“Larger meat pack­ers opposed such test­ing. If Creek­stone Farms Pre­mium Beef began adver­tis­ing that its cows have all been tested, other com­pa­nies fear they too will have to con­duct the expen­sive tests.”

“After apply­ing con­ver­sa­tional analy­sis tools, Ped­er­sen asserted that lan­guage is more than the sim­ple act of trans­fer­ring infor­ma­tion, but a con­ver­sa­tional inter­ac­tion between active par­tic­i­pants. Language-​​competent bono­bos use lex­i­grams, which are made up of arbi­trary sym­bols that rep­re­sent words, as the basis for con­ver­sa­tions with humans.

Ped­er­sen said lin­guis­tic aspects of the con­ver­sa­tion included turn tak­ing, nego­ti­a­tion, pauses and rep­e­ti­tion, and went far beyond infor­ma­tion shar­ing made pos­si­ble through the use of lex­i­grams symbols.

“She was using lan­guage to get at what she wanted,” Ped­er­sen said. “She is very, very clever and is fully capa­ble of fol­low­ing the con­ver­sa­tion the same way a human does. This tells me that Panbanisha’s knowl­edge of lan­guage is far beyond under­stand­ing the words, to under­stand­ing how to use them in a con­ver­sa­tion to get what she wants.”

Why I don’t use Ning.

“I think it’s fair to say at this point that if you want to learn how to deal with such “open” devel­op­ment plat­forms and part­ner­ships, do pretty much the oppo­site of what Ning did.”

“When reader Nick tried to sign up for ATT “naked DSL” or “dry loop” ser­vice (get­ting DSL with­out hav­ing pay­ing for a land­line), a curi­ous thing happened.

AT&T said his address doesn’t exist. But when he went through the process to sign up for bun­dled ser­vice, more expen­sive, with land­line phone ser­vice, mag­i­cally, it could find his address.

This is odd when you con­sider a cus­tomer ser­vice rep later said both options draw from the same data­base. It’s not odd when you con­sider that AT&T only made naked DSL avail­able because the FCC made them in exchange for let­ting them do some fancy busi­ness trans­ac­tions, and then ini­tially made it very con­fus­ing for peo­ple to try to sign up.”

“Accord­ing to Malik, Detroit is one of the lead­ers in com­mu­nity gar­den­ing. The net­works sup­ports church gar­dens, back­yard gar­dens, con­tainer gar­dens and school gar­dens. Malik placed spe­cial impor­tance on school gar­dens as a means to edu­cate chil­dren, not just see them as con­sumers. He stated that kids who cul­ti­vate veg­eta­bles want to eat them, and that these gar­den­ers encour­age their par­ents to start back­yard gar­dens at home.”

“Judg­ing from the tar­gets here, they espe­cially fear the orga­ni­za­tions that car­ried cam­eras in the streets of NYC in 2004. They fear this so much that they would dis­patch their min­ions in force to go after the peo­ple with signs and cam­eras before they can leave their homes. The next time there’s an anti-​​war protest in the LA area, if at all pos­si­ble I need to attend…with cam­era in hand. We must show them a dis­play of cam­eras and signs like they’ve never seen before. Unfor­tu­nately, my cell phone cam­era is crappy. Yes, I have a bet­ter cam­era, but a cam­era that doesn’t trans­mit can be con­fis­cated before the images are uploaded.”

“Instead, the raids were purely antic­i­pa­tory in nature, and clearly designed to frighten peo­ple con­tem­plat­ing tak­ing part in any unau­tho­rized protests.”

“With NORTHCOM tak­ing the lead on brief­ing the pub­lic, it’s clear the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion wants to send the mes­sage that every­thing is under con­trol. Instead, to those that do this for a liv­ing, the mes­sage is clear that every­thing is absolutely and com­pletely broken.

Per­haps the state gov­ern­ments need help. Per­haps FEMA is not up to the job. Per­haps the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion sim­ply wants a uni­form on cam­era, and this way of doing things is prefer­able to things hap­pen­ing the way that they should (a process, by the way, that WORKED before Bush screwed it up).”

“There are some efforts in progress to develop peren­nial grain pro­duc­ing grasses to over­come one of the costly and destruc­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics of food plants: cul­ti­va­tion. The yearly need to break the soil to plant a crop is an expen­sive labor and mate­r­ial con­sum­ing activ­ity, and it degrades soil. It’s a non-​​trivial objec­tive. A cross of some sort that pro­duced peren­nial C4 grain pro­duc­ing grasses that are able to pro­duce in a wider range of tem­per­a­tures would be as rev­o­lu­tion­ary as ear­lier efforts that pro­duced shorter grain plants that put more of their energy into seed than stalk.”