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Monday, March 25, 2002 |
How have I missed this one before now?! Tony knocks me over with MP3IsNotACrime.org, a great resource for all things fair use and digital. Added to my news aggregator.
11:43:51 PM Permanent link here
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Back In Touch Q&A with John Seely Brown.
"The real spirit of ubiquitous computing is to let technology disappear. I drive high-performance automobiles. What is the question you never ask when you buy a car: Is it powered by Unix or Windows? There is serious computing going on inside the automobile, but you don't even know it's there. With ABS braking, you don't have to activate a system. It diagnoses when you need help, moves seamlessly to help you, and then moves out of the way again. We're incredibly far from that with most technology. There has been no new innovation in interfaces for 30 years. We have to use the power of Moore's Law not just to design things that amplify our computing abilities but to keep things simple, robust, and transparent....
You've got to understand the affordances. A book lets you skim through it, rapidly thumbing through the contents. The design of the book, the heft, the paper, tell you a lot. Right now we have no idea of what the affordances are with e-books. Eventually we'll find them. An e-book will download into something that feels like a book. Magazines and newspapers will be done on electronic paper (a reusable display material with many of the properties of the printed page). You have a printer at home that reprints on this paper in a format that looks like a newspaper. A well-designed newspaper gets you to see stories you would never read. These are things you're going to lose with filters....
My favorite technology is a very, very lightweight printer. It weighs about an ounce. It never runs out of batteries, even though it's portable. It prints at astounding resolution. Here, I'll give you one if you like. [He throws a pen down on the desk.] This is a beautiful example of friendly technology. I spend a lot of time finding good pens." [Forbes ASAP, via Tomalak's Realm]
11:34:08 PM Permanent link here
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" 'The question here - and it's likely one that will have to be decided ultimately by the U.S. Supreme Court - is whether the First Amendment permits the government to withhold subsidies to libraries that don't block access to pornographic sites,' says CBSNews.com Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen. 'To the extent this law is not as broad as its predecessors, and to the extent it focuses on government funding and not on direct limitations of school and libraries, it has a better chance of being upheld....'
Since 1999, the government has provided more than $880 million to public libraries under LSTA, according to the American Library Association, which says the loss of that support could cause small public libraries to shut off Internet service altogether, eliminating Web access to poor people for whom the library is the only Internet portal....
'It's not just Playboy soft-porn nudity. A lot of it's torture. A lot of it's bestiality. And a lot of it is teen hard-core sex,' said Donna Rice Hughes, an Internet safety advocate who works as a consultant for a company that markets blocking software.
Rice Hughes, who campaigns against online pornography, briefly became a household word in the late 1980s as a central figure in the sex scandal that ended former Colorado Democratic Sen. Gary Hart's presidential hopes." [CBS News, via Privacy Digest]
Okay, Miss Pot. I didn't realize it was that Donna Rice. What symmetry. I'll bet if you try to access this article on a filtered computer you won't be able to. Someone want to test this out for me? Don't forget that part of that $880 million is your hard-earned taxpayer money. Do you want that money rescinded from libraries that stood up for your free speech rights? Stay informed.
11:26:45 PM Permanent link here
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29 Reasons Why the NBA Is Better than College Ball [via Plastic]
There is so much wrong with this article that I don't even know where to begin. Most points seem to rate the NBA higher than the NCAA based on commentators and which channels carry the games. Talk about style over substance! Would you rather hear good commentary or watch a good game? (And hey, having Bill Walton for play-by-play is a LIABILITY, not an asset!)
"The NBA has superior ball movement?" You've got to be kidding me. They're so lame they don't even allow zone defense because they can't handle having to use strategy instead of superstars always driving to the basket. Or did the NBA finally allow zone? I don't even know because I stopped watching it years ago. Why doesn't ESPN let me post my comments on this article's page?
Oh, wait. I get it now. The author is using sarcasm to note why the NCAA is actually better than the NBA. Sly little author! Had me going for a minute there....
March Madness rules!
11:09:36 PM Permanent link here
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Court to Napster: Remain Offline
"The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds a federal judge's July ruling that ordered the Redwood City company to keep its free service offline until it can fully comply with an injunction to remove all copyright music.
The decision, though, has little practical effect.
That is because the same appeals court in July blocked the lower court's ruling from being enforced, but Napster never resumed its free service. Instead, it has focused on creating a paid online music service....
At the time, Napster argued that it could block more than 99 percent of all infringing song files. But Patel told Napster it needed to block 100 percent of unauthorized copyright songs or stay offline indefinitely." [New York Times: Technology]
Shouldn't the corollary then be that music publishers can't take their services online unless they are in 100% compliance with existing fair use rights?
Hypocrites.
10:54:05 PM Permanent link here
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Porn-Filter Judge Boots Public
"A trio of federal judges abruptly kicked members of the public out of a library filtering trial on Monday, saying they feared confidential smut-blocking techniques would be disclosed....
N2H2 had provided details on some of its filtering techniques in response to a subpoena from the ACLU. Lawyers for both sides had negotiated before Monday's hearing, and the ACLU said no trade secrets would have been divulged." [Wired News]
How long will it be until we start seeing judges who have at least some passing knowledge about technology? (Ernie?)
10:42:16 PM Permanent link here
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"But what's not fully understood is that the pace of change is itself accelerating, and the last 20 years are not a good guide to the next 20 years. We're doubling the paradigm shift rate, the rate of progress, every decade. This will actually match the amount of progress we made in the whole 20th century, because we've been accelerating up to this point. The 20th century was like 25 years of change at today's rate of change. In the next 25 years we'll make four times the progress you saw in the 20th century. And we'll make 20,000 years of progress in the 21st century, which is almost a thousand times more technical change than we saw in the 20th century....
Most importantly, we'll be able to enhance our biological intelligence with non-biological intelligence through intimate connections. This won't mean just having one thin pipe between the brain and a non-biological system, but actually having non-biological intelligence in billions of different places in the brain. I don't know about you, but there are lots of books I'd like to read and Web sites I'd like to go to, and I find my bandwidth limiting. So instead of having a mere hundred trillion connections, we'll have a hundred trillion times a million. We'll be able to enhance our cognitive pattern recognition capabilities greatly, think faster, and download knowledge." [Edge, via John Robb's Radio Weblog]
10:32:52 PM Permanent link here
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"There’s a reason Washington will be the only state in America without a state library should its door close. Keeping our heritage alive is a privilege, yes. But, more importantly, it’s a duty. What kind of resources will we leave the next generation or the people who will make their homes here 300 years from now should we compromise our legacy in tough times?
Since 1853, the State Library has helped improve the quality of life in Washington. It has given us an accurate account of history—good, bad, or indifferent,—and stopped us from reliving our mistakes." [WA Secretary of State Sam Reed, via H2Oboro lib blog]
Finally, some sanity at the state level in Washington!
10:21:31 PM Permanent link here
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If they're accurate (which they should be, at least in concept), a couple of choice quotes from a session at the PC Forum conference as blogged by Doc.
Esther: We need to think about the rights of citizens, and not just consumers.
Mitch: People are having their cvitizzenship taken away and replaced by consumership.
This is a major issue swirling around the edges of libraries. We're about citizenship, not consumership.
9:57:24 PM Permanent link here
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Oops, I thought I had posted Dan Gillmor's excellent article Bleak Future Looms if You Don't Take a Stand, but apparently I haven't. Here you go.
"Here's my message to the record industry and its allies:
I'm not a thief. I'm a customer. When you treat me like a thief, I won't be your customer.
Enough is enough."
I think I've bought my last CD, too. At least, pretty close to it. This past weekend I was thinking about the last time I bought a CD. I think I bought one in January, and that's a record for me. Even just a year ago I was buying a couple each month. Now... zero. And it's because I'm tired of paying $15 for whole albums that I won't listen to. I want to pick and choose my songs (much like I want to pick and choose my news), and I'm tired of paying so much for an entire album.
Enough is enough.
On a tangential note, I had forgotten what a great album De La Soul's Three Feet High and Rising is. Maybe I'll be back if the music industry releases something as good as that for $10.
9:13:08 PM Permanent link here
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"The real question here is whether the government has the right to demand censorship in return for federal funding. The governments proposition amounts to 'its my ball, and I'll take it home if you don't follow my rules'. But librarys are depositarys of information, the measuring stick of civilization, they must be free of all constraints. In order for democracy to exist, information must flow free. It doesn't matter if that information is a naked chick or the works of Volitare, information is information, and must not be restricted." [kuro5hin.org]
Check out the comments on kuro5hin's post about libraries fighting CIPA. At least some folks appreciate us!
8:01:06 PM Permanent link here
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Request for help: we have our next Tech Summit coming up on May 9, and I really want to cover the DMCA and CDBTPA and how they will affect libraries. I know I could talk about it in the "big picture" context (and I might end up doing that), but does anyone know of or is anyone themselves a speaker knowledgeable enough on this topic that could specifically discuss related legal issues or a historical perspective? I'm going to contact ALA and ask if they can provide someone (maybe we can get a panel going), but I think Senator Hollings has kicked up the urgency on this topic and I want to start educating my member libraries now, not in the fall.
Of course, there's a catch. We're a non-profit organization and we don't have any extra money these days, so we can't really pay the speaker(s). :- Please contact me if you have any ideas, though. Consider it a way to up your good karma quotient!
Sidebar for Paul: if I end up putting something together, we could definitely talk. Otherwise, feel free to point folks towards our session. If I can't pull something off now, maybe we could try to coordinate over the summer.
12:14:33 PM Permanent link here
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"Tony Collen links to two more Pioneer Press articles about blogging." [Scripting News]
I'm blowing my own horn here because I'm one of the interviewees in the Blog.craze article. I'm not sure I said blogging signals a generational shift, although I do think it is embraced along generational lines (providing for the inevitable exceptions like Doc, Dave, etc.) and it will have a much bigger impact on NetGens. It's always weird when you condense an hour-and-a-half conversation down to ten sentences, but Les gets my central thesis right: "You don't go to information anymore — it comes to you."
Kailee will be thrilled to see she's noted in the article, too. Hopefully online news outlets will shift so that she will grow up equally comfortable with both blogs and professional journalism. I do think she'll grow up more comfortable with online media than traditional media, make of that what you will.
The great thing about having my own blog (and Radio providing this service for me so easily) is that I can add my own addendum to Les' article!
And hey, I'll take any good press that highlights librarians, so thanks, Les!
10:55:07 AM Permanent link here
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Bruce sends along a pointer to the new Samsonite Hardlite 625 laptop case. It seems very cool, although you wouldn't know it from the distracting Flash. What I like best about it is the embedded Bluetooth chip that synchronizes devices and notifies the owner if the case is being removed. Add laptop cases to the list of intelligent appliances you didn't know you needed.
9:45:33 AM Permanent link here
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"In spite of some imperfections that RIM will no doubt correct, the device is quite possibly the best existing combination of wireless/e-mail functionality and personal information management....
The 957 is smaller than all other leading PDAs, at about the same width and half the height of a deck of cards. Considering the device's size and built-in wireless functionality (typically a power drain), no similarly equipped PDA I know of can challenge the BlackBerry's battery life. But reliability is really its strong suit. My BlackBerry has crashed only twice and, in both cases, a simple reboot revived the device without any data loss....
Most everyone I know is skeptical about thumbboard-based devices. The keys are so small it's hard to imagine entering contacts or notes--much less responding to e-mail. But you can cut down on your typing by using the 957's pre-programmed--and modifiable--text shortcuts. For example, I programmed "ty" to automatically convert to "Thank you." And the 957's larger display (than the 950) means less scrolling through documents and databases (such as contacts)." [ZDNet AnchorDesk]
And don't forget those NetGens that have already adapted to thumb-based devices. I may have to start seriously thinking about getting one of these later in the year, especially since I could use the mail-to-blog feature of Radio to maintain TSL. I intentionally have not played with one because I know if I hold it in my hand, it will go out the door with me. It sounds like the 957 may finally be the "killer app" version.
9:00:46 AM Permanent link here
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"You might think third-generation (3G) mobile phones would be fun for watching video messages sent from friends and family. But Japanese law enforcement has another use in mind for these high-tech phones: fighting crime. How? They hope anyone who witnesses a crime will capture video footage of the event, and then e-mail it to police. Police offices in Osaka have reportedly set up an emergency videophone hotline, to launch in April, to aid the process." [ZDNet News]
I think I find this creepy since I know human nature. I can't imagine how many more Rodney King videos we're going to see in the future, good or bad.
8:52:53 AM Permanent link here
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Today is "Heritage Day" at SLS. Yay! This is a tradition at SLS, at least as long I've been here (five years). Kate would know the history, so I'll have to ask her. Once a year, we have a party for which everyone brings in a dish that is specific to their ethnicity and we all chow down heartily throughout the day. Luckily, the folks here are all great cooks.
I always declare my ethnicity as "chocolate," and this year was no exception. I made chocolate covered Tollhouse brownies, which are most excellent on a cold and windy day like today. (Actually, they're good on any day, but you already knew that, didn't you?.) Fill a 9x9 pan with chocolate chip cookie dough, bake until the center is done, pour a bag of chocolate chips on top, bake for one minute, spread the melted chocolate across the top, and let cool. Then gorge.
8:46:48 AM Permanent link here
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"The idea is that we should have all our information services always available, no matter what we are doing, and as unobtrusive as possible. If I pick up your cell phone today and make a call, it charges you, not me. With our prototype H21s, when you pick one up and use it, it recognizes your face and customizes itself to you—it knows your schedule and where you want to be. You can talk to it, ask it for directions or make calls from it. It provides you access to the Web under voice or stylus command. And it can answer your questions rather than just giving you Web pages that you have to crawl through.
The E21s provide the same sorts of services in a pervasive environment. The walls become screens, and the system handles multiple people by tracking them and responding to each person individually. We are experimenting with new sorts of user interfaces much like current whiteboards, except with software systems understanding what you are saying to other people, what you are sketching or writing, and connecting you with, for instance, a mechanical-design system as you work. Instead of you being drawn solitarily into the computer’s virtual desktop as you work, it supports you as you work with other people in a more natural way....
In 10 years, we’ll see better vision systems in handheld units and in the wall units. This will be coupled with much better speech interfaces. In 10 years the commercial systems will be using computer vision to look at your face as you’re talking to improve recognition of what you are saying. In a few years, the cameras, the microphone arrays will be in the ceiling in your office and will be tracking people and discriminating who is speaking when, so that the office can understand who wants to do what and provide them with the appropriate information. We’re already demonstrating that in our Intelligent Room here in the A.I. Lab. I’ll be talking to you—then I’ll point, and up on the wall comes a Web page that relates to what I’m saying. It’s like Star Trek, in that the computer will always be available." [MIT Technology Review, via bOing bOing]
A very thought-provoking interview with Rodney Brooks (the Director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab) that is well worth your time. Plus, I'm adding Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us by Rodney Brooks to The Shifted Reading List.
7:43:49 AM Permanent link here
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"This morning in a Philadelphia courtroom, a coalition of libraries, Web sites and library patrons will begin nine days of hearings in which they will ask three federal judges to help decide a seemingly simple question: What is a library for?
They argue that a law passed by Congress in December 2000 requiring schools and libraries to use Internet filtering software changes the nature of libraries from being places that provide information to places that unconstitutionally restrict it....
They call [CIPA] a case of good intentions leading to a bad result, hamstringing the computers that are, for many people, the sole link to the Internet. They argue that the law pre-empts community control over libraries and the judgment of local librarians. They also point to the failings of the software, which can let objectionable material through and block constitutionally protected sites. The law constitutes 'classic prior restraint on speech,' said Ann Beeson, staff lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Those in favor of the filtering law say its opponents mischaracterize the law and the software. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who co-sponsored the bill, has said it 'allows local communities to decide what technology they want to use, and what to filter out, so that our children's minds aren't polluted....'
Donna Rice Hughes, an opponent of pornography who has supported mandatory filtering, said the law contained "a tremendous amount of flexibility." She noted that the precise technology to be used by libraries was not prescribed, and that a library patron with a 'bona fide research or other lawful purpose' can get the library to temporarily turn off the filters....
Librarians and their allies say the simple message is complex in practice. Families might do well with filters as part of the close supervision of a child's Internet wanderings at home, opponents of the bill say, but the same technology is ill-suited for use in libraries. Turning off the filters, they say, is cumbersome, and having to prove a "bona fide" research purpose violates users' privacy." [NY Times]
This is another very important issue for libraries and their users, so I'm glad the American Library Association challenged this law. Too often, people with good intentions forget that they wouldn't want other folks' beliefs and filters forced on them. For some reason, it's okay that they do it to everyone else, though. John Ashcroft is a perfect example of this. He doesn't want to see the naked statues that someone else placed in the public's Great Hall of the Justice Department, so he places his own moral code over them and covers them up, thereby covering them up for all. But if I walk in there and uncover them because I do want to see them, I'd probably be arrested for forcing my own beliefs on him.
When we went to library school, we all knew we would be part of the ongoing debate over censorship of books, but I don't think we realized we were going to be the future battleground in the digital wars.
7:31:49 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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