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Susan Thur

Leaking Oil Well Lacked Safeguard Device - WSJ.com - 0 views

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    "U.S. regulators don't mandate use of the remote-control device on offshore rigs, and the Deepwater Horizon, hired by oil giant BP PLC, didn't have one. With the remote control, a crew can attempt to trigger an underwater valve that shuts down the well even if the oil rig itself is damaged or evacuated"
argh2xxx lala

U.S. Says It Can Kidnap British Citizens - 0 views

  • I'm living in the United States and I'm loving this country, but I'm fearing that this country has going beyond arrogance.  Some US officials say the US has rights to kidnap British citizens.  Is this something sort of like the bounty hunters portraying in doses of action movies?  As long the U.S. acting like it is a master of the world and not a member of the world, it is encouraging other nations to be on guards and viewing the U.S. as their soon to be enemy.  The real story is at http://www.timesonline.co.uk.
tony curzon price

House of Commons - Home Affairs - Appendices to Minutes of Evidence (Volume II) - 0 views

  • In this second respect, there is and never has been a secret ballot in Britain, because the way in which individual citizens vote can be traced from each ballot paper used. Every ballot paper given to the citizen who is voting contains a serial number on it, which is also printed on the counterfoil retained by electoral officials. Before a ballot paper is handed to the citizen, he is asked for his name and address (or preferably to show the clerk his official poll card which shows his name, address and electoral registration number on it). The polling clerk then traces the person in the copy of the electoral register that he has on the table in from of him, and ticks the voter's name off the list. The clerk then tears one of the ballot papers out of the book of papers printed for the purpose, hands it to the voter and directs him or her to the private booth. And then the clerk writes the electoral registration number of the voter on the counterfoil to the ballot paper just issued.
tony curzon price

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - The centre-ground's shift to the left - 0 views

  • You can hear the change in what prominent would-be centrists are saying. In the 1990s, when neoliberalism was the centre, the line was: we must slash middle-class entitlements in order to be more competitive in the global free market. Now the line is: in order to save free-market globalism from populists preying on middle-class economic anxieties, we must expand the middle-class welfare state.The winners – at least for now – are welfare state liberals such as old-fashioned New Dealers in the US and their equivalents in other countries. The position of the original “third way” of 1932-68 always made sense. Middle-class social insurance programmes, by guaranteeing economic security, reduce the appeal of populism, socialism and other kinds of ­radical statism, and make possible broad political support for open and competitive national and global markets. You will hear much more of this line as politicians rush to occupy the new centre in the years ahead.
tony curzon price

AlterNet: Blogs: Rights and Liberties: MoveOn Sets Its Sights on Facebook Privacy Viola... - 0 views

  • Bill O'Reilly can howl all he wants about the "war on Christmas." But Facebook has leaped several parsecs ahead of him, making itself into a Grinch so big that the good Dr. Seuss himself would have been gobstopped by the sheer evil magnitude of it all.
tony curzon price

Kindle: Web Browsing Experience Is Horrible - 0 views

  • I met up with Robert Scoble last night at an Orange party in San Francisco (my photos from the party are here). He brought along his Amazon Kindle and let me and others test it out. It was the first time I’d held one - the Kindle I bought hasn’t arrived yet and my co-editor Erick covered the New York launch. Anyway, he took video of me giving my opinion of the Kindle (thumbs down). The problem is the UI is completely non-intuitive and the screen is unreadable in medium light (it was much brighter in the room than the video suggests and it was easily bright enough to read a normal book). I was trying to simply pull up the browser and go to a web page and I couldn’t figure it out. The scroll wheel on the side is obviously designed only to frustrate users. And without any sort of mouse, I kept touching the screen to try to get it to do what I wanted (which of course doesn’t work). I also compare it in the video unfavorably to the etch-a-sketch. I asked Robert to pull up a web browser and load TechCrunch. He did it once and it took so long I asked him if I could video it. He agreed, and did it again. It took him 55 seconds to pull up the browser and enter the TechCrunch URL. I then pulled out my iPhone and did the same thing in 14 seconds. The Kindle can be given some slack since web browsing isn’t its core function. But web browsing on the iPhone isn’t the key feature of that device, either. Amazon just didn’t design a good device (the user interface, keyboard and screen are all very flawed), and they had all the time in the world to get it right. Hopefully v.2 will be an improvement. Of course this is just my opinion after trying it out for a few minutes, and I’d had a couple of beers. Don MacAskill wrote up his own review after a day with the device and says its wonderful.
tony curzon price

Encrypted E-Mail Company Hushmail Spills to Feds | Threat Level from Wired.com - 0 views

  • Hushmail, a longtime provider of encrypted web-based email, markets itself by saying that "not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail, since each message is uniquely encoded before it leaves your computer." But it turns out that statement seems not to apply to individuals targeted by government agencies that are able to convince a Canadian court to serve a court order on the company.
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    encryption / privacy
tony curzon price

Deal Journal - WSJ.com : Credit Crisis: The Used-Car Analogy - 0 views

  • As the man who oversees about $20 billion of fixed-income investments at American Century Investments, we revisited with Keegan as part of today’s The Game column on the recurring foibles of Wall Street. Deal Journal: You were right back in April. You called it all. Why does Wall Street keep messing up? Jim Keegan: It’s too profitable to stop. It’s too profitable at the individual level, so the individuals interests are not necessarily aligned with the company’s interest. Pay me now and you pay for it later. There is no clawback. Employees can walk away with hundreds and tens of millions of dollars. And someone else will hire them to do it again.
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    agency problems lead to bubbles
anonymous

How to Choose Safe (and Green) Cleaning Products - 0 views

  • Borax is a naturally occurring mineral, soluble in water. It can deodorize, inhibit the growth of mildew and mold, boost the cleaning power of soap or detergent, remove stains, and be used with attractants, such as sugar, to kill cockroaches.
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    Interior Designer James Swan gives helpful advice on selecting safe cleaning products for your home.
tony curzon price

Wikipedia 2.0, with added trust - 0 views

  • In the new version, only edits made by a separate class of "trusted" users will be instantly implemented. To earn this trusted status, users will have to show some commitment to Wikipedia, by making 30 edits in 30 days, say. Other users will have to wait until a trusted editor has given the article a brief look, enough to confirm that the edit is not vandalism, before their changes can be viewed by readers.
    • tony curzon price
       
      how do we trust the trusted editor? is there a rush to become trusted editor?
  • It allows select groups of editors, probably associated with specific subject areas, to vote on whether an article should be flagged as high quality. Readers would still see the latest version of an article by default, but a link to a high-quality version, if it exists, would also be available.
    • tony curzon price
       
      looks like an editorial committee
  • Contributors whose edits tend to remain in place are awarded high trust ratings; those whose changes are quickly altered get a low score. The rationale is that if a change is useful and accurate, it is likely to remain intact during subsequent edits, but if it is inaccurate or malicious, it is likely to be changed. Therefore, users who make long-lasting edits are likely to be trustworthy. New users automatically start with a low rating.
    • tony curzon price
       
      so a scientist, writing a fact-based and relatively obscure set of entries, will become trustworthy on questions of politics or ethics ...
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • De Alfaro has shown that the software's ratings correlate with human judgements. Using data from the Italian Wikipedia, his software assigned trust ratings to editors based on the persistence of past contributions, and then asked volunteers to rate edits by those editors. Edits made by editors with ratings in the bottom 20 per cent were up to six times more likely to be judged as bad than those with higher ratings.
    • tony curzon price
       
      this data is _before_ the mechanism introduces an incentive for abuse ...
tony curzon price

AlterNet: Sex and Relationships: Pornography and the End of Masculinity - 0 views

  • As is often the case, this paradox can be resolved by recognizing that one of the assumptions is wrong. Here, it's the assumption that U.S. society routinely rejects cruelty and degradation. In fact, the United States is a nation that has no serious objection to cruelty and degradation. Think of the way we accept the use of brutal weapons in war that kill civilians, or the way we accept the death penalty, or the way we accept crushing economic inequality. There is no paradox in the steady mainstreaming of an intensely cruel pornography. This is a culture with a well-developed legal regime that generally protects individuals' rights and freedoms, and yet it also is a strikingly cruel culture in the way it accepts brutality and inequality.The pornographers are not a deviation from the norm. Their presence in the mainstream shouldn't be surprising, because they represent mainstream values:
anonymous

Up to 5 million in funding for news web sites - 0 views

  • This is year two of the Knight News Challenge, a contest awarding as much as $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news. 
    • anonymous
       
      The Knight Foundation is offering up to 5 million in funding for innovative news web site ideas. Anyone can enter at www.newschallenge.org
tony curzon price

About - journa-list.com - 0 views

  • About Journa-list Why journa-list? Have you ever read an article and thought, I'd really like to know more about the journalist who wrote this? Maybe you want to read previous things the journalist has written, or find out more about their experience in a particular subject area, or get in contact with them. Or perhaps you want to find out who else is writing about a particular subject - say 'Bluetongue' - and compare one journalist's articles with those written by other journalists from different publications. Or, you might want to build your own newsroom of journalists - science journalists for example - and have all their articles emailed directly to you each morning. You can do all of this on journa-list. It's our attempt to make news a bit more transparent and journalists a bit more accountable - on behalf of the public.
    • tony curzon price
       
      accountability tool
tony curzon price

The Mr. Wright Blog: Everything in context - 0 views

  • we mused over the perceived legitimacy you can create via a nice website, concluding that in effect, without a solid online presence you don’t exist in today’s media environment. You may not have a definite physical location, but not to worry, a nice website is more or less a substitute. The location is becoming more and more peripheral to the website. Not to say location isn’t important.. it is a nice feather in an organization’s online cap.
    • tony curzon price
       
      signals of credibility - an office
tony curzon price

The Click Heard Round the World: Andrew Puddephatt on media reform from a human rights ... - 0 views

  • Andrew Puddephatt on media reform from a human rights perspective This morning I attended a very broad and interesting side-event on “Global Information and Communication Policy” organized by Consumer’s Union.  The event featured an international panel of speakers including : Luiz Fernando Marrey Moncau, Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa do Consumidor, Brazil Rosemary Okello-Orlale, African Woman and Child Feature Service, Kenya Bjarne Pedersen, Consumers International Andrew Puddephatt, Global Partners UK Jamie Love, CPTech Andrew issued a provocative challenge to the media reform community to show the evidence of their claims. 
  • We are interested in moving toward a curating model of information.  Information needs to be curated in  a way that shows the information that you want similar to how a museum curates a large body of information into discrete exhibits and presentations that people can understand and digest.
    • tony curzon price
       
      is journalism curation? and what does curation do to the messages that are produced?
  • who is doing the curating?  Is it going to be bottom-up or done by Bill Gates and Google.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The problem is not technology or capacity – we have lots of geeks. It’s an organizational issue – we are divided and unable or unwilling to connect with each other across borders.
    • tony curzon price
       
      is internet not being used for transnational network building _becasue_ there is fundamentally no desire for this?
tony curzon price

Chicago Reader | Defending Strauss: University of Chicago philosophy prof Leo Strauss h... - 0 views

  • “Strauss’s interpretation of Plato is wrong from beginning to end,” Burnyeat argued. “There is much talk in Straussian writings about the nature of ‘the philosopher’ but no sign of any knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy.”
    • tony curzon price
       
      Burenat's view of Strauss
  • Strauss said, political philosophy is good for something: “If for no other purpose, at least in order to defend a reasonable policy against overgenerous or utopian thought, we would need a genuine political philosophy reminding us of the limits set to all human hopes and wishes.”
    • tony curzon price
       
      Strauss in a good light on politics
  • “I was certainly struck by how very skeptical he was for the prospects of establishing democracy in Germany,” Tarcov says. In “Re-education,” Strauss doubted that a just government in Germany could be constructed after the war, at least not if the effort were left to the Allies. “A form of government which is merely imposed by a victorious enemy will not last,” Strauss predicted. “Only Germans, only Germans who remained in Germany and shared all the misery of Nazi rule and of defeat, can do it. Only they will be able to speak a language understandable to post-Hitlerian Germany.”
tony curzon price

Getting democracy into focus | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • The one element clear right through representative democracy’s advance across the world has been the centrality of popular rejection of autocratic effrontery, often exhilarating at the time but in retrospect a transitory pleasure. The structure of modern representative democracy (the form of state now called by that name) does not provide a clear model for any community to rule itself in freedom, let alone in reliable serenity and prosperity. What it provides is a practical basis through which to refuse to be ruled unaccountably and indefinitely against your will. Less steadily and on far less egalitarian terms, it also provides a framework through which to explore together what people should and should not attempt to do as a community. Virtually none of the elements of an answer to that question can come from democracy as an idea. Almost all have to be pieced together arduously from somewhere else.
    • tony curzon price
       
      Churchillian defense of democracy ... but the rest is pieced together from elsewhere
  • Crudely speaking, the political appeal of democracy lies in its claim to realise political equality. (So, soberly speaking, does its potential political menace.)
tony curzon price

A Righter Shade of Green - 0 views

  • While the Left pursues environmentalism to advance its global agenda, conservation is best entrusted to local stewardship.
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    Roger on how ecology translates into politics. Is there right and left greenery?

    And what of a _global_ issue like climate change - can it really be reduced to its local impact?

tony curzon price

Welcome to NewAssignment.Net | NewAssignment.Net - 0 views

  • Welcome to NewAssignment.Net by Jay Rosen on August 19, 2006 - 10:41pm. What is NewAssignment.Net? New Assignment.Net is a non-profit site that tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust.
    • tony curzon price
       
      open source jounralism mission
Maggie Tsai

Undercurrent | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • He'd phoned twice the week before, and I'd returned the call to his hotel voice mail on both occasions, but we hadn't connected. So when the 350-pound biker widely known across the deep south as "Grizzly" called me again last Thursday, I was as prepared as could be for another of his semi-annual communications.
    • Maggie Tsai
       
      I can share a private group note or a public one, and share it with my opendemocracy group. Make sure that the share to "group(s)" is selected.... submit OK
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