Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Seeeduino V1.1 from the Maker Shed is an Arduino compatible micro controller. The design is based on the Arduino Diecimila, and it is 100% compatible with the IDE and available shields. Check out the "More Details" tab on the Maker Shed web page for more a lot more information.
Features:
More about the Seeeduino V1.1
More:
More about the Seeeduino Catalyst Pack
Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest-blogger.
Brad Friedman at the Brad Blog has been keeping up on the latest too-real news about the nation's voting machines and the people who sell, buy and operate them. Two recent postings send the outrage meter way into the red.
First is California's continuing effort to clean up the mess it's made over the last few years. It's going to be harder than anyone imagined. As we learn in this post:
Even the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold's) electronic voting and tabulating systems --- used in some 34 states across the nation --- fail to record the wholesale deletion of ballots. Even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. That's the shocking admission heard today from Justin Bales, Premier's Western Region manager, at a State of California public hearing on the possible decertification of Diebold/Premier's tabulator system, GEMS v. 1.18.19.
Then there's the incredible charges in Kentucky, where officials are said to have literally changed votes after the fact:
The Kentucky officials arrested and indicted today, "including the circuit court judge, the county clerk, and election officers" of Clay County, have been charged with "chang[ing] votes at the voting machine" and showing others how to do it!
It all makes you wonder if we're ever going to have voting we can trust.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, a nifty laser "sundial," controlled by an ATtiny24 MCU and a servo:
An Atmel ATtiny24 microcontroller drives an R/C servo which in turn rotates a line LASER taken from a LASER level.The microcontroller runs a software real time clock and turns the servo and the line LASER to mimic the shadow cast from the style of a sundial as the time goes.
XXI century sundial - Now for Arduino also!
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MAKE Flickr pool member Whymcycles cross posted the above image to The DIY Bride pool.
As it turns out, there are loads of great things that the clever maker can do to spice up that most special of days. You and your family can create some wonderful materials for your wedding, from hand-made invitations, personally-crafted wedding programs, and other paper goods. Food and other tasty treats are included along with DIY wedding favors.
If you are looking to support makers and crafters, you may want to consider seeking out real people to create the physical components of your wedding.
Have you had a DIY wedding? What did you make? How would you make your wedding day more creative? What other groups do you follow on Flickr? Join the conversation in the comments, and contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"On the other hand, I'm kind of glad that he put this out there in the open. I imagine it's the kind of things people at Google and Microsoft write about me when I criticize their products, except they don't have the guts to put them out there where we can see them. Truth is, the big companies, and Mozilla thinks it's one of them, do have this attitude about their users. This is why the tech industry can't be trusted to run the news networks, which is where it looks like it's going. Jay Rosen take note."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Got an extra router in your parts pile? How about an wifi enabled robotic car?
Wifi Robot: A remote control car that can be driven over the internet or with a laptop wirelessly from up to 500m away. It has a live-feed network camera so that it can be driven without line of sight and a horn so that you can honk at people.
Much to love here, parts libraries, pros and cons about microprocessor chips, oodles of photos, loads of text describing the process and downloadable libaries of files.
via Hack n Mod
What do you think? Let us know in the comments and contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Liz writes in with information about an innovative new project to convert surplus shipping containers into medical clinics for people in the developing world. As it turns out, shipping containers are a pretty useful even if they aren't shipping stuff around.
A shipping container, once retrofitted for use as a health clinic, is a durable, standardized, adaptable, secure structure with significant potential for replication and consistency in care. The interior of an industrial shipping container can be renovated to allow space for a small consultation room, a small laboratory, an office for staff, and storage and inventory space. Modified for ventilation, light, and utility connections, a container clinic provides a personalized, local-level venue for community members to seek treatment services or preventive health education.
In many places, shipping containers are used as stores, cellular based phone access points and more. Once they have delivered their goodies, sometimes they can have a long and useful life by staying in place.
The Container Clinic can be organized as a stand-alone structure, or to complement and improve services and capacity adjacent to an existing structure - health facility, community center, school, or church. The container clinic functions as a gathering place for community members providing robust health education programming to address a multiplicity of community health concerns including prevention of disease transmission, sexual health, gender relations, women's health, antenatal care and eldercare.
By providing a shelter for the patients, medical staff and equipment Containers 2 Clincs hopes to make a dent in the pressing needs of those less fortunate. Their Facebook group has some more information and community around the project.
What is the most amazing thing you have seen done with a shipping container? Join us in the comments and add your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.
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.
Episode Two, take two, coming at you:
Maker Cris Benton takes spectacular aerial photographs by rigging remote-controlled cameras to high flying kites. In the Maker Workshop John Park builds a Burrito Blaster, which can propel a burrito 50 yards, and Mister Jalopy shows off his giant iPod. The Maker Channel features vegetable flutes, cool remote control robots, printer that makes designs on a café latte, and a stealthy technique to park anywhere for free!
Get the m4v of Episode Two, or subscribe in iTunes. Watch the individual segments of Episode Two and find instructions for the Burrito Blaster 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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Photo credit: Markus Angermeier
In this second part of my presentation at theEVO 2009 Multiliteracies event, I focus on further exemplifying what learning really is by showcasing my personal experience with Seymour Papert's Logo turtle, a fantastic tool to learn math and geometry, as well as my frustration in learning to play percussions with my own music teacher.
From these two simple stories you can see how much the diving into, the being part of, the loving of something are so essential components of the learning process. Actually, I would even venture to say that those extra factors characterize a true, deep form of learning, vastly distant from what, although normally called learning, is just rote memorization with little or no understanding.
I then explore again some of what, inspired by Stephen Downes' own list of true critical things to learn in life, should be some of the core topics of mandatory learning curricula everywhere. It is in fact, by realizing how distant the topics we force our kids to study are from those skills and abilities that can effectively help any human to communicate, listen, be creative and move swiftly through the many perils and surprises that life has in store for us.
Here Part 2 (Part 1):
Do You Know About the Turtle?
Let me take some real-life examples, which I think can be quite illuminating for supporting my topic. The turtle first of all. What is the turtle? Many of you may know about the turtle from the language LOGO developed by Seymour Papert, a great computer scientist, educational scholar and researcher, who over 20-30 years ago, developed this programming language that would allow kids to learn mathematics, and geometry in a way that was very engaging, playful, and which allowed them to discover those things by themselves and become one with them. For those of you who haven't had the experience to try this, it may sound a lot of abstract good thinking. In reality, I had an experience which showed me with my own kid how powerful this is, because he is going to school, and he was going for a while to a private teacher, and the mathematics teacher have him to do a lots of assignments, and getting a little bored on this, and so one day on the motorbike, we were just talking about the turtle, and I say: "Do you know about the turtle and what it does?", and he said: "No, I don't know." So, i said: "Let's download it when we are at the office." So, we downloaded this tool, there are many different versions available for all you to use, and they are all free, many open-source, and you get a very simple interface where you can give some simple task commands, and there this apparent turtle, it's just a circle in some cases, that moves. You say "forward 100", and the turtle goes for 100 steps leaving a trail. So, by moving forward, right, left, top and down, you can actually design shapes, geometrical shapes, and so it was very easy for him to create a triangle, by learning a few commands, and then a square. And then I asked him to do a square had some extra-sides, a bunch of extra-sides. Don't do me just four sides, do me a square with ten sides. I then said: "Oh, why don't you do a circle?", and my son Ludovico said: "I don't know how to do a circle, because there must be a command to do a curve, and I don't know that command unless you tell me." I said:
"<emLook, there's no command to do a circle. You can discover it yourself. Just look at the square you just did with ten sides. Doesn't it look like a little circle, tough a little rough? What if you wanted to make it more circle-like?"And so, he lit up in a second, and he said: "Daddy, not only I know that I can make a circle now, but I also know how many sides it has to be. And the number of sides is 360." He had that number sitting in there, inside his head, from before, from school, and so he decided that those two things now finally made sense if you create a 360 size of 1 pixel each, you are going to get a circle. He tried out and blam! There he had a circle. In that moment, my son had created a circle himself, and he was one with that circle, knowing that he had created a circle, and knowing perfectly how it was made. In fact, it became an enjoyable game from there on to go on with things like: "Now let's make it bigger, let's make it half the size...", and while we were doing this we were learning lots of formulas but without that dry, cold feeling of learning stuff that you're just memorizing but has no meaning. We were creating and changing reality, though abstract reality, with our own thinking, and that was very powerful, enjoyable, and certainly a memorable experience, whereby mathematics for him is not now anymore for him something dry to memorize.
My Percussion Teacher Is Wrong
Let me take you also to another place. I myself am a buddying percussionist. I love Latin music. I love soul music, I like very much the rhythms that come from Africa, and so since I was a kid I liked to bang on something at the rhythm of the groove. So, on and off, I started at applying myself to it, and recently I signed myself to a percussion music school. I broadcast very often what we do there, if you go from the Qik.com/RobinGood platform where I use my little portable video camera. You can see some of our playing couple of times a week. Anyway, I have there a private lesson with a teacher, and once a week we sit down in front of each other in sound-proof room, and we try to learn something. My teacher is a great musician, is really charismatic. I really like him, but he teaches just like a very traditional teacher. He has no 2.0 stuff. So what he will tell me is:
"There are four beats in this, and on the up of the second beat you're going to hit with your right hand with an angle of 45° down this way, and then as soon as that finishes you see there's an up note so you'll have to go "pick, pick" with the other hand, while you hit the bass with this. So, it's 1, 2, and then there's a third one like we saw... ok, now do it".When he says: "Now do it", I can't do nothing, nothing at all. Because my brain when it comes to music, doesn't work like that, and for most people that I talk to, those who have made their brain work that way, it has take them a lot of effort, and they really have had to re-wire their brains; or they're great musicians, who have had the opportunity to learn this technical know-how straightforward, serialized learning, after they had learned music through personal direct learning. So my music teacher goes mad. He goes mad because he knows that I have a good ear, good sense of music, good rhythm, good timing, and I'm not just a stupid guy. He knows because he sees, and he's a human being. But when he sees that I cannot make a step, that I'm all blocked, he just doesn't know what to do. So, I take over subliminally, and I use all my smart brain technology and I say to myself:"Look, if he's going to get mad, he's going to try to play that rhythm back to me. So, I just wait for the time he's going to get so mad, that he's going to play it again for me. And when he plays it for me, what do I do? I just listen and record. I just simply record with my brain."It's a function you have by default, you don't have a driver to install, you don't need a plugin there. You just say to your brain: "Record." That's it. It works. Then, as soon as he stops, or while he's going, you start playing back the recording, and then you tell your hands to do that rhythm. PU-PU-PA PU-PU-PA-PA. You don't know that the third beat is done with a 45° degree angle, and... but you can do it. Again, here learning is very much getting into the music, many of you know this, and it's not transmittable by way of words, diagrams, or charts. Those can be of great help, ONCE YOU KNOW the rhythm and can play it, and then these can give you great extension of your vision, and more in-depth understanding, but not without FIRST getting your hands dirty. And so my teacher puts in a very frustrating situation many of the learners, because he doesn't realize this.
What Do We Really Need to Learn
Another point if Stephen Downes would be here now, reminding us of the little time left would be:
"Robin the approach of teaching is evidently not right, and if we look at learning, and the way it happens, in real life, just like you have made examples now, you've modeled for us now, it really looks like something different."So, one thing that we have set aside is that the paradigm shift is made up by realizing, in acknowledging, that teaching is not equal to learning in very deep, meaningful ways. But what do we really need to learn is very much about what we would teach our kids on that spaceship we have left before, and that certainly again is not going to be very much about the seven kings of Rome, or some other dry notionistic stuff. It's going to be more like something that they can bring anywhere they can go. Any country, any region, any planet...
1. Live Healthy
Biologically, how am I made up? How do I work, is it good if I drink 20 Coca-Cola everyday or not, what difference does it make? Knowing a little bit of the biology, chemical made-up of your organism, what makes you feel good, what makes you feel bad, what you need to put inside to get outside energy, coming out of your pores, and bloods, and veins? That's what we need to know. What is good food and what is not without having to be sold to anyone line of thought, nor medicine, pharmaceutical, nor alternative, but understanding the information and where to get it so I can make my own choices without having to depend on prescriptions from somebody else. That would be number one for me.
2. Know How to Read
Number two, because we know that without health we can't really do nothing, Stephen Downes suggests, and I take directly him up on this, understanding really how to read things. Not how to read for the sake of knowing the letters and the words, but being able to read in a way that is the exactly the opposite of what my kids are being taught in school, which is to memorize flawlessly what is written there, and specifically the terms that are in the books. This is completely useless. Because if it's then asked them what they just said, and they don't know what those words mean, and why things should be that way or another. It's just self-brainwashing. They are not being brainwashed. They allow themselves to brainwash themselves with word that have no meaning. Stopping and understanding all, to read in a meaningful way, and what are the techniques, the methods, the approaches, the strategies to do that, it's very very valuable, and that's something we should learn, in the time we dedicate to what we now call school.
3. How to Learn
Same thing would be how to learn. How to learn is not sitting in front of a teacher and listening, and looking quiet and educatedly posed with your body. It's about learning a very extended number of approaches, about exploring, trying out, making mistakes, summarizing, reviewing, sharing, planning out, using techniques that whereby you have a piece of paper and a pen you can do a thousand useful things with other people, to explore new grounds, to inventory new ideas. I didn't get any of this when I went to university in Rome, Italy, or San Francisco, California. Very little of this. Maybe one per cent of the overall curriculum is dedicated to that, but if you're going to another planet, don't you think this would be quite useful, to be able know how to learn? I'm sure I'm not the first telling you this, and I'm sure you're more convinced than me since earlier times. So, what else would me or Stephen Downes bring in here?
4. How to Be Creative
How to be creative and understanding! This is not a gift sent by God into your DNA, this is a faculty that anyone can develop by learning about the fact that creativity is all about knowing, enjoying how to solve problems. Then, if those problems are more in the visual or auditory reality you tend to fall in the more classic, artistic fields, but you can be very artistic and very creative also when you fix some of your kitchen problems or electricity ones. Creativity is everywhere, and it can be measured by your ability to think differently. To think outside of the box, to think with your lateral thinking as Edward De Bono would say. That's something else I would like to teach my kids on the spaceship. And then what else?
5. How to Empathize
This is one of the things we miss the most, that is: Being able to put myself inside the shoes of whoever I'm talking with. We're here conferencing, chatting, and this and that, but many times, many of us, when confronted with another two eyes, and a mouth in front of us, are just competing for time in which they introduce their own words and share their ideas, but that sharing is very much one-way. The ability to listen-in and listen-in between the words is really all about understanding pro-actively what the other is saying and what the other is craving for. Not just adding up: "Oh you know this, and this..." sometimes gets to be a little arid. It's not a competition for who has the last word, or for whoever knows most. It should be an exchange, and the exchange should be dictated by curiosity or by desire to help others. And so by stopping and looking at what it's not been said, one can see where the other is wanting some gratification, reward, or wants to establish himself even if the others don't want to and can be proper way with that desire if the setting and opportunity allow it. Isn't that much better than wasting lots of words for nothing. And so to empathize is to put oneself in the shoes of the person in front of you. We dedicate so very little time to this, in a practical, pragmatical way, so that we exercise this function and master it in our daily life, we could have lot of less hassles in our living rooms, without families, with boring friends, and girlfriends... how much frustration would we save ourselves in our lifetime just by mastering a little more of this discipline instead of knowing when the... whatever.
6. How to Tell Truth From Fiction
Let's take a few more of these key topics that we never cover in the ideal learning classroom. How to tell truth from fiction. The media literacy that many advocate today is very much important. We have the situation all around where many people have a very hard time separating truth from fiction, propaganda and the protection of self-interests and so on. It becomes very hard for people to tell with their own heads how things really went, whether that is Gaza or whether that is 9/11 tragedy. People are less and less equipped to evaluate by themselves the information that is given to them, and they have sold their beliefs system to newspaper, television, and radio mainstream channels. I think this is very bad for this planet in general, not because of the news being brought forward or what they represent, but because it takes away from the thinking muscle. If you don't exercise that muscle, is going to get loose, is going to get weak, is going to get like a mozzarella. In a world that keeps changing and where mainstream media is more powerful than ever, if Fox is your God, go for it. But if it's not, think about it.
7. How to Predict Consequences
Look at the future is now what am I advocating, to look in the crystal ball, but many of our kids do very stupid things. Not because they don't listen to us. I think they have all of the right not to listen to us and verifying things, but they don't have the frame of mind, have not given the frame of mind, to think about what is going to happen next. We ourselves sometimes don't do it. Quite often. It doesn't matter if you're publishing a blog post, or if you're shooting some firecracker out of the windows for new year's eve. What are the consequences of doing that? Too many times we act like actors in a movie, like Tom Cruise's of the situation, but the situation doesn't warrant us to act like Hollywood stars, because there is no end of the movie, and the consequences are real. Way too many times we just don't think. So what about training a little bit myself and everybody around me in thinking a little more, in stopping and thinking before doing something. Yes there are some of us are very undecided in life, and that is not the point we're trying to cure. We're trying to cure when we act too much out of impulse, when we act not thinking about the consequences, whether that is electricity we're wasting, or pollution, or doing sex without thinking, it makes a big difference what type of human being and civilization we create for the future. Having that skill coming up as a key one and not just as a secondary "I happen to learn abut this during my life" would be really valuable.
8. How to Value Yourself
Learning that is not a matter of getting good grades, but learning how to give yourself the opportunity to explore new grounds independently of the judgement of others and maybe sometimes against the judgement is very important. Try also to question, and question, and and put yourself in front of the question forever: "Where the hell am I going, and why am I going there?" It's got to be some of the time that I spend if I have an ideal classroom or space ship that I'm on to, and that I want to use to make my time useful. Where the hell am I going? Trying to answer this question and putting your energies and slotting your time so that you can fulfill it in your lifetime, I think brings great rewards. Not all the time great money, but I don't think that's the key to living a successful life, or to really learn what is key to survive in any type of situation.
9. How to Communicate Effectively
Last but not least: How to communicate effectively. I think myself that this is probably the one most important thing and most approachable thing to learn. Spending time learning, mastering, discovering, exploring how to communicate better. To the person next to you, with voice, as well as with the most sophisticated technologies: from video to blog, RSS, P2P, whatever that is. Mastering this allows you not only to live a better life, but to build opportunities for survival, that have been unthinkable of until today. Because tomorrow many of us are going to be teachers, and guides, and many will be paid for doing this. So it's not that it is going to be a commercialization of the teacher, but in this world of fast change and of knowledge economy it's evident that there is going to be a lot more learning that is going to happen, and it's not going to take any place in the classroom. So someone is going to got to go and do it. And unless these people can communicate clearly including showing me the rhythm by doing PU-PU-PA PU-PU-PA-PA instead of telling me, we're not going to learn very much.
10. How to Ask Good Questions
Last and closing. I think we got to learn very well how to do what we just did until now, which is to keep asking ourselves great, fastidious, tremendously fastidious, uncomfortable questions so that we can open new gateways, new doors, new roads, make some mistakes, and find where we really want to go and how to get there.
Duration: 23' 26"
The folks over at Stamen Design released another slick visualization tool earlier this month, this one for showing video posts on Flickr:
It's a browser for the videos that people have recently started uploading to the site. They're arranged chronologically, and drawn from videos that people have posted to the flickrclock group on flickr.
The pool is quickly filling up with the usual Flickr brilliance: shadows, windmills, kangaroos, an almost casual "look at all this great stuff we have" that this community excels at providing. It will eventually autoplay, so you can sit back and let the user-generated goodness just wash on over you; sort of like Neave Television without all the wierd cat stuff.
If you want to add a video to the clock, just tag it with the hour of day it was recorded and post it to the Flickr Clock group. The format for the machine tag is time:hour=11PM (replace 11PM with the desired time).
Flickr Clock
Flickr Clock Info at Stamen Design
the kids are alright (via Wonderland)
If you’re observant, in central London, you may have seen this notice casually cable-tied to a lamppost. From afar, it looks like a council planning application, or parking bay suspension. It’s actually notifying you that you’re now subject to an anti-social behaviour order, and the Police (and the not-really-Police Community Support Officers) have special powers to remove you from this area if they feel like it. These dispersal areas cover large swathes of London, and other cities in England. There are now over 1000 such areas.It’s ambiguously worded, but it institutes law that in other words may not seem so palatable. There’s a curfew for unsupervised under-16s, from 9pm to 6am. Any group of 2 or more people can be broken up and/or that the member of the group have to leave the designated area (if they do not live there). Crucially, police do not have to see actual anti-social behaviour, but a constable in uniform has reasonable grounds for believing that the presence or behaviour of a group of two or more persons in any public place in the relevant locality has resulted, or is likely to result, in any members of the public being intimidated, harassed, alarmed or distressed...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Many Noise Toys were born at last night's Handmade Music event. Kit creators Loud Objects were on hand assisting with assembly and soldering basics for those new to the sport. Bret Truchan, creator of GlitchDS (and its forthcoming desktop iteration), demonstrated his cellular automata based software and Eric Beug explained the inner workings of his Wireless Sound Objects. These free events at 3rd Ward are an excellent way to meet like-minded sound-makers or even just get a taste of the scene if you're curious. These are happening on the third Thursday of every month so stay tuned for the next one on 4/16/09.
Handmade Music 3-19-09 on Flickr
Have you seen our bundles available exclusively in the Maker Shed. This one is for any of our online readers that haven't subscribed to the print edition of MAKE. For a limited time we are offering a "Welcome to MAKE bundle" at an amazing discount.
The Welcome to MAKE bundle includes:
All for the discounted price of $48. That's an amazing 46% off the price if you purchased these items individually. Take advantage of this amazing deal before it's too late.
More about the Welcome to MAKE bundle in the Maker Shed
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Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Man wearing an "I Heart My Marriage" t-shirt arrested for choking wife (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)The arrest report says that the couple were arguing over drugs, and during the fight at their home, Gellert screamed in his wife's face, threw things, grabbed her neck and strangled her, and knocked her to the ground.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Contrail is a device that applies chalk to the rear tire of your bike, leaving a trail behind you. It leaves trails for motorists and other cyclists to see, enabling bikers to "reclaim this crucial shared space." I'm not sure where you can get one or if it's even been physically realized, but I like the idea. It's like a cross between the prototype for the projected bike lane symbol and Bikes Against Bush, which sprayed chalk according to text messages. Via Cool Hunting.
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via miters
This looks like fun. Nice project. University of Louisiana News has a decent interview with Dr. Terrence Chambers, and student Don Tamosaitis. The design draws on the work of Theo Jansen.
The crawler travels about 2-3 miles/hour. There were five of us working on it, there was a lot of 3D modeling of all the parts in SolidWorks, a CAD package. We tested our assembly in SolidWorks also. It's a really useful software tool, because you can make the parts and assemble them, and then check for interference, do some finite element analysis to see if it can take the stress.
It is nearing the end of the Spring semester for Northern hemisphere universities. What great projects have you cooked up with your classmates? Join the conversation in the comments and post up your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.
"I wanted to show the labels that I could do what they're supposed to be doing at a fraction of the cost, and do it better. I spent a couple of weeks in a studio in Los Angeles where Joni Mitchell and the Carpenters and Poison --- let's not forget Poison -- recorded. I wanted to make an album that could've come from a big-label artist, and at the same time was totally grassroots."She does note, of course, that the process of "connecting with fans" is time consuming, and admits that there are times when her writing suffers because she's spending so much time online, communicating with fans. Indeed, that is an issue, and I think that artists who are adopting these models are definitely going to have spend some time finding the right balance -- or getting to a point where they can work with someone (the role that a good label should be playing) to help manage the "marketing" side of things. Still, can we kill off the myth that these new models mean that quality of new recordings suffers?
German law stipulates that each criminal must be individually proven guilty. The problem in the case of the O. brothers is that their twin DNA is so similar that neither can be exclusively linked to the evidence using current methods of DNA analysis. So even though both have criminal records and may have committed the heist together, Hassan and Abbas O. have been set free.(via Kottke)Both brothers have stolidly refused to comment ever since their arrests on February 11. Since no further evidence has become available, police cannot detain them.
SLF Older Writers Grant
(Thanks, Corie!)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
For some time now, a self-proclaimed "freelance anti-terror investigator" named Glen Jenvey has been feeding stories to the media about on-line Islamic extremism, particularly in British tabloids (but also in the famous "Obsession" DVD). However, a blogger, Tim Ireland, has uncovered overwhelming evidence that Jenvey made bogus postings to Muslim discussion sites himself to create panics. Jenvey also boasts of having influenced the James Ujaama trial by releasing videos at strategic moments.Obsession Pundit Glen Jenvey in Meltdown (Thanks, Richard!)One high-profile British MP who has used his talking-points is currently in the process of repudiating him, and a number of journalists and others are possibly compromised by having relied (lazily) on his material. The link to my blog provides what I hope is a clear short introduction to the story, which highlights a lot about what's wrong with the "old" media. Regards.
Starbuck by diablo2003
(Thanks, Thomas!)
Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
Photo from Animated Knots
One of the challenges with learning knots is that it's often difficult to interpret written directions and sometimes it's tough to follow photos. Animated Knots by Grog has a neat collection of knot-tying animations. There are loads of variations, and the interface allows you to invert, flip, and rotate some of the animations to suit your needs. There are sections for various uses of knots. The rope care section could save you some headaches, if not your life.
You might also want to check out these offerings from Make: Online and CRAFT:
How has a knot saved you? How has a knot saved you money? Have you used your superhuman ropesmanship to impress or deter others? If you could suggest three or four knots that every maker should know, what would they be? Have you made animations like the ones on Animated Knots by Grog? What would you use for a setup to shoot animations of sequences? Add your thoughts in the comments and contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.
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Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest blogger.
Former VP Al Gore is speaking at the CTIA Wireless show on April 3. But the giant trade show says:
Special Notice: Photography, recording, webcasting and any other reproduction of Vice President Al Gore's speaking appearance is strictly prohibited.
The press, whatever that is these days, has been barred from coverage, too, according to a letter on the Romenesko media blog: No one with a press pass will be allowed in.
This calls for a) lots and lots of blogging of the event by attendees who are not registered as press; and b) "official" press interviews of attendees and publication of those interviews. (I might also note, just for the sake of noting it, that you don't have to be obvious about waving around a smart phone with a video camera; audio and video recording gear has gotten really small and cheap.)
It would be great if the good folks attending this trade show could help make clear to Al Gore and others in similar positions that a speech to 4,000 people is not off the record no matter how much they may wish it to be so, not anymore.
My own suspicion about Gore's reasons: He probably imagines he's saving the material for a new book or movie. Otherwise the only possible explanation is that he's giving the dullest speech in history and knows that already.
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