Watching President Obama's speech on Inauguration Day, I had a strange experience of cognitive dissonance as he uttered the above quote. My word, I thought, could he be aware of MAKE and the maker movement?

Either way, he's definitely speaking our language, and that passage and the general tone of his speech, his call to remake America, served as part of the inspiration for this year's Maker Faire and the theme of the forthcoming issue of MAKE.

Today, he did it again. We just got this email from MAKE Senior Editor Phil Torrone saying:

We interrupt this MAKEcation to bring you the following message from the President..

"...think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, like science festivals, robotics competitions, and fairs that encourage young people to create, build, and invent -- to be makers of things, not just consumers of things."

It's like he's writing our editorial copy!

Dear Mr. President and First Family, please come to the Maker Faire, Oct 30-31, San Mateo, CA. We promise you'll be inspired by what you see, hundreds of people, of all ages, doing amazing and innovative backyard science, technology, crafts, and art, people who aren't just sitting around waiting for instructions, but who've rolled up their sleeves and are "remaking America." Join us!

In National Academy of Sciences Speech, President Obama Announces Major Investments in Research and Education, Encourages NAS Members to Think About New Ways to Engage Young People in Science

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jamie found this note from Jason Scott, who organizes the Archive Team. They are busy downloading as much of Geocities as they can before it vanishes from the Net after Yahoo pulled the plug. (Note: that textfiles.com link is a good candidate for Readability.) "..after 48 hours of work, Archive Team has saved over 200,000 Geocities sites. We're now pulling in new sites at the rate of something like 5 a second. Is that fast enough? We'll see, won't we. ... A side-effect of the whole process is I now know way, way, way too much [sic] about Geocities than I ever expected to. We've had to dissect every aspect of how the site functions to understand how to mirror things, from its history through how it does crazy javascript ads. Some of it is stupid and some is hilarious... We think we have most every site from 1999 and before on Geocities that was left. ... It is more important to me to grab the data than to figure out how to serve it later. People who have been talking about copyright and stuff seem to think I'm going to sell it or take credit or some crap. I don't see how the final collection won't end up online, but how is elusive — maybe a torrent of a bunch of zip files, or as a curated collection, or as a bunch of hard drives. However it is, I'll make sure people can get it, somehow."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm not sure what it is about Google's Street View offering that so freaks people out. It's simply taking photos of public areas, not private properties. Yet, we already saw how folks in the UK freaked out about it, insisting that it must be illegal. Well, the UK's "privacy watchdog" has now announced that Google Street View is perfectly legal, so there's nothing to worry about. The group pointed out that there were significant safeguards in place, and any violation of privacy was minimal. Of course, there are still others who haven't quite realized this yet. Colin writes to alert us that politicians in Alberta, Canada are now the latest to worry about how Street View might violate privacy, with the Privacy Commissioner getting upset that Google had started taking photos in Alberta without first concluding talks with his office to make sure that everything was on the right side of the law.

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MAKE HQ reports that they had a nice turnout and a fine time this past weekend at Hillsdale Shopping Center in San Mateo. Our compadre Kent Barnes took these photos and has more in his photostream. It was a great opportunity to reach out to people who might otherwise not have previous exposure to MAKE. We'll be doing a few more of such events in the future, so stay tuned. Thanks for takin' the snaps, Kent.

Kentb's Photostream

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CWmike writes "Microsoft's decision to let Windows 7 users run Windows XP applications in a virtual machine may have been necessary to convince people to upgrade, but it could also create support nightmares, analysts said today. Gartner analyst Michael Silver outlines the downsides. 'You'll have to support two versions of Windows,' he said. 'Each needs to be secured, antivirused, firewalled and patched. If a company has 10,000 PCs, that's 20,000 instances of Windows.' The other big problem Silver foresees: Making sure the software they run is compatible with Windows 7. 'This is a great Band-Aid, but companies need to heal their applications,' Silver said. 'They'll be doing themselves a disservice if, because of XPM, they're not making sure that all their apps support Windows 7.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bobby Ciraldo (Twitter), who co-directed the YouTube-famous music video "What What (In The Butt)," starring Samwell -- once famously parodied on South Park -- says:

This video came our way and i found it really hard not to find neato. somehow. it's a group of soldiers from the israeli army spending their time wisely by making an ambitious "what what in the butt" homage video. what what (in the butt) - Israeli IDF army version.

And you've probably already seen this one, but if not: it's a performance from what i believe is the swedish version of american idol. they actually dance to "what what" on national television! sweden must have a pretty advanced culture. (i've read that those modesty discs are crispbreads.) Knäckebröddansen Talang 2009.

Via Boing Boing comes this link to a NY Times article from 1897 (yes, you read that right, not 1987) about the struggle of the music industry against "pirates" (you can see the original via the NY Times site here). This really old article really does sound like pretty much any of the more recent news about music "pirates" except they're talking about sheet music, rather than MP3 files. The fact that it focuses on Canadian copyright laws as the problem, again nearly perfectly mimics today's claims from the recording industry. The article even talks about a recent conference held by industry members to create a committee to fight piracy. Basically, it's the same exact story we see today -- and the same bogus complaints. If the industry has shown one thing, it's that it will consistently overreact to any new change in technology, claiming it's some massive threat, rather than learn how to embrace it and turn it into an opportunity.

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jmwci1 writes "The US Defense Department is enlisting an open source approach to software development — an about-face for such a historically top-down organization. In recent weeks, the military has launched a collaborative platform called Forge.mil for its developers to share software, systems components and network services. The agency also signed an agreement with the Open Source Software Institute to allow 50 internally developed workforce management applications to be licensed to other government agencies, universities and companies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cy Tymony, a featured maker on Make: television, had a great interview with Ira Flatow on Science Friday last week. For you educators, how do you use projects like these? Does this fulfill a niche in your curriculum? What gaps are present that could be filled by future Make: television episodes?

Green DIY

Didn't get enough Earth Day this week? We'll talk with Cy Tymony, author of the book "Sneaky Green Uses for Everyday Things," about simple green projects you can undertake using objects around your house. Call in with your own DIY projects that somehow reduce, reuse, or recycle in unusual ways. Teachers, find more information about using Science Friday as a classroom resource in the Kids' Connection.

LINK

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Here's a recap of the past week in Boing Boing Video episodes.

Above -- Digital Open: A Call for Entries. Boing Boing Video is teaming up with Institute for the Future and Sun Microsystems to launch The Digital Open, a global expo for youth innovation. (Download MP4)

Above: War Dialer, an experimental animation by Bob Jaroc and Plaid. Best experienced with headphones -- the stereo is part of the fun. Download MP4.

Boing Boing's Webby Award Nominations -- a highlights reel for our consideration in the "Online Film and Video Weird/Experimental" category. (Download MP4)

Please consider voting for Boing Boing Video in the Webbys "People's Voice" awards, here.

(RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video.)

More video highlights reels for each the categories in which Boing Boing Video was nominated for the 13th annual Webby Awards, after the jump.

Boing Boing Video - Webby Award Nomination: Variety (Download MP4)

Boing Boing Video - Webby Award Nomination: Technology (Download MP4)

Boing Boing Video - Webby Award Nomination: Best Host (Download MP4)

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Andersen v. Atlantic Recording, the Oregon class action brought by Tanya Anderson against the RIAA, MediaSentry, and others, the plaintiff's motion for class action certification has been sealed by the Court. Also, the Court conducted an 'in camera' conference with the defendants' attorneys — meaning the Judge met with the defendants' attorneys alone — in connection with a discovery motion, and the record of that conference has been sealed as well. The RIAA has made a motion to dismiss the class action; that has not been sealed. In case you're wondering what's going on here, so am I."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chris Wilcox, from Alkali Media, sends in (without a link, forcing us to go searching...) his story about his company created a somewhat crude iPhone app called (appropriately) "Crudebox." The app is nothing special -- just a sound box of semi-crude noises, not unlike some other apps out there. They were a bit surprised when the app was rejected for "objectionable" material. So, they reskinned the interface, to make it look a lot nicer, called it Prudebox and resubmitted it. The actual app (and all the sounds) were identical. And... of course, in Apple's arbitrary wisdom, they approved the new app and added it to the iPhone App Store. So, apparently the lesson for those of you who have had Apple's arbitrary app censors reject your app: just reskin it to make it look less threatening.

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Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

If you're interested in the dorky intricacies of pandemic flu, you might also like to know that the National Academies Press is offering Microbial Threats to Health: The Threat of Pandemic Influenza as a free download right now. This is a 2005 book, so it's not going to cover anything about this current variant of swine flu, but it should still be an interesting overview of the background science.

Also, for the record, I am not an author on this book. I'm just planning on reading it tonight.

Jim Macdonald is hosting a good, science-y, factually grounded thread about swine flu over at Making Light. Snip:

You must know that proteins have shapes, and those shapes are how you can tell one protein from another. Your cells are covered with protein, viruses have protein capsules, it's all protein on the molecular level.

Your immune system (when it's working right) recognizes self and non-self. It protects the self and attacks the non-self. It does this in a couple of ways. First, you have generalized reaction. When cells are distressed, they release cytokines, and those switch on a kind of white cell called the NK-cell. NK stands for Natural Killer (no, I'm not making this up). The NK cells find anything they don't recognize, and, using specialized proteins, destroy it. When you've got an infection, those are the first things that come on line.

The next thing to arrive are the antibodies. These are specialized cells that are keyed to find one specific protein--the foreign invader protein--and destroy it. Before your body can produce antibodies, it has to have been exposed to the antigens (which is what you call non-self proteins), and be sensitized.

Meanwhile, your body is releasing enzymes that act as chemical messengers to produce various effects. Fevers, swelling, sweating, headache ... all enzymes. The aching in your bones that you feel is the marrow pumping out white cells to fight the infection.

Once your body has successfully fought off an invader, the antibodies remain. If they ever again encounter proteins of the same shape, they'll be on 'em fast. The infection won't have a chance to start.

Flu Redux (Making Light, thanks Teresa Nielsen Hayden!)

Previously: Swine Influenza Update from a Nurse: Virus, Panic, Precautions, and End of the World Websites.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

You should probably know that I'm a giant infectious disease dork. Viruses are right up there with subways, as far as I am concerned. In fact, the main reason I'm writing this right now and not, say, working on a Ph.D. somewhere, is because nature saw fit to gift me with the math skills of a brain-damaged baboon. Do not pass calculus. Go directly to journalism school.

Naturally, then, I have spent the weekend geeking the hell out over this whole looming-threat-to-civilization thing. In between obsessive reading and some interviews conducted for National Geographic News, I've come up with a few tidbits of information I thought y'all might find as fascinating as I did.

Why It's Called "Swine Flu"
By now, you've probably heard about the fact that this particular strain is basically a genetic tossed salad of pig, bird and human flu virus. So why is the pig part getting all the "glory"? According to Andrew Pekosz, over at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, it's because the two genes most important to determining whether humans are immune and what level of protection they have (that'd be the "H" and the "N" in H1N1, by the way) happen to be ones that came from porcine flu strains. We call this chimera "Swine Flu" because that's where it got the genes that really matter most to our health.

On a related note, the AP is reporting that an Israeli Deputy Health Minister is vehemently opposed to the name, because he finds the pig reference religiously offensive. Yeah,I dunno, either.

Swine Flu Was Genetically Manipulated to Target Conspiracy Theorists
It's true: If you own a tin hat, you're ten times more likely to contract the virus. Seriously, though, could the Internets please stop forwarding those increasingly out-of-context videos of Dallas County medical director John Carlo? In some recent interviews, Carlo referred somewhat clunkily to culturing samples of H1N1 in the laboratory. This quote is now being used as "evidence" in a delightful meme claiming that H1N1 is a man-made virus, wholly created in the laboratory. As Carlo himself has pointed out, that is not remotely the case. In reality, those video quotes are actually Carlo referring to the common practice of taking samples of a virus and growing it in the lab until you get enough of the virus that you can analyze the thing. That's how researchers learn what makes a specific virus unique and how they figure out ways to combat it. Scientists studying cultured samples of a naturally-occurring virus =/= evil plot to create a man-made super-virus. Please, tell your friends.

How Nature Makes a Chimeric Virus
As frustrating as that whole Carlo debacle is to me, I can understand where some of the confusion is coming from. Everywhere, you're reading that H1N1 swine flu contains genes from human, avian and swine flu viruses and, for most people, the imagination immediately jumps to genetic engineering. But, let me assure you, nature can do this perfectly well on its own. No human tampering required.

It works like this. Flu viruses have eight genes, each of which is on a separate piece of RNA and, each of which replicates independently of the others. Multiple types of flu virus can infect the same cell. If a cell is infected with two or three different viruses, genes from the "parent" generation can easily get shuffled around and randomly repackaged into chimeric "offspring". For a visual, think about taking two shakers of dice, tossing the dice out on the table, swirling them around and splitting them back up again into the shakers. Chances are, some of the dice that were originally in shaker 1 are now in shaker 2, and vice versa. And that's basically a simplified version of what's going on with flu virus genes when they create something like H1N1.

Some Thoughts on Factory Farming
So I know that Grist, and a couple of other places, are promoting the theory that the genesis of H1N1 swine flu can be tied directly to factory farming practices. I'm no fan of factory farming, and it definitely has some associated public health dangers, but I'm not yet convinced that this one of them.

First, according to the experts I've spoken to, nobody currently knows specifically where H1N1 swine flu comes from. In fact, the information we're getting out of Mexico seems to have a lot of holes in it, to the point that (as of my writing this) nobody even knows how many supposed swine flu cases/deaths are actually caused by swine flu or what percentage of people infected with swine flu are dying in that country. As Pekosz told me, there's no evidence one way or the other.

Second, while past pandemic viruses have had connections to farming, they haven't necessarily been connections to factory farming; but rather small-scale (and, particularly, subsistence level) farming, where animals of several species share close quarters. This is important for the H1N1 swine flu. Pigs seem to provide a particularly good environment for flu viruses to get their gene-reassorting watusi on. But to get that pig/avian/human mix, the most likely candidate would be a pig who'd had close contact with both people and poultry. As I understand it, it's less likely that a human who works with pigs and chickens separately could pass the avian virus to a pig. And, factory farms, which tend to be single-species outfits, aren't really great places for pigs and chickens to interact.

Now, I can see some ways around that. Say, if the pigs were sleeping or wallowing in muck that was contaminated with chicken feces or something. I could also be interpreting the facts incorrectly here. But from what I've read, and from the researchers I've spoken with, it seems more likely that H1N1 would have been created in the communal barn of a small farm, than in a giant hog-only factory farm shed.

I'm going to be enthralled with the swine flu story for weeks, I'd imagine. So if you've got questions about it, or rumors you'd like to hear the facts behind, I'm more than happy to put my nose to the research wheel on them. Best thing is to email, though.

narramissic writes "Engineers at Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) have developed stereo speakers in paper (video) that are are well suited for thin devices like LCD TVs and will be used in cars starting next year. According to an ITworld article, 'The special paper is made by sandwiching thin electrodes that receive audio signals and a prepolarized diaphragm into the paper structure. A special Flexpeaker adapter between the MP3 player and the speaker is used to play music through the paper.' ITRI says it hopes in the coming year to develop a chip that will do away with the adapter and allow people to plug a digital music player directly into the speaker. ITRI is also working on wireless technologies and will show off its first Bluetooth enabled paper speaker in July."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wil Wheaton sez, "Paul Sheer's photos of his favorite items from the Michael Jackson auction are amusing, puzzling, hilarious, surreal, disturbing, and have that "horrific car crash that I can't look away from" quality that we've come to expect from anything associated with Michael Jackson."

Michael Jackson Auction: My Favorite Items (Thanks, Wil!)

Ampersand, after all, is H&FJ’s middle name.

#

You may recall back in 2007, that the BBC put on a program all about the "dangers" of WiFi that was entirely one-sided and had shoddy reporting, bad science and (best of all) conflicts of interest, as one of the main participants sells products to protect people from so-called radiation. The program was widely criticized, and many months later, the BBC finally admitted it made some mistakes with the program -- but the only one it would admit was that it was unfair in how it presented the one dissenter who pointed out that there's little to no evidence that WiFi causes any harm.

It looks like the BBC has done the same thing yet again. TorrentFreak notes that it just did a segment on all of the harm done by "piracy" to the movie industry, including quoting the already discredited report, paid for by the movie studios, claiming that movie piracy funds terrorism. Beyond that, the BBC program speaks to four different people -- all of whom agree that movie piracy is a hugely dangerous problem that could (they claim) end the movie industry in the UK. Do they present any evidence? Other than the discredited Rand study, not a bit.

So when someone complained to the BBC about the piece, you would think that maybe they'd realize that the piece had been a bit one-sided, but instead, they responded:

This report focused in on a legitimate problem for both the film industry and the authorities as they try to tackle what is an ever increasing and profitable criminal activity. We feel the report outlined the laws surrounding the issue of film piracy adequately and that the interviewees from the film industry were entirely appropriate people to comment on the problem.

Impartiality is the cornerstone of all our output, and we feel this report was fully balanced in itâ??s coverage of copyright theft.

You see, apparently there is no other side to the story, and you can take the word of the industry insiders, because they're the only ones who can or should comment on the issue.

Amusingly, TorrentFreak also points out that the previous segment on that same broadcast, was about pirate radio, where the participants are described as "lovable." Yet, suddenly, when it switches to movies, they become "no laughing matter." Why? Did it ever occur to the folks at the BBC that perhaps the issues are actually the same -- and the people involved in both types of "piracy" are effectively doing the same thing? Apparently not.

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pdclarry writes "A Boeing 747 that serves as an Air Force One backup and two F-16 fighters escorting it caused a brief panic among office workers at the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan this morning, as large numbers evacuated the buildings. The incident was also spurred evacuations in Jersey City across the Hudson River from Manhattan."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adafruit industries took a little field trip recently to W/------ project space in Chinatown, NYC to check out Peter Sand's robot-tended garden.

The giant robot creates a garden, plants seeds, waters them and lovingly tends to it - the operator can control the robotics with a game controller and for the Arduino fans, it has an Adafruit protoshield and Arduinos that help the gardening.

Peter Sand's FAST PLANTING

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Sometimes it's funny how you're led to an interesting idea when you're not expecting it. This idea arrived at the end of a chain of events started by inviting Guy Kawasaki to use my 40-tweets app. Here's the story.

1. Guy asked if I could make the app work with his favorite URL shortener, Adjix. I said I'd check it out.

2. Joe Moreno, the CEO of Adjix, emailed me and showed how to get hit stats from his service, in a manner similar to what I was getting from tr.im.

3. When I tried to deref one of his short URLs I found he was using the meta-refresh technique. I was irritated, why isn't he using the HTTP redirect mechanism like everyone else. He said it was so they could use Adsense to track clicks. Some of his users wanted it. I found a way to work around the issue without having to parse the HTML and then forgot it. (Here's the text of the page they return.)

4. A few days later Moreno mentioned in an email that another advantage is their shortener could be served statically from S3. This hit me like a ton of bricks. Say what!

Think about it. When you shorten a URL, what if instead of generating a record in a database that requires a dynamic server to stay up indefinitely, you generated static HTML and saved it somewhere likely to survive the apocalypse. It's not a complete answer to the problem presented by URL shorteners, but it's pretty great half-step. Maybe even a 3-quarters-step.

Joe wrote it up here.

Jake Jarvis calls this an Apocalypse-proof URL shortener. I like!

tritonman writes "Obama wants to set a goal that the US spend 3% of it's GDP on scientific research and development. 'I believe it is not in our character, American character, to follow — but to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again. I am here today to set this goal: we will devote more than 3 percent of our GDP to research and development,' Obama said in a speech at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Scott points us to the news that German book publishers have joined with recording industry representatives to demand that a variety of file sharing websites be blocked by German ISPs, claiming "I don't see any other way than access controls to get to platforms like these that are based in foreign countries." Or, you know, the labels and book publishers could (*gasp*) try to figure out way to use these sites to their advantage rather than denying their existence. Blocking the sites, of course, won't do much of anything, other than moving those who file share to alternative sites or proxy's/encryption, making it that much more difficult for these companies to learn how to use these sites to their own advantage.

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In this tutorial, bladesmith Ben Potter shows how he inlays a Celto-Norse design in non-ferrous metals into a steel blade. You can see one of the tutorials of him making one of his incredible blades and hilt here.

Celto-Norse Wire Inlay Tutorial [Sent by MAKE subscriber David DelaGardelle. Thanks, David!]

More:
HOW TO - Make a machete from a leaf spring

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Liam sent in this really interesting telemetry project that uses the Make controller as the 'brains' of the system. It's able to serve up real-time data to the pit crew, and anyone with Internet access. Thanks Liam!

Seasoned track racers know what it means to be able to see all their lap times, acceleration and braking points, position on track, speed, etc. While there are relatively inexpensive data loggers that can do this in varying degrees, none have what I want and none can show the data live in the pits. Live data during a race can make a big difference to a driver's performance, and to a hopefully attentive pit crew.

I really like the "Tupperware-like" enclose they chose. It's easy to open, waterproof, and transparent. Be sure to check out the link for a lot more information about the project, including future plans.

More about Real-Time racing telemetry with the Make controller

In the Maker Shed:


More about the Make Controller 2.0 & Interface Board kit

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A wave of new companies are springing up to offer such things as virtual cemeteries, alerts to remind loved ones about the anniversary of your death, and even email services that send an alert to your sinful relatives in danger of being left behind when the Rapture carries you away. "People have a desire to perpetuate not only for themselves, but for their loved ones, the story of their lives, and technology has all these new great ways of doing that," said John McQueen, owner of the Anderson McQueen funeral home.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this month, the Guardian's Henry Porter wrote a poorly thought out opinion piece attacking Google for not simply handing money over to the recording industry, declaring that Google "creates nothing." This is beyond wrong, it's dumb. If it were true, there would be nothing to worry about, because no one would care about Google. It seems clear that Porter didn't bother to read the widespread criticism about his piece, because he's right back at it, with a column all about "the good old days" of local newspapers, that concludes with yet another misguided attack on Google:

The crisis in local news is not just about "the business model", a phrase I am coming to loathe. It is about the fabric of a society and the careers that grew out of local journalism and have made so many contributions both to journalism and national life.

This is something that new companies such as Google, with all their wealth and lack of obligation to anything beyond their own exhilarated sense of entitlement, will never understand. Why would they when they can sell advertising around journalism that has been provided for free by increasingly desperate newspapers?

This is, of course, a pretty pathetic response. Tim O'Reilly points us to a great "off the cuff" piece by famed baseball statistician Bill James, who in researching a crime novel he's writing also ended up researching the history of the modern newspaper and noted that it was actually quite similar to today's blogging pioneers:

Writing the crime book ... the modern newspapers started about 1836. There were newspapers for a hundred years before that, but they were relatively expensive. In 1836 somebody "invented" the steam-driven printing press ... not sure tying together a steam engine and a printing press can really be considered an invention. But anyway, paper was cheap, so putting together a little engine and a little printing press enabled anybody with a small investment to start his own newspaper. Every significant city by 1845 had dozens of little newspapers, which were much closer to Blogs than to modern newspapers.

One of the first things they did was start writing crime stories, exploiting crimes for money. Then there was 100+ years of newspapers getting bigger and bigger and more organized and more expensive to produce. What were basically one-man shows, and then the better ones hired assistants and then business managers, they added sports sections, cartoons, advertising salesmen and then advertising departments. They invented wire services (about 1890), and then there were syndicated columnists and syndicated features. The newspapers drove each other out of business for 100 years....

We're back to 1836 now, in a sense; everybody who wants to has his own "newspaper", and it's tough to know who is good and who is reliable and who isn't, but the same processes are still running. The blogs will get bigger; the good ones are hiring a second helper and a third and fourth, and we'll spend a century or more sorting things out and re-creating the market. It's hard, but it's not a bad thing. It's a good thing.

But an even better response to Porter's accusation that Google is the entitled party comes via Michael Scott, who points us to a great discussion of Porter's statement by the blog TechnoLlama, who points out that Porter appears to have the whole story backwards:

Is it not the old media the one that has an "exhilarated sense of entitlement" that prompts them to bemoan their loss of prominence with the public? People vote with their feet (or more accurately, with their clicks), and if some local newspaper does not fulfil those functions, then it will disappear.

I'm pretty good at stating the bleeding obvious, but this has to be repeated. We are currently undergoing a shift in media consumption of cataclysmic proportions, the lines are being drawn between what Lessig calls the Read-Only and Read/Write cultures (RO and RW respectively). As the advertising well dries up, the old RO media is left hurt and bewildered, wondering where have all the punters gone. Then they see clips of Susan Boyle on YouTube accumulating 100 million views, and it dawns on them. YouTube and Google have stolen all of the viewers! The parasites do not create anything, yet profit handsomely from stolen content. They try to negotiate, but Google is not budging as it has the upper hand. Then they talk about lost profit, and expect some form of compensation. Soon there will be talk of yet more legal action.

The problem for the RO crowd is that they have it completely backwards. In the age before YouTube, Susan Boyle would have been viewed only by those who actually watched the show (just over 8 million UK viewers). It would have been a water-cooler moment, with people commenting on it. But the fact that it was posted on YouTube and went viral made it a global story, it enhanced the ratings for the show, and in general enhanced ITV's position with advertisers. But all that the RO crowd can think of is loss revenue from those 100 million clicks.

Indeed. I've been amazed to read stories in the press claiming that somehow Boyle and the show Britain's Got Talent somehow is a sad story because the show and/or Boyle didn't "monetize" the traffic with ads, and I'm wondering where these people are coming from. Both Boyle and the show got tremendous amounts of free publicity from YouTube that they never would have received just a few years ago, thanks entirely to YouTube. The fact that the site was able to help promote the whole thing without the TV producers having to pay for advertising, bandwidth or distribution is revolutionary, and a massive change in the way things used to be.

And people are complaining?

The only sense of entitlement is coming from the old school players -- the newspapers and the recording industry -- who fail to recognize revolutionary technologies that are changing their markets, and enabling tremendous new opportunities. These old school players seem to feel entitled to their old business models, even as they fail to embrace the new opportunities and fail to provide what consumers clearly desire. There is no sense of entitlement from the new generation. The philosophy of entitlement comes from the old guard, that seems to think that because they made money one way in the past, the rest of the world has to ignore the possibilities of new technologies in order to let the world pretend that it still needs to do things and pay for things the old way.

That's the only sense of entitlement I'm seeing.

It's not in people participating in news stories by sharing them, spreading them, linking to them and commenting online. And it's not in people sharing music, listening to music and promoting music online. It's in the old industries that refuse to admit that new technologies make things more efficient, and it's in pretending that all new efficiencies must be illegal or immoral because money can no longer be made via outdated business models.

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bheer writes "According to the NYTimes, at a conference next month, GE will debut their new holographic storage breakthrough — 500GB disks that will cost 10 cents a GB to produce at launch. GE will first focus on selling the technology to commercial markets like movie studios and hospitals, but selling to the broader corporate and consumer market is the larger goal."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David A Kessler, author of The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, is a doctor and lawyer, med school dean and former FDA commissioner. He's also someone whose weight has yo-yoed back and forth all his life, someone who is plagued with insatiable junk-food cravings. His new book -- grounded in research that included dumpster-diving chain restaurants to read the ingredient labels on the foods whose makeup they wouldn't discuss, tries to answer the neurological question of why we crave shitty junk food:

The labels showed the foods were bathed in salt, fat and sugars, beyond what a diner might expect by reading the menu, Kessler said. The ingredient list for Southwestern Eggrolls mentioned salt eight different times; sugars showed up five times. The "egg rolls," which are deep-fried in fat, contain chicken that has been chopped up like meatloaf to give it a "melt in the mouth" quality that also makes it faster to eat. By the time a diner has finished this appetizer, she has consumed 910 calories, 57 grams of fat and 1,960 milligrams of sodium.

Instead of satisfying hunger, the salt-fat-sugar combination will stimulate that diner's brain to crave more, Kessler said. For many, the come-on offered by Lay's Potato Chips -- "Betcha can't eat just one" -- is scientifically accurate. And the food industry manipulates this neurological response, designing foods to induce people to eat more than they should or even want, Kessler found...

"The food the industry is selling is much more powerful than we realized," he said. "I used to think I ate to feel full. Now I know, we have the science that shows, we're eating to stimulate ourselves. And so the question is what are we going to do about it?"

Crave Man

The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite (via Bioephemera)

The Tin Can app takes advantage of the iPhone's audio ports to send and receive messages using sound. This deceptively unadorned app points the way to jailbreak-free hardware solutions for the iPhone -

For those of you who are technically inclined, Tin Can uses frequency shift keying (FSK) to send data from one iPhone to the other. This is the same technique used by early modems to transmit data.
FSK uses alternating frequencies to represent binary data. For instance, to transmit a '1' using FSK you might use a 4 kHz signal, whereas to transmit a '0' you might use a 3 kHz signal. You would then alternate the two frequencies to send sequences of ones and zeroes.
What we have done, in essence, is turn the iPhone into a simple modem using its speaker and microphone. Pretty cool.

Tin Can iPhone app from the authors of iPhone Hacks Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in hacks | Digg this!

• Brando's "Spy Ear" is a tiny cellphone that always picks up.
• Praxionoscope animation is a zoetrope on drugs.
• The youngsters these days, with their U-238 Atomic Energy Labs.
• General Electric invents Blu-Ray killer.
• Behold! Mashamaro the MP3 Rabbit.
• The Telos 5000 is an amplifier that costs more than a house.
• The new Flip HD mini-camcorder is out.
• Fujitsu didn't get the memo about expensive, high-tech pocket computers not selling well.
• Motherboard mirror on the wall (obscures all.)
• The networking card of the future never stop networking.
• Seiko once made a drum machine watch.
• Review: Seagate's Replica brings Time Machine-style no-brainer backups to Windows PCs.
• Hacking drink vending machines is, evidently, great fun.
• The Loltus offers a cracking drive.
• Tears! There will probably be no new OQO, as the company is in trouble.
• How much would you spend on a chair? Lisa reviews the best.
• Video at 1000 fps.
• Watch Joel make beer.
• Terrorize your dearest with remote-controlled nerf artillery.
• Trim-it-quick tree lights make for a festive April.
• In the future, people will sit -- on chairs!
• Remember the Computer Chronicles?

Michael J. Ross writes "Two decades ago, Web usage was limited to a single individual (Sir Tim Berners-Lee) using the only browser in existence (WorldWideWeb) running on a single platform (a NeXT Computer). Nowadays, billions of people access the Web daily, with the ability to choose from over a dozen browsers running on desktop computers, laptops, and a variety of mobile devices, such as cell phones. The number of possible combinations is growing rapidly, and makes it increasingly difficult for Web designers and developers to craft their sites so as to be universally accessible. This is particularly true when accounting for Web users with physical and cognitive disabilities — especially if they do not have access to assistive technologies. The challenges and solutions for anyone creating an accessible website are addressed in Universal Design for Web Applications, authored by Wendy Chisholm and Matt May." Keep reading for the rest of Michael and Laura's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alex from Worldchanging sez, "I have a new piece up about how the right is spinning geoengineering to undermine climate action. No matter what our stance on geoengineering itself - pro, con, undecided -- we should all agree that the last thing we need are climate denialists manipulating the debate."

Their new justifications for delay are simple. Taking advantage of the economic crisis, they call climate action a job killer. If the Right's anger and vehemence against the very idea of green jobs has shocked and confused you, well, understand that it's important that climate change be framed as a threat to the economy, and never an opportunity: the growing importance of clean tech industries and jobs to the American economy must be downplayed in order for this strategy to work (never mind that wind power already employs more Americans than coal mining). Look for this argument to increase in volume as Copenhagen draws near...

But if we can be made to believe that megascale geoengineering can stop climate change, then delay begins to look not like the dangerous folly it actually is, but a sensible prudence. The prospect of geoegineering is the only thing that can make that delay seem at all morally acceptable.

In other words, combining dire warnings about climate action's economic costs with exaggerated claims about geoengineering's potential is the new climate denialism.

Geoengineering and the New Climate Denialism (Thanks, Alex!)

Writing in Wired, Jonah Lehrer talks to Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) about his contribution to a recent paper on the neurology of magic. Fascinating reading -- magic as applied neuroscience.

Consider a technique used by the legendary pickpocket Apollo Robbins, another coauthor of the Nature article spearheaded by Macknik and Martinez-Conde. When the researchers asked him about his devious methods--how he could steal the wallet of a man who knew he was going to have his pocket picked--they learned something surprising: Robbins said the trick worked only when he moved his free hand in an arc instead of a straight line. According to the thief, these arcs distract the eyes of his victims for a matter of milliseconds, just enough time for his other hand to pilfer their belongings.

At first, the scientists couldn't explain this phenomenon. Why would arcs keep us from looking at the right place? But then they began to think about saccades, movements of the eye that can precede conscious decisions about where to turn one's gaze. Saccades are among the fastest movements produced by the human body, which is why a pickpocket has to trick them: The eyes are in fact quicker than the hands. "This is an idea scientists had never contemplated before," Macknik says. "It turns out, though, that the pickpocket was onto something." When we see a hand moving in a straight line, we automatically look toward the end point--this is called the pursuit system. A hand moving in a semicircle, however, seems to short-circuit our saccades. The arc doesn't tell our eyes where the hand is going, so we fixate on the hand itself--and fail to notice the other hand reaching into our pocket. "The pickpocket has found a weakness in the way we perceive motion," Macknik says. "Show the eyes an arc and they move differently."

While the magicians are educating the scientists, so far the scientists haven't offered much in return. Cowboy trick aside, Teller says, "this is an example of entertainers getting there first." And he wishes it weren't so. Teller hopes that laboratory insights will offer ways to break free of the stale tricks that have defined magic for decades--much as new technologies made possible the illusions of David Abbott in the early 20th century. A loan shark in Omaha, Nebraska, Abbott performed innovative, late-night shows in his living room. (Harry Houdini was one of many magicians who made the pilgrimage.) "Abbott used to say he wasn't satisfied with a trick unless people began to weep," Teller says. "He was that good."

Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion (via Kottke)

We've definitely seen how companies and their lawyers are often over-aggressive in trying to "protect" their trademarks, often not realizing how much more damage it does to their brand. Take, for example, the story of Monster Cable who has created an army of people who will never do business with the company due to its incredibly aggressive nature when it comes to over protecting its trademarks. With Wikipedia now entering the fray with trademark bullying, it's interesting to see a lot of Wikipedia-hatred come out in our comments as well.

With all that happening, Rob Hyndman recently wondered if Twitter's much more "laissez-faire attitude towards its trademarks has helped it grow fast," noting that "there's just no question that people feel more warmth towards the brand because of its openness." And, it's true, there are a number of services built off of Twitter that the company could potentially go after if it were feeling legalistic. Twitpic? Stocktwits? But the company has (at least for now) taken an approach of letting those services move forward (often promoting them itself). And, as Rob notes, that's part of Twitter's success as a brand.

This is a key lesson that big companies and trademark lawyers really should pay attention to. As people always like to point out, trademark law requires you to "protect" your mark to keep it from being declared generic, but that does not (as many assume) mean that you absolutely have to sue or threaten anyone who makes use of your mark. Especially in cases where it's clearly not making the brand generic, but simply building off of the brand, it can be a much smarter move to let it live on. People (often lawyers) seem to think that just because you can block a business for using a trademark, that it's a good business decision to do so. But, seeing how much damage has been done to Monster's brand (and now Wikipedia's brand) for taking the legal stance, in addition to the positive way in which people view Twitter's brand, these examples should (hopefully) make some of those trademark protectionists think twice.

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

Leadtowill posted this detail shot of a rather excellent mod/conversion -

This was a cassette radio. I removed the motor etc and added an input to the amp section of the circuit, mounted a spring and converted the speaker to a driver with a knife - the result is a roomy sounding spring reverb.
Future additions ---- a filter and feedback section, maybe make use of the radio section as a white noise generator...

Quite a few interesting works can be viewed in his Electronic and Microtonal Instruments photo set.

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I'm reading the docs for Facebook's Open Stream API, with fascination. It sounds like an app can read and write to a user's stream, something like the way one writes an app to access the Twitter status stream. That's something I want to do!

But...

Say I want to write an app to access my own stream. What's the process? How do I give the app permission? What's the endpoint?

I assume FQL is Facebook Query Language? What do I do with that? I don't know.

I have a feeling these docs are written for developers who have been working with Facebook. I have never written any code to call Facebook's API.

If they want to go after Twitter developers (no one is going to like this, but it's the truth) read their developer docs, and make your API work like that.

I say no one is going to like that except Twitter developers of course.

This is why I say that to compete with Twitter you must start with item #0 in the wishlist.

gkunene writes "Oracle expects Sun to contribute to its operating profit right away. To make that happen, Oracle may pull funding and staff from projects such as JavaFX, Project Looking Glass, and Project GlassFish."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Joining the modular forces of Arduino and Lego, Greg and Rael built the above-seen motor shield with a convenient plastic brick interface. Head over to Flickr for more project pics.

In the Maker Shed:


MotorShield for Arduino Kit

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nk497 writes "The UK government has further detailed plans to track all communications — mobile phone calls, text messages, email and browser sessions — in the fight against terrorism, pedophiles and organized crime. The government said it's not looking to see what you're saying, just to whom and when and how. Contrary to previous plans to keep it all in a massive database, it will now let ISPs and telecoms firms store the data themselves, and access it when it feels it needs it." And to clarify this Barence writes "The UK Government has dropped plans to create a massive database of all internet communications, following stern criticism from privacy advocates. Instead the Government wants ISPs and mobile phone companies to retain details of mobile phone calls, emails and internet sites visited. As with the original scheme, the actual content of the phone calls and messages won't be recorded, just the dates, duration and location/IP address of messages sent. The security services would then have to apply to the ISP or telecoms company to have the data released. The new proposals would also require ISPs to retain details of communications that originated in other countries but passed over the UK's network, such as instant messages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently on Offworld, One More Go columnist Margaret Robertson explained why she couldn't stop returning to Psygnosis' original future racer Wipeout, particularly the version for the best games console we never bought, and Tom Armitage gave us Something For The Weekend, explaining why retro racer remake OutRun Online Arcade is "polished, joyous, arcade fun, and the perfect game to get you in the mood for a spring weekend in the sun." Elsewhere we watched vegetation valiantly stave off an undead attack in the first gameplay footage of PopCap's upcoming defense game Plants Vs. Zombies, watched a River City Ransom-inspired flier for an upcoming chiptune showcase created on a NES (with rom included), and saw the soul of a PS3 DualShock controller. Finally we saw the first hints of fluid dynamics in the latest teased images of Q-games' upcoming PS3 downloadable PixelJunk game, saw Noby Noby BOY's dream of new music about to come true, watched the unbelievable MegaMan inspired pixel wizardry of Myk Dawg's unofficial video for Kanye West's Robocop (with a cameo appearance by Boxxy Adriana Lima) (above), and, finally, saw Saturday Night Live mashed up with Legend of Zelda as Link lets us know that he's on a boat.

The BBC's Rory Clellan-Jones (the same guy whose YouTube vid of a soccer match he filmed got yanked) has taken an interesting look inside the Internet Watch Foundation, the organization that runs the UK's child-porn blacklist. The piece does little to counter the negative press the IWF has received in light of its misguided blocks on Wikipedia and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, with the group's CEO appearing to gloss over the failures because he doesn't "want to dwell" on them, instead trying to hide behind the moral cover of stopping child porn. But the group's efforts on that front don't appear to be particularly fruitful, either: one of its "analysts" who looks into complaints the group receives about images online says that few of the images it finds are in the UK, so it just reports them to sister groups in the countries where they are hosted, if such groups exist. The aim of the IWF -- to stop child porn -- is laudable, but its techniques, and their collateral damage, leave much to be desired.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Brian Dettmer carefully dissects books into these lovely sculptures that reveal their inner relationships. They'll be on display in Chicago through May 9 at the Packer Schopf Gallery. Via Cool Hunting.

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Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

Giant squid are carnivorous mollusks the size of a school bus with a beak-like mouth that can cut through steel cable. You think they'd be hard to miss. And yet, largely because the squid tend toward the deepest water, they're so seldom seen that most people thought they were a myth---right up until a French ship brought back a chunk of one in the 1860s.

But while bringing home the giant squidy bacon isn't particularly simple, it's also not impossible. In this excerpt from Be Amazing, you'll find that there's more than one way to skin a sea monster.

Method 1: Forget the Net
You might have more luck "capturing" a squid on film. In September 2004, Japanese researchers took the first photos of a live giant squid in its natural habitat. The team sent cameras mounted to barbed bait hooks (the bait: smaller squids) nearly 3,000 feet below the Pacific Ocean. Before long, a 26-foot squid attempted to eat his scrawnier brethren and hooked himself on the line, allowing researchers to take some 500 photos before the squid escaped.

Method 2: Offer Squid a Tasty Treat
If your preferred squid looks hungry, try luring it with a delicious oil tanker. During the course of the 1930s, the Norwegian tanker Brunswick was attacked not once, not twice, but three times by giant squid. Metal boats don't sound especially appetizing, but scientists think squid mistake the large, gray objects for whales---a decidedly yummy entree giant squid have been known to dine upon. Unfortunately, it's more difficult to get a good grip on the steel hull of a tanker, than on the pliable hide of a whale. Whenever a squid tried to put the Brunswick in a choke hold, its tentacles would slip, and the squid would end up making a fatal slide into the ship's propellers.

Method 3: Just Go Have a Beer and Wait for the Squid to Come to You
Time-tested and infinitely more relaxing, this classic method is also responsible for catching one of the largest squid ever measured. In November, 1878, two Canadian fishermen from the delightfully named town of Timble Tickle, New Brunswick, found a giant squid washed ashore. Although technically on the lookout for smaller aquatic creatures, the fishermen gladly accepted the bounty the sea had given them, hauling the giant beast further onto land and tying it up to a tree. After it was dead (and, presumably, less feisty), the fishermen broke out the tape measure. From the tip of the its tail to the end of its tentacles, the squid was more than 50 feet long.

Please direct praise and/or fawning donations to illustrator Michael Rogalski.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Andy posted pics of this here classically styled elastic launcher with a tung oil/selective stain finish. He notes it's still a work in progress - either way, looks pretty darn 'snappy' as is.

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BillyG noted an RMS interview where he says "'Software as a service' means that you think of a particular server as doing your computing for you. If that's what the server does, you must not use it! If you do your computing on someone else's server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server. It is like running binary-only software, only worse: it's even harder for you to patch the program that's running on someone else's server than it is to patch a binary copy of a program running on your own computer. Just like non-free software, 'software as a service' is incompatible with your freedom."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crush All Hu-Mans is the latest collection of strips from the excellent robosexual webcomic Diesel Sweeties, a pixellated tribute to love, robots, and world domination. In Crush, Red Robot takes center stage: bent on the destruction of all humanity ("Destroy all that lives! Mutilate the corpses! Flay and tear and maim and pirate music!") he finds himself awkwardly between Clango Cyclotron (the human-loving bot) and Menace-11, the all-black nihilist-bot who's just back from a stint volunteering in Robotania.

The slim volume is good for big, angry, bloody-spattered laughs, filled with the kind of robotic non-sequiturs that makes Diesel Sweeties such a charming strip.

What's more, R. Stevens and co are selling a plush, knitted Red Robot with savage claws for all your self-loathing human robo-cuddling needs.

CRUSH ALL HU-MANS! Book

longacre writes "I.B.M. plans to announce Monday that it is in the final stages of completing a computer program to compete against human 'Jeopardy!' contestants. If the program beats the humans, the field of artificial intelligence will have made a leap forward. ... The team is aiming not at a true thinking machine but at a new class of software that can 'understand' human questions and respond to them correctly. Such a program would have enormous economic implications. ... The proposed contest is an effort by I.B.M. to prove that its researchers can make significant technical progress by picking "grand challenges" like its early chess foray. The new bid is based on three years of work by a team that has grown to 20 experts in fields like natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval. ... Under the rules of the match that the company has negotiated with the 'Jeopardy!' producers, the computer will not have to emulate all human qualities. It will receive questions as electronic text. The human contestants will both see the text of each question and hear it spoken by the show's host, Alex Trebek. ... Mr. Friedman added that they were also thinking about whom the human contestants should be and were considering inviting Ken Jennings, the 'Jeopardy!' contestant who won 74 consecutive times and collected $2.52 million in 2004."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, who recently wondered if the world would be better off had the internet not been invented has now introduced a bill that would encourage the use of open source technologies for healthcare records. It's nice to see that he's not entirely anti-technology. Still, this is a lot easier said than done. As we recently saw, an attempt to create open source technology for emergency dispatch was forced to shut down after a proprietary vendor threatened the open source project with patent infringement. You can pretty much bet that any open source healthcare solution would likely face the same sort of problem. Would anyone in the Senate like to protect such open source projects from those who abuse the patent system to block such projects?

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An anonymous reader writes "We have a T1 line coming into our satellite office and we rely fairly heavily on it to transfer large amounts of data over a VPN to the head office across the country. Recently, we decided to upgrade to a 20 Mbit line. Being the lone IT guy here, it fell on me to run cable from the ISP's box to our server room so I went out and bought a spool of Cat6. I mentioned the purchase and the plan to run the cable myself to my boss in head office and in an emailed response he stated that it's next to impossible to create quality cable (ie: cable that will pass a Time Domain Reflectometer test) by hand without expensive dies, special Ethernet jacks and special cable. He even went so far as to say that handmade cable couldn't compare to even the cheapest Belkin cables. I've never once ran into a problem with handmade patch cables. Do you create your own cable or do you bite the bullet and buy it from some place?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an interesting vid of a close-up/card magician using augmented reality with his card tricks.

Marco Tempest

From the Maker Shed:

MAKE, Volume 13
Our Price: $14.99
MAKE, Volume 13 is our magic issue, loaded with enough tricks to keep your friends and family entertained and mystified for months. Telekinetic pens! Levitating heads! Ghostly blocks! These are just a few of the many terrific magic tricks you'll find in this issue of MAKE. And as always, you'll find dozens of other projects, ideas, tips, and tricks for doing everything from growing giant vegetables to finding lost screws.

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DeviceGuru writes "The Linux version of Boxee's eponymously-named multimedia platform has finally been updated to include several new features introduced into the OS X and Windows versions over the past few months. Key additions include an App Box and restored support for Hulu, which disappeared several months ago. Still lacking in the latest Linux release, however, is the long-awaited addition of Netflix movie and TV show streaming for subscribers to Netflix's monthly service."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alex sez, "This is a Flickr set taken by me of a group of kids and their dad riding on their five Victorian bicycles with the one big wheel in the front and the small wheel in the rear, which are known as Penny Farthings, High Wheels, or Boneshakers."

The Penny Farthing Bike Gang (Thanks, Alex!)

Patti at New World Geek sent us a link to this post showing a clever use of rain gutter as a wall-borne gardening system.

Repurposed rain gutters

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Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times writes about Justin McMurry of Keller, TX, who spends up to 20 unpaid hours per week helping Verizon customers with high-speed fiber optic Internet, television and telephone service. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies, and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service. Such enthusiasts are known as lead users, or super-users, and their role in contributing innovations to product development and improvement — often selflessly — has been closely researched in recent years. These unpaid contributors, it seems, are motivated mainly by a payoff in enjoyment and respect among their peers. 'You have to make an environment that attracts the Justin McMurrys of the world, because that's where the magic happens,' says Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon. The mentality of super-users in online customer-service communities is similar to that of devout gamers, according to Lyle Fong, co-founder of Lithium Technologies whose web site advertises that a vibrant community can easily save a company millions of dollars per year in deflected support calls' and whose current roster of 125 clients includes AT&T, BT, iRobot, Linksys, Best Buy, and Nintendo. Lithium's customer service sites for companies offer elaborate rating systems for contributors, with ranks, badges and kudos counts. 'That alone is addictive,' says Fong. 'They are revered by their peers.' Meanwhile McMurry, who is 68 and a retired software engineer, continues supplying answers by the bushel, all at no pay. 'People seem to like most of what I say online, and I like doing it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a somewhat amusing joke, it looks like the folks behind The Pirate Bay have had their latest IPs listed as being controlled by the law firms involved in the prosecution against them. Some thought that somehow the law firms had taken control over the IP addresses, but it appears to be much more of a joke by The Pirate Bay folks, showing the prosecutors how IP info isn't universal truth. However, the timing of this little prank may have been a bit off, as The Pirate Bay site has been experiencing some downtime due to ISP issues totally unrelated to the IP addresses or to the trial (though, it didn't stop someone from emailing me that The Pirate Bay had been down for all of three minutes and something must be wrong!!!).

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The always-inspiring folks at Oomlout are now showing off a forthcoming Arduino breadboard kit they're working on, a make-your-own 'Dunio built around the ATMega168 chip. The kit will come with the chip, a breadboard, a hook-up wire kit, and all of the support components you need to wire up a working Arduino. If you already have the parts, or would rather just make your own, they give you a parts list. They also have a paper layout sheet you can lay over the breadboard (or just use a reference) to see how everything hooks up onto the board. They hope to have the kt available soon.

Earthshine Design did their own breadboard-based Arduino (above). You can find info on their version here.

Breadboard Based Arduino Compatible (BBAC) Micro-Controller

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Check out this elegantly simple Star Trek iPhone case mod -

A decade old Star Trek pin with the pin part broken off many years ago.
It's been super glued to the back of my iPhone case (not to the iPhone)

Andy C. [via iPhone Savior]

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Sumana sez, "Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson selected nine mind-squibbling SF and fantasy stories from the slush pile, commissioned five works of art, paid the authors and artists, and packaged the whole thing as a high-quality anthology that you're free to copy and remix. Artists include E-Sheep's Patrick Farley and fanfic darling Erin Ptah; authors include Mary Anne Mohanraj, Carole Lanham, and Ken Liu. We also wrote an essay describing the process, which you can read if you're interested in how we did it or what the SF/fantasy market looks like from the editor's perspective."

Thoughtcrime Experiments (Thanks, Sumana!)

A few folks have sent in this essay by Evgeny Morozov at ForeignPolicy.com complaining about "Twitter's power to misinform" concerning swine flu. It sure sounds good as a thesis, but it makes little sense. Twitter's power to misinform is no different than any method of communication. The issue of swine flu is hardly limited to Twitter. It looks like it was all over the cable news channels, newspapers and news websites over the weekend. The fact that Morozov finds a few people were clueless on Twitter means nothing. Your next door neighbor could be clueless, and if he shouted over the backfence to Morozov something wrong about swine flu, would Morozov write an article about how picket fences have a power to misinform?

Part of the problem seems to be that Morozov (and many Twitter critics) seem to want to assign to it a purpose that it does not have and no one uses it for. If people are misinforming others via Twitter, that's an issue about who you follow, not about Twitter as a whole. I'll admit that I saw multiple mentions of swine flu over the weekend among the folks I follow on Twitter -- but I believe every single one of them was making a joke of some sort. Should I then write an essay about "Twitter's power to create laughter out of a serious situation"?

There are some clueless people out there -- no doubt. And I'm sure those clueless people may know other clueless people, but there's no indication that a sudden influx of dumb Twitter statements from clueless people resulted in further cluelessness. At no point does Morozov bother to see if any one of the Twitter users he mentioned have a significant number of followers, or if any of those followers actually believed/responded to the clueless statements. Nor does he investigate if (perhaps) some of the more knowledgeable followers of those users actually corrected the clueless. That's because, just as a clueless person may repeat bad information, others can use Twitter to properly educate. Twitter, itself, is just a tool. Just like a website like ForeignPolicy.com. And it's just as easy for someone like Morozov to misinform -- such as by claiming Twitter misinforms -- via ForeignPolicy.com than it is for individuals on Twitter to misinform. In the case of Morozov and ForeignPolicy.com, however, I'd argue the situation is worse, since there are probably a lot more readers, and they might actually believe that someone writing for a site like ForeignPolicy.com knows what they're talking about.

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tobiasly writes "I administer several Ubuntu desktops and numerous CentOS servers. One of the biggest headaches is keeping them up-to-date with each distro's latest bugfix and security patches. I currently have to log in to each system, run the appropriate apt-get or yum command to list available updates, determine which ones I need, then run the appropriate install commands. I'd love to have a distro-independent equivalent of the Red Hat Network where I could do all of this remotely using a web-based interface. PackageKit seems to have solved some of the issues regarding cross-distro package maintenance, but their FAQ explicitly states that remote administration is not a goal of their project. Has anyone put together such a system?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball from the Maker Shed is on sale now as part of our Spring-cleaning sale. It's a really interesting 2-DVD set that includes seven hours of extras, including interviews with industry greats and a pinball factory tour.

One of the great maker tales of the game industry. In 1998, Williams was the world's biggest pinball manufacturer, but they were in trouble. Two legendary designers took their "crazy" idea out of the company and into a garage; the result, "Pinball 2000," became a sensation... until Williams mysteriously pulled the plug. This grass-roots effort to innovate inside corporate America will fascinate any student of technology, design, or business.

Check out TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball DVD on sale now in the Maker Shed.

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Destiny sez, "In a new interview, Vernor Vinge predicts the Singularity within 21 years. 'I'd personally be surprised if it hadn't happened by 2030,' he announces, saying humankind may become 'the only animal that has figured out how to outsource its cognition' to superintelligent machines. Since 1981 Vinge has been popularizing the idea of a massive technological shift which replaces 'the human era' with an advanced humanity augmented by artificial intelligence. 'It is very unsettling to realize that we may be entering an era where questions like 'What is the meaning of life?' will be practical engineering questions,' 64-year-old Vinge agrees. 'On the other hand, I think it could be kind of healthy, if we look at the things we really want -- and look at what it would mean if we could get them.'"

I'm on record as being a skeptic about this stuff, but man, Vernor's fun to read.

Singularity 101 with Vernor Vinge (Thanks, Destiny!)

An anonymous reader points out a ReadWriteWeb piece on an hour-long demo of Wolfram Alpha (which we discussed at its announcement). Stephen Wolfram does not like to call it a "search engine," preferring instead the term "computational knowledge engine." It will open to the public in May. "The hype around Wolfram|Alpha, the next 'Google killer' from the makers of Mathematica, has been building over the last few weeks. Today, we were lucky enough to attend a one-hour web demo with Stephen Wolfram, and from what we've seen, it definitely looks like it can live up to the hype — though, because it is so different from traditional search engines, it will definitely not be a 'Google killer.' According to Stephen Wolfram, the goal of Alpha is to give everyone access to expert knowledge and the data that a specialist would be able to compute from this information."

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In this superb Australian public radio documentary, "MBA: Mostly bloody awful," the idea of "scientific management" and "professional management" is subjected to an extremely critical look and comes up wanting. Focusing on the Harvard Business School and the circumstances that gave rise to it (America: "a corporation founded by a corporation"; "scientific" Taylorism and its focus on quantifying the unquantifiable, the fad to quantification in management, such as Meyers-Briggs). It looks at the difference between MBAs and real entrepreneurs, looking at all those successful founders who didn't get MBAs (Gates, Jobs, Bezos, etc), and at the pants-wetting insecurity on display in the number of times the word "leader" and its associated terms appear in the bumpf for management programs ("every leader needs to have a bunch of followers -- do we want a world of followers?"). This is extremely meaty stuff, funny and engrossing and refreshing at once. Definitely worth the listen.

MBA: Mostly bloody awful (via Justine Larbalestier)

The Council of Europe has released a set of guidelines on the human rights of video-game players, calling on game-creators to design systems that encourage freedom of expression and creativity (many online games actually put up an "agreement" every time you patch them in which you promise not to assert your right to either). On the academic games blog Terra Nova, Ren Reynolds points out problems with this approach and sets out a course for improving it.

Providers (designers and publishers) of online games design and make available products which can promote the exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms, in particular the freedom to express, to create and to exchange content and communications while respecting the rights of others. Designed and provided in an appropriate manner, games can be powerful tools to enhance learning, creativity and social interaction, thereby helping users to benefit from the information society.

However, like other content, online games may also inadvertently impact on the rights and sensibilities of individuals, in particular children, as well as their dignity. The potential impact of such games may increase as they allow the gaming experience to become more creative and interactive (as the possibilities for expression, interaction and exchange of content with other gamers increase) and ever more realistic (as the visual effects of games develop).

Online games can play an important positive role in the lives and development of individuals, especially for children and young people. It suffices to consider the importance of rights and freedoms, values and dignity, into the embedded design and marketing of games. In this regard, it is recalled that the exercise of freedom of expression carries with it duties and responsibilities, in particular as regards the protection of health and morals and the rights of others, which publishers of online games are encouraged to bear in mind when deciding on the content of their games.

Human rights & the 'online game provider'

Carsten sez, "On May 5, thus in only two weeks, the politicians in Brussels will vote on a package of laws regulating the Internet in EU countries. This is the so-called telecoms package. If the lobbyists' and bureaucrats' version is adopted, ISPs will be able to arbitrarily block sites to their customers, and governments will be able to impose three-strikes measures without involving the judiciary. A group of MEPs, among them the Swede Eva-Britt Svensson, are proposing some amendments which will effectively table a set of digital 'Citizen's Rights' which will effectively prohibit filtering and cutoffs unless as decided in a courtroom with adequate cause/proof. If the Citizens' Rights amendments are accepted, Europeans will gain important safeguards, if not, lobbies and governments and Network Neutrality-bashing ISPs will get a free ride."

Tell the European Parliament to vote against conditional access to the Internet! (Thanks, Carsten!)

Rishab sez, "India's election commission has a sense of humour. It has insisted that when about 500 million Indians vote in the general elections this summer, they will be marked on their middle fingers with indelible ink to prevent double voting. The photograph shows the Chief Minister of Maharashtra state (and his wife) showing their middle fingers to the camera, apparently only realising later what it looked like."

The Election Commission is ensuring your message goes out loud and clear -- they are giving your index finger a go-by, and painting your middle finger with indelible ink instead. A Commission official said the change was necessitated by the recently-concluded elections to local bodies in some parts of the country. "Since these voters will still have their index fingers marked, we decided to uniformly mark the middle finger of the left hand," he said.

Not everyone's amused, though. In many places, politicians and celebrities smiled and posed for the cameras after casting their vote, but realisation dawned much later. A Pune-based Bollywood celebrity said, "I did not realise it when I posed for the cameras. But when I saw the photo, my pose appeared to be in poor taste."

Voters will now show middle finger (Thanks, Rishab!)

Irene sez, "On April 24th, an Air France flight from Paris to Mexico had to make an unscheduled stop in Martinique when US air traffic controllers notified the jet that it would not be receiving permission to fly over US airspace. The plane was not en route to the US, just passing over some of it. On board the plane was Colombian Journalist Hernando Calvo Ospina, who works for the French left-wing journal Le Monde Diplomatique and wrote about US involvement in Latin America. Ospina and his publisher said they will sue for compensation."

What makes the whole incident even more interesting is that Air France had only sent its passenger manifest to the Mexicans, but now it is clear that Mexico shares this information with the United States.

Hernando Calvo Ospina has written articles about the United States involvement in Latin America, and is currently writing a book about he CIA. The exact reason for him being on the terrorist watch list is unknown, and we'll probably never know what criteria are used for adding people to it. Air France is considering asking the United States for compensation. Good luck with that.

Air France jet diverts after being told to stay clear of US airspace (Thanks, Irene!)

The new Walkman is great. Click the pic for comments, a full-size picture, link to the product page.

Ant writes in to mention the World Privacy Forum's top ten information collector/user list, which shows opt-out instructions (or at least a starting point): "As privacy experts, we are frequently asked about 'opting out,' and which opt outs we think are the most important. This list is a distillation of ideas for opting out that the World Privacy Forum has developed over the years from responding to those questions. ... Many people have told us that they think opting out is confusing. We agree. Opting out can range from the not-too-difficult (the FTC's Do Not Call list is a fairly simple opt out) to the challenging (the National Advertising Initiative (NAI) opt out can be tricky). Our hope is that this list will clarify which opt out does what, and how to go about opting out. In this list, some opt outs can be done by phone, some have to be sent in a letter via postal mail, and some can be accomplished online. Some opt outs last forever, some have time limits, and others can be changed at will. If an opt out is on this list, it is because we thought it might be important enough to be worth whatever annoyance it may pose. "

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This week's 40-plus minute podcast with Jay Rosen and myself.

To subscribe, add this URL to your podcatcher (or iTunes).

The Narrative Fallacy writes "The Washington Post has an interesting profile on Barbara A. Ringer, who joined the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress in 1949 and spent 21 years drafting the legislation and lobbying Congress before the Copyright Act of 1976 was finally passed. Ringer wrote most of the bill herself. 'Barbara had personal and political skills that could meld together the contentious factions that threatened to tear apart every compromise in the 20 year road to passage of the 1976 Act,' wrote copyright lawyer William Patry. The act codified the fair use defense to copyright infringement. For the first time, scholars and reviewers could quote briefly from copyrighted works without having to pay fees. With the 1976 act that Ringer conceived, an author owned the copyright for his or her lifetime plus 50 years. Previously under the old 1909 law, an author owned the copyright for 28 years from the date of publication and unless the copyright was renewed, the work entered the public domain, and the author lost any right to royalties. Ringer received the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest honor for a federal worker. Ringer remained active in copyright law for years, attending international conferences and filing briefs with the Supreme Court before her death earlier this year at age 83. 'Her contributions were monumental,' said Marybeth Peters, the Library of Congress's current register of copyrights. 'She blazed trails. She was a heroine.'"

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