MAKE Flickr pool member Whymcycles has contributed a great Meatricity powered Christmas tree build.

Colin pedals my Dad's '75 Schwinn Exceriser stationary bike..30,000+ miles, with a fixed magnet electric motor rubbing on the wheel.' All sizes' will show the simple clamp set up to hold the motor and the device itself to the fork leg. I used 2 old BMX 4 bolt handlebar clamps (Stems). The motor spins and gets enough juice to light 110 volt electric bulbs, or Christmas lights! 0 carbon footprint, the motor can be tilted away to let the bike function minus the generator. The only weld is a 'x' cross of two seat post segments to which the stems attach. Plumbers metal tape would do just as well with bolts hold tight.. Built Fall of '05. Made merenque..beat the eggs with the electric mixer plugged into the bike! yum.

What novel ideas have you tried out recently? What can you power without plugging in to the wall? Join us in the comments, and show off your great ideas in the MAKE Flickr pool.

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NuclearCodeMonkey writes "Blockbuster Total Access has changed the terms of its user agreement without notice to users. Previously, users could return online (mailed) rentals in-store for free rentals. The next set of online rentals was immediately mailed out. Now, without notice, they have changed their policy so that the in-store free exchanges count against you, and no more online rentals are mailed out until the in-store rentals are returned. No wonder they are closing stores and losing to Netflix! Needless to say I am canceling my account in protest."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fred Trotter writes "CCHIT is the dominant Electronic Health Record certification body in the US. It is also decidedly anti-FOSS and has been for years. Certification of one kind or another will be required for EHR systems to qualify for funding under the Stimulus Act. If CCHIT is chosen as the certification body, and the current certification strategies continue, it will not be possible to have a funded EHR that is both certified and truly FOSS. Now, however, CCHIT has agreed to meet the FOSS Health IT community at HIMSS 09 to address this issue." We discussed the shortcomings in the stimulus bill as it relates to FOSS a few days back.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Hudson, Executive Producer of Make: Television at Twin Cities Public Television, sent me this photo of the show's host John Park gathering a crowd at today's Make: Day festival in St. Paul, MN. TPT and the Museum of Science in Minnesota organized the day at the museum in St. Paul. One of the makers featured is the circuit-bending artist Tim Kaiser, who also appears in one of the profiles in Make: Television.

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When you learned that JFK had been assassinated?

Okay, most of you aren't old enough to remember that. I am. And thanks to Google Maps I can show you where I was when I heard the news. I was in second grade, they let us out of school early, the parents came to pick us up. On this street corner my mom told me what had happened. I didn't get it. I asked who the President would be now, she said Lyndon Johnson. It didn't make any sense, because the only President I had been aware of up until then was Kennedy.

I got into this mode when I was trying to find the White Castle I used to go to when we lived in Jackson Heights.

Then I found the apartment building we lived in. Of course it's still there. We lived in Apt 5W. I remember that because I thought it was really neat that the apartment had the same last initial as I did and I was 5 years old. How about that -- a memory when I was less than 1/10th my current age.

Another way to get unreconstructed childhood memories is to watch a movie you haven't seen since you were a child. I didn't actually think the Cowardly Lion was a lion, I knew what a lion looked like, but I sure didn't think he was human! What a sweet kid, so smart.

nloop writes "The Pentagon is intending to develop a new spy ship — a dirigible. At 65,000 feet it would provide a 10 year, solar power based, unblinkingly intricate and continuous view of the surface via radar surveillance. Because of its altitude it would be safe from surface-to-air missiles and most aircraft. A 1/3-scale prototype, now being designed, is 'known as ISIS, for Integrated Sensor Is the Structure, because the radar system will be built into the structure of the ship. ... 'If successful, the dirigible... could pave the way for a fleet of spy airships, military officials said.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Allison sez, "These are a pair of hand painted shoes I made one afternoon. I got the shoes for $5 at payless, and already had the paint. I free handed the shoes carefully by painting with a really tiny paint brush that I made. I sealed the shoes afterwards with spray acrylic, and voila!"

Hand painted shoes (Thanks, Allison!)

Avi sez, "Mumbai photographer David de Souza has just put together a collection of amazing studio photos of Mumbai's colorful Nomads." The book, "Itinerants, the Nomads of Mumbai," looks and sounds like a doozy. but doesn't seem to have much in the way of distribution outside of India.

Charmayne sets the subjects of David’s photos back into movement through poetic inspiration. Her writing reminds us of the mythical dimension of itinerant life, which is present in every civilization. Sedentary societies have indeed always had an ambivalent relationship to the people of the wind, as Japanese villagers call them. Itinerants have been perceived in turns as indispensable trading partners, threatening agents of change and as objects of desire. David and Charmayne’s images and words bring to life some of the multiple avatars of that nomadic spirit that all of us carry deep inside and which refuses to leave.

This is probably why, turning these pages, even those of us who chose or inherited comfort and security cannot help but sigh at the thought of these untied lives, which seem to be fed by faith and magic more than anything else. Of course nomadic life, as intense and meaningful as it can be, is usually driven by necessity more than choice. But for an instant, it is liberating to believe that most of the people in this book would never trade itinerancy for routine and standardization.

The Itinerants of Mumbai (Thanks, Avi!)

I've got a Laconica server up, and a small community has started there -- the very same day Google released Jaiku as open source, and somehow made it able to run (for free?) in AppEngine? I want to try it!

But the instructions assume you want to build the app or check things out or care what libraries it uses. None of that applies to me. I want to see what it's like to sysop one of these systems, and get feedback from people here on scripting.com. So...

Choice #1 is for someone to write a howto that a technical end-user might be able to use to set up a Jaiku on AppEngine. That way I could test the docs and the software, and pave the way for others to follow.

Choice #2 is for someone to set one up for me and give me the keys. Not optimal since I won't be able to help improve the setup process.

I like the way this is shaping up. As a user I want choice, it makes me powerful. If any vendor, open source or not, feels that they have me locked in, they won't listen. If the users are truly independent of the vendors then really interesting things can happen.

So if you like Jaiku and want to help it, let's go!

coondoggie writes "The US Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate recently awarded almost $420,000 to a Kentucky company to further develop a contactless finger print/biometric system. The goal is a machine that can snap 10 fingerprints in high resolution in less than 10 seconds, without human intervention. This goal is beginning to lok feasible. FlashScan3D is working with the University of Kentucky's Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, and has developed a technique called 'structured light illumination' (WIPO patent description), where a pattern of dots or stripes is projected onto a curved or irregular surface."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm only vaguely aware of Facebook. Not sure why, but I never really got into it.

Even so, some of my Twitter posts make it through to Facebook, so every once in a while I get a comment "over there" -- and that's how it feels to me, far away.

I had a few minutes this morning to check out the changes they've made and found it's much more accomodating from the point of view of a Twitter user.

A few observations.

1. On the home page you have a box. Instead of asking what you are doing, it asks what's on your mind. Small difference, and in fact much of the time what I post on Twitter is what's on my mind, not what I'm doing. I'm not one of those people who posts twits saying "I'm brushing my teeth," or whatever. Most of the time what I'm doing is none of anyone's business.

2. In that box you can type up to 160 characters. Twenty more than Twitter. Someone over there is marketing. If you're coming in second, you need to offer more. At first I wondered if it was unlimited. They must have really sweated over that decision.

3. Now that it behaves like Twitter, the other features come into play, ones I've been begging Twitter for since the beginning. The ability to enclose photos and video is essential. Why no MP3? Don't they love podcasts? I wish they would change that.

4. Now I might be interested in developing for Facebook. But their API never interested me as long as I was confined to a little box in their page. This venue is more interesting. Is there an API to post a twit to Facebook? (Update: Seesmic released a version of their Twitter client for Facebook, which sort-of implies that there is a Twitter-like API for Facebook.)

5. People can comment on your Facebook twits without using up twit-space in their own stream? That's a question. Do comments I post show up to my readers?

6. Who can see my posts? My friends? Anyone? I think this is a major difference from Twitter, where everything is by default public. Here, I think everything is by default not public. Or maybe not public in any way. I'd love to see a Facebook for Twitter users howto. Are there enough Twitter users to make that worth doing?

7. Now I see what they mean about how it's a favor to FriendFeed. There's the Like command. They totally need to have that in Twitter. Retweeting is so lame. Like is what we need.

8. I don't like the way they link to things. I linked to this post over there, and there's this huge picture of me next to the link and an extensive quote. No no no. That's wrong. I want a little icon that means "click this to read more." Let me write the intro in the message I post. (Which I did. The excerpt is wrong.) Screen shot.

9. Since (presumably) this text is staying within the Internet (and not being transmitted via SMS) why not allow styling -- bold, italic. Or maybe it is meant to go through SMS (hence the 160 character limit).

10. I really like the way they do pictures. But it should be possible to collapse them, so the picture stops taking up vertical space. That's the problem with media objects, they take up space. If you let the user collapse, then you can have it both ways. Win-win.

11. I know they're tacky but how about some animated smileys.

12. Movies work great too.

Summary: I like what they've done! Will I use it? Don't know.

Observer writes "Bugs in software are nothing new, but when they're discussed in the open, how do open source projects adapt policy? A major regression in the Gnome project's session manager has seen some major distributions choose to refuse to follow the update rather than drop a major feature. Between Gnome's public bug tracker and similar trackers from distributions which released (and still distribute) the buggy version, months of debate provide an interesting case-study in the way front-line users and developers interact for better or for worse. What lessons can be learned here for release planning, bug triage, and marketing for a major open source project?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rob has some clever tips for how to use your digital camera.

For the past five years or so I have had a pocket camera with me every day. I find lots of uses for it, and the rapidly taken, easily accessed photos. Despite the massive collection of physical photos in slide, print and negative form that I have, the ones I can actually use are the ones that are saved on my Flickr account, tagged and parked in sets. Notebook pages, step by step sequences of projects, before and after, student work, whatever I feel like shooting.

The first decent digital camera I had was the Nikon Coolpix 990. Eventually that one died when I got run down by my daughter and her friends on a sledding hill and I needed to replace it. I figured out that my Nikon Coolpix S4 had a setting for making audio recordings, which got me experimenting with podcasting. Before the S4 fully died, I got its' replacement on the eve of a trip to South Africa and Malawi. When I was trying out my Canon S515, I discovered the great use of making video. It is amazing to me just how useful a $400 camera is. These moderately priced cameras are so much better than my old Nikon N90 slr ever could have dreamed to be. While I miss the interchangeable lenses, I have no regrets about leaving my enormous camera bag stowed away. My recent pocket camera is an HTC Dream, or G1, with a 3 megapixel camera. The images are not perfect, but better than many phone cameras. For me, it has become essential that I have a camera with me all the time.

How do you use your digicam to support your making? What are your tips for how to use your camera? Is it worth lugging around a pricey DSLR, or do you need the smallest, lightest, most simple camera? What is the best model for your uses? What do you do with your photos? Where do you park your photos? What software do you use to edit, store, manage, all the zillions of pictures you take? Join us in the comments, and of course, contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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Defeat Globalism writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are pursuing a 6-month prison term for a Los Angeles man who pleaded guilty in December to one misdemeanor count of uploading pre-release Guns N' Roses tracks, according to court documents. Kevin Cogill was arrested last summer at gunpoint and charged with uploading nine tracks of the Chinese Democracy album to his music site — antiquiet.com. The album, which cost millions and took 17 years to complete, was released November 23 and reached No. 3 in the charts. The sentence being sought — including the calculation of damages based on the illegal activity of as many as 1,310 websites that disseminated the music after Cogill released it — underscores how serious the government is about punishing those for uploading pre-release material."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kelson writes "As the release of Internet Explorer 8 approaches, Microsoft's IE Team has published a list of differences between IE7 and IE8, and how to fix code so that it will work on both. Most of the page focuses on IE8 Standards mode, but it also turns out that IE7 compatibility mode isn't quite the same as IE7 itself."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This gentleman, Gabriel Cardona, was a hit man for a Mexican drug cartel. His eyelids are tattooed with eyes.
"U.S. teens were hit men for Mexican cartel"

Make: television Season One has come and gone. But in case you missed it, we'll be rolling out the ten episodes of our premiere season again, starting of course with Episode 1 which features the amazing bicycle wizardry of Cyclecide, and the VCR Cat Feeder in the Maker Workshop:

Meet Cyclecide, an inventive band of performance artists who build outrageous bicycle contraptions straight out of the dump. In the Maker Workshop segment John Park turns an old VCR into automated cat feeder, and William Gurstelle demonstrates the "Nibbler" - an unusual tool for shaping metal. Maker Channel contributors showcase their talents through scream machines, laser harps, cupcake cars and a sly gadget that turns off those annoying TV screens in public places.

Get the m4v of Episode One, or subscribe in iTunes. Watch the individual segments of Episode One and find instructions for the VCR Cat Feeder after the jump.

All episodes, individual segments, and PDF instructions of our Maker Workshop projects from Make: television Season One can always be found at our Episode Guide. You can also watch Make: television videos on YouTube, Blip, Vimeo, or download our torrents at LegalTorrents.

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whitefox writes "The scoop from CNet is that 'The US House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a resolution introduced two days earlier that designates March 14, 2009 (3/14, get it?) as National Pi Day. It urges schools to take the opportunity to teach their students about Pi and "engage them about the study of mathematics."' The resolution is available online. I doubt it'll ever become a national holiday, but the Pi string in the article is pretty cool in a nerdy sort of way."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nathan sent this tip in via the comments:

"Hangar No. 5": The story of two treasure-hunting teens sneaking into an abandoned military base looking for a rumored gold cache. Once inside, they accidentally activate a top secret relic of the Cold War - a huge mobile weapons system bent on protecting the base from all intruders. Cut off from every exit, the pair must fight to survive.

Running 11 minutes, this live-action short was produced entirely by undergraduate students during fall 2007 and spring 2008. The film contains 110 visual effects shots, all of which were completed by the film's visual effects supervisor using the open-source animation software Blender for all 3D work Apple's Shake compositing software for 2D work.

The varied effects in the film include a fully CG robot, CG set extensions, green screen replacement, extensive rotoscoping, wire removal, 3D camera tracking, image based modeling and lighting, volumetric lighting effects, and particle effects. All CG models,
textures, and other assets were built from the ground up.

Pretty cool video, death dealing robots, racks of automatic weapons, conspiracy, great special effects, mounds of gold bullion, clever story and a cliff hanging ending. For more information, check out the project's site. They set up a funding mechanism where people can contribute to the producers of the film before downloading it.

How do you like working in groups? What is the best thing you have created in school or university? How does a collaborative project help prepare you or your students for life and work in the modern world? How do you plan on funding your projects? How important is money to your projects? What have you or your students created with Blender? Share your thoughts and projects in the comments, and pass along your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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volume4 brings news that David Wood of the Symbian Foundation has made a post detailing their plans for a release schedule, with new versions due out every six months. We discussed Nokia's acquisition of Symbian for the purpose of open sourcing the popular mobile OS last year. Quoting: "There's a lot of activity underway, throughout the software development teams for all the different packages that make up the Symbian Platform. These packages are finding their way into platform releases. The plan is that there will be two platform releases each year. ... Symbian^2, which is based on S60 5.1, reaches a functionally complete state at the middle of this year, and should be hardened by the end of the year. This means that the first devices based on Symbian^2 could be reaching the market any time around the end of this year — depending on the integration plans, the level of customisation, and the design choices made by manufacturers. Symbian^3 follows on six months later — reaching a functionally complete state at the end of this year, and should be hardened by the middle of 2010."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eric Goldman writes "Earlier this month, we discussed HB 450, the Utah Legislature's third attempt to regulate keyword advertising after the past two efforts failed miserably. The latest attempt barely passed the Utah House, aided in part by a 'yes' vote from Representative Jennifer Seelig, who also happens to be a lobbyist-employee of 1-800 Contacts, the principal advocate of HB 450. Nevertheless, HB 450 died in the Utah Senate without a vote when the Utah Legislature adjourned last night. Despite the seeming good news, it would be surprising if the Utah Legislature didn't try a fourth attempt to regulate keyword advertising in a future session."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well Happy Pi Day to you! This little video came to me a few years ago via two alumni of my high school technology and engineering program. Math geekery made fun!

The Math Forum at Drexel has some good Pi Day activities. if you are looking for some classroom resources for Pi Day, you might check out Pi Day. Of course if you are inspired to TeachPi, then go for it. If music is your thing, check out some Pi songs. maybe you like pictures, so search about on Flickr and see what comes around. You might even want to get artistic with your Pi fantasies.

Thanks Michael and Stephen!

There are loads of ways that Makers can have a robust and fulfilling Pi Day. You might need to bake some Pi, or you could write some Pi-Ku, play some Pi games, calculate the area of your records, figure out the distance your bicycle moves for each revolution of its' wheels and more. How do you use Pi in your daily life? How do you use Pi in your classroom? Does Pi affect your career? How does Pi figure into your hobbies? What is the most unusual way your have had to use Pi? Join in the conversation in the comments, and contribute your Pi Day photos and videos to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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MySpacer GoodVillain has taken Casio SK-1 modding to its limits with the "Sample Smasher". Stripped of its original enclosure and controls he rehoused the popular sampling keyboard's electronics in a gig-worthy metal case. and added a slew of new controls and abilities -

The user can record or overlap samples and then change and glitch out the sound using the patch bay below the joysticks. You can also turn those samples into synth sounding basses, pads, leads, and effects as well with the proper tweaking. More importantly you can create sounds no commercial synth can produce.

Additionally you can run your cable connections through pots (the knobs) and fine tune your sound.

The 4 joysticks on the right allow you to play up to 32 notes. And trust me, playing with joysticks instead of keys is not only fun but it is just as easy if not easier to play the synth. The patch bay you see below the wires already jacked in allow you to program which note range the joysticks play so you can set them up to your liking.

The single joystick on the left allows you to actively change the routing of the connections. Using this you can turn the connections on or off which for live play is much easier and entertaining then a regular toggle switch.

The feature list goes on to include MIDI and even a gooseneck mic for vocal sampling. Quite awesome - I'm guessing the patchable pot feature alone would be a lot of fun Read up on his post for more detail. [via Matrixsynth]

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Remember yesterday's post about how the Obama administration had refused to release the details of a secret copyright treaty because doing so would compromise "national security?" Well, it turns out that there are plenty of people who are cleared to be privy to this "sensitive" document -- strangely, they all seem to work for giant copyright companies!

Of course, they're allowed to know what's in the treaty -- but the public, activist groups, consumer rights groups, and the artists whom this treaty is supposed to protect are all forbidden from knowing what it says.

What an embarrassment for an administration that holds itself out as an end to the corrupt, business-as-usual beltway fandango.

Chairman , Mr. Eric H. Smith
President
International Intellectual Property Alliance

Vice-Chairman
Mr. Jacques J. Gorlin
President
The Gorlin Group

Sandra M. Aistars, Esq.
Senior Counsel, Intellectual Property
Time Warner Inc.

Kira M. Alvarez, Esq.
Director, International Government Affairs
Eli Lilly and Company

Mark Chandler, Esq.
Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary
Cisco Systems, Inc.

Ms. Erin L. Ennis
Vice President
The U.S.-China Business Council

Francis (Frank) Z. Hellwig, Esq.
Senior Associate, General Counsel
Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc.

J. Anthony Imler, Ph.D.
Director, Public Policy, Latin America
Merck & Co., Inc.

Ms. Mary A. Irace
Vice President, Trade and Export Finance
National Foreign Trade Council, Inc.

Jeffrey P. Kushan, Esq.
Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood LLP
Representing Biotechnology Industry Organization

Stevan D. Mitchell, Esq.
Vice President, Intellectual Property Policy
Entertainment Software Association

Douglas T. Nelson, Esq.
Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary
CropLife America

Timothy P. Trainer, Esq.
President
Global Intellectual Property Strategy Center, P.C.
Representing the Thomas G. Faria Corporation

Neil I. Turkewitz, Esq.
Executive Vice President
Recording Industry Association of America

Ms. Susan C. Tuttle
Governement Programs Executive
IBM Corporation

Mr. Herbert C. Wamsley
Executive Director
Intellectual Property Owners Association

Ms. Anissa S. Whitten
Trade Director
Motion Picture Association of America, Inc.

Ms. Deborah E. Wiley
Senior Vice President
John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Association of American Publishers, Inc.

Shirley Zebroski, Ph.D
Director, Legislative Affairs
General Motors Corporation

Who are the cleared advisors that have access to secret ACTA documents?

theodp writes "Steve Jobs wasn't around to convince you that you should be impressed, but on Wednesday Apple unveiled a 4GB Shuffle that's half the size of its predecessor. Holding up to 1,000 songs, the pre-shrunk Shuffle sports a 10-hour battery life and also adds a new VoiceOver feature that can recite song titles, artists, and playlist names, as well as provide status information. Even without a show from Steve, the new player is generally leaving folks dazzled, although there are some complaints."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Find more videos like this on Hollywood East TV

Hollywood East is a new movie studio being planned and built in Plymouth MA. As part of their buildup for creating the studio complex, they have a daily webisode called The Series, which details many of the aspects of the project. <a href="http://www.hollywoodeasttv.com/profiles/blogs/and-the-sign-said-hollywood".

One of the episodes from this week profiles the work of Mark Goulthorpe, MIT Architecture professor, and his fascinating project, the amazing Hyposurface project. Pretty cool wall-ish-thing.

What are you working on? Share your project, in whatever state of completion it's in. How would you use the Hyposurface? If you could build a studio anywhere, where would it be, and how would you go about developing a community around it? Have you worked on the Hyposurface? Do you have any pictures or video of it in action or development? Add your ideas in the comments and contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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The use of mashups in learning, serialized feeds, the value of lectures, and crowdsourcing are just some of the topics George Siemens explores in this new issue of the Media Literacy Digest. Photo credit: Courosa The idea of serialized feeds, explored with Stephen Downes, is a fascinating one, and a potentially useful one in the delivery of online trainings as RSS-based courses. Serialized feeds are basically the RSS counterpart of email-based "autoresponders" and are characterized by posts being arranged inside the feed in a linear pre-established order, rather than in a standard reverse chronological one. In this way RSS subscribers of such a serialized feed start reading always from the first post and not from the latest (chronological) one. This allows for specific sequences of information, such as those to be provided in standard training situations to be more effectively delivered via RSS feeds. If you are interested about new technologies and the social impact they have on the educational landscape, this weekly digest is a good source of pointers, facts and resources to make sense of the disruptive changes that are affecting our lifestyle, both on the Web and in the real world. Here all the details:

eLearning Resources and News

learning, networks, knowledge, technology, trends by George Siemens

Handbook of Emerging Technologies For Learning

Over the last year or so, Peter Tittenberger and I have been working on a Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning. We’re done with version #1. The wiki is now available (will continue to be updated), and if you prefer to read paper, a .pdf version of the handbook is also available. Questions, comments, and reactions are most welcome.

Course: Virtual Worlds

We are offering a new course in our Certificate in Emerging Technologies: Immersive Worlds, Avatars, and Second Lives. A schedule of upcoming courses is available here.

Why TV Lost

Education has three components that provide value to learners: content, interaction, and accreditation.

1. Content creation / validation has moved sharply (but not exclusively) to learner control… and where still under institutional control, it’s often available for free.
2. Interaction with peers and experts outside of universities is not confined to classrooms anymore. Blogs, podcasts, mailing lists, etc. offer learners the prospect of connecting with others globally.
3. Which leaves accreditation as the main value offered by institutions to learners.

As educators we can look to other information and interaction centric fields for glimpses of what our future holds. Consider the future of news:

“smart content, smart sensors, avatars reading the news to you from your television and even interactive newspaper boxes that print out a personalized paper and automa[t]ically orders your customary drink at a nearby Starbucks.”

…or take a few minutes and read this post on Why TV Lost. Read the article with the view of education and learning (i.e. why education lost (will lose) and learning won (will win)).

Snowflake Effect

Here’s your irony for the day: BECTA’s site on emerging technologies only lets you read the Snowflake Effect article in MS Word. Very well then. I heard Erik Duval speaking on the snowflake effect last year at E-Learn Las Vegas. Wayne Hodgins describes the snowflake effect:

“We now have the chance to invert our design assumptions from mass markets of similarity to singular markets of unique solutions for individuals. We now have the opportunity to adopt an approach which focuses on design for mass personalisation and uniqueness called the Snowflake Effect.”

The article goes on to describe mashups as the means to personalize education… and introduces a variety of mashup “types”. Midway through the article, a Gartner quote states:

“web mashups, which mix content from publicly available sources, will be the dominant model (80 per cent) for the creation of new enterprise applications.”

Does anyone believe Gartner? They have a habit of offering insane forecasts. Someone needs to research their accuracy. I think it’s dismal. Anyway, Hodgins article is well worth the time. The personalization of learning through mashups is a welcomed concept.

The Burden of Proof: What Does Education Research Really Tell Us?

I appreciate the spirit of articles like this The burden of proof: What does education research really tell us?. Various discussions are presented on the value of hands-on science education in contrast with lecture-based. It’s difficult to defend lectures in today’s participatory media environment. But I like lectures when they are delivered well with stories, examples, and even a few metaphors. It’s a mistake to conclude that lectures are passive. Carl Bereiter has argued that, based on Popper’s three worlds, interacting with ideas is a form of active learning. I agree. When interacting with ideas, we build, we contrast, we compare, we argue… call it “minds-on learning”. I find as much satisfaction from a good book or lecture as I do from hands-on learning. A steady diet of either, however, and fatigue does set it.

The CCK08 Solution

I’m delayed in highlighting Stephen Downes’ comments on our Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course from last fall. It’s a good overview of how the course was setup, the challenges we encountered, technical details, and learner involvement. Stephen casually references a new initiative that partly developed in CCK08: Serialized RSS Courses. This concept is developed more fully here:

“A serialized feed is one in which posts are arranged in a linear order and where subscribers always begin with the first post, no matter when they subscribe to the feed. This contrasts with an ordinary RSS feed, in which a subscriber will begin with today’s post, no matter when the feed started”.

Be sure to read through to comments by Tony Hirst. I think this is an important concept and one that deserves more attention. The next stage is to find ways to allow subscribers to find, and connect to, each other. Information without social interaction is a reduction to MIT’s OCW.

Forgetting Things…

If NASA can forget (ok, “lose knowledge”) how to return to the moon and the US can forget how to make certain missiles, I’m sure we can be forgiven for our daily absent-mindedness. I am, however, surprised information of national, even global, importance can be just… lost. And it makes me wonder what we are losing today. Or, are we losing anything? Does Google (and enterprise data management) capture all? Obviously, once we capture everything, then we’re faced with a new range of problems: how to make sense of abundance, how to recognize what’s important in different contexts, etc.

Pushing the Limits of Crowdsourcing

Stories of the value of “crowdsourcing” (opening your content, code, information to the creative (and destructive) moods of the masses) are fairly common. Pushing the Limits of Crowdsourcing:

From around the world, almost 20,000 people chipped in on a five-minute animated film that features a love story between a guitar and a violin. You could have been one of them. All you needed was a Facebook account and an itch for computer-generated animation. The Mass Animation project, led by Yair Landau, is showing how much further crowdsourcing can go, and how traditional production methods may get left behind.

Crowdsourcing, as with any activity that pulls on and requires attention is subject to network phenomenon. Which means some initiatives will get lots of love and others will languish. In an ideal world, we would have many small dedicated projects carefully attended to by a passionate core. LTC released software used for developing our Virtual Learning Commons. The masses didn’t come to improve the software. I think this is more frequently the case than projects that succeed in gaining numerous contributors. That’s why we don’t hear much about competitors to Wikipedia. Divergent attention and effort could possibly diminish the value of all projects. Does this mean crowdsourcing reduces diversity? I’m not sure. Need to think about that more.

Imminent Changes in Higher Education and Its Delivery

Over the last several years, I’ve been trying to communicate the basis for educational change: don’t change education based on an instantiation of change (web 2.0, participative web)… change education based on foundational change. What is the foundational change? As this article - Imminent Changes in Higher Education and its Delivery - states, it’s related to how information is created / shared / validated / disseminated :

The term education is no longer bound by the traditional concepts that shackled it for so long - we don’t have to rely on the traditional methods of information access and content delivery that formed our staple learning diet all these years. Thanks to the Internet and associated technology, there have been rapid advances in the way we access and assimilate information. What was earlier available only at a premium cost is now open to all at no cost at all, what was earlier limited to the heavy, printed and bound version is now digitized and easier to access.

Originally written by George Siemens for elearnspace and first published on March 11th 2009 in his newsletter eLearning Resources and News.

About the author To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book "Knowing Knowledge".

Photo credits: Why TV Lost - Paul Bodea The Burden of Proof: What Does Education Research Really Tell Us? - Miroslav Tolimir Forgetting Things… - James Steidl Pushing the Limits of Crowdsourcing - Miroslav Tolimir Imminent Changes in Higher Education and Its Delivery - brunoil

Clay Shirky explains how all the "visionary planning" in the newspaper business in the 90s amounted to variations on this theme: "Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!" This fallacy drives every conversation about selling digital units of content as though they were physical units of atoms, using DRM to stop copying or divide the uses of content into millions of infinitely fungible "licenses" ("You've bought the right to listen to this song on this player, on Wednesday, only if you've got curly hair and you stand on one leg at the same time"), and suing/"educating" your customers about why they should pay you for stuff that you're not offering in their preferred format.

As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better? Shouldn’t we try a carrot and stick approach with education and prosecution? And so on. In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.

The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiency, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of its most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

And here's the money-shot:

When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Al writes "The economy has hit green energy technologies hard, but technologies focused on energy efficiency and clean coal are still attracting money. Over the next few years, venture capitalists say that the biggest winners in clean tech will most likely be companies with technologies that improve efficiency. Such ventures often take advantage of cheap sensors, communications hardware, and software packages to monitor and control energy use both in buildings and on the electricity grid. High-capital businesses are now more likely to succeed if they can attract foreign funding. For instance, Great Point Energy, based in Cambridge, which has developed a process for converting coal into natural gas, has attracted $100m in funding from China."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reminder: I'm doing a benefit reading for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco tonight along with Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders. Hope to see you there:

Join EFF on Monday, March 23rd, for a fundraising event featuring award-winning writer Cory Doctorow. Cory will be reading from his novel, "Little Brother," a story of high-tech teenage rebellion set in the familiar world of San Francisco. As he currently calls the UK home, this is a rare opportunity to to hear Cory read from his work in person. He will be joined by fellow writers Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders reading from their latest works.

7pm on Monday March 23, at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco.

Admission is $25. No one turned away for lack of funds. Must be 21 or older to attend.

Geek Reading with Cory Doctorow, Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders

I'm thrilled to announce that I'm doing a benefit reading for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco on March 23, 2009 -- a week this Monday -- along with Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders. Hope to see you there:

Join EFF on Monday, March 23rd, for a fundraising event featuring award-winning writer Cory Doctorow. Cory will be reading from his novel, "Little Brother," a story of high-tech teenage rebellion set in the familiar world of San Francisco. As he currently calls the UK home, this is a rare opportunity to to hear Cory read from his work in person. He will be joined by fellow writers Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders reading from their latest works.

7pm on Monday March 23, at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco.

Admission is $25. No one turned away for lack of funds. Must be 21 or older to attend.

Geek Reading with Cory Doctorow, Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders

Happy Pi Day, everyone (and condolences to our non-American cousins who have to wait until July for 22/7 day). I'm a single dad this weekend -- Alice is at SXSW -- so the baby and I are going to go down to Hackney City Farm and order a huge slice of pie, then go and celebrate with the chickens, ducks, piggies and bunny-rabbits.

Pi Day

Pi on Wikipedia

Lenore Skenazy (creator of the Free Range Kids blog and an activist for allowing kids to take risks as they grow up) has just posted the first chapter of her new book (Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry) to Scribd.

Yet here in the nice, safe, scurvy-free twenty-first century, we worry about our kids riding their bikes to the library, or walking to school. We worry when we can’t reach them on their cells. In fact, cell phones—though I love them dearly—are a great example of how everything has gotten so mixed up. We give them to our kids because we don’t want to worry. We say, “They’re for emergencies.” And yet now, if you ex- pected to hear from your daughter after her Mandarin lesson and you can’t reach her immediately, you may well start to think: What happened?! Lost, dead or white slavery? (Which, for our purposes, includes Hispanic, Asian American, African American, Native American, and Inuit slavery, too.)

So now the phone—the very device that was supposed to reas- sure you—is making you freak out when you never would have freaked before. Back in the good ol’ 1990s, you’d at least have waited for your kid to be a few minutes late before the heart-stopping scenarios kicked in. Now anxiety is on speed dial.

And so we worry all the time: Is he safe? Is she OK? Did he eat all his baby carrots? (Answer: no.) And what happens when we don’t worry?

FREE RANGE KIDS (Intro) by Lenore Skenazy

Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry

These customized Katamari Damacy basketball shoes were hand-painted by "Steve," a Kotaku reader, for his Katamari-obsessed girlfriend. True love is such a wonder to behold -- and Katamari Damacy remains my favorite new game of the young century.

Katamari Damacy Gets Ported To Nike Dunks

Katamari Damacy on Amazon

(via Wonderland)

The EPA's most-wanted fugitive list is filled with people who smuggled ozone-depleters, dumped toxins into the water supply, and committed other criminal acts of despoilment (The EPA notes: "Do not attempt to apprehend any of these individuals"). Alas, there are no senior execs from Fortune 100 chemical companies who dump millions of gallons of petroleum into the ocean, or sell carcinogenic pesticides, or manufacture cars that get 0.5 miles to the gallon.

EPA Fugitives (via Beyond the Beyond)

"This is a hilarious yet edifying talk on Sex given by Prof. Sapolsky to his Bio l50/250 Human Behavioral Biology class at Stanford in Spring 2002" -- regular readers of this blog will remember Sapolsky as the incredibly fascinating, funny and engaging scientist whose Stanford lectures on stress are some of the most interesting biology presentations I've ever heard.

He's absolutely scintillating on the subject of primate sexuality: funny, informative, and filled with aha moments that'll have you rethinking your relationship to your naughty parts.

Prof. Robert Sapolsky on the Neurobiology of Primate Sexuality (Thanks, Avi!)

This scrap-metal skeleton sculpture, "Jibetarian," is on display at the National Art Center in Tokyo -- it's a student piece from Tokyo Zokei University. As Tokyobling notes, it has a haunting, moving aspect that I could look at for days:

The term is a pun on the word ji (ground, earth) and vegetarian. I think most of you have seen this kind of work before, but I can’t even begin to imagine how the artist balanced this life sized sculpture while crafting it. It is a massive undertaking - to so finely shape a person that it can balance all by itself. I felt moved by the open mouth and stare of skeletal figure, like a post apocalyptic corpse, a Hiroshima meets Pompeii figure, tragic, doomed and beautiful at the same time. Like a corpse withered by an atomic blast, mere moments before collapsing in a smoking pile of bones in a radioactive desert. Art at it’s finest, a fruitful composition of idea and execution.

Jibetarian - ???? (Thanks, Robert)

Photo from Ottawa Foodies
Alan writes in the comments:

I got into brewing during its mid-90s revival. Coincidentally or not, that's also when the World Wide Web started coming online. Ever since, I've considered zymurgy discussion to be the web's first killer app.

Whether if he is referring to the magazine Zymurgy, or the term zymurgy, meaning fermentation. Either way, Homebrew as the killer app of the web. Interesting idea.

You might also check out Collin's post on root beer from a few months ago. Phillip also wrote about how beer is made a few years ago.

Where do you go to find community around your projects? Where are the best information resources, hottest forums, best tips? If you don't drink beer, what could you use the homebrew techniques for? Have you made your own soda, rootbeer, birchbeer, grape soda? What are your techniques and suppliers? Share your passions in the comments, and contribute your photos to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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Jaymis on Create Digital Motion writes:

On Monday I had a CT scan. If you haven't already, every visualist should go for a ride in a computed tomography machine. It's the best mix of futuristic medicine and video geekness I've ever encountered. As happens with most medical imaging these days, I came away with both a collection of printed films and a CD full of images. However, unlike previous scans and xrays which were generally disparate grainy stills of amorphous organs or bones, these prints showed hundreds of clear, consecutive slices through my body.

Looking at the films I knew immediately that I should be able to use the frames to create an animation. Checking through the CD I found a folder of images named "CT000000?, "CT000001? etc. Some quick googling informed me that these are DICOM format files, which contain both patient information and imagery.

Anyone on Windows who works with images should know the fantastic, free image viewer/toolkit Irfanview - it's the VLC of the still-image world! Irfanview has a plugin in its default bundle which allows it to read and operate on DICOM files, as long as they have a .DCM extension. Fortunately Irfanview's batch functions feature both Rename and Convert, so I was able to quickly go from the aforementioned folders of consecutively named, extensionless files; to folders filled with consecutively named .BMPs, which any visualist will recognize as a Good Thing.

I can't wait to do this with my MRI images!

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "You may recall that in an RIAA case, SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, the district court ruled that an oral argument about the constitutionality of statutory damages could be streamed, and the RIAA has been fighting that with a petition for 'mandamus or prohibition' in the appeals court, which is opposed by the press. Interestingly, it now turns out that the appeals court's oral argument about the streaming will itself be recorded and then streamed. It is hard to imagine how a court which routinely streams its own oral arguments can rule that it is somehow inappropriate for similar oral arguments in the district court to be streamed as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's sometimes quite amusing to watch how various economic ecosystems grow, where multiple companies have symbiotic relationships, and then start to freak out when they think that other companies in the ecosystem are somehow earning "too much." That, of course, is at the heart of many recent battles we've seen -- from net neutrality (where the ISPs think Google is earning too much) to the music industry (where record labels think ISPs and Apple are earning too much). But sometimes it leads to rather amusing contrasts. For example, up in Canada, the entertainment industry is complaining that ISPs earn too much, and therefore are pushing for laws that would require broadband providers to pay money to the entertainment industry to develop new content.

But contrast that to the situation in the UK, where there's an ongoing push for content companies to pay extra to help subsidize the cost of broadband deployments. The argument there is that all the content that's being put online is creating a drain on broadband network resources. But, isn't that exactly what the content creators in Canada are saying is a "free ride" for the ISPs?

Basically, it's yet another situation where each side of the debate overvalues its own contribution. The ISPs think that it's the network that is the most important thing, and the content providers should be paying their way to use it. Meanwhile, the content companies think that it's their content that makes the networks valuable, so the ISPs should be paying extra to offer their content. In reality, they're both wrong. The two things work together just fine in a market where each side pays its own way and doesn't have to subsidize the other. Now, if we could just see such contrasting regulations proposed and passed in the same country, we could have an amusing situation where the cross-subsidies cancel each other out.

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Last year we wrote about a fascinating interview with Terry McBride, the CEO of Nettwerk Music, a Canadian record label that has proven to be quite innovative with its business models (and quite successful). He's really focused on helping musicians build up valuable brands, and then being able to make money off of those brands by being consumer-friendly, rather than consumer-antagonistic. One of the examples mentioned in that interview was a new album coming out where before the album was even released, the raw files were put online for fans to download and mix themselves. As he said, it wasn't "remixing," it was "premixing." And, the plan is to take the best of those and release the actual album in two formats: the official mix and the best fan mixes.

There's now another interview with McBride at the Future of Music site where he talks more about his vision of a music future where people effectively pay not for the music, but for the convenience of a "music valet" that does a better job organizing and finding the music you want when you want it. I'm still not convinced this is how things eventually work out, but it's certainly worth thinking about.

However, there are few statements McBride makes that are worth highlighting. First are two statements I agree with, and then one I don't:

People have always been sharing music. Why would I want to stop them? Why would I want to tell them what to do? The way to win was to get them to support my artists, not to force them to do it a certain way. I know I wouldn't like anyone telling me that.

This is a huge point that is so often missed by those in the industry who are focused on "protecting" and "control" rather than recognizing how people want to interact with musicians. The thing that I find most ridiculous from those complaining about file sharing is that they always make some statement along the lines of, "people who are sharing my files aren't fans, because real fans spend money." Of course, if that's true, what's the problem? The people who aren't fans aren't paying and (based on that statement) the real fans will pay. So, there's no problem at all...

Songs are not copyright. Songs are emotions.

Indeed. And that's the point. Do people pay for emotions? No. However, emotions will impact what people will pay for. However, despite agreeing with McBride on so much, I think he goes a bit off-track with the following:

Out of all of the sharing of music, who's making an economic return? Whoever is should then share that with all the people that allowed it to happen, creating a nice alignment of interests to grow any business. A lot of the providers have viewed music as free content, while at the same time paying for the cable content to grow their networks. They've been making money off the backs of the artists without any compensation for the artists at all. I think that's fundamentally wrong. I've also said it's fundamentally wrong to go after the consumers that are using that opportunity. That's not the right approach either. The phone companies and the cable providers have gotten away with murder in this whole situation.

This is the blame game and it's missing the point. The ISPs haven't "gotten away with murder." They've simply put in place a reasonable business model based on fundamental economics -- and there's nothing stopping plenty of others in the music business from doing the same. Demanding those who have figured out how to make money share with those who haven't isn't the answer either. There are business models that work just fine for those creating the music that don't require demanding anyone else share their profits. You just focus on coming up with real scarcities that give people or companies real reasons to buy and there are tons of business models that work.

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Plenty of folks are quite concerned about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations are being negotiated in secret. This is a treaty that (from the documents that have leaked so far) is quite troubling. It likely will effectively require various countries, including the US, to update copyright laws in a draconian manner. Furthermore, the negotiators have met with entertainment industry representatives multiple times, and there are indications that those representatives have contributed language and ideas to the treaty. But, the public? The folks actually impacted by all of this? We've been kept in the dark, despite repeated requests for more information. So far, the response from the government had been "sorry, we always negotiate these things in secret, so we'll keep doing so." At one point, even the ACTA negotiators held a closed-door meeting and then released a press release saying they discussed being more transparent, but haven't actually followed through.

When the Obama administration took over, there was a public stance that this administration was going to be more transparent -- especially with regards to things like Freedom of Information Act requests. The nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International took that to heart and filed an FOIA request to get more info on ACTA. The US Trade Representative's Office responded denying the request, saying that the information was "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958." This is a treaty about changing copyright law, not sending missiles somewhere. To claim that it's a national security matter is just downright scary. As KEI points out, the text of the documents requested have been available to tons of people, including more than 30 governments around the world and lobbyists from the entertainment industry, pharma industry and publishing industry.

But when the public asks for them, we're told they're state secrets? This is transparency? This is openness?

As Declan McCullagh points out at News.com, Executive Order 12958 only allows material to be classified if revealing it would do "damage to the national security and the original classification authority is able to identify or describe the damage." Can the US Trade Representative please describe the damage to national security if the public gets to see what's being proposed that would require governments around the country to enact significantly more draconian intellectual property laws?

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sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from a story about research into an unusual form of superconductivity:"Superconductors, materials that carry electricity without resistance, can be divided into two broad groups depending on how they react to a magnetic field — or so physicists thought. New experiments show that one well-studied superconductor actually belongs to both groups at the same time. The advance may not immediately lead to new gadgets and applications, but it suggests that superconductivity, which has already netted four Nobel Prizes, may be an even richer phenomenon that previously thought."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Youtube user Petitblenderman has a great video of a Rubik's Cube solved in a Blender animation.

Danny says this looks reasonably solid. You may remember Danny's laser cut tactile cube post by Collin.

Looks pretty legit to me. The cube's colors are all in the right place, although I was a little confused at about :27 where in the middle of the solution, the cube seems to be scrambled only by half turns (180 degree turns on a face). The rest of the solution is in half turns, which is unusual. It looks good though!

Have you got any clever Rubik's Cube solutions/problems? Have you made something cool with Blender? Join the conversation in the comments, and contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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When it comes to checkin' in with prolific Maker William Gurstelle, the hardest part is where to start. Bill has contributed to 14 out of 17 volumes of MAKE, been a presence at our annual Bay Area Maker Faire (and started the KIng of Fling catapult contest), and is the workshop producer/writer of the Maker to Maker segment of Make: television. Take a gander at the dizzying array of projects on Bill's MAKE author page for an overview of the types of projects he's written for the magazine. The major projects he's contributed include the Night Lighter 36 stun-gun triggered, high-powered see-thru potato cannon (in MAKE Volume 03):

The Jam Jar Jet pulsejet (from MAKE Volume 05):

The rubber band-powered Ornithopter called Orly (from MAKE Volume 08):

And that's just to showcase a few. Bill has also provided how-tos for a Rodent-Powered Nightlight, a Two-Can Sterling Engine, a Bullwhip, a Taffy-Pulling Machine, a Pole Camera, as well as the Barrage Garage series detailing how to build the perfect workshop. Did I mention he's written features and compiles the Maker's Calendar?

In his infinite spare time (haha), Bill writes books, lectures, and provides professional engineering services. Bill's latest endeavor involves adding a new title to the series of books he's authored (which include Backyard Ballistics, Whoosh, Boom, Splat, and Adventures from the Technology Underground). His newest title is Absinthe & Flamethrowers:

The book includes such scintillating chapters as "Why Live Dangerously?" and "Thrill Eating." Find out more about Bill and his many undertakings on his site and on his blog, Blowing Things Up. Can you tell the guy likes to live on the edge?

The Maker Shed has a great deal going on right now on what we're calling the Ballistic Bundle, which includes 2 of Bill's books, MAKE Volume 03, and the Barrage Garage DVD. (And while you're there, you can also pick up back any back issues of MAKE you may not already have.) Get em while they last!

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Reader Cannen alerts us to the fact that MediaNews wants to experiment with the idea of letting people create custom newspapers and print them out at home via a special printer. The idea is interesting at a first pass, but the more you think about it, the less it makes sense. Who wants to get a special printer just to print out their newspaper? If they really wanted to offer this, what's wrong with letting people use the printers they already have? Or are these newspapers hoping to make more money by selling printers? Perhaps they're jealous of the ridiculous margins found in printer ink these days -- and they're hoping to cash in on selling special ink that you can only buy from them to print your paper. While I'm sure there are some people who might like this option, just so they can still read their news on paper each day, it seems like a pretty narrow market.

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I'm always amazed when companies think that they can take features away from users and then charge more for re-accessing those features. Taking features away from people to charge them for them almost never works. It just pisses off people who quickly go looking for alternatives. The latest company getting set to discover this for themselves appears to be 20th Century Fox studios, who wants to remove all the special features from rental DVDs in the hopes that people will buy those DVDs instead. Of course, what might happen is that fewer people rent their movies and fewer people buy the movies. I'm a fan of various DVD extras -- and it's part of the reason why I rent movies. If a DVD doesn't have them, I'm a lot less likely to rent the film -- and I'm unlikely to buy a DVD if I haven't first seen it as a rental. So, for me, Fox's strategy will certainly backfire, and I'd imagine the same is true for many others as well.

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In the past, we've noted that laws covering defamation have a much lower barrier in the UK, leading to what appear to be many more questionable defamation lawsuits there. It's now getting even more ridiculous. A court in the UK, basing its ruling on a precedent from 1830, says that every visit to a web page counts as a separate publication instance in a defamation lawsuit. Thus, every view of the content increases the potential liability. As many are noting, this creates a massive chilling effect to publishing anything online in the UK.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: I'm beginning to question whether defamation laws even make sense online these days. The original purpose behind libel laws was to prevent the situation where the few folks who controlled the presses could lie and smear the reputation of someone who had no legitimate way to fight back. Given that everyone has a printing press and worldwide distribution system in their computers these days, everyone does have a way to respond to such false claims. I'm not saying that we should get rid of defamation laws or that there aren't some obviously questionable cases -- but it does seem like many defamation lawsuits these days are little more than "I don't like what that guy said about me!" As more and more people recognize that online content really does tend to be more conversational and opinionated than, say, something in a traditional newspaper, the worries about reputation being damaged come to seem a bit overblown.

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CWmike writes "The fallout from Thursday's arrests of a District of Columbia IT security official and contractor quickly raised questions about the fate of Vivek Kundra, the new federal CIO who until recently ran the office now mired in bribery allegations. Appointed by President Barack Obama as CIO less than two weeks ago, Kundra was CTO for the District of Columbia. But yesterday, Kundra's former office in a downtown government building was a crime scene. A White House official, speaking on background, confirmed today that Kundra took a leave of absence from his new CIO job shortly after federal investigators arrested two men in the DC government office on bribery charges. The official would not elaborate on the reasons for the leave; there were no indications yesterday that Kundra was involved in any wrongdoing. Kundra's decision could slow his plan to create a 'revolution' in the federal government's use of technology."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.