From the category archives:
My friend Josh Glenn, and his collaborator Rob Walker, have been running an interesting project: Significant Objects. I’ll quote from the project info page:
THE IDEA
A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay! [click to continue…]
This excellent piece by Jonathan Zittrain explains very nicely the potential downsides of how cloud computing is developing these days. (“Cloud” here refers to having all our data reside out there on others’ machines instead of on our own devices.)
A few quotes, but as we like to say, read the whole thing.
The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice or Firefox.
[..]
The iPhone’s outside apps act much more as if they’re in the cloud than on your phone: Apple can decide who gets to write code for your phone and which of those offerings will be allowed to run. The company has used this power in ways that Bill Gates never dreamed of when he was the king of Windows: Apple is reported to have censored e-book apps that contain controversial content, eliminated games with political overtones, and blocked uses for the phone that compete with the company’s products.
[..]
When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.
On a related note, this post seems like an appropriate occasion to link to this great cartoon, which the artist created over 10 months ago.
I’ve got a long post in the works touching on some of the same issues as John’s “recent piece”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/10/suicidally-strong-ip/, which began as a response to Larry Lessig’s recent silliness on socialism (which he has qualified in the meantime) but has since metastasized into something much shaggier and alarming. In the meantime, some speculation regarding a smaller question – is the Pirate Party’s presence in the European Parliament going to change anything? This is something that I wanted to talk about in a “bloggingheads debate”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/20468 with Judah Grunstein yesterday, but we got stuck into more general questions of copyright good or bad. Anyway – my answer to the question is yes, plausibly – but around the margins, and depending on what alliances it strikes.
[click to continue…]
In case the various existing modern-version Haggadahs out there are not modern enough for you, try this. Thanks to Carl Elkin for CC-licensing this, see his page for the rest of the story.
The “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/21/AR2008122102397.html?nav=hcmodule
This season’s animatronic Baby Alive — which retails for $59.99 — comes with special “green beans” and “bananas” that, once fed to the doll, actually, well, come out the other end. “Be careful,” reads the doll’s promotional literature, “just like real life, sometimes she can hold it until she gets to the ‘potty’ and sometimes she can’t!” (A warning on the back of the box reads: “May stain some surfaces.”) …
_Withnail and I_ some twenty-two years ago (or forty, depending on how you want to measure time):
Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve been very interested in the relationship between technical and cultural innovation. Among other things, I make the point that this is now a two-way street: the development of the Internet is driven as much by cultural innovations, like the manifold uses of blogs, as by technical innovation, and in many cases it’s hard to distinguish between the two.
I gave a presentation on this at the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) Conference a few months ago, and was invited to turn it into a paper for a special issue of a new journal, Cultural Science.
I was very favorably impressed by the issue when it came out, and also by the interval between submission and publication, which was quite a bit shorter than I’ve experienced in the past. To be precise …
As some of you know, much of my recent work has been funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation through their Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Last week came the announcement about a new competition for projects on participatory learning. Compared to last year’s competition, it’s an expanded initiative thanks to a new Young Innovator’s Award for those ages 18-25 with grants up to $30,000. The Innovation grants will be up to $250,000. The Web site lists last year’s winners, a fascinating mix of projects by academics and non-academics alike. This year, institutions and organizations from some countries other than the U.S. are also eligible (Canada, China, India, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, UK).
While it is obviously great to get funding for work one wants to pursue, being a MacArthur grantee has come with other benefits. First, the people at the Foundation are very knowledgeable about the areas they fund so they are an important source of information about the substantive questions of interest to one’s work. Additionally, they do a remarkable job of connecting people. Thanks to the folks at MacArthur, I’ve not only made numerous important professional connections, I’ve also developed some wonderful friendships over the years.
Note that MacArthur isn’t administering this competition directly, it’s an initiative of HASTAC. See details here.
Huh? It’s a play about “a group of outsourced Japanese Ninjas hired by China to infiltrate the American Psyche by taking on roles in the Media, Pop Culture, and Politics”. Go see it at the Zipper Factory Theater in NYC on Saturday, July 26th at 10:30pm. It’s a fun, fast-paced, multi-media production that will appeal to CT readers. (It’s also directed by one of my oldest and dearest friends.) I thought the actors were great, for example, they were superb with the various accents (from BBC anchor to ninja).
The play also has an improv segment with guests, two this time: Paul Rieckhoff (executive director and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and author of Chasing Ghosts, a personal account and critique of America’s war on terror) and Hunter Bell (a writer and performer of the new Broadway show [title of show]).
While you wait to be seated, you can enjoy a drink at the bar or simply engage in some people-watching from one of the comfy/funky seats in the waiting area. Also, the two guests will be around after the play so this is really a play-plus-party event, all for $20.
Check out the “1960s dance track”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7512072.stm (scroll down, after the Dr Who theme).
On the basis of not paying particularly close attention but listening to what Australian friends had to say, I’d formed a generally positive impression of Australian PM Kevin Rudd. Now I see that Rudd has been stupid enough to “weigh”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7492579.stm into “a controversy”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23979363-601,00.html about the artistic depiction of child nudity with the following comment:
bq. “Frankly, I can’t stand this stuff …. We’re talking about the innocence of little children here. A little child cannot answer for themselves about whether they wish to be depicted in this way.”
I can’t wait for the Australian government’s prosposals for banning the appearance of child actors in soap operas and TV advertising on similar “couldn’t consent to thus being depicted” grounds!
The image in question can be seen “here”:http://www.artmonthly.org.au/ . (Perfectly safe for work in my opinion, but what do I know.) Chillingly, “Officials have said they will review the magazine’s public funding.” Of course there may be questions about whether art magazines should be publicly funded at all, but if they are to be, then this seems an crazy reason to withdraw the case.
(Incidentally, a relative of mine works with someone who was on the front cover of Led Zeppelin’s _Houses of the Holy_, no doubt the Australian Childhood Foundation would have been up in arms about that too on the grounds of possible “psychological effects in later years” — there don’t seem to be any.)
This ArsTechnica write-up of some recent research of mine has received numerous votes on the recommendation site Digg in the last few hours. I wonder if it will make the front page of Digg, although as a Twitter contact of mine noted, since it’s not a top-10 list (nor, if I might add, does it cover Google or Apple), that may be unlikely.
The post reports on a study in which we found that male college students are more likely than their female counterparts to share creative content online even though both men and women in the sample are equally likely to create such content. However, when controlling for online skill, the gender differences in posting go away.
Gina Walejko and I published the paper “The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age” this Spring in the journal Information, Communication and Society. We examine the extent to which college students share creative content online and whether we can identify any systematic differences by user background. In particular, we looked at whether students create and share the following types of material: poetry/fiction, artistic photography, music, and video (both completely own and remixed in the case of the latter two), including both private and public sharing. [click to continue…]
The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/09/business/09nocera.html?_r=2&oref=slogin has an interesting piece on the efforts of J.K.Rowling to stop a Harry Potter lexicon from being published, on the grounds that it ‘hijacks’ Rowlings’ name and work.
So long as the Lexicon was a free Web site, Ms. Rowling looked kindly upon it. But when Mr. Vander Ark tried to publish part of the Lexicon in book form — and (shudder!) to make a profit — Ms. Rowling put her foot down. She claims that she wants to publish her own encyclopedia someday and donate the proceeds to charity — and a competing book by Mr. Vander Ark would hurt the prospects for her own work. But more than that, she is essentially claiming that the decision to publish — or even to allow — a Harry Potter encyclopedia is hers alone, since after all, the characters in her books came out of her head. They are her intellectual property. And in her view, no one else can use them without her permission.
“There have been a huge number of companion books that have been published,” Mr. Blair said. “Ninety-nine percent have come to speak to us. In every case they have made changes to ensure compliance. They fall in line.” But, he added: “These guys refused to contact us. They refused to answer any questions. They refused to show us any details.” _They fall in line._ There, in that one sentence, lies the reason Mr. Falzone and his colleagues have agreed to help represent RDR Books. And it’s why Mr. Lessig decided to start the Fair Use Project in the first place.
I think if you tried this at Paddington or King’s Cross, security and the British Transport Police would be pushing you around within 90 seconds …. A pretty cool piece of street theatre:
While I realize not everyone is as obsessed with photography as I am, many phones now have cameras and I wonder if people remember to use them for the logistics of everyday life. So this post is just a reminder that all those things you often forget (I certainly forget all sorts of details that would be helpful to remember later) can be captured easily with your pocket-sized camera.
A recurring theme when I go shopping is trying to remember the name of that wonderful cheese I purchased earlier. Good cheese can be expensive so it’s a pity to buy the type that doesn’t work out. Last week after buying some cheese that turned out to be very tasty, I decided to take a picture of its label. Yesterday when I returned to the store I started looking for it. I couldn’t find it, but then I showed the image to the person behind the counter and immediately she had an answer. Although they were out of that particular item, she pointed me to another one that, upon sampling it, reminded me sufficiently of the earlier one that I was happy to find it. The woman mentioned that she wished more people would think to take photos as it’s usually difficult to guess what they want from their descriptions.
This method can work with all sorts of details that are easy to forget: book titles and authors, wines, where you parked your car, what you ordered off of a restaurant menu, bus & train schedules, maps (yup, I’ll just take a quick snapshot of a map instead of printing it out), and lots more. For some of these (like maps) a higher resolution photo where you can zoom in is helpful, but for others a simple camera phone should work just as well.