kev – asleep at the wheel, 40 miles left to go [View Page] Posts: [yes, we’re still friends. honest.], [bear with me], [sometimes, I totally miss the links], [all these things that I have done], [the nhl is important in the usa], [firefox 3: disabling the awesomebar], [well hey, that’s nifty], [this is a corvette?], [john henry’s got a great sense of humour], [flickr’s got issues, and they’re getting worse], [halle-freaking-lujah, no more first keypress ignored on osx], [corporate zombie], [and this month, I joined a cult], [oh. my. god.], [flightstats now available with google]
kev
asleep at the wheel, 40 miles left to go
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yes, we’re still friends. honest.
I just nuked my Facebook account. It’s nothing personal, I assure you.
I’m just a little disenchanted with the way a lot of people are using it as their primary means of communication, as well as using it as an excuse for not returning calls or email (”why didn’t you just email me on Facebook?”). It’s a walled garden that collects a tonne of information on people, and it makes me uncomfortable. So, I’m out.
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bear with me
things will be a little bright around these parts for a while. I’m in the process of updating this theme to something a little less bright, and a little less coop-like. after that, I’ll be posting thoughts and ramblings here again as opposed to flickr (although I’ll be keeping the flickr badge :) ).
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sometimes, I totally miss the links
a couple weeks a friend of mine sent me a vid of fixie riders in San Francisco. It was set to a great instrumental, and said instrumental was “I’m bound to pack it up” by Aluminum.
I didn’t know (until today) that Aluminum’s self-titled album was a rework of the White Stripe’s “White Blood Cells”, performed by an orchestra.
Listen to “Fell In Love With a Girl”, and then listen to “I’m Bound To Pack It Up.”
Too cool. I like this stuff even more, now.
White Stripes - Fell in Love With a Girl
Aluminum - I’m Bound to Pack it Up
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all these things that I have done
so, I got in to my hotel last night at around 10:30 (I’m on the left coast, so it felt like 01:30) and had every intention of crashing. before I nodded off, I flipped on the tube, and stumbled across the premiere of “Carrier”, PBS’s new documentary that captures a tour of duty aboard the USS Nimitz, a US aircraft carrier.
the show runs ten episodes, and last night’s introduced viewers to the wide variety of people on board. the emphasis was on how the whole thing wouldn’t work unless everyone did their job, and how big the pool of “everyone” is. the interviews are pretty blunt (in a good way), and I think my favorite bit was one of the airmen explaining that because of the large number of 18-20 year olds, the amount of drama is a lot like high school.
I got sucked in, and ended up watching the whole thing. it was worth the feeling totally tired this morning, and I’ll be looking for it over the next couple months. the show also gets my nod as one of the best intros (and choices of music to set the tone - “gotta help me out”) to a program of any kind in a very long time. (the youtube quality doesn’t do it justice, but you get the idea)
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the nhl is important in the usa
so… the nhl playoffs start tonight.
you can see how important espn thinks this is. there is not one story about the playoffs visible in the prime real estate. phil mickelson playing a par-freaking-three event with his kids is bigger news. that’s awesome.
bettman’s done a hell of a job raising awareness of the game there.
it’s so pathetic it’s funny, really.
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firefox 3: disabling the awesomebar
UPDATE: The browser.urlbar.richResults preference checking was removed in bug 407836. Please use the oldbar addon if you want to return to Firefox 2’s style of lookups. The rest of this post is kind of moot now :)
Some people don’t like the “awesomebar” in Firefox3, which is a widget that replaced Firefox 2’s location bar’s auto-complete with a whack of new functionality. Instead of just looking at your history and matching URLs, the awesomebar goes through your history and bookmarks (and the metadata around them) while remembering which sites you visit most. So, instead of just URL matching, it suggests the sites you visit the most that are most relevant to what you’ve started to type in the location bar (and this can be keywords as well as partial URL matching - it’s nifty).
I confess, I didn’t much care for it at first, but the improvements to its learning behaviour and search routines have made me pretty damn happy. I’m not disabling it, but I’ve read a number of posts where people don’t really like/want the functionality and the slightly fatter UI elements it brings. So, I say give it a chance and it’ll grow on you, but if you really don’t like it, you can disable it.
To disable the awesomebar, you’ll need to set the boolean preference of browser.urlbar.richResults to “false”. If you’re asking yourself “how do I do that?”, then you need to do a little reading on “about:config“.
So, short and sweet for the skimmers:
Add the pref browser.urlbar.richResults as a boolean, set it to false
This pref is only checked on startup, so you’ll need to restart Firefox for it to take effect.
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well hey, that’s nifty
CBC Radio 3, a radio program and satellite channel that features all-Canadian music I like, featured one of my pics today. They maintain a pool on flickr where people can submit their shots. Each day they pick a photo from this pool as their image of the day.
Mine made it today :)
It’s also the background image for their website, but only for today (if you click on the “show background” in the lower right you get the whole image).
It’s a little thing, but it’s pretty cool for me.
(the original is here)
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this is a corvette?
dear chevrolet,
you’re doing it wrong.
like, really, really wrong.
congrats on taking an icon and turning it into a piece of rice.
I wish I could say I was surprised, but this kind of product - which the big three just can’t seem to get their heads out of - is why I finally (and not willingly) switched to an import last year.
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john henry’s got a great sense of humour
no doubt that hank will continue to prove he doesn’t after he receives his membership card. I’m a yankees fan (well, more a jeter fan), and I gotta say that this is the perfect response to Hank’s idiocy du jour. I’m thinking of starting a pool on when good ‘ole Hank will implode under the media and fani scrutiny in New York.
I’m thinkin’ maybe June-ish, when it starts to get really warm again, and the boobirds come home to the bleachers to nest for the summer and hatch some batteries.
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flickr’s got issues, and they’re getting worse
I have to say, I’ve noticed that flickr hasn’t been the same since some "optimization" changes to the databases were applied in mid-january. in addition to a few outages, which weren’t so irritating, the contact update issue seems to be getting progressively worse. I’ve noticed it’s gone from 1-3 hours to update some contact to 3-4 days . that seems like fail to me.
the admins are aware of the issue, and I can appreciate the scaling fun they must be hitting, but this is starting to get a little stupid. it’s frustrating more than anything, because there are folks I chat with through comment streams when they update.
I’m hoping they fix the problems sooner rather than later. a couple hour delay is fine, but days is silly. right now 40 contacts of mine are out of date, out of 148. one of them hasn’t updated in over a year, which surprised the crap out of me. most are over a day behind at this point.
I’m not calling for heads (like you’ll see in the forums), but it would be nice if the admins did more than say "don’t worry, we’re working on it, but it’ll be a few more weeks". I’d like to understand what the problem is, and if they fucked it up royally in january just say so (or if it’s purely a scaling issue).
anyways. sad-making.
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Perseid Meteor Shower This Week: Stars Fall Over A...
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Hello BlogAshevillians!
Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance Presents...
Free Coen Brothers screenings this Aug @ Pack Libr...
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Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Dollar Dollar Bill
The Top Floor Studio guys are bringing the know-how. You're invited.
Labels: blogging, business, Top Floor
Monday, August 11, 2008
Pre-Fall New Bloggers Welcome
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Perseid Meteor Shower This Week: Stars Fall Over Asheville
The annual summertime Perseid meteor shower is less spectacular from a suburban back yard than it is from the deep dark of the countryside, but I've seen cool meteors in West Asheville, a mile from the city center.
Please Pardon Our Mess
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Hello BlogAshevillians!
First I want to thank all the BlogAsheville folks who have been such a great help to the Media Arts Project in the past on such projects as the HATCH Fest and the Ashevillage Building Convergence. You are a wildly motivated group.
Friday, August 08, 2008
Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance Presents...
Free Coen Brothers screenings this Aug @ Pack Library!
Blood Simple - Aug 18th
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Shop at Earth Fare West This Saturday
Earth Fare West shoppers, save your game until the weekend: the organic grocery is donating 5% of Saturday's total proceeds to the Animal Compassion Network, a local no-kill rescue, placement, foster and reduced cost spay/neuter agency.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Breaking Parkside news: City Hall magnolia to be cut down?
According to the Mountain Xpress, developer Stewart Coleman hand-delivered a letter today to the demonstrators who have held vigil under the City Hall magnolia for over a month.
Urgent Press Conference: Magnolia Tree, Noon, Thursday, August 7th In Front Of Asheville City Hall
Parkside Condominiums opponents will hold a press conference tomorrow at noon, Thursday August 7th in front of Asheville City Hall to release the contents of a letter threatening to kill the magnolia tree and demolish the nearby historic Hayes & Hobson building within a newly specified time period. The letter was hand-delivered to Coven Oldenwilde on Tuesday by Parkside developer Stewart Coleman.
Magnolia tree watchers will respond to the letter by outlining their new plans to reject Coleman’s ultimatum and save the tree and the building.
Mountain X article here.
Lusty Monk? Local Mustard.
(Lusty Monk mustard, "Original Sin" flavor)
Lusty Monk Mustard (a Western Carolina history student discovered a Victorian mustard recipe, tried it at home, and started serving it with pretzels at the bar where she worked) Theros Olive Oil (get it at Greenlife) Imladris Farms (fifth-generation Fairview farm; you've had their jams at Sunny Point Cafe in Best Asheville)
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Whispers On The Wind
On the heels of the BlogAsheville gathering at the fantastic Wedge Brewery last Friday, folks are already getting excited about the 3rd annual Extravablogiversapaloozathon. To be held sometime in late September or early October, the Extrava will feature at least two musical acts, donated keg'o'beer, a snazzy location, and, of course, the BlogAsheville Awards. Nominations for the awards will open early next month, so check out the blogroll and read the folks you might not have acquainted yourselves with yet.
Labels: blogasheville, extravablogiversapaloozathon
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
WLOS at BJs gas station
BJ's Market, a convenience store and gas station in West Asheville has currently dropped their regular gas prices to $3.75/gallon in an effort to gain new customers. They are taking a small loss on the gas, but hoping to make up the difference with increased revenues.
2008 Biltmore Village Art and Craft Festival
Monday, July 28, 2008
The District: Photography by Max Cooper
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10 August 2008
Hypothesis testing and long range memory
Filed under:
Instrumental Record
Climate Science — gavin @ 9:29 AM
What is the actual hypothesis you are testing when you compare a model to an observation? It is not a simple as 'is the model any good' - though many casual readers might assume so. Instead, it is a test of a whole set of assumptions that went into building the model, the forces driving it, and the assumptions that went in to what is presented as the observations. A mismatch between them can arise from a mis-specification of any of these components and climate science is full of examples where reported mismatches ended up being due to problems in the observations or forcing functions rather than the models (ice age tropical ocean temperatures, the MSU records etc.). Conversely of course, there are clear cases where the models are wrong (the double ITCZ problem) and where the search for which assumptions in the model are responsible is ongoing.
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9 August 2008
Comprehensive climate glossary
Filed under:
Tutorials
Glossary
Climate Science — rasmus @ 2:47 AM
Recently we received a request for setting up a glossary-only search mechanism, or perhaps one web page with a long list of glossary entries with hot links to full explanations. The glossary that we already have is a good start, but we are all busy and it's hard to find the time for extending this.
But there are also a number of external web pages which provide climate-related glossaries, such as the NOAA (they also have a seperate page for paleo-stuff), the Bureau of Meteorology (Australia, and there is even one by the Australian EPA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, the U.S.), and the Western Regional Climate Center (WRCC, the U.S.). Wikipedia also has a glossary for climatological terms.
For those who seek the explanation for more bureaucratic terms, both the EU and the UNFCCC provide glossaries that may be useful.
Furthermore, there are some nice resources available, such as the Encyclopedia of Earth.
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2 August 2008
Bridging the divides
Filed under:
Communicating Climate
Climate Science — gavin @ 12:57 PM
We often discuss the issues that arise in doing interdisciplinary work in climate science, and Liz Moyer and I have a commentary on that just out in Nature Reports Climate Change. Normally I don't mention these kinds of pieces on the blog, but in this case the editors commissioned a nice cartoon (from Mark Roberts) illustrating our point. I liked the cartoon a lot, and so it deserves as wide an audience as possible.
A bit of context is probably useful. The three main protagonists are representative of the somewhat different foci of paleo-climatologists, climate modellers and economists. Very broadly speaking, paleo-climate science is built around the analysis of single location time series (often from holes that are drilled). Climate modellers spend a lot of time trying to see what is coming up in all its complexity, while economists tend to eschew complexity and look for insight in highly idealised situations. But in order to increase the credibility of models, they have to do well at simulating past climates and what might happen in the future is certainly informed by what has happened in the past. And in order to better understand the impacts of climate change and various proposed policies, economists will need to embrace the complexity of human-climate interactions while modellers need to better understand what aspects of climate really do make a difference. None of these things will happen if we continue to all look in different directions, and more problematically, fail to support and reward those scientists who want to bridge the divides. Sea monsters notwithstanding.
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29 July 2008
Journalistic whiplash
Filed under:
Communicating Climate
Reporting on climate
Climate Science — gavin @ 6:15 PM
Andy Revkin has a good article in the Science Times today on the problem of journalistic whiplash in climate change (also discussed here). This phenomena occurs with the more uncertain parts of a science that are being actively researched and where the full story is only slowly coming together. In such cases, new papers often appear in high profile journals (because they meet the 'of general interest' test), and are often parsed rather simplistically to see what side of the fence they fall - are they pro or anti? This leads to wide press interest, but rather shallow coverage, and leaves casual readers with 'whiplash' from the 'yes it is', 'no it isn't' messages every other week.
This is a familiar pattern in health reporting (is coffee good for you/bad for you etc.), but in more recent times has started happening in climate science too. Examples picked out in the article include the hurricanes/global warming connection and the state of Greenland's ice sheet. In both cases, many new pieces of evidence, new theories and new models are being thrown into the pot, but full syntheses of the problems remain elusive. Scientists are of course interested in knowing how it all fits together (and it usually does), but the public - unaware of what is agreed on and what is uncertain - see only the ping-pong across the media. Unlike more mature parts of the science (such as the radiative effect of greenhouse gases), there is much less context available to relate to these new pieces of science.
This spectacle of duelling and apparently contradictory science fuels the notion that scientists can't agree on anything. Ironically, just as climate change has made it on to the front page because the weight of evidence supporting a human role in recent warming, increased coverage may actually be leading people to think that scientists are more divided on the basic questions.
Is this inevitable? Or can scientists, press officers and journal editors and journalists actually do anything about it? Your thoughts are most welcome!
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23 July 2008
Once more unto the bray
Filed under:
skeptics
Greenhouse gases
Climate Science — gavin @ 10:36 PM
We are a little late to the party, but it is worth adding a few words now that our favourite amateur contrarian is at it again. As many already know, the Forum on Physics and Society (an un-peer-reviewed newsletter published by the otherwise quite sensible American Physical Society), rather surprisingly published a new paper by Monckton that tries again to show using rigorous arithmetic that IPCC is all wrong and that climate sensitivity is negligible. His latest sally, like his previous attempt, is full of the usual obfuscating sleight of hand, but to save people the time in working it out themselves, here are a few highlights.
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12 July 2008
Aerosols, Chemistry and Climate
Filed under:
Aerosols
Greenhouse gases
Climate Science — gavin @ 12:21 PM
Everyone can probably agree that the climate system is complex. Not only do the vagaries of weather patterns and ocean currents make it hard to see climate changes, but the variability in what are often termed the Earth System components complicates the picture enormously. These components - specifically aerosols (particulates in the air - dust, soot, sulphates, nitrates, pollen etc.) and atmospheric chemistry (ozone, methane) - are both affected by climate and affect climate, since aerosols and ozone can interact, absorb, reflect or scatter solar and thermal radiation. This makes for a rich research environment, but can befuddle the unwary.
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12 July 2008
Weekend round-up
Filed under: — group @ 12:09 PM
A few interesting pieces from around the web relevant to some previous postings:
The latest satellite imagery from the Wilkins Ice Sheet (discussed recently) is not looking good. And most curiously the collapse is happening in winter.
The Weather Channel "Forecast Earth" team make a valiant attempt to explain the problems and promise for regional climate change projections by 2050. See our post on the general subject from last year).
And for those of you following the various sagas of political interference in the communication of climate science, a nice interactive graphic summary, courtesy of UCS.
Next week will be a little quiet - it is mid-summer after all - so apologies in advance if the moderation is a somewhat slow. You may also note that we have instituted a "captcha" step to the commenting process. This uses reCAPTCHA which as well as providing protection against spam, helps with the digitization of old books.
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11 July 2008
All-paper salutes to the environment
Filed under:
Communicating Climate
Climate Science — group @ 8:50 AM
The Onion last week had a great (recycled) spoof on the various 'green' special issues being published but, not to be outdone, the contributors to RealClimate have also been busy producing paper products about the environment.
Surprisingly perhaps, as well as having day jobs and writing for this blog, collectively we have written a number of popular science books about climate change. Some of these have already been published, but there are a few more "in the pipeline". We try not to overdo self-promotion on this website (for instance, we don't blog about most of our own technical publications) but since these projects are synergistic with our aims here, it makes sense to let people know what we've been up to. We have therefore set up a page listing "Our Books" that we will keep up-to-date as more titles become available. It's also linked from the new animated gif image on the side bar.
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7 July 2008
CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas, and greenhouse effects are not the only CO2 problem
Filed under:
Oceans
Greenhouse gases
Climate Science — gavin @ 7:59 PM - ()
The title here should strike a familiar theme for most readers. Climate forcings do not just include CO2 (other greenhouse gases, aerosols, land use, the sun, the orbit and volcanoes all contribute), and the impact of human emissions often has non-climatic effects on biology and ecosystems.
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4 July 2008
Global trends and ENSO
Filed under:
El Nino
Instrumental Record
Climate Science — gavin @ 7:17 PM - ()
It's long been known that El Niño variability affects the global mean temperature anomalies. 1998 was so warm in part because of the big El Niño event over the winter of 1997-1998 which directly warmed a large part of the Pacific, and indirectly warmed (via the large increase in water vapour) an even larger region. The opposite effect was seen with the La Niña event this last winter. Since the variability associated with these events is large compared to expected global warming trends over a short number of years, the underlying trends might be more clearly seen if the El Niño events (more generally, the El Niño - Southern Oscillation (ENSO)) were taken out of the way. There is no perfect way to do this - but there are a couple of reasonable approaches.
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dvanhorn @ λ-calcul.us › Research weblog for David Van Horn [View Page] Posts: [Interpretation in Scheme and JavaScript], [Functional programming with JavaScript], [Summer School on Logic and Theorem Proving in Programming Languages], [World’s smallest Universal Turing Machine], [To appear: Flow analysis, linearity, and PTIME], [Sharing graph for call/cc], [Preprint: Deciding kCFA is complete for EXPTIME], [SK: Advice to Graduate School Recommendation Letter Writers], [Job search advice], [SRFI Libraries]
dvanhorn @ λ-calcul.us
Research weblog for David Van Horn
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Interpretation in Scheme and JavaScript
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
We implement an evaluator for a core functional language. This core language is both a subset of Scheme and JavaScript. Moreover, we implement the evaluator twice, side-by-side, in both Scheme and JavaScript. The two are remarkably similar.
This exercise is a continuation of me throwing some of my favorite functional programs at JavaScript to see what they look like. This one is the meta-circular evaluator, a staple of PL textbooks and classrooms. (These evaluators aren’t quite meta-circular since they can’t evaluate themselves, but maybe we’ll get there someday.)
Writing programs always starts with designing data definitions, so let’s start with data definitions for the abstract syntax trees of our language. Our core language is expression based and an expression is either a variable, a number, a function constructor, or an application. We represent each variant of an expression as a record. Records in Scheme vary among dialects. SRFI 9 Records are widely supported and simple, and although R6RS has a sophisticated record facility, we rely on a very simple subset of PLT Scheme’s define-struct syntax:
;; An Exp is one of
;; - (make-var Symbol)
;; - (make-num Number)
;; - (make-lam Name Exp)
;; - (make-app Exp Exp)
;; And Name = Symbol.
(define-struct var (name))
(define-struct num (val))
(define-struct lam (var body))
(define-struct app (left right))
This defines constructor functions, e.g. a variable is represented by a (make-var 'x), accessors (var-name, lam-body, etc.), and predicates (var?, lam?, etc.).
In JavaScript, functions (invoked with the keyword new) are used to construct records:
// An Exp is one of
// - new Var(Name)
// - new Num(Number)
// - new Lam(String, Exp)
// - new App(Exp, Exp)
// And Name = String.
function Var(name) { this.name = name }
function Num(val) { this.val = val }
function Lam(variable, body) {
this.variable = variable;
this.body = body }
function App(left, right) {
this.left = left;
this.right = right }
Notice we had to do the field initialization by hand above. Also, record definitions won’t provide predicates by default, unlike in Scheme, so we build these by hand, too:
function isVar(exp) { return exp instanceof Var }
function isNum(exp) { return exp instanceof Num }
function isLam(exp) { return exp instanceof Lam }
function isApp(exp) { return exp instanceof App }
(If JavaScript included a hygienic macro facility, we could have baked in all this syntactic sugar easily.)
Now let’s sketch data definitions for the values (denotations) of our language. These are the results of evaluation. Since our language is functional, we have function values (closures), and since we have number expressions, we’ll include number values. So we have:
;; A Val is one of
;; - (make-closure Lam Env) [Scheme]
;; | makeClosure(Lam, Env) [JavaScript]
;; - Number
More will be said about the representation of closures later. With data definitions in place, we can now give the heart of the evaluator. First, in Scheme:
;; evaluate : Exp Env -> Val
;; Evaluate the given expression in the given environment,
;; which must close the expression.
(define (evaluate exp env)
(cond ((var? exp) (lookup exp env))
((num? exp) (num-val exp))
((lam? exp) (make-closure exp env))
((app? exp) (let ((fun (evaluate (app-left exp) env))
(arg (evaluate (app-right exp) env)))
(fun arg)))))
And now in JavaScript:
// evaluate : Exp Env -> Val
// Evaluate the given expression in the given environment,
// which must close the expression.
function evaluate(exp, env) {
return isVar(exp) ? lookup(exp, env) :
isNum(exp) ? exp.val :
isLam(exp) ? makeClosure(exp, env) :
isApp(exp) ? (function () {
var fun = evaluate(exp.left, env);
var arg = evaluate(exp.right, env);
return fun(arg) })() :
undefined }
Evaluation is defined by structural recursion on expressions. A variable evaluates to the value it is bound to in the environment. (We have not chosen a representation for environments, or defined lookup, yet. These things are on the proverbial wish list.) A number evaluates to the number it represents. A lambda expression evaluates to a closure: the term closed by the current environment. An application evaluates its operator and operand, then evaluates to the application of the operator value to the operand value. You can see here that a closure is being applied (note (fun arg) in the Scheme, and fun(arg) in the JavaScript), so we’ve committed to representing closures with functions in the implementing language (seems just as natural as representing number values with numbers, after all).
One thing you might notice in the JavaScript is the (function () {...})(). This is an idiom to create block scope in a language without let. This is done by creating a function of no arguments, which creates a block of scope in which fun and arg are bound. The function is then immediately applied, so its body is evaluated. Thus we can “fake” let (x = y) e as (function () {var x = y; e})(). (Again, macros would alleviate the syntactic tax here. It seems embarrassing that JavaScript doesn’t have let; maybe more modern dialects do? and maybe the next revision of the language will include it?)
Returning to closures, we know that a closure is a (make-closure Lam Env). Since the evaluator applies closure values, we are committed to a functional representation of closures. Closures are applied to single arguments, so they will be represented a functions expecting one argument. When applied, a closure should evaluate the body of the lambda expression in the environment in which it was created, extended with the formal parameter of the lambda expression being bound to the given argument. So we arrive at the following:
;; make-closure : Lam Env -> (Val -> Val)
(define (make-closure lam env)
(lambda (v)
(evaluate (lam-body lam) (extend env (lam-var lam) v))))
The analogous JavaScript is:
// makeClosure : Lam Env -> (Val -> Val)
function makeClosure(lam, env) {
return function (v) {
return evaluate(lam.body, extend(env, lam.variable, v))}}
All that is left is dismissing our wish list items: we need to choose a representation for environments and implement lookup and extend. We just to use association lists, which are lists of pairs.
;; A [Listof T] is one of
;; - '(), the empty list
;; - (cons T [Listof T])
;; And Env = [Listof (cons Name Val)]
In JavaScript, we use arrays with two elements to represent pairs, arriving at the following data definitions. Type parameterization is written in curly braces so as not to be confused with the array notation:
// A {Listof T} is one of
// - [], the empty array
// - [T, {Listof T}]
// And Env = {Listof [Name, Val]}
The operations lookup and extend are straightforward:
;; lookup : Var Env -> Val
;; Produces the binding of the given variable
;; in the given environment.
(define (lookup var env)
(cond ((eq? (first (first env)) (var-name var))
(rest (first env)))
(else (lookup var (rest env)))))
;; extend : Env Name Val -> Env
;; Produces an extended environment
;; with the given name bound to the given value.
(define (extend env name val)
(cons (cons name val) env))
JavaScript:
// lookup : Var Env -> Val
// Produces the binding of the given variable
// in the given environment.
function lookup(variable, env) {
return variable.name === first(first(env))
? rest(first(env))
: lookup(variable, rest(env))}
// extend : Env Name Val -> Env
// Produces an extended environment
// with the given name bound to the given value.
function extend(env, name, value) {
return [[name, value], env]}
This relies on the obvious definitions of first and rest to emphasize the correspondence:
function first(p) { return p[0] }
function rest(p) { return p[1] }
The evaluator is complete now, but we still don’t have a concise notation for writing programs in the implemented language. A cheap and traditional solution is to use S-Expressions:
;; An S-Exp is one of
;; - Name
;; - Number
;; - (list 'fun Name S-Exp) [Scheme]
;; | ["fun", Name, S-Exp] [JavaScript]
;; - (list S-Exp S-Exp) [Scheme]
;; | [S-Exp, S-Exp] [JavaScript]
Some examples in Scheme:
'(fun x x),
'(add1 4),
'(((fun x (fun y x)) 3) 7).
Some examples in JavaScript:
["fun", "x", "x"],
["add1", 4],
[[["fun", "x", ["fun", "y", "x"]], 3], 7].
S-Expressions are parsed into abstract syntax trees as follows. This is a brain-dead application of the design recipe for functions that consume self-referential data (in this case S-Exps), where the template for such functions is:
;; template : S-Exp -> ?
(define (template sexp)
(cond ((number? sexp) ...)
((symbol? sexp) ...)
(else
(cond ((eq? 'fun (first sexp))
...(second sexp)...
...(template (third sexp))...)
(else
...(template (first sexp))...
...(template (second sexp)...))))))
And the following examples guide filling in the dots for our particular function, parse:
(parse 5) => (make-num 5)
(parse 'x) => (make-var 'x)
(parse '(fun x x)) => (make-lam 'x (parse 'x))
(parse '(add1 4)) => (make-app (parse 'add1) (parse 4))
In Scheme:
;; parse : S-Exp -> Exp
(define (parse sexp)
(cond ((number? sexp) (make-num sexp))
((symbol? sexp) (make-var sexp))
(else
(cond ((eq? 'fun (first sexp))
(make-lam (second sexp)
(parse (third sexp))))
(else
(make-app (parse (first sexp))
(parse (second sexp))))))))
And JavaScript:
// parse : S-Exp -> Exp
function parse(sexp) {
return isString(sexp) ? new Var(sexp) :
isNumber(sexp) ? new Num(sexp) :
sexp[0] === "fun" ? new Lam(sexp[1], parse(sexp[2])) :
new App(parse(sexp[0]), parse(sexp[1]))}
Where,
function isString(sexp) { return typeof sexp === "string" }
function isNumber(sexp) { return typeof sexp === "number" }
Finally, we can evaluate some example programs in Scheme:
(evaluate (parse 3) '())
(evaluate (parse '(fun x x)) '())
(evaluate (parse '(((fun x (fun y x)) 3) 7)) '())
Or in JavaScript:
evaluate(parse(3), [])
evaluate(parse(["fun", "x", "x"]), [])
evaluate(parse([[["fun", "x", ["fun", "y", "x"]], 3], 7]), [])
We can also embed values from the implementing language into the implemented language via the initial environment, in Scheme:
(define initial-env (cons (cons 'add1 add1) '()))
In JavaScript:
var initial_env = ["add1", (function (n) {return n+1}), []]
This brings us back to yesterday’s functional program, iterative doubling, which we can evaluate in Scheme:
(evaluate
(parse '((fun double (((((double double) double) double) add1) 0))
(fun f (fun x (f (f x))))))
initial-env)
=> 65536
Or in JavaScript:
evaluate(
parse([["fun", "d", [[[[["d", "d"], "d"], "d"], "add1"], 0]],
["fun", "f", ["fun", "x", ["f", ["f", "x"]]]]]),
initial_env)
=> 65536
And we are done. Complete code is available here [Scheme] and here [JavaScript].
Filed in JavaScript, Scheme
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Functional programming with JavaScript
Monday, April 21, 2008
Last week, Brendan Eich, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation and the original designer of the JavaScript programming language, was hanging out at Northeastern, talking about JavaScript and writing reliable software for the web. Let’s just say there are plenty of opportunities to apply well-developed PL technology to the huge JavaScript code base (one in two pages in the Google index contain JavaScript code). Eich’s talk was, in my opinion, the most interesting to come through the NEU halls over the past year. The content could’ve motivated half a dozen PhD dissertations.
I’ve always had a strong respect for Mozilla. Their commitment to openness and support for standards and free software makes the world a better place to live in. Literally. And Eich’s candor and fluency in research really impressed me. The fact that they fund fundamental research in the theory of hygienic macros speaks to their seriousness in academic work. (And if they had a research lab, I’d take half as much money to get a job there.)
I had known for a long time that JavaScript was the Schemer’s hidden gem in the overwhelmingly turdish world of real-world technologies. But I didn’t realize the extent to which Scheme itself had influenced its design. Eich describes his days at Netscape building the first JavaScript implementation as the “Scheme in the Browser” project. You might go so far as to say JavaScript is the world’s most ubiquitous dialect of Scheme.
So today, I thought I’d give JavaScript a test run and throw some of my favorite functional programs at it to see how far the Scheme in the Browser analogy went. Here’s the transcript of one of my favorites: iterative doubling.
>>> function add1(n) {return n+1;}
>>> add1(0);
1
>>> function double(f) {return function (x) {return f(f(x));}}
>>> double(add1);
function()
>>> double(add1)(0);
2
>>> double(double)(add1)(0);
4
>>> double(double)(double)(add1)(0);
16
>>> double(double)(double)(double)(add1)(0);
65536
>>> double(double)(double)(double)(double)(add1)(0);
error: too much recursion
OK, so there’s really no “recursion” going on here, but that’s forgiveable. The point is, if you’re used to programming in a dynamically typed, higher-order programming language with a REPL (I’m using Firebug), this little exercise should make you feel right at home.
(You might miss having big numbers. This isn’t all that satisfying:
>>> Math.pow(2,Math.pow(2,2));
16
>>> Math.pow(2,Math.pow(2,Math.pow(2,2)));
65536
>>> Math.pow(2,Math.pow(2,Math.pow(2,Math.pow(2,2))));
Infinity
The correct answer to that last one is much, much smaller than infinity:
200352993040684646497907235156025575044782547556975141926501
Oh well.)
Filed in JavaScript, Scheme
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Summer School on Logic and Theorem Proving in Programming Languages
Monday, April 21, 2008
If you wanted to learn about formalizing PL metatheory, you’d be hard pressed to find better teachers than Bob Harper or Stephanie Weirich. And if you wanted to reason about programs with ACL2, Pete Manolios is your man. Unfortunately for you, these folks teach at geographically diverse universities (not to mention your SAT score wouldn’t get you in to any of them). But if you can make it out to Eugene, Oregon in late July, you can catch these and the other outstanding lecturers that are going to be speaking at this year’s Summer School on Logic and Theorem Proving in Programming Languages at the University of Oregon.
I went to a UofO summer school in 2003 and really enjoyed it. This sort of thing is great for junior graduate students; they give you a broad overview of topics from the world’s best researchers. It’s great if you’re not sure what you want to work on, or if you want to build up your theoretical tool kit. Later in your studies, you won’t have time for this kind of breadth. Also, don’t expect to digest all of it. I know I didn’t. But hopefully you’ll get something in your head. Years later when you’re deep in the throes of research you’ll have an “ah-ha” moment, deja vu sets in, and you realize that’s what they were talking about. It’s a really good feeling to realize I get it, now. But don’t worry, this brief moment of solace is quickly replaced by the more worrisome thought, why didn’t I figure this out sooner? When this sets in, I recommend keeping in mind Piet Hein’s T.T.T.:
Put up in a place
(With thanks to Olivier Danvy for sharing this Grook, long before I knew what it meant.)
Filed in Poetry, Uncategorized
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World’s smallest Universal Turing Machine
Thursday, April 17, 2008
All of computation boils down to the following,
,
a universal Turing machine with 2 states and 3 symbols (the symbols are represented as colors and the states as arrows in the graphic). It is the world’s smallest universal TM. The machine was discovered (invented?) by Stephen Wolfram and proved universal last year by Alex Smith, a 20-year-old undergraduate hacker from Birmingham, UK, earning him $25,000 in prize money and a small brick, laid in the foundations of computation.
Filed in Uncategorized
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To appear: Flow analysis, linearity, and PTIME
Monday, April 7, 2008
Flow analysis, linearity, and PTIME was accepted at this year’s Static Analysis Symposium (SAS). An early preprint was announced here, but the presentation has benefitted significantly from the anonymous reviewers’ comments. Also, the abstract was rewritten to be somewhat comprehensible (thanks to Dave Herman for encouraging the rewrite).
Flow analysis is a ubiquitous and much-studied component of compiler technology—and its variations abound. Amongst the most well known is Shivers’ 0CFA; however, the best known algorithm for 0CFA requires time cubic in the size of the analyzed program and is unlikely to be improved. Consequently, several analyses have been designed to approximate 0CFA by trading precision for faster computation. Henglein’s simple closure analysis, for example, forfeits the notion of directionality in flows and enjoys an “almost linear” time algorithm. But in making trade-offs between precision and complexity, what has been given up and what has been gained? Where do these analyses differ and where do they coincide?
We identify a core language—the linear λ-calculus—where 0CFA, simple closure analysis, and many other known approximations or restrictions to 0CFA are rendered identical. Moreover, for this core language, analysis corresponds with (instrumented) evaluation. Because analysis faithfully captures evaluation, and because the linear λ-calculus is complete for PTIME, we derive PTIME-completeness results for all of these analyses.
See you in Valencia!
Filed in CFA, Linearity
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Sharing graph for call/cc
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Sharing graphs are, in my opinion, the syntax representation of the discriminating hacker. They work wonderfully well on whiteboards, napkins, and yellow pads of unruled paper. But typesetting them is an exercise left only for the true masochist. The best known solution to this problem is to become a full professor, leaving it up to sycophantic graduate students to obsess over. Shy of that, you might try typessetting them with Peter Neergaard’s proofnets package, PS Tricks, or XFig, as I have in the past with limited success. This weekend, I tried another approach: MetaPost.
The graph shown here is the sharing graph for call/cc; my favorite because there’s a straightforward reading of the graph that gives the usual operational understanding of call/cc. Understanding this graph goes a long way towards understanding sharing graphs in general and demonstrates their generalization of a term-based representation (which cannot express call/cc directly).
MetaPost was far more pleasant to deal with than the other approaches I’ve tried. And it looks like it will be straightforward to add graph annotations for either flow analysis or reduction. So for the time being at least, I’m going to use MetaPost for my dissertation figures.
Filed in Syntax, Typeset
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Preprint: Deciding kCFA is complete for EXPTIME
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
A new preprint is available (submitted to ICFP), Deciding kCFA is complete for EXPTIME:
We give an exact characterization of the computational complexity of the kCFA hierarchy. For any k > 0, we prove that the control flow decision problem is complete for deterministic exponential time. This theorem validates empirical observations that such control flow analysis is intractable. It also provides more general insight into the complexity of abstract interpretation.
Comments welcome and appreciated.
Filed in CFA
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SK: Advice to Graduate School Recommendation Letter Writers
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Shriram Krishnamurthi has a recent and insightful essay on writing graduate school letters of recommendation.
Filed in Jobs
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Job search advice
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Matt Might was recently in town interviewing at Brandeis. Having been steeped in the job search process over the last year, I asked him for any advice and hints for finding open positions. Here is response (with permission):
cra.org has the best listing.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a listing of more teaching-oriented positions.
Other than that, you can search through the sites of individual schools for listings starting in September-October.
My advice would be:
Go to as many other job talks as you can.
Apply early (November); apply often. (Get your materials ready now.)
Get your letter writers primed now. (You’ll need at most 6, but no less than 3.)
Start contacting PL folks at other universities, and start having Harry do the same, to check for open slots.
Keep publishing.
Prepare your job talk for a general audience. (Systems, graphics, databases, etc.)
Make sure other fields can see the possibility of collaboration. (Most the people you meet will be non-PL.)
Interview at a throw-away school first to test out your job talk.
Have your “Over the next 5 years, I see myself…” elevator pitch rehearsed and ready to fire.
Be prepared for productivity to grind to a halt for two months during interview season. (Don’t be dissing or defending.)
Buy the book “Even a Geek Can Speak.”
Having now interviewed with 5 places and with 1 or 2 more to go, I might’ve been more careful about accepting interviews at places I didn’t think I’d go. This is a grueling process.
Good questions to ask others:
Why did you choose this school during your job search?
Where do you see this dept/school/college in 5 years?
What’s the teaching load like?
What’s the tenure process like?
Which courses need teaching?
What kind of start-up package do you think I should negotiate? (Ask this of asst. profs.)
That’s everything I can think of off the top of my head. I’m sure more will drip out later.
Other resources I’ve stumbled across are:
The ACM’s Career & Job Center.
Stephanie Weirich’s Computer Science Faculty Job Search Resources.
Ken Shan’s comprehensive AcademiaAdvice.
Filed in Jobs
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SRFI Libraries
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
SRFI Libraries, http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-97/:
This SRFI is designed to facilitate the writing and distribution of code that relies on SRFI libraries. It identifies a subset of existing SRFIs that specify features amenable to provision (and possibly implementation) as libraries (SRFI Libraries) and proposes a naming convention for this subset so that these libraries may be referred to by name or by number. Moreover, portable R6RS reference implementations and test suites are provided, where possible, for the SRFI Libraries.
Filed in Scheme
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Civil Pandemonium [View Page] Posts: [Monday Melbourne: CLXVI, August 2008], [Assorted old transport notes], [Monday Melbourne: CLXV, April 2008], [Rental crisis or distorted market?], [Harnessing Federalism], [Monday Melbourne: CLXIV, April 2008], [Monday Melbourne: CLXIII, April 2008], [Grounding Transport Planning In Reality: Assessing East-West Need]
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Russell Degnan
The city, from the Yarra Boulevard, Fairfield. Taken August 2008
Melbourne
12th August, 2008 21:49:13
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Assorted old transport notesRussell Degnan
No blogging recently, distracted by teaching and marking instead, but some stories are too good to pass up. The Brumby government has been copped a beating a while back for spending money on spinning their transport initiatives instead of on the system. The spin is annoying, but otherwise I can bear it, and the money is, as stated, fairly piddling. But then you come across a non sequitur like this:
"The reason we have done the ads is, in all of the research we have done with commuters, they say they want information about what is happening on the system," she [Lynne Kosky] said.
Now, I may be wrong, there may be a commuter survey out there saying that people want information on new projects and initiatives being undertaken by the department, rather a raft of actual projects and initiatives. But I doubt it.
What this comment represents is a deplorable disconnection between the department and/or the government with what commuting actually entails. If I ticked a box or made a comment saying I wanted "information about what is happening on the system" , then I wouldn't be talking about the next few years, I'd be talking about while I was traveling" . I'd be wanting to know if I was wasting my time freezing my arse on the bus stop when it would be quicker to walk to the station, or a different bus. Or I'd want to know the alternative routes and times from where I was, at the time I wanted to travel (a service already provided incidentally, but only online, not by mobile).
It is unbelievably sad, that a quite reasonable and sensible request by commuters for information that would actually take pressure off the system has been met with a stale and wasteful advertising campaign. Especially when that same information, distributed widely and reliably, would in the current climate of invention and added customer value, allow people to build useful systems for real time route finding.
But it is also a bizarre decision in light of recent practice. The quality and quantity of information presented on the transport system has improved by an order of magnitude in the past few years - remember when you'd have a one in five chance of having a route map on board a train? The aim should really be to take the next step beyond those initiatives, but as with most little transport initiatives, they are piecemeal, even when they do some good.
But two things need remembering. Firstly, the major strategic purpose of both bicycles and buses is to connect commuters to the radial railway system. Very few commuters would use either a bus (even the smart buses) or a bicycle for a trip longer than thirty to forty minutes. And secondly, for trips of that length, a bicycle is roughly as fast as the bus anyway - faster once you include delays from congestion and waiting times.
There is hardly a significant demand for such a service, unlike on trains, where bikes are still either belittled or inadequately provided for: is it that hard to install some vertical, space efficient hooks in carriages?
The money would be far better spent improving bicycle lanes and off-road routes parallel to smart bus lanes, to get cyclists there quicker and easier.
I'm not though. I have spent far too many years designing human-computer interfaces not to recognize too fundamental truths. Firstly, somewhat regardless of how clever you are, and how good your interface is, until a computer passes the Turing test, you can't beat a human's ability to be flexible in performing a task. Yes, a computer can sell tickets, and provide some directions, and other commuters can help people on and off the tram, but not to the same level of quality, and not in a way that improves running efficiency and reduces far evasion. Secondly, no matter how intuitive your interface is, customers have a remarkable ablility to both break it, and be baffled by it. The current ticket system in Melbourne is completely baffling to the uninitiated (ie. tourists). Myki will probably be worse, because it tries to be more clever, and clever is confusing.
Which is not to say Myki isn't a good idea - actually it is probably a pointless waste of money, but politicians love the idea of automation, because it looks like an easy way to save money; at least until the IT bills come in. Fare system improvement is a good idea. Re-introducing conductors is a good way of improving the fare system.
Planning
12th August, 2008 19:43:05
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Monday Melbourne: CLXV, April 2008Russell Degnan
Old Treasury in fake morning colour. Taken June 2006
Melbourne
19th May, 2008 18:41:40
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Rental crisis or distorted market?Russell Degnan
After the better part of half a decade of laments over the price of houses and the problem for first home buyers, the last year has seen a shift into concern over declining rental vacancy rates and a different kind of housing affordability. As a problem though, it is both better and worse then we think. Worse because the problem of insufficient housing stock and rising rentals - particularly where people are really concerned, in gentrified inner cities - is not going to go away quickly, and better because market distortions have meant there are substantially more people renting than perhaps there normally would.
To understand why we need to go back to the late 1990s. Back then, a decline in interest rates, and a surge in investment actually brought vacancy rates up to around 4-5%. Obscenely high, and investors - particularly apartment investors - got burned. From that point onwards, we've seen declining vacancy rates, dropping slowly down to the 1% level being reported in the past few months. House prices also levelled off during this period, before surging again - for no reason I can discern - after 2004.
But rents didn't increase with them. In fact, rents haven't even been increasing with wages, despite an apparent increase in the number of potential first home buyers (and therefore, reasonably well-off) people renting. Once again, negative gearing is partly to blame.
The argument put in favour of negative gearing is that it increases rental affordability and rental investment. This is undoubtedly true, as is the claim that it encourages speculation and increases house prices in a rising market. Up until very recently, when interest rates began to increase and prices seem to have stalled, buyers could be sure of receiving capital gains on their property, and weren't much bothered with rents. The RPA summarises the last few years quite well:
"[...] we need to look back to the start of the housing boom in the mid 1990s. At that point, commonly used measures of gross yields on rental properties were in the order of 5-6 per cent. Over the subsequent decade, rents rose much less than dwelling prices, so that rental yields fell to relatively low levels about 3 to 4 per cent (Chart 14). During this period, investment continued to flow into rental properties, as investors anticipated that capital gains would more than compensate for the low yield.
"However, once it became clear that dwelling prices may no longer keep rising, the rental yield by itself was not sufficiently attractive to sustain the rate of investment, and the vacancy rate started to fall."
How big a subsidy for renters? Well, if the reports of $2.4 billion in tax losses because of negative gearing are accurate then (at a tax rate of 40%) that translates into $3.6 billion in rental subsidies bfrom investors to lucky tenants. More, probably, but across the 3 million or so rental households that translates to an average of $1200 year, or $100 a month in rent.
Which brings us to the two key problems we are now faced with. Firstly, as David Tiley's post on the topic points out, investors (90% of whom are mom and pop investors with only one property) can't afford these levels of subsidies under rising interest rates and rising inflation. Their hand is being forced, to either raise the rent, or sell up, and there is no incentive for new investment in the market. At the moment, we are seeing rapid rent rises in a tight market - a market that, after several years of stagnant prices and increased incomes, has a reasonable level of flexibility to do so. But it can't continue forever, and eventually, either rents will stop rising as the market opens up, or the owners will need to sell, with current renters making the switch to homebuyers (though what that might mean for prices is anyone's guess).
The second problem is more troublesome while the market shakes itself out. At the bottom end of the market, where a thousand a year in rental subsidies makes a big difference, the rental market consists of poor families and young households (mostly students). The latter are a fluid group, preferring to rent, but often able to share houses, bedrooms or live wih their parents, when money is tight. The fact that the rental market has gone from flooded to dry in such a short period is not just to do with increased population in Melbourne. It has to do with the subsidies investors have happily worn in exchange for capital gains, and the concomitant increase in the number of rental households.
As of the 2006 census, there were some 20,000 spare bedrooms sprinkled through Melbourne's group households, most of whom rent. There are as many as that again in lone person households, but it is hard to distinguish those between renters and the elderly. You don't hear about boarders as much anymore, it seemingly being something people did in the 1960s. With an ever ageing population, no shortage of needy renters, it might be time that idea was revived.
Planning
17th May, 2008 18:27:33
[#] [1 comment]
Harnessing FederalismRussell Degnan
A lot has been said on the plastic bag issue in the past few weeks, most of it - though not all - critical of the failure of Federal and State governments to come up with a levy, or a ban, or something that was so obviously (apparently) needed.
I don't have anything substantive to add to that; for those interested, David Jeffery put up two excellent posts on the issue. What I'm interested in here, is drawing on a strand that came out my friend Rob's critique of the 2020 Summit. To quote:
"The 'national' aspect of this strikes me as a complete irrelevance, and symptomatic of a more general assumption that the solution to any serious problem - whether it inherently crosses state borders or not - is to get the federal government to act on it."
The plastic bag issue is a classic case of this, because while plastic bags cross state (and national) borders, the issues Jeffery notes are no more national issues than state ones:
* they're a large component of litter;
None of these are national issues, they are either local or they are global, not in between. But, to the environmental lobby - who have a long history of successful pushes at national level - and to people whose main goal for the states is abolishment, failures of environmental policy are failures of national leadership.
This is a mistake, for two reasons. Firstly, because while their have been a number of significant environmental movement successes at national level, they mostly occur before the affected bodies have shifted their focus to counter them at a national, or international level. As someone noted regarding the 2020 sustainability session, the coal lobby came prepared.
Shifting the debate to the national level only shifts the debate. You can only outflank industry so many times; this is true for plastic bags, and it is true for public transport (increasingly being begged for at a federal level). If you can't win a cost-benefit debate at state level, there is no particular reason to believe you'll win it at national level.
Mostly, people seem to chase the money. But just because the Federal government has the money doesn't make them the best people to distribute it. The long term outcome of increased Federal control is increased Federal pork-barreling and Washington-style lobbying. It is practically impossible to hold the Federal government to account on local spending issues (it is extremely difficult even at state level). Lobbyists benefiting from Federal largesse might not care, but things are as likely to turn out badly as good.
Secondly, there is the oft-cited benefit of having states: competitive federalism. Plastic bags, again, offer a clear case of the benefits of multiple state policies. As Jeffery says, the issue is complex, and there is not necessarily one best way to gain benefit the environment; levies might work best, but so might an outright ban, subsidies for alternatives, bio-degradable bags, or even some other issue. Nothing beats an experiment for determining a policy outcome, and other states are normally reasonably quick to follow successful outcomes.
From a national point of view, if the Federal government wants to enact change, and they should, where they can, the best way will almost never be a direct policy. Like a market, often the best policy is targets and incentives, but in this case, not targeting the individual, but the state governments.
But most of the time, as the Victorian and NSW Treasuries never fail to point out in their budget papers, it penalises efficiency, because being more efficient reduces the average cost of that service, and therefore, some of the savings to other states.
The Federal government's spending authority would be better utilised, not with handouts, but with the whip hand. If the goal is to reduce landfill, then per capita (per industry) landfill requirements should be assessed for each state. If they manage to use less landfill than expected, then they should receive an environmental efficiency bonus through the grant, that both redresses the existing efficiency de-bonus, and provides incentives for further efficiencies (and further R&D into efficiencies).
Practically any social, environmental or economic outcome can be incentivised in this way, provided the incentives can be brought back to specific state government policy (there is no point penalising Tasmania or Northern Territory for low unemployment, though we make a fair fist of subsidising it now). If lobbyists want more public transport usage, adding an improvement factor for air emissions and health is a much better policy than subsidising new train lines that the State Government, probably rightly, never chose to build through a marginal electorate.
Instead of proscribing a solution, it allows one to be found, be it through improved transport, or congestion charging, or travel demand programs, or better urban design. Similarly, a state-wide ban on plastic bags might be the outcome of improvement factors for litter, landfill, water quality and non-renewable resource usage. Or as no doubt some of the states argued, there may be a better solution to those problems.
Environment
23rd April, 2008 18:45:42
[#] [0 comments]
Monday Melbourne: CLXIV, April 2008Russell Degnan
The Windsor Hotel in a gothic pose. Taken July 2006
Melbourne
21st April, 2008 19:45:16
[#] [0 comments]
After Corbu [View Page] Posts: [Quixote To Be Kicked Around No More], [Begging: Not actually a mean thing that poor people do to rich people to annoy them], [The Ayn Rand School for Tots], [1000 Coders at 1000 Typewriters], [Add Another to the Black List], [Don’t Hate the Player], [A Question:], [Foreshadowing], [The Gehry Punishment], [My Guy Calls It]
After Corbu
Quixote To Be Kicked Around No More
11:18 pm July 10th, 2008 by Quixote · 1 Comment
In case it hasn’t been obvious for some time, I’ve all but shuttered this blog. I just don’t have the time to post enough to make this project real to me, if that makes sense. I would be interested in some kind of group-blogging situation in the future, so feel free to email me about that.
I am also working on this sort of leftist housing networking site — radical crib – but the site goals & functionality are still both a little broken. If and when that project comes together a bit more I’m sure I’ll return to talk about it at length. Anyway.
If you came here expecting something exciting to read, this may strike you as quite a bummer, so let me suggest you head on over to the ‘ol blogroll for some choice content.
So Long. Thanks for all the fish.
→ 1 CommentTags: autobio
Begging: Not actually a mean thing that poor people do to rich people to annoy them
11:16 pm April 17th, 2008 by Quixote · 5 Comments
Sadly, today my hopes that public transit would be a panacea for anti-social behavior were, once again, dashed. PT: not a sufficient condition for people to develop enough affinity for their fellow man to avoid being mean to beggers.
Today, as I left the metro a woman was asking for money for food. Not uncommon. Less common: she was accompanied by her 5 year old (? — I find it impossible to tell the age of children. My observations can’t get past: small, disproportionate), who had very large eyes. Then:
She asked, “Spare some money for food?” and the person behind me said, “No. But I will call Social Services to come pick up your child.”
“Fuck You.”
“I’m going to call Social Services since you can’t feed your child.”
The woman paused, then walked to the elevator where we all enjoy an awkward ride up out of the station.
Now, I’m willing to admit that there’s some moral complexity with regards to the children of extremely poor folk. At what point should one give up their child for a “better” life? At what point should the government step in and “take” children away? Certainly food, shelter, and safety form a bright line that there’s probably consensus about. And it’s possible that my subway woman had crossed those lines, and she probably should have access to a social worker for assistance if nothing else.
However: I don’t think begging in and of itself should be grounds to take a child away. Entirely possible that said child had been fed and a bed for the night at a local church was lined up, but woman had not eaten. Or needed money for job interview clothes (my strong case). Or for beer (my weak case, but not actually an illegitimate purchase!). Moreover, hanging out in the subway asking for money: not particularly dangerous. So cursory look at the situation suggests hard-luck case to sympathize with, not vile child abuser to scorn.
But no: must call child protective services. Of course, given that SS does not have a rapid response guerrilla division, and I would only be able to direct SS to “go check out the Hollywood Metro,” and on top of it all the chances of me actually calling are about one in a million, this is all just posturing.
You see, I’m so annoyed that you, a poor person, would have the gall to ask me, ‘innocent’ bystander in your poverty, for money and thus make me feel guilt at my own tightfistedness that I will threaten to break up your family. That’s just how I roll. Asshole.
I feel like I should end my story by saying how I gave the women money/food to make this recitation serve as some sort of behavioral model. Or I could say that I didn’t do anything to help, admitting my own complicity, and by extension that of everyone who reads, given that we all participate in this classist society. But neither feels right. I’m not comfortable with my character as either holy or fallen.
Instead: a plea. I don’t have a solid opinion on the quantity and frequency of direct small-sum charity you should engage in. But sure as hell, harshing on beggars is fucked up. So don’t do it or I may have to punch you in the face.
→ 5 CommentsTags: autobio · culture · politics · punks · urban planning
The Ayn Rand School for Tots
10:25 pm April 17th, 2008 by Quixote · 2 Comments
Do you think if I named my charter school this, there’s enough diehard Simpsons fans out there to populate it with hilarious children? Second question, could we still get the money if we fake-added the Fountainhead to our curriculuum?
Update: Someone is already doing this in The City. Clever Hippies.
→ 2 CommentsTags: culture
1000 Coders at 1000 Typewriters
7:12 pm April 11th, 2008 by Quixote · 2 Comments
While doing ‘research’ into computer gaming lore, I stumbled onto this map of Quake’s children:
Mostly, I don’t understand how there could possibly be so much variation in the first-person shooter genre. I mean, you’re basically (only?) holding a gun and shooting things; how different can electroquake be from ezquake?
All this to say, why not a lefty SimCity that has mixed use and biking? Is that a tax on the coder strategic reserve?
→ 2 CommentsTags: culture
Add Another to the Black List
6:57 pm April 11th, 2008 by Quixote · 2 Comments
See Ezra try to take food out of my (hypothetical) child’s mouth by downplaying the very real danger of the earthquake menace with his “Robots! Robots!” flimflam. In reality these things are not competitive, as the worst robots are brought by quake.
But really: setting most of the snark aside, unless you live or work in an unreinforced masonry building, you don’t have much to fear from earthquakes. Codes now require buildings to be able to dissipate a lot of kinetic energy (read: break) in the event of the Big One, and they definately probably won’t fall on your head most of the time. Of course seismic engineering is largely empirical so it suffers from all the usual problems of trying to extrapolate from a curve set to a small historical data set, meaning it’s predicitive value is something less than awesome.
There’s a reason they write a new building code after every major earthquake…
→ 2 CommentsTags: engineering · punks
Don’t Hate the Player
5:13 pm March 23rd, 2008 by Quixote · 1 Comment
More evidence of the delusional nature of Clinton supporters:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAqVkYWq1wc
…and the youtube primary continues to go to Obama in a landslide.
→ 1 CommentTags: politics
A Question:
11:39 am March 23rd, 2008 by Quixote · 2 Comments
If I were to spend $500 and the next two weeks of my life on this:
Or,
Would it be the most brilliantly awesome thing in the history of humanity?
I really just can’t decide…
→ 2 CommentsTags: art · culture
Foreshadowing
11:34 pm March 3rd, 2008 by Quixote · No Comments
Light posting of late, as I’m working on a different online project that I’m quite excited about. When it’s of at least beta quality you’ll hear me chattering about it endlessly, but until then…your moment of zen phallacy:
It’s not often you see a building get larger as it goes up. Something to do with physics…
→ No CommentsTags: architecture · autobio · los angeles
The Gehry Punishment
7:35 pm February 27th, 2008 by Quixote · 1 Comment
I should never have poked fun at the new Thom Mayne building and the poor engineers that have to design it; today I was put on a new project team for one of the starchitect’s towers. It has a crumpled facade. The steel is kinked at every level. The diaphragms are discontinuous. Almost every one of it’s 50+ floors are different. I want to stab myself in the eye.
On the plus side, this is my first project by a popularly known architect (the blank stares that come with saying you’re consulting for DMJM just aren’t as fun). And I would rather work on interesting projects than, say, parking garages. Still, when the office joke is that you must have done something to piss of your boss, you have to be a little wary.
→ 1 CommentTags: autobio
My Guy Calls It
11:04 pm February 26th, 2008 by Quixote · No Comments
When he runs through the numbers and facts, rather than make proclamations based on his gut, Chris Bowers is the best election analyst on the web. So, when he makes a convincing case, I feel comfortable believing him. Therefore: barring an act of god, the underdog doesn’t just beat the spread, but wins outright.
The great American electorate continues to befuddle me, so I have no idea what happens in the matchup against McCain (and Nader!), but I’m cautiously optimistic…just like I was in 2004. Shit.
→ No CommentsTags: politics
To Dream in Revit…
4:09 am February 26th, 2008 by Quixote · 1 Comment
Reminiscent of a Norman Foster building broken and twisted by a kinetic event and then frozen in place, Phare Tower:
I think it’s beautiful, but let’s look at the structure: steel emerges from the ground as bundled roots or muscle fibers (definitely organic, but I wonder what the intended metaphor is?), then distributes itself, forming a structural skin that envelops the building in a kind of distended exoskeleton, providing an impressively redundant lateral system.
Unfortunately, that system appears to have many members that are weakened by kinks and inefficient placement or are just completely extraneous. Those negatives, combined with the modeling nightmare that is the tower’s shape, may mean that the designers choose to treat the triangulated exterior structure as cladding; mere dead load along the building perimeter.
Note that the interior structure of the tower quickly becomes linear, which also suggests that Phare Tower’s radical engineering is really only skin deep. Compare this building to Foster’s Gherkin, which relies almost entirely on the exterior skin for structural support, and the Mayne building becomes less impressive — the equivalent in honesty and utility of throwing a brick face on a 2×4 house.
But that’s par for the course in this kind of pomo architecture, where paying homage to the base structure is paid without regard to the actual physics of materials — symbolically only (which is to say, not at all). Thankfully (sadly? my inner masochist asks.), I’m not the one that has to deal with this system — which is either extremely complicated, or extremely dishonest — and can just enjoy the aesthetics. which are wonderful!
But somewhere out there is a young engineer building a Revit model and cursing the name of Thom Mayne long into the night.
→ 1 CommentTags: architecture
An Unreasonably Attractive Candidate
2:33 am February 26th, 2008 by Quixote · No Comments
Apparently all the cool kids are running for President (Despite being an academic, nonhuman, and British respectively — not exactly a group that screams electable, or even “legally electable”), but I’m going to take a different tack and declare for National Zoning Czar. True, it doesn’t have the same aura of “President” — or exist (yet) — but if that Chicago anarchist gets elected, you can bet we’ll be on the express lane to becoming the United Soviet States and the position will open up, and then…
Suffice to say, you’d be surprised how many old scores the power of eminent domain can settle. So I graciously leave the white house to my fellow bloggers — I was going to zone it heavy industrial in any case.
→ No CommentsTags: politics · urban planning
Hesitate to Burn the Buildings
1:48 am February 26th, 2008 by Quixote · No Comments
Detroit’s beautiful/desolate architecture makes me want to buy an old Kahn building and turn it into an urban commune. In honor of the coming Detroit resurrection, Sufjan Stevens playing Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWen_lkrM1k
→ No CommentsTags: architecture · resistance
A Congress Less Creative; More Common
12:53 am February 26th, 2008 by Quixote · No Comments
So this is disappointing, but I have no doubt Lessig will resurface doing exciting things elsewhere, with his Change Congress movement just the beginning.
→ No CommentsTags: politics
Arachnotexture
12:04 am February 26th, 2008 by Quixote · No Comments
The impressive facade stylings of Thom Faulders:
I like looking at architecture models, but check out the designers’ website above for the as-built version. This skin was developed for a new building, but what’s most exciting is its potential uses on existing structures. In LA, we love us some low-rise stucco box apartments, and while economical, they’re no one’s idea of high design (well, few people’s). The easiest way to mod this blight is to attach lightweight structures to the exterior –no demolition, no retrofit, no loss of resident access. Moreover, these typical apartments tend to have bad insulation, too little privacy, and only token transitions between indoors and out — all problems that a perforated facade can address, by acting as a sun and privacy screen.
See Loud Paper for the conceptual basis for the Airspace Tokyo design, which utilized computer algorithms — giving me hope that I’ll one day be able to put my killer programming skills in long-defunct programming languages (fortran) to use on something more exciting than my moment of inertia calculator.
→ No CommentsTags: architecture · los angeles
Big Brother Dolan
11:11 pm February 24th, 2008 by Quixote · No Comments
Seth at Posting and Toasting:
…if both sides got Thunder Stix, we bitter Knick fans would surely be compelled to attack our own players with noisy distraction as an indicator of our discontent. Limit it to one side, one half, and the opposing team is the only viable target. The Dolan regime is censoring you in ways you can’t even detect.
What makes this argument even more compelling is that given the Knicks horrid play this season, it would actually make sense for the ownership to start rooting for losses (high lottery pick!). Here they have a situation where their fans are willing to be team players in this effort and the Knicks brass is thwarting them. Since acting counter to their own best interests is about what you would expect from the Knicks front office at this point, the policy is probably intentional.
→ No CommentsTags: culture
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With High Probability [View Page] Posts: [ICALP coffee directions], [First post!]
With High Probability
ICALP coffee directions
June 15, 2008 · 1 Comment
One of the most important tools for surviving a conference is coffee. Strictly speaking it’s caffeine, but that always translates into coffee for mathematicians. This is why conferences usually provide default coffee during breaks. However, default coffee is not good for your stomach/soul/brain so you owe it to yourself to get a good cup of coffee every now and then.
In the US you can always count on Starbucks to get decent coffee, and they seem to be everywhere, but I like going somewhere new for coffee. RANDOM last year was in Princeton, and it didn’t take long to figure out that Small World Coffee was the coffee place of choice. I wished someone had told me beforehand so I wouldn’t have wasted any time. Ideally this should be a part of the conference materials, perhaps even in the call for papers.
Now that ICALP is coming up I thought I’d give detailed directions for good coffee. The conference is in Reykjavík University which happens to be right next to Kringlan shopping center. Kaffitár has a small café inside the shopping center, which serves ridiculously good coffee. To get to the café just enter the shopping center opposite from RU and walk to the opposite end of the mall (don’t worry, it’s a big mall, but not US-big), take the escalator to the first floor and the café is at the bottom of the escalator. Once you’re there you can’t miss it. Te og Kaffi is also in RU, but I’ve never been there and I’m a bigger fan of Kaffitár. In any case you can’t go wrong with either one of these places. They take coffee very seriously, both have had silver medalists in the World Barista Championships, can you see that happening at Starbucks?
→ 1 CommentCategories: Uncategorized
First post!
June 9, 2008 · No Comments
First things first. My name is Páll Melsted,but others will spell my first name as Pall since nobody knows where á is on their keyboard. I’m a math graduate student at CMU and I come from Iceland. When I pronounce my first name (correctly) all I get is a blank stare as if I were speaking Klingon. I guess that’s not so surprising, since the “ll” sound in my name is quite close to the “tˡɬ” sound in Klingon, or so the internet tells me. Come to think of it, Klingon and Icelandic have about the same number of speakers, and certainly more people have heard Klingon spoken so I guess that’s quite natural.
When people ask me what I do, I usually reply “random stuff in random graphs” because (a) it’s funny, (b) an accurate description of what I do. All kidding aside I work in Probabilistic Combinatorics and Theoretical Computer Science, usually average case analysis of graph algorithms and that sort of stuff. For papers and preprints visit my academic site.
Anyway, the idea for this blog is just yet another research blog where I talk about research, things that I find interesting and stuff that’s happening in the research community. In the next week or so I promise to give a detailed description on how to do cool animations with ipe and beamer and tell you where to find good coffee for those of you going to ICALP.
→ No CommentsCategories: Chat
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hyku | Josh Hallett geek, blogger, photographer [View Page] Posts: [PRWeek Cover Story], [More Golden Gate at Night], [Vote for Voce], [Clarity], [BlogHer 08 Photo Highlights], [Golden Gate Bridge at Night], [Nikon Coolpix S600 Initial Review], [Off to California and BlogHer Next Week], [BlogOrlando 2008 Registration], [Stepping it Up: Nikon D300], [BlogOrlando 2008 - September 25-27, 2008], [How Much More Will We Pay for CLEAR?], [Vacation], [BlogPotomac Photo Highlights], [Washington DC Photo Tour]
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Friday, August 08, 2008
Global Metal
Just found this through the Savage Minds blog: "In 2005 his movie Metal - A Headbanger’s journey took the world with storm. Now anthropologist and metal musician Sam Dunn has released “Global Metal” - a film about the global expansion of heavy metal music."
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Thursday, August 07, 2008
Summer Hiatus
This blog is in recess, probably until mid-to-late August.
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progressive reactionary [View Page] Posts: ["ingenious, but useless"], [Links for 2008-07-21 [del.icio.us]], [Sante on nostalgia], [Links for 2008-07-16 [del.icio.us]], [home delivery opens at moma], [Links for 2008-05-31 [del.icio.us]], [the ghost of huntington hartford], [Links for 2008-05-18 [del.icio.us]], [sottsass], [Links for 2008-04-13 [del.icio.us]], [Links for 2008-04-08 [del.icio.us]], [lost city], [hudson yards: a critique], ["a nation worth defending"], [Links for 2008-04-05 [del.icio.us]], [foot in mouth], [nouvel nabs the pritzker], [home delivery @ moma], [a welcome mess], [good news for brooklyn], [earth's future, deep in the arctic.], [save robin hood gardens.], [yes we can.], [what lies beyond the spectacle?], [so long, new frontier], [paul rudolph drawings], [gluck in metropolis], [ornament and crime in the west bank], [fleeting fortunes of corporate architectural taste], [humanitarianism at the cooper-hewitt], [legalize your basement], [CCTV progress]
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04 August 2008
"ingenious, but useless"
[image: mattdork's flickr page] New Statesman : an interesting tale of war, historic preservation, and what to do with Vienna's Flaktürme. Relics of the Nazis' visionary but ultimately futile plans for defending the city from Allied bombing raids, these six towers are now lightning rods at the center of a debate on how to recognize and memorialize the city's history under Nazi rule.
20 July 2008
Sante on nostalgia
I'm currently reading Luc Sante's Low Life—something I should have done when I lived in the Lower East Side before I escaped to the Brooklyn countryside. I'm quite taken by the book's critique of nostalgia, which Sante defines in his preface as a kind of false, delusional sentimentality for a version of history that might not have actually existed in the first place. There's something quite compelling about Sante's take on nostalgia, and even though his words are directed towards a specifically New York-centric brand of repackaging the past, I think the critique can easily apply to any number of architectural or urban adventures in nostalgia. Sante:
16 July 2008
home delivery opens at moma
Despite evidence to the contrary (the embarrassing dearth of activity at this spot over the past several months), I've been enjoying busier-than-normal summer with the Day Job, among other distractions. I did manage to escape momentarily to attend last night's opening of the Home Delivery show at MoMA. The show is certainly worth checking out for those in New York at all this summer - it revisits the troubled history and perhaps-promising-yet-likely-also-troubled future of prefabrication in architecture. The most exciting elements are of course the pieces commissioned by the Museum specifically for this exhibition: five full-size buildings constructed in an adjacent parking lot and three speculative wall prototypes installed in the interior gallery. Should be interesting to see how the public, press, and pundits receive it all. As for this Progressive Reactionary, once I have a free moment I hope to post some more cohesive thoughts on the show. Until then...
19 May 2008
the ghost of huntington hartford
[image credit : progressive reactionary]
07 May 2008
sottsass
Beautiful.
07 April 2008
lost city
[Staff House, North Brother Island. image: Christopher Payne]
06 April 2008
hudson yards: a critique
From Metropolis: Stephen Zacks offers a critique of the recent bid contest for the development rights to the West Side rail yards in Manhattan. Without going into too much detail: in the wake of several failed attempts to develop this mega-site with public funding (Olympic stadium, Jets stadium, Javits Center expansion, etc. etc.), the MTA, owner of the site, solicited bids from developer-bank teams for the air rights to the railroad yards. Teams included, among others, architects Steven Holl, a KPF-Stern partnership, and a super-st.architecture lineup of Di-Sco-Fro/SANAA/SOM/Field Operations/Thomas Phifer/SHoP/Gary Handel. In the end, a Helmut Jahn / Peter Walker scheme for developers Tishman Speyer / Morgan Stanley took the cake. Needless to say, the winner's a real doozy.
"a nation worth defending"
Came across this speech that critic Jim Kunstler gave back in 2004:
01 April 2008
foot in mouth
[image: Inhabitat]
30 March 2008
nouvel nabs the pritzker
Looks like it goes to Nouvel this year. Yawn.
26 March 2008
home delivery @ moma
Just got word that MoMA has launched their website for this summer's exhibition on prefabrication titled Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. Looks like it will be an online journal recording the progress of the five mega-prototypes that will be constructed in the empty lot next to the museum in time for the exhibition opening. As reported by RoPog in the Times back in January, MoMA has commissioned these projects to accompany the exhibition upstairs as a way to showcase contemporary approaches to prefab. It's Barry Bergdoll's debut as his new position as chief curator of architecture & design... so expectations are high.
"Cellophane House" by prefab vets Kieran Timberlake BURST*008 by Douglas Gauthier and Jeremy Edmiston, the duo formerly known as System Architects System3 by Austrians Oskar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Rüf Housing for New Orleans by MIT's Lawrence Sass Micro-Compact Home by Richard Horden of Horden Cherry Lee in London
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CVCA - Capital Rants
Access to the 2008 CVCA Annual Conference PresentationsPublished on 25 Jul 2008 in Canada, by Chris ArsenaultIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
To those who attended - Thank you for making it out to this year’s CVCA Annual Conference. The event was a phenomenal success and your active participation was valuable and greatly appreciated. Themed “The Face of change”, this year’s event introduced some new faces leading our industry, hosted new networking activities and embraced change with the launch of a new communication channel for CVCA members: CVCA’s Capital Rants blog.
We have received very positive feedback and many of you have shared valuable comments and ideas to make next year’s event even better. In lieu of sending out a CD-ROM as initially stated, we decided to be more efficient and eco-friendly by hosting a secured web site and to publish the speaker’s presentations, bio’s, videos and some great pictures taken throughout the event for you to enjoy.
Please login to the CVCA Web site at: www.vcractive.com/clients/cvca
Once again, thank you for your participation and we hope to see you next year at our annual conference in Calgary, Alberta on May 27-29, 2009.
Sincerely, Chris Arsenault
2008 Conference Chair
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The great LSIF mythPublished on 02 Jul 2008 in Canada, LSIF, by MarkMcQueenOriginally posted at the Wellington Financial Blog.
Myths have a habit of surviving long past their due date. If not disproven, myths can often become accepted as fact.
Was there a shooter on the grassy knoll? Do pets explode in a microwave? There is no such thing as global warming (just look at the weather yesterday). Will your sports car disintegrate if you drive 300 km/h and hit a retaining wall? If you are 8 years old and fire a pellet gun, you’ll shoot your eye out. And so on….
As Darwinian forces have culled the Ontario Labour Sponsored Fund Industry over the past few years, there are but a few tall trees standing: GrowthWorks, ROI, VenGrowth and VentureLink are the four that come to mind that still have new material capital to deploy into new Ontario-based opportunities. Covington is also looking at new deals on the back of their great Platespin win.
There are a variety of reasons why these firms have survived the Ontario Government’s penny-wise-but-pound-foolish 2005 decision to kill the LSIF industry (see prior post “Ontario politicians asked to address deteriorating VC climate” October 1-07). “Poor returns” was certainly one of the key alleged reasons behind Premier McGuinty’s decision to kill the program, despite excellent results in B.C. and Quebec.
I love talking about returns, because so few people in positions of power can clearly articulate what a good return is.
Is investing $30 million of taxpayers money into an engine plant a good investment if it will only save 75 jobs? Is a flat return in an LSIF fund over the past twelve months a “poor return”? What about a 5% positive return over the past three years, Mr. Premier? Is that a “good return” or a “poor return” for retail investors?
Let’s have a look at some relevant returns, shall we?:
Sample LSIF returns:
GrowthWorks Canadian: 3 yrs: +2.85%, since inception: +0.01%
Sample Household Name Financial Institution Returns:
Blackstone Group (BX:NYSE): -49.9% since June 29, 2007 (1st day of trading post IPO)
So, according to publicly available information, a wide variety of labour-sponsored funds have performed better than all but one of the 10 global financial institutions named above. And by “better”, I don’t mean that they’ve lost their investors less money. In fact, many LSIF investors are up over the one and three year investment horizons. QED.
Since the McGuinty Government pulled the plug three years ago, they can’t be blamed for not knowing that these investment teams would outperform the likes of BMO, CIBC, Citigroup, Lehman, Blackstone, et al. But, now that they have these facts, the rationale for killing the program just lost one of the alleged key drivers: poor investment returns.
And returns aren’t the only good news. LSIF funds are producing real companies: 5N Plus, Bridgewater, DataCom, Diamedica, DragonWave, Espial, IMRIS, RuggedCom, Sandvine and TeraGo all went public on the TSX between March and December 2007.
Moreover, Med-Eng Systems, Galleon Energy, Sandvine, Aspreva Pharmaceuticals and Lakeport Brewing have all been honoured by the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association over the past three years as either “Deal of the Year” or “Entrepreneur of the Year”. Each of these successful investments had LSIF backers.
Perhaps, with these new bits of pithy information, the Ontario Government will consider recrafting the LSIF program as the “Commercialization Fund Program” in their Fall economic statement. With so much money pouring into “R&D”, but with so little commercializable activity coming out the other end, now’s the time to focus the Queen’s Park minds.
Here are some ways to reform the LSIF program (change the name to “Commercialization Fund” to start):
- focus must be on commercializing companies in such sectors as information technology, biotech, cleantech, alternative energy;
Firms such as ours might do even better if we had less competition, but that’s a small-minded approach. Ontario, and Canada, would be better off if the local venture capital community was given a chance to thrive. With five consecutive years of reduced VC investment, Ontario needs to take the plunge and keep the essence, if not the name, of the LSIF program. An incremental $15 million/year via the MRI Fund is but a drop in the bucket (see prior post “MRI Fund rumors come true” June 11-08).
Mark McQueen
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Video Blog Part 3 of 3: CVCA 2008 ConferencePublished on 16 Jun 2008 in Media, VC, Video, by Chris ArsenaultRoger McNamee of Elevation Partners - An Unforgettable Catalyst for Change
Through our collaboration with VC-TV extraordinaire Kristina Tomaz-Young, the CVCA Capital Rants blog gives you part 3 of a 3 part video cast series of this year’s CVCA 2008 Annual Conference held in Montreal Quebec, at the Fairmont - The Queen Elizabeth Hotel on May 28-30th.
This was a record breaking year on all fronts for the CVCA, and the “who’s who” that attended the conference are still talking about the comments, experiences and opinions shared over the course of the 2 day event. Better yet, we already started receiving great suggestions for next year’s event from this year’s participants! No wonder everybody is so revved up, with this year’s theme -Face of Change, the well renowned speakers and panelists, and the ever edgy Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners, telling it as it is, our members are pumped.
Part 3 of the video cast series, features highlights from the unforgettable presentation made by the conference’s keynote speaker, Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners. Roger’s wake up call and no nonsense, no holds barred style captivated the audience and had them wanting to hear more.
Please check out this coverage and meet Kristina at VC-TV Venture Cap TV blog at http://www.vc-tv.biz/?p=417
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Video Blog Part 2 of 3: CVCA 2008 ConferencePublished on 13 Jun 2008 in Media, VC, Video, by Chris Arsenault
And now VC-TV extraordinaire Kristina Tomaz-Young gives us Day 2 of the CVCA Annual conference which looked at how investors get their edge in an evolving market, with growth opportunities in the cleantech sector, and increasing fund raising challenges and opportunities for VC’s and private equity players alike. This is the second video cast of a 3 part coverage of this year’s CVCA 2008 Annual Conference held in Montreal Quebec, at the Fairmont - The Queen Elizabeth Hotel on May 28-30th.
Part 2 of 3 features highlights from the final day of the 2008 CVCA annual conference: Face of Change. This video cast features an interview with this year’s organizing committee’s chairman, Chris Arsenault of iNovia Capital, and a chat with conference participant, Grant Kook of Golden Opportunities.
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Video Blog Part 1 of 3: CVCA 2008 ConferencePublished on 05 Jun 2008 in Media, VC, Video, by Chris Arsenault
Very special thanks to VC-TV for this wonderful video series.
Venture Fairs: Are they worth it?Published on 29 May 2008 in Conferences and Fairs, venture capital, by Mark MacLeodThe Canadian Innovation Exchange took place in Toronto recently. It’s one of a host of similar conferences where startup entrepreneurs pitch their stories to VCs. The topic for the day is: Are these venture fairs worthwhile?
The short answer is: it depends. You should go to these fairs if:
You’re a 1st time entrepreneur, have not raised VC before, and / or just don’t have connections to book meetings with VCs directly
You have the spare time to go and sit in the sessions and learn
You’re a professional and looking to get clients in the space
You are a speaker (on a panel, not pitching your company)
Don’t expect to hook a VC at this show. For most investors, these shows are for investor-investor networking. The company pitches can be a distraction. This is a shame because the companies there make a real effort. I’m generalizing of course, and I’m sure there are many VCs who really do check out these companies, but on the whole, it’s not their top priority.
Personally, I avoid them. The last time I went was 2004. There is a prevailing view that the best companies and most experienced entrepreneurs skip these shows. Still, for every rule, there’s an exception: There are some good companies there this week that include 1st time VC-backed entrepreneurs like Ben as well as seasoned pros like Austin. So, their presence alone contradicts my opinion.
So, I guess it’s up to you at the end of the day. Go if you need to build your relationships and / or learn about VC. Don’t go if your goal is to land the VC that will fund you. You may be disappointed…
Mark MacLeod
http://startupcfo.ca
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The Art(istic side) of the DealPublished on 27 May 2008 in VC, venture capital, by Andy NulmanAndy Nulman, Co-founder & President of Airborne Mobile.
Please visit his blog by clicking here.
Although I have spent many hours in meetings with, and accepted impressive sums of money from, VCs, I must admit that I am kind of a “fish out of water” in your world. Other than the perfunctory pitch sessions where I feel like I’m on autopilot or trial, the words I’ve exchanged with VCs over the years have been essentially limited to “Thank you” and “We will be EBITDA positive by next quarter.”
You see, I’m the “creative guy.” The “idea man.” The necessary evil for the return on your investment. I used to think that my type was about as relevant to you guys as a sea squid is to a hot air balloon, but after seeing Dr. Richard Bruno (a Venture Partner at iNovia Capital) speak at a VC conference a year or so ago, I realized just how very important I am. Not only to the end result…but to the process of getting there.
Of particular interest in Dr. Bruno’s dissertation was his “Bizplans-to-Bucks” timeline, in which he takes entrepreneurs down this startling path of reality:
1,000 Business Plans Are Written
150 Are Moderately Credible
50 Are Interesting To Read
20 Undergo Due Diligence
5 Get Funded
1 Makes Money
The big shock here is not that only 1 in 1000 makes money; the big shock is the qualifier of “Interesting To Read” as a crucial VC criteria.
Many times, as entrepreneurs try to appeal to their corporate audience, their brilliant ideas are sanded down and neutered by VC-speak. In trying to suck up to their hoped-for lifeline, they take an exciting project and render it lame, dull and, worst-of-all, unsellable.
I have a theory that goes “Everyone’s a Kid in Disneyland.” What I mean by it is that no matter how important or powerful you are, when you’re amongst flying Dumbos, giant Mickey Mouses, Space Mountains and Towers of Terror, you are stripped of all conceit and are a mere soda-sipping, popcorn-munching regular folk. Applied to the boardroom, Venture Capitalists are not robots; they are (for the most part) human beings like you and I, and as susceptible to the right excitement, creativity and sell job as the next guy.
Thus, entrepreneurs shouldn’t worry about adding some colour, some life, some pizzazz to their pitches. To put it into financial terms, it does not diminish the return; it compounds the interest.
And as Dr. Bruno points out, it may be the difference between being considered for funding…or ending up in the recycling bin.
Taking this into account, I have a little personal anecdote.
When Garner Bornstein and I put together our first business plan for Airborne Mobile (then known as Airborne Entertainment), in one of the pitch slides, I wrote that he and I were professionals with “pristine reputations.”
“Pristine?” he said. “You don’t use the word ‘pristine’ in a VC pitch! They’ll laugh us out of their offices!”
I gave in on about 14 other points in the presentation, as Garner was way better versed in the way of VCs than I, but I held my ground tough on “pristine.”
Cut to presentation day, and the VCs are sitting like statues as we plowed through our very grey presentation. Essentially, this was a one-way conversation tinged with gallons of flop-sweat.
Then came the fateful slide.
“Pristine!” Suddenly, one of the mannequins came to life. “Now there’s a word you don’t see too often!”
All of a sudden, the guys were animated and discussing the meaning of “pristine.” This led to questions about our past, and to hypothetical situations and projections of the business-to-be.
I looked over at Garner, who had a huge smile on his face, and gave me what soon came to be known as his trademark “life is strange” shoulder shrug. We were back in the game…
So we became one of the 20.
Then one of the five.
And best yet, we became the One.
So go crazy, you entrepreneurs. All you’ve got to lose is someone else’s money.
–Andy Nulman
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The Case for Canadian Venture CapitalPublished on 20 May 2008 in VC, venture capital, by Suzie Dingwall WilliamsAs a lawyer for entrepreneurs, I am often frustrated by my clients’ reluctance to seek local venture capital. There is a persistent view that Canadian venture capital is somehow second best to American or other foreign funds. This may or may not be true. (My own view is that having a rock star U.S. VC backing you won’t make a good business great; it may, however, help you fail more slowly.) What is clear is that there remains a growing divide between entrepreneurs and venture investors which needs to be addressed.
While this may seem to be about you, this post in fact is all about me. The continued health of my business depends on an expanding, sustainable base of good, well-fed entrepreneurs. I don’t believe this is achievable unless there is an alignment of startups and venture capital into one community. While there are many aspects to this issue, at its heart, it’s a question of marketing.
Is there any other industry that has so sharply felt the impact of negative publicity as has venture capital? Take a look south of the border: one day, everyone’s trading tips on the best place in Carmel to park your MIG. Then Blackstone files a prospectus disclosing private equity executive compensation and CEO Stephen Schwarzmann holds a few multi-million dollar parties. Next thing you know, Congress is overhauling its taxation of carried interests for everyone. Venture Capital may be the worst marketed industry out there.
Canadian private equity has been tarred with the same Blackstone feather in the public eyes, if only because it has not provided an alternate mission statement to the public at large and entrepreneurs in particular. I tip my hat to those labour-sponsored funds, who, in their heyday, tried to make the connection between job creation and local investing. Very few would argue, however, that the public right now sees much difference between venture capital and vulture capital.
If Canadian innovation is to scale, there needs to be a call to action for all participants in the ecosystem. This is a marketing exercise that needs to be led by you, the VCs. When was the last time you went to a bootcamp? Provided sponsorship dollars to entrepreneur-generated initiatives? Extended your channels in the US to provide a broader network for your portfolio? Many of these events are not immediately accretive to you, but they are vital to community creation. Let me re-phrase that; there has never been a more vital startup community, but it is one being fostered largely without VC involvement. This must not continue. The need to take a long-term approach to deal flow has never been greater.
Of course, it always helps to have a deep-seeded conviction that local partnering between VCs and startups matters. For me, this is the biggest missing piece: a mission statement that everyone can embrace. It’s also the easiest to solve. Think of the consequences of leakage (one of the most polarizing terms in the international development community). Every dollar of investment that comes from outside Canada ultimately leaks profit and wealth creation outside of Canada. There cannot be sustainable growth if the benefit of local innovation is reaped beyond our boundaries by private equity tourists. Every entrepreneur should feel a moral (if not economic) imperative to include Canadian VCs as part of its growth plans, and to serve as ambassadors for you abroad, directing deal flow from beyond your way (leak unto others as they leak unto you).
It’s time for you to make them believers.
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Lijit’s CEO on raising money from angels.Published on 19 May 2008 in Private Equity, VC, venture capital, by Venture HacksTodd Vernon, the CEO of Lijit, has written a great article on raising money from angels. I especially like his taxonomy of angels:
“The Family Investor: The Family Investor is likely not really a classic Angel Investor at all but rather a supportive family member that “knows you”. Their motivation is likely out of support (sometimes guilt), but their basic investment thesis is they trust you. For me these are the worst type of investor because you likely have intimate knowledge of their financial situation and whether or not they ’should’ be investing. Likely, they have no inherent feel if your idea is good or not, but may have changed your diaper at one time or another and have overcome that experience to hand you a check for $25K or $50K. Personally, I like this category of investor the least because the investment is totally emotional and personal – and that sucks in business. But based on the financial situation of the individuals involved and the relationships this can work ok if everyone comes into the situation with their eyes open, but go out of your way to make sure.
“The Relationship Investor: The Relationship Investor is probably one or more co-workers from a previous gig or business friends you have known for a while. They may or may not understand what your new company is doing but they have had a track record working with you. They want to be supportive, but are looking for a return. You won’t lose them as friends if things go bad, but the investment for them is likely not ‘trivial’. In my experience these are good Angels to have, again as long as their eyes are open going in. These people can also be wildly supportive of you in terms of finding employees and other resources.
“The Idea Investor: The Idea Investor is probably very familiar with the space your company is targeting. These are in some ways the very best types of Angels because to some degree they validate your idea. There investment is based on the Idea and there is little emotion around the table (always good). If you can get them onboard they can open doors into partner relationships and just generally good advice. You will spend most of your time convincing the Idea Investor that you and team are the right people to attack this problem (as they likely don’t have a strong relationship with you or the team). Often an influential Idea Investor makes a good early board member for the company.
“The Once Removed Investor: The Once Removed Investor is likely connected through a personal or professional relationship with either the Relationship Investor or the Idea Investor. They likely don’t know you, and they likely don’t have a clue if your idea is good or bad but they have translated the trust in the investment to the person they know. This is a great way to get additional Angel Investors onboard, but without a solid Relationship Investor or Idea Investor it just isn’t going to happen.”
Read the rest of Todd’s article, it’s great.
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10 Investment lessons learned over 10 yearsPublished on 18 May 2008 in Private Equity, VC, venture capital, by Georges van Hoegaerden(http://www.venturecompany.com/Opinions/files/Investment_lessons.html)
I’ve written about my Top 10 fund raising lessons for entrepreneurs, and dare to follow up with my Top 10 investment strategies that may be useful to investors and entrepreneurs, here:
1 ) Invest in the founders, but be wary if the company consists of technologists only. The ones that come in without an operating plan clearly do not understand what you as an investor are looking for. Get a real operator in early.
2 ) Invest in the business, don’t invest in technology. The statistics prove it: ninety-nine out of a hundred of the most innovative technologies never turn into successful businesses. Especially investors (both VC and Angels) that made their money in the hay-days of technology have a tendency to underfund the business side, providing a weak foundation for any technology to succeed.
3 ) Don’t invest in an early stage company with more than one product or service. Let the company become the King-of-One, rather than the King-of-None. Multiple products or services require more money to support successfully and dramatically dilutes the focus of the company. Multiple products or services also “invite” a larger group of competitors, making it hard for customers to perceive true differentiation and unknowingly, slows down adoption.
4 ) Don’t invest in an early stage company with more than one business model. Keep it simple. Multiple revenue models sound good, but usually don’t yield the projected outcome. The company should make all of its money in advertising or in subscriptions, not in both. Dilution of focus is costly and provides yet another reason for failure.
5 ) Don’t invest in companies that rely heavily on partner support early on. This is the typical David and Goliath phenomenon. Partners sell once the company does in overwhelming numbers. The company should always have direct control of its own business model first, before they allow any partner to reduce its margins.
6 ) Invest money or time, don’t do both. I very much relate to Carl Icahn in an interview with Dan Primack (on PEhub) with regards to CEOs responsibility to make the numbers work, and not to rely on investors to “add value”. The CEO is in the driver seat, take him out if he doesn’t produce.
7 ) Look for fundamental changes in customer experience. The Ultimate Driving Experience is what sets BMW apart, not just the timing in their engines. Customer experience is much more than a pretty user interface, it is an overall experience that spawns disruptive purchasing.
8 ) Watch how professional the team operates pre-funding as an indication of their interaction post-funding and with customers. Real professionals do everything with a purpose and I have mastered the art of detecting them. So well that I can tell from a visit to a trade-show floor whether a company is going places.
9 ) Don’t categorize investment allocations based on past investments or trends. Every company is unique and requires an amount of money unique to their assets: people, timing, market and ecosystem. If you don’t think you have a unique scenario, you probably don’t have a valuable investment opportunity.
10 ) Invest with passion but don’t fall in love with the company. Investing is the ultimate flirting game, but it is usually a bad idea to get really involved. Your asset value is the selection and performance of all the companies in your fund. Stick with what you do best.
From an investment perspective I see many “sub-optimizations” but not a lot of real great innovations these days. I do blame the current investment model for that sometimes. We, in Silicon Valley, have too many technology investors using the same rear view-mirror investment criteria. Although I have a lot of admiration for Apple, it is a bad sign when we need to leave real innovation in the hands of large companies like theirs.
The landscape for investors is about to change dramatically, no longer can they just continue to invest in proprietary technology silos at single digit valuations. They’ll soon need to broaden their experience (”in search of the Economist VC”) to understand the macro-economic impact of marketplaces, platforms and the impact of technology to other industries.
A wonderful long road for technology innovation and investing still lies ahead.
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NetworthIQ on Should Do This [View Page] Posts: [add ability to set and track goals], [allow you to break down each asset group into multiple accounts. So you can track IRA/401k/Roth separately, but they all go into the Retirement asset group], [allow you to view graphs of selected categories in addition to just overall net worth], [allow more controls in comparison report], [integrate a friends list or allow tracking of other users contributions], [add a way to track discussions that you've contributed to], [add account level tracking], [add a spam reporting mechanism], [break down location by country], [some kind of integration with Yodlee Moneycenter]
add ability to set and track goals — 4 people
allow you to break down each asset group into multiple accounts. So you can track IRA/401k/Roth separately, but they all go into the Retirement asset group — 3 people
allow you to view graphs of selected categories in addition to just overall net worth — 2 people
allow more controls in comparison report — 2 people
integrate a friends list or allow tracking of other users contributions — 2 people
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add account level tracking — 2 people
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Is there an easy way of removing spam links and comments from fake profiles such as this?
https://www.networthiq.com/people/List_Dragon
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2 months ago (May 30, 06:20AM)
For instance, allow users to compare themselves to people who are both in their age group and in their occupation as opposed to the current system where you can only compare to one category at a time.
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9 months ago (Oct 24, 09:38AM)
Since we have many users from outside the U.S. now. There was just a recent article that resulted in new users from Australia:
http://www.news.com.au/business/money/story/0,25479,22633570-14327,00.html
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9 months ago (Oct 23, 01:30PM)
There are several users on NetWorthIQ who’s contributions I enjoy reading on a regular basis. However, the only way to track these peoples’ contributions is to continually visit their page. I think a tracking list, or friends list, would greatly help build the NetWorthIQ community.
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9 months ago (Oct 23, 08:59AM)
Exactly. Thanks for the suggestion. This is the same thing as my “Add account level tracking” suggestion, but I’ll leave this hear because this is more obvious what the suggestion is.
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The end of this quest
Better yet, in your warm, eager hands. A book on a shelf's worth nothing compared to it open to your eyes.
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Jess Nevins - Foreword
10 March 2008
The sleep of bees
My other box of confections —
Fresh Comfits
The end of this quest
The greatest conservationists have no brains
Optical illusions, spiders and waspishness
Lookdown at the lookout
Fresher than that from "the fresh food people"
The Workers' Paradise anthology and the arses of t...
Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy ready ...
The sleep of bees
Early 21st century art
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Up from the cellar
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What 'ordinary' really means
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A pellet of dung beetles
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The beauty of natural invention
Onuspedia: Lord Pemberton Gimble and Lord Pemberton Gimble
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BrophBlog [View Page] Posts: [A Vaster Right Wing Conspiracy…], [Does Screen Size Matter?], [The Metro/Elctro Polis], [The Classroom… what is that?], [Play the tape machine make the toast and tea], [The Blog and the Blogosphere], [Rise of the First Web], [Why it is best to look at things from many angles…], [Michael Jordan In Flight - EA Sports], [Young Indiana Jones & the Instruments of Chaos - Part II]
BrophBlogI never believed the notion that a “vast right wing conspiracy” to topple the Clinton’s and the Democratic Party existed, but now I do… It is not just talk radio, and Fox News… it has managed to creep in like a virus to my computer.
I was writing an email to a colleague, part of an on going political dialogue that we have been engaged in for years, and in the line of opinion and discourse we were discussing the merits of Barrack Obama.
When my thoughts were completed, I hit the send button, and my email client went through the usual spell checking routine. I have this set to run automatically, as I am one of the worst typists on the planet, if not the worst. I have to look at the keyboard, use two fingers and I still manage to mistype a large number of words.
As the spell check ran it caught the usual errors, “id” instead of “is,” “predisent” instead of “president,” and then it came across something interesting and provocative. Although I had spelled “Obama,” correctly it asked me if I wanted to replace it with “Osama.”
Was this for real? How could “Osama” be a valid word and “Obama” not be? I have the most recent updates, drivers and patches… What could be causing this? I have searched high and low for an answer and have found nothing to explain this… therefore; I can only reach one conclusion. It’s the VRWC virus. It has entered my computer, infiltrated my office and altered all of my programs. I checked every application with spell check routines, and they all came back the same: Obama = Osama.
When will it end? How low will the Right go to tarnish the reputation of the illustrious, chosen one? Why haven’t the “main stream media” picked up on this… could it be technology media bias? They have covered every other minute of “His” campaign, why not this.
Or have the Right wingers managed a subliminal covert operation so ingenious that the ‘Mainstream media” professionals have not even picked up on it. It’s curious to think that when we as citizens enter the voting booths in November, might we look at the screen of the electronic voting machine, or the punch ballot, and in the back of our minds see the red line and the word Osama, hesitate, feel the sweat break on our foreheads and look for the name McCain.
tjb
Categorised in Uncategorized
Jul
04
Does Screen Size Matter?
1 Comment
For years the motion picture industry has pushed the limits of movie production. We have are seeing the end of film as we know it and the digital age is ushering in new more efficient ways to produce content and new methods of distribution. For years film makers and producers struggled with standards in film stock, film size, and film speeds. Original silent movies were shot and projected with hand cranked cameras, which did not establish or uphold a standard speed. The frame rate standards were ushered in with the advent of the sound film. Sound required a constant recording and play back speed.
Mechanization of the camera and technological advancements in sound recording allowed for innovations such as Synch sound, constant frame rates, innovative camera design, noise reduction, film stock advancements, and advancements in lens technologies and design.
Today, we are seeing a similar progression in motion picture technology as the digital age is making what was once an industry of big dollars and expensive productions, a world that is accessible to almost anyone. The cost of production, editing, sound design and distribution have decreased at an exponential rate. The once powerful and dominant Goliath of the Studio system has been challenged by the new digital Indie-producer system. Technological advances has moved film making from the back lot to the desk top, and has pushed distribution from the once great movie house or mega-plex movie theatre to the Uber-plex of the Internet. “In Hollywood terms, a low budget film is anything under $10 million; The Blair Witch Project cost a mere $60,000 to produce, and grossed $248,639,099.” [1]
Technology has not only helped the smaller, low budget producer, it has also allowed mainstream, big budget studios such as Lucas Arts to shoot entirely in a digital format. Digital technology allows film makers like George Lucas, and Stephen Spielberg to pre-visualize every shot of a project in a live motion format before ever actually shooting a scene. The digital medium has allowed film makers to build a scene out as a live action, digital story board creating enormous efficiencies and lowering costs an expenses incurred shooting on location. Additionally, digital formats are ushering in whole new distribution methods for major motion pictures as well as small Internet videos. Digital theatres are being set up primarily in large market cities. These theaters are capable for downloading titles with out any degradation of quality over the life of the films showing.
The next great step in distribution of media is the Internet and the On Demand systems of consumption. Today, YouTube estimates that it has over 100 million video streams per day. “In January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users had made over 3 billion video views. [2] ” In 2008, the motion picture industry has seen a decline in ticket sales of levels reported in 2000, though revenues are up. The increase in revenue despite a drop in tickets sales in due to increase in the cost per ticket sold.
So, with DVD rentals, peer-to-peer file sharing, television and computer based On-Demand services, and sites such as YouTube, IMDB, etc… the small screen has become much more important than ever before. So what does this mean to the film maker and producer?
It allows for more individuals to become film makers and producers. But it also drastically changes the dynamics of film production and the techniques used for production, and the stylistic methods used to display the narrative. One of the hallmarks of digital media is its platform friendly nature. Digital media can be produced for one display medium and distributed across many others. Today, the majority of video shot for television, music videos, and motion pictures are re-purposed across viewing platforms. An epic film such as “Lawrence of Arabia,” will be viewed by most people today on either a television, or some smaller media device such as an iPod, or a laptop. This 70 mm masterpiece that is hallmarked by its wide shots, bright color, and incredible composition, is viewed at resolutions of 320 X 200, or 1024 X 768; a far stretch, or an incredible shrinkage from the 40 foot theatrical screens the film was intended to be viewed on.
Today many critics of the film industry see this emergence of the small screen market place as one of the most detrimental to the film industry and the creative norms associated with it. Wheeler Wiston Dixon lists as one of his “Twenty-Five Reasons it’s All Over,” the fact that films are now “composed” for television screens or mobile devices rather than cinematic screen presentation.
The restriction of the media device will drastically change how a film maker’s approaches the composition of a shot. A wide shot of Peter O’Toole as he stumbles over and down an enormous sand dune is great when the actor is life size, but at 320 X 200 the subject of the shot is lost. The impact of man against the elements, the sheer dimension and power of the desert is lost, or certainly diminished on a tiny screen.
Recently the Sundance Institute challenged several film makers to produce a short film for mobile phones. Maria Maggenti, director of the upcoming big-screen film Puccini for Beginners, was one of the film makers who accepted the challenge. She notes that “I held the phones up and looked through them to see what it looked like, to see what faces looked like and depth of field… from there I decided that, although both my films feature people who talk, the best way to handle this was to have no dialogue. So the elements are a simple narrative, no or little dialog, visuals that are very clear and more or less fill up the screen, and easily readable. I guess not a great deal of character development.” [5]
But not everyone agrees. Today there are thousands of amateur “film” makers who are happy to shoot with the tools they have, and plenty of people who don’t want great cinematography, they just want to laugh as some idiot jumps off a garage roof during a backyard wrestling match. Some say that mediocrity is becoming the new standard, and it may be true. We have seen a diminishing sense of value in creative endeavors and productions and the work that traditionally goes into a professional execution of these efforts.
We have seen the 35 mm SLR replaced by the digital camera, and along with that we have seen an extinction of the photograph. Today most are satisfied to save it to a hard rive, and printout a copy on low quality paper and cheap ink cartridges. Stock photography has replaced real table top, commercial photographers. Innovation in printing, and low resolution requirements for the web have brought down the bar of acceptable product. This effect is being felt across industries, as MP3 compression is good enough recording quality has dropped down on the importance scale. Blogs have ushered in new lows in journalism and writing, and YouTube has made just about any video fodder for distribution.
Ideally, the cream will rise to the top. Good film makers will not be satisfied with being on YouTube next to a back yard girl fight video. The truly talented film makers and videographers will adhere to principals of visual composition such as the rule of thirds, the Golden Section and the natural geometry that we exist in. As producers we are challenged by the restrictions of new mediums, but we are also supported, and promoted by them as well.
True innovators succeed in the environment that they find themselves existing in. They take to tools available, the confines and restrictions set upon them, and find ways to break out and express themselves in clear and evocative ways. It is truly an exciting time to be a producer…
tjb
References:
Zimmerman, C. Indie Film Investments: Independent films present an alternative investment opportunity. February 22, 2008 http://www.nuwireinvestor.com/articles/indie-film-investments-51440.aspx
Yen, Y.W. YouTube looks for the money clip. March 25, 2008, http://techland.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/03/25/youtube-looks-for-the-money-clip/
US Movie Market Summary 1995 to 2008
http://www.the-numbers.com/market/
The End of Cinema as we know it: American Film in the Nineties. (2001) New York University Press. Edited by John Lewis. Twenty-Five Reasons It’s All Over. Dixon, W.W., (pp. 356 – 366).
Making a Film for the Really Small Screen. Morning Edition, NPR January 18, 2007. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6898780
Marill, A.H., Big Pictures on the Small Screen (2007). Praeger, Westport CT.
Categorised in ICM - INTRO, ICM - MOBILE MEDIA and Virtual Worlds
Jun
30
The Metro/Elctro Polis
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The “new hybrid space” that is being created by our behaviors and use of mobile technology is a fact, but I don’t see it as a negative, it’s just a reality. I am from the mid-west, and lived for ten years or so in Chicago. Chicago is a terrific city, and the people there are genuinely friendly. I have known many people from the East, New York and Boston in particular who have visited Chicago and experience genuine friendliness; something which is hard to come by, especially in New York City. In Chicago, if you ask for directions you usually get them; in New York you are more likely to get the “finger.”
I lived in Chicago in the 1990’s, before cell phones, PDA’s, and mobile technology took over the planet. And, even though, as I described earlier, Chicago is a friendly city it wasn’t like everybody knew your name, helped you with your groceries, gave you rides, it wasn’t a utopia of communication and openness. There seems to be an underlying tone to this article, and many others I have read on similar subjects, that the mobile tech movement is destroying some Shangri-La type existence. I don’t buy it.
People are at there core, and by their very nature cautious beings. I am certain that this is part of the Darwinian survival inclinations that are deeply rooted in all animal life forms on the planet, especially humans. If you are an outgoing individual, you will still be that way, even though you have a cell phone, and use it while you walk down the street, or ride in a cab. Sure you might not talk to the cab driver if you are on the phone, but most conversations, at least from my experience with big city cab drivers, are not very poignant, are mostly small talk, and usually very difficult to understand.
So, if my option is to be able to talk to a colleague, a friend, or my wife instead of making small talk with a person I will never see again, about things neither of us cares about, I choose the former. Mobile communication technology is simply another tool that makes us more efficient and allows us to reach out to people, regardless of physical location.
As a mobile technology is a tool, we all have the choice to use it or not. We can actively participate in our surroundings, or not, but we have always been able to do that. We could check out long before there were cell phones. One could argue that mobile technology has probably done more to help the shy and introverted than it has to harm the sacred “metropolis,” and its members. Those who don’t like face-to-face interaction, now have several alternative ways that allow them to participate with the world on their own terms, or at least terms that they are more comfortable with.
Siegel and Schore argue very strongly and support the concept of face-to-face interaction between developing infants and their primary caregivers, and as a father of two, I agree fully with their observations and assertions, but I don’t really see where it applies to adult communication. Most infants, toddlers, and even children under 10 that I know don’t have or rarely use mobile technology. Sure, my seven year old has asked me for a cell phone, but he doesn’t need one, and rarely uses one.
Adults, because of their early neurobiological development are capable of communicating with each other though mediated methods equally as well as they are face-to-face. There may be times, during a negotiation, or an interview where it is beneficial to infer additional information from the conversation, where a face-to-face meeting may benefit one or both parties. However, in general, for everyday communication via mediated methods are full adequate, and sometimes beneficial for most users.
One of my favorite modes of communication is Instant Messenger. It is quick, free, it requires no small talk, I can check in with someone, ask them a quick question, tell them I can’t talk, and be done with it. I don’t IM my mom, if I want to talk, but if I need an address, or a quick question for someone, it is the perfect mode of communication. Low overhead, easy to ignore, and completely passive if that is what the user desires. Someone can send me IM’s all day, and I am not required to respond if I do not want to.
Of course there are times when you want communication to be up close and personal, but there are probably more times when you don’t. Technology meditated communication is perfect for all those times you don’t.
tjb
Categorised in INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATION
Jun
30
The Classroom… what is that?
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Distance learning is nothing new.
There have been correspondence courses taught via the mail for decades. The difference today, is the technological means of real-time delivery, if desired or asynchronous delivery of content. Broadband accessibility, the ever decreasing cost of computer hardware, and the relatively new trend toward open source everything has lowered the barriers to entry to a minimum.
Economically the concept of computer aided distance learning is an obvious choice for colleges and universities that are trying to compete for tuition dollars of the world. Distance learning allows schools to expand their base of adjunct and visiting professors to a world-wide level. A Nobel Prize winning physicist from Prague doesn’t have to live in Cambridge to teach at MIT. Their course can be designed and developed in an online fashion, so they never have to leave their native land. This goes for students as well.
Courses offered at Yale, MIT, Stanford can be accessed via platforms such as Itunes University, or Blackboard, and students can enroll and participate from their home town. No relocation, no dorm living, much more affordable.
Of course, there is something to be said about dorm life. Everyone should experience the surreal life of the freshman dorm: The roommate that plays Nintendo for an entire semester and only leaves the room for meals, and the occasional coed softball game. Or the pre-med dude that stays up all night playing guitar, and never gets tired. There is so much vomit, beer, pizza, and cigarettes that the online student will never experience if they stay home and take their classed online. Some may feel that vomit and cigarettes are over rated, but I think they are an essential part of the freshman experience, amongst many other things I will not mention. No self incrimination here…
Here at Quinnipiac, I have personally taken part in 5 online courses; some worked well and some not so well. The online course inherently lacks the human element. The spontaneity of questioning and lecturing is non-existent. The relationship, though short that develops between students in a class is missing completely. If it were not for the other in-class course I have taken, I would not know anyone in class at all. No faces just email addresses. Not that I came to Quinnipiac to make friends, but I can say I am here partly to network, and partly to engage in discussion and the face to face discourse that gets the mind excited and active. And, if we could all go out and have a few beverages, and someone threw up, that wouldn’t be bad either.
There is no getting around the fact that distance learning is the future. Quinnipiac is embracing it. I tunes launched I tunes University, and has schools such as Yale, MIT, Stanford, Duke, etc… the list goes on and on. Currently, many of these schools are offering courses to non-matriculated students, and offering them for free. I would venture to guess that if the numbers are there and a constant and cohesive model can be developed, we will see the shift from free to tuition based courses. But this will be a real challenge.
Most academic institutions are built on the academic freedom of faculty members to teach as they see fit, within some limits. Tenure has rightly protected the academic from the pressures of the administration, and ensured the autonomy of the faculty, but this may have to change if there is to be a reliable model for the online program.
There are new barriers such as the technological learning curve, for both teacher and student. This of course will diminish as older faculty retire, and are replaced by younger faculty who have literally grown-up with technology as part of their beings. The freshman of 2020 will know Photoshop, Word, Illustrator, Final Cut, and Flash. They will be adept in whatever social networking platform is prevalent; assuming that FaceBook eventually becomes passé. The online movement is occurring at all levels of education, not just the University level. Elementary, Junior High and High Schools are adopting these technologies and teaching methods as well. The K-12 education system will never be entirely online, as those of us with children know, because of the babysitting aspect of school. Our tax dollars pay for roughly, 190 days of educational child care, by trained professionals. Many of those points are debatable, but that is a whole other essay.
The future of the classroom is an interesting one. Recently, many schools have been contemplating doing away with tuition as well. The endowments of several schools would allow them to exist, and function fully without tuition at all. Harvard’s endowment is somewhere in the range of $29 Billion dollars. That’s more than the GDP of many African nations.
The next generation will be raised with cell phones in hand, and laptops instead of notebooks. They will be ready for the online classroom, and will most likely demand it. It is almost absurd to thin that if you miss a lecture in today’s University, that you couldn’t download a podcast of it complete with Power Point slides, lecture notes, and assignments, but even here at Quinnipiac there are classes where that’s not possible. Academia is not a place of quick change, so I applaud Quinnipiac for the strides that it has made with technology. But, I have a feeling that once the stigma of an “online course” has diminished, and it will, the world of academia is going to ramp up quickly and begin to move at broadband speed.
Tjb.
Categorised in INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATION
Jun
19
Play the tape machine make the toast and tea
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Play the tape machine make the toast and tea
When I’m mobile
Well I can lay in bed with only highway ahead
When your mobile
Keep me moving…
- Pete Townshend
Mr. Townshend, besides being a talented song writer, a great guitar player and a rock and roll icon also seems to be quite the visionary. Although not talking specifically about mobile technology, he is singing the praises of being on the move, with everything at his finger tips, with nothing to encumber or slow him down. He describes all of the advantages of being “mobile” before you could truly be “mobile.”
Innovation of mobile media and communication has absolutely freed us from need to be grounded. We have become islands of one. Our own home bases, our own mobile offices, we are free of the constraints of physical place. One can judge whether this is a good or bad, and that answer is subjective. But the objective fact is that we have all become mobile, whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not.
I am sure that most of us feel that the good of being “mobile” out weighs the bad, but there is, as with most new trends, innovations, movements, some bad to deal with. Prohibition was probably seen as a “good” thing, but the net result was Al Capone, organized crime and the Kennedy family. Some may feel that there isn’t much difference, but that is another debate.
Technology, when accepted on a mass scale brings with it inherent vulnerabilities. As we move to a paperless, digital age, the opportunities for fraud and criminal activities unfold at exponential rates. Hackers have been plaguing online servers and terminals since the late 1970’s. We all, well some of us remember Mathew Broderick in War Games. Besides changing his grades via a phone and a phone terminal, he almost started world war three…
“Do you want to play a game?”
“Yes… global thermal nuclear war”
Whew! Good thing Matthew Broderick is so smart…
Today it’s e-terrorism: cell phone hacking, credit card fraud, fishing, spamming, viruses, and all kinds of fraudulent activities. We have even seen, although I am still on the fence on this one, “Cyber Bullying.” The notion that your avatar is getting harassed or even “raped” seems very out there to me. Here is an idea… get out of Second Life and start living your first life. Turn off the computer, get rid of the Anime pink Fox outfit and go outside, change your cell number, and your email address.
Perhaps that sounds cold, but there are much more serious cyber crimes and cyber costs to be dealt with before we worry about getting beat up in Second Life. As a web developer and hosting provider one of the most costly cyber issues in simply spam.
Who knew that a small potted meat food product would become one of the most used terms and biggest issues for large companies in the twenty first century? Hawaii is the spam capital of U.S.A, with “residents consume nearly 7 million cans of Spam a year, an average of about six cans for every man, woman and child.” (Honolulu Star Bulletin, March 2004) But Wall Street is where spam does the most damage. The Boston Business Journal estimates that Spam costs U.S. companies over $70 billion dollars per year – “$712 for each employee in lost worker productivity.”
Spamming issues are just the tip of the iceberg as a service provider. Our servers are under an almost constant sate of siege. We are bombarded by hackers, spammers, and other attacks on a 24-7-365 basis. But that is life on the high tech cutting edge.
These are the modern facts of life. Technology is so inexpensive that soon, everyone will be connected at all times. For less than $1,000.00 you can get a phone, PDA and a Laptop and be hooked up to the Internet. The market is growing with each new generation. The baby boomers, which are the next round of seniors, have been connected for years. There are not too many individuals, at least not that will be around for much longer, that are not connected. Sure there are always outliers that skew the norm, and choose to unplug, but for the most part we are a plugged-in society. No wonder mobile tech is one of the largest growing industries.
We have all become part of the “Mobile-sphere.” We can produce, publish and participate with almost no barriers to entry. Video, audio, and the written word can be turned around in no time at all, and disseminated in even less time. This connection to the live “mobile-sphere” has moved from a fun or cool luxury to a staple, a requirement. The phone is fashion. Have you asked yourself which Ipod defines you? Do you judge your neighbor by the connection he keeps? Most of us would say of course not… but how many of us are going to trade in their perfectly good PDA for the new Ipod that was just unleashed on the world.
Being consumers is nothing new. Detroit has been changing models slightly each year so there is always something new to buy. There is always a reason to trade in the old Chrysler for a new one. The fashion industry has been doing it for decades. Who’s holding on to a Member’s only jacket, just waiting for them to be cool again? No one needs thirty pairs of shoes, unless you are a member of the fabulous Sex in the City crowd of course. But, we are all guilty of it. I have way too many video game systems. I think I have them all; from a Sega Genesis to an XBOX 360… The funny thing is, I rarely play any of them.
The mobile phone providers are not doing anything new with their advertising that Madison Avenue hasn’t done before. You don’t have to show them they need it; just show them why they should want it. No one needs cigarettes, but Big Tobacco, had successfully managed to show us that we should want them. How else could you grow up to be a cowboy, other than smoking Marlboro Reds? I bought my first cell phone because I needed it for emergencies, but I bought my first PDA because I wanted it.
Speaking of marketing and advertising… I wonder how long until Mr. Townshend sells out and we hear his soulful, distinct high-pitched voice pushing the new Verizon Razor, or the special edition “Who’s Next” Iphone… with a Union Jack emblazoned across the body of the phone? You can be “Mobile” while checking to see if “The Kids Are Alright.”
tjb
Categorised in INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATION
May
11
The Blog and the Blogosphere
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To Blog or not to blog… that is the question.
The rise of the internet as a new medium of mass communication is illustrated no better than with the acceptance and growth of personal, political, issue-oriented and business web logs, or blogs. Within the eight years that have passed since its birth, blogging has been on a meteoric rise and is rivaling all established, traditional forms of media dissemination. It is difficult to define a real and accurate statistic on how many blogs exist today. Due to the nature of the medium, many blog sites are set for a short time and then abandoned, while others have been spewing forth their content and have no plans on stopping.
A February 2008 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults or 44 percent of adult internet users have used the internet to “publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online. Twenty-one percent of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites. Thirteen percent of internet users maintain their own web sites. Around 7 percent have web cams running on their computers that allow other internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings.”[1]
Various estimates put the number of blogs and blog users anywhere from 2.5 million to over 8 million. Regardless of the exact number, blogging is fast becoming an important part of the fourth estate.
Yale University law professor Yochai Benkler defines the “public sphere” as how the “people in a given society speak to each other in their relationship as constituents about what their condition is and what they ought to or ought not to do as a political unit.[2] Blogs allow for low-cost participation in the discourse of the “public sphere.” The blog is the catalyst of change in the transformation of the old-guard media to the new collaborative and participation-based media. The dominance of single sources of media is being challenged on a daily basis by the blogosphere and all its members.
For example, the Drudge Report started as an email-based news aggregator produced from an apartment in California. But Matt Drudge’s web site achieved real media gravitas and legitimacy when it broke the President Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal story. The Drudge Report scooped all other news outlets, including the weekly news giant Newsweek, that decided not to run the story. Drudge took the citizen journalism approach and put his site on the map. Today the Drudge Report takes in annual revenue of $800,000 and attracts millions of unique visitors every month.
Many people are critical of the blogosphere, claiming that individuals like Matt Drudge are too risky in that they are willing to put things out that other established news outlets want to stay away from. “The refrain of “Manifesto” is that Drudge, a “nobody,” is now a “player” in medialand.”[3]
There are many other great examples of citizen journalism and information activism, and how they are fighting the establishment media and winning. CBS news was the victim of this new type of journalism. Bloggers mobilized quickly to expose Dan Rather and his producer from the CBS news program 60 Minutes for running a negative story about George W. Bush and his military service record. The story was based on forged documents that CBS and Rather never took the time to investigate.
The blog littlegreenfootballs.com posted a document experiment on the documents. The authors ran re-typed documents from 1972 in Microsoft Word and were able to make an exact duplicate of the document, kerning, spacing, text wrapping, hyphenation and fonts. “I’ve received more than a hundred emails pointing out serious new problems in the CBS News documents. Several readers mentioned the “19 May 1972” document as a particularly striking example; so I typed this document into Microsoft Word as well, again with default margins and tab stops… and once again, the character spacing, line spacing, line breaks (and remember, any 1972 typewriter would have had a manual or manually triggered carriage return), and letter forms in my MS Word document exactly match the CBS News ‘original.’”
The Playing Field is Being Leveled
The new media is one of interaction and participation. This doesn’t only apply to journalism. Today musicians, artists, writers are sharing and collaborating like never before. Movements such as the Collective Commons are setting the stage for this type of license free sharing. Not that all of this is new. For years DJ’s have been sampling, mixing, and mashing up music and lyrics in live performances and in recorded tracks, but today the ease of distribution has opened up global exposure for these artists.
For years there have been alternative press news papers and magazines, most operating on small budgets and servicing a local community. But today these alternative media outlets can gain international exposure with even smaller budgets than before. The cost barriers have been removed completely. There is no need for printing presses, ink, paper or postage. Today most blog hosting is free, broad-band internet connections get cheaper almost daily, and computers are so cheap they are the throw away commodity of the year.
Not only has the creation and distribution of media changed, but so has the consumption of it. Users today want information delivered quickly, and conveniently. The news cycle has gone from 24 hours to 5 minutes. The “Scoop” is a thing of the past. Sure an outlet can be the first to put something out there, but within seconds other outlets will pull that information via RSS feeds, email, or other means and make it their own, or simply credit the source.
The consumer of media has shifted from a complacent, passive receptacle of information to a social and active hunter and gatherer of media. The user has the tools at their disposal to seek truth, to dig through the bias, and dodge the spin. Hopefully, the playing field is being leveled not only because more people can reach the field, but also because the quality level of those opting in and choosing to participate is getting better. Much like professional sports, as free agency allows players to move from one team to another, and the quality of players entering the league increases, parity slowly moves through and reshapes the leagues. Teams become better, records become closer, and you never know who will win the Super Bowl.
↑ Amanda Lenhart, Deborah Fallows, and John Horrigan, “Content Creation Online,” Pew Internet & American Life Report (February 29, 2008), http://www.pewinternet.org/report_display.asp?r=113.
↑ Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 263
↑ Scott Rosenberg, “Drudge Work,” Salon.com, November 9, 2000, http://archive.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/11/09/drudge/
This essay is from a book being produced as a collaborative exercise and assignment from the class Communications, Media and Society in the Interactive Communications Masters program at Quinnipiac University.
Categorised in Virtual Worlds
May
11
Rise of the First Web
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What does the dot-com bubble, and its bursting, tell us about predicting revolution, other than “it’s dangerous?”
Irrational Exuberance
What were the predictions surrounding Web 1.0 and why were they so widely accepted?
The promise of Internet technology…
The end of the 1980s saw the development of the World Wide Web. The development of the first Web client and browser, by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, followed in 1990. Although concepts of hyper-linked information had been conceptualized as early as 1945 by Vannevar Bush in his article “As We May Think,” practical application and use of the technologies didn’t come to fruition until 1995 when Mark Andreesson launched the Mosaic browser, and the WC3 consortium was established.
The period from 1995 – 2001 is typically referred to as the Dotcom Bubble era. This period of time is marked by intensive speculation from the venture capital community, the marketplace, and the general investing population on internet technology start-up companies that promised to change the way people communicated, consumers consumed and the business world worked. The enthusiasm that took over much of the business and financial world at that time was bolstered by several necessary infrastructure factors:
The widespread use of personal computers, equipped with voice-grade telephone line modems and/or Ethernet capabilities
Extensive development of local area networks (LANs) connected to information servers in organizations.
Widespread use of TCP/IP and Ethernet standards to create an inter-operable system composed of elements form many different companies.
Continued and rapid decline in the prices of transmission, routing and end-user equipment
Favorable regulatory treatment in both domestic and international forums for value-added or enhanced services (Internet-based services), allowing them to utilize the established infrastructure without being bound by the rules developed for an earlier technology.
Passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, relaxed regulatory boundaries and moved in favor of competition and market driven pricing.[1]
It is the arrival of World Wide Web standardization that paved the way for the acceptance of the technology and facilitated its growth as a method of information retrieval with enormous potential. New companies such as Mark Andreesson’s Netscape exemplified the dotcom start-up story that became the standard tale of rags-to-riches-to-rags that defined dozens of start-up dotcom companies and venture capitalist firms over the dotcom era.
Netscape and its Web browser of the same name were quickly accepted as the standard for Web browsing and the company experienced a meteoric rise. In August of 1995, not even a year after its inception, the company issued an initial public offering (IPO) that valued the company at $2.2 billion dollars despite revenues of less than $10 million dollars. This became the typical tale of the dotcom company for the next half decade. Eager venture capital investors began looking for the next great Internet-based idea, and as a result they were funding almost any Internet-idea regardless of profitability or generally accepted rules of business planning. “A canonical “dot-com” company’s business model relied on harnessing network effects by operating at a sustained net loss to build market share (or mind share). These companies expected that they could build enough brand awareness to charge profitable rates for their services later. The motto “get big fast” reflected this strategy.”[2]
The following is a list from CNET of the top ten worst DotCom Start-up Failures:
Webvan (1999-2001): A core lesson from the dot-com boom is that even if you have a good idea, it’s best not to grow too fast too soon. But online grocer Webvan was the poster child for doing just that, making the celebrated company our number one dot-com flop. In a mere 18 months, it raised $375 million in an IPO, expanded from the San Francisco Bay Area to eight U.S. cities, and built a gigantic infrastructure from the ground up (including a $1 billion order for a group of high-tech warehouses). Webvan came to be worth $1.2 billion (or $30 per share at its peak), and it touted a 26-city expansion plan. But considering that the grocery business had razor-thin margins to begin with, it was never able to attract enough customers to justify its spending spree. The company closed in July 2001, putting 2,000 out of work and leaving San Francisco’s new ballpark with a Webvan cup holder at every seat.
Pets.com (1998-2000): Another important dot-com lesson was that advertising, no matter how clever, cannot save you. Take online pet-supply store Pets.com. Its talking sock puppet mascot became so popular that it appeared in a multimillion-dollar Super Bowl commercial and as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But as cute–or possibly annoying–as the sock puppet was, Pets.com was never able to give pet owners a compelling reason to buy supplies online. After they ordered kitty litter, a customer had to wait a few days to actually get it. And let’s face it, when you need kitty litter, you need kitty litter. Moreover, because the company had to undercharge for shipping costs to attract customers, it actually lost money on most of the items it sold. Amazon.com-backed Pets.com raised $82.5 million in an IPO in February 2000 before collapsing nine months later.
Kozmo.com (1998-2001): The shining example of a good idea gone bad, online store and delivery service Kozmo.com made it on our list of the top 10 tech we miss. For urbanites, Kozmo.com was cool and convenient. You could order a wide variety of products, from movies to snack food, and get them delivered to your door for free within an hour. It was the perfect antidote to a rainy night, but Kozmo learned too late that its primary attraction of free delivery was also its undoing. After expanding to seven cities, it was clear that it cost too much to deliver a DVD and a pack of gum. Kozmo eventually initiated a $10 minimum charge, but that didn’t stop it from closing in March 2001 and laying off 1,100 employees. Though it never had an IPO (one was planned), Kozmo raised about $280 million and even secured a $150 million promotion deal with Starbucks.
eToys.com (1997-2001): eToys is now back in business, yet its original incarnation is another classic boom-to-bust story. The company raised $166 million in a May 1999 IPO, but in the course of 16 months, its stock went from a high of $84 per share in October 1999 to a low of just 9 cents per share in February 2001. Much like Pets.com, eToys spent millions on advertising, marketing, and technology and battled a host of competitors. And like many of its failed brethren, all that spending outweighed the company’s income, and investors quickly jumped ship. eToys closed in March 2001, but after being owned for a period by KayBee Toys, it’s now back for a second run.
Boo.com (1998-2000): Though Boo.com is another flop that has been given new life by Fashionmall.com, its original incarnation proved that dot-com flops were not restricted to U.S. shores. Founded in the United Kingdom as an online fashion store, Boo.com was beset with problems and mismanagement from the start. Its complicated Web site, which relied heavily on JavaScript and Flash, was very slow to load at a time when dial-up Internet usage was the norm. Boo spent wads of cash to market itself as a global company but then had to deal with different languages, pricing, and tax structures in all the countries it served. The company also mysteriously decided to pay postage on returns, but even more importantly, sales never reached expectations. Boo.com eventually burned through $160 million before liquidation in May 2000.
MVP.com (1999-2000): Like Planet Hollywood and Flooz.com, MVP.com proved that celebrity endorsements are worth nothing in the long run. Backed by sports greats John Elway, Michael Jordan, and Wayne Gretzky and $65 million, MVP sold sporting goods online. Founded in 1999, the company grew to more than 150 employees, but a high-profile partnership came to be a liability. A few months after its launch, MVP.com entered into an $85 million, four-year agreement with CBS in which the network would provide advertising in exchange for an equity stake in the e-tailer. Yet barely a year later, CBS and its online affiliate SportsLine.com killed the agreement because MVP.com failed to pay the network an agreed-upon $10 million per year. The game was over for MVP.com soon afterward, and SportsLine took over the domain.
Go.com (1998-2001): The Walt Disney Company felt the sting of the dot-com bust with its portal Go.com. Started in 1998, Go.com was a combination of Disney’s online properties and Infoseek, in which the Mouse had previously acquired a controlling interest. Though it was meant to be a “destination site” much like Yahoo, Go.com had its own little quirks, such as content restrictions against adult material. Disney was never able to make Go.com popular enough to validate the millions spent on promotion. In January 2001, Go.com was shut down, and Disney took a write-off of $790 million. Go.com still exists, but it carries only feeds from other Disney Web properties.
Kibu.com (1999-2000): Unlike the other flops listed here, Kibu.com, an online community for teenage girls, didn’t wait till the very end to wave the white flag. In fact, at the time of its October 2000 closing, the company had not run out of the $22 million it raised. And on a more bizarre note, the end came only 46 days after a flashy San Francisco launch party. Though Kibu had started to attract traffic from its target demographic (incidentally one of the fastest-growing segments of Web users), company officials said they decided to shut down because “Kibu’s timing in financial markets could not have been worse.” Kibu was backed by several Silicon Valley bigwigs, and they sent a strong message about the financial prospects of other dot-coms by bailing on Kibu so soon.
GovWorks.com (1999-2000): Last but certainly not least, the story of GovWorks.com was good enough to become the documentary Startup.com, which chronicles its brief life. Envisioned as a Web site for citizens to do business with municipal government, GovWorks was started by two childhood friends in 1999. One was the flashy salesman, while the other had the technical know-how. At first, the future seemed bright as they suddenly found themselves worth millions of dollars each and rubbing elbows with the politically powerful. But you can guess what happened– everything that could go wrong soon did. Personalities and egos clashed during long work hours, one partner was ousted, technology was stolen, and they never got the software to work as it should have. A competitor eventually took over GovWorks in 2000.
So what drove the DotCom boom? What was the blood in the water that brought in the sharks and elicited the financial feeding frenzy?
It wasn’t a single source of blood that attracted the money-hungry investors and venture capitalists; it was a combination of things. The timing was right, the environment was right and an unknown and promising technology was in the jaws of the carnivores regardless of its taste.
We can look to the S-curve of both personal computers and the Internet for the timing of the feeding frenzy. The first consumer-based home personal computers were released in the late 1970’s with Apple’s Apple II, which was released in the spring of 1977. Throughout the following decade computers began to move into the home at an accelerating pace. By 1996 it was estimated that 40% of all households would have a personal computer in them. The Internet came to the home a little later, but once it arrived, it moved in at an even faster pace.[3]
The S-curve illustrates how new technologies evolved slowly at first, but then as barriers to entry, such as price, availability, and support, are reduced, the growth rate of evolution quickly increased. When a new technology moves into the mainstream marketplace and becomes accessible to the average person, the adoption of these technologies occurs at a rapid pace. It is the speed of adoption by the average individual that drives the market speculator to take notice and nudge the venture capitalist to open his wallet and fund what he feels is the next great idea. With a computer in every house, and low-coat access to communication technology, how could they not succeed?
The Dotcom’s were promising a new world driven by technology: a world where people didn’t step into a grocery store, they had all their goods and sundries delivered to their door. A world built on complex e-commerce applications, Flash driven animation and secure transaction processing. But they couldn’t deliver it — at least, not in the 1990s. Not all Dotcom’s failed because they had no profit strategy in their business plans, although this did happen to several. Many were built on solid business plans, with profit strategies, but they were counting on technologies that had not matured. The average consumer wasn’t willing to sit through an opening Flash animation that took 15 minutes to download over a slow modem. Most users were underwhelmed by the experience that had been promised to them.
Broadband connectivity, the delivery of information signals over multiple frequency channels or bins, was not readily available to the average consumer as it is today. Connectivity to the Internet and web sites was facilitated over the existing phone lines and modems. The speed of most modems and telephone lines maxed out at 600 bits per second. Today, most homes are equipped with high speed Internet access; cable modems support roughly speeds of 30 Mbps (mega bits per second) where DSL (digital subscriber line) services reach the 10 Mbps speed.
In addition to the poor performance of communication technologies and web-based application design beyond the available information conduits, user behaviors were unknown, and in many cases misjudged. The assumption that traditional business models, such as selling shoes or clothes, would translate successfully to the online world was also misjudged. The excitement and frenzy around the quickly evolving technologies, endless sources of venture capital funding and astronomical growth in paper wealth of inexperienced CEO’s blurred vision of the visionaries. Concepts such as profitability, customer satisfaction, usability, competition, return-on-investment, sales, and business planning were pushed aside, for the promise of fast cars, expensive offices and stock options.
The Web 1.0 promises were eventually realized as the communication technologies matured, but the burst of the dotcom bubble left a vast crater in the marketplace strewn with the collateral damage of bankrupt companies, lost fortunes and empty high-priced offices. Today the promises of Web 1.0 have been surpassed and the technology sector is looking toward what has been termed Web 2.0. The fundamental infrastructures of broadband access, wireless LANs, fiber optic networks and mobile devices have set the stage for the social networking and communication that defines Web 2.0. The Internet is not simply a means of providing information to a mass of users sitting at a desktop station, as was speculated by early Internet pundits. Today the Internet is defined as much by the user as by the supplier. The user has taken on a new role as contributor, producer and consumer.
[edit] Radio Web 1.0
History is doomed to repeat itself, and history shows that whenever a new media form is created, it is quickly capitalized on by industry, effectively killing its authenticity and democratic potential. cf. Bob McChesney, Schiller, etc.
The relationship between popular media and industry is a rocky one. Whenever a new type of media has become popular, industry has stepped in and used that medium to make money. Profits have come both through outright ownership of the new medium and placing advertising within said medium.
This pattern has recreated itself time and time again. Newspapers make a small portion of their revenue through subscriptions; most of it comes from advertising. The prevalence of newspaper ads is so overwhelming that the space remaining for journalism, the purpose of the paper, is now referred to as the “newshole.” It’s not uncommon for a score of pages to pass before readers get to a magazine’s table of contents. Radio stations advertise having fewer commercials than competitors to entice listeners. The commercial breaks are even driving people to pay for radio from satellite services. TiVo was created to both allow people to watch TV on their own schedule and to skip the commercials in recorded shows.
That’s just the advertising quotient. The massive media conglomerates also have a history of simply buying productive media outlets and folding them into their corporate structure. Clearchannel Communications, Time Warner, News Corp., Vivendi SA, are just some of the largest corporations that employ this tactic.
Then came the Internet. For a long time nobody was sure how to make money online. The first attempts produced IPO’s that (temporarily) made certain people a lot of money, then busted.
But that was the old Internet. Does Web 2.0 have a better chance against both history and industry?
Popular opinion states that the new web is a different beast since the dot-com bubble burst. Gone are the days where a Web site simply sold you a product. Now, sites offer users the tools to create their own content and communities. Despite this change, industry’s former ways are using their old tricks to creep into Web 2.0.
Take the examples of Myspace and Facebook. Both are Top 50 websites (6 and 21, respectively) visited.[4] Both have a similar goal: be an “online community that lets you meet your friends’ friends.”[5] But industry has reacted to each differently. Realizing the potential of Myspace, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. paid $580 million for Myspace in 2005.[6] Not wanting to be bought (it’s rumored to have turned down offers of at least $750 million[7]
Everyone has a right to make money; that’s one of the tenets of capitalism. But at what point does the struggle for wealth corrupt the goal of the application?
Both Myspace and Facebook are free to their members; they are completely supported by advertising revenues. Nothing, however, is completely free. Facebook has no qualms about selling their user’s profiles to advertisers for highly targeted marketing campaigns [need citation]. Myspace leverages its place as one of the most visited websites to charge exorbitant fees for ads [need citation]. The question becomes do people mind having their profiles used for corporate gain? Or is this a case where ignorance is bliss (users only notice that they aren’t being charged and don’t explore the matter beyond that)? Could this be construed as betrayal because the website is profiting off the personal profiles and hard work of its users?
This is a new area for both industry and users. It’s an ongoing situation between maximizing potential profits and user freedom.
[edit] References
↑ Brock, Gerald W. The Second Information Revolution., Cambridge, Mass.,Harvard University Press, 2003
↑ Cassidy, John, Dot.Con The Greatest Story Ever Sold., New York, NY., Harper Collins, 2002
↑ Dent, Harry S. The Roaring 2000’s: Building The Wealth and Lifestyle You Desire in Greatest Boom in History., New York, NY., Simon & Schuster, 1998.
↑ Meattle, J. (10/30/2007). Top-50 Websites – Ranked by Unique Visitors; Digg.com, Facebook, Flickr sky rocketing. Retrieved January, 28, 2008, from http://blog.compete.com/2007/10/30/top-50-websites-domains-digg-youtube-flickr-facebook/.
↑ Myspace.com. Myspace.com-About Us. Retrieved January, 28, 2008, from http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.aboutus.
↑ Butcher, A., Everett, T., Nolte, R. & Brewer, B. (7/18/2005). News Corporation to Acquire Intermix Media, Inc. Retrieved January, 28, 2008, from http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_251.html.
↑ Rosenbush, S. (3/28/2006). Facebook’s on the Block. Businessweek. Retrieved January, 28, 2008, from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2006/tc20060327_215976.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_internet.</ref, Facebook has turned its user profiles into cash by selling ads (called pages in Facebook-ese) and allowing members to join them as a group.<ref>Rosmarin, R. (11/29/07). Facebook Woos Advertisers. Forbes Online. Retrieved January, 28, 2008, from http://www.forbes.com/businesstech/2007/11/29/facebook-advertising-widgets-technology-internet-cx_rr_1129facebook.html?feed=rss_business_businesstech.</li></ol></ref>
Additional Resources
CNET of the top ten worst DotCom Start-up Failures: [1]
This essay is from a book being produced as a collaborative exercise and assignment from the class Communications, Media and Society in the Interactive Communications Masters program at Quinnipiac University.
Categorised in Virtual Worlds
Apr
24
Why it is best to look at things from many angles…
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A colleague sent me this article on the recent logo design for the Office of Government Commerce in England.
It is very funny, but illustrates a valueable point.
tjb
Categorised in Uncategorized
Apr
11
Michael Jordan In Flight - EA Sports
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Categorised in Video Games
Apr
11
Young Indiana Jones & the Instruments of Chaos - Part II
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A scathing review of this side-scroller game.
Categorised in Video Games
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Browse People Dan Saffer // Experience Design Director [View Page] Posts: [Don DeLillo on Interaction Design], [Favorite Album for Every Year You've Been Alive Meme], [UX Intensive: Minneapolis], [Review: Five Themes for Interaction Design], [Towards Some Rules for Online Identity Management], [Why did you go to [other conference] instead of Interaction08?], [Do You Want to Be My Boss?], [Topless in the Echo Chamber], [In Praise of a Water Bottle], [Sneak Preview of Interactive Gestures!], [4x4 Meme: More About Me], [Conferences I'll Be At, Spring 2008 Edition], [Firefox 3 to Fitts' Law: Suck It], [How to Lie with Design Research video], [A Meditation on Fate, Chance, and Luck at Year's End]
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Xavier Thoughts [View Page] Posts: [None of His Vices], [Evanston Capitulates], [Antique Parts], [Ilsa Update], [To Buy or Not to Buy], [More Rain], [Original Sistema on Gun Broker], [Fitz Special on Gun Broker], [No Bike Commute Today], [Old Newsprint], [Coaster Brake Rebuild/Repair], [Big Guns], [Ugly Gun Sunday], [Tiring Thoughts], [Failing Coaster Brake], [What's Wrong With This Picture?], [Clark 1911 on Gun Broker], [Cross-Dominance], [The .380 ACP], [Eight], [Cycle Commute Update], [Packin' for Protection], [Hoplophobes Voted Down in Mishawaka], [Know Your Bike], [The Laryngospasms]
A Nurse with a Gun
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
None of His Vices
On June 28, 2008, I made this Hellerbration post. Seems like not so very long ago. Only a month or so......... But time is relative, according to one's experiences in that time frame.Labels: Search and Rescue
Evanston Capitulates
Evanston Illinois has become the latest Chicago suburb to repeal it's unconstitutional handgun ban. Not surprisingly, it is the NRA's lawsuit against Evanston that brought about the change. Labels: Gun Control, Heller v. District of Columbia
Antique Parts
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Ilsa Update
This evening, I removed the staples from Ilsa's incision. She is finished with her antibiotics as well. It looks like her wound healing was a success. Labels: Pets
To Buy or Not to Buy
From an email:Xavier,Labels: Gun Tradin', Smith and Wesson Victory Models
More Rain
Labels: Bike Journal
Original Sistema on Gun Broker
Labels: Gun Auctions, Sistemas
Monday, August 11, 2008
Fitz Special on Gun Broker
"COLT CommandoLabels: Colt, Fitz Specials, Gun Auctions
No Bike Commute Today
Labels: Bike Journal
Old Newsprint
Labels: Cool Beans
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Coaster Brake Rebuild/Repair
I was up until three AM last night rebuilding the rear hub/coaster brake on the Raleigh PUB. The house is quieter, allowing me to think things through at that hour. Since the rear wheel was perfectly true, I did not want to remove the hub and then have to lace it up again. I decided to rebuild the hub inside the wheel.Labels: Bicycle Repair, Bike Journal
Big Guns
Labels: Blood Guns, Ugly Guns
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Tiring Thoughts
Eventually different tires will be mounted on my commuter bike. Presently it wears it's old mountain bike tires, and while serviceable, some street tires would have less rolling resistance and better braking. Labels: Bicycle Building
Failing Coaster Brake
The coaster brake on the Raleigh PUB is beginning to give me trouble after one year. Excessive slack and clattering. At first, I thought I was dealing with a loose chain, but after further troubleshooting, it definitely seems to be the hub. Labels: Bicycle Repair
What's Wrong With This Picture?
Labels: Colt
Clark 1911 on Gun Broker
Labels: Clark Guns
Friday, August 08, 2008
Cross-Dominance
Todd G takes on the issue of cross-dominance over at pistol-training.com.Labels: Shooting
The .380 ACP
"From a few feet away, she shot him in the head with the .380. At that point, he moved quickly, causing her second shot to miss. He then grabbed the gun away from her and went outside and called the police on his cell phone. When police and paramedics arrived, they found that the bullet had entered the skin on his head, and burrowed around a few inches without entering the skull. This left what the officer described as a “mole tunnel” in the skin. The shootee refused to be taken to the hospital, and was treated and released at the scene by the paramedics. At no time did he lose consciousness or the ability to fight back."Syd explains why I am not a fan of the .380. Every caliber, with the possible exception of the magnums, has anecdotal evidence of failure to penetrate the human skull. Some calibers though, have more failure stories than others. The .380 is one of those. Labels: CCW
Eight
Labels: Bike Journal
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Packin' for Protection
From the Florida Times-Union: In most classes, the teacher doesn't point a gun. But none of the almost 40 people in a bunker-like back room of the Jacksonville Expo Center at the Fairgrounds even raised an eyebrow when Charlie Berrane calmly aimed and sighted a revolver. The firearms instructor worked his way methodically through safety tips as he explained the correct way to hold the pistol and squeeze the trigger. "Do you know the story about the man who brought a knife to a gun fight?" Berrane said. "I want you to win your fights."Labels: CCW, Self Defense
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Hoplophobes Voted Down in Mishawaka
A weapons ban proposed in Mishawaka Indiana by Mishawaka Mayor Jeffrey L. Rea and City Attorney Cory Hamel has been voted down, 5 to 4. The ban would have prohibited guns, knives and pepper spray from the Mishawaka City Hall, the police station, the Battel Center, and Mishawaka Utilities main building. Labels: CCW, Gun Advocacy
Know Your Bike
Labels: Bicycling
The Laryngospasms
Labels: Musical Interludes, Nursing
Monday, August 04, 2008
Pawn Shop Circuit: Missed Punishment
As I walked into Neil's pawn shop this afternoon, I noticed that he still had a Glock for $419, but several of the other handguns that had been in his case were gone. I broke out my wallet to place some more money on my SW1911 and get ahead of the curve on picking it up. I put $340 on it. Next payment due in November. Labels: Pawn Shop Circuit
Steampunk Guns and the Nagant Revolver
I was cruising the web looking at some of the fantasy steampunk ray guns while searching for ugly guns. The coolest, in my opinion was the Victorious Mongoose 1902a - concealable ray pistol. It is, of course, pure fantasy. The Victorious Mongoose operates on the extremely sophisticated scientific principals pioneered in Dr. Grordbort's full size weapons; Aether Oscillation, Atomic Vibratulation, high pitch whining noises, all these techniques were used, and more. Labels: Mil-Surps, Steampunk
Xavier is a Registered Nurse who specialized in complex wound care. He has practiced for over twelve years in his community. He often provided nursing service in areas where law enforcement refused to enter without back-up. Xavier now works in surgery.
Xavier has been an avid shooter for over 30 years. He strongly supports the 2nd Amendment, opposes gun control of any sort, and carries a weapon 24 hours a day.
Xavier is known on various internet gun forums as XavierBreath. He is married with three children, and is moderated by an apathetic one eyed cat, a tyrannical Welsh Corgi, and a stalwart German Shepherd Dog. One day, he hopes to be deserving of them all.
Xavier can be emailed at
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NRA Blacklist The National Rifle Association has compiled a list of anti-gun individuals, authors, religious organizations, businesses, and celebrities. All have officially endorsed anti-gun positions. Choose wisely.
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© 2008 Xavier Thoughts Fark Yaraları = Scars of Différance [View Page] Posts: [A Call to Habermas], [France: à bout de souffle], [The Possessed Individual: Technology and the French Postmodern], [The Image in French Philosophy], [Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate], [Political Writings by Lyotard], [Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II], [France since 1945], [The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (1960-1983)], [Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser], [The Universal (in the Realm of the Sensible) by Olkowski], [The Practice of Everyday Life by de Certeau], [The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity], [Figures of the Thinkable by Castoriadis], [The Imaginary Institution of Society by Castoriadis], [Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity And The Persistence Of The Subject], [Biography and the Question of Literature in France], [Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews], [Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings], [Mythologies by Roland Barthes], [A Short History of French Literature], [We Carry On], [A Question that Came Across ...], [Jean-Luc Nancy - The Creation of the World or Globalization], [Lyotard - The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge]
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MULTITUDE OF BLOGS None of the PDFs are my own productions. I've collected them from web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, socialist bros, cross-x, gigapedia..) What I did was thematizing. This blog's project is to create an e-library for a Heideggerian philosophy and Bourdieuan sociology Φ market-created inequalities must be overthrown in order to close knowledge gap. this is an uprising, do ya punk?
Thursday, July 24, 2008
A Call to Habermas
Habermas vs Foucault - Is Modernity an Incomplete Project?
"I’ll never paint again. Because it’s of no use to anyone... I shall offer the Lord a vow of silence." Andrei Rublev
" The thinking of the truth of Being has its basic character in that silence which lets concealment expressly be concealment.thinking does not discuss one thing in order to be silent about what one in a strict manner cannot discuss; rather, its silence is eloquent, its discourse is silent; that is, it gives revealment back to concealment. silence is a making sielnt of concealment as the msytery which shelters everything. the "logic" of the the thinking of the truth of Being is making silent, "Sigetics" [Sigetik]. "silence is the prudent lawfullness of making silent. silence is the logic of philosophy in sofar as it asks the basic question from another beginning. It seeks the the truth of the essencing of Being [Seyn]-and this truth is the beckoning-suggestive concealment (the mystery) of the appropriative event [Ereignis]" (Beitrage; cf. also Nietszche 1, 471f). " Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger's path of thinking; mütercim: daniel magurshak & sigmund barber, NJ: Humanities Press Intl.
SLA PAM Division Blog [View Page] Posts: [Centennial stamps from SLA], [Podcasts from SLA 2008], [SLA Photos from the Photo Group], [Photos, photos and a video, too...], [Book Group 2008], [Astronomy Roundtable], [External Reviews of the SLA Conference], [my notes from the cs rt], [PAM Annual Business Meeting], [SLA Conference so far], [Pamwide Roundtable Plus], [PAMwide Roundtable], [Our Games], [Early Bird dinner, SLA 2008], [Leadership Development Institute], [Early Bird Dinner], [Looking for a Good Place to Eat?], [PAM Dancecard: PAM Division events at the 2008 SLA Annual Conference], [Receptions at SLA], [Twit, Twit, Twitter Away at SLA], [Outreach to othe societies], [SLA08 PAM Book Group], [Congrats to David Stern!], [SLA Leadership Summit], [Internet Librarian's coming up!]
SLA PAM Division Blog
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Centennial stamps from SLA
Sending out any paper mail? Use the SLA centennial celebration stamp. Thanks to Mary Ellen Bates for finding this.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Podcasts from SLA 2008
Here are the podcasts of a few sessions from the SLA 2008 Annual Conference. Speakers and facilitators volunteered to have their remarks recorded. While questions were not included in the recording, you will hear the answers to queries from the audience.Labels: podcasts, SLA08, SLA2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
SLA Photos from the Photo Group
1. Go to the site, www.thephotogroup.comLabels: photos
Friday, June 27, 2008
Photos, photos and a video, too...
Here are where a bunch of the photos are located.Labels: PAM, SLA, SLA2008
Book Group 2008
Thanks to all 22 members who participated in this year's Book Group discussion! The book chosen this year, "The Bookman's Wake" by John Dunning, veered off into the world of fiction, and was enjoyed by everyone. Dinner at Von's Grand City Cafe was also darned tasty! Labels: bookgroup, SLA08, SLA2008
Astronomy Roundtable
(Thanks once more to everyone who showed up bright and early Wednesday morning for the Astronomy Roundtable after partying the night before at the IT/PAM/LMD dance party!)Kerry Kroffe, from IOP Publishing, reviewed the publishing contract for the AAS journals and outlined what IOP had to do in a short amount of time to get the Astronomical Journal switched over and ready to go by January 2008. The Astrophysical Journal transition is currently in process, and many exciting things are planned for the future (VO tables, 30-day turnaround between acceptance and web publishing, and Object/Feature linking). Chris Biemesderfer, from the American Astronomical Society, picked up from where Kerry left off and shared some information about other things to come from AAS (data cubes, digital printing, and print on demand options, along with print bundling and regional delivery options). Karrie Berglund, representing the International Planetarium Society, shared a brief history of the IPS and discussed collaboration options between IPS and SLA/PAM. If you have any ideas or are interested in collaborating, please let her know. Donna Thompson gave us the latest information from the Astrophysics Data System (which I kept referring to as "service", eek!), including information about the CrossRef collaboration and the rescanning project for older journals. Labels: astrort, SLA08, SLA2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
External Reviews of the SLA Conference
Information Today blogged much of the conference. Here is their most recent blog entry. This posting provides some of the "numbers" from the conference.Here are the official numbers from SLA’s 2008 annual conference in Seattle: There were 5,011 total registrants, 845 first time attendees, 1,681 exhibitor registrants, 464 booths, 283 companies, and 50 new exhibitors. This compares with last year’s numbers of 5,047 total registrants, 801 first timers, 1,702 exhibitors, 445 booths, 275 companies, and 38 new exhibitors.Labels: SLA2008
About This Blog
The PAMblog is sponsored by the Special Libraries Association Physics - Astronomy - Mathematics Division. The PAMblog is NOT meant to replace the regular division communications, nor is it meant to replace the after-conference reports that appear in the PAM Bulletin. It is merely a limited-purpose supplement to that conference information. For more about our blogging policies look here.
For more on SLA conferences and events the SLA events index page or the SLA Conference Blog.
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A Grand Illusion [View Page] Posts: [Dmitri decides, finally], [Castro retires], [Magnum presents the other side of karaoke culture.], [David Defeats Goliath, Again!], [Bedding Lolita], [¿Mama, que será lo que tiene el negro?], [Fire of My Loins], [Sad? Good!], [No Time], [Philosophical throw-down!], [This Just In], [Sunday Reading], [Book of the Week], [Brooklyn's Books of Wow], [Oh, Bush--I hate you], [Me fail english, unpossible], [Something New], [Metal Health], [God Hates Fags], [Hello...], [Greatest video ever], [And now, a lesson from Bill Clinton], [One more thing], [Globalization and politics], []
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Previous Posts
Dmitri decides, finally
Castro retires
Magnum presents the other side of karaoke culture....
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Bedding Lolita
¿Mama, que será lo que tiene el negro?
Fire of My Loins
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Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Dmitri decides, finally
I have not been blogging lately as I have been too busy with school. But I felt this needed to be said to finish a line of blogging I stated previously.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Castro retires
Yeah, I know the title to this post sounds casual, but that’s exactly what happened today. After being at the helm one of the most destructive and insidious dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere for nearly 50 years, Castro bid adieu in a letter to the editor, and secured a transition of power–a victory of sorts in a continent and an era when rulers like Castro generally met less illustrious ends. There is strong evidence that the new Cuban junta will need to implement some changes, and gradually modernize the country’s government. The new de facto leader, Castro’s brother Raul, has almost conceded the need to reform large parts of the economy. Beyond that, it is practically inconceivable that the new junta–devoid of Castro’s impelling charisma–will be able to continue to rule so effectively without making concession.
Today’s announcement is another reminder of the abject policy failure that is the U.S. embargo against Cuba. As long as Castro ruled, the United States provided a convenient windmill for him to turn into monsters. The embargo never weakened Castro’s government, in fact, it became a rallying cry for misguided, self-destructive leftists in Cuba and the rest of Latin America, and it metastasized Castro’s hold on power.
(I can imagine that today some of the more fanatical proponents of the embargo on Cuba will try to frame today as a victory for their cause, but the assertion would only make sense if you’re willing to believe an economic embargo can cause an intestinal illness.)
Today is a bittersweet experience for Cubans–yeah, I know that’s a cliché. It marks the beginning of the end of 50 years of dictatorship. But it also means that the man who engineered so much suffering–in Cuba, Latin America, and even Africa and Asia–will never see trial.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Magnum presents the other side of karaoke culture.
I know so many people who should read [watch] this video from Slate.com:Labels: Dogs and cats living together, Mass hysteria
Friday, February 01, 2008
Bedding Lolita
Labels: Did they just really say that?, Politics, Race
Friday, January 18, 2008
Fire of My Loins
Labels: Buddhism, Philosophy, Time
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Philosophical throw-down!
I have been on vacation (and more), so it has been hard to concentrate. I did come across this, though, and thought it was pretty funny. Labels: fight, Miami, Philosophy
Sunday, December 16, 2007
This Just In
Labels: Grammar, weather/wether?
Sunday Reading
Labels: Philosophy, science
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Book of the Week
Labels: Books, Post-modernism, post-structuralism, Pynchon
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Brooklyn's Books of Wow
As I procrastinate in grading papers, I came across this highly aggressive review which states how this crop of BBoW books are trite and something yadda yadda...Labels: Books, Eggers, Reviews
Oh, Bush--I hate you
And and this is whyLabels: Bushism
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Me fail english, unpossible
As I sit up at night unable to sleep, I came across this article. No commentary necessary other than "duh." But I'll comment for the hell of it.Labels: Backslash, FIU, Magazines, MDC, UM
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Metal Health
As a child when I was first becoming interested in music, I was, of course, influenced by the high pitched vocals, grimy guitar, and pounding drums blaring out of the stereo speakers as my older brother played his heavy metal. Additionally, after about a year of not having some new channel called MTV, my family finally got cable, and I got to see images attached to the music. Labels: Cock rock, Heavy metal, obit., pop-metal
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
God Hates Fags
I'm sure you have heard about these people. They think that anybody that is not in their church are "fags" and are going to hell. I mean, I'm all for freedom of speech, but this is invasion of privacy. Of course, I'm sure Andy knows more about the law than I do. "This has come up before in abortion cases. You can't go outside a doctor's house and protest because you're targeting that person," Summers said. "This isn't 'I love the war, I hate the war.' You're targeting that family."
I'm going to have to agree with the latter. One thing is freedom of speech, but
The Supreme court, I'm sure, will put in its two cents soon enough on the issue. We'll just have to wait and see.
Labels: Books, Palahniuk
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Greatest video ever
El Rey le grita a Chávez Uploaded by frankib Labels: clinton, MoveOn
One more thing
We all love Springsteen, but it's important to note, as Howie Klein reminds us, that he had no business covering this song, even though he's from Jersey and doesn't want you to forget, because it was already perfect.© 2006 A Grand Illusion All rights reserved to the individual contributors of A Grand Illusion. Please contact each individual contributor for details. A Grand Illusion reserves the right to publish all e-mails addressed to the site or its contributors. A Grand Illusion encourages all fair use of copyrighted materials.
Purse Lip Square Jaw [View Page] Posts: [Dr. Purse Lip Square Jaw], [A never-ending story], [Announcement and invitation], [Networks of Design], [Mai 68 : une rvolution sociale], [Mended spiderwebs], [Biomaterials research watch: future silk], [Phenomenology, smart materials and ambient robotics], [Computing culture at Georgia Tech], [Affective Politics in Urban Computing and Locative Media], [Intensities and multitudes], [Social sciences and design: managing complexity and mediating expectations], [It's a mad, mad, mobile world], [Teasing only the ones we love], [How The University Works], [Techno-determinism, temporality and the problem of critique], [Underground aesthetics and ethics], [Quote of the day], [Reimagining the everyday], [Art calls], [If it can't be made at home, maybe it can be made in transit], [This winter: 374 cm and counting], [Representing the political agency of technological devices], ["Holding theorems in their hands": The Hyberbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project], ["A very hopeful, gentler perspective of the world..."]
Friday, July 11
Dr. Purse Lip Square Jaw
It's official!Labels: score
Thursday, June 19
A never-ending story
I've got some consulting work to finish, a bit of reading and writing to do, classes to start planning, and 87 email in my inbox that need answers.Labels: made of win
Saturday, May 31
Networks of Design
Networks of DesignLabels: anthropology, conferences, design, sociology
Thursday, May 1
Mai 68 : une rvolution sociale
Labels: histories, labour, politics
Wednesday, April 30
Mended spiderwebs
Artist Nina Katchadourian lists The Mended Spiderweb series as an uninvited collaboration with nature, and I don't know what is more impressive: that she tried to repair broken webs, or that the spiders rejected her mends and properly repaired them.Labels: art, collaboration, nature
Tuesday, April 29
Biomaterials research watch: future silk
Long-time readers may recall my fascination with the desire to mass produce spider silk--something notoriously difficult because spiders are highly territorial and cannibalistic and cannot be housed together in the numbers needed to make this possible. For those unfamiliar, spider silk is one of the holy grails of materials research because it has a tensile strength greater than steel, the extensibility of rubber, the water uptake capability of wool, and is biodegradable.Labels: biotechnology, material culture
Monday, April 28
Phenomenology, smart materials and ambient robotics
Jill Coffin was another Digital Media PhD student I met at GA Tech, and I had the pleasure of talking with her about phenomenology in art and design practice (pdf), as well as the opportunities and challenges of collaborative work.Labels: embodiment, technology
Computing culture at Georgia Tech
Back from a lush, if a bit too warm for my post-winter constitution, Atlanta, I'll cover my talk in a separate post--but first I want to talk about the amazing grad students I met. They appear to work in a much more driven and stream-lined university environment than mine, and while I have some reservations about this educational model, there's no doubt that good people are getting some good work done there.Labels: computing, media, politics
Wednesday, April 23
Affective Politics in Urban Computing and Locative Media
The Responsive Objects, Surfaces and Spaces (ROSS) research group at Georgia Tech has very kindly invited me to give a lecture tomorrow, so this afternoon I'm off to Atlanta. Copyright Anne Galloway 2001-2008. This web site's content is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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"Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?" Will Price [View Page] Posts: [Widgetbox at SF New Tech], [Alacatraz 100 - One to Add to the Bucket List], [Summer Read - Rob Smith's Child 44], [Change Will Come], [SWAT Summit], [Mongol, A Movie To See], [Rich Price - Turn Off My Heart Video], [Facebook Turning Off Spammy Apps], [Widgetbox is Hiring], [Custom Galleries from Widgetbox], [Team Chemistry, Stress, and Success], [Shantaram], [ThinkTomorrow], [List of Service Providers for Start-ups], [Lost My Voice], [How Widgets and Widgetbox Drive Incremental Traffic], [blogger badge - get one today], [Moving from Humwin to Widgetbox], [Why Blog....and Widgets], [Magic Number for SaaS Companies], [Eat Your Own Dogfood], [Embracing Uncertainty], [VKernel and Hummer Winblad Join forces on Virtualization Infrastructure], [OnMedia NYC], [HWVP Portfolio Job Site]
Will Price
A personal blog sharing ideas and observations on the vc industry, technology, and life.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Widgetbox at SF New Tech
Tonight, SF New Tech is hosting a "Widgets up the Wazoo" event. Gigya, Musestorm, iWidgets, Zembly, and Widgetbox are presenting and all will be demoing.Labels: sf new tech, widgetbox, widgets up the wazoo
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Alacatraz 100 - One to Add to the Bucket List
Today, I swam the Alcatraz 100; the icnomic swimming race starts at Alcatraz Island and ends 1.5 miles later in SF's Acquatic Park.Labels: alcatraz 100, swimming sf bay
Friday, July 25, 2008
Summer Read - Rob Smith's Child 44
Great murder mystery, 1950s Soviet Union, the next Ridley Scott project....Child 44.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Change Will Come
Monday, July 21, 2008
SWAT Summit
Last week's SWAT Summit in SF brought together leading players in the social media, brand, and agency worlds. Widgetbox participated on the Social Advertising Case Studies Panel.Labels: cpi, swat, value of widgets, widgetbox
Mongol, A Movie To See
In July 2005, I read and reviewed on this blog Jack Weatherford's wonderful book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
Labels: genghis kan, mongol, sergei bodrov
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Rich Price - Turn Off My Heart Video
My brother Rich's song Turn Off My Heart premired on MTV's Real World show last week. Since then, he is up to the #4 unsigned artist on MySpace for the Folk Rock segment.Labels: rich price music
Facebook Turning Off Spammy Apps
Guest Post by Tracy Pizzo, my colleague at Widgetbox:Labels: http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
Widgetbox is Hiring
Widgetbox is actively hiring senior JAVA and DMBS engineers. The spec follows. If anyone is interested in joining us/me at Widgetbox, please reach out and let me know - will.price at widgetbox.comLabels: hiring, widgetbox
Custom Galleries from Widgetbox
Today, Mashable covered the launch of Widgetbox's Custom Gallery Product. Labels: custom gallery, widgetbox
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Team Chemistry, Stress, and Success
I recently read an interesting article on what makes a great start-up. The author, a Google alum, noted three important characteristics:team chemistry rapid iterations clear end-user focus deflate - withdraw, become resentfully compliant, are negative inflate- yell, raise our voice, lash out, seek to dominate
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The Importance of...: [View Page] Posts: [Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 23], [Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 22], [Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 21], [Kitchen Academy - The Hollywood Cookbook and Guest Chef Michael Montilla - March 18th], [Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 20], [Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 19], [Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 18], [Salsa Verde], [Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 17], [Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 16], [Kitchen Academy - Hosting Explore-A-Story - March 12th], [Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 15], [Mango Chutney], [Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 14], [Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 13]
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Balkinization
Posted by Ernest Miller
As I mentioned before (Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 22
Of course, to make fish and chips, you first need a fish. Ours was lingcod. Another ugly fish that was fairly easy to fillet (though there is a trick or two to trimming the edible parts of the fillet). It certainly makes wonderfully shaped portions for fish and chips (not to mention it is quite tasty). Luckily, I got an entire fish to myself, as my first batch of beer-battered deep fried fish had a serious problem.
When I put the battered fish into the deep fryer they immediately sank to the bottom and then stuck to the fry basket. When I tried to free them, the batter tore off and they were in no shape to present. Ooops. Back to the fish and trimming the other fillet ... also had to use the 1/2 bottle of beer I had left to make more batter (damn). The trick here is to lower the fish into the frying oil slowly so that the batter starts to crisp up and provide some buoyancy before you let the fish go entirely to finish frying.
Well, that's it for this day's cooking. I was just happy to move on to the rest of my production for day 24.
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Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 22
Posted by Ernest Miller
Well, I actually missed this day and the next due to a previous engagement. However, that doesn't mean I missed the cooking experience. If you make plans ahead of time, you can make up classes in consultation with your chef instructor. Otherwise, you'll get a zero, which can be a major hit on your grade.
To make up this class and the next I had to come in an hour earlier (5am) and get cooking right away. I was really rushed and the focus was on the main dishes, not the side dishes (some of which I simply didn't make). I was given a station all to myself so that I would have enough burners and space to deal with the multiple days of cooking I had to accomplish in a single day.
Day 22 is devoted to Southern Cusine, particularly Creole and Cajun.
My first dish was Crayfish Etouffee on rice. The base for the dish is a very dark roux and trinity (Cajun and Creole mirepoix, aka onion, celery and bell pepper). Problem: there isn't too big a step between a brown roux and a burnt roux. Found that out with my first batch. Darker, darker, burnt. Like I needed to start a dish over again on such a busy day. Oh well.
Although I was able to get a good flavor balance, I had difficulty matching the flavors with the right consistency. Still, it tasted good and the rice came out quite well. I also got busted for garnishing with a very nice looking crayfish head. You aren't supposed to garnish with something that is inedible. Hey, I thought you could suck the heads, but apparently only if you are eating them shell on and not part of a dish.
My second dish was Southern-Fried Catfish. They're ugly and not easy to get ahold of for cleaning and fabrication. I highly recommend a nice cut-resistant glove. Protects your hand, gives you a better grip on the fish. You'll have to wash the glove immediately after, but that is a small price to pay. Nothing particularly difficult about this dish, it's just a straight-up seasoned flour and pan-fry sort of thing. Fresh and straight out of the frying pan, it's pretty tasty.
Well, that was it for this day. Unfortunately, I didn't get the chance to make shrimp gumbo.
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April 20, 2006
Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 21
Posted by Ernest Miller
Today we returned to the world of Asian appetizers. After a day of Chinese dim sum nearly two weeks ago (Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 13
I'm a fan of miso soup, but I've only made it from an instant paste (just add hot water) in the past. It was a quite nice experience to make it completely from scratch.
The first step was to make the famous and basic Japanese stock, Dashi. Dashi is made with dried bonito flakes - katsuobushi - and seaweed - kombu. One simply brings the kombu to a simmer (do not boil it, or else it will turn slimy) at which point the katsuobushi is added and allowed to steep before straining. Dashi is also used as the basis for the tempura dipping sauce, tentsuyu. I like dashi and plan on experimenting with it some more, using it in place of Western stocks. For example, I think it would be excellent in a seafood risotto.
Making the miso soup was rather simple, after the dashi had been produced. We has a choice of misos to use. There are dozens of different types, but we chose between two of the most common, white miso (shiro miso) and red miso (aka miso). I went with aka miso for the heartier flavor, since our only garnishes were wakame, tofu and green onion.
There isn't much one can do to make a unique presentation of miso soup, so I served my table style, bringing the garnishes in a bowl and serving the soup in front of the chef instructor.
The miso soup was the easy dish. The other dishes required a significant amount of prep, but the main issue was that they were all deep fried. There were a few issues with this. First, there is a dearth of deep fryers at school. Lines formed. Even with the addition of some stove top deep frying stations, it was impossible for everyone to get frying when it was most convenient for them. You had to fry when you had the opportunity (hope you didn't have anything else on the stove at the same time). Second, though you're in a rush, you have to watch the fry temperature. When you fry a great deal of ingredients, the temperature of the oil is going to drop. If you don't allow the oil to come back to the proper temperature before adding more things to the fryer, the ingredients will absorb too much oil and be greasy.
Third, fry and present. Deep fryed foods have a short shelf life. They're nice and crisp right out of the fryer, but a few minutes later they can turn into a soggy, limp mess. Once you did fry something, the rest of your plate had better be ready so that you could present it at once.
Tempura was particularly difficult. Many students tried to save time by making the batter ahead of time, but this results in a very doughy coating. The best thing is to make the batter at the last moment, preferably right by the fryer. Also, the sparkling water should be ice cold and still have its fizz (don't take it out of the bottle until you need it).
Thanks to having to drop stock in the morning, we pushed darned close to the deadline, but the end results were pretty tasty.
Miso Soup Garnishes (Tofu, Wakame, Green Onions), Before Addition of Soup
Tempura Plate
Spring Rolls with Plum Sauce
Lumpia with Chile Sauce
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March 20, 2006
Kitchen Academy - The Hollywood Cookbook and Guest Chef Michael Montilla - March 18th
Posted by Ernest Miller
Another Saturday, another day of culinary learning at Kitchen Academy and, a pretty long day at that, but it was definitely worth it.
Continuing a project that started last Saturday (unfortunately I had to miss the first Saturday), Kitchen Academy students prepared recipes so that they could be photographed for an upcoming celebrity charity cookbook: The Hollywood Cookbook
Our job was simple: prepare the dishes so that they could be photographed. I learned a lesson: camera-ready food and people-ready food are two different things. Although, ideally, each dish would be perfectly edible, our goal was good-looking, not necessary what we would want to serve. Seasoning? Unless it was going to change the look of the dish, why bother adding salt and pepper? Not really completely cooked? If it looks good, so what? Simmer for twenty minutes? Only if it is going to make a difference in the final look of the dish. Pasta overcooked? No biggie, if it still looks good.
There were a number of humorous incidents. For example, we needed to roast a pork shoulder, but the roast hadn't completely thawed. Ah well. Toss it in the oven at 500 degrees F. After fifteen minutes or so, we had a nicely browned roast. Looked great. When we took it out of the oven we pushed a thermometer into the meat. The dial went backwards from room temperature. Not something you expect to see when you stick a thermometer into a beautifully browned roast.
Another example: Arturo and I baked what would have been a perfect pecan pie. However, for stylistic purposes, we baked it in a picturesque deep dish ceramic pie pan. Looked great. Unfortunately, because the pie dish was so deep, the center of the pecan pie never set, it was still liquid. Photographed great, but not something I'd want to serve.
We Kitchen Academy students didn't do any of the plating. Basically, we prepared the dishes then set them out in mixing bowls, sheet pans, deli cups, etc., and let the food stylist do his magic. Some things, because of their nature, were prepped up to a point and then were boiled or baked on order so that they didn't sit around too long waiting for their turn in front of the camera. We also got called upon for some garnishes. I made Anne Hathaway's Mango and Lobster salad so was asked to thinly slice and fan some mango as a garnish.
Producing all these dishes was fairly complex from a logistical point of view. The ingredient lists were impressive since the recipes ran the gamut of cuisines. In order to make things manageable, we did the recipes in waves, a dozen or so at a time. A couple of students spent most of their time simply pulling the ingredients for each wave then putting them back in storage when we were done with them.
All-in-all, it was a good learning experience and pretty darn fun.
Also fun was assisting one of Hollywood's preeminent personal chefs, Michael Montilla.
In addition to the recipe book work, Kitchen Academy was also hosting a guest demo by Chef Montilla, who has done similar demos before (Kitchen Academy - Consumer Education and a Guest Chef Demo Kitchen Academy - Feb 18 - Guest Chef Demo by Michael Montilla
Because I was working on the recipe book, I didn't work with Chef Montilla for most of his prep. However, because the students assisting him had to leave just before his demo was to begin, I and my classmate Arturo assisted with the very final preps, the demo, and plating the final product.
As usual, Chef Montilla was very generous in sharing his experience. Today I would have to say his primary theme was simplicity: simple dishes prepared properly with the finest ingredients. It doesn't have to be complex to be great. The dish we prepared today was fairly simple: Beef Tenderloin Stuffed with Braised Leeks & Wild Mushrooms, Potato Gratin, Roasted Asparagus and a Red Wine Glaze.
The beef tenderloin was stuffed with the leeks and what was essentially a duxelles that was not finely chopped. We had just made a pork tenderloin stuffed with duxelles earlier in the week (Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 19
The gratin was essentially a Pommes Dauphinoise put together in a hotel pan for a large group of people. One of the chef-instructors who was assisting with the recipe book by supervising the students tried them and was quite impressed. I rather enjoyed them too, especially as Chef Montilla had not skimped on the garlic in either the gratin or roasted asparagus.
After the demo, it was back to working on the recipe book to finish a ten-hour day. A long day, but definitely worth it.
Pulling Ingredients for the Recipe Book
Food Staged to be Plated by the Food Stylist
Cookbook Organizers (l-r) Morgan Most and Jackie Zabel
Choosing Props for Food Styling
A Pot of Stew Nearly Ready for Photographing
Discussing How to Photograph Some Chocolate-Dipped Strawberries
Chef Michael Montilla Demos
Chef Montilla's Mise
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March 19, 2006
Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 20
Posted by Ernest Miller
After the stress of yesterday's production schedule (Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 19
Simple enough, no? Yes, but.
Today was also a time fire exercise. What this means is that we were given specific thirty-minute windows in which each dish had to be presented. The tea-smoked duck had to be presented between 7:30am and 8:00am. The pan roasted duck between 9:30am and 10:00am. During the first presentation window we were not allowed to prep our second dish.
Normally, we simply have a 10:00am deadline for all dishes, putting them out as soon as they are done. In some ways having specific presentation windows simplifies things (you don't have to decide which you'll present first), but can also complicate things as you have to stagger your prep. Frequently, for example, I would dice, chop, and/or mince all my onions for all my recipes at once, then move onto the next vegetable. However, due to time constraints, I had to finish all my prep for the tea-smoked duck first, and then get onto the pan-roasted duck. Not a big deal, these weren't particularly stressful plates, but still a good learning experience for organization.
Another good lesson is why we are training to be chefs, not simply recipe-makers. A lesson I forgot. The recipe for the tea-smoked duck breast calls for a Kabocha squash purée. Instead, we substituted acorn squash. Acorn squashes are generally smaller than kabocha squashes and our squashes were a bit on the small side in any case. What this means is that you have to adjust the recipe to take this into account. Don't use (as I did) the same amount of Chinese Five-Spice Powder for an acorn squash that you'd use for a kabocha squash.
"Why does your squash look and taste a bit like licorice?" "Um, that would be the star anise and fennel seed from an excessive amount of Chinese Five-Spice Powder."
Actually, the licorice flavor wasn't overpowering, but it was definitely there just barely in the background. As a fan of licorice, I sort of liked the effect, especially since the squash also had some nice sweetness from brown sugar and there was a good amount of ginger powder as a foreground note. Still, there was too much spice in the purée.
Recipes are like maps. Sometimes your directions just don't make sense due to construction or something. What we're supposed to be learning is how to read the map so that we can get where we're going despite unforseen roadblocks on the most direct route.
And, have I mentioned that gastriques are quite cool? I like that sweet/tart flavor combination. I'll have to play with them a bit, but I think that the addition of some dry mustard at the very end might enhance the flavor somewhat. A bit more and you should get sweet/tart/spicy, sort of like an Italian mostarda.
Tea-Smoked Duck Breast with Acorn Squash Purée, Gingered Tangerine Supremes, Tangerine Gastrique and Arugula
Pan-Roasted Breast of Duck with Spiced Butternut Squash Purée, Roasted Plums, Plum Gastrique and Duck Glace
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Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 19
Posted by Ernest Miller
What a difference a day makes. The last couple of days (Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 17, Day 18
Today we had to present three different recipes, five plates: Pasta e Fagioli with Crostino; Poêlé Game Hen with Matignon, White Beans and Herb Breadcrumb-Stuffed Artichoke Hearts; and, Roasted Pork Tenderloin with Mushroom, Duxelles, Celery Root Purée, Sautéed Mushrooms and Sauce Robert.
Each of these recipes was fairly involved and required a generous amount of prep. Consequently, the entire class was pretty stressed and many students just barely got their dishes in or didn't quite make it (such as serving their matignon without the stuffed artichoke hearts). Even when the students got everything finished, they might have forgotten one specific part of the presentation instructions, such as that the game hen breasts were to be airline-cut (first wing bone attached to the breast and frenched).
I was pretty happy that I actually finished everything with about 10 minutes to spare, though I actually had a slight advantage in not having a partner I think: I didn't have to share burner space or coordinate putting items in the oven. I did volunteer my time and one burner to making the court bouillon for the entire island (eight stations) so that everyone could poach their artichoke hearts.
Still, I wasn't as efficient as I could have been. For example, you needed cooked white beans for both the Pasta e Fagioli as well as the matignon. Cooking the beans takes some time. I could have cooked the beans for both at the same time and then separated them, but I didn't, which wasted both burner space and time. Although I was familiar with the plates, I've been thinking of them as discreet units, not as a whole.
You've got to be prepared and have a plan.
Also, if someone is doing something for several students, make sure you check it before using it or putting it on a plate. My court bouillon was fine, but some of the Sauce Roberts (which were done in groups of four) didn't come out so well. You may not have made it, but if you put it on a plate, it is yours.
Pasta e Fagioli with Crostino
Poêlé Game Hen with Matignon, White Beans and Herb Breadcrumb-Stuffed Artichoke Hearts
Roasted Pork Tenderloin with Mushroom, Duxelles, Celery Root Purée, Sautéed Mushrooms and Sauce Robert
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Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 18
Posted by Ernest Miller
Yesterday, we worked on the prep for our class buffet (Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 17
St. Louis Ribs Santa Maria Tri-Tip Barbecued Baked Beans Macaroni and Cheese Country Onion Rings Hush Puppies Carnitas Guacamole Refried Beans Salsa Verde [recipe Mexican Style Rice Since my dish, salsa verde [recipe
Everything seemed to go fairly smoothly, as far as I can tell. The class seemed much more organized and comfortable with everything compared to the buffet from Course I (Kitchen Academy - Course I - Day 19
Main Buffet Line Secondary Buffet Line Arturo Carving the Santa Maria Tri-Tip (l-r) Dani, Robin, Manuel, Joe (l-r) Natalie, Saul, Rose Serving the Men in Blue
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March 16, 2006
Salsa Verde
Posted by Ernest Miller
Courtesy of Kitchen Academy
Yield: approximately 10 cups
10 large fresh Anaheim Chiles 2 1/2 pounds tomatillos, husked, rinsed and diced 7 cups chicken stock 15 large green onions, chopped 5 large serrano chiles, stemmed, seeded 5 garlic cloves 1 1/4 cup fresh cilantro leaves 10 ounces fresh lime juice Procedure: Blacken the Anaheim chiles on all sides directly over a gas flame or in a salamander. Put them in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap and let stand ten minutes. Peel, seed and chop chiles. Combine tomatillos, stock, green onions, serrano chiles, and garlic in a saucepan; bring to a boil over medium high heat. Reduce heat and simmer until mixture has reduced to a sauce consistency. Transfer mixture to a food processor. Add the Anaheim chiles and cilantro and puree until smooth. Add lime juice and season the salsa with salt and pepper. Personal Notes: This is a good, basic salsa verde recipe and can be varied in any number of ways to achieve the results you want. First, a couple of specific notes. You don't need a food processor. An immersion blender actually works better. Simmer until tender, immersion blend into a puree and then reduce to a sauce consistency. Also, you most likely won't need all ten ounces of fresh lime juice. Taste the salsa as you add the juice. If you don't need it all, don't use it. Finally, when you season, remember that the salsa will be served cold or at room temperature. Seasoning should be done or rechecked once the salsa cools down.
This salsa has a bit of a bite, but not much. One obvious way to increase the kick is to not remove the membranes and seeds of the chiles. You can also use more and/or different chiles for heat and flavor. Want more roasted flavor? Roast the tomatillos and serranos before adding them. Like your salsa junky? Don't puree it. Dice to the size chunks you like. If you prefer it smoother, run it through a strainer.
This recipe was made for the PCA2 lunch/dinner buffet (Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 17
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Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 17
Posted by Ernest Miller
Three of the four courses at Kitchen Academy provide a buffet meal to friends, family, the school and select visitors once during the course, in the fourth week. Course I does a breakfast buffet on a Thursday (Kitchen Academy - Course I - Day 19
Wednesday is Course 2's buffet, a lunch/dinner menu:
St. Louis Ribs Santa Maria Tri-Tip Barbecued Baked Beans Macaroni and Cheese Country Onion Rings Hush Puppies Carnitas Guacamole Refried Beans Salsa Verde [recipe Mexican Style Rice I and Natalie Walker produced the Salsa Verde [recipe
This was easy. Production went quite rapidly. Of course, some dishes required more effort than others, but when students are finished, or have a break (as I did when the salsa was simmering), they helped another team. There sure was an awful lot of garlic to peel.
The biggest issue with producing such large quantity recipes is paying close attention to tastes and flavors and common sense. You can't simply multiply a small portion recipe and expect a large quantity to come out the same. For example, just because a recipe calls for a single clove doesn't mean you should add ten cloves when you make a batch ten times as big. Having one slightly larger than average onion won't generally throw off a recipe that calls for one onion, small dice. However ten larger than average onions will be much more likely throw off a larger batch.
Time is also a major factor that can vary non-linearly when multiplying recipes. A small roux takes a certain amount of time. A roux five times as big doesn't necessarily take five times as long. It'll take longer, but not exactly five times as long. Sometimes things take longer than the multiple, more often less time, but you have to recognize this and take it into account.
Sometimes, you might want to divide a multiplied recipe down. Rather than make one multiple of ten bechamel, you might want to make two multiples of five, or four multples of two and a half. Why? Sometimes you don't have a container big enough. Sometimes it is simply easier. Or, as in the case of bechamel, you'll be less likely to ruin it. And, even if you do ruin it, you've only blown a small portion, not the whole deal.
Where production was difficult was in fixing some of the problems that multiplying recipes might cause, for example, adding more avocados and tomatoes to cut down the overly strong onion flavor in the guacamole.
As the recipes were finished (at least as finished as they would be today), we stored and staged them for use the next day. We also put together a list of what needed to be accomplished the day of the buffet (i.e., fry hushpuppies in APCA, fry onion rings in PCA-2, grill tri-tip in APCA, etc.). The chef instructors also went over service and how we would organize that.
Still, there was plenty of time, which meant: deep cleaning the ovens. They come apart pretty easily. Of course, some steel wool would have come in handy.
Don't tell anyone, but we still got out of class a good twenty minutes early.
Danny Riskam Making Guacamole
Leon Miller and Marie Miller (no relation) Making Bechamel for the Macaroni and Cheese
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Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 16
Posted by Ernest Miller
Another Monday, another morning of dropping stock and clearing out the ice machine. At least I now know what a stock that has gone bad smells like. Some say gym socks, I say a good cheese.
Unfortunately, one of our chicken stocks had gone bad over the weekend. Not sure why, but most likely the stock wasn't kept at a simmer. We make plenty of stock, so it wouldn't be a problem. If anything, it made the job slightly easier.
On the other hand, the classrooms were unusually cold this morning, which meant that it took my hands longer than normal to warm up after numerous immersions in ice water. Consequently, my knife cuts at the beginning just seemed rather slow. Or perhaps it was simply that I always feel slow and disorganized after a quiz, dropping stock and figuring out what all the mise cups on my station contain and which recipe they're for. And, once again, we had recipes that needed to get into the oven for a significant period of time. This is always a source of a sense of urgency, since you need to finish prep as fast as possible so whatever needs to spend time in the oven, can.
Production today was: Whole Roasted Young Chicken with Giblet, Apple and Chestnut Stuffing Served with Roasted Root Vegetables, Pine Nuts, Arugula and fortified Pan Jus; and, Roasted Leg of Lamb (Butterflied) with Herbs and Garlic and Served with Salt-Roasted Fingerling Potatoes and Lamb Jus.
Roasting is generally faster than braising, but it still takes awhile to properly cook a large chunk of meat such as a leg of lamb. Even whole chickens take a good 40 minutes or more. Roasting is also less forgiving than braising, so you have to make sure to keep an eye on your meat. Depending on the cut and any oven/roasting pan peculiarities, your meat might brown extra fast (cover it with some foil to stop the browning), or simply cook faster than you think. The recipe might say 1.5 - 2 hours, but your roast might only take 1 hour.
Another thing about roasting is that not everything roasts at the same temperatures. For example, the chicken was started at a high temp to brown, then the temperature reduced to finish cooking. The lamb and potatoes were roasted at a temperature between these two extremes. And, not only did we roast the chicken, leg of lamb and potatoes, but the chestnuts had to be blanched, peeled and then roasted separately before going in the stuffing. The beets also had to be roasted separately, and the darn things took longer than an hour to be properly roasted.
So, you need to have a roasting plan. What will go in when and at what temperature. What will happen if you need to change temperatures in between. For some things it might not matter too much, just changing the amount of time it takes. If you're working with a partner, as I was, you need to communicate and stay on the same page, otherwise, not only will you have problems with the oven temperatures, but you'll likely run into space problems (not enough room in the oven).
Thus, it wasn't surprising that around 9:10am or so, Chef Merino told the class that if they didn't have their chicken in the oven, it was too late, don't bother, they wouldn't be able to turn in their plates (properly finished, anyway) by the 10am deadline. However, the students were given the opportunity to finish their chickens the next day; they just had to put all their prep on a sheet pan for storage. More than a few sheet trays went into storage. There probably should have been more, but some students pushed the deadline a bit, perhaps more than a bit in a couple of instances.
I was pretty happy that I was able to meet the deadline, though it was closer than I would have liked. Part of the problem at the very end was that the plating instructions for the Roasted Chicken weren't terribly clear. Even Chef Knight wasn't sure what they meant.
In any case, sometimes it seems that cooking is more about logistics and organization than anything else. Mise en Place, the most important thing you learn in culinary school, I think.
Roasted Leg of Lamb (Butterflied) with Herbs and Garlic and Served with Salt-Roasted Fingerling Potatoes and Lamb Jus
Whole Roasted Young Chicken with Giblet, Apple and Chestnut Stuffing Served with Roasted Root Vegetables, Pine Nuts, Arugula and fortified Pan Jus
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Kitchen Academy - Hosting Explore-A-Story - March 12th
Posted by Ernest Miller
On Sunday, March 12th, the Arclight Cinemas hosted Explore-A-Story: A Celebration of Books for the Wonder of Reading organization. It is basically a children's book festival with book readings by authors and celebrities, screening of popular movies based on children's books, activities and etc. Of course, there was food as well, frequently themed to children's books, such as donuts for (what else?) Arnie the Donut .
As Kitchen Academy is in the same complex as Arclight Cinemas, we provided a venue for serving the food provided by different sponsors.
We students did prepare some hors d'oeuvres for the VIP room: gravlax on toast with herbed cream cheese; savory pastries stuffed with ham and cheese; pate on toast; and, etc. Other than that, however, this was mostly a serving event. Students portioned and readied for buffet service food provided by other sponsors of the event, such as California Pizza Kitchen.
Although there wasn't much cooking done (I did learn a couple of tricks for the gravlax, though), learning proper service is an important skill for the well-rounded chef. Either you're going to be directly involved in organizing service, or you're going to be supporting service so it is good to know what it is like.
Since I've done so few events, each one is quite a learning experience for me. For example, I'm getting a much better idea of when you need to swap out hotel pans of food. You never want to run out, of course, but you don't want to leave too many servings in the hotel pan either. It is an experiential thing learning how quickly portions get used.
I also learned a bit more about keeping an eye on things like plates, napkins, utensils and condiments. It may sound trivial or easy, but if you're not used to it, it takes some attention to ensure that you don't run out of one of these things.
Other tricks you just pick up. For example, we didn't have enough fuel canisters to keep the warming pans, well, warm. So, we periodically filled them with boiling water. This means pouring out the old, cool water. This means some large buckets under the table at the station. Not a big thing, but this knowledge will come in handy should something similar happen in the future.
Anyway, I enjoyed serving children and their parents.
Explore-A-Story
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March 15, 2006
Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 15
Posted by Ernest Miller
Most of today was spent fabricating the biggest piece of meat that we'll work on in the course: Lamb.
First, of course, we needed the fabrication demo by Chef Guevara, which included the requisite Silence of the Lambs reference ("Brave Clarice. You will let me know when those lambs stop screaming, won't you?"). How strange is it that one of the movies most often cited in culinary school is about a serial killer? Or that those watching the demo had to note how much like a dog the lamb carcass looked?
In any case, we worked on fabricating our lambs in groups of four. I payed close attention as the scheduled final calls for fabricating one lamb per student, though I suspect that due to lack of space we'll actually work in groups of two. I don't think there is room in the classroom for everyone to fabricate their own lamb.
We had to prioritize our fabrication because our scheduled production was Braised Lamb Shank Provençal. Proper braising takes time, in this case two hours, so we had to fabricate the shanks first thing in order to get them in the oven and going before tackling the rest of the lamb.
Fabricating shanks is relatively quick. For the final we're going to have to fabricate, debone and butterfly a leg which will be produced the same day. That takes a bit longer, although we won't get a fabrication demo either.
Usually, one of the first things you do when braising is to sear and brown the meat in a bit of oil. This dish was no different. However, the recipe called for pouring out the oil after browning the meat and adding new oil before sweating some onion and garlic. This seemed somewhat strange to me (wouldn't you want to keep the oil for the flavor?) so I asked Chef Knight why. The answer is actually quite simple. The oil used for browning was extremely hot. If you put the onions and garlic immediately in the hot oil, you'd flash saute them, which is not what you want. You could wait until the oil cooled off, or you could simply pour out the hot oil and add new, cooler, oil so that you get a sweat, not a saute. Not everyone followed the recipe though, and I witnessed a quite crispy onion and garlic "sweat".
With the braising shanks in the oven, it was back to the lamb fabrication. Other than the sawing through bones thing, lamb fabrication is fairly easy and straight forward. I'm certainly no expert after just one lamb, but I feel confident I could get pretty good fairly quickly.
With four people working on the lamb, we finished with plenty of time. So, a little deep cleaning while we waited for the shanks to finish braising. Still, at the end, time was tight. Once the shanks were finished braising, you still had to reduce the braising liquid for use as a sauce. I braised my lamb shank as long as possible and then reduced the liquid using one of our largest saute pans, a 12-inch, so that the reduction would go as quickly as possible (more surface area, a faster reduction).
Actually, it worked too well. Chef Knight noted that my sauce should have been a bit looser. The flavor was very good and rich, but as the plate cooled, the sauce would start to become a bit too sticky from the high concentration of gelatin. Although tasty, some might not like the texture of the cooled sauce, and it simply isn't sauce consistency. One has to be careful not to overshoot a reduction, although it is usually easy to fix with the addition of a little water.
Personally, I thought the sauce clung nicely to the meat and, especially, the croutons used for garnish.
Whole Lamb for Fabrication
Braised Lamb Shank Provençal
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Spend less time traveling and more time selling with GoToMeeting. Hold instant Web conferences in just a few clicks. › Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 23› Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 22› Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 21› Kitchen Academy - The Hollywood Cookbook and Guest Chef Michael Montilla - March 18th› Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 20› Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 19› Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 18› Salsa Verde› Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 17› Kitchen Academy - Course II - Day 16
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Is Office Suite Markup worth the trouble? In his Extreme "first person" talk yesterday, Patrick Durusau asked some of the right questions about the recent explosive battles over standardizing XML generated by Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. I can't share his conviction, though, that getting through this firefight...… read more Simon St. Laurent
Can a URL contain an XPath? It seems that the answer is, yes, a URL can contain an XPath, providing it has been delimited in certain ways. Why would we want to do this? The trouble with using fragment identifiers or queries in URLs (? and #) is that the resources identified become, in effect, terminal leaves. You cannot merely add more paths underneath, as far as I can see, to drill down further.… read more Rick Jelliffe
Just how large was the XML revolution? In a talk that he'd contemplated naming "XML as the precipitating factor in the upcoming religious wars," Eduardo Gutentag examined how XML participated in, or even started, a revolution that most of the world didn't notice. Gutentag quoted Jon Bosak...… read more Simon St. Laurent
Montreal, August, Markup A small but high-powered core of markup specialists converges on Montreal every August. A decade ago there were XML conferences everywhere - everyone wanted to know everything they could about XML. Today, I think it's fair to say that most...… read more Simon St. Laurent
Google Open Sources Google XML Pages Given the mind-numbingly large number of pages that Google serves up every day, compiled efficiency is a key requirement for their web development team. However, as with many organizations, Google's team has also needed to split up their development efforts, so that web designers do not need to be programmers (and more importantly, do not need to endlessly spend their time validating and debugging low level code), and the core developers could spend time building components.… read more Kurt Cagle
Importing XML documents into Word 2007 and OpenOffice Writer through XSLTs Opening an XML file with an XSLT transformation is a simple, useful and valuable technique for integrating work processing systems into larger XML ecosystems… read more Rick Jelliffe
The Incomplete Web So I'm claiming here that the Web we have today is incomplete. How comes? Imagine you have a wonderful programming language which is object-oriented, nicely to read, produces beautiful documentation, etc. but does not support, say, I/O operations. Would you...… read more Michael Hausenblas
Drupal as Open Architecture I have a confession to make - after close to a decade covering XML, I have something of a new love ... and the name of that love is Drupal. Drupal's become one of those interesting hobbies that is rapidly becoming both a profession and a passion. It wasn't supposed to happen this way ... by rights, I should be deeply in the world of Ruby on Rails right now, or learning the latest deep programming secrets of Python, but somewhere along the line I realized one of those ugly little fundamental truths that good programmers should never actually learn - that at some point, recreating the wheel yet again begins to lose its luster, and, indeed, become rather ... well ... dull.… read more Kurt Cagle
The challenge of validating XML-in-ZIP file in place: how to do it with Schematron Thoughts on Schematron headers for processing ODF and OOXML, with a C# URL Resolver that handles ZIP files like some Java resolvers. The new XML-in-ZIP documents present a new challenge: constraints that formerly would have been kept in a single document are now split into multiple documents. When the basic information is kept in a single XML file, validation is reasonably straightforward.The current range of schema tools support these kinds of intra-document invariants quite well. But no document is an island, so Schematron also supports a range of intra-document constraints, but it may be time to enhance it to support the XML-in-ZIP issues better.… read more Rick Jelliffe
Efficient XML Interchange Evaluation: a little fragrant? When you read a column that says that XML+GZIP "prevents processing efficiency" you know someone has given the bull a laxative.… read more Rick Jelliffe
New release of ISO Schematron validator code I have put a new version of the ISO Schematron validator up at Schematron.com.… read more Rick Jelliffe
New draft of ISO character entities from W3C I am pleased to see that the W3C MathML WG has produced a new draft XML Entity definitions for Characters. These are the latest and greatest mappings from the characters to Unicode.… read more Rick Jelliffe
Openness: the survivalist's ideal becomes the authoritarian's buzzword An essential issue for making sure the good survivalist benefits of FOSS are not swamped by the corporate agenda abetted by authoritarians, is that FOSS (and open standards intended to allow FOSS) has to be architected for hackability. People are used to thinking that a technical standard is bad when it disenfranchises normal geeks (in favour of an elite or minority) rather than good because it enfranchises non-geeks.… read more Rick Jelliffe
How Comet Brings Instant Messaging to meebo The ability to create an "instant" communications experience through the Web is the strength of the Comet recipe. The use of long-polling via the XMLHttpRequest is a critical technology to meebo. It enabled meebo to implement low-latency bi-directional communication on any modern computer that can access the Web, without the need to download software.… read more Howard Wen
XRX: Performing Updates This is part 3 of a series in which I’m trying to implement a RESTful social bookmarking web service using the XRX (XForms, REST, XQuery) architecture. I’ve covered setting up queries in eXist and using Orbeon to expose those queries with nice URLs in the previous parts. This time I’m going to look at how to handle PUT and POST to make a read/write web service.… read more Jeni Tennison
OSCON for FREE! I am offering a novel idea about Open Source. Ric Johnson
Grouping in XQuery One of the really convenient features introduced in XSLT 2.0 is Grouping. It is a typical second-generation change in a programming language: Not essential for the language itself (grouping can be done by hand using techniques such as the Muenchian… read more Erik Wilde
XML makes you stoopid! Everyone is missing the forest for the trees on Google Protcol Buffers not using XML. Ric Johnson
Google hates XML Goolge does not know how to use XML - in fact it seems the HATE it. Ric Johnson
Why M. David Peterson is WRONG The truth in blogging: follow the money to know where your favorite posting really are saying. Ric Johnson
Microsoft credible as blushing debutante at the standards ball? Effective participation in standards bodies involves quite specific commitment and development of expertise, it is not a generic capability that can be instantly redeployed, Rumsfield-style, to trouble spots. For example, while knowledge of OASIS procedures may help you understand some… read more Rick Jelliffe
Using SwiXML and Substance 5 SwiXML is Wolf Paulus' XML User Interface languge (XUI or XUL) which uses the regularity of the Java Swing GUI libraries to allow very lightweight implementation: XML elements are used for JComponents, XML attributes are used for properties (e.g. <frame… read more Rick Jelliffe
Why Jeff Atwood Is Right Firstly, I, like many of you, am glad to see that Dare Obasanjo's indefinite hiatus from the blogosphere was short lived. Secondly, while I most certainly agree with the premise of his recent "In Defense of XML" post -- which… read more M. David Peterson
CherryPy 3.1 Released CherryPy 3.1 is out and there are some exciting new features. The first exciting piece is the Web Site Process Bus. Robert Brewer had come up with an idea to create a generic server management API to help make management… read more Eric Larson
10% of top Google product features are broken every week. Result of Google culture - Roll out cool features, not focus on quality? My saga on problems with GMail continue. Despite of the -ve feedback ("GMail is working fine", "GMail is awesome', "Not sure why you are complaining GMail?" etc) to my posts, I continue to see the problems with GMail. I am… read more Hari K. Gottipati
RDF Parsing in XSLT During the recent discussion of the OAI-ORE drafts (which use RDF), the claim was made that RDF is serialized in RDF/XML and thus could be considered an XML representation of the underlying data model. My response to that was that… read more Erik Wilde
Freedom in Web Applications It is interesting to see the progression of free software along side the proliferation of the web. When I first started programming, I got involved with a web CMS I used in my contract work. I would write a new… read more Eric Larson
Associating Resources with Namespaces The W3C just published a new TAG Finding called Associating Resources with Namespaces. Here's the abstract: This Finding addresses the question of how ancillary information (schemas, stylesheets, documentation, etc.) can be associated with a namespace. I don't quite understand why… read more Erik Wilde
Permanent URLs for things in the real world At the Semantic Technologies conference in San Jose I attended an interesting presentation entitled “persistent identifiers for the real web”. XML often uses URLs for identifying schema namespaces, and I suppose could be credited for influencing RDF’s practice of using… read more Taylor Cowan
Castoff hints? Rethinking interoperability and fidelity First some jargon (from the Glossary of Typesetting Terms or Harrod's Librarians' Glossary full props to Google.) Castoff: The calculation the number of typeset pages a manuscript will make, based on a character count. Proof: An impression made from type… read more Rick Jelliffe
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August 12, 2008
Obama’s friends
Filed under: Politics, Terrorism, Islamists — Jerry @ 12:09 pm
DNC Invites Radical Islamist to Convention ‘Interfaith Service’
(from Little Green Footballs)
One of the participants at an “interfaith service” at the upcoming Democratic Convention is Ingrid Mattson—a deceptive shill for the Islamic Society of North America, one of the groups listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas funding trial: Radical Islamist to Appear at Democrat Convention ‘Interfaith Service’ .
Hamas co-conspirators at an “interfaith service.” Welcome to the modern Democratic Party.
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What next?
Filed under: Foreign Policy, Freedom, Tyranny, Military — Jerry @ 11:52 am
How the West Can Stand Up to Russia
By GARY SCHMITT and MAURO DE LORENZOAugust 12, 2008; Page A21
Given the cutthroat politics Moscow has practiced at home and abroad in recent years — with only the softest protests from the U.S. and its allies — no one should be surprised by Russia’s decision to conquer the two breakaway regions of Georgia. Nevertheless, it should once and for all disabuse policy makers in Washington and Brussels of hopes that Russia intends to become part of the post-Cold War condominium of democratic peace in Europe. The point of the Kremlin’s invasion of Georgia, which now threatens the capital city of Tbilisi, is to demonstrate to the world how impotent that security order has become.
For Moscow, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s mistake in finally taking the bait of Russian provocations and ordering his troops in South Ossetia last week was the opening they sought — and for which they had been planning for some time.
David Gothard
South Ossetia is not, as some have suggested, tit-for-tat payback for American and European recognition, over Russian objections, of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia. Russia has been “at war” with democratic Georgia for some time. Driven to distraction by Mr. Saakashvili’s assertiveness and Georgia’s desire to join NATO, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin first tried to bring the country to its knees through economic warfare beginning in 2005. He cut off access to Russian markets, expelled Georgians from Russia, quadrupled the price of Russian energy to Georgia, and severed transport links. (more…)
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Add them to the list of Obama supporters
Filed under: Politics, Dissecting Leftism — Jerry @ 11:42 am
Obama Will ‘End 30 Years of Ultra-Right Rule,’ Communist Paper Says
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The Bear bites
Filed under: Foreign Policy, Dissecting Leftism, Freedom, Tyranny — Jerry @ 11:38 am
Moscow’s Sinister Brilliance
Lost amid all the controversies surrounding the Georgian tragedy is the sheer diabolic brilliance of the long-planned Russia invasion. Let us count the ways in which it is a win/win situation for Russia.
The Home Front
There will be no Russian demonstrations about an “illegal war,” much less nonsense about “blood for oil,” but instead rejoicing at the payback of an uppity former province that felt its Western credentials somehow trumped Russian tanks. How ironic that the Western heartthrob, the old Marxist Mikhail Gorbachev, is now both lamenting Western encouragement of Georgian “aggression,” while simultaneously gloating over the return of Russian military daring. (more…)
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Compare
Filed under: Politics, Brutal Rant — Jerry @ 11:00 am
I was thinking about the Russian invasion of Georgia yesterday and the images of Putin and Medvedev can to me, stern, focued and fierce. At that moment I said and who are these men looking at on our side? Excluding the President and Senator McCain, we have Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the rest of the America hating left. All I could think about after that was how screwed we were.
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The ACLU: the good is always held hostage to the perfect.
Filed under: Dissecting Leftism, Crime, Rule of Law — Jerry @ 10:54 am
Ark. city neighborhood under 24-hour curfew
Associated Press - August 10, 2008 8:34 PM ET
HELENA-WEST HELENA, Ark. (AP) - Helena-West Helena Mayor James Valley says he ordered a round-the-clock curfew and heavy police patrol in a ten-block section of town because the neighborhood was “under siege with repeated gunfire, loitering, drug dealing and other general mayhem.”
Valley ordered the emergency curfew Thursday, effective immediately. It was still in place today. He said it would remain in place as long as the problems persist or until the city council can come up with a long-term plan at its August 19th meeting.
Thursday night, 18 to 20 police officers carrying M-16 rifles, shotguns and night-vision scopes patrolled the “curfew zone.” They arrested about eight people and confiscated drugs and loaded weapons.
Under Valley’s order, officers do not tolerate loitering or “hanging out.” Officers can stop and investigate all foot traffic, bicycle, horseback, mo-ped, motorcycle, riding mower, golf cart or other means of transportation.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas says the curfew is “blatantly unconstitutional” and has demanded that Valley lift the order immediately.
(my emphasis)
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Offshore Drilling
Filed under: Economics, Environment — John @ 10:22 am
An editorial in the Washington Post takes apart the arguments of the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, an anti-drilling advocate:
THE NATURAL Resources Defense Council Action Fund has taken out full-page ads in this newspaper and others to decry offshore drilling for oil as “George W. Bush’s Gasoline Price Elixir” that is “100% Snake Oil.” The environmental group calls on supporters “to stop the giveaway of our coasts.” It is urging visitors to its Web site to send a pre-written letter to their members of Congress that says, “I am not buying the lie . . . that sacrificing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and America’s coastal waters to oil drilling would make a real difference in gas prices — either today or twenty years from today!” And the missive adds, “With just three percent of the world’s oil reserves, our nation simply doesn’t have enough oil to impact the global market or drill our way to lower prices at the pump.”
The NRDC’s arguments above neatly encapsulate the position taken by environmentalists and other opponents of offshore drilling. And they include a couple of good points. Contrary to the baldly political suggestions regarding lower gasoline prices by President Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), drilling would make no impact on today’s pain at the pump because it would be years before any oil flowed from the Outer Continental Shelf. We agree that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with its varied and sensitive ecosystems, should be preserved. In the quest for new sources of energy, there are trade-offs. That pristine area must remain off-limits. But there are three “truths” masquerading as fact among drilling opponents that need to be challenged:
· Drilling is pointless because the United States has only 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves. This is a misleading because it refers only to known oil reserves. According to the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS), while there are an estimated 18 billion barrels of oil in the off-limits portions of the OCS, those estimates were made using old data from now-outdated seismic equipment. In the case of the Atlantic Ocean, the data were collected before Congress imposed a moratorium on offshore drilling in 1981. In 1987, the MMS estimated that there were 9 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. By 2006, after major advances in seismic technology and deepwater drilling techniques, the MMS resource estimate for that area had ballooned to 45 billion barrels. In short, there could be much more oil under the sea than previously known. The demand for energy is going up, not down. And for a long time, even as alternative sources of energy are developed, more oil will be needed.
· The oil companies aren’t using the leases they already have. According to the MMS, there were 7,457 active leases as of June 8. Of those, only 1,877 were classified as “producing.” As we pointed out in a previous editorial, the five leases that have made up the Shell Perdido project off Galveston since 1996 are not classified as producing. Only when it starts pumping the equivalent of an estimated 130,000 barrels of oil a day at the end of the decade will it be deemed “active.” Since 1996, Shell has paid rent on the leases; filed and had approved numerous reports with the MMS, including an environmentally sensitive resource development plan and an oil spill recovery plan that is subject to unannounced practice runs by the MMS; drilled several wells to explore the area at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars; and started constructing the necessary infrastructure to bring the oil to market. The notion that oil companies are just sitting on oil leases is a myth. With oil prices still above $100 a barrel, that charge never made sense.
· Drilling is environmentally dangerous. Opposition to offshore drilling goes back to 1969, when 80,000 barrels of oil from an offshore oil well blowout washed up on the beaches of Santa Barbara. In 1971, the Interior Department instituted a host of reporting requirements (such as the resource development and oil spill recovery plans mentioned above) and stringent safety measures. Chief among them is a requirement for each well to have an automatic shut-off valve beneath the ocean floor that can also be operated manually. According to the MMS, between 1993 and 2007, there were 651 spills of all sizes at OCS facilities (in federal waters three miles or more offshore) that released 47,800 barrels of oil. With 7.5 billion barrels of oil produced in that time, that equates to 1 barrel of oil spilled per 156,900 barrels produced. That’s not to minimize the danger. But no form of energy is perfect or without trade-offs. Besides, if it is acceptable to drill in the Caspian Sea and in developing countries such as Nigeria where environmental concerns are equally important, it’s hard to explain why the United States should rule out drilling off its own coasts.
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August 11, 2008
Coming here soon
Filed under: Dissecting Leftism, Odds and Ends, Government Incompetence, medicine — Jerry @ 11:29 am
One in four NHS patients denied latest cancer drugs
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Iraq
Filed under: Iraq, Odds and Ends — Jerry @ 11:10 am
Iraq’s Budget Surplus Scandal
Why do we have such a hard time hearing good news from Baghdad?
By Christopher Hitchens Updated Monday, Aug. 11, 2008, at 6:53 AM ET
Largely attributable to the bonanza in oil prices, to new discoveries of oil since the eviction of Saddam Hussein, and to the increasing success of Iraqi exports via the pipelines to Turkey, this surplus could amount to as much as $79 billion by the end of this year. A good chunk of that money is sitting safely in a bank in New York. I would call this good news by any standard, though of course I understand the annoyance of Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and others involved in the auditing of Iraq, who complain that all the unspent wealth is a bit much, given the heavy outlay from the U.S. treasury for the rebuilding of Mesopotamia. (more…)
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Any wonder why the Eastern European countries want a US missle defense system?
Filed under: Odds and Ends, Freedom, Tyranny, Euroland — Jerry @ 11:00 am
History Returns to the Caucasus By Matthew Omolesky Published 8/11/2008 12:08:22 AM In his 1953 collection of political essays, The Captive Mind, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz described a visit by a Soviet journalist to Silesia in the aftermath of World War II. Mistaken for an Englishman, the journalist “was embraced on the street by a man crying: ‘The English have come.’” The apparatchik wryly responded: “That’s just how it was in the Ukraine in 1919.” According to Milosz,
This recurrence of sterile hopes amused [the journalist] and he was flattered to be the representative of a country ruled according to infallible predictions; for nation after nation had indeed become part of its empire, according to schedule. I am not sure that there wasn’t in his smile something of the compassionate superiority that a housewife feels for a mouse caught in her trap.
There is a Russian word for this sort of attitude: naglost’. A blend of condescension, arrogance, and brazenness, naglost’ has always been associated with political power in Russia, and lately has been a defining characteristic of its revanchist foreign policy with respect to the democratic states of the post-Soviet “near abroad.” The gas shut-offs in Ukraine, the bronze soldier mayhem in Estonia, and the combative rhetoric from the Kremlin concerning NATO Central European missile defense initiatives were relatively irenic, however, when compared with the unfolding crisis in the Georgian region of South Ossetia. As the young democracy of Georgia grapples with its gigantic adversary, with the world looking on ineffectually, we can see Robert Kagan’s notion of an “end of dreams” and a “return of history” in action in the volatile region of the Caucasus. (more…)
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Playtest [View Page] Posts: [Unexpected], [Good thing I checked then], [Constant Variation], [Waiting…], [Meetings and Squids], [Mobile Games Workshop], [Credit crunch?], [Thanks Alex!!], [A trail gone cold], [Damn iPhone!]
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Unexpected
Posted by peterbayliss on August 13, 2008
I’m not so sure how it happened, but while writing my thesis today I somehow ended up arguing that primarily the prevailing visualist approach to understanding the experience of gameplay is in a sense an embodied account, in the wider sense that it pertains to how we experience our lifeworld, i.e. that we primarily think about our interaction with videogames as being about what’s on-screen. Not really sure if it will still make sense to me tomorrow though, not that it does particularly now really. Freaked myself out a bit actually.
Also unexpected, but pleasantly so, was the discovery that my DiGRA 2007 paper Notes Towards a Sense of Embodied Gameplay was used as an optional reading for a MSc (Media Technology and Games) course on Game Culture at IT University of Copenhagen taught by T.L. Taylor. Not that I’m bragging mind, it was just nice to think that my work is being used to teach students at arguably the best university for game studies in Europe.
Posted in Research, Theory | Tagged: huh | No Comments »
Good thing I checked then
Posted by peterbayliss on August 4, 2008
I’ve used the phrase ‘intentional stance’ a few times in the chapter I’ve been writing, and I wasn’t really sure of where I had gotten it from, or if it was something I had come up with. So i decided to google it, and it seems like it was a lucky thing I did, seeing how its the name of a “theory of mental content proposed by Daniel C. Dennett” according to wikipedia.
Anyway a clarifying footnote later, the actual theory itself piqued my interest, as it seems to have some fleeting resonance with the layered model of the interface I developed in my DiGRA 07 conference paper . The crux of the theory is that things can be explained firstly by anthropomorphising them, in the sense of treating them as a rational agent, and then considering it at different levels of abstraction, from the most concrete physical stance, through the function and purpose orientated design stance, to the titular intentional stance that is concerned with thinking and intent.
Whilst the theory seems, at least from what I can glean from its wikipedia entry, to be concerned with things work, i.e. make predictions, rather than the with the different levels at which we actually interact with things, in the case of my paper, the interface, there is something to the most abstract layer, the intentional stance, which I think may help we elucidate the most abstract level of my model, which I termed the conceptual level for lack of anything more effectively descriptive. Perhaps what I was trying to get at with that layer is that our use of the interface, both in its physical and software manifestations, is not just arbitrary but directed and meaningful at a higher level, that it is intentional. Might be some lucky timing as I will probably need to revisit the paper in my thesis writing sometime soon.
Posted in Research, Theory | Tagged: intentional stance, interface | No Comments »
Constant Variation
Posted by peterbayliss on August 1, 2008
Its been far too long since I’ve written a post. In my defence I started teaching again last week, and of course there was the kind of small preparations and problems to take care off that always end up taking more time than they have any right to. Also in my defence I’ve been re-experiencing the strange cadence of thesis writing. A day or two ago I was trying to think of inventive ways to represent the thesis in a videogame mod so I could thus shoot the damn thing or something; today I’ve been quite enjoying sorting out (hopefully) some of the problems I had. Or maybe I’m just moody from not sleeping well.
Whilst doing a google to check what accessories are available for my new phone (note: not actual size) last week, I found out that it also has an accelerometer that I didn’t know about. Of course I did the first thing any reasonable person would have done, and downloaded an application that makes lightsabre sounds as you swing the phone around. Yes its naff.
Posted in Misc | Tagged: writing | No Comments »
Waiting…
Posted by peterbayliss on July 20, 2008
There’s nothing quite like the prospect of waiting for a delivery to turn up, particularly when you’re given the very convenient window of sometime between 9-5. Given the weather outside its not such a bad thing to stay indoors for a bit longer, hopefully it arrives closer to 9 than 5 though.
I played quite a bit of Assassin’s Creed over the weekend, and I can get why some people have a problem with it - I only completed a couple of missions and there’s really not any variation. However I was quite happy just to leap through the cities, Parkour style, and having epic sword fights anyway.
Interestingly I don’t recall hearing anything about the game’s meta-narrative, so I was quite surprised very early on in the progression of the game when you find out that your avatar isn’t actually a 12th century assassin, but rather his 21st century descendent who being forced to relive his ancestor’s life through the quite Lamarckian notion of genetic memory, so effectively you’re playing a character who is playing a character.
The game manual, set out in part as an instruction manual for using the genetic memory accessing apparatus, the so-called ‘animus’ , even makes reference to this strange twist, stating that the system became much more useful after switching to a videogame style controller set. This is interesting in itself as the control design of the game diverges from the norm in its ‘free running’ mode, where the player has to only hold down two buttons to move rapidly through the environment, scaling walls and leaping gaps, rather than the more usual approach of requiring the player to accurately time these actions.
In a way this approach kind of makes sense within the conceptual context of the game, the player is ’steering’ rather than controlling their character, and as it results in no jumping puzzles I quite like it. Interestingly the game refers to the in game interface that your actual avatar uses as ‘contextual puppeteering controls’, with the four face buttons assigned to the head, each hand, and legs of the avatar. This is interesting in terms of embodiment, however it’s implementation is a little quirky. For instance the weapon hand is assigned to the left most button, even though the avatar wields his weapons with his right hand. Another unrelated quirk is that while playing scenes which revert back to the player’s immediate avatar the game remains in a third person view when perhaps a first person one, effectively what the player is experiencing narratively during the main part of the game, would have made more sense.
In any case its an interesting game because of both the narrative and the control design in terms of embodiment, specifically because of its blending of first and third person perspectives, and in terms of what Hirose describes as embodiment as a process, rather than a static state.
Posted in Games, Research, Theory | Tagged: embodying | No Comments »
Meetings and Squids
Posted by peterbayliss on July 17, 2008
As a result of change with my thesis structure its been a little strange writing this week, going from a 70 odd page monster of a document to a fresh blank page. The new start is coming along well, though I did have some problems getting started with it, mostly due to the difficulty of deciding on what to start with. Looking over the various games I’ll be looking at, and at the themes I want to investigate, it was a little tough to work out how to disentangle the themes from each other, as they tend to overlap considerably. For instance, the notion of the interface is heavily connected with questions of spatiality, whilst there is a similar problem with notions of presence and spatiality. At the moment I’m thinking of using the game I’m writing about at the moment [giantJoystick] by Mary Flanagan as something of a test case, going over it in detail to flag the themes and different permutations of the themes that can then be examined in more details with the other games.
So far this approach seems to be falling into place relatively satisfactory, though I haven’t got as much work done today as I was hoping to due to a series of minor distractions. I had a meeting this morning with the lecturer and other tutors for the course I’m teaching in next semester, which went on for longer than I expected. Then, checking The Age website whilst eating lunch I noticed that they were about to start a live stream of a dissection of a giant squid at Melbourne Museum. Having finished my lunch I thought that it was too good an opportunity to miss seeing a 250kg mystery of the deep being cut apart, I guess I have an unhealthy curiosity in giant cephalopods, luckily I’m not alone.
Posted in Games, Misc, Research | Tagged: squids, teaching, writing | No Comments »
Mobile Games Workshop
Posted by peterbayliss on July 13, 2008
Last Thursday and Friday I attended a ARC Cultural Research Network workshop called The game of being mobile: mobile technologies, gaming cultures and the haptic, organised by Larissa Hjorth and Dr Ingrid Richardson. There were some very interesting discussions, including the suggestion of a location based mobile game for domestic spaces, and also on the nature of the haptic. It was also great to get to talk to scholars like Andrew Murphie about the notion of embodiment. Hopefully these discussions will carry on and present some opportunities for further research after I’ve finished my PhD.
On that topic, my thesis has gone back to the drawing board to a degree, as my writing has drifted quite far from what was originally intended. Though this was somewhat bound to happen with my particular writing practice, I think that I took the maxim of ‘don’t be afraid to write rubbish’ a little too far, and ended up in an exploration of philosophical issues somewhat outside of my purview. Hopefully some of the stuff that I’ve written will be able to be lifted out and worked into the new structure, which orientates around the close reading of a host of games I’ve flagged as potentially interesting.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Credit crunch?
Posted by peterbayliss on June 30, 2008
There’s been a lot of news reports about the global credit slump etc, but it really can’t be that bad if I can be approved for a credit card.
Since getting my DS, I’ve noticed that a lot of interesting games seem to be released in Australia anywhere up to a year after they are released in the US (the less said about the lag behind Japan the better), and often cost twice as much. Happily, the DS doesn’t bother with the ludicrousness that is region coding, so I can happily import them from Hong Kong based online shops.
One I’m particularly looking forward to is DS-10, essentially a software synthesiser made in conjunction with Korg. Its currently only planned to be released in Japan, but given that all the dials etc are labelled in english, I can’t imagine the language barrier being much of a problem.
Posted in Misc | Tagged: NDS | No Comments »
Thanks Alex!!
Posted by peterbayliss on June 29, 2008
A friend of mine recently got themselves a nice shiny new MacBook, well as shiny as a black matte finish can be in any case. Seeing how he didn’t need his old notebook any more, he kindly passed it on to me over the weekend, so thanks a bunch Alex. Its roughly twice as powerful as the crummy 5 year old desktop I have, so apart from being able to write whilst on the move, I can catch up on some of the games I’ve missed out on over the last couple of years that would have caused my poor old computer to have the digital equivalent of a nervous breakdown.
I received the results of the Course Experience Survey for my class last week at well. At first I was a bit disappointed until my coordinator assured me it was actually a decent score, but from the break down of the individual questions I think the key thing I need to work on is explaining things more effectively.
Posted in Misc | Tagged: friends, teaching | No Comments »
A trail gone cold
Posted by peterbayliss on June 16, 2008
I didn’t get much writing done last week, as in addition to the public holiday on Monday, I was busy preparing for my candidature review on Friday. Returning to writing this morning it seems that I’ve completely forgotten the tack my argument was taking, though to be honest It had gotten bogged down last week as well. The crux is a synthesis between the concept of affordances and Merleau-Ponty’s conception of habits, but the argument itself seems to be stuck in a kind of vortex, spinning around repeating itself whilst being sucked into the void, or perhaps rather a knotted piece of string that needs untangling.
The review itself went well, though there were some important issues with structure and scope that were raised by the panel, so I’m not really sure if its worthwhile pushing on with the chapter I’m writing as it stands, as it will most likely have quite a different form within a few weeks, but move on to another area instead to at least get my thoughts clearer. Of course that might just add another string to the tangle as well.
Posted in Misc, Theory | Tagged: writing | No Comments »
Damn iPhone!
Posted by peterbayliss on June 9, 2008
Haven’t got much writing done today, as I’ve been distracted trying to glean whatever information I could from forum threads about the Australian release of the iPhone. So far I’ve learnt that:
1) It may cost a lot, or it might not
An afternoon well spent so far then.
Posted in Misc | Tagged: iPhone, time-wasting | No Comments »
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Detroit Institute of Arts Sacred Detroit Flickr Contest
August 7, 2008
The Detroit Institute of Arts is ”organizing an online photo contest that invites DIA visitors, the online community, and the general public to submit photos that capture their interpretation of sacred Detroit.” Prizes include a signed copy of Kenro Izu’s Bhutan: The Sacred Within, two front-row seats to Izu’s lecture on September 14, 2008, admission for two to the post-lecture strolling supper, and a DIA Companion Membership. The second place winner will receive a signed copy of Bhutan: The Sacred Within as well as a DIA Companion Membership. The photo contest is in conjunction with the Kenro Izu: Sacred Places exhibit. The deadline for submitting photos is September 3, 2008.
For more information and rules for entering, go here: http://www.dia.org/sacred_places/
To view the Flickr page and photos submitted so far, go here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/detroitssacredplaces/pool/
Also, be sure to visit the blog here: http://detroitssacredplaces.wordpress.com/
No Comments » | DIA, Events, News | Permalink
Faceted Searching Solutions
July 31, 2008The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) offered a forum series at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim. One was sponsored by the ALCTS Catalog Form and Function Interest Group entitled “Old Records, New Records, New Interfaces.” Three librarians, Charley Pennell, Mary Charles Lasater, and Cheryl Gowing, presented their experiences from their online catalog redesign projects. Links to the powerpoint presentations are below:
Charley Pennell, Principal Cataloger for Metadata, North Carolina State University Libraries - Endeca Presentation
Mary Charles Lasater, Authorities Librarian, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University - Primo Presentation
Cheryl Gowing, Director, Information Management & Systems, University of Miami - Encore Presentation
[Also, here is a link to SirsiDynix's faceted searching solution: Enterprise.]
No Comments » | ALA, Library Vendors, Technology, faceted searching | Permalink
Digital TV Conversion
July 28, 2008
Have questions about the Digital Television Conversion coming up on February 17, 2009?
Go to dtvanswers.com or dtv2009.gov for answers.
To apply for a coupon for a digital converter box, go here or here.
No Comments » | News | Permalink
From “Curious Expeditions”
July 25, 2008At the blog Curious Expeditions: Travelling and Exhuming the Extraordinary Past, you can explore some beautiful libraries around the world: Librophiliac Love Letter.
Here is a beautiful library many of us are familiar with…
“Man’s Mobility” by John Stephens Coppin
No Comments » | Miscellaneous | Permalink
Interested in Learning to Write Grants?
July 22, 2008Save the Date for this Informative Workshop
Are you looking for sources for grant funding for your school, lab or community organization? Trying to write a grant to fund a special project? Or supporting administrators or researchers who are applying for federal or foundation funding? Plan to attend “Grant Writing Basics For All” on Saturday, August 23rd at Wayne State’s David Adamany Undergraduate Library.
The Wayne State University Library System is pleased to sponsor “Grant Writing Basics For All” – a one-day workshop to provide participants with the skills to identify funding sources and write good grants. The programming includes:
The workshop will be held from 8:30 a.m. – 4 p.m. on Saturday, August 23, 2008 at the David Adamany Undergraduate Library, in the heart of Wayne State’s Detroit campus. The cost is $45 or $20 for students.
Click Here to register
For more information, contact Lothar Spang at 313-577-3367 or by e-mail at lothar.spang@wayne.edu.
No Comments » | Events, Grant Writing, WSULS | Permalink
Copyright
July 21, 2008Here are some useful links about copyright in libraries:
Five Things you should read about Copyright and Sharing Instructional Materials (from ACRL)
Is it protected by copyright? (Calculator)
International Study on the Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation (PDF document)
“Best Practices for Locating Copyright Owners of Photographic and Visual Art” (from American Society of Picture Professionals)
No Comments » | Copyright | Permalink
Metalogue
July 16, 2008Karen Calhoun, Vice President, WorldCat and Metadata Services for OCLC is hosting a new blog called Metalogue. It is “a forum for sharing thoughts on all things related to knowledge organization by and for libraries.” Also posting to the blog will be “friends and colleagues from all over the globe, who contribute perspectives and experiences about the current and future state of cataloguing and metadata.”
Take a look at some other OCLC blogs:
025.431: The Dewey blog
BlogJunction
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DALNET Board Approves New Grant Program
July 14, 2008Looking toward the future, the DALNET Board of Directors established the Program Initiative Reserve as a shared resource for DALNET members. The Board has now formalized a process for offering grants from the reserve to DALNET members. Through this new program the Board will be pleased to award grants ranging from $250 to $25,000 per project or program. The grants will be awarded to members whose proposals support the DALNET mission to advance research and learning through resource sharing. The grant program is one in a host of benefits and services for DALNET members.
Members may read and download the grant application and materials on the new grant website at:
Institutions interested in placing membership in DALNET may find more information here: http://www.dalnet.lib.mi.us/howtojoin.html
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Gutenberg-e records added to DALNET catalog
July 1, 2008Gutenberg-e is a series of award-winning digital monographs in history, selected by the American Historical Association and published by Columbia University Press and available at no charge to users. The MARC records for 25 theses on topics including world history, military history, and women’s history and art have been added to the DALNET Consortium catalog.
**Click here to find the records in the DALNET catalog.
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Web Tips
June 27, 2008The College @ Home blog has some good web tips and tricks this month, including:
1. 100 Useful Niche Search Engines You’ve Never Heard Of
2. 57 Useful Google Tools You’ve Never Heard Of
3. 100 Places to Find Free Webinars and Tutorials
4. Twitter for Librarians: the Ultimate Guide
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Cadillac Tight [View Page] Posts: [Smoking or non-smoking?], [Russia, Georgia, and the test for the US presidential candidates], [McCain’s and Obama’s tax proposals], [Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Potsdam Declaration], [Beijing, 8-8-08], [John Edwards], [Georgia “under attack” as Russian tanks roll in], [Support McCain and win valuable prizes!], [Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq], [Forged documents used as a justification for the Iraq War?]
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Smoking or non-smoking?
Posted on August 12, 2008 by The Red Pill
As we have been reading, our government’s health prevention intervention has its sights set on the foods that we eat. But food is not the only freedom under attack by our nanny-state officials. The right of adults to smoke cigarettes is continually being threatened by hipocritical politicians who feel they know what is best for us.
City-wide outdoor smoking bans in places such as Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Belmont are becoming commonplace all over California, and across the nation.
Just last month, Newsweek reported that New York has become the first state to ban smoking in all of its addiction recovery centers.
“New York is leading the way and it is to be commended for that,” says Michael Miller, president and board chairman of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. “People who have other drug addictions should be encouraged to stop smoking.” Indeed, a 2004 study in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology found that smoking cessation during addiction treatment was associated with a 25 percent better chance of maintaining long term abstinence from alcohol and drugs.
But many addicts say they rely on cigarettes to help them through the treatment of their other, more problematic addictions. “This policy is saying that if someone [in New York] wants to quit heroin, but is not ready to give up cigs, well, sorry but you can’t get treatment,” says Tony Newman of the drug law reform advocacy group Drug Policy Alliance, which opposes the ban. If living from cigarette to cigarette is what it takes to get a more dangerous monkey off your back, Newman argues, then shouldn’t the treatment facilities turn a blind eye to tobacco?
And then there is this September 2007 Democratic Presidential Primary debate. While Hillary Clinton supported community decisions to ban outdoor smoking, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Dennis Kucinich all went on record in support of a national law to outlaw smoking outside. Barack Obama said that he also supported legislation at the community level, but added that he would support a nationwide ban if communities failed to do it themselves.
I think that local communities are making enormous strides and I think they’re doing the right thing on this. If it turns out that we’re not seeing enough progress at the local level, then I would favor a national law.
I don’t think we’ve seen the local laws play themselves out entirely because I think you’re seeing enormous amount of progress in Chicago, in New York in other major cities around the country because I think we have been treating this as a public health problem and educating the public on the dangers of second-hand smoke.
That pressure will continue. As I said, if we can’t provide these kinds of protections at the local level, which would be my preference, I would be supportive of a national law.
Of course, this all begs the question: is Barack Obama serious about a nationwide ban on catching a puff outside, or is he just blowing smoke?
Filed under: Barack Obama, California, Chris Dodd, Democrats, Dennis Kucinich, Election 2008, Government, Health & Fitness, Hillary Clinton, Hypocrisy, Politics, Wordpress Political Blogs | 5 Comments »
Russia, Georgia, and the test for the US presidential candidates
Posted on August 12, 2008 by The Red Pill
As Russian forces continue their offensive to remove the democratically elected Georgian government, the American presidential candidates had the chance to display their foreign policy knowledge and judgement, as well as their talents in the area of international diplomacy. The initial reactions from both candidates were as different as the men themselves, and offer a glimps into how each could potentially react when recieving the infamous “3:00 am phone call.”
More after the fold.
Filed under: Barack Obama, Diplomacy, Election 2008, Europe, John McCain, News, Politics, Wordpress Political Blogs | 4 Comments »
McCain’s and Obama’s tax proposals
Posted on August 10, 2008 by twc01
Here they are, in graphic format.
Filed under: Politics | 2 Comments »
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Potsdam Declaration
Posted on August 9, 2008 by The Red Pill
This week marks the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which brought an end to the horrific fighting of World War II. As is the case every year, many have turned out to protest the American action against Japan, and to call for the United States to give up its nuclear weapons arsenal. Yet, as is also the case every year, there is a critical piece of the history puzzle that is being forgotten in the world’s admonition of our “nuking” an enemy who’s code of honor prohibitted surrender. That vital missing piece is the Potsdam Declaration.
More after the fold.
Filed under: History | 5 Comments »
Beijing, 8-8-08
Posted on August 9, 2008 by twc01
The opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Beijing last night were, by all accounts, truly spectacular. As Jim Yardley of the New York Times put it:
An ecstatic China finally got its Olympic moment on Friday night. And if the astonishing opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games lavished grand tribute on Chinese civilization and sought to stir an ancient nation’s pride, there was also a message for an uncertain outside world: Do not worry. We mean no harm. . . .
Yardley’s colleague, Andrew Jacobs, observed the reactions of the upscale 20-somethings who will begin moving into leadership positions in another decade or so:
They are the children of China’s modern market economy, professionals in their 20s blessed with top-notch educations, disposable incomes and fluency in English. On Friday night they filed into a bar in an upscale night-life district, sat down with their Heinekens and blasé expressions, and waited for the pageantry to begin on the big screen. . . .
But once the opening ceremonies started, Ms. Tian was transfixed. The eyes of some of her friend welled up with tears. They screamed and cheered when the Chinese team appeared on the screen. They shouted, “Go China.” They put down their smartphones and hugged each other with joy.
“I’m so proud of my country,” Ms. Tian said, a Chinese flag affixed to each cheek. “When I see this, I suddenly appreciate all the things the government put us through.”
For hundreds of millions of Chinese, the lavish Olympic kickoff on Friday was a crystallizing moment: an affirmation of their nation’s emerging might and, according to popular lore, the realization of a dream deferred 100 years by revolution, invasion, colonial exploitation, civil war and misrule. . . .
Even as they quietly decried the sins of their government — the corruption, the nepotism, the intolerance of dissent — Ms. Tian and her friends could not resist the intoxicating thrill of the day.
There’s something happening here. Millions of Chinese are standing up proudly and celebrating the fact that China has re-taken what they see as its rightful place among the pre-eminent nations in the world.
The crowd at the Nashville Bar in Beijing last night sensed that. They’re not heedless of the shortcomings of their society, particularly its political situation. But they’re young, educated, and proud to be Chinese:
They were eager to talk about the Olympics, Beijing’s new subway lines and their nation’s newfound self-confidence, but when asked if they yearned for things like democracy and free speech, the enthusiasm often ebbed. “Let’s not talk about politics,” Mr. Zhang gently suggested. “Such talk gets us nowhere.”
After three hours of elaborate stagecraft and an endless parade of overseas athletes, the revelry began to lose its exuberance. Then the announcer signaled the arrival of the Chinese contingent.
The room erupted in a cacophony of cheers. Patrons shouted approvingly as Yao Ming, the towering basketball star, emerged with the Chinese flag. They hooted as the hurdler Liu Xiang grinned for the cameras.
Then a lingering shot of President Hu Jintao filled the screen. As he waved mechanically and offered up a Politburo smile, there was a faint hesitation. Then someone yelled, “Go China!” and the crowd resumed its roar.
Filed under: China, Diplomacy, Entertainment, History, News, Oil, Politics, Tourism, Travel | 5 Comments »
John Edwards
Posted on August 8, 2008 by twc01
He has now admitted an affair in 2006, after denying the story and denouncing the questions for nearly a year, but denies being the father of the daughter born to Rielle Hunter. I’m not much for prying into the private lives of politicians and public figures, but here we are.
I suspect he’s not told the full truth here.
His reported behavior when confronted by the National Enquirer’s reporters at the Beverly Hills Hilton after visiting Ms. Hunter and the child on July 21 (if accurate) — bolting and running down the stairway and into a rest room, then holding the rest room door shut for some time — is not confidence-inspiring, to say the least.
There’s certainly more to come on the money aspect. I find it hard to believe that his national campaign’s finance chair paid sums to Ms. Hunter and to Andrew Young, an Edwards campaign worker who says he is the father of the child, without any knowledge or authorization from John Edwards.
And characterizing his own conduct as “99 per cent honest,” as he did in his statement, is insulting and maddening.
Filed under: Celebrities, Election 2008, Elizabeth Edwards, Family, Hypocrisy, John Edwards, News, Politics, Sex | 5 Comments »
Georgia “under attack” as Russian tanks roll in
Posted on August 8, 2008 by twc01
Joe, I imagine that headline grabbed your attention!
The Russians responded after Georgia began sending its armed forces into South Ossetia. The Georgian interior ministry says they’ve shot down two Russian aircraft, and the Georgian President told CNN that Russian bombing and shelling has killed and wounded scores of civilians — although the Washington Post quotes a villager saying it’s the Georgians who are shelling her village. So it looks like it’s war in the Caucuses.
Take a look at this bit of tape. Joe, I bet that’s an image that you used to see in your head many nights in your previous career — either as nightmare that they’d begun to roll, or as fantasy at their nice, tight columns.
Update (Fri., 8/8, 3:57 p.m): The BBC says that its reporter is reporting the sounds of heavy fighting continuing in the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, and the International Red Cross has received reports that hospitals are having difficutly keeping up with the casualties flowing in. The story quotes a Russian source says 12 Russian soldiers have been killed in South Ossetia. I believe it was CNN that reported earlier that 10 Russian peacekeepers were killed in an artillery hit on their barracks. CNN’s Barbara Starr reported just now that Georgia is pulling its 2,000 troops out of Iraq and has asked the U.S. to airlift them back home so they can join in the fighting there. She says the Pentagon has said that it is considering the request for airlift support.
Update 2 (Fri., 4:48 p.m.): Good info here.
Update 3 (Fri., 7:06 p.m.): CNN is reporting that Russia has bombed at least two sites in Georgia proper (i.e., outside of South Ossetia) — an airfield outside of the Georgian capital of Tblisi, and the Black Sea port of Poti. Georgian television claims that the port was destroyed, and the Georgian parliament was evacuated.
Update 4 (Sat., 8/9, 1:00 a.m.): The Lehrer Newshour reported tonight that Georgia has called up reserves and is mobilizing its armed forces, and that Abkhazia has moved its troops to the border with Georgia. The BBC tonight quotes Georgian authorities as saying that Russian planes bombed three Georgian military bases today as well as the port, and that they expect a Russian attack on the Georgian capital of Tblisi.
Update 5 (Sat., 8/9, 11:36 a.m.): The Georgian government has declared a 15-day “state of war” and the Russian Interfax new service reports that the S. Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali is under Russian control but has been “destroyed,” with at least 2,000 civilian casualties. All reports seem to agree that the city was hammered on Thursday and Friday and suffered widespread damage. Russian warplanes struck several targets inside Georgia including the city of Gori, 15 miles . They hit a military base where Georgian reserves were mobilizing but bombs also struck two apartment blocks. Georgian officials say there were 60 civilians killed. The Georgians claim to have shot down ten Russian planes, and a Russian commander confirmed the loss of two aircraft. Abkhazian separatists also said that they had launched air and artillery strikes on Georgian forces along their border.
Update 6 (Sun., 8/10, 12:05 p.m.): The tide has clearly turned against Georgia as Russia continues to reinforce its forces in South Ossetia, strike targets in Georgia, and send troops into Abkhazia, another breakaway Georgian province on the border with Russia. Georgia today said its forces had retreated out of South Ossetia and it would begin to observe a cease-fire. Russia did not accept a cease-fire and disputed the assertion that all Georgian military forces were out of South Ossetia. Meanwhile, the Russians bombed an airfield near Tblisi, the Georgian capital, sent troops into Abkhazia to assist separatist forces there who are preparing an attack on Georgian forces in a disputed gorge, and began a naval blockade of the Georgian Black Sea coast. The BBC was earlier reporting that Ukrainian officials were suggesting that they may not permit the Russian naval vessels to return to their port, which Russia leases from the Ukraine, but I haven’t seen that repeated. (The Ukraine, like Georgia, wants to join NATO and is supported in that goal by the U.S., and that is something that Russia firmly opposes). Georgian officials also said that a western Georgian town, Zugdidi, was bombed.
Update 7 (Sun., 8/10, 10:40 p.m.): The U.S. Air Force has begun flying Georgia’s 2,000 troops home from Iraq. Georgia has — or had — the third-largest contingent of troops in Iraq, after the U.S. and the U.K. I imagine Vladimir Putin will notice that we are ferrying veteran Georgian troops in to fight Russian soldiers, but it probably won’t make much difference. We have very little leverage over the Russians here and I expect one goal of the Russians now is to shatter the Georgian military that we have helped to train and equip. President Bush claims he gave Prime Minister Putin a stern talking-to in Beijing, but it doesn’t seem to have had any impact on Russian actions. No word on what he saw when he looked into Putin’s soul this time:
President George W Bush said that he told Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin: “This violence is unacceptable.” At a meeting on the sidelines of the Olympic in Beijing on Friday, the US president said that all troops should return to their positions prior to the latest unrest, which began on 6 August.
“I was very firm with Vladimir Putin,” Mr Bush said.
Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney told Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in a telephone conversation that “Russian aggression must not go unanswered”. He said the events in Georgia would have “serious consequences” on Russia’s relations with the United States.
It’s beginning to appear that another goal may be regime change in Tblisi:
The US ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, quoted Russia’s foreign minister saying Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili “must go”.
He asked his Russian counterpart, Vitaly Churkin: “Is the goal of the Russian Federation to change the leadership of Georgia?”
Mr Churkin did not directly answer the question, but said there were leaders who had “become an obstacle”.
Filed under: Diplomacy, Europe, Georgia, Military, News | 2 Comments »
Support McCain and win valuable prizes!
Posted on August 7, 2008 by twc01
This is comical. The Washington Post reports today that the McCain campaign is trying to gin up its online presence by offering a system of reward points to those who post their campaign talking points on various political websites.
That, in essence, is the McCain campaign’s pitch to supporters to join its new online effort, one that combines the features of “AstroTurf” campaigning with the sort of customer-loyalty programs offered by airlines, hotel chains, restaurants and the occasional daily newspaper.
On McCain’s Web site, visitors are invited to “Spread the Word” about the presumptive Republican nominee by sending campaign-supplied comments to blogs and Web sites under the visitor’s screen name. The site offers sample comments (”John McCain has a comprehensive economic plan . . .”) and a list of dozens of suggested destinations, conveniently broken down into “conservative,” “liberal,” “moderate” and “other” categories. Just cut and paste. . . .
(By the way, “The Straight Talk Express” was in an accident this morning — with Sen. Joe Lieberman aboard. No injuries, thank goodness, but the metaphor gods are surely chuckling at their handiwork today.)
The story mentions that dissidents have alleged that “that the Chinese government has paid Chinese citizens token sums for each favorable comment about government policies they post in chat rooms and on blogs,” but does not explore where the McCain folks got their idea.
No word on whether Cadillac Tight made the listing at JohnMcCain.com, and if so, how it was listed (Conservative? Liberal? Incoherent?). If there are any of you parroting away here — I claim the right to use your new toaster on Tuesday and Thursday mornings!
Filed under: Blog Memes, Blogging, Conspiracy Theories, Election 2008, Humor, John McCain, Media, Netroots, News, Politics, Republicans, Wordpress Political Blogs | 6 Comments »
Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq
Posted on August 7, 2008 by twc01
Today’s news includes word that the ruling coalition in Pakistan has announced that they intend to attempt to impeach Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. I don’t know whether they will succeed or what the consequences may be, but this story reminds me of recent stories that American intelligence has concluded that the Pakistani ISI intelligence service may be sympathetic with the Taliban and may even have colluded in the recent deadly bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. And that certainly reminds me that it is this region — Pakistan, Afghanistan, and southwest Asia generally — that is the real “central front in the war on terror,” to the extent that such a front exists.
The Pentagon just announced an extension of the tour for the 2nd Battallion, 7th Marine Regiment in Afghanistan through late November. They’ll be there through the American election. Maybe they could use some help.
Update (Thurs., 8/7, 1:29 p.m.): Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, just returned from Afghanistan, describes the country as “in misery” and our efforts there floundering, in what he sees as a “generational” effort, a “25-year campaign” in which “we cannot allow ourselves to fail.”
In a memo written last week for the Social Sciences Dept. at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, McCaffrey observed that the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, with approximately 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, compared to about 140,000 in Iraq, a far smaller and somewhat less populous nation, has become dangerously overstretched and was not designed to fight a war of that duration:
“Many of these troops and their leaders through general officer level are on their 4th or more combat deployments since 9/11,’” McCaffrey writes. “We have suffered 36,000 U.S. killed and wounded. Their families are getting tired. The country is not at war. The Armed Forces and the CIA are at war. We are at the point of breaking faith with our troops.”
In the memo, McCaffrey also:
asserted that 2009 would be “the year of decision” in Afghanistan. His predictions were bleak. “The Taliban and a greatly enhanced foreign fighter presence will: strike decisive blows against selected NATO units; try to erase the [Pakistani Federal Administered Tribal Areas] and Baluchi borders with Afghanistan; try to sever the road networks and stop the construction of new roads (Route # 1 — the Ring Road from Kabul to Kandahar is frequently now interdicted); and try to strangle and isolate the capital,” McCaffrey wrote. “Without more effective and non-corrupt Afghan political leadership at province and district level, Afghanistan may become a failed state hosting foreign terrorist communities with global ambitions. Afghan political elites are focused more on the struggle for power than governance. “
McCaffrey also writes that there is no unity of American military command — U.S. forces have two regional commands: European Command, which is also the NATO military command, and Central Command, which directs U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia — and “no clear political governance relationship organizing the government of Afghanistan, the United Nations and its many Agencies, NATO and its political and military presence, the 26 Afghan deployed allied nations, the hundreds of [non-governmental organizations, and private entities and contractors." And he called for a broader plan incorporating both economic and political efforts: "[t]he atmosphere of terror cannot be countered by relying mainly on military means.”
McCaffrey’s assessment was praised by Andrew Exum, who led infantry and special operations units in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2004: “Gen. McCaffrey confirms what we’ve known for quite some time: Afghanistan is an under-resourced war that suffers from both a serious lack of unity of effort and no clear guidance across the NATO forces as to what we’re supposed to be doing.” Exum found McCaffrey’s report “less helpful from a policy perspective with respect to how, in an environment of scarcity, we’re supposed to balance our resources between Iraq and Afghanistan — and whether or not we have the treasure or patience to stay in Afghanistan long enough to both defeat the insurgency and reform a hopelessly corrupt establishment.”
Filed under: 9/11, Afghanistan, Barack Obama, David Petraeus, Diplomacy, Election 2008, George W. Bush, Government, Iran, Iraq, John McCain, Military, News, Oil, Politics, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism, The "war" on drugs | 1 Comment »
Forged documents used as a justification for the Iraq War?
Posted on August 5, 2008 by twc01
This could be interesting. Ron Suskind, an author and journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting with the Wall Street Journal, where he worked from 1993 to 2000, claims in a new book coming out tomorrow that the Bush White House ordered the CIA to forge a letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein designed to serve as evidence of a link between Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda and thus provide a justification for the Iraq War. According to Suskind, the CIA dutifully created a handwritten letter, backdated to July 1, 2001 from the director of Iraqi Intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, to Saddam Hussein purporting to say that the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, Mohammed Atta, had actually trained for his mission in Iraq — something that the Vice President’s office had been very eager to prove ever since the 9/11 attacks. Suskind says that the CIA then delivered the bogus letter to Iraq, where its existence was “revealed” to Con Coughlin, a reporter with the London Daily Telegraph, and Coughlin wrote a story about the document as if it were genuine that appeared on the paper’s front page on December 14, 2003 with the headline: “Terrorist behind September 11 strike ‘was trained by Saddam’.” The White House denies Suskind’s claim. The book also claims that the top Iraqi intelligence official told the Bush administration before the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Forged documents deliberately used as a justification for the Iraq War? That’s a pretty explosive charge.
Update (Thurs., 8/7, 1:14 p.m.): Amidst a flurry of denials, Suskind is standing by the claims in his book, and noting that some are rather carefully phrased.
Update 2 (Fri., 8/8, 4:54 p.m.): Here’s a good synopsis of where the story stands at the end of the week. Suskind has published a partial transcript of one of his interviews with one of his named sources, Rob Richer, who was the second-ranking official in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, the clandestine service. And perhaps most intriguing (so to speak) is what a former CIA agent, Philip Giraldi, said in an article in The American Conservative magazine: he says an “extremely reliable and well placed source in the intelligence community” tells him that the Bush Administration — specifically, VP Dick Cheney — did order a forged letter drafted up, but not by the CIA, which Cheney mistrusted, but through Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon, a close bureaucratic ally. Giraldi notes that the Pentagon has its own false documents center used, for example, to draw up fake papers for special ops officers traveling under cover as businessmen. That makes sense, given that the CIA was always dubious of the claimed Saddam/al Qaeda links than the neocons in Feith’s office. As Giraldi quotes his anonymous source: Tenet is actually telling the truth in this denial!
Filed under: 9/11, Congress, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Iraq, Joe Wilson, News, Oil, Politics, Terrorism, Valerie Plame | 4 Comments »
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