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Monday, November 29 2004

Do-Not-Call List Rules to Be Weakened?

Slashdot discussion of a Chicago Sun Times article regarding the FTC's proposed rule change "to allow telemarketing calls that deliver a prerecorded message to consumers with whom the seller on whose behalf the calls are made has an established business relationship." In other words, to let people who you've bought something from robo-call you with automated messages, even if you're on the federal Do Not Call list.
Want to let the government know your thoughts on whether companies should be able to robocall you? Fill out their comment form.

Sunday, November 28 2004

Trippy little personal art site...

Surfing around the web looking for Dave McKean-related information and items led me to the website for Adam Schwarcz and Fumi Nakamura. Featuring some of their drawings and digital images - surreal and trippy stuff, some of it quite good.

From Tarot-like images to partial nudity to posing amputees; not quite anime, not quite not anime. Worth a quick view if you're into this sort of thing.

Tuesday, November 23 2004

MoveOn tech infrastructure...

A short fluffy article sheds a little light on some technology MoveOn.org uses to communicate with its 2.7 million members.

MoveOn house parties

This past Sunday, MoveOn.org pulled 18,000+ of its members into house parties across the country to discuss the future of the organization: what issues it should concentrate on for the next several years, and how it should go about doing so. Here are three accounts of parties in the San Francisco Bay Area: from Alternet, Salon.com, and SFGate. Report on a house party in Seattle, Washington. Or you can read notes from MoveOn members discussing the future of the organization.

World of Warcraft Launches

Blizzard Entertainment has launched World of Warcraft, their MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) after a fairly massive public beta release. I haven't played MMORPGs before for fear of getting sucked in and spending too much time online (more than I already do for work, news reading, blogging, etc.) Back in college, I spent hours playing Empire, a (sometimes massively) multiplayer online war/world game:

"It [Empire] is a strategy wargame played by a number of people (usually between 4 and 100) on the internet connected to an Empire Server. If you've ever seen the game 'Civilization', Empire is a lot like it, except it is more detailed, and of course multi-player."

Statement from Kevin Sites (he took the famous footage of a U.S. soldier shooting an unarmed Iraqi)

Kevin Sites, an embedded journalist currently in Iraq, recently videotaped a U.S. soldier shooting and killing a wounded unarmed Iraqi man in Fallujah. He explains what happened that day, who he talked to in the military before providing the footage to the U.S. media, and has a message for the soldiers he was embedded with:

"I knew NBC would be responsible with the footage. But there were complications. We were part of a video 'pool' in Falluja, and that obligated us to share all of our footage with other networks. I had no idea how our other 'pool' partners might use the footage. I considered not feeding the tape to the pool -- or even, for a moment, destroying it. But that thought created the same pit in my stomach that witnessing the shooting had. It felt wrong. Hiding this wouldn't make it go away. There were other people in that room. What happened in that mosque would eventually come out. I would be faced with the fact that I had betrayed truth as well as a life supposedly spent in pursuit of it."

Saturday, November 20 2004

To Do in San Francisco This Weekend

Saturday night: Opel appreciation party at Sublounge. Free. Lotsa DJs...
Sunday: Thai Temple Lunch Mixer with the mixermixer.com folks. And/or do the MoveOn.org house party thing.

Thursday, November 18 2004

Election: What's Wrong With Undecided Voters

If you're not tired of post-election analysis, horrifying anecdotes about undecided voters in Wisconsin. (Registration required, or get a username/password at BugMeNot.)
Choice quotes:

"I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil... Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research...
"[T]he very severity and intractability of the Iraq disaster helped Bush because it induced a kind of fatalism about the possibility of progress. Time after time, undecided voters would agree vociferously with every single critique I offered of Bush's Iraq policy, but conclude that it really didn't matter who was elected, since neither candidate would have any chance of making things better. Yeah, but what's Kerry gonna do? voters would ask me...
"Had he made a connection between his predicament [being sued for a work-related accident caused by sleep deprivation] and the issue of tort reform, it might have benefited Bush; had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of labor rights, it might have benefited Kerry. He made neither, and remained undecided."

Wednesday, November 17 2004

Maintaining (personal) digital archives

Non-technical piece at The New York Times about maintaining your digital files (photos, email, music, etc.) over years or decades:

"Simon Yates, an analyst at Forrester Research, for example, keeps his old PC in the back of a closet underneath a box. The machine contains everything in his life from the day he married in 1997 to the day he bought his new computer in 2002. If he wanted to retrieve anything from the old PC, Mr. Yates said, it would require a great deal of wiring and rewiring. 'I'd have to reconfigure my entire office just to get it to boot up,' he said."

Tuesday, November 16 2004

Project Open Hand

"September 2004" charity of the month: Project Open Hand.
Project Open Hand provides hot meals and a few minutes of human companionship to people with AIDS, the homebound, and the critically ill in San Francisco. How they started:

"In 1985 in San Francisco, Ruth Brinker, a retired grandmother, watched a dear friend die of AIDS. She realized that for many people with HIV/AIDS, malnutrition was causing death as much as the illness itself. At that time, no social service agency was providing meals to those too weak from AIDS or too impoverished to feed themselves. Using her experience as a manager with another food program, Ruth enlisted the help of her friends, secured a basement kitchen at a local church and began to serve meals to seven clients, Project Open Hand was born."

Just to cushion any possible surprises in the next few weeks...

John Kerry, when asked about his plans:

"In his first extensive interview since his Nov. 2 defeat, Kerry was asked by the Fox News affiliate in Boston about running again in 2008 and reminded the questioner that Ohio is still counting votes from 2004."

Monday, November 15 2004

The Spiders: Alternate History of Afghan War

Cool alternate-history web comic: The Spiders. I haven't gotten through all the episodes yet, but it seems to involve a United States (under President Al Gore) prosecuting a war on Taliban-controlled Afghanistan with millions of mechanical surveillance spiders (controlled by random Internet users?), and at some point dropping Ecstasy-laced chemicals over the country to destroy the enemy's desire to fight...
[UPDATE: that first episode/issue isn't as good as the later ones; you can actually start with the second episode for higher-quality stuff, then go back later. My initial reaction to episode #1 was that it was too hit-you-over-the-head, with overly stereotypical (some might say "archetypal") characters; but, well, by all accounts, the Taliban were willing to inflict horrific violence on those women (and others) who did not adhere to their brand of religious dogma.)

Friday, November 12 2004

Billy Harvey

Blogged all over the place: Billy Harvey Music. A neat Flash-based interactive music site; feels real interactive, lots of (decent) music, very well-done.

Accelerating Change 2004: Random Thoughts (3)

BTW: if you're wondering whether it's worth it to go to this conference next year, the answer is yes. It's fairly inexpensive ($300 early bird, compared to thousands of dollars for the ones I used to go to last century (I tended to get in free as a journalist for ahref.com)) and gives you a chance to interact with a lot of smart folks dealing with interesting technology issues.
My experience with this conference was generally better than that with past conferences; I'm a bit more social and confident than the Ed of 4+ years ago, more capable of doing the "networking" that many say is the real purpose of technical conferences. I also think the people here were more open to random discussions with random individuals in the halls and at the dinner tables than at past conferences, where talks were often focused more on "how do I improve in my current job/prepare for a new one" than "what kind of world are we entering/building." I won't get work out of people I met based on our short interactions; I may not get work out of those who I'll end up meeting again at the Future Salon or elsewhere. But I did get good ideas on where technology could be moving, and new projects to engage in.
I feel compelled to give my impression of the demographics of the conference. (Which may be wildly off.) The organizers say they were looking to get up to 300 attendees; I don't know that they got that many. I counted about 5 black people at the conference, though I could've missed one or two. (One attendee mistook me for one of the black speakers at the conference; I could've taken offense, but (1) I didn't realize it was happening at the time, (2) I'd mis-identified an Indian member of a social networking site I'm on just a few weeks before, and (3) no offense was meant.) The male-to-female ratio? 9-to-1 is my best guess. (Note from Will Wright's talk about The Sims: they have a lot of women on their staff; it makes it a lot easier to build a product that appeals to women as well as men. No need for gender-specific focus groups.) Age range? I think Doug Engelbart's somewhere in his 70s; we also had what appeared to be a couple of high school students attending. Plenty of people in their 20s and 30s and 40s.
Most of the people who talked about the U.S. election didn't seem happy with the results. Don't know if this is a result of the Bay Area location of the conference, or the technical and libertarian leanings of the audience.

Accelerating Change 2004: Random Thoughts (2)

Andreas Olligschlaeger of TruNorth Data Systems talked about Homeland Security technology problems, privacy issues, etc. The government (along with associated contractors) is trying to integrate a lot of databases, computer systems, technology to help in the fight against terrorists; that's not news. But even as they're trying to integrate old information from old incompatible agency databases, they're taking in about 36.6 terabytes of new terrorist-related information each week. To cope with it all, each Homeland Security employee would need to read 221 books per week. Obviously they're trying to automate collection and analysis of this information as much as possible. A slide that made me laugh: he listed FOIA as a barrier to Homeland Security's job. Talking later to an ex-State Department employee at the conference, ex-SDe explained that FOIA requests just take too much of government employees' time; particularly because information is so hard to find in government records. Which took us into discussions of how to make it easier for citizens to request information, and for the government to fulfill those requests, without increasing the potential for abuse of citizen information by government employees/agencies, hackers, etc... Something that interested me: Olligschlaeger discussed the need for 2-way trust between law enforcement and the citizenry; unless citizens trust the government with their information, they're not going to provide information to help the government help them. He implied that he favored European-style data privacy rules for the United States; something which several people I talked to later completely missed from his talk. He called the trust issue a marketing or PR problem; I'd call it a process problem.
Nova Barlow on "The Art of Community Management": community management requires the 3 Cs - consistency, communication, and clarity. She approvingly cited the example given earlier in the conference (I think by Cory Ondrejka of Linden Labs) of players in Second Life staging an in-game protest against various Linden Labs policies and technological problems, and Linden Labs responding to their concerns, as a good example of management.

Abortion Trends: Abortion Declines in (Prosperous) Clinton Years, Rises in (Recessionary) Bush Years

Professor Glen Stassen, Fuller Theological Seminary, says abortion rates declined under Clinton and rose under Bush because economic opportunity and access to health care rose under Clinton and declined under Bush:

"Economic policy and abortion are not separate issues; they form one moral imperative. Rhetoric is hollow, mere tinkling brass, without healthcare, health insurance, jobs, childcare, and a living wage. Pro-life in deed, not merely in word, means we need a president who will do something about jobs and health insurance and support for prospective mothers."

Non-hormonal injectable male contraceptive. Coming soon?

Finally, an injectable non-hormonal contraceptive - for monkeys.

"In the experiments, designed in the United States and carried out in India, seven of the nine males tested developed high antibody levels. Five of the seven recovered fertility once the immunization stopped. They were injected with eppin about every three weeks to maintain the immunization."

Thursday, November 11 2004

Attorney General Albert Gonzales? Bad News.

Alberto Gonzales, Bush's pick for the new U.S. Attorney General, to replace John Ashcroft, has a a long, strong record of what the Center for American Progress calls "A Record of Injustice": he approved memos authorizing torture of those suspected of terrorism; considers parts of the Geneva Conventions (which are part of U.S. law at this point) obsolete; failed to fully inform then-Governor Bush of mitigating circumstances, or evidence of innocence, in the death penalty cases Bush was supposed to review; and while a judge, accepted monetary "contributions" from litigants in the cases he was judging.

To Do in San Francisco (and nearby) This Weekend

Friday night possibilities: hear Michael West discuss Human Life Extension with The Long Now Foundation; or go see the Space Cowboys, Lee Coombs, Adam Ohana, and others at 1015 Folsom.
Saturday possibilities: We the Planet Festival at the Kaiser Center in Oakland (Joan Baez, The Roots, The Coup, Third Eye Blind, Michelle Shocked, etc.); Third I South Asian Film Fest (continuing through Sunday); Fray Day 8 (spoken word fest, Derek Powazek's brainchild), or True Skool and Massive Selector take over Mighty.
Sunday: stay home and clean your room.

Wednesday, November 10 2004

Planetwork: Elections & Electronic Polling

Planetwork, a San Francisco-based non-profit working for positive global change, succintly describes the main problem with U.S. elections:

"A very large number of our elections are settled by margins of victory that are much smaller than the margin of error in the system itself. It is absurd to have a winner take all system wherein the decision is made based on a fraction of a percent difference but the margin of error in the counting the result is actually at least one or two percent and frequently as high as five or six percent."

Accelerating Change 2004: Random Thoughts (1)

A few notes on the Accelerating Change Conference at Stanford University this past weekend:
When asked by someone what the conference would be about, I said it would be filled with the types of folks who believe in (or spend their time arguing against) The Singularity, and expected some fairly far-out (100-year timeline, maybe) thinking. Instead, many of the talks were along more 5-to-10-year timelines: what people were doing now in various areas, and where they expected the world to be in the next 10 years.
The conference was split into 3 tracks: Physical Space (robotics, business processes, privacy), Virtual Space (virtual reality, non-physical stuff, online games), and Interface (neat interfaces, language processing, social software).

David Brin's 45-minute talk on "Coping With Accelerating Change": much of it was taken up lamenting the results of the U.S. election (as was much of the conversation in the halls). His take on the cultural divide in the U.S.: the Romantics, who look back to a mythical Golden Age when everything was great; and the Moderns, who look forward to a Golden Age ahead of us which they expect to be better than anything that's come before. (OK, that's not a new thought or paradigm.)
The power of criticism: if your movement or field or leader is not open to honest critique, it's doomed to failure; it's only through criticism that we can refine our thoughts, plans, and experiments, and improve on what we've done in the past.
Caloric restriction for longevity: won't work, he says. Why? Because we've had monks living in monasteries for years, eating little, and they aren't living to be 200+ years old. So calorie restriction has been tried, and failed. (Unless there are 200-year-old monks among us, constantly shifting their identities as they live longer and longer...)
The socioeconomic shape of society: it used to be pyramid-shaped in every society, with the rich at the top, more middle-class than rich in the middle, and great masses of the poor at the bottom. Now we're more diamond-shaped: a few rich at the top, a few poor at the bottom (well, 35 million isn't a few, but it's better than 270 million), and a bunch of people in the middle. That's great - but worldwide, the pyramid still holds; and those of us in the U.S. are on top of a huge pyramid. (About the Indian pyramid.)
David Brin vs. Brad Templeton on issues of privacy: what it comes down to is Brin believes the aristocracy is so powerful, we can't keep them from watching us, but we can put systems into place so we can keep an eye on them; and Templeton believes the aristocracy is so powerful that they won't let us watch them as much as we'd need to to make sure they aren't abusing their ability to watch us. So we'd better not let them put into place the systems to keep ever-present eyes on us (and ever-present boots on our heads). Because if we build the apparatus of the transparent society which Brin seems to favor, some day someone is going to push the big red button on the system that says "turn on fascist state."
(To paraphrase one of Brin's funny analogies: go to the zoo, pick up a sharp stick, climb into the baboon cage, and poke the biggest baboon in the eye with a sharp stick. He won't let you do it, and you'll get your ass kicked. But if you just climb in and watch him, he might not like it, but he's not going to stop you.) (Nobody asked if Brin had ever tried either experiment.)

BiDil: Race-Specific Drug

In the New York Times Magazine, Robin Marantz Henig looks at the controversy (and promise) surrounding race-based pharmacology: developing and testing drugs for specific "races" (white, black, Asian, Native American). A long article, worth reading. A shorter take on the first race-based drug likely to come out in 2005, BiDil, is available at Salon.com:

"Earlier research suggested that standard heart failure drugs called ACE inhibitors do not work as well in blacks, and that blacks may have lower amounts of nitric oxide, which plays many roles in heart health, in their blood.
"Two chemicals -- isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine -- boost this substance, but administering the right dose is complicated when they are prescribed separately. A Massachusetts biotechnology company, NitroMed, developed a combination pill, BiDil, that gets around this problem, but the FDA refused to license it as a new drug because earlier studies involving mostly white patients who got the chemicals separately showed no benefit.
"But there were tantalizing signs that BiDil helped the few blacks in the studies, and NitroMed won a patent to use it just in that minority group."

Tuesday, November 9 2004

Red State, Blue State, Purple State

There's been lots of talk, over the past week, about red states vs. blue states vs. purple (swing-type) states in the presidential election. The only reason the press (and the rest of us) latch on to red vs. blue is that that's how votes are counted - if Bush grabs a state with 51% of the vote, it's counted red, even though 49 out of 100 voters there voted against him (and vice-versa for blue states).
That's OK for presidential campaigns trying to figure out who to target with their messages, but isn't accurate in terms of figuring out how the country's ideolog(y|ies) look(s) over a geographical (or population-weighted geographical) map. For alternate views of Democrat-vs-Republican areas of the country, see these election 2004 maps showing population-weighted views, what the country looks like if you take percentages each candidate won into account, what it looks like at the county level, etc.

Skin Your Treo

Via BoingBoing (via Engadget): custom latex skins for your hand-held devices - Treos, PDAs, Gameboys, etc. Under $10, in a variety of styles (and you can submit your own style).

Salon.com Debunks "Stolen Election" Stories

Salon.com's Farhad Manjoo looks at a bunch of the stories circulation about voting irregularities, vote fraud, etc., and concludes that Bush really did win anyway.
True, Republicans managed to suppress votes by not counting the ballots of legitimate voters who went to the wrong precinct (whether due to their states' clerical errors or their own ignorance); in many states, lines tended to be longer in Democrat-leaning precincts than Republican ones; there were more spoiled ballots in majority-African-American precincts; and Republican-funded organizations illegally tossed out voter registrations for Democrats while keeping Republican registrations. But of the votes actually cast legitimately, Bush won enough to win the electoral college. To the best of our knowledge.
If you want to keep up with voter (dis)enfranchisement news, keep looking at the News page at EIRS. Meanwhile, the EFF also thinks there wasn't sufficient fraud to change the results of the presidential election.

Thursday, November 4 2004

19" LCD Monitors getting cheap...

Track the prices of 19" LCD monitors at dealnews.com. At under $400 for decent monitors, there's no reason to buy anything smaller. Trust me: the extra screen real estate will get you more than $400 extra productivity a year.
Years ago I decided never to buy (or let friends buy) a CRT again, or anything under 17". 19" LCD is now the new low-end...

Reader comment on the Echo Chamber

From Salon.com's reader section:

"That 'echo chamber' you are now complaining about is more properly called a 'team.' The 'false hope' that you've carried around for several months -- the confidence that your arguments would prevail and that your opponents were absurd -- is called a 'game face.' And that 'nice, soft cocoon of intellectual safety' could more charitably be called 'high morale.'
"By mentally preparing oneself to lose, one may cushion the blow of defeat, but successful athletes don't do this. Instead, they somehow convince themselves that they can win, and act accordingly."

"Every time I got slapped in the face last night by return numbers, I mentally lashed out at Salon. You guys have bolstered my vision and fostered my hopes for six months and now it feels like you lied to me. You gave me proof over and over again to think it was in the bag!"

Wednesday, November 3 2004

Meme: Internet Echo Chamber

Andrew Leonard at Salon.com buys the idea, which gained extra currency when Dean's campaign faltered and ended up failing, that the Internet ends up bringing like-minded people together, rather than preparing us to deal with The Other:

"I really think I need to get out more, now. Perhaps if I'd spent less time at Daily Kos and more time talking to people who live in Alabama I'd have been less surprised by the election results. And perhaps I'd be better prepared to deal with them."

Tuesday, November 2 2004

Whole mess of photos...

Here are a whole bunch of photo albums from recent San Francisco events:
Power to the Peaceful 2004, Michael Franti and Spearhead's annual free concert in Golden Gate Park.
Folsom Street Fair 2004, the annual leather/S&M-themed street fair in downtown San Francisco. Pictures not safe for work. (No nekkid pictures of me, don't worry.)
And... Halloween in the Castro 2004. 200 pictures of San Franciscans (and visitors) dressing up for our favorite holiday.
Interestingly enough, about a week before Halloween, my server hits started going way up; searches for "castro halloween" on Google were showing my site as the number 2 result for a while (my site result for "halloween castro" was somewhere in the 20s and 30s). The official site is at http://www.halloweensf.com/.

San Francisco vote parties

Not sure where to celebrate Kerry's victory? Don't want to go to the East Bay for the votergasm parties? Check these out (free unless otherwise noted):
Peter Camejo, Nader's running mate, at The Elbo Room. Food, drink, wide-screen TV (no, I didn't vote for him)
Syd Gris/Opel Productions at Sublounge. TV for watching the returns, plus DJ'ed dance music.
Papa Toby's Revolution Cafe. Bring your voting stub, and get 25-cent PBRs.
Across the street from Papa Toby's, Renee Saucedo's victory party (assuming victory) at The Makeout Room. Where the PBRs are $2 during happy hour regardless of the day (I coulda sworn they used to be $1. Not that I drink that swill. Much. Unless it's just $1.)
Tomorrow night, Pop and Politics has its post-election party at the Dragon Bar in North Beach.

EIRS

If you have a problem at the polls, or are denied your right to vote, check out voteproblem.org.
Something I've been working on recently: the Election Incident Reporting System. Not nearly as much as some others, but I've put in time where I could over the past few weeks. With this system, orgs like the Election Protection Coalition can track voting problems, and dispatch lawyers, technologists, activists, and news crews to trouble spots. Neat, eh?

VOTE

Get out and vote.
For John Kerry. And, if you're in California, for Barbara Boxer, and against Proposition 71.

About this site

This is the personal web site for Edward (Ed) Piou. Consisting mainly of a blog (operational since 1999) and various photos.

Some online projects I'm working on

Politics

Charity, Non-profits...

A while ago, I decided to put my money where my mind is on a (roughly) monthly basis and give to:

Photos

Public events documented through pictures...