music—or musicians.

After the current contraction, a few artists, like Lil' Wayne, will still be able to rake in large sums. But the top-heavy shape of the industry as a whole will change. There will never be another 100-million-selling album, there may not ever be another 20-million-selling album. “The profits were just gloriously obscene,” says Bob Sherwood, who was head of marketing for Columbia when Faith was released, and has had top positions at Mercury Records, CBS Records, and Sony. “You can’t do that today.”

Yet there will always be fans, always be musicians, and—of course—there will always be money. “If you find 100,000 fans who are willing to contribute $15 a year for your music, that’s one and a half million dollars," says Goldberg, doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation. "If you can find a way to get your music to them efficiently and for them to get that money to you efficiently, you can make a very nice living.” It's the internet, not the labels, that connects musicians to their audience. What's gone is the major-label hit-making machinery. “The top is going to come down," says Goldberg, "but the middle class is going to grow." (source)

Mapping the genetic structure of the human brain.

2009-04-04T14:47:00.005-04:00

Any Battlestar Galactica fan can appreciate this news if even from an artistic standpoint. The idea that the human brain can be figured out in such detail by humans -- with brains of their own -- is nuts. The theoretical repercussions are even more nuts. Imagine literally programming a brain as if it were a piece of hardware loaded with an operating system.

(Wired) The scientists here are mapping the brain. And while conventional brain maps describe distinct anatomical areas, like the frontal lobes and the hippocampus—many of which were first outlined in the 19th century—the Allen Brain Atlas seeks to describe the cortex at the level of specific genes and individual neurons. Slices of tissue containing billions of brain cells will be analyzed to see which snippets of DNA are turned on in each cell.

If the institute succeeds, its maps will help scientists decipher the function of the thousands of genes that help produce the human brain. (Although the Human Genome Project was completed more than five years ago, scientists still have little idea which genes are used to make the brain, let alone where in the brain they are expressed.) For the first time, it will be possible to understand how such a complex object is assembled from a basic four-letter code.

"The maps of the brain we currently have are like those antique maps people used to draw of the New World," says Allan Jones, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute. "We can see the crude outlines of the structure, but we have no idea what's happening on the inside." Jones is in charge of making sure the atlas gets finished. He wears starched button-up shirts and crisply pleated khakis, and he looks like the kind of guy who has a drawer full of bow ties. "Studying the brain now is like trying to navigate a vast city without any driving instructions," he says. "You don't know where you are, and you have no idea how to find what you're looking for." (continued at WIRED | photo gallery)

Kids go to text, while older folks yammer on...

2009-04-04T01:30:00.000-04:00

(NY Times) You’ve Got Voice Mail, but Do You Care?: When Steve Hamrick left his last job as manager at a software corporation, he had at least 25 unheard messages in his office voice mailbox. And that’s not counting the unreturned calls on his cellphone or landline at home.

It’s not that he doesn’t like to talk. But with the cascade of messages he receives by e-mail, texting and on Facebook, Mr. Hamrick, 29, a self-described “voice mail phobic” from Cupertino, Calif., said he’d found better ways to keep in touch.

“I had to give up something and that, for me, was voice mail,” he said. “It’s cutting out some forms of communication to make room for the others.”

When it was introduced in the early 1980s, voice mail was hailed as a miracle invention — a boon to office productivity and a godsend to busy households. Hollywood screenwriters incorporated it into plotlines: Distraught heroine comes home, sees blinking red light, listens as desperate suitor begs for another chance to make it all right. Beep!

But in an age of instant information gratification, the burden of having to hit the playback button — or worse, dial in to a mailbox and enter a pass code — and sit through “ums” and “ahs” can seem too much to bear.

Many dread the process or, like Mr. Hamrick, avoid it altogether, raising the question: is voice mail on its way to becoming obsolete?

“Once upon a time, voice mail was useful,” said Yen Cheong, 32, a book publicist in New York who has transitioned almost entirely to e-mail and text messaging. According to her calculation, it takes 7 to 10 steps to check a voice mail message versus zero to 3 for an e-mail.

“If you left a message, I have to dial in, dial in my code,” Ms. Cheong said. “Then I mess up and redial. Then once I hear the message, I need the phone number. I try to write it down, and then I have to rewind the message to hear it again,” she added, feigning exhaustion.

Tim Kassouf from Baltimore, 24, who calls himself “a certified voice mail hater,” said he had 68 messages, 62 of them unheard, in his cellphone mail box. Scott Taylor, 41, a senior manager at an e-commerce company in Phoenix, said voice mail was “just totally an ineffective communication method, almost ancient now.”

Like many others, Mr. Taylor advises callers on his outgoing message to try his cellphone or to send an e-mail message if they need to reach him right away.

It is good advice. Research shows that people take longer to reply to voice messages than other types of communication. Data from uReach Technologies, which operates the voice messaging systems of Verizon Wireless and other cellphone carriers, shows that over 30 percent of voice messages linger unheard for three days or longer and that more than 20 percent of people with messages in their mailboxes “rarely even dial in” to check them, said Saul Einbinder, senior vice president for marketing and business development for uReach, in an e-mail message.

By contrast, 91 percent of people under 30 respond to text messages within an hour, and they are four times more likely to respond to texts than to voice messages within minutes, according to a 2008 study for Sprint conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation. Even adults 30 and older are twice as likely to respond within minutes to a text than to a voice message, the study found.

There are no definitive studies of how many voice mail messages American leave compared with earlier periods, but if the technology is heading toward obsolescence — as many communication experts suspect — the trend is being driven by young people. Again and again, people under 25 recount returning calls from older colleagues and family members without bothering to listen to messages first. Thanks to cellphone technology, they can see who called and hit the Send button to reply without calling their voice mail box. “Didn’t you get my message?” parents ask. “No,” their children reply, “but I saw that you called.”

Jack Cathey, 20, a college student in Lewisburg, Tenn., said his parents and grandparents continued trying to leave him voice messages despite his objections. “Do you know your voice mail’s full?” a family member asked him recently, failing to comprehend that, for his generation, that might not be a problem.

To cater to those with no patience for voice mail, wireless providers are busy rolling out a new generation of text-based alternatives that promise to make communication faster and more efficient.

The most popular is Visual Voicemail, which comes standard on the iPhone and is available on other smart phones, including the Samsung Instinct and the BlackBerry Storm. The application displays messages in a visual in-box, just like e-mail, and allows users to listen to messages one by one, in any order, so important calls can be returned first and others saved.

Other companies have taken a bolder approach, eliminating the need to listen to messages altogether.

Frustrated by missing important calls while stuck in meetings, James Siminoff founded PhoneTag, now one of a handful of companies that offer voice-to-text transcription services. For a monthly or per-message fee, subscribers’ messages are converted into typed texts, which are then automatically delivered to phones or e-mail in-boxes.

“Voice mails are totally trapped info,” Mr. Siminoff said. Because the average person can read at least twice as quickly as he or she can speak, and text messages require no log-ins or waiting, Mr. Siminoff estimates that textual voice messaging is about 15 to 20 times faster than traditional voice mail.

Services like PhoneTag are about to be jolted by Google, which plans to introduce a competing free service, Google Voice, in a matter of weeks. The service will ring each phone a person uses at once — cell, home, office — and centralize all the messages received. Most important for the voice-mail-averse, Google Voice will also transcribe voice mails at no cost.

“Voice mail feels like it was a technology that was created to fill a gap — until something better came along,” Piers Fawkes, 34, a trend tracker, wrote on his company’s popular trend-tracking site, PSFK.com. “And now it has.”

Those in the industry expect voice-to-text messaging service to be standard in as little as a year or two down the line.

“Text is the future of voice mail,” Mr. Fawkes said.

But not everyone thinks that voice mail is going the way of the floppy disk. Richard Kelleher, 59, from Phoenix, who worked at AT&T when voice mail was developed, said he was still a loyal user and wondered why young people were shunning the technology.

“What does it take, 10 seconds to leave a message?” he said. “I can do that faster than Twittering.”

Yet many see the shift away from voice mail as part of a generational divide, in which younger people are substituting text for talk, while older folks yammer on.

Text messaging has increased more than tenfold over the last three years, according to CTIA — the Wireless Association, the trade group representing the industry. Young people have overwhelmingly been the most enthusiastic adopters. According to Nielsen Mobile, users 13 to 17 now send or receive an average of 1,742 text messages a month, versus 231 cellphone calls, and they spend nearly the same amount of time on their phones texting as talking.

For Charlie Park, 30, a Web developer in Williamsburg, Va., a text message is more efficient and — equally important — more respectful of the recipient’s time.

“You never send an e-mail that says, ‘Hey, e-mail me back!’ You’re always sending information,” he said.

But even Mr. Park admits that sometimes, there is value in voice.

When his eldest daughter, Lucy, now 5, was learning to talk, he had to take a business trip. While away, she left him a message: “I love you daddy. I miss you. Come home soon.”

Mr. Park said he kept the message for several years and would replay it again and again.

“There is something nice about hearing people’s voices,” he said.

Thankfully, she kept it brief. (source)

Computer Software in Plain English

2009-03-26T07:09:00.000-04:00

Kamal Meattle: How to grow your own fresh air

2009-03-26T03:41:00.001-04:00