Thursday, January 23, 2003

Feds Open Portal for Online Comments on Regulations In a step forward for e-government, the Bush Administration today unveiled a new web site, http://www.regulations.gov, that allows individuals to more easily find and comment on proposed rules being considered by federal agencies. Increasingly, government agencies have been accepting online comments opposing or supporting proposed regulations, and a 1998 law requires all agencies, "when practicable," to accept submission of online comments by October of this year. But in the past, citizens had to know what agency might have responsibility for an area of interest. The new regulations.gov web site allows Internet users to search by keyword across government agencies for areas of interest, rather than having to guess which agency is writing a particular regulation. The site also creates a common interface for filing comments. Agencies generally have different rules about what kind of information they want from persons submitting comments and different formatting styles. The new web site automatically provide submitters with the proper fields needed to submit comments to all covered agencies. (via The The Center For Democracy and Technology's CDT POLICY POST) 8:20:04 PM    comment [] Human Genome on an iPod. A genetics researcher in New Hampshire carries around the entire Human Genome on spare space on his iPod, rather than wait for the data to transfer over the university network. After all, the iPod can download up to 1,000 songs in less than 10 minutes. What's 3 billion As, Ts, Cs, and Gs? Well, with 4x compression, Gilbert estimates, the human took up less than 1GB of disk space on his 5GB iPod, which also contained 300 songs. He recently upgraded to a 10GB iPod, on which he stores 600 songs plus the human genome. (Yahoo News via the relentlessly astounding Boing Boing Blog) 8:11:04 PM    comment [] Big In Japan Sony said yesterday it has begun sales in Japan of CD singles that require users to pay a small fee over the Internet each time they make copies. Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc said the new CDs are designed to prevent piracy of music over the Internet, making anyone other than the buyer who wants to listen to music from the CDs pay a small fee on the company's Web site. The company [said] it currently has no plans to use the technology outside of Japan. (Taipei Times via Blogcritics.org) 7:56:54 PM    comment [] DVD Fairy Tale   (Russell Pavlicek) ONCE UPON A TIME, in a land far, far away, there was a young man named Jon. Jon was a decent, intelligent young man, who lived a fairly normal life with his family. One day, Jon purchased a DVD. He thought to himself, "I have a laptop with a DVD drive on it. Why don't I watch this movie on my laptop?" But there was a problem. His Linux laptop had no program that would allow him to watch his DVD, and one was not available commercially. Being a bright and industrious young man, Jon thought to himself, "Maybe I'll write some code so I can watch this movie I bought." Jon labored long and hard, and using only some ingenuity and information found in the public arena, he finally found a way to view the movie on his laptop. Jon was happy. And being a generous soul, he decided to share his program with others so that they might watch their DVDs on their PCs, too. One day, Jon received an angry letter from an organization in a far away land. "Thief! Pirate! Criminal!" read the letter. "You have no right to view that movie on your laptop! And you have no right to tell others how to do so!" So the far-away organization complained to the police, and the police came, raided Jon's home, and arrested the young man. It tried to find evidence that young Jon sought to commit acts of piracy but could not. After three long years, Jon was put on trial. "Thief! Pirate! Criminal!" they cried to the judge. But the judge disagreed. "Not guilty!" said the judge. "Jon merely wanted to view his DVD on his laptop, and as a consumer, he has that right. He is not a thief, nor a pirate, nor a criminal!" Just a modern fairy tale? Unfortunately, no. This is basically the story of young Jon Lech Johansen of Norway, who at the tender age of 16 wanted to view his DVDs on his Linux laptop. Once he figured out how, he released the code as open source so that others could watch their legally purchased DVDs, too. The motion picture industry and its European allies, incensed that Jon's work might be used to pirate movies, demanded that he be tried as a criminal. But in a January ruling that had more to do with justice than political correctness, the Norway court acquitted him. Jon's DeCSS code does exactly what he claims: It allows consumers to view their legal DVDs. If I see one more news report claiming that it "allows people to pirate DVDs," I'll scream. You don't need DeCSS to pirate DVDs. But you do need DeCSS or something similar to view DVDs under Linux. The absence of a legally available DVD solution has reduced DVD sales in the developer community. It is time for DVD producers to worry less about open-source code, which empowers consumers and promotes DVD sales, and worry more about real piracy, such as illegal DVD copies appearing in Asia before a film is even released. Russell Pavlicek is an independent open-source consultant. Contact him at pavllicek@linuxprofessionalsolutions.com. Log on to his forum at www.infoworld.com/os. 7:25:26 PM    comment [] Netlogo NetLogo is a programmable modeling environment for simulating natural and social phenomena. It is particularly well suited for modeling complex systems developing over time. Modelers can give instructions to hundreds or thousands of independent "agents" all operating in parallel. This makes it possible to explore the connection between the micro-level behavior of individuals and the macro-level patterns that emerge from the interaction of many individuals. NetLogo lets students open simulations and "play" with them, exploring their behavior under various conditions. It is also an "authoring tool" which enables students, teachers and curriculum developers to create their own models. NetLogo is simple enough that students and teachers can easily run simulations or even build their own. And, it is advanced enough to serve as a powerful tool for researchers in many fields. NetLogo has extensive documentation and tutorials for all of its features. It also comes with a Models Library, which is a large collection of pre-written simulations that can be used and modified. These simulations address many content areas in the natural and social sciences, including biology and medicine, physics and chemistry, mathematics and computer science, and economics and social psychology. Several model-based inquiry curricula using NetLogo are currently under development. 7:11:25 PM    comment [] America: European Perspective I   (Brian Eno) Europeans have always looked at America with a mixture of fascination and puzzlement, and now, increasingly, disbelief. How is it that a country that prides itself on its economic success could have so many very poor people? How is it that a country so insistent on the rule of law should seek to exempt itself from international agreements? And how is it that the world's beacon of democracy can have elections dominated by wealthy special interest groups? For me, the question has become: "How can a country that has produced so much cultural and economic wealth act so dumb?" When Europeans make such criticisms, Americans assume we're envious. "They want what we've got," the thinking goes, "and if they can't get it, they're going to stop us from having it." But does everyone want what America has? Well, we like some of it but could do without the rest: among the highest rates of violent crime, economic inequality, functional illiteracy, incarceration and drug use in the developed world. President Bush recently declared that the U.S. was "the single surviving model of human progress." Maybe some Americans think this self-evident, but the rest of us see it as a clumsy arrogance born of ignorance. Europeans tend to regard free national health services, unemployment benefits, social housing and so on as pretty good models of human progress. We think it's important - civilized, in fact - to help people who fall through society's cracks. This isn't just altruism, but an understanding that having too many losers in society hurts everyone. It's better for everybody to have a stake in society than to have a resentful underclass bent on wrecking things. To many Americans, this sounds like socialism, big government, the nanny state. But so what? The result is: Europe has less gun crime and homicide, less poverty and arguably a higher quality of life than the U.S., which makes a lot of us wonder why America doesn't want some of what we've got. ("The US Needs to Open Up to the World", from the Jan 20, 2003 issue of the European edition of Time Magazine) America: European Perspective II   (John LeCarre) The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world’s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions. But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies are riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are told. The US defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around $360 billion. A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the pipeline, so we can all breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long, please? At what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American taxpayer’s pocket? At what cost — because most of those 88 per cent are thoroughly decent and humane people — in Iraqi lives? (The Times Online via GreaterDemocracy.org) 6:19:55 PM    comment [] The Resource Shelf I like the Resource Shelf! It lists "Resources and News for Information Professionals" but we amateur information hunter-gatherers will also find much there to appreciate. I signed up for their weekly newsletter, which serves to remind me to check this excellent resource out every week. Here's what I found of interest in this week's crop of entries (The commentary is from the Resource Shelf site): MSN Maps (this is their resource of the week) I'm pointing out MSN Maps this week because of how clear, clean, and crisp MSN Maps look on a monitor and when printed on paper. Overview maps are available for the entire World. Street level maps (accessed by entering as little as a city name) are available for Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxemborg, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, U.K. and U.S. Make sure to take a look at the largest maps available. To access them simply click the third box at the top of the map labeled "Map Size". Here are a few examples. Remember, you're able to zoom in and out for more or less detail. don't forget to expand the maps to the large size. Looking good! A Street Level Map ("Address In") Map for Portland Place in London, U.K. A "Place Name" Search and Map for the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Netherlands A "Place Name" Search and Map for Dakar, Senegal Note: Place Names Can Be Cities, Museums, Airports, Train Stations, Rivers, etc. See the Help page for more details. I sort of hate to pat MS on the back as they are slightly evil, but when they do something right, as they have in this case, they really do it quite well. This is your friendly blogger talking now, not the guy from the Resource Shelf: Nice maps, motherfuckers! Moving right along... Web Search--Daypop Daypop Upgrade and Fast Facts Daypop, a specialized search tool focusing on news and weblog content, reports that they are now crawling over 10,500 weblogs. Here are A Few "Fast Facts" About Daypop Via an E-Mail with Dan Chan (Daypop's Founder and Sole Proprietor): 1) "Weblogs are initially set to be crawled every 12 hours. Depending on how often a weblog is updated, it may get crawled less often, or more often if it pings weblogs.com." 2) "There are 1000 news sources. The big sites get recrawled every three hours. The majority of the sites are crawled every 24 hours." 3) Odds and Ends -- "Appending &o=rss in a search URL? It outputs RSS so you can monitor with a news aggregator." --There's a Daypop Top 40 archive at http://www.daypop.com/top/archive/ . Similarly, the Daypop Top News archive is at http://www.daypop.com/news/archive/ --"Appending &sum=desc to a search URL brings up a description of the page, usually the first paragraph of a news article." Music Search Source: Reuters "Song Search: A Real Humdinger" From the article, "Query by Humming," a type of melody-recognition software program on display at this week's Midem music conference in Cannes that identifies a song by title and composer based on a person humming a few bars into a microphone." Thanks to J.D. for the news tip. See Also: Learn About Another Product, Shazam (via IDG) "The service works like this: When you hear a song you like but can't identify, you simply dial a short code (2580 in the U.K.), hold your handset up to capture the music, wait 15 seconds while Shazam's patent-pending technology listens to the music and then receive an SMS (short messaging service) identifying the track and artist. Shazam refers to the identification process as "tagging." Web Search--Teoma Source: Search Day Teoma Unveils Version 2.0 Most of what makes up today's "official" launch has been covered on the ResourceShelf over the past few months. Nevertheless, take a look at the article that I co-authored with Danny Sullivan for a review (or an intro) to all of the new goodies from Teoma. As I've said on many occasions Teoma offers great possibilities for the web searcher. I'm thrilled to see that the product continues to develop into a useful resource. The Search Day article also contains links to a few articles that will offer you background about how Teoma works and what makes it different from other web search tools. 2:15:22 PM    comment []

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