Moloch, meet Mammon. Mammon, Moloch.
Oh, you two know each other already?
[Happy Labor Day, people. Especially those of you in the Academy, who don't imagine those two fellows are involved in your lofty endeavor.]
Archive for August, 2008
links for 2008-08-31
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"They created the tissue by coating a three-dimensional polymer scaffold with a gene delivery vehicle that encodes a transcription factor known as Runx2. They generated a high concentration of Runx2 at one end of the scaffold and decreased that amount until they ended up with no transcription factor on the other end, resulting in a precisely controlled spatial gradient of Runx2. After that, they seeded skin fibroblasts uniformly onto the scaffold. The skin cells on the parts of the scaffold containing a high concentration of Runx2 turned into bone, while the skin cells on the scaffold end with no Runx2 turned into soft tissue. The result is an artificial bone that gradually turns into soft tissue, such as tendons or ligaments."
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"This conservative myopia dates back to President Reagan, who gutted Jimmy Carter's multibillion-dollar research and development budget for renewables, and ended the tax credits for wind and solar. The sad result is our country is now a bit player in what will probably be one of the biggest job-creating industries of the century, an industry we launched. We had 90 percent of global-installed wind capacity in the 1980s. Today we have one major wind manufacturer, General Electric, with about one-sixth of the market.
Clean energy shouldn't be a partisan issue. But it is. And that means those who who want this country to be a leader in clean energy — those who want to avoid catastrophic global warming and avoid the worst of peak oil — need to start becoming single issue voters."
links for 2008-08-30
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"See yonder!" said Tom, stretching his long arm into infinite space, "see yonder—there's a bee!"
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Can I pay in Social Capital? How about Intellectual Capital??
links for 2008-08-29
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"Librarians are being moved from intermediaries (mediating between patrons and information), and some say they are being disintermediated. However, I think they are on their way to becoming apomediaries when it comes to information access.
Publishers have traditionally been intermediaries between authors and readers, but some experiments (PLoS One, Wikipedia and the like) seem to indicate that they are moving into the realm of serving as apomediaries. In the realm of blogs, apomediation is the main force affecting much of the talent running blogs. Publisher intermediation is not what it once was.
Google is perhaps the most prominent apomediary, guiding results to the top based on apomediation.
Apomediation feels like the net effect of an information economy that no longer operates on a scarcity model. Now, information is readily available any time. Intermediaries will still be needed, but less often than before, in fewer roles, and for shorter durations."
GoPlan is upgefuckt
Laura Fisher plurked the mysterious phrase “mitten is vaguery” earlier this evening. Turns out that in the context of the GoPlan project management site… she’s right.
Seems like some kind of deep but odd database corruption has crept in at GoPlan. Whenever a hyperlink to Laura’s account appears on our project site, my name appears; when a link to me appears, her name shows up. Click “Laura Fisher” and you’ll be emailing me, for example; I edit something and the RSS feed records her as doing it.
She’s nowhere near as wordy or bossy as I am, so this is clearly a mistake.
Update: Tiago Macedo from GoPlan support responds by pointing out that Laura’s account record has my name in it, and my account record has her name in it, so ‘if you change your name everything will be “as expected”.’
And the big question right here is: How did private, session-associated data get mixed up, and how often does that typically happen in a bugless, secure, safe Web application these days?
Scary. Very close to asking for a refund on this one issue. WTF, WeBreakStuff?
ArbCamp 2008: Publishing
What: A two-day unconference is focused this year on the broad theme of “Publishing”
Who: ArbCamp 2008 is for anybody who has an idea or an interest, experience or a business, a mission or a goal that involves taking recorded ideas and showing them to other people. That’s book publishing, news media, web development, music publishing, printing, marketing, activism, blogging, podcasting, film production, social media.
When: October 18-19. 9am-5pm both days. Several external events are being planned for evenings.
Where: Morris Lawrence Building at Washtenaw Community College, 4700 East Huron River Drive Ann Arbor, Michigan 48105
Why: ArbCamp is an annual event focused around the idea of making cool things happen in Ann Arbor. ArbCamp 2007 drew over 100 people. This year’s event has been extended to two days, and we hope to draw more than 250 people to Southeast Michigan.
Haven’t been blogging much lately
Aside from the constant stream of del.icio.us links, there hasn’t been much I’ve felt like writing lately. A bit of an oppressive pall cast over the whole affair.
Several other bloggers, most of them academics with big important journals and conferences and departments standing at their sides, published much the same thing I did back in 2005, when I voiced my negative personal opinion about the corporate culture at a small engineering conference-organizer and journal publisher.
As far as I know, those other academic folks with equally negative opinions haven’t spent several thousand dollars of their personal savings on legal fees. Hopefully they won’t have to.
But I did.
My lawyer and the publishers’ lawyer have hammered out a binding legal agreement regarding my opinion piece. Kudos to both legal teams, dealing with two clients, both a mix of idiot and ideologue. After this explanatory post, I’ll refrain from further comment on the affair here in my blog. I have removed my blog post that annoyed the publisher, and also all comments posted by my readers in response.
That said, my personal opinion of the culture of that organization has not been improved by this ridiculous and expensive affair.
At any rate, good riddance. Let’s get back to business. I’ve deleted everything I and you all wrote about the problem, at their behest.
No great loss, is it?
links for 2008-08-28
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Thinking about the network of publishing and print media distribution, as well.
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"Suppose you and your friends have a small project each. To increase traffic without spending much money, you could put up ads for each other. This site makes that a snap.
Login, create a group (public or private), and start uploading your ads. Add a link to the ad to your site and you’re done.
Best of all, Ad Mates is free."
links for 2008-08-27
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"… If the bus company has to meet labor, environmental, and equipment standards to cart passengers around for a fee, it could easily be undercut by unlicensed shared-ride operations, it says. Whether that turns out to be true or not, Trentway finds itself in the same basic situation that existing business like Encyclopedia Britannica faced when free or low-cost upstarts like Wikipedia threatened to crowd-source their core product into oblivion"
Lost arts of the Secret Listservs
Both Ed Vielmetti and Juliet Sutherland have suggested I subscribe to the Read2.0-l mailing list.
Thing is, they’ve never forwarded instructions, and the general state of affairs on the Web these days means it’s nigh impossible to Google instructions on how to subscribe, what’s expected, or even what goes on there. Far as I know, an old blog entry of mine made the rounds… and nonetheless I had no idea except for a forwarded message or two, years back.
So, listserv generation: Taking a walled garden and subsequently forgetting the walls are even there? Weird and kinda scary, by modern standards. That would be feeling like a secret, invisible walled garden overgrown and emitting no noises.
Very Harry Potter, mind you.
links for 2008-08-26
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I was presented with this del.icio.us link MOMENTS after sending off a patient and tactful explanation of why economic development is doomed and stupid. To an economic development person.
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