I just had an epiphany (or a moment of Duh! depending on perspective)
I’ve been thinking of the University as a Really Big School with bajillions of faculty and students who are mostly interested in maintaining the status quo (or in not taking risks, which has the same effect).
What if, instead, I ignore the status quo and think of the University as a small school, full of a small group of faculty and students who want to work together to try something new?
Read MoreI could watch this video all day. The fluid, organic flow of people and machines through the streets of San Francisco in 1905 - before the big fire. There’s something mesmerizing about the way everyone is able to move together. No ring roads. No interchanges. No streetlights. No bike lanes. Just a fluid, organic flow of humanity. I lost count of near-miss collisions, though…
Update: Looks like the video got yanked from YouTube due to copyright issues on the audio. Awesome. So, here’s the version direct from the Prelinger Archives:
I’ve been crafting a fine tinfoil hat in response to thinking more about pervasive third party tracking. And I realized I had been a total hypocrite since I was still running Wordpress.com stats on my blogs. Even though it was “anonymous,” it adds to the pile of third-party data that is tracked for online activity. I’ve now disabled tracking from Wordpress.com stats - and with that, I think, there are no third party trackers tied to my blogs. There could be something through a plugin or something, but nothing I’ve added.
Read MoreThe Wall Street Journal has been on a roll, looking at privacy online. The latest article looks at the trackers, bugs, beacons, and cookies used by various websites to monitor you (and then share that data). For example, the simple site dictionary.com tracks a fair bit of data about visitors:
234 activity trackers. To look up the definition of a word.
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The Wall Street Journal took a look at the trackers (cookies, beacons, etc…) used by advertisers to track activity and connect various bits of data (what movies you like, what websites you go to, what music you buy, etc…)
They claim that the data they store is anonymous.
The information that companies gather is anonymous, in the sense that Internet users are identified by a number assigned to their computer, not by a specific person’s name. Lotame, for instance, says it doesn’t know the name of users such as Ms. Hayes-Beaty—only their behavior and attributes, identified by code number. People who don’t want to be tracked can remove themselves from Lotame’s system.
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>Software programmers are taking the displacement of personal agency to a new level. Relentlessly focused on making their programs more “user friendly,” they’re scripting the intimate processes of intellectual inquiry and even social attachment. We follow their scripts when we click on one of Google’s keyword suggestions, and we follow them when we select from a list of categories to describe ourselves and our relationships on Facebook. These choices are convenient, but they’re not our own. They’re generalizations masquerading as personalizations.
Read MoreI ran EtherApe on my Ubuntu Server system for about 45 minutes this afternoon, sniffing network connections on the office LAN. Nothing snoopy/creepy, just network addresses and protocols. Man, there are a LOT of machines involved…
The node at around 10 o’clock is my desktop Mac.
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Stephen responds to my previous post on classblogs:
> My first reaction (as I’m sure it is for many) is that we shouldn’t compel them to do anything. But when you ask the question in the context of formal education, you begin to see how ridiculous it is. Is there anything in education that isn’t compelled? Participation is enforced to the age of 18, college and university courses typically have requirements for graduation. So why should public performance be any different? And - it isn’t! We require singers and actors to perform in public in order to graduate. Lawyers stand in moot court. Interns perform in actual hospitals, apprentices in real garages. Graduate students are frequently reminded that they should have some journal publications to their name. So why the objection to publishing on the web? It’s an irrational objection, when compared with the practices we see everywhere else in education.
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good questions, indeed…
other search engines take a stab at the meaning of life:
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In Medium Raw, Bourdain describes the thoughts he had, transitioning from a coke-head heroin addict to a doting father, and how the panopticon (he didn’t call it that, though) played a role in the process:
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The iniquitousness of Twitter and food- and chef-related Web sites and blogs has totally changed the game for anyone with a television show - even me. You don’t have to be very famous at all these days to end up with a blurry photograph on DumbAssCelebrities.com. You don’t want your daughter’s little schoolmates reading about her daddy, stuttering drunk, two o’clock in the morning, at a chef-friendly bar, doing belly shots from a chunky and underdressed cocktail waitress – something that could well have happened a few years ago. In a day when a passing cell-phone user can easily get a surreptitious photo of you, slinking out of the porn shop with copies of Anal Rampage 2 and MILFBusters under your arm, and post it in real time, maybe that’s a particularly good time to trade in the leather jacket for some cotton Dockers.
With journalism being neutered in favour of fluff pieces like cat fashion and covering the latest reality tv shows, there is a real danger. If real professionals aren’t left in the newsrooms, who will be asking the tough questions?
From an interview with climate scientist Stephen Schneider:
> The reason that we do not ask focus groups of farmers and auto workers to determine how to license airplane pilots and doctors is they have no skill at that. And we do not ask people with PhDs who are not climatologists to tell us whether climate science is right or wrong, because they have no skill at that, particularly when they’re hired by the fossil-fuel industry because of their PhDs to cast doubt. So here is where balance is actually false reporting.
>
>What the media needs to do is not to ignore outliers—we should never ignore outliers—[but] to frame where they sit in the spectrum of knowledgeable opinion. The good reporters always did that. They said, ‘There are a small number of people, many of whom are funded by particular industries, who make the following point.’ That’s completely legit, because now the public knows where these guys sit.
>
>But now, given the new media business-driven model, where they fired most specialists and the only people left in the newsroom are general-assignment reporters who have to do a grown-up’s job, how are they going to be able to discern the north end of a southbound horse?