Technorati Tags: hacking
Archive for February, 2008
Know thy enemy.
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteLesson 1: The Public Won’t Support You, Unless You Do Things “Harshly”: Soon after 9/11, according to Bob Woodward, Ailes sent a “back-channel message” to President Bush, suggesting that he needed to take “the harshest measures possible” in retaliation for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He added that “support” for war “would dissipate if the public did not see Bush acting harshly.”
Lesson 2: The Public Does Not Need To Know The Full Reasons For Going To War: In 2003, a University of Maryland study found that “those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions” about basic facts related to the war. 80 percent of those who relied on Fox News as their primary news source believed at least one of three lies: the discovery of alleged WMD in Iraq, alleged Iraqi involvement in 9/11, and international support for a U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Lesson 3: When Things Go Bad, The Public Doesn’t Need To Know: “Fox spent half as much time covering the Iraq war than MSNBC during the first three months” of 2007, “and considerably less than CNN.” Fox News “were obviously cheerleaders for the war,” said CNN U.S. President Jon Klein. “When the war went badly they had to dial back coverage because it didn’t fit their preconceived story lines.”
192021 is an In incredibly provocative and beautiful assemblage of info graphics about the future of urban growth.
And if you want to monitor the stats that get us there, you can check out the awesome World Clock.
Technorati Tags: 122021
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Maybe he’d be happier if he considered collective intelligence.
“A Song Alone”
By Neil Young
No one song can change the world. But that doesn’t mean its time to stop singing.
Somewhere on Earth a scientist is alone working. No one knows what he or she is thinking. The secret is just within reach. If I knew that answer I would be singing the song.This is the Age of innovation. Hope matters. But not hope alone. In the age of innovation, the people’s fuel must be found. That is the biggest challenge. Who is up to the challenge? Who is searching today? All day. All night. Every hour that goes by. I know I am.
My friends write to me don’t give up. I am not giving up. I know this is the time for change. But I know that it’s not a song. Maybe it was. But it isn’t now. It’s an action, an accomplishment, a revelation, a new way. I am searching for the people’s fuel. Will I find it? Yes. I think so. I don’t know why I may have been chosen to help enable a discovery of this magnitude. I know I can only write a song about it when I find it. Until then I can write a song about the search or spend all my time looking. But a song alone will not change the world. Even so, I will keep on singing.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, is a Silicon Valley veteran at a mere 36 years of age. His latest pride, Ning, is a place were you can start your own social network. I think it’s an awesome idea. There already is one for media literacy, created by Understand Media’s Nick Pernisco.
What follows is a snip from a short interview with Anderson who has some pretty harsh words for the newspaper industry, but maybe he’s right.
SPIEGEL: But who is on to the next big thing? News Corp. bought MySpace, Google has invested in AOL, Microsoft purchased Facebook shares and is now fighting to acquire Yahoo. It looks like the pie will soon be cut up and distributed.
Andreesssen: No! If anything, I think this rate of change is accelerating. TV and the press have always functioned according to the same sets of rules and technical standards. But the Internet is based on software. And anybody can write a new piece of software on the Internet that years later a billion people are using. My theory is: Every year there is a new killer app. One year it’s Ebay, the next year it’s Craigslist, then it’s Napster, then Paypal, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and so on. I have invested in a whole series of start-ups that are all candidates to be one of these new big things — take Digg, for example …
**
Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust — it has a business model that either works or it doesn’t.
Technorati Tags: Marc Andreessen, Ning
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Maps can serve all kinds of purposes, some for peace, others for commerce, but all function by communicating ideas about land. In this case, I find the Global Incident Map quite disturbing, mainly because of how it filters and defines incidents of “suspicious” activity. It is a very fearful portrait of the world, through the lens of “security” professionals. And why not? Those who prosper by peddling fear need to keep us informed of how dangerous the world is so we’ll buy more security devices and weapons, like the security camera companies in cahoots with insurers to make people think surveillance makes them safer (as opposed to simpler things like street lights).
Wouldn’t it be nice to see a map that displayed every act of kindness? Maybe I’m naive, but I think the world is actually an incredibly safe place. It’s just that our perception of the future is one that’s filled with danger because we are unable to accept the fact that the universe is impermanent.
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A fascinating specimen of antimarketing marketing. I don’t know what to make of this ad. It freaks me out, just a little.
I nice little profile from MTV about community low power radio.
Depressingly, the Axe guys survives.
Technorati Tags: Axe
OK, let’s get one thing straight, the RIAA represents the true counterculture. They have their heads so far up their paradigmatic arse that they are now promoting shrill profiling that equates music piracy sd being a gateway to terrorism. With this kind of logic, half the population will end up in Guantanamo Bay. See the video linked below and pity the fools.
RIAA: Murderers, Terrorists, And Other Criminal Minds May Be Graduating To Pirating Music:
Yesterday the RIAA-produced video In Trial, which covers the societal dangers of music piracy, made its way out to torrent sites, and among its contents are instructions on how to get RIAA investigators qualified as expert witnesses, a guide to identifying pirated CDs, and the above bit, about the links between people who profit from pirated music and people who deal weapons, populate terror cells, and murder their fellow man for sport. Surely I’m not the only person who thinks that this particular bit on the “kill ‘em all” impulses of miscreants dealing in fifth-generation copies of Graduation would hit home a little more effectively if it were accompanied by a bangin’ soundtrack?
Technorati Tags: RIAA
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This year’s most stimulating Super Bowl ads competed for mirror neurons. And the winners are (all the ads are viewable here):
WHO REALLY WON THE SUPER BOWL? By Marco Iacoboni:
If a good indicator of a successful ad is activity in brain areas concerned with reward and empathy, two winners seem to be the ‘I am going to Disney’ ad and the Bud ‘office’ ad. In contrast, two big floppers seem to be the Bud ’secret fridge’ ad and the Aleve ad. What is quite surprising, is the strong disconnect that can be seen between what people say and what their brain activity seem to suggest. In some cases, people singled out ads that elicited very little brain responses in emotional, reward-related, and empathy-related areas.
Among the ads that seem relatively successful, I want to single out the Michelob ad. Above is a picture showing the brain activation associated with the ad. What is interesting is the strong response — indicated by the arrow — in ‘mirror neuron’ areas, premotor areas active when you make an action and when you see somebody else making the same action. The activity in these areas may represent some form of empathic response. Or, given that these areas are also premotor areas for mouth movements, it may represent the simulated action of drinking a beer elicited in viewers by the ad. Whatever it is, it seems a good brain response to the ad.
Technorati Tags: advertising, Super Bowl, super bowl ads
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Mad TV parodies School House Rock.
A robot does interpretative dance of dreaming. No kidding. Thanks Scud!
As reported previously, Apple seems to have an eating disorder. Others have picked up on Apple’s movement towards “thinnovation.” Is it in dialog with greater social trends, in particular the shrinking waistlines of celebrities and fashion models? Maybe it’s a stretch to equate the MacBookAir with anorexia, but I would certainly link it to the increasing ephemerality of technology. As Bruce Mau says, the goal of (system) design is to become invisible, innocuous.
Apple has declared itself the master of “thinnovation.” (Head to your nearest Apple and you’ll see this word-creation plastered on the store-front window.) It troubles Shannon McCartney-Simper, manager of business development of the Eating Disorders Institute in St. Louis Park.
“My 12-year-old daughter and I were looking at the MacBook Air online, and the words right out of her mouth were, ‘Wow, look how thin that is!’ ” she said. “Of course that’s appealing to young people. It’s what they’re used to believing is the ideal.”
McCartney-Simper can’t help but consider the parallels between ultrathin computers and people who are striving to be ultrathin. “These laptops are really thin and portable — almost like you can hide them,” she said. “And then you take that to another level, and you think of how women so often want to hide their bodies.”
(via Ypluse)
Technorati Tags: macbook air, thinnovation
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Filmed entirely at Time Square, this is one of those works of art that makes me think, I wish I’d done that! This is the trailer for a longer piece, which can be viewed here.
An exciting new documentary project that highlights an emergent global culture and its core values for change. You can get involved by visiting the site and sharing the video.
The Dumbing Of America - washingtonpost.com:
Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteThis is the latest installment in the dumbing of America argument. The “dumbing down” polemic is pervasive in the media literacy movement and is also a subtext of Jean Twenge-inspired attacks on gen-y and the millennials so-called mediated narcissism.Though the article is compelling in its finely tuned arguments, riddle me this: if early educators in the US believed that universal literacy would produce a rational society, what happened? It appears to me that everything that the “dumbing down” crowd rails against is the product of highly rational, extremely well-educated people. From my vantage, rationality seems to be the problem, not the other way around.
A meditation on on TV. Alhough I think TV and how the viewer experiences it is a lot more complex than what this video depicts, I like the visuals.
PS TV as we knew it– as a one to many form of industrial media– is dead. Time to rethink our critique.
