Comments (4)

By chris, April 3, 2013 2:41 pm

I guess Morozov is happy with recasting the Jobs-ian exhortation as an admonishment…his job being to tell us to “think different” without bothering with the luxury of doing any of the actual hard work of what that means when it comes to doing anything.

The more I read Morozov the more I wonder why anyone believes he is a corrective to the sales pitching of the self-prompting techno-punditry. It looks pretty clear from here that he models exactly the behavior he decries, but has taken the less popular Bauerlein and Keen-style approach of being the gadfly rather than the cheerleader.

There’s very little, if any, “there” there. Wake me up when Morozov decides to stop whining and spend some intellectual currency on the luxury of the hard part of thinking his own ideas through.

[Sasaki quotes Morozov] “making pro-active suggestions, rather than stinging critiques, isn’t the author’s forte.”

This I [Morozov][ will disagree with as well. A suggestion to stop bloviating about “the Internet” counts a pro-active suggestion as far as I’m concerned. I have no intention of operating in the current “paradigm” – to use the buzzword. What I want is to blow it up. To focus on “pro-active suggestions” that go beyond methdological critiques at this point is an intellectual luxury I can’t afford. Not with so many idiots around – to quote from my Twitter bio.

—from: Future Imperfect: Evgeny Morozov vs. Steven Johnson

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By chris, March 29, 2013 11:17 am

Philosophically, I don’t really agree with the “moral precedent” here–I believe this should be a perfectly fair use–but I also think Robert Lang is correct in pragmatic terms…

” So what does this mean for origami and origami artists? Well, the first thing to point out is that since this was a private settlement with both sides agreeing to drop the case, there is no legal precedent established. That’s probably the case with most legal disputes; our legal system wants disputants to come to terms on their own, not least because it saves the taxpayer money! Going all the way to trial should be a last resort, only to be taken if (a) the parties can’t agree, and (b) it’s not clear what the outcome of a trial would likely be. (Even if folks can’t agree, if it’s really clear what the outcome of a trial would be, one should settle.) As the legal system proceeds with motions, counter-motions, and rulings on said motions, the murkiness of (b) may start to become clearer and at some point, it may (and often does) become clear enough that it points the way to a legal settlement.

But even though there was not a legal precedent set with this settlement, I do think there was something of a moral precedent set for origami artwork, and, paradoxically, it’s not that there’s something special about origami, but quite the opposite: that there’s nothing particularly different about origami when it comes to matters of copyright and rights of attributions. Origami artworks and artwork related to origami, like photographs, metal sculpture, and yes, crease patterns, are, first and foremost art, the creative expression of an artist with an aesthetic vision, and so are entitled to the respect and protection that are afforded to other visual arts. In the case of crease patterns, the artworks are unique, distinct, and individually recognizable (in fact, the way I learned about this situation was someone saying, “hey Robert, I saw one of your designs under someone else’s name”). There are certainly plenty of public-domain crease patterns available (such as those of traditional Japanese designs), and an artist who wishes to use a crease pattern always has the option of creating his/her own (if only by folding a sheet of paper randomly and then unfolding it and recording the pattern), but if one wishes to use the specific creative output of another artist in a way that leaves it recognizable, one should engage with that artist to work out an arrangement satisfactory to all.”

—from: Now that’s settled… | Folding Under Pressure

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By chris, March 29, 2013 10:10 am

“We had managed to publish our results, but we were troubled by the incident. Our decision to withhold the news of the rootkit from the public seemed necessary, even in hindsight, but it was contrary to our mission as researchers. It was the last research Alex and I did on copy-protected CDs. Although I have a higher tolerance for lawyers than many of our research colleagues do, I still prefer the laboratory and the classroom to the courtroom. My peers seem to feel similarly—the volume of peer-reviewed research on copy protection technologies fell off about this time and has not recovered.

The good news is that this problem is easily fixed. Congress could amend the DMCA to create a robust safe harbor for legitimate research—not limited to encryption, not tied down with detailed requirements and limitations. There is a growing groundswell to address the DMCA’s ban on unlocking cellphones and its roadblocks to access for the disabled. Bills have been introduced in Congress to legalize cellphone unlocking. While we’re tinkering with the statute, let’s create a safe harbor for the researchers who can be our early warning system against unpleasant surprises in the next generation of technologies.”

—from: DMCA chilling effects: How copyright law hurts security research.

Comments (1)

By chris, March 21, 2013 2:24 pm

So our brain uses two different areas to identify the mood and then the actual meaning of the words. On second thought, what still doesn’t quite make sense is why we can even distinguish “language” so distinctly from any other sounds.

The UCL team tried to find out about exactly this. They played speech sounds and then non-speech sounds, that still sounded similar to speech to people. Whilst measuring their brain activity, they found something fascinating:

“Speech was singled out for special treatment near the primary auditory cortex.”

In short, our brains can magically single out language from any other sounds and port it to the right “department” in our brain to give it meaning.

—from: The most persuasive words in English: The psychology of language

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By chris, March 21, 2013 8:16 am

…in the following pages I present a historically informed ethnography of Wikipedia. I also observe that building an encyclopedia is a cumulative and interdependent activity and writing this book is no different. In fact, it seems impossible to properly acknowledge all those who have influenced and supported this work. But as in any other seemingly impossible task, like creating a global encyclopedia, one must start somewhere — and the perfect is the enemy of the good.

—from: Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia

Comments (1)

By chris, March 20, 2013 4:03 pm

Before I get into this I have to note that for most writing I try to keep things as simple as possible: I compose (using Vim, mostly) almost everything in plain text (using MultiMarkdown (see an example of Markdown and its output), converting to another format using Marked, or Scrivener, or something even more geeky like Pandoc.

But my Holy Grail of Writing Workflow is to, as seamlessly as possible, move through all four of the funamendal writing stages:

1. Brainstorming
2. Outlining and/or Mind Mapping
3. Composing with Scrivener and Multimarkdown (which I am falling in love with)
4. Publishing, as needed, to various formats:
   • Markdown
   • PDF
   • MS Office or RTF
   • HTML

Brainstorming

I’m a big fan of brainstorming (despite the critics…which are mostly criticisms based on downsides of group brainstorming), and there are many ways to brainstorm using minimal technology. I’ve long done this using a simple text document (or a shared Google Doc, etc). But I’ve taken to using a mind mapping tool for brainstorming; it’s just as quick as using simple text but with the added benefit that the results can be easily manipulated in various ways—reordering, rearranging and grouping, nesting, etc.

So, for these purposes I am using, depending on my mood, either ConceptDraw MindMap, which has a simple brainstorming function that can then be manipulated like a map, or Novamind, in which I simply use the mapping function directly.

Mind Mapping

Obviously, if I am using a mind mapping tool for the brainstorming phase, I simply continue to use that tool to build the actual map. Visually organizing helps me figure out a macro view of of the relationship of ideas, concepts, and provides a foundation for the initial organization.

Composing

So far, I’m pretty happy with the way things are working. But this is the step—or more accurately, the point of transition—that I’m not really satisfied with: the transition from the mind map to Scrivener. Scrivener has become my go-to tool for composition because it supports the way I work.

Some screenshots of Scrivener at work using this document as an example: Basic Composition Mode, The Corkboard, Outline Mode.

Scrivener:

1. provides a great framework for not just composition, but for rearranging the structure, keeping notes and research materials, and producing the result to various useful format,

2. can work from a folder of synchronized text files, which I keep on Dropbox so I can access the project from multiple computers as well as my iPad…or any other editor I might want to use, like the aforementioned Vim,

3. integrates with bibliography tools such as Zotero, Mendeley, and BibDesk,

4. and has numerous features for both focusing in on specific parts of a composition as well as at a macro level.

Scrivener can import OPML files (as can another editor I use quite often, MultiMarkDown Composter), but both of them only import the basic outline structure, doing nothing with the text notes, links, or anything else attached to an mind map node. I even wholesale geek on the OPML outlines, trying to use XSLT to transform the OPML to Markdown, but this removes linebreaks from the text leaving a mess of text that is of little use to me.

Publishing

I “publish” my writing in various forms demanding different formats: the dreaded Microsoft Word or the not-so-bad but not-so-administrator-friendly Google Docs, PDF for other kinds of exchange, HTML for blog posts and web writing, or to long Markdown documents for further munging and crunching or text exchange. Scrivener’s publishing process “compiles” all of the—or selected—pieces of a project into a complete document using any of the formats I need and even apply a variety of different manuscript and bibliographic styles. Scrivener can even produce ebooks in both .epub (a common format that can be used on many devices) and .mobi (less commonly used by a primary format for Kindle, though I’ve only played with that feature. For now.

Resources

1. Brainstorming

   • Wikipedia on Brainstorming
   • Simple Brainstorming How-To
   • Various Brainstorming Methods
   • StormBoard

2. Mind Mapping

   • Wikipedia on Mind Maps
   • MindTools on Mind Maps
   • List of Concept and Mind Mapping Tools

3. Markdown and Text Markup

   • A Markdown Primer
   • MultiMarkDown
   • Why Use Markdown?
   • Three Reasons Everyone Needs to Learn Markdown
   • Markdown Tutorial Video

4. Scrivener

   • Scrivener Product Site
   • Scrivener Forums
   • How to Write Faster and Get Organized with Scrivener
   • Scrivener Tutorial Videos

Comments (0)

By chris, March 20, 2013 10:53 am

Recently, the White House made about 114,000 new friends by agreeing that it should be legal to unlock your cellphone. In a response to a We the People petition, a White House adviser wrote that the Obama administration would work to address a recent decision by the librarian of Congress that made unlocking your cellphone illegal under the anti-circumvention measures of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The unlocking furor is just the latest example of popular opposition to the DMCA’s dreaded anti-circumvention measures. The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently issued a report arguing that over the last 15 years, the DMCA has impeded scientific research, innovation, fair use, and more. But among the DMCA’s many flaws is a significant one of which most people aren’t aware: For more than a decade, the act has imposed a barrier to access for people with disabilities. It hinders access to books, movies, and television shows by making the development, distribution, and use of cutting-edge accessibility technology illegal.

—from: DMCA copyright reform: U.S. law makes digital media inaccessible

Comments (0)

By chris, March 19, 2013 2:54 pm

> The case turns on a provision of the Copyright Act that permits the owner of a copy that was “lawfully made under this title” to resell the work. The publisher argues that the Thai books, printed in Thailand, were not made “under this title,” and thus that Kirtsaeng cannot lawfully resell them. Kirtsaeng, on the other hands, argues that the books were “lawfully made,” because they were made under a license from Wiley. > > Justice Breyer’s opinion (joined by all the Justices except Scalia, Ginsburg, and Kennedy) directly and emphatically accepts Kirtsaeng’s argument

—from: Justices reject publisher’s claims in gray-market copyright case

Comments (2)

By chris, March 14, 2013 9:34 pm

CC image by Alan Levine

Google Reader will soon be no more. And then there was maniacal laughter and the rending of garments around the blogo-tech-nerdo-sphere.

I sympathize. Google Reader was at the center of my reading and information gorging universe from the time I dumped Bloglines (I can’t even remember how long ago) to just last year.

When Google gutted the sharing features from Reader some years ago (remember those awesome “Shared Item Pages”?) I predicted it was the beginning of the end. When the Google+ options for sharing appeared I knew the end was near. That was when I seriously started investigating and finally moving almost completely to different applications (more on that another time).

Using RSS and ATOM feeds to read content has always been an activity confined largely to the somewhat geeky to power user end of the spectrum. I’m far less concerned about the loss of an app to read feeds than I am what this might mean in two other related areas.

1. The future of feeds…I have to see this as an artifact of the fact that social media in the form of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ is effectively replacing a significant part of the potential user base for web feeds and, related. Power users see all the limitations of these mechanisms, but for most people RSS reading using a reader is the solution to a problem they don’t have.

2. The future of FeedBurner, which will be much harder to replace (for me, anyway)…why keep around a system that eases the administration, enhancement and statistical tracking of feeds after dismissing the consumer need for those same feeds? I’ve worried about the fate of FeedBurner for more than a year. The demise of Reader is the penultimate nail in FeedBurner’s coffin.

Most people still don’t even know about RSS, much less want to hassle with a reader when they can see announcements of the latest articles and blog entries in their Facebook and Twitter streams. Informavores may not like it, but that’s the way most people operate. Google and Facebook and Twitter aren’t charities. They don’t exist to provide the highest quality products. They exist to sell sell sell, and when the market for Google Reader proved to be too small (and the data not useful enough to warrant being mined)…well, that was all she wrote.

If I were building up a new media property, I wouldn’t bother with RSS unless it were a very simple addition…it’s just not worth the time. If I operated an existing property, I wouldn’t spend much in the way of time or resources keeping feeds working for that relatively small audience that are, by virtue of using the feeds, likely missing some of the advertising and who aren’t going to stop reading the work on my site anyway.

Which isn’t to say feeds aren’t useful. They are particularly useful in ways that have nothing to do with direct reading…to achieve some interoperability between applications such as using plugins to pull data between blogs, and a simple data source for re-displaying and munging information. But most of these needs are being met through simple APIs for the gearheads and through Twitter and the like for the herd.

So, while I agree with the sentiment that, thanks to Google pulling Reader’s plug, we’ll see all kinds of attention being paid to improving existing alternatives and possibly even some innovative new approaches to feed reading unveiled–market forces at work–I’m not sure how much it ultimately matters if there are fewer and fewer feeds to read in the first place.

Comments (1)

By chris, February 22, 2013 8:05 am

Facebook’s “Other” Inbox Link

I can’t believe I’d never even noticed that “other” link in my Facebook inbox. I only became aware of it when I read this article in Slate.

Sure enough, when I checked it I found messages from old friends, some groups I’m interested in, and even my biological father. And this despite the fact that my filtering was set to the lowest level (of only two options). There is apparently no way to adjust privacy so there are no filters at all.

Thanks Facebook! Guess what… you still aren’t smarter than me.