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Tuesday, December 27, 2005
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And self expression and exploration.
....Combined, the two developments
speak to some fundamental changes in the way the public views news and
other mass information: People have grown increasingly mistrustful of
U.S. media organizations' historical claims of objectivity (long
ridiculed by European journalists as impossible), and many citizens are
willing to take on reporting responsibilities of their own through
blogs, wikis, social networks or other online vehicles.
Many hope that the result will be a return to the country's
journalistic roots, with news that actually reflects the concerns of
ordinary people--a concept that, for whatever reason, seems to have
gotten lost in the last couple hundred years.
[has some comments on the site]
Self portrait tuesday
is about self expression and exploration. The idea is each tuesday you
post a self portrait on your blog, give a brief explanation of the
picture - you may include your state of mind, what you were trying to
do, technical information about the image etc. Link back to the list of
other SPT people - thus enabling everyone to share and explore each
others self portrait experience.
from the site (has links in the
following)
How it got started:
Self-portrait Tuesday (SPT) started a few months back when I posted a
self-portrait on my personal/craft/art weblog. I wrote a little about
why I take self-portraits and this seemed to spark something in some of
my readers. A few of them started to post Self-portraits too ( bird in
the hand, port2port, scrapalicious and Nikkishell were enthusiastic) So
self-portrait Tuesday was started. After a few weeks it had started to
become quite popular, so I put a list together for everyone to check
out each other[base ']s SPT's. Soon a self-portrait Tuesday flickr group was
created (by Joy at scrapalicious) and more people joined.
Power
to the (online) people
In prehistoric times, i.e., before the Internet, getting a political
movement off the ground meant getting your hands dirty. You had to go
find your target audience and talk to them, find volunteers to go
knocking on doors or cold-call people on the phone. There were letters
to write and envelopes to stuff, and it was just a lot of work. Then
along came the 'Net, where you could publish one web page and the whole
world could find it. Easy-to-use e-mail lists, and later on, instant
messaging and blogs, also helped simplifying the process of drumming up
support from your friends, neighbors, and countrymen....
The Associated Press just released a story detailing the efforts of a
few individual citizens who got tired of waiting for change, and took
matters into their own hands. The causes run the gamut from the
admirable and the game-changing to the offbeat and ridiculous; the
article's examples range from a stay-at-home mom who felt disempowered
when MoveOn.org lost momentum after John Kerry's loss in the 2004
elections, and decided to run her own political mailing list, to a
woman who organized a group of pug owners (yeah, the ugly dog) to save
a punk rock club on the edge of extinction....
Flickr, 2005 -
Your Single Best Photo - pool
Flickr submitters retain ALL rights to photos they submit.
The restrictions on use vary - so see the photographer's site on flickr
for what is allowed.
(The links only below are highly restricted, only viewable at Flickr,
while the shown pictures have some uses permitted.)
Two
Hands
versailles
it's
the biggest lightbulb
oaxaca, mexico
Ouarzazate
Tangier
Clouds - Tucson AZ
Where bricks go to die
Mesa Verde
Jaiphur, India
Napa Valley (from hot air balloon)
You might consider the photo-journalism here.
Not the headline journalism,
but the common joy and beauty found across the landscape.
This is a small sample of the submissions that I relate to
out ot the 1100+ photos submited.
1:30:26 PM 
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And an explosion of commentary on it
maybe it's the year-end navel scanning?
but... could it be true?
Daniel Gross writes:
What
Makes a Nation More Productive? It's Not Just Technology - New
York Times : Today, as bubble-era books like "Dow 36,000" collect
dust on library shelves, evidence is mounting that there may be a new
economy after all. In the late 1990's, growth in labor productivity -
the amount of output per hour per worker - kicked into a higher gear.
[snip]
...One mystery of recent years has been
the enduring gap in productivity growth between the United States and
Europe. In this case, another structural force - regulation - may be at
work. "In economies with less regulation, companies can use information
communications technology that link sectors to one another in ways that
create joint productivity," said Gail Fosler, executive vice president
and chief economist at the Conference Board. Because domestic retailers
don't face the same sorts of restrictions on working hours and road use
that European retailers do, for example, the Americans have been better
able to use technology to manage trucking fleets, deliveries and
inventory....
Yes, it could be true.
But there remains the question about the Luddites.
A clue may be in this link.
Maybe
Telecommuting Just Isn't Meant To Be
For years and years, we've discussed
various trends in telecommuting, noting earlier this year that high
gas prices and public
transit strikes might help push the trend even further. However,
the problems
of telecommuting continue to mean that it's just not for everyone.
The NY Times notes that, even in the transit strike last week, many
workers who could have telecommuted preferred
to brave the cold and go into the office. There are a variety of
reasons given -- from the traditional need for "face time" to the basic
separation between home and work life. For many, it appears, the
"commute" is more than just the function of getting from home to the
office and back again, but a mental separator to keep work out of home
life. That's one issue that's not so easy to break down with
technology. Still, it will be interesting to see if that's more a
generational issue. I would imagine that today's multi-tasking,
instant-messaging, text-messaging, listening-to-music, watching-tv,
surfing-the-web all at once kids might not have as much need to
separate home life from work life.
[ Techdirt Corporate
Intelligence: Techdirt Wireless News]
Two things stick out for me
- well, we are primates after all - we need others around. In part
to know what we feel.
- "a mental separator to keep work out of home
life" - this is linked to primates and feelings. But there is more
here. We tend to think of home as "safe," we can let our guard down
(well somewhat). Bringing work into it, brings the risks - the flight
or fight urges from "that" place to "this" place.
With no separator, the worries of both might feed on each other.
Or one might bury the other.
Some love the mix, the variety of "always connected" but others resist.
That might be the defining issue in this culture shift to the "digital
age".
And why there is a digital divide.
Well, there is also Kurzweil and his idea of Singularity.
"The Singularity" is a phrase borrowed
from the astrophysics of black holes. The phrase has varied meanings;
as used by Vernor Vinge and Raymond Kurzweil, it refers to the idea
that accelerating technology will lead to superhuman machine
intelligence that will soon exceed human intelligence, probably by the
year 2030. The results on the other side of the "event horizon," they
say, are unpredictable. We'll try anyway.
THE
SINGULARITY : A TALK WITH RAY KURZWEIL [3.25.01]
We are entering a new era. I call it "the Singularity." It's a merger
between human intelligence and machine intelligence is going to create
something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution on our
planet. One can make a strong case that it's actually the cutting edge
of the evolution of intelligence in general, because there's no
indication that it's occurred anywhere else. To me that is what human
civilization is all about. It is part of our destiny and part of the
destiny of evolution to continue to progress ever faster, and to grow
the power of intelligence exponentially.To contemplate stopping that [~]
to think human beings are fine the way they are [~] is a misplaced fond
remembrance of what human beings used to be. What human beings are is a
species that has undergone a cultural and technological evolution, and
it's the nature of evolution that it accelerates, and that its powers
grow exponentially, and that's what we're talking about. The next stage
of this will be to amplify our own intellectual powers with the results
of our technology.
The
Intuitive Linear View versus the
Historical Exponential View
Most long range forecasts of technical feasibility in future time
periods dramatically underestimate the power of future technology
because they are based on what I call the " intuitive linear" view of
technological progress rather than the " historical exponential view."
To express this another way, it is not the case that we will experience
a hundred years of progress in the twenty-first century; rather we will
witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (at today's
rate of progress, that is).
Well, he is an optimist.
What I think we need to worry about is:
- What if he's even half right?
- What do we do as a significant number of our fellow tourists
trekking into the future
do not want even 25 years of technological progress in the next 25
years.
They want every thing to be the same as now -
expect what they wish or need will change
(say treatment for my family's illnesses but let me pay for it doing
the work I've always done).
The difficulty is less the resistance to change, its the resistance to
adopting (changing) the financial, legal, medical, social environment
for accommodating the prospective change. For even considering what is
structurally needed for even the "every thing to be the same as now -
expect what they wish or need will change."
10:19:36 AM
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extracted
(But its a for pay page anyway).
Mark
Thoma reports that Paul
Krugman writes,
the rise of medical technology ...
makes ... medicine ... in which
doctors call for every procedure that might be of medical benefit,
increasingly expensive.
This is the position that I arrived at
in my research on health care
costs. That is, our health care spending is high because of the
expenses involved in diagnosis and treatment, as we throw more
technology (and also more specialists) at the problem.
[ EconLog: Library of Economics
and
Liberty]
9:39:54 AM
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they can do more with
voice applications then just dial a phone number
From the article
...Most new cellphones have
voice-recognition software already included; on some others the
software can be downloaded. With the most advanced software, users can
dictate a text or e-mail message, find a calendar item on the phone or
jump directly to a ring tone and buy it with a simple command like
"Madonna ring tone."
This last possibility is especially appealing for carriers, which have
content on their mobile portals they are trying to sell clients, most
of whom cannot be bothered to click through multiple menus to find what
might interest them.
"The challenge has been getting people to realize they can do more with
voice applications then just dial a phone number," said Collin Holmes,
director of product marketing for V-Enable, a San Diego-based company
that makes voice-recognition search software....
9:10:28 AM
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8:52:16 AM
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2006: The End
of Traditional TV?
Broadcast dinosaurs still rule the earth. Place shifting, DVRs, IPTV,
on-line broadband video; Terry Heaton thinks that 2006 is the year
traditional broadcast television meets its maker (via GigaOM). "I
believe history will look back at 2006 as the year of an unbundled
awakening in the medi..
[ Broadbandreports]
but I think this is premature
for the non-geek universe.
8:45:37 AM
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No internet connection cuts off a main
artery of life. On a short
holiday a variety of computers broke down, the internet connection blew
up, or just, whatever. Suddenly there went the knowledge, the
connectedness, the information of usual daily life.
We are in the world of the
information haves and have nots. Cut
yourself off from the net for three days and you realize how dramatic
that divide is already and will become.
actually... think about it
it speaks volumes
about the silence
the have nots hear
It's like living in the world of color
thinking black and white
is good enough.
8:34:17 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Russ Savage.
Last update: 1/15/06; 7:33:25 AM.
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