jill/txt

Friday: May 21, 2004

[social fabric rent]

Clay Shirky has an interesting point in his response to the MT debacle:

The dilemma for people who build communal tools is this: if you want something that hooks people emotionally, you cannot have rational users, and vice-versa. And when you build a tool that helps create a social fabric, changes to the tool trigger social anxieties.

As you'll see from the comments, class gets brought up here. I'm gainfully enough employed now that if I live cheaply I have money over to travel far and even to take the occasional taxi home from the airport, and yes, I could afford $69, but not long ago it would have been a choice of having fresh fruit and vegetables for my child this month or a software licence. Obviously, it doesn't help that Dave Winer's calling MT users whiney children, backing this up with an astonishingly myopic statement like this:

Yesterday we saw people complain about spending $60 for a big useful piece of software like Movable Type. I paid $60 for a cab ride in Geneva. A good dinner is $100. A hotel room $150.

$69 means very different things to different people.

Mum says all these posts about Movable Type are excruciatingly boring. I'd try and think of something more interesting, but it's cold and raining and I miss my boyfriend. Ah well. I'd do better working on those timestamps.

Thursday: May 20, 2004

[other countries' ceremonies]

We don't really celebrate graduations en masse in Norway, well, except PhD graduations, I suppose, so last week I was astonished to hear Pomp and Circumstance played as the graduates walked in (the most familiar part of the melody on repeat) and found myself confused, even wondering whether that could be the Star Spangled Banner and I'd just forgotten the tune, but why then the words in my head: Land of hope and glory, kingdom of the free? What strange irony for a song about a kingdom where the sun never sets to be played at an American graduation ceremony.

My favourite part of the ceremony, was watching the parents and cousins and siblings and grandparents standing up as the graduates poured into the many seats provided for them, peering to see their young ones, some yelling out names, many waving, and the graduates themselves responding by craning their necks, waving back, proud grins visible even from my distant seat.

The first speech was by a faculty member who was British. He spoke about how strange it was for him to hear such an English song reappropriate for American graduations, and said how proud Elgar would have been to hear his music played at such an occasion, its audience completely unaware of the imperialistic words added to it after Elgar wrote it, words that any British (and if I'm representative, Australian-Norwegian) listener could not help but hear listening to that music even today. Elgar hated those words, apparently. The speaker, I think, managed to say everything about his own opinions of empires, hopefully without going so far as to offend parents who no doubt wanted a celebration of their children rather than political statements.

The best thing about immersing myself in other cultures is that my own prejudices become visible to me. Some I'll keep, others I'll reconsider, but not taking things for granted is always of value. Things don't mean the same thing everywhere.

[Correction: I'd written Edgar, and of course, as Mark points out in his comments, it's Elgar. Oops! I corrected it.]

[penalise the spammers, not the community]

In a discussion of anti-spam remedies over at Grandtextauto, Nick argues that attacking spam by crippling blogs and other arenas for public discussion is not solving anything: instead we should devise anti-spam tactics that penalise the spammers. Wouldn't that be brilliant?

I'm getting so much spam here these days that it seems every time I look at my blog there's new spam comments. I delete them as often as I see them (using MT-blacklist, with a blacklist growing absurdly long) but they're incessant. And ugly and infuriating.

Wednesday: May 19, 2004

[no human intervention]

If you complain to US Airways about being on the Selectee list, the form letter you receive in return (PDF available from EPIC) includes the following comfort:

CAPPS is a government administered computer application that operates in the background of our reservations computer system. This application scans the data in each reservation record and prompts for additional security measures when specific data are present. There is no human intervention in the CAPPS selection process and US Airways personnel cannot modify a reservation to prevent a search or cause a passenger to be selected. An "S" is printed on the boardign pass of each passenger who is a CAPPS selection so that our gate personnel and security agents know which customers require additional screening.

You can read a thick wad of customer complaints and form letter responses in this PDF (from EPIC's problems page)

Compare this to Google's bragging about the objectivity of GoogleNews:

Google News is highly unusual in that it offers a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention. Google employs no editors, managing editors, or executive editors. While the sources of the news vary in perspective and editorial approach, their selection for inclusion is done without regard to political viewpoint or ideology.

Or, indeed, look at ValueCents, a program that interprets financial data, and according to the CEO, "has two unique benefits. First, the analysis is objective. There is no human intervention; it is being generated by artificial intelligence."

Do most people really trust computers more than people? Is it because they have no faces? How on earth can we think an algorithm is objective!?

(Related: my posts on links and power from 2002)

[back to iraq 3.0]

Christopher Allbritton is back in Iraq. He's the freelance journalist who collected $15000 in donations and went to Iraq to report directly in his blog last March. His posts will no doubt be interesting, but oh dear, I hope he doesn't get beheaded or something.

[bureaucracy]

Wow. Nobody from US immigration actually checks your passport when you leave the country. Every other country I've ever left has immigration do this, but in the US, they leave it to the airlines. I guess in my case the check-in guy forgot to do his job, because I noticed that green departure record is still in my passport. Wanting to be able to return to the US, I rang the embassy, because, you know, they'll think I'm still there. Ring back Friday between 2 and 4, they said, which made me remember tales told by people who'd rung every Friday for weeks and not gotten through.

So I did a Google, as you would, and my goodness, I have a lot of work to do.

Better start acting in a way that documents I'm home, huh? At least they stamped my passport properly when I entered Schengen. And I didn't lose my boarding pass. Should be OK.

Tuesday: May 18, 2004

[commerical efforts]

I just almost bought Moveable Type 3.0 for jill/txt. Regardless of how long I keep using Moveable Type, I figured I've certainly had enough pleasure and use from it that I'm willing to pay $70. The teaching blogs I can figure out later. But this time I read the licence before clicking accept (uh, no, I don't always, do you?), and you see, I think I'd be in breach of a personal licence, look: ""Non-Commercial Purposes" means use of the Software by an individual for publishing on a personal blog site on a single sever that does not directly or indirectly support any commercial efforts." Well. Indirectly, you know, some of the talks I've given and the essays I've been asked to write - for pay - are at least in part due to people having read my blog. So does that mean I need to buy a commercial licence for my personal blog?

I clicked cancel. Maybe later.

[using moveable type with lots of students]

In a wonderful use of trackbacks, Mena Trott's asking us to tell them how we use Moveable Type. Here's how I use it - mostly for teaching, but also in my personal blog.

Continue reading "using moveable type with lots of students"

[S]

There was an S on my boarding pass today. S for Search, S for Suspicious; I'm not sure what it stands for but when there's an S on your boarding pass they'll single you out and search you specially. A friendly check in man once explained that the airline automatically selects S passengers - if you buy your ticket less than n days before the flight, or pay with cash, or have a one-way ticket, you'll get an S for sure. I suppose either there are other rules that covered me or they assign some Ses at random.

Once siphoned into a special searching space I was asked to sit while my shoes were x-rayed, my bags were perfunctorily searched and a metal-detecting wand passed along my body. I've been searched as closely in ordinary security checks. It wasn't the searching that was bad. It was being stamped as Suspicious that made my adreneline rise till I felt guilty and angry though I still forced a smile that kept the security guards smiling too. When I got on the plane and showed the flight attendent my boarding pass I cringed to know that she too saw the S.

Most of the time I'm fortunate that I can pretend I'm a free citizen in an open and trusting society. Crossing borders, that illusion becomes very thin.

Sunday: May 16, 2004

[wordpress]

Mark Pilgrim has an eloquent post about reasons why open source software is good, and it's not about the money. He's switched to Wordpress, as hordes of other bloggers are doing. I haven't researched the alternatives, but Wordpress does look good. Not sufficient for my students, but I've got half a year to work that out. Wordpress have even set up an installation you can play with - simply log in as admin/demo. The installation looks a lot simpler than the Moveable Type installation, except I'm going to find out what my server's MySQL setup is. Which shouldn't be too hard.

[paper on blogs]

I haven't read this freshly published paper yet, but will soon. It's one of the first papers on blogs to be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal: Edmonds, K. Andrew, James Blustein and Don Turnbull. "A Personal Information and Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator". Journal of Digital Information, 5:1, 2004. Actually it's not exacltly about blogs but about using blogs as a basis for thinking about knowledge organisation.

The Next Big Thing is being grown organically, cultivated by software developers and pruned by personal Weblog publishers. The rising Weblogging space of the Internet is looking more like traditional hypertext than the Web of the 1990s. The ways in which Weblogging has evolved beyond the previous limitations of the Web as hypertext, and the ways Weblogging is evolving towards common-use hypertext destined to play a critical role in everyday life, will be explored. We have a vision of a universal information management system built on extending the traditional hypertext framework. In our utopian future, everyone will use tools descended from today's blogs to structure, search and share personal information, as well as to participate in shared discussion. We begin by expressing a vision of common-use hypertext for information management and interpersonal communication. This vision is grounded in the rapid evolution of Weblogs and known issues in information systems and hypertext. The practical implications of who will use these systems, and how, is expanded as usage scenarios for Weblogs now and in the future. After recapping the current issues facing the Weblogging community, we look to the long-range implementation issues with optimism. Our system is forward-looking yet realistic. The activities the system will support are extrapolated from recent developments in the online community, and most of the sketches of implementation are based on current approaches. It is of more than passing interest that the features we extrapolate were all described by Nelson as early hypertext ideals. Of particular interest is that the features are now being implemented because of perceived immediate need by communities of interest.

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