Internet Stokes Anti-War Movement. The peace rallies staged across the United States over the weekend are a testimony to the Internet's power as an organizing tool, observers say. It's the first time a large anti-war movement has sprung up before the actual war. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]

What the Internet helps do is lessen the friction for self-orgainzation. Before, to get a group going, you had to personally find others. If it was for something that not many peple wanted to do, it could be very hard. With the Internet, it is easy. With something like an anti-war movement, there are many groups that could come together. In the old days, this would be very difficult since it would require getting all the right leaders, and their egos, together. Now it is self-organizing. Simply posting "Everyone who wants to participate meet Tuesday' can get a huge response. This is what was first seen with some of the protests at the WTO here in Seattle. There were no leaders. You see the same thing now. No ONE person called on 500,00 people to protest and organized it. It was an emergent property that comes from increased ability to move information around, resulting in the creation of valuable knowledge. It will be interesting to see just how well this continues in the future and whether any 'leader' will try to emerge to claim the power. Somehow, I think that Jackson and Sharpton still live in the old world of political organizations. It may take someone brand new to 'lead' this.  11:28:51 PM    

The Need for Talking Points. Brad DeLong advises on how to avoid misrepresentation by careless quote: Have two different kinds of conversations with reporters. First, have normal conversations on background that they agree not to quote. In such conversations, you can talk through the issues in a relatively loose way, and accomplish some mutual education. Second, have abnormal conversations designed to produce quotes... [Jinn of Quality and Risk]

Even though I get Brad DeLong's newsfeed, I love quoting from other sources. I shows how 'well read' I am. Anyway, this is very useful advice. Reporters have their jobs to do and will usually favor an approach that gets them what they need without ticking of future sources too much. But they do need to get what they need.  11:21:53 PM    

RIAA wins battle to ID Kazaa user. A federal judge orders Verizon to disclose the identity of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate in a decision that could make it easier for the music industry to crack down on file-swapping. [CNET News.com]

This is as if a store could claim you were shoplifter and supeona your credit card records without ever having to file suit. No trial. No determination that you actually did shoplift. All they have to do is simply say you are and they get your records. And there had better not be ANY discrepancies or mitakes. Because then they'd put you in jail. Bad laws stink. What I want to do is spend some bandwidth moving song files around that I already own, get the RIAA to falsely accuse me of piratring and then sue them for a ton of money. Probably never happen. There probably is some 'safe harbor' provision in the DMCA that would always get them off the hook even if they falsely accuse someone. What is troubling is the simple threat of a lawsuit can be very chilling. Sometimes I hate what some lawyers do, particularly when it seems to be solely designed to make themselves and their clients very wealthy. But that's life, I guess.  11:13:38 PM    

The Music Business And The Big Flip. Another excellent piece of writing from Clay Shirky looking at how the music business chooses which music to publicize. He points out that in the writing world the "big flip" has occurred. It used to be that you needed publishers to filter down what was worth publishing, and then pursue that. It was the "filter, then publish" model. Now, however, thanks to the web, the model has become "publish, then filter". Sure, there's a lot of crap out there, but it's quickly filtered, and the quality stuff tends to rise up. The nice thing about this, of course, is that the filters can be more easily set to different tastes, and more stuff gets produced, so that things that otherwise might never see the light of day are suddenly able to. However, the world of music is still stuck in the "filter, then publish" world of A&R people from music labels. Shirky suggests that eventually the music industry will realize that the "publish, then filter" world offers much more in the way of opportunity, but it has to follow certain criteria for it to work properly. For example, it needs to offer more "false negatives" than "false positives". If you end up listening to a lot of stuff you don't like, you're unlikely to trust the system in the future. But, if you miss a song or two you would like, it's not such a big deal. It also has to be simple to set the filtering. I think that this is clearly the type of thing that P2P networks should have started offering a long time ago. The real benefit to "music sharing" systems, as opposed to "music downloading" systems is the ability to have other people in the music sharing network act as a filter for you. If it were more formalized, the potential advantages are huge. As Shirky points out, if the music industry embraced such a system, it would make life for the A&R person much easier. They would still have a job - but their job would be to try to sign up the acts that are successful in the "filtered world" to contracts where they can be marketed. In the same way that newspapers still function in a world where bloggers often report the news, the music industry could still have a place in a world where P2P users help filter the music. [Techdirt]

Unfortunately, this could take some time, since the world that the RIAA inhabits contains very powerful legislators who will probably find some way to make it illegal to filter any content. We are still along way away from the truly 'publish, then filter' world but I wholeheartedly believe that is where we are headed.  11:00:27 PM    

Verizon Must Reveal Internet Song-Swapper. Another bad legal decision for those of you who believe in privacy protection and the question of whether or not ISPs have any liability for the traffic that runs over their network. Back in October we had the story of how the music industry was suing Verizon to get the name of one of their customers who they said was downloading plenty of music. Verizon refused, saying that it wasn't their responsibility to do the work for the music industry, and it was a violation of privacy for the user. Today, the judge has ruled that Verizon needs to give up the name or face the legal consequences. This is bad news, as it means that the music industry is likely to start swamping ISPs with requests for names of their customers. It also makes it more likely that the RIAA will follow through on their ridiculous threat to sue their own customers. I'm actually wondering if this will become a negotiating point for the recently announced plans to get ISPs to pay for file trading. I can just see the agreement now... "RIAA says they'll stop pestering ISPs for names, in exchange for $5/user/month fee..." Update: Declan McCullough, over at News.com has a good analysis of what this means. [Techdirt]

This is very scary. There is no need for a lawsuit to be filed or even for anyone to prove they are the real copyright holder. You can just use the DMCA to get all that information. This is evidence that the DMCA is a bad law. We need to have leaders that will fix this before the corporations really start suing. And why should honest people have to pay because the RIAA can not come up with a viable business model that provides a healthy living for the scu... well, I won't use the word, since they would probably try to sue me in some country that would allow them to.  10:57:43 PM    

Time of day affects drug's blood pressure control [Reuters Health eLine]

It looks like some drugs, like beta-blockers, do control blood pressure fine during the day but are not as effective as other treatements, such as diuretics, during the night. This will be a wide open area for drug treatments, not only for blood pressure but for other therapies. Daily cycles will have huge effects on the ability of certain therapies to work well. In the future, we may take one drug in the morning and another in the evening, instead of the same drug at both times.  10:47:36 PM    

Getting started creating your own CC content: part 1. Creative Commons licenses are designed so that creators can share their works with others easily. You might ask "What can I create if I am not an artist, writer, or musican?" but there many options when it comes to personal publishing online.

The first such example is a weblog. Many weblog authors have applied licenses to their daily writings, and you can too. If you're new to weblogs and want to know how to get started, O'Reilly offers a good introduction to weblogs and walks the reader through using Radio Userland for the first time. Blogroots offers a brief introduction that steers readers to using Blogger.com's site to create and manage their weblog. [Creative Commons: weblog]

I guess I'll have to figure out which license I'm going to use.  10:42:41 PM    

Language evolved in a leap [Nature Science Update]

Sometimes mathematical modeling can really provide important insights. Amd as we gain a better understanding of complexity and emergent behaviour, even more is revelaed. Here, the sceiontists identified 2 opposing needs between speakers and listeners. A listener wants a compolex a language as possible, conveying as much meaning in each word as possible. Then they don't have to work as hard figuring out the meaning from context. The speaker wants as few words as possible. Let the listener figure it all out. By simulating this, they found that there was not a gradual increase in coplexity of language but a tipping point, a point where there is a phase change from a simple language to a complex one, just as we do see in cultures around the world. Very nice. This sounds very much like the way many biological reactions occur. There is little change, then, over a relatively small change in protein concentration, there is a shift to a new state, which is stable with little change.  10:34:39 PM