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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Ed Webb

Ed Webb

Russia Weighs K.G.B. Powers for Security Agency - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The note contends that print and electronic media “openly facilitate the formation of negative processes in the spiritual sphere, propagate the cult of individualism, violence and mistrust in the government’s ability to protect its citizens, in effect drawing youth to extremist acts.”
  • On Tuesday, opposition leaders worried that the F.S.B.’s new powers would be used to suppress dissent of all kinds. “In the Soviet times, there really were warnings issued for anti-Soviet activity,” Viktor I. Ilyukhin, a Communist deputy who serves on the Duma committee on constitutional law, told the newspaper Noviye Izvestiya. “But even then, the warnings were delivered only by prosecutors,” Mr. Ilyukhin said. “Now, they spit on all that. Any citizen can be called an extremist for taking a public position, for political activity. A warning can be given to anyone who criticizes the powers that be. If you print this interview, they will announce that Ilyukhin is an extremist.”
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    Minority Report?
Ed Webb

Three lessons from the Times Square bomb. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine - 0 views

  • Terrorism, in some of its forms, may be a campaign of war—but it manifests itself in criminal acts. And while the military has a role in combating terrorist organizations (see the war in Afghanistan, the drone attacks on al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan, etc.), the acts are often best pre-empted, foiled, and punished by the routine procedures of a well-trained police force and intelligence organizations.
  • a continuously busy sidewalk is a safe sidewalk, because those who have business there—"the natural proprietors of the street"—provide "eyes upon the street."
  • Research project for a sociologist: Have terrorist attacks in Western cities taken place more often, or less often, in areas with lots of street vendors?
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  • the use—and popularity—of public security cameras will certainly get a boost.
  • These cameras are probably permanent fixtures in American cities. And city dwellers (as well as tourists) may have come to accept that privacy cannot be presumed when they're out on public streets.
Ed Webb

Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Every man, woman and child on the planet using micro-blogging site Twitter for a century. For many people that may sound like a vision of hell, but for watchers of the tremendous growth of digital communications it is a neat way of presenting the sheer scale of the so-called digital universe.
  • the growing desire of corporations and governments to know and store ever more data about everyone
  • experts estimate that all human language used since the dawn of time would take up about 5,000 petabytes if stored in digital form, which is less than 1% of the digital content created since someone first switched on a computer.
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  • A zettabyte, incidentally, is roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States.
  • Mobile phones have dramatically widened the range of people who can create, store and share digital information."China now has more visible devices out on the streets being used by individuals than the US does," said McDonald. "We are seeing the democratisation and commoditisation of the use and creation of information."
  • About 70% of the digital universe is generated by individuals, but its storage is then predominantly the job of corporations. From emails and blogs to mobile phone calls, it is corporations that are storing information on behalf of consumers.
  • actions in the offline world that individuals carry out which result in digital content being created by organisations – from cashpoint transactions which a bank must record to walking along the pavement, which is likely to result in CCTV footage
  • "unstructured"
  • "You talk to a kid these days and they have no idea what a kilobyte is. The speed things progress, we are going to need many words beyond zettabyte."
Ed Webb

Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall of the Downfall Parodies - Mark Dery - Doom Patrol:... - 1 views

  • Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall of the Downfall Parodies
  • Hitler left an inexhaustible fund of unforgettable images; Riefenstahl’sTriumph of the Will alone is enough to make him a household deity of the TV age.
  • The Third Reich was the first thoroughly modern totalitarian horror, scripted by Hitler and mass-marketed by Goebbels, a tour de force of media spectacle and opinion management that America’s hidden persuaders—admen, P.R. flacks, political campaign managers—studied assiduously.  A Mad Man in both senses, Hitler sold the German volk on a racially cleansed utopia, a thousand-year empire whose kitschy grandeur was strictly Forest Lawn Parthenon.
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  • Hitler, unlike Stalin or Mao, was an intuitive master of media stagecraft. David Bowie’s too-clever quip that Hitler was the first rock star, for which Bowie was widely reviled at the time, was spot-on.
  • the media like Hitler because Hitler liked the media
  • Perhaps that’s why he continues to mesmerize us: because he flickers, irresolvably, between the seemingly inhuman and the all too human.
  • His psychopathology is a queasy funhouse reflection, straight out of Nightmare Alley, of the instrumental rationality of the machine age. The genocidal assembly lines of Hitler’s death camps are a grotesque parody of Fordist mechanization, just as the Nazis’ fastidious recycling of every remnant of their victims but their smoke—their gold fillings melted down for bullion, their hair woven into socks for U-boat crewmen—is a depraved caricature of the Taylorist mania for workplace efficiency.
  • there’s something perversely comforting about Hitler’s unchallenged status as the metaphysical gravitational center of all our attempts at philosophizing evil
  • he prefigured postmodernity: the annexation of politics by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, the rise of the celebrity as a secular icon, the confusion of image and reality in a Matrix world. He regarded existence “as a kind of permanent parade before a gigantic audience” (Fest), calculating the visual impact of every histrionic pose, every propaganda tagline, every monumental building
  • By denying everyone’s capability, at least in theory, for Hitlerian evil, we let ourselves off the hook
  • Yet Hitler, paradoxically, is also a shriveled untermensch, the protypical nonentity; a face in the crowd in an age of crowds, instantly forgettable despite his calculated efforts to brand himself (the toothbrush mustache of the military man coupled with the flopping forelock of the art-school bohemian)
  • there was always a comic distance between the public image of the world-bestriding, godlike Fuhrer and his Inner Adolf, a nail-biting nebbish tormented by flatulence. Knowingly or not, the Downfall parodies dance in the gap between the two. More immediately, they rely on the tried-and-true gimmick of bathos. What makes the Downfall parodies so consistently hilarious is the incongruity of whatever viral topic is making the Fuhrer go ballistic and the outsized scale of his gotterdammerung-strength tirade
  • The Downfall meme dramatizes the cultural logic of our remixed, mashed-up times, when digital technology allows us to loot recorded history, prying loose any signifier that catches our magpie eyes and repurposing it to any end. The near-instantaneous speed with which parodists use these viral videos to respond to current events underscores the extent to which the social Web, unlike the media ecologies of Hitler’s day, is a many-to-many phenomenon, more collective cacophony than one-way rant. As well, the furor (forgive pun) over YouTube’s decision to capitulate to the movie studio’s takedown demand, rather than standing fast in defense of Fair Use (a provision in copyright law that protects the re-use of a work for purposes of parody), indicates the extent to which ordinary people feel that commercial culture is somehow theirs, to misread or misuse as the spirit moves them.
  • the closest thing we have to a folk culture, the connective tissue that binds us as a society
  • SPIEGEL: Can you also get your revenge on him by using comedy? Brooks: Yes, absolutely. Of course it is impossible to take revenge for 6 million murdered Jews. But by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths. [...] We take away from him the holy seriousness that always surrounded him and protected him like a cordon.”
  • risking the noose, some Germans laughed off their fears and mocked the Orwellian boot stamping on the human face, giving vent to covert opposition through flüsterwitze (“whispered jokes”). Incredibly, even Jews joked about their plight, drawing on the absurdist humor that is quintessentially Jewish to mock the Nazis even as they lightened the intolerable burden of Jewish life in the shadow of the swastika. Rapaport offers a sample of Jewish humor in Hitler’s Germany: “A Jew is arrested during the war, having been denounced for killing a Nazi at 10 P.M. and even eating the brain of his victim. This is his defense: In the first place, a Nazi hasn’t got any brain. Secondly, a Jew doesn’t eat anything that comes from a pig. And thirdly, he could not have killed the Nazi at 10 P.M. because at that time everybody listens to the BBC broadcast.”
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    Brilliant
Ed Webb

Doubleplusungood - 0 views

Ed Webb

Skipping Class? Sensors Are Watching - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • Students at Northern Arizona University who hope to skip large lecture courses may have more trouble doing so this fall: The university is installing an electronic system that measures student attendance. The university is using $75,000 in federal stimulus money to install the system, which will detect the ID cards students are carrying as they enter large classrooms. (The cards can be read by an electronic sensor.) Faculty members can choose to receive electronic attendance reports.
  • the Facebook group "NAU Against Proximity Cards," which has over 1,300 members.
  • In light of last week's vote by its legislature, I think the Arizona schools should go a step further and require passports and birth certificates to enter classrooms.
Ed Webb

A program designed to reduce energy consumption persuaded some Republicans to consume m... - 0 views

  • UCLA economists Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn analyzed the impact of an energy-conservation program in California that informed households about how their energy use compared with that of their neighbors. While the program succeeded in encouraging Democrats and environmentalists to lower their consumption, Republicans had the opposite reaction. When told of their relative thrift, they started cranking up the thermostat and leaving the lights on more often.
  • Why would some energy-conscious Republicans all of a sudden become power hogs? One explanation is that many conservatives don't believe that burning energy harms the planet, so when they learn that they're better than average, they become less vigilant about turning the lights off. That is, they're simply moving closer to what they now know is the norm (what psychologists call the boomerang effect). Costa and Kahn also look for guidance from the patron saint of right-wing fundamentalists, Rush Limbaugh, who encouraged his listeners to turn on all their lights during Earth Hour. Costa and Kahn suggest that ardently right-wing electricity customers might respond to paternalistic nudges by burning more energy, just to thumb their noses at Big Brother.
  • That some groups respond in unexpected ways to well-meaning nudges is a lesson that the architects of "behaviorally informed" policy and regulation should keep in mind in drafting their messages. Costa and Kahn's findings suggest that you shouldn't try to prod Republicans into conserving energy through this type of social pressure. But perhaps there is a nudge that would resonate with Opower's conservative customers—maybe one that stresses savings over environmentalism. Future messages could be tailored to the market—what works in San Francisco might backfire in San Diego—or even to individual households based on their political leanings, ties to environmental organizations, or enrollment in renewable-energy programs. But this starts to sound an awful lot like fine-tuned social engineering
Ed Webb

Meet Eric Goldstein - CEO of Amplify : LyndiT.com - 0 views

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    Prime mover behind a great social media tool
Ed Webb

Internet Evolution - Rob Salkowitz - There Oughta Be a Law: A WTF Moment at the Supreme... - 0 views

  • In the future, the Court may need to rule on network neutrality, property rights in virtual worlds, anti-trust issues related to closed APIs and application stores, and many other sticky issues. In cases like those, it’s not enough to know the law. You actually need to know a little something about how technology works in the real world. Otherwise, to the uninformed and proudly ignorant, the issues themselves can seem bizarre, baffling, or merely trivial.
Ed Webb

SXSW: Verbatim in places, Bruce Sterling closing speech. Telling the truth is a revolut... - 0 views

  • Moral authority based on technocracy. The small pieces loosely joined begin to rattle like bones.
  • If we had it to do over the first thing we should have demonitized was food and shelter.  Imagine if the world had open source food, and shelter.
  • Why is there not a single startup whose business model is communist? From each according to their ability to each according to their need, Vanguard of the revolution… how much could it hurt?
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  • it looks like Detroit
  • It looks like New Orleans
Ed Webb

The bright side of science fiction | Books | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

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    Comments well worth reading.
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