Tuesday, May 13, 2003

There has been quite a bit of anecdotal support for the conjecture that teenagers prefer IM over email for communication. The paper referenced here is probably interesting. On a related note there is the concept of a happening - an ad-hoc multimodal event. 10:53:09 AM     Vanu Inc is showing the first practical portable software defined radio I've seen. In a software defined radio the modulation waveforms are defined in software. In the transmitter the waveforms are generated as digital signals, converted to analog using a wideband digital to analog convertor and then upconverted to RF (many of the current software defined radio designs skip this last step). A receiver extracts, downconverts and demodulates the signal in software (like the transmitter, the first two steps are not generally done in software, but moving there is the goal). This is very cool stuff that would lead to very flexible radios. Far too expensive and cumbersome for today, but there is real promise here. 6:29:08 AM     Dave recently made some points about blogs and the news Jon Bonne of the MSNBC responded Dave answered In my mind blogging isn't reporting so much as aggregating and editorializing. On the other hand I can't think of any major commercial network that does what I would consider reporting (finding stories, vetting sources and indicating the bias of the report). With blogs you have the issue of finding a set of reasonable voices. It is much easier for me to listen to NPR the BBC and CBC; watch PBS (news hour, NOW and Frontline) and read a few newspapers (NY Times, Guardian, LA Times, Salon, Washington Post) to get my particular flavor of the news. Most of the bloggers I trust quote heavily from these sources rather than break news, so blogs become a mechanism for digesting large amounts of news - turning some power over to people with the "librarian gene" Still - it is interesting to watch the interchange between conventional journalists and folks like Dave Weiner. (I would love to see a serious blogging effort in a primary, but it would be important to establish the voices of the bloggers before the final campaign) _____ The issue of media ownership has largely been avoided by the commercial media despite a looming FCC ruling (PBS listeners are aware of it as are NOW viewers and careful NY Times readers, but it has not been covered elsewhere until the past week). Paul Krugman comments on it and the interesting disparity between the US and the UK. I note that many of the news sources (especially commercial network and cable TV sources) are not doing anything remotely resembling careful news gathering and reporting. Mediareform.net is a good starting place if you want to follow issues and news associated with media control. If this troubles you it is very important to hammer your representatives now. A few weeks ago the office of our US Representative said they were unaware of any feedback from voters in his district. 5:51:39 AM     OS X users should check out the seasonal Red Pill screensaver on Versiontracker. 5:31:23 AM

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