snydeq writes "Datacenter operators seeking increased server density may soon turn to power capping, an emerging technology that limits the amount of electricity a server can consume, InfoWorld reports. The practice, which can be applied at the rack level, ensures that no server draws above a set power level, thereby increasing datacenter capacity within a rack-level power envelope by as much as 20 percent, according to a proof-of-concept study at Baidu, China's largest search company. As with powering down servers during off hours, of course, power capping incurs calculated risk, as those in charge of business-critical applications may be reluctant to set power limits below maximum utilization. Yet given IT's need to contend with the permanent energy crisis, the notion of power capping the datacenter could prove advantageous."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the twice-monthly Make: Online Toolbox, we focus mainly on tools that fly under the radar of more conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool-making projects, strange or specialty tools unique to a trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but once you do, and incorporate them into your workflow, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them. And, in the spirit of the times, we pay close attention to tools that you can get on the cheap, make yourself, or refurbish.

---

This week, as part of "Teach Your Family to Solder Week," we're looking at what you need to get started in soldering. In Part 1 of this Toolbox, we looked at essential tools. In this installment, we'll look at some of the support tools that can make soldering more enjoyable, go faster, be less fumey, etc.

We've written about the "Dry Solder Tip Cleaners" (aka "Cleaning Genie") a number of times. They're sold under different names, but it's basically a little container of metal shavings that you clean the solder tip in (instead of the damp sponge found on most spring-type soldering stands). Elliot Williams of HacDC writes: "Tip cleaner/tinner is good for rejuvenating oxidized tips, but cleaning your tips with one of these metal sponge thingies makes it almost unnecessary in the first place. Rant #25692: Water rusts/oxidizes metal. Oxidized metal doesn't transfer heat well. Why the hell would you ever want to touch your soldering iron tip to a sponge with cold water in it?"

You can easily make your own such cleaner by getting a copper scrubby pad at the grocery store and stuffing it into a small container.

A solder dispenser is not really an essential tool, but can come in very handy, especially if you're doing a lot of near-production-line soldering. Scott Austin, of Dorkbot DC and Dorkbot Baltimore, says: "A larger project of mine (over 60 dip sockets in each of two projects) required lot of soldering. I bought a solder dispenser and borrowed a friend's soldering station. I was able to solder the sockets (700-800 soldering joints) very quickly with this set-up."

While we talked about solder suckers and solder braid in the last Toolbox, there's also the desoldering bulb (which works similarly to the sucker). Scott Austin says: "A desoldering bulb works pretty well. But you do have to work quickly: heating the joint with the iron and then positioning and using the bulb before the solder cools. If you find yourself desoldering a lot, I really like the combination desoldering iron/bulb tool. They're not that expensive and you don't have be doing the dangerous juggling between soldering iron and solder sucker."

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igny writes "I have just recently cleaned up my home office, reducing the clutter, but I could not come up with a neat solution to my cable problem. I believe my cable usage is even below average for a slashdotter, but still I have three computers with a bunch of ethernet and power cables, two cellphones, video and photo cables, with several proprietary chargers/AC adapters, printer, two NASes with a couple of external drives, phone, audio system, routers/switches, modem ... Everything requires cables of different kinds. I believe that AC adapters still draw some power even with no device hooked to it. So I organized my power cables by usage with several power strips to turn off adapters which I use less frequently. I am asking for advice from experienced slashdotters. How do you cope with your cable problem? Do you use dedicated tables, shelves, armoire for the cables? I am still looking for a neat, efficient, and safe (I have small kids) solution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Image above from Things to Do With Books Other Than Read Them).

harry potter pitch
turning the pages
coveted covers
nameless letter
bookjournals
things to do with books
book mooch
sense and sensibility and sea monsters

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter. (Image courtesy Eric Curry. Thanks Frank!)

In the last few years, Zappos has definitely come on strong as an e-commerce brand -- perhaps the first online brand ever to have a real shot at unseating Amazon in terms of serious customer loyalty. Obviously, this did not go unnoticed by Amazon. The key to Zappos' success has been their focus on overdelivering on the customer service front (sometimes to hilarious levels). Zappos execs realized a key point that many more companies really ought to understand: customer service is marketing. Customer service is where many of the interactions occur with your customers. Companies that view customer service as a cost center will discover that they end up driving away customers. Zappos, on the other hand, would bend over backwards to keep customers happy -- and because of that, customers were very loyal to the company.

While still a lot smaller than Amazon, there was definitely a lot of attention getting paid to a potential world where Zappos had a brand presence that rivaled Amazon. It's no surprise, then, that the two companies have probably discussed an acquisition, and it looks like those plans have finally come together, as Amazon is buying Zappos. The link there is to the letter announcing the deal from Zappos' CEO Tony Hsieh. I like Tony and like what he's done with Zappos, but have to admit the letter is a bit silly, as he tries to redefine the acquisition as not being an acquisition:

This morning, our board approved and we signed what's known as a "definitive agreement", in which all of the existing shareholders and investors of Zappos (there are over 100) will be exchanging their Zappos stock for Amazon stock. Once the exchange is done, Amazon will become the only shareholder of Zappos stock.

Over the next few days, you will probably read headlines that say "Amazon acquires Zappos" or "Zappos sells to Amazon". While those headlines are technically correct, they don't really properly convey the spirit of the transaction. (I personally would prefer the headline "Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree...")

We plan to continue to run Zappos the way we have always run Zappos -- continuing to do what we believe is best for our brand, our culture, and our business. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are switching out our current shareholders and board of directors for a new one, even though the technical legal structure may be different.

If I had a dollar for every time an acquired company insisted that the acquirer was going to keep them running exactly the same as before, I'd be a lot wealthier. And if I had to give back that dollar for every time that wasn't true, I'd be giving all that money back. This is an acquisition, no matter how Zappos is trying to paint it. It's great (and, I believe, smart) that Amazon plans to keep Zappos running as a subsidiary, rather than fully integrate the two, but that doesn't make this any less of an acquisition -- and Zappos' attempt to paint it as something "different" is a bit disingenuous. Yes, the company always likes to present what it does as being different and unique, but an acquisition is an acquisition.

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Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

So my wife Sally saw this ad on her Facebook page:

Now, this is confusing for many reasons. Most obviously, why does that gothed-out hotula want me to advertise my church so badly? I swear, she's looking right at me. When you click the ad, you end up here, which is a part of Truth Advertising, a direct-mail marketing company that specializes in churches.

I'm sure the churches that use this have noble intentions, but there's just something profoundly creepy about it all. The strange meshing of religion and corporate-type business never sits well-- and this works both ways, both when religion is infused with corporate culture or when corporate culture becomes quasi-religious, like some of those Steven Covey 7 Habits of Highly Effective People weirdos I've met.

Plus, and I can't put my finger on exactly what it is, but there's some overdone quality about almost everything that tries to mesh religion and mainstream commercial culture that makes things look just a bit off. Maybe it's too many Photoshop filters. I bet, given a lineup of these ads with their copy blocked out, you could pick out the ones for a church and the ones for a godless business.

Maybe I'll try praying at a Staples for a while and see how it goes.

An anonymous reader links to Ars Technica's report that (quoting) "Microsoft today announced that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have hit the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) milestone. The software giant still has a lot of work to do, but the bigger responsibility now falls to OEMs that must get PCs ready, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that are testing their new apps, and Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs) that are preparing their new hardware. The RTM build is 7600, but it is not the same one that leaked less than two weeks ago (7600.16384). We speculated that Microsoft may end up recompiling build 7600 until it is satisfied, but it only took the company one more shot to get it right: 7600.16385 is the final build number. Microsoft refused to share the full build string, but if you trust leaks from a few days ago, it's '6.1.7600.16385.090713-1255,' which indicates that the final build was compiled over a week ago: July 13, 2009, at 12:45pm. This would be in line with the rumored RTM date but it is also the day Microsoft stated that Windows 7 had not yet hit RTM. Although the final build had been compiled, Microsoft still had to put it through testing before christening it as RTM."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the (snail) mail this week I happened to get an ad for the Visa Black Card, which Visa is pitching as "exclusive," though I'm guessing that exclusivity is mostly based on finding enough suckers to pay a $500 annual fee for the card. Anyway, as I was tossing the application into the shredder, one thing caught my eye. The pamphlet cover lists out six marketing bullet points, with the fourth one being that the card is "patent pending." This struck me as odd on a couple of fronts:

1. Why is the fact that it's patent pending a marketing point? I could maybe sorta barely understand it if it was an issued patent. But a pending one? That means next to nothing other than that you spent some money to file a patent application. To me, that means you may have wasted a lot of money -- which could explain the $500 fee.
2. A patent on what? On the idea of a "black card" or some other swanky exclusive credit card? Or on the physical card itself?

So, I did a little Googling, and turned up the following: apparently the patent filing (at the time of this announcement, just a provisional patent filing) is is on the physical card itself because it includes "carbon and/or carbon based material." I guess if you're the sort of person interested in spending so much money on a credit card, perhaps you'll pay extra to have carbon in your credit card. Still doesn't make much sense here...

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When writer and maker Hi Sibley died in 1971, the editors of Popular Mechanics dubbed him the dean of do-it-yourself. Hi wrote hundreds of articles over the years for Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, many of which are now available online through Google Books. Howard Fink has created a Hi Sibley blog and bibliography that links to many of these articles. The blog also has other news, background, and ephemera related to Hi. Good stuff.

Hi Sibley Blog [Thanks, Howard!]

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stry_cat writes "Over a year ago ICANN moved to clean up misbehaving registrars like GoDaddy. They released this scary sounding advisory. However, over a year later, problems remain. One company is now publicly complaining. Some of the biggest registrars are slammed for their actions. 'Register.com is one frustrating company. The ICANN policy clearly prohibits blocking a transfer of a domain name that has expired but not yet been deleted. Despite that, a customer trying to transfer a three-day-expired Register.com domain name told us last week that they refused to give him the necessary code to allow him to transfer — unless he pays them to renew it first. ... GoDaddy (and their reseller arm, Wild West Domains) have a different problem: They still block transfers for 60 days after a registrant's contact update, even after the ICANN update specifically prohibited doing so. They freely admit it, too. ... We see a similar problem with many transfers from Network Solutions.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to antiwar.com, the US military has "dropped several tons of explosives on a field in the Helmand Province, destroying mounds of poppy seeds which had been gathered there."

State Department official Tony Wayne says the attacks are part of the campaign to win the “hearts of minds” of Afghanistan’s civilian population. He claimed farmers were being “intimidated” into growing poppies instead of wheat, which the US has been attempting to subsidize as an alternative crop.

US Bombs Poppy Seeds in Afghanistan ‘Show of Force’

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

Too bad I don't live in the 1920s or I'd purchase one of these Boggin's Window Cribs, a 2' x 2' x 3' metal box that you could store your baby in at night (kind of like an air conditioner, but for babies). According to The Health-Care of the Baby by Louis Fisher (1920), window cribs were "admirably adapted for city apartments."

Twenty-plus years later, B.F. Skinner made a more sophisticated version, with temperature and humidity controls, clean modernist lines, and no danger of falling several stories down to the sidewalk. (Photo here.)

alphadogg writes "Inside a plain-looking garage on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's campus, undergraduate Radu Gogoana and his team of fellow students are working on a project that could rival what major automobile manufacturers are doing. The team's goal is to build an all-electric car with similar performance capabilities of gasoline-only counterparts, which includes a top speed of about 161 kph, a family sedan capacity, a range of about 320 kilometers and the ability to recharge in about 10 minutes. They hope to complete the project, which they chronicle on their blog, by the third quarter of 2010. Each member of MIT's Electric Vehicle Team works almost 100 hours a week on the project they call elEVen. 'Right now the thing that differentiates us is that we're exploring rapid recharge,' Gogoana said during an interview. He said that many of today's electric vehicles take between two to 12 hours to recharge and he doesn't know of any commercially available, rapidly recharging vehicles."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention (to be held in Montreal this year) is almost upon us, and the programming committee has put together a kick-ass program, and they've put it online. Here's my program items -- hope to see you there!

Friday

10 AM: Intellectual Property and Creative Commons, with Laura Majerus and Felix Gilman (2-032, P-512CG)

12:30PM: The New Media, with Melissa Auf der Maur, Tobias Buckell, Neil Gaiman, and Ellen Kushner (2-126, P-511BE)

3:30PM: Reading, with Charlie Stross and Connie Willis (2-224R, P-512AE)

8PM: Prometheus Awards, with Fred Moulton, Jo Walton, John C. Wright and Charlie Stross (2-349, P-524A)

9PM: Cecil Street Irregulars: A Canadian Writing Group, with Doug Smith, Karl Schroeder, Madeline Ashby, Michael Skeet, Dave Nickle, Jill Snider Lum and Sara Simmons

Saturday

9AM: Stroll With the Stars (a morning walk!), with Ann Vandermeer, Gay Haldeman, Joe Haldeman, Peter Atwood and Stu Seigel, 3-005, Riopelle Fountain

10AM: Autographs, with Ellen Datlow, Jean-Claude Dunyach, David Anthony Durham, Felix Gilman and Robert Silverberg, 3-053S

5PM: Kaffeeklatsch, 4-263K, P-521C

9PM: Gaiman Reads Doctorow (Neil records one of my stories for an upcoming audiobook), with Neil Gaiman, 3-342, 5-511BE

Monday

9AM: No User Servicable Parts Inside, with C Meeks, Howard Davidson and Jack William Bell

Oh, and a note to Montrealers: the convention centre WiFi is CAD$395 a day!, so I'm hoping to rent someone's 3G modem, like the Fido Stick modem. I'll pay your whole month's data-tariff and I promise not to download porn or warez or anything else likely to get you in trouble with your ISP. I'll need it from Aug 6-10 (and ideally, I'd like to rent two, so my wife can have one.) If you're headed to the cottage for the weekend or similar, I'd really appreciate it.

Programming

Another day, another example of copyright being misused. This one, sent in by JJ, involves police in the UK demanding that certain speed camera photos be taken offline as copyright violations. They're apparently pissed that a guy who used the photos to prove that the cameras are faulty has posted his story (with the photos) online:

"The content of these photographs are the property of Sussex Police and publication of them is a breach of copyright. They should be removed from the website forthwith. If they are not removed further action may be contemplated."

The real issue is that the guy who posted the photos is one of a growing number of folks who have discovered that, if you know a little bit of math, you can often show that the speed cameras were flat-out wrong.

Copyright is a gov't granted exclusive right solely for the purpose of creating incentives for works that otherwise wouldn't be created. I can't see how that applies to police speed camera photos at all -- which seem to have a different incentive to "create," whether it's to make the roads safer (the official explanation) or to raise money from speeding tickets (the real reason). Neither one of those requires copyright at all. And, of course, posting the images hardly seems like it should be a violation of copyright. The whole thing is obviously being used to stifle free speech because the police department doesn't like it, not because there's any sort of reasonable copyright claim.

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Celebrity bank robber John Dillinger died on this date, 75 years ago. In honor of the iconic American outlaw, Oxford University Press posted a blog entry about Dillinger's reportedly massive penis, rumored to be stored in formaldehyde at the Smithsonian. The post was penned by Brown University professor Elliott J. Gorn, author of Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year That Made America's Public Enemy Number One. From OUPblog:

The story of Dillinger’s legendary proportions originated with a morgue photo that circulated just after he died. There he is on a gurney, officials from the Cook County Coroner’s office gathered around, and the sheet covering him rising in a conspicuous tent at least a foot above his body, roughly around his loins, though truth be told, it looks more like where his naval should be. Probably his arm, rigid in rigor mortis, was under the sheet. No matter. It looked like he died with an enormous hard-on. Newspaper editors quickly realized how readers interpreted the photo, withdrew it, retouched it, then reprinted it in later wire-service editions, with the sheet nice and flat against the dead man’s body.

But the damage was done. Soon, Dillinger’s likeness appeared in crude pornography. Mostly, however, rumors of his enormous manhood persisted in oral tradition until roughly thirty years after his death, when it congealed into the urban belief tale centered on the Smithsonian.

In a literal sense, the story is almost certainly not true. Dillinger’s autopsy reported nothing unusual about the man. Government workers just look perplexed when asked about the legendary object. No one has ever produced substantial proof that the famed member exists.

"Is It True What They Said About John Dillinger?" (Oxford University Press, thanks Megan Branch!)

Wild Ride: The Year That Made America's Public Enemy Number One by Elliott J. Gorn (Amazon)

Image above: "Two Girls And a Space Crab: Simpatici alieni invadono le cartoline del nonno." From Invading the Vintage, a photoset of space alien invaders 'shopped onto old tourism postcards, uploaded by (posssibly created by?) a Mr. Franco Brambilla. From BeDifferent magazine N.5: MUTATIONS (Italy).

(thanks, KodakCB)

bednarz writes "Network World ranks America's 10 most wanted botnets, based on an estimate by security firm Damballa of botnet size and activity in the United States. The leader is Zeus, with 3.6 million compromised PCs so far. The Zeus Trojan uses key-logging techniques to steal user names, passwords, account numbers and credit card numbers, and it injects fake HTML forms into online banking login pages to steal user data. At the bottom of the list is Conficker, which despite its celebrity status has compromised just 210,000 US computers so far."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

I do a "useless lectures" series in Brooklyn, Adult Education, and one of my favorite talks last year was by the delightfully peculiar artist Gertrude Berg. Here are a couple of short films of her doing her thing: In "Waste Carrier," she stores the trash that she uses during the day in a specially designed dress that she wears all over town. In "Pick Up Artist," well, you just have to watch...

MSNBC: "Gidget, the Chihuahua best known for her Taco Bell ad campaign, died from a stroke on Tuesday night at age 15."

5/6/98: "The dog is cool, and Taco Bell owns [her], for a while. Then some ad guy at some agency realizes that he could get a dog too and that dog could eat dog food and like all dogs that we love, the dog farts. Yay!"

Through this Esquire blog post, I learned today about Baron Ambrosia, aka Justin Fornal, the "outsider foodie" whose Bronx Flavor public access cable show is -- well, surprisingly watchable. Sort of like Anthony Bourdain meets Paint, Exercise and Make Blended Drinks TV meets Don the Magic Juan. He also reminds me of Gary Vaynerchuk. Looks like I'm among the last to know about him, though: John Law guest-blogged about him back in January on Laughing Squid. More: NYT profile, Slashfood, Wikipedia. I hope some profit-hungry web video carpetbaggers don't come along and mess it all up for him by trying to slickify it. Keep doing your weird thing, Baron, keep it raw and real, baby. That cake don't need no icing! (thanks, Matt Sullivan)

Timed with the phenomenal Todd Schorr "American Surreal" retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art, the fine artisans at Pressure Printing have issued this mind-blowing hand-stained intaglio print. Funnily enough, this particular artwork, titled "Wish Fulfillment From Another Planet," was like a magnet to me at the exhibition. It's small, powerful, and exquisitely painted. Even with Schorr's huge masterworks all around me at the museum, this is one I kept coming back to. The print (6.375" x 9.5"), in a limited edition of 100 and encased in a resin frame with curved glass, is $395.
Todd Schorr's "Wish Fulfillment From Another Planet" by Pressure Printing

MAD creator Harvey Kurtzman's influence extended far beyond his famous comic book. He was also the discoverer, mentor, and inspiration to a large number of brilliant artists, filmmakers, comedians, and artists.

Here's biographical snippet from the dust jacket of the new book The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics:

Harvey Kurtzman discovered Robert Crumb and gave Gloria Steinem her first job in publishing when he hired her as his assistant. Terry Gilliam also started at his side, met an unknown John Cleese in the process, and the genesis of Monty Python was formed. Art Spiegelman has stated on record that he owes his career to him. And he's one of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner's favorite artists.

Harvey Kurtzman had a Midas touch for talent, but was himself an astonishingly talented and influential artist, writer, editor, and satirist. The creator of MAD and Playboy's "Little Annie Fanny" was called, "One of the most important figures in postwar America" by the New York Times. Kurtzman's groundbreaking "realistic" war comics of the early '50s and various satirical publications (MAD, Trump, Humbug, and Help!) had an immense impact on popular culture, inspiring a generation of underground cartoonists. Without Kurtzman, it's unlikely we'd have had Airplane, SNL, or National Lampoon.

The above is no exaggeration. if you want to know the roots of modern American comedy, you need to study Kurtzman. In addition to his comedic genius, Kurtzman was also a tremendously gifted visual artist as well. This book, written by comic books historians Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle, showcases hundreds of examples of Kurtzman's work throughout his career, including many never-before-seen examples of his earlier comics and art school figure studies and landscapes. It's especially interesting to see his conceptual sketches for magazine covers and comic book stories, which show Kurtzman's powerful command of composition and art direction.

This is a book worth consulting and treasuring for a lifetime.

The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics

Pissed off to discover that cell-phone companies leak personal information -- customer addresses, calling records and more -- to sleazy resellers, the Zug.com guy paid a couple bucks to discover the home address of Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg. Then he went to Seidenberg cushy mansion and stood on his lawn with a bullhorn, broadcasting: "I'm here on behalf of Verizon customers. PLEASE DO A BETTER JOB PROTECTING YOUR CUSTOMERS' CELL PHONE RECORDS! Everyone has the right to privacy, including you Ivan! When we don't have privacy, then freaks with bullhorns start showing up on our front lawn."

How Easy Is It To Get the Private Cell Phone Records and Address of Verizon's CEO? (via Consumerist)

Joseph Smarr asked if I had a snappy answer to why rssCloud is better than The Leading Brand.

I said I do have snappy answers, but like all such answers, they are retarded.

But I gave him a list anyway.

1. Google sux.

Or

2. Feedburner sux.

Or

3. I love RSS, they haven't heard of it.

4. Simple is better.

5. Trade one Big centralized server owned by the tech industry for... another one? You must be kidding.

6. Let's have fun again!

I don't mean any of these things. It's the tech industry way of explaining why the BigCo won't crush your or eat your lunch, or worse, crush you and eat your lunch. In all my years in the tech biz, the only times I've seen the Bigs ever actually crush anyone was when the crushee bought into the crushing.

I don't think Google will crush RSS, any more than TechCrunch will. If they try they're:

1. Assholes.

2. Idiots.

3. Losers.

So they won't try.

A few weeks back, I wrote an article based on a column written by Connie Schultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where she discussed and endorsed a proposal by two brothers (David and Daniel Marburger) -- one a First Amendment lawyer and the other an economist -- supposedly on ways to change copyright law to protect newspapers. I found this troubling for a variety of reasons -- not the least of which is the idea that a First Amendment lawyer and an economist together would agree to a protectionist policy that limits free speech! The story itself got lots of attention when Jeff Jarvis called attention to the fact that Schultz happens to be married to U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, leading to a counter attack from Schultz, but not necessarily a clear discussion of the actual proposal. I don't care one way or the other about Schultz, but I was interested to receive an email from one of the Marburgers suggesting that Schultz greatly misrepresented their analysis. I had based my own analysis on what Schultz had written, and they suggested that the full report was quite different. They sent over a copy and said that I could share it with the readers here as well, so click on through to read it (if you'd like to download it, you can go directly to the Scribd page, where there's a download option: It's true that the Marburgers' suggestions are a lot more interesting, nuanced and (frankly) less ridiculous than Schultz's distortion of what they put forth. And yet, it still has some significant problems. Most specifically, the paper makes a mischaracterization in the assumptions that aggregators who merely "offer truncated rewrites of newspapers' reports" somehow "are close substitutes for those that newspaper publishers and others originate." There's been scant evidence to support that. In fact, most of the aggregator behavior we see is a link to the original story with a very brief snippet (often computer generated). If that brief snippet and the headline acts as "close substitutes" to the original report, the problem is not with aggregators. The problem is with the original reports not providing enough value beyond that brief summary. But much of the Marburgers' ideas are based on this idea that aggregators are a substitute, rather than a distribution channel. That's a problem.

To be fair, they do attempt to distinguish between "pure aggregators" that just do snippets and "parasitic aggregators" that do much more. But their examples of "parasitic aggregators" is also quite odd. It's basically any competitor who has real staff that writes a story that competes with the original reporting. That's not an aggregator. It's competition. And if someone who was not on the scene can actually add so much value to the news that the original reporter doesn't provide enough value, the problem is in the original publication for doing a poor job in providing enough scarce value beyond the basic facts. However, the Marburgers conveniently conflate these two types of "aggregators" despite the fact that it doesn't make much sense. Later in the paper they admit that a "pure aggregator" like Google News is not doing anything wrong, and shouldn't be impacted, but the first third of the paper does not make that clear, and many readers naturally assume that the aggregators being discussed include Google News.

Furthermore, the report (again mistakenly) assumes that the aggregators are siphoning away advertising dollars from the newspapers -- but again, there's little evidence there. Instead, we've seen that aggregators don't tend to make very much money at all from news aggregation, and -- if anything -- it simply acts as a loss leader. Since much of the proposals seems based on the faulty idea that aggregators are getting unfair "profits" from aggregating the news, this is equally problematic. The "pure" aggregators that the Marburgers' discuss tend to use news aggregation as a loss leader, so it's not taking away much ad revenue. The "parasitic aggregators" (i.e., actual competitors) are simply other news sites -- and the ones named (The Daily Beast and Newser) are so tiny that if they're taking away any revenue from newspapers, it's at best a rounding error. Honestly, the newspapers aren't complaining about The Daily Beast. They're complaining about Google News, which the Marburgers eventually absolve, but that's deeply buried in the report.

Next, the Marburgers continually, incorrectly, focus on aggregators "free riding" on the content of newspapers. This is incorrect. It is a relationship where benefit goes in both directions. If you believe the Marburgers' view, then the newspapers are, in fact, "free riding" on all of the traffic that aggregators send them. They're also "free-riding" on whoever they write about and whoever they quote, since they don't pay those people either. In fact, this is a big part of the problem. The Marburgers only focus on the flow of value in a single direction, quoting an analysis from 1942 suggesting that "free-riding" in the news would cause trouble in the industry. But that ignores the realities of the market, and that smart publications can learn to benefit and profit from traffic sent to them for free. It's not about free-riding, it's about learning to capitalize on promotion.

Oddly, the Marburgers then use the fairy tale of the Little Red Hen, to suggest that a market involving free riding is not a free market. This is wrong. There may always be some kind of free riding. Nearly all products and markets give off some externalities that involve free riding. While formerly assumed to be a small part of the market, these days economists are learning that externalities can often be a very large part of the market -- and unlike what the Marburgers' claim, that's not necessarily a bad thing if you take the time to understand the larger market. It's only a problem if you so narrowly define your market as the single product that gives off the externalities -- which is a major flaw in the Marburgers' analysis. They assume, incorrectly, that the "free-riding" does not lead to any externalities that can be monetized back by the newspapers. That's wrong. And, from this, the Marburgers simplify the world of news production to an unrealistic level, that may prove their point, but does not represent the actual market.

So while the Marburgers appear to have spent a lot of time detailing how newspapers make money, they incorrectly assume that this is the only way to make money from newspapers. On top of that, they seem to assume that newspapers cannot fund reporting -- but there is little evidence to support that. Almost all of the newspapers currently discussed as being in "trouble" are actually still profitable (i.e., they can fund reporting from advertising), but are in trouble because they cannot meet their debt obligations (i.e., management took out too many loans that they can't repay). And, from that, they get to their questionable challenges concerning how to "remedy" a situation that does not appear to actually need a remedy.

Their real focus is not actually on "aggregators" so much as it is on direct competitors who don't have a reporter on the scene, but tend to write an analysis based on what original reporters have written. Of course, that's almost as expensive as the original reporting, in that it still requires human bodies to write up the news -- and it's always (by definition here) delivered late. Anyone who's spent time online playing with traffic stats of news reporting pretty quickly learns that the first publication to break a story is much more likely to get the majority of the traffic. Sometimes that fails, but in the long run, if you're first, you're more likely to get a substantial amount of traffic. Furthermore, having actual reporters on the scene should give the original source better material with which to add more value to the community on the site. The failure to do so isn't because of "parasites" but because of a weak understanding by many newspaper execs of the importance of community.

As for the specific proposals, then, Schultz incorrectly stated the Marburgers' proposal to be:

• Aggregators would reimburse newspapers for ad revenues associated with their news reports.
• Injunctions would bar aggregators' profiting from newspapers' content for the first 24 hours after stories are posted.

But that's not true. The Marburgers don't have any problem with real aggregators. Instead, their concern is with a few relatively small online sites that often do rewrites/summaries of news stories. This is an amazingly small market that doesn't actually make that much money already. So the idea that they're siphoning off very much does not appear to be supported by much evidence. Furthermore, the second point isn't quite accurate either. The change the Marburgers are pushing for is more about adding some sort of economic hardship to these competitors such that they're more likely to form an economic relationship with the newspapers that originate the news stories.

But this, too, is not a particularly good solution, and makes little economic sense to me. Putting barriers into a market almost always makes that market less efficient, not more, and leads to less production, not more. Furthermore, in a world where anyone can be a reporter, forcing every publication to do a deal with every other publication is a legal nightmare. The false assumption the Marburgers seem to make is that all "real" news will be published by a small group of big name newspapers (The NY Times, The Washington Post, USA Today etc.) and everyone else will pay them for their "journalism." Also, it's worth noting that the Marburgers appear to not necessarily focus on changing copyright law to officially state all of this, but merely adjust copyright law to allow common law to make this happen.

So, while Connie Schultz' description of the Marburgers' paper was wholly inaccurate, the paper itself has many problems and does not seem like a reasonable suggestion either. It's based on too many faulty assumptions that do not appear to be accurate.

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BayaWeaver writes "Slate reports that the F-22 Raptor has been cancelled by the Senate. At an estimated price tag of $339 million per aircraft, even the powerful military-industrial-congressional complex couldn't keep this Cold War program alive in these hard times. They look very cool though and have appeared in movies like Hulk and Transformers. But not to worry too much about the future of the military-industrial-congressional complex: the F-35 Lightning II begins production next year! As a side note, in 2007 a squadron of Raptors became deaf, dumb and blind when they flew over the International Date Line."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jess Bachman, creator of the "Death and Taxes" posters I've blogged about before, sends word that the 2010 version has just been released. The posters display an intricate visual representation of where your US tax dollars go. Jess says:

I was excited to get this done because it is Obama's first budget and I wanted to see if budget each year was a 'more of the same' process, of if the administration in power really had their hands in its crafting. I can say that the changes from the Bush administration are many, and mostly positive (depending on who you talk to). Public radio no longer gets cut every year, Education, Energy and Health are all up, and get this, there is tons of cuts.... on the military side!

More about this year's poster here. Jess is offering a discount to BoingBoing readers: enter 'boing' during checkout to get 50% off if you buy two or more posters.

(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)

---

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

Michael J. Ross writes "Slow Web page loading can discourage visitors to a site more than any other problem, regardless of how attractive or feature-rich the given site might be. Consequently, many Web developers hope to achieve faster response times using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), since only portion(s) of an AJAX page need to be reloaded. But for many rich Internet applications (RIAs), such potential performance gains can be lost as a result of non-optimized JavaScript, graphics, and CSS files. Steve Souders — a Web performance expert previously at Yahoo and now with Google — addresses these topics in his second book, Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I just wrote a piece for GOOD about shady online services that make it easy to lie and cheat.

Alibi Network?
alibinetwork.com

After you’ve hooked up with some honey whose fallen for your ATM receipt trick, you’ll probably want to start spending a little quality time with her at that $29.99 motel across town. But what about that nosy spouse of yours at home, the one who is always interfering with your personal life? Get yourself over to the Alibi Network and set yourself up with a bulletproof excuse that will fool even the shrewdest shrew.

From their website:

The basic concept is rather simple: we invent, create and provide alibis and excuses for people wishing to justify absences. These alibis can take various forms: a telephone call simulating work emergency or car accident, an invitation to a classical music event, a letter documenting your participation in a sales seminar, a Dallas Cowboys football game or a Britney Spears concert ticket…

They’ll even “provide you with seminar handout and certificate of achievement or the program of an event to which you were invited.” Won’t wifey be proud of your accomplishment.

Fees for the alibi service start at $75.

Deception, Inc.

Photo credit: Jim Dunn

Treehugger has a slideshow about building a great-looking geodesic dome solar greenhouse for growing vegetables.

What do you do when you want to grow your own food, but live here? That's the question my dad wanted to answer when he started this project about a year ago: Living at 7,750 feet above sea level, with a summer growing season of 80 days, at best, between killing freezes, how can you grow your own food? The answer, as it turns out, is pretty cool: A geodesic dome solar greenhouse.

Click through to see what it's like to build one for yourself, and how the garden grows inside once you're done.

Build a Geodesic Dome Solar Greenhouse to Grow Your Own Food

Richard Metzger has just posted a review of Torchwood: Children of Earth, which just began a five consecutive night run on BBC America and BBC America HD. Snip:

For those of you who agreed with me about how much I hated the new Harry Potter movie, believe me again when I tell you that the new Torchwood season three mini-series is one of the finest, most action-packed, unpredictable, FREAKY and most deeply moving sci-fi tales I’ve ever seen. Totally raises the bar for the genre in so many, many ways.

Torchwood: Children of Earth boasts one of the most intelligent and sophisticated long form scripts in the history of the genre. I don’t want to give anything away to American viewers who still have four shows left to go, but my god when you find out what the aliens really want with the kids, WHOA, it is fckng dark! The lead actors John Barrowman, Eve Myles and Gareth David-Lloyd are terrific and guest star Peter Capaldi proves once again that he’s one of Britain’s finest acting talents. It’s truly a milestone.

Go read the entire review at Dangerous Minds.

Gwen of Sociological Images compares a chart used by judges in the 1950s to pick Miss Universe with the 4H market steer charts she used to to see when she was in 4H.

First, some people like to suggest that men are programmed by evolution to find a particular body shape attractive.  Clearly, if judging women’s bodies requires this much instruction, either (1) nature has left us incompetent or (2) cultural norms defining beauty overwhelm any biological predisposition to be attracted to specific body types.

Second, the chart reveals the level of scrutiny women faced in 1959 (and I’d argue it’s not so different today).   It made me think of my years in 4-H. I was a farm kid and I showed steers for several years and also took part in livestock and meat judging competitions. I was good at it, just so you know. Anyway, what the beauty pageant image brought to mind was the handouts we’d look at to learn how to judge livestock.

1950s Beauty Pageant Judging Guidelines

After enjoying several years of popularity, music games seem to be drawing less and less interest from gamers lately. Guitar Hero and Rock Band titles have been conspicuously absent from a list of the 20 best-selling software titles in the past two months, and one report estimates that revenue from those games has dropped by almost half. Analyst Jesse Divnich suggests that there's no longer much room for dramatic improvements in game play, saying, "it would be erroneous to assume that any franchise or brand can grow unless it brings something new to the table. After a while, utility to the gamer will diminish and he/she will surely move on." Nevertheless, the companies are happy to continue to rely on DLC sales while working on new releases. Harmonix is showing off a trailer and a partial set list for The Beatles: Rock Band, and Neversoft has detailed a number of new features and tracks for Guitar Hero 5.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in 2007, Mark hit on Don Wilkes' 1960s invention (U.S. patent #3,452,175) of the so-called "rolamite"over at boing-boing, quoting a description of it as "the only 'basic mechanism' invented in the 20th century." Basically, a rolamite is a very-low-friction bearing. Rex Research has posted the entirety of a 1966 Popular Science article covering their invention, but the easiest way to understand what a rolamite is and how it works is to see one in motion. The above YouTube video, by user AutogenicMotor, shows the action of a simple linear rolamite, and the one below, by ErikBrinkman1, of a more complex rotary model.

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Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

For some reason, I've always found old, obsolete display technology fascinating. I'm hoping some of you out there will too, since I drone on about it for over four minutes here. Still, one plane displays are pretty obscure and hard to find information about, so hopefully you'll find your four minutes adequately spent. If not, let me know and I'll see about giving you four of my minutes to make up for it.



UPDATE! A clover! It's not a tree, it's a clover. Thanks, commenters. Man, I'm an idiot. Tree? Jeez. And, it's great to see more information on these things, so thanks to those who posted.

This guy needs to hook up with the slingshot sharpshooter. (Via Bits & Pieces)

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

If you were a mad scientist evil genius who happened to only be interested in advertising, it would make sense for you to come up with this: a way to brand the moon with a giant ad. You'd call the UN, get on that big screen, and blackmail the world into caving into your demands, otherwise you were going to deface the moon with a colossal ad for Gold Bond Foot Powder or Cool Ranch Doritos.



This idea has been around a while, and I have no doubt it's possible. The only way I think this could be justified is if the advertiser paid each and every moon-gazing person some amount to do this, since the visual image of the moon in the night sky can be thought of as public property; you can't legally throw a billboard up on land that you don't own, so I don't see how this is different. But, if someone wants to rent the moon from the collected people of Earth, who knows? Feel free to make us an offer; someone's almost always here.

There's a good roundup article over at Network World about "both blunt and surgical tools" the government of Iran is using to surpress online speech. (Via Oxblood Ruffin)

Law professor Doug Lichtman has a monthly podcast (on an annoyingly flash-only website) called the Intellectual Property Colloquium. A few months back, we discussed the episode that looked at file sharing damages. I must admit that I tend to disagree with a significant percentage of Lichtman's conclusions on intellectual property, but unlike many copyright maximalists, I tend to believe he's much more intellectually honest on these issues. His positions don't seem to come from a "more is absolutely better because it makes me/my clients more money" position, but he honestly tends to believe that greater copyright leads to a greater net outcome, and tends to argue reasonably about it -- though, I believe some of that reasoning, and the assumptions that underpin it are faulty.

In the latest podcast, Lichtman and three guests discuss "fair use" with most of the focus being on the Shepard Fairey case. Lichtman talks with one of Fairey's lawyers (Mark Lemley), a lawyer for the AP (Dale Cendali) and finally the General Counsel of the NY Times, Ken Richieri. It won't surprise many, I'm sure to say, that I strongly agreed with the points Lemley made, in explaining (a) how Fairey's use is almost certainly fair use. But the debate between Lemley and Lichtman is still quite worthwhile.

The key point that Lichtman keeps jumping back to is an interesting attempt to justify blocking fair use on what (at first glance) appears to be free market principles. That is, Lichtman states, repeatedly, that because Fairey could have licensed an image of Obama prior to making his artwork, there shouldn't be fair use. His argument is that this is as free market approach, and that fair use might not even need to be considered. To Lichtman, if there is a "functioning" market that can be made, there's no fair use. At a first pass, this may sound quite appealing to free marketer/libertarian types. But it's wrong. That's because what he's talking about is not a true free market at all. It's an artificial market, based entirely on a gov't backed artificial scarcity. It's a market built on a monopoly, which is no free market at all.

It also seems to go against the very intent of copyright itself, in that it suggests that as long as there's a "reasonable" tollbooth that can be placed on things, there shouldn't be fair use. But if that tollbooth is actually creating friction and decreasing, limiting or hindering creative output, then it can and should be seen not as "promoting the progress," but the exact opposite. Lemley does a decent job on the spot to warn against the frictions caused by such a "permission" culture, in that it's quite unreasonable in many cases to have to get permission, but Lichtman dismisses this as a minor issue, or really one that can be worked out separately. To me, that suggests a rather distinctly poor assumption about creativity and creative culture these days. Requiring ad hoc permission on any potential use would create massive chilling effects on all sorts of creativity. Lichtman also suggests that a third party intermediary (perhaps YouTube) could serve as a clearinghouse for such rights, but that too creates all sorts of problems.

Overall though, this highlights the problem I have with those who continue to support strong copyrights under a "free market" perspective. A true free market for a good with infinite supply will price that good at zero. But copyright distorts that market to limit that possibilities. It's as if some believe that any market represents a free market, even if that market is massively inefficient. Back in the days of the sugar monopolies, there was "a market" for sugar, but it was not a fair market price, because of the gov't backed monopoly. Or, to make the point clearer, today there is no "market" for air, despite the fact that it's quite valuable to all of us mammals who like to breathe. We could, in theory, create a gov't backed market for air, recognizing its value, and forcing people to pay to breathe, but most people inherently recognize how inefficient and wasteful that would be. Yet, content has the same fundamental (effectively) limitless supply as air (if anything, air is more limited). And yet, some think it needs a similar artificial and inefficient market.

As for the rest of the podcast, Cendali's defense of the AP's position was an incredible stretch (and, it was disappointing that Lichtman softballed his responses to her, pretending to "channel" what Lemley might say). Her defense was effectively: "The AP relies on licensing to survive. We need to survive. If what Shepard Fairey did was fair use, then it would destroy the AP, thus it can't be fair use." That's wrong on a variety of levels, and Lichtman barely touched on any of them. The purpose of copyright isn't to protect the business model of a single company. I could create a company that is harmed by fair use of my works, but that doesn't mean they're not fair use. Cendali also induced a guffaw from me in response to Lichtman's question about why the AP didn't notice the fact that its image was being used. Her response was that since the AP has so many images, it would be impossible to track them all and see if they're being used. Indeed, but no one was asking that. What Lichtman asked (and failed to follow up on) was why the AP didn't notice that this image -- which was being used everywhere -- was based on an AP image. No one expected the AP to track all its images, but you would think with such an iconic image getting so much coverage, that the AP would notice.

Cendali, keeps trying to suggest that the Mannie Garcia photo was something special, but fails to explain (even Lichtman pushes back somewhat, and Cendali answers a different question) what parts of the photo are actually protectable under copyright. She basically just says that because Garcia was a professional photographer, that the work is clearly covered by copyright. That's not how copyright works, though. She also keeps saying that because Fairey picked this particular photo it proves that the photo had something special. But, if he'd picked a totally different photo, she'd say the same thing. The simple fact is that Fairey could only pick one photo to make this picture, and this is the one he chose:

"He could have selected any one of probably hundreds if not thousands of photographs, But he selected this particular photograph, and he selected it for a reason, as he's already stated in various interviews. He was looking for a particular photograph that presented Obama in a particular way, in a hopeful way, in a way looking forward to the future... This wasn't just any random photograph... He was looking for a particular photo... and for him to now minimize that is not fair."

No, what's not fair is claiming that any of that is the AP's to own. None of it. Not a single part of it was. All of that -- the hope, the way he was looking, was simply there. What made him choose it was the look on Obama's face -- which is not Garcia's creative output, and thus cannot be covered by copyright. In fact, the most frustrating thing of all is that Cendali repeatedly claims that Fairey was ripping off Garcia (and the AP), but misses the obvious problem with that argument: which is that if her argument is correct, then the AP and Garcia also ripped off Obama, since it was his creativity in looking the way he did and making the facial expression he did. Once again, such externalities are apparently only acceptable when the AP benefits. But, Cendali seems to ignore that, and Lichtman lets her get off, noting that he basically agrees with her.

The final guest was actually a pleasant surprise. Richieri notes that he's not a copyright lawyer, but a newspaper lawyer, and thus doesn't approach things from an "ownership" perspective, but a "fairness" perspective, and notes the importance of fair use in the news business. He doesn't add too much new to the conversation, but it is refreshing to hear someone who, unlike the AP, seems to recognize that trying to own every last word/phrase/headline doesn't really make much sense.

Overall, the podcast is worth listening to, but the Cendali section may involve a bit of headbanging for it being so blatantly mistaken on the very basics of copyright law.

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These baboons are having a great time.

The baboons at Knowsley Safari Park have taught themselves how to open roofboxes onthe top of visitors cars as they go through. Visitors with the boxes are now advised to take the car friendly route and to demonstrate why we produced a press release with a box set up by staff.

(Via Arbroath)

The Vanish project proposes to give web users control over the lifespan of the data they post online, or to cloud computing services. Vanish encrypts your data, and all of it, even cached or archived chunks, become "permanently unreadable" at a date of your choosing, without any action on the part of the service provider or end-user.

For example, using the Firefox Vanish plugin, a user can create an email, a Google Doc document, a Facebook message, or a blog comment -- specifying that the document or message should "vanish" in 8 hours. Before that 8-hour timeout expires, anyone who has access to the data can read it; however after that timer expires, nobody can read that web content -- not the user, not Google, not Facebook, not a hacker who breaks into the cloud service, and not even someone who obtains a warrant for that data. That data -- regardless of where stored or archived prior to the timeout -- simply self-destructs and becomes permanently unreadable.

Vanish: Self-Destructing Digital Data. See also this related University of Washington press release. Vanish authors: Roxana Geambasu, Yoshi Kohno, Amit Levy, Hank Levy.
(via Jake Appelbaum)

Barence writes "With help from readers of PC Pro, Sky News in the UK launched an undercover investigation into rogue PC repair shops. As a result, Sky's cameras caught technicians scouring through private photos, stealing passwords and over-charging for basic repairs. It was a simple enough job: 'To create the fault, we simply loosened one of the memory chips so Windows wouldn't load. To get things working again, one needs only push the chip back into the slot and reboot the machine. Any half-way competent engineers should fix it in minutes.' But these technicians had other ideas, stealing photos and documents, as well as login details for email and bank accounts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Chaser's War on Everything (TV show in Australia) punks torture memo author John Yoo while he teaches a class. (Via The Agitator)

Following up on last week's post about our government's attempts to block investigation into mass killings in Afghanistan by a US-backed warlord (see this NYT article by James Risen):

There is an update to the story today from Mark Benjamin at Salon, where you can also read through the archive of related FBI documents in PDF form.

And Ben Greenberg writes in from Physicians for Human Rights, the organization that discovered the mass grave where the victims were buried. They've been investigating the case and advocating for appropriate action since 2001. Ben says:

We've produced a 10 minute documentary video about the massacre and the three federal investigations that were impeded by the Bush Administration. It's called War Crimes and the White House: The Bush Administration's Cover-Up of the Dasht-e-Leili Massacre.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has also produced a report based on high resolution satellite imagery that shows evidence of when and how the mass grave site was subsequently dug up. A blog post on the satellite imagery report is here and the main images from the report are available here, along with a .kml file that can be used with Google Earth.

Since the New York Times story by James Risen, President Obama has stated on national television that he is asking the National Security Council to gather the facts concerning the massacre and the alleged cover up.

We are petitioning Attorney General Holder to resume the FBI investigation that was shut down bu the Bush Administration.

All of these items, as well as other photos and documents, are available at a website that we've set up for the case: AfghanMassGrave.org

.

Recently on Offworld, Crayon Physics creator Petri Purho showed us a fantastic time lapse video of what it looks like to rapid prototype a game in seven days (including Team Fortress breaks), watched the latest footage of the multi-part harmonizing in Rock Band: Beatles with newly confirmed tracks, and saw Sega announce a new Wii Fit Balance Board enabled Super Monkey Ball. We also watched Namco's bizarre puppet show video for PS3 collection Katamari Forever, and saw Katamari's Prince -- as well as the PS3's PixelJunk series -- coming to Sony's Home virtual space (above), and found an unofficially fashionable Tetris T-shirt. Finally, we saw the World of Goo and Henry Hatsworth devs behind Experimental Gameplay Project collaborating on a new WiiWare game, and our 'one shot's for the day: soft-shaded 3D pixelcrafter Dotter Dotter does more Super Mario, and Die Gute Fabrik tease a game where a couple, by "synchronising their headbanging, reach new planes of heavy metal love."

False-color shadowgram of gunshot from a .357 magnum by Gary Settles at Penn State university.

The New York Times has an awesome slideshow of shadowgrams and Schlieren photographs, created by engineering professor Gary Settles, which accompany a 2008 article about his work at Penn State's Gas Dynamics Lab. The method, which can produce fantastic visualizations of fluid flow in turbulent systems, is amazingly simple. I am surprised there aren't more hobbyists doing it.

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Just posted! Our updated waterproof camera group test. Following the publication of our waterproof camera group test, we were inundated with requests to include the Panasonic FT1/TS1. At around the same time, Pentax launched the W60's successor, the Optio W80. So we donned our swimming trunks again to see how these cameras would perform.

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

I'm so inured to pharmaceutical advertising, it took my husband to point this one out to me: this Latisse spot may appear to be just another by-the-numbers pharma spot, but in fact it's the greatest bad pharma spot ever. Let's count the ways:

1) "The first and only approved FDA treatment for inadequate and not enough lashes," "also known as hypotrichosis."
Hypotrichosis has all the makings of a fake illness: enough of a medical basis to sound real (it's a condition of "no hair growth") and yet vague enough to invite creative interpretation. In December, the same month the FDA approved Latisse, someone at Allergan--the company that makes the drug--repeatedly tried to alter the Wikipedia entry of hypotrichosis to include eyelash hypotrichosis. Fortunately, Wikipedia moderators caught the changes and removed them (here and here).

2) Brooke Shields as spokesperson
In case it wasn't perfectly clear that eyelash hypotrichosis is a fiction, we're asked to believe that Brooke Shields--a woman with well over 30 years in modeling--isn't pretty enough without this new drug for her lashes.

3) "May cause eyelid skin darkening, which may be reversible, and there is potential for increased brown iris pigmentation, which is likely permanent."
Also "itchy eyes and eye redness" and, though the commercial never says it, the active ingredient in Latisse is also linked to optic nerve damage and blindness. Ok, so you get longer, dark lashes, but your eyes might turn brown, itchy, and useless.

4) "Full results in 12 to 16 weeks" and "If discontinued, lashes will gradually return to their previous appearance."
So you have to wait four months for this stuff to work and as soon as you stop, you're back to your old bald lids. It's worth noting that the message about discontinuing Latisse appears only as text on screen at the same time that the voice-over lists side effects. The makers of this commercial are hoping to cram the drawbacks in as little space as possible to free you, the consumer, from reflection.

5) "Find a doctor at Latisse.com."
Gee, I wonder what those doctors will think of Latisse.... Perhaps this serves a useful purpose, though: any dermatologist on here is probably one you'd want to avoid.

Hugh Pickens writes "Information Week reports that the National Security Agency is taking a cloud computing approach in developing a new collaborative intelligence gathering system that will link disparate intelligence databases geographically distributed in data centers around the country. The system will house streaming data, unstructured text, large files, and other forms of intelligence data, and analysts will be able to add metadata and tags that, among other things, designate how securely information is to be handled and how widely it gets disseminated. For end users, the system will come with search, discovery, collaboration, correlation, and analysis tools. The intelligence agency is using the Hadoop file system, an implementation of Google's MapReduce parallel processing system, to make it easier to 'rapidly reconfigure data' and for Hadoop's ability to scale. The NSA's decision to use cloud computing technologies isn't about cutting costs or seeking innovation for innovation's sake; rather, cloud computing is seen as a way to enable new scenarios and unprecedented scalability. 'The object is to do things that were essentially impossible before,' says Randy Garrett, director of technology for NSA's integrated intelligence program."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

How can there be so much goodness packed into so little space? From the moment your eye is grabbed, slapped, and dragged to the ad by the headline "LASER" you know you're in for a hell of a ride. Complete plans for a laser or phaser (whatever that means, exactly) pistol, $2.75! Invisible force fields, moon men robots, two bucks a piece-- why hadn't this Jack Ford just taken over the world with his army of laser-equipped, invisi-shielded moon men bots, all built for less than the cost of a used Hyundai?



Maybe it has something to do with the fact that his horoscopes cost more than his Moon Man robots or lasers.

If you've ever thought to yourself, gosh, I wish I had a modular snake robot with which to inspect these pipe joints I've just welded, well -- you're gonna love this video. Modular Snake Robot: Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute. This robot also has him a website. (Thanks, Katrina Corley)

Todd Neiss camouflaged his 1979 Chevy K-10 Blazer using real plants as stencils. He calls his vehicle the "Squatchmobile." From Cryptomundo:

I would spray the color (flat) I wanted for [what] plant first, then lay the plant over the paint and spray a background color over it. I intentionally arranged ground plants low on the body and trees on the upper half.

The whole truck took me two days. Technically it is a work in progress as I carry cans of paint with me in case I run into a plant I haven’t captured yet.”

"Cryptocamouflage Vehicle"

From the MAKE Flickr pool

I was particularly non-plussed upon discovering my vidcam's lens thread had been stripped while using an exceptionally cheap wide angle attachment. Rather than sending it in for repairs I pondered the options - epoxy? tape? ick! To my surprise, I found that a small piece of fabric placed between the connection before attaching made for a nice snug fit - and the lenses actually aligned quite well. Of course your mileage may vary, but it's certainly worth a try when other options are cost/time prohibitive.

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Tiburon is a nice little wealthy coastal town a little ways north from where I happen to live. It's a cozy place to go for a nice meal out or something -- usually somewhere I'll take visiting friends or relatives. It's certainly not a place where you'd expect there to be a big crime problem, and, indeed, the facts seem to bear that out. But, apparently, that's not stopping the local gov't from deciding to set up cameras to photograph and record every car entering and leaving the town. It will also record and use the license plate info. If that sounds like a bit of an invasion of privacy, well, the town's Manager, Peggy Curran, insists you're just paranoid:

"As long as you don't arrive in a stolen vehicle or go on a crime spree while you're here, your anonymity will be preserved. We don't care who you are and we don't know who you are."

Actually, if you didn't care, you wouldn't be recording the info, now would you?

This is really just a variation on the "if you haven't done anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about" sort of claim. It's a fallacy that privacy is only about if you're doing something wrong. So, for folks up in Tiburon, who wants to follow Peggy Curran with a camera when she's walking around? As long as she doesn't do anything illegal, her anonymity will be preserved. No one cares who she is. They would just be making sure she doesn't go on a crime spree or steal a car. By her own logic, that's perfectly reasonable, right?

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John Oakes sez, "Article in New York Business describing OR Books, a new sort of publishing house being started up by two longtime indy publishers. We plan to take existing tech and apply it to old-fashioned publishing values--and to commit to massive marketing for our authors, and to do so within a progressive framework, releasing fiction and nonfiction."

Believing that e-books and print-on-demand technology have reached a tipping point with the public, Messrs. Oakes and Robinson will launch OR Books this fall as a Web-only house selling straight to consumers. The plan is to operate at a drastically reduced cost--blowing up a model whose inefficiencies have helped make this past year so painful for publishers large and small. The Association of American Publishers reports that revenues from adult hardcovers fell 16% through April, while revenues from adult trade paperbacks plunged 26%, compared with the same period a year ago.

Some specialty publishers have built businesses around e-books, but OR would be the first general-interest press to try the model. The partners are betting that the new-media opportunities that all book people are rushing to exploit will let a startup thrive even in a dismal retail environment.

"The whole system of stuffing as many books as you can into stores, whether or not buyers want them--it's broken," says Mr. Oakes, who co-founded and ran the left-leaning Four Walls Eight Windows for 17 years. The press disappeared in an indie shakeout in 2007. A stint as executive editor at Atlas & Co. ended last fall when the small publisher ran into financing problems.

John published my first short story collection, as well as books by Octavia Butler, Abbie Hoffman, Kathe Koja, Rudy Rucker and many other writers whom I adore and admire. This sounds like a great, exciting project!

Betting on e-books

suraj.sun tips this story at ZDNet about a new problem with the LHC. Quoting: "The restart of the Large Hadron Collider has been pushed back further, following the discovery of vacuum leaks in two sectors of the experiment. The world's largest particle collider is now unlikely to restart before mid-November, according to a CERN press statement. The project had been expected to start again in October. To repair the leaks, which are from the helium circuit into the insulating vacuum, sectors 8-1 and 2-3 will have to be warmed from 80K to room temperature. Adjacent sub-sectors will act as 'floats,' while the remainder of the surrounding sectors will be kept at 80K, CERN said in the statement. The repair work will not have an impact on the vacuum in the beam pipe. CERN has pushed back the restart a number of times, as repair work has continued. To begin with, scientists said the LHC experiment would restart in April 2009. In May, CERN [said] that the restarted experiment could run through the winter to make up some of the lost time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

angry tapir writes "Microsoft has made its second release under the General Public License in two days with software for Moodle, an 'open-source course management system that teachers use to create online learning Web sites for their classes, and it has about 30 million users in 207 countries.' It comes on the heels of Redmond contributing drivers to the Linux community. No reports as yet on dropping temperatures in hell."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here is a lovely time-lapse video of more than 100 hot air balloons ascending for the 2006 Reno Balloon Race.

Artist Val Thompson creates commissioned paintings incorporating the ashes of people who have died, as memorials for their surviving loved ones. Above is a beach scene that Thompson painted for Anne Kearney, using some of her husband John's ashes mixed into the paint. It depicts the couple's last vacation together. From Sky:

(Kearney) was so pleased with the results that Ms Thompson did three more paitings for her before starting up her new business 'Ash 2 Art'.

"My brother and I did a bit of research on the internet and discovered nobody else is providing this sort of service," she said.

Val Thompson's Ash2Art

"Brush With Death: Painter Uses Ashes For Art" (Sky)

"Widow uses dead husband's ashes for painting" (Telegraph)

AlejoHausner writes "To find one terrorist in 3000 people, using a screen that works 90% of the time, you'll end up detaining 300 people, one of whom might be your target. A BBC article asks for an effective way to communicate this clearly. 'Screening for HIV with 99.9% accuracy? Switch it around. Think also about screening the millions of non-HIV people and being wrong about one person in every 1,000.' The problem is important in any area where a less-than-perfect screen is used to detect a rare event in a population. As a recent NYTimes story notes, widespread screening for cancers (except for maybe colon cancer) does more harm than good. How can this counter-intuitive fact be communicated effectively to people unschooled in statistics?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member 5Volt points out an especially historic schematic from NASA's publicly available Apollo Lunar Module documentation. It's function was to light the appropriate indicator lamps once the module made contact with the surface of the moon -

The lights are two (top of drawing) on two different panels, namely panel 1 and panel 3. Both lamps light up when at least one of the probes touches the ground. The circuit is powered from two different sources and only when the descent engine is on - relay 3K7 controlled by switch K16B inside dotted square at left. Should the descent relay fail, switches 1K5B and 2K5B (at left) can be used to manually override switches to both supply lines. The two lamps are independently powered from the two power sources.

The circuit is redundant wherein the bulb besides being powered from two separate power sources, are controlled by two circuits.

Read more on the 5Volt blog.

A quick search turns up this rather gorgeous hi-res photo of Apollo's control panel -

The actual lamps in question are fairly easy to spot in the large source file -

More:

Remembering Apollo 11 & One small step for open source software...

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It was just a few weeks ago that we were suggesting all the talk about YouTube's inability to be profitable was suspect, and there was increasing evidence not that YouTube was profitable yet, but that the claims of how much they were losing didn't take into account the real situation. Still, it comes as a bit of a surprise for Google to come out with a blog post that basically tells everyone that they are way, way, way off in thinking that YouTube is a huge money loser for the company. The reason it's a surprise is because it actually seemed like Google enjoyed having people think that YouTube was such a loser, since it held back competition. Perhaps there was some fear that it was also holding down the stock price or something. Either way, hopefully we can put to rest the silly idea that YouTube is some sort of blackhole for money.

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LinuxScribe writes "Red Hat, Mozilla, Novell, Oracle, and Sun are among the 50-plus member Open Source for America coalition that will be officially announced today by Tim O'Reilly at OSCON. The OSA will be a strong advocate for free and open source software, and plans to boost US Federal government support and adoption of FOSS. From their website: 'The mission of OSA is to educate decision makers in the US Federal government about the advantages of using free and open source software; to encourage the Federal agencies to give equal priority to procuring free and open source software in all of their procurement decisions; and generally provide an effective voice to the US Federal government on behalf of the open source software community, private industry, academia, and other non-profits.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

It's pretty well-known that Hitler and his propaganda minister, Paul Joseph Goebbels, looked to American advertising for inspiration. What I didn't realize was how proud the advertising industry was about it. In its July 20, 1933, issue, Printers' Ink, one of the lead advertising trade journals of its time, speaks approvingly of Hitler's methods:

[Hitler] has depended almost entirely upon slogans made effective by reiteration, made general by American advertising methods...[S]logans on billboards and newspapers and in publications of national circulation have made a new Germany which has raised much excitement, made many changes.

Many changes, indeed. And many more to come!

It continues:

"As is well known, the word propaganda in Germany is used synonymously with the word advertising. Although in this country and in Great Britain propaganda has the unfortunate connotation of being free instead of being paid for, this distinction does not exist in Germany."

Ah, yes, that unfortunate connotation of freedom! Interesting that this is the only negative connotation of "propaganda" at this time. In fact, the (American) author makes sure to point out that in the Hitler speech that follows the word "propaganda" should be read as "advertising." Apparently, the trade mag wants credit for schooling the Führer.

The article then goes on to quote Hitler at length talking about something that Americans who worked in advertising at the time already believed: that the masses are morons who respond only to simple messages repeated thousands of times (a perspective I discuss at length in my book).

Seventy-some years later, this belief is as popular with the powers that be as it was in 1933. Which, if nothing else, provides a shred of evidence connecting the makers of the Head-On commercial to the Nazis.

Here's Google's senior copyright counsel, William "Patry on Copyright" Patry, with a pithy little zinger about the idea that copyright law is made for creators:

While one hears, constantly, corporate chieftains claiming that they're out there fighting for the creators, we all know that is b.s.: the creators are merely an expense item on a balance sheet, to be reduced as much as possible. We also hear politicians make similar paeans to creators, yet when was the last piece of legislation that was passed that benefited creators at the expense of corporations? When was the last time you heard a government official suggest such a thing?

Barbara Ringer (via Blogzilla)

Erik over at Homegrown Evolution has posted a how-to on using a milk crate, a five-gallon bucket, and a toilet seat to create a dry waste toilet. Even if the idea of "humanure" and the composting of human waste is a gross-out to you, this might still make an easy camping/temp outhouse toilet.

Humanure Dry Toilet Made from Milk Crate [via BB Gadgets]

From MAKE magazine:

Check out MAKE, Volume 18: ReMake America!
Read "Humanure for the City Dweller" by Nance Klehm in the Digital Edition
Buy your copy in the Maker Shed, subscribe to MAKE, or access the Digital Edition (if you're already a subscriber).

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suraj.sun passes along a report from a Seattle TV station that has been investigating reports of Apple iPods overheating and bursting into flames. "An exclusive KIRO 7 Investigation reveals an alarming number of Apple brand iPod MP3 players have suddenly burst into flames and smoke, injuring people and damaging property. It's an investigation that Apple has apparently been trying to keep out of the public eye. It took more than 7 months for KIRO 7 Consumer Investigator Amy Clancy to get her hands on documents concerning Apple's iPods from the Consumer Product Safety Commission because Apple's lawyers filed exemption after exemption. In the end, the CPSC released more than 800 pages which reveal, for the very first time, a comprehensive look that shows, on a number of occasions, iPods have suddenly burst into flames, started to smoke, and even burned their owners. ... Apple refused to comment, and refused to answer all of the other questions [the reporter] has been asking of the company since November."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE subscriber John Honniball points out this interesting take on the proto shield design. o0mouse0o's recipe for a "Large Prototyping Shield" consists mainly of breadboard - plus a headers, and a bit of stripboard.

Having recently become an Arduino fan I want to be able to have several projects but save the expense of buying more than one Arduino board. Being very lazy I would also like to be able to change between several projects and avoid all the tedious swapping around of many dangly wires and all the trouble caused when you get the order wrong or cant remember how it went together.

All the available prototyping shields I've seen are small and I want something that a whole project can be built with so I solved the problem by making a Large Arduino Prototyping Shield

Of course you could use a larger breadboard - maybe even hardwire the power connection below as well. Check out the step-by-step in the project's instructable.

In the Maker Shed:

Half-Size Breadboard

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We asked our MAKEcation Camp Counselor, Dave Hrynkiw, to share with us some of the common mistakes he sees newbies making when learning to solder. He shares some of his thoughts below.

Dave is the geek behind the woman (hey Cheryl!) who runs the Solarbotics and HVW Technologies. He's our virtual Camp Counselor during "Teach Your Family to Solder" week. If you have any questions for Dave related to soldering, send email to campcounselor@makezine.com.

---

Using Too Little Heat: This is an issue when you're using those wimpy 10- or 15-watt pencil-type soldering irons. They're usually purchased as part of a set which includes some murky solder, a useless soldering-iron "stand," and a "what is this thing for?" mini-wrench, used for replacing the tip (trust me, the iron ain't worth that effort). The idea behind soldering is to heat the item, and then melt the solder to the item. In most electronics situations, that item will likely be a wire, or an electronic component. When you have an iron that generates wimpy amounts of heat, trying to heat up the item will take longer than it should, which will usually lead to damaged components from excessive heating, or a messy solder job (because the builder got impatient and melted the solder to the tip and tried to "paint" the molten solder to the joint). Either situation is bad. Save those wimpy irons for burning your name into a piece of wood, or roasting marshmallows from the inside-out (but don't eat them! - bet that iron isn't lead-free/RoHS compliant).

Using Too Much Heat: We often see kits come in for repair that have been scorched like they've been soldered with a butane torch! Sometimes they have! Or with one of those huge pistol-grip soldering guns designed for soldering 12-gauge car trailer connections in mid-winter Alaska. A printed circuit board's copper traces are barely more than glued onto the phenolic or fiberglass substrate we call a PCB. Too much heat kills this adhesive layer, making traces and pads lift from the board like a bad sunburn two days after that bender on the beach (sorry for that imagery, but it's pretty accurate). Go easy with the firestick, chief. The boards and components are made to withstand a certain amount of heat in the soldering process, not the heat of a solar flare.

Painting: This is the most common newbie mistake. As mentioned under "Too Little Heat," soldering is the process of heating the items you want to solder together, and melting the solder to those items, using the heat in the items (as transfered by your iron). It's the reverse of painting. The (wrong) painting method is melting solder onto your iron, then trying to smear it onto the item you're soldering. What you end up with is a solder job that will most likely flake right off. You want to paint? Try the Bob Ross-style class at the local community college (Jeez, I miss that guy -- and his tremendous hair). Think of the soldering iron as a gravity gun for solder. Stick the iron where you want the solder to go, and when you apply it, the solder will naturally flow towards the heat. You can't convince solder to go where there's no heat. It's kinda like a retired Canadian that way.

Appriopriate Tools, Equipment, and Supplies: I bet you think I'm going to suggest getting the best soldering iron you can afford, right? Nope. A decent low-cost iron is fine. If you stick with electronics long enough to thoroughly wear out a medium-quality 20-to-30 watt pencil-type soldering iron, then go ahead and buy something fancier. Spend about $25 on a iron (not a kit!) and you'll be all set.

Solder comes in many types and flavors, the most common being "Lead-free" and "Lead/Tin." Given a choice, I'll take leaded any day. There's a reason all military-grade electronics are still done with lead-based solder. It's just better. It melts at lower temperatures, flows better, and ends up looking shiny when applied properly. The other stuff looks like crud, even when it's done correctly, which is especially troublesome for beginners looking for proof of a healthy join. Yes, there are lead-based dangers, but use some common sense, good ventilation, and don't eat while you're working (solder/fingers, fingers/sandwich, sandwich/brain, brain/dumb), and wash your hands well with soap when you're done.

Secondary to the leaded/non-lead solder issue, there's the decision of "no-clean" vs. "rosin" flux. OK, there are more types, but those are the main types. Flux is a chemical paste that's usually in the core of the solder you use. When you melt it, the flux cleans the surfaces and "lubricates" the soldering, making the metals bind correctly. If you have a choice, get a "no-clean" flux, as the other types will make your solder joints look like burned sugar.

In short, get a $25, 20-to-30 watt pencil-type soldering iron, a $12 1-lb. roll of no-clean lead/tin solder (that's lots - share with family and friends), don't floss with the solder, and don't paint it onto your projects.

Bonus Tip: Get a container of Multicore "Tip Cleaner." Best $3 you'll spend on a soldering accessory. It will triple the life of your solder tips, and make almost any gungy tip look clean and shiny again. Just don't breath the fumes when you push a hot dirty tip into this pumice-like substance.

More:
Toolbox: Soldering Essentials, Part 1
Toolbox: Soldering station tools and hacks

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<a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/developers-create-unofficial-f.html
">

@brady over at radar.oreilly.com has an excellent summary of what some folks are already doing to integrate Apple's new Find My iPhone service into their location aware applications. He speculates formalization of these techniques into a service and offers meaningful use cases, citing established applications, that would benefit from granular location data. People are building real world apps against this service and a community is forming around its use.

[via radar.oreilly.com]

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While on the web you keep hearing that we are in the so-called web 2.0 era, the age of collaboration, sharing, questioning and having a bottom-up approach, when you go to a physical conference or a live event it seems as if you are taking a time-machine into the past. Photo credit: Jose Manuel Gelpi Diaz edited by Daniele Bazzano You just sit back on a comfy chair and listen passively to the presenter. There is no interaction, no engagement, no dialogue, just somebody tossing a pre-scripted lecture out there on the podium. There is no easy way to talk or discuss with the presenter, no way to avoid watching an infinite series of boring slides, nor an easy and respectful way to counter or correct what you disagree with. I don't know about your experience, but I feel very frustrated and angry in those situations when I cannot engage, contribute and exchange. Being forced to listen to somebody without expressing my ideas feels very much like the TV-prison state of mind. Wouldn't be great instead if the presenter tried to step down from her podium and sincerely tried to ignite a two-way conversation with the audience? Asking questions, sharing suggestions, bringing in new ideas and viewpoints into the discussion are the type of things I, as an audience, am always on the lookout for. This is why I have taken the time to video interview, on this topic, three critical thinkers and analysts of our key activity of our times: communication. As they recently passed by Rome to attend conferences and events they were invited to speak at, I have captured the ideas and visions of media futurist Gerd Leonhard, education and learning researcher George Siemens, and online facilitation and community-building expert Nancy White, on the topic of the future of conferences and events. Where are we headed? What is preventing us from changing such TV-like approach inside events? How can we transform this one-way lectures into really engaging get-togethers? Here are some critical but also constructive viewpoints on our present limitations and mistakes as well as some interesting ideas on what the future of conferences and events may look like in the near future. Here all the details:

The Open Format of Conferences - Gerd Leonhard

Duration: 2' 47''
Full English Text Transcription
Gerd Leonhard: I go to a lot of conferences where I speak and it's kind of funny you ask the question. I think a lot of conferences where I go to, I end up learning more from them than they learn from me. At least I feel that way. From the participants or the other speakers, and they are actually quite lucky to get paid to go to conferences and also learn from it, which is unusual.
Robin Good: But you go to very special conferences. There are a lot more events than the ones you go to, there are more academic-, business-like, presentations and showcasing of various kinds. I'm sure you've found yourself in some of those, where you actually get to yawn pretty many times during the day. You want to know how much time before the next break, you can't wait to talk to people instead of sitting down. How do you feel conferences are heading in that respect? Are they getting more boring or less boring? Are we realizing that maybe something there is not working right? What do you think? Gerd Leonard: I think many of them are getting more boring, because the level... again, this is because of the web. The web is allowing us all to exchange and to talk already. That's what we do all day long, we talk on blogs, and Twitter, and Facebook, and Skype... We already have a pretty high level of buzz, right? So when we go to a conference we expect it to be beyond that, much better than that, even. The best one I went to recently was Mobile Monday in Amsterdam where I spoke, but there were so many good people there, because of the kind of audience, that it was great to network and talk to everyone. And you could learn a lot. Or PICNIC last year in Amsterdam, which is very much a peer-oriented environment. I think we're going to find the top-down thing demolished. This idea that I would listen to some CEO talk about how he made lots of money, except for few CEOs, like the Google CEO - I like Eric Schmidt, I would love to hear that - but in general we're going to find these top-down idea rather demolished, in the sense that there's very few people that would deserve that kind of billing. It's more like we talk to each other. And therefore the open format is going to be taken over in conferences. And the unconference format, the idea of twittering at the same time... All of these things are going to take over and it's going to remove the distance between the speaker and the audience to be much more of a collaborative effort. When you have real fore leaders.. If I listen to Yochai Benkler or so - I can listen to him for five hours - but when I have sort of people where I am saying "what's new?", that's not that exciting. We have a lot of that in conferences. That sort of pitching things and people talking to each other about their products and who makes more money... That is going to go away.

Participatory Online Conferences - George Siemens

Duration: 4' 38''
Full English Text Transcription
Robin Good: Conferences and Events. I can't stand anymore going to conference and events and I feel overwhelmed by the desire to jump out of my seat. I feel consuming by them talking and me being here by this separation of them apparently having been assigned the role of the experts, the knowers of knowledge and we, us, receiving. It feels like very much TV. Is there a way you feel that - since we're talking in 2.0 about bottom-up, collaboration, sharing, challenging, questioning - is there going to be some osmosis? What do you see in the future of conferences? George Siemens: I've been dealing for years with the same kind of feeling. I don't know how to put it. On one hand it seems, for me at least, it's kind of like we're past that now. That view that you're the expert and I have to listen at your feet. If there's anything that I've at least come to think as the Internet as a whole, is that model isn't valid all the time. There are times where it is. I enjoy sometime listening to personally a good lecture - I'm not sure what your experience is like - but if I have the opportunity to listen to someone who has thought a long about a subject and then understands it critically well, I like listening to a part of a lecture. But after that I'm not satisfied just listening. I can listen to a lecture for 45 minutes or an hour. Then I want to ask questions, I want to give my opinion, I want to ask the opinions of people sitting beside me. That's where I find my frustration is that conferences. There's a great statement I often quote by Roy Pea and he says that in certain events, or certain tools I guess, are carriers of previous patterns of reasoning. Which means: We build into our system, our viewpoints at one time, and even when the society around has sort of changes, we keep those viewpoints and we use them to build new systems. Let's say you look back in 1900s where you would have the expert, the Einstein coming in and he taught you about physics and stuff like that. That model was built into classrooms, even before 1900s. There was the creation of universities, the lecture halls in some cases already did that. We've just kept that, and now that we have these wonderful participatory tools available, we've still kept that mindset. We've kept that way of thinking, and we still use that in our current conferences. We've run through university management, we've run through several - I think - very successful online conferences, and we've had as 7800, as highest 25000, people involved in these events. And people who at the end when we kind of have sent out a few letters or a survey and say: "what do you think?", people have said: "this is the best conference I've ever attended". I think one of the reasons is that they were able to ask questions, they were able to contextualize. They can personalize it to their own experience. If I'm asked what's the future of conferences, like you're saying, I have to say we're still keeping some of the human contact. Meeting you here, in Rome, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the food, there's no way an online conference is going to duplicate that, right? But there's a way to augment it. And the very fact that I was able to connect with you here was exclusively genuine of the fact that we met each other in virtual spaces. I think it's going to be a merging of both physical and online, so you'll be at a conference and it'll be... let's say you walk in and you use the social network that you have. It should be able to connect you to people who have similar interests. If they know that you're into emerging technology, into pedagogy, it should be able to suggest recommendations of people that you should meet at the event. That's a very low-level functionality. Any good social networking service does that already. But we don't use ii for conferences yet. That's part of the problem. We've done a little bit of work at< AACE. We did a conference this year, an online conference on how to improve conferences. It's called "a href="http://www.aace.org/globalu/archives/spaces/">Spaces of Interactions and we have people like Teemu Arina and individuals like that coming who really kind of push the envelope to present and talk about the ways that we should extend conferences. I guess probably the best way of saying "what will conferences look like in the future", it will be much more you and I creating them ourselves as participants, rather than someone creating them for us and telling us what to do. I think we will be the ones to create that for ourselves.

Conferences and Missing Conversations - Nancy White

Duration: 1' 32''
Full English Text Transcription
Nancy White: First I think is a financial model and that people who are in the business of conferences... If we said: "You're capable of having a conference by yourself. Just get a room, get some coffee, and have a conversation", where's their model for making money? If we say: "Come and talk to everybody who's an expert" - people don't have faith in the expertise of each other, we require some "big name - then we're not going to come. I think one is: we have been trained to expect the important people at the podium and we're trained to expect that if we pay you'll do the work for me. Part of that is: the financial market model makes people lazy. We don't take ownership. How often have you gone and said: "I'm just going to sit here and listen", instead of saying:

"I insist on participating. I won't go unless this is an open space and it's conversational. I won't go unless you have a place for the speakers to come and be asked any question they want, sitting around with coffee or chocolate. I won't go unless there's time for us to have and share dinner together - because we know people say different things over dinner with a beer in their hand - and they don't when they are..."

I think we have to demand it, and I think we have to understand that we sometimes still have to pay and do the work. Because if someone pays for the facility and pays for the food, there's a cost for them. But it's still our responsibility to lead, to participate, to engage. If we think pay means past, we'll never going to get anywhere. And right now I think that's the model.

Originally recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia, and first published on July 22nd, 2009 as "The Future Of Conferences And Events: Critical Viewpoints From Gerd Leonhard, George Siemens And Nancy White".

About the authors Gerd Leonhard is a media futurist as well as an author and writer, a media and Internet entrepreneur, a strategic advisor, and a keynote speaker & presenter. If you want to get a good feel for what he does, you can check out Gerd's blog MediaFuturist or visit his Youtube channel.

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".

Nancy White is an online facilitation and community-building expert. Nancy is the owner of Full Circle Associates, a company that develops collaboration and facilitation strategies, communications, planning and Internet collaboration solutions for non-profits, organizations and businesses.

AS220 is holding their annual Foo Fest in Providence, Rhode Island. It looks like a really interesting event, especially for kids. Check out the link for the complete schedule of artists, musicians, and other activities. I'll see you there!

This August 15th from 1pm to 1am, AS220 brings back our famous urban street party, blocking off most of Empire Street and filling it with things infinitely superior to parked cars! Numerous interactive art installations and games, local artists showcasing their creations and twelve hours of all-original music will make this our most art-packed, music-filled festival yet!

Create giant exquisite corpse drawings, make masks, play the games in our artist's video arcade, learn to silkscreen your own T-Shirt, and help us build a giant pinata! Drinks and refreshments from our bar and local restaurants will keep your wheels turning!

More about the AS220 Foo Fest

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Earmarks -- the pork barrel spending our elected officials dump into various bills to fund friendly projects for constituents -- got plenty of attention during last year's Presidential campaign, but since the campaign is over, it seems that many have forgotten about them. The House and Senate did recently update rules, requiring members to reveal earmark requests, but they've done so in different ways and different formats, and there's no central repository. WashingtonWatch is trying to change that. The site, which has long been a useful source of information on various bills is trying to crowdsource a centralized earmark dataset, asking folks to enter in the earmark data on their own politicians. They're offering up some prizes (a Kindle, iPod shuffle or a fruitcake -- yes, a fruitcake) to those who enter in the most (accurate) data. If you think the Kindle is evil, fear not, as you can just get the cash value and spend it all on fruitcakes yourself.

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The Register covers security firm Secunia calling out Adobe for its insecure distribution practices with regard to Adobe Reader. (Here is Secunia's note.) The accusation is that the way Adobe provides Reader extends the software's window of vulnerability once an exploit has begun to circulate. Version 9.1 of Reader, which is what you get when you visit the official download site, contains 10 vulnerabilities that were patched by later releases. "Adobe Systems has been taken to task for offering outdated software on its downloads page that contains dozens of security vulnerabilities, several of which are already being exploited in the wild... Visitors who obtain Adobe Reader from the company's official downloads page will find that it installs version 9.1 of the program on their computers, even though the most recent version was 9.1.2 at time of writing. That could put users at considerable peril given the number of vulnerabilities fixed in the two iterations that have come since 9.1, complains Secunia..."

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The Temporary Music Machine is just as its name implies. It's meant to be used for only a limited amount of performances, and then the parts are reused for another project. The machine works by using two binary counters controlled by the performer. These counters are then mapped to chord structures and drum sequences.

The device is only intended to be temporary. A handmade bespoke electronic musical instrument for a limited number of performances. It is based on the Arduino platform and realised through an iterative rather then planned process.

More about the Temporary Music Machine powered by an Arduino

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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The Sussex, England police are trying to suppress publication of images from speed cameras -- images that show technical shortcomings in the cameras -- by claiming that they are copyrighted. Copyright is meant to protect creativity; I'm not sure who the aggrieved artist is meant to be here. Is there some tortured constable who spent hours on a ladder getting the composition of the camera's shots just right?

"It has been brought to our attention that the photographs from the Gatso camera, produced for your recent court case, have been published on TheNewspaper.com website," Sussex Police Solicitor Alexandra Karrouze wrote to Barker in a June 28 letter. "The content of these photographs are the property of Sussex Police and publication of them is a breach of copyright. They should be removed from the website forthwith. If they are not removed further action may be contemplated."

Sussex Police did not send any copyright notice to TheNewspaper, nor did Karrouze respond to requests for clarification and comment. The agency became particularly upset with Barker in May after he threatened legal action against the Sussex Speed Camera Partnership for insisting that he had been speeding even after his court acquittal. The agency had no choice but to issue a swift apology.

"The partnership accept that such an assertion should not have been made and have apologized unreservedly to Mr Barker for this error," the partnership said in a statement.

Barker believes that the local council and police do not want motorists to know that a time-distance calculation can be performed on the images to check the vehicle's speed against the radar reading. A difference of more than ten percent between the two figures renders the machine's speed estimate "unreliable" under UK guidelines.

UK Council Considers Speed Camera Photos Copyrighted (Thanks, Richard!)

Ukrainian arts collective Bob Basset have put another leather Cthulhu mask up -- I hadn't realized it was possible to top their previous effort, but...wow.

New Cthulhu. ????? ??????.

Kudos to Professor Anne Curry of the University of Southampton and Dr Adrian Bell of the University of Reading for putting a 250,000-record database of the English medieval soldiers online; a great boon to historians, scholars, and the curious:

The detailed service records of 250,000 medieval soldiers - including archers who served with Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt - have gone online.

The database of those who fought in the Hundred Years War reveals salaries, sickness records and who was knighted.

The full profiles of soldiers from 1369 to 1453 will allow researchers to piece together details of their lives.

Medieval battle records go online (via /.)

Here's Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the stupendous Red Mars books, in the Washington Post explaining why we shouldn't go to space -- and why we should.

The creation of a cosmic diaspora is just one argument for putting humans in space -- a bad one. But now, as human-made climate change has thrust us into the role of stewards of the global biosphere, new reasons, good ones, have emerged. Indeed, keeping our space ambitions relatively local -- within our own solar system -- can help us find solutions for the climate crisis.

It has been said that space science is an Earth science, and that is no paradox. Our climate crisis is very much a matter of interactions between our planet and our sun. That being the case, our understanding is vastly enhanced by going into space and looking down at the Earth, learning things we cannot learn when we stay on the ground.

Studying other planets helps as well. The two closest planets have very different histories, with a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus and the freezing of an atmosphere on Mars. Beyond them spin planets and moons of various kinds, including several that might harbor life. Comparative planetology is useful in our role as Earth's stewards; we discovered the holes in our ozone layer by studying similar chemical interactions in the atmosphere of Venus. This kind of unexpected insight could easily happen again.

Return to the Heavens, for the Sake of the Earth (via Making Light)

Writing in the Armed Forces Journal, retired Marine T.X. Hammes excoriates PowerPoint and its impact on decision-making in the military:

Our personnel clearly understand the lack of clarity and depth inherent in the half-formed thoughts of the bullet format. In an apparent effort to overcome the obvious deficiency of bullets, some briefers put entire paragraphs on each briefing slide. (Of course, they still include the bullet point in front of each paragraph.) Some briefs consist of a series of slides with paragraphs on them. In short, people are attempting to provide the audience with complete, coherent thoughts while adhering to the PowerPoint format. While writing full paragraphs does force the briefer to think through his position more clearly, this effort is doomed to failure. People need time to think about, even perhaps reread, material about complex issues. Instead, they are under pressure to finish reading the slides before the boss apparently does. Compounding the problem, the briefer often reads these slides aloud while the audience is trying to read the other information on the slide. Since most people read at least twice as fast as most people can talk, he is wasting half of his listeners' time and simultaneously reducing comprehension of the material. The alternative, letting the audience read the slide themselves, is also ineffective. Instead of reading for comprehension, everyone races through the slide to be sure they are finished before the senior person at the brief. Thus even presenting full paragraphs on each slide cannot overcome the fundamental weakness of PowerPoint as a tool for presenting complex issues.

The next major impact of slide-ology has been the pernicious growth in the amount of information portrayed on each slide. A friend with multiple tours in the Pentagon said a good rule of thumb in preparing a brief is to assume one slide per minute of briefing. Surprisingly, it seems to be true. Yet, even before the onslaught of the dreaded quad chart, I saw slides with up to 90 pieces of information. Presumably, some thought went into the bullets, charts, pictures and emblems portrayed on that slide, yet the vast majority of the information was completely wasted. The briefer never spoke about most of the information, and the slide was on screen for a little more than a minute. While this slide was an aberration, charts with 20 items of information portrayed in complex graphics are all too common. This gives the audience an average of three seconds to see and absorb each item of information. As if this weren't sufficient to block the transfer of information, some PowerPoint Ranger invented quad charts. For those unfamiliar with a quad chart, it is simply a Power Point slide divided into four equal quadrants and then a full slide is placed in each quadrant. If the briefer clicks on any of the four slides, it can become a full-sized slide. Why this is a good idea escapes me.

Essay: Dumb-dumb bullets (Thanks, Bill!)

Jeffrey sez, "We just finished making this fancy table for Penny Arcade. It's full of crazy teak and resin inlay, all sustainable woods, and get this: the moon center bit glows in the dark. We made it that way as a surprise, and didn't tell them about it prior! You can see it in the 'making of' video that's at the end of the blog post. To make it even better, it costs the same as a normal boring 'mid-level' large conference table from an office furniture store. Take that, Ikea and DWR.com!"

Penny Arcade themed conference table (Thanks, Jeffrey!)

mknewman sends in an MSNBC piece on a promising way to keep bats from straying into wind farms — by using radar. "Bats use sonar to navigate and hunt. Many have been killed by wind turbines, however, which their sonar doesn't seem to recognize as a danger. Surprisingly, radar signals could help keep bats away from wind turbines, scientists have now discovered. ...some researchers have raised concerns that wind turbines inadvertently kill bats and other flying creatures. ... The bats might not be killed by the wind turbine blades directly, but instead by the sudden drop in air pressure the swinging rotors induce... The researchers discovered that radar helped keep bats away, reducing bat activity by 30 to 40 percent. The radar did not keep insects away, which suggests that however the radar works as a deterrent, it does so by influencing the bats directly and not just their food. Radar signals can lead to small but rapid spikes of heat in the head that generate sound waves, which in turn stimulate the ear. A bat's hearing is much more sensitive than ours. It may be so sensitive that even a tiny amount of sound caused by electromagnetic radiation is enough to drive them out."

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Last year, during the presidential campaign, singer Jackson Browne sued John McCain for using one of his songs in an ad. There were a few questionable aspects to the lawsuit. First, the ad wasn't actually from the McCain campaign. There were also some questions about whether or not this was fair use since it was ostensibly used for "political speech," but so far the court didn't seem too amenable to that. And so, McCain has settled the lawsuit and publicly apologized to Browne, who claims this wasn't a partisan issue (yeah, right), but about the rights of musicians. This actually would have been an interesting fair use battle, so it's a little disappointing that it's ended, but the argument over "musicians' rights" strikes me as a bit silly, too. McCain could have easily used the same song live at a campaign stop, assuming the venue paid a compulsory performance license. And someone in the McCain camp could have legally covered the song, paying the correct compulsory license as well -- and then potentially used that version in a commercial. Basically, all this really did was highlight how convoluted and often arbitrary copyright laws are in many cases. But, rather than learning a useful lesson on the mess that is today's copyright law, it looks like McCain has taken the easy way out.

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Excellent entry by Meredith Newcom in the Threadcakes competition.

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Olympus has announced the latest additions to its FE range of budget compact cameras. The FE-5020, FE-4000, FE-46, FE-26 all include 12 Megapixel CCDs, 2.7 inch LCDs, but vary in lenses. They all include a 'One button, one Function' design principle, AF tracking and an Intelligent Auto mode. The FE-5020 and FE-4000 also include a set of Magic Filters. The new cameras will start shipping next month.

Olympus has released the Stylus 7010 ultra-compact camera. It is built around a 7x optical zoom lens starting at 28mm equivalent and a 12 megapixel image stabilized sensor. It has a 2.7 inch LCD and ffers features such as AF tracking and an Intelligent Auto mode. It also includes a set of 'magic filters' including Pop Art, Pin Hole, Sketch and Fish-Eye filters.

Next in the line of Fujifilm's announcements comes the FinePix J30 digital compact. With a 12MP sensor, 2.7 inch LCD and 3x (32-96mm equiv) zoom range it includes a Panorama mode, ISO sensitivity up to 3200, Face Detection and Auto Scene Recognition.

Fujifilm has also announced an addition to its A series of budget compact cameras. The A170 is based around a 10MP sensor, 3x (32-96mm equiv) zoom lens and a 2.7 inch LCD. There are 16 scene modes, Auto Scene Recognition and a Panorama mode.

Fujifilm has released the FinePix Z35 digital compact camera targeted towards the youth market. Sporting a compact body, this 10MP camera with a 2.5 inch LCD and 3x (35-105mm equiv) zoom lens includes in-camera edit and upload options via its Blog mode.

Fujifilm have launched the world's first three dimensional digital imaging system which includes the FinePix Real 3D W1 digital camera, FinePix Real 3D V1 picture viewer and 3D print capability. The W1 uses two CCD sensors and blends the information into a single symmetrical image and can produce both stills and movies.

Canon has developed the an image stabilization system that corrects for both linear and rotational shake. The system, which the company claims is a world's first for SLR lenses (Pentax offers similar capabilities in-camera), will be incorporated into a lens that will be released before the end of 2009. The new system is designed to offer improved stabilization performance in a wider variety of shooting situations.

Fujifilm has unveiled the FinePix S200EXR advanced super zoom - a successor to the FinePix S100FS. Incorporating a 12MP Super CCD EXR sensor and an optically-stabilized 14.3x (30.5-436mm) manual zoom lens, it offers CCD-RAW (EXR) and JPEG shooting and three bracketing options. It also includes a new Pro Focus and Pro Low Light mode and improved battery life. It features a 2.7 inch LCD and an electronic viewfinder.

Fujifilm has introduced the FinePix F70EXR featuring a new half-inch 10 megapixel Super CCD EXR sensor. It has a 10X image-stabilized zoom starting at 27mm equivalent and a 2.7 inch LCD screen. The EXR technology uses the sensor in three different ways to optimize resolution, dynamic range or low-light performance. The camera features a new Pro-Focus and a Pro-Low light mode which use multiple exposures in an attempt to mimic DSLR depth-of-field and low light performance.

dusty writes "Laser Focus World has a story on researchers from Ford, GSI, and The University of Liverpool and their success in using near-infrared lasers instead of spark plugs in automobile engines. The laser pulses are delivered to the combustion chamber one of two ways. One, the laser energy is transmitted through free space and into an optical plug. Two, the other more challenging method uses fiber optics. Attempts so far to put the second method into play have met some challenges. The researchers are confident that the fiber-optic laser cables' technical challenges (such as a 20% parasitic loss, and vibration issues) will soon be overcome. Both delivery schemes drastically reduce harmful emissions and increase performance over the use of spark plugs. So the spark plug could soon join the fax machine in the pantheon of antiquated technologies that will never completely disappear. The news release from The University of Liverpool has pictures of the freakin' internal combustion lasers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

A flickr set of Stitch Wars--a Star Wars-themed craft exhibit in Lauderdale, Florida--is now online. I know shit about Star Wars, but this little blue man with the white hat and the dead ram is kinda cute. Link (via Daddytypes)

To hear some in the entertainment industry tell the story, you'd think that BitTorrent was an evil technology designed with no redeeming value whatsoever. But, of course, there are tons of legitimate uses for it in a more efficient and economic way to distribute files by spreading the burden out. It's great for Linux distributions, for example. And now it's nice to see more and more companies recognizing that there's value in using BitTorrent technology to their advantage. Apparently, the latest is computer maker Asus, which is using BitTorrent for many software downloads. As the article points out, this is hardly revolutionary, but it is nice to see large corporations recognizing the usefulness of the technology.

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If the video above doesn't mellow you out, nothing will. Maddy says, "Geggy Tah has been in the news recently with a challenge over Pharrell's appropriation of their classic '90s gem 'Whoever You Are,' but this is a cute video of a gal doing a hula-hoop routine to one of their less known songs." Hooping to Geggy Tah's Holly Oak Tree.

More about charges that Clipse/Pharrell ripped off Geggy Tah's work (and the resulting lawsuit): Stereogum, Daily Swarm, TMZ, Prefix, Velvet Rope. (Thanks, Doug!)

DeviceGuru writes "Mediafly's A/V podcast aggregation service will be added to Roku's $100 digital video player set-top box this fall, the companies report. This puts the companies on a path to compete directly with Hulu.com. According to Mediafly, its service will provide free access to 'tens of thousands of audio and video podcasts' from NBC, CNN, ESPN, Comedy Central, and other sources. Roku VP Jim Funk notes that Mediafly is using a new Roku Developer Kit to ease the task of developing its add-on for the Roku box. Surely the cable companies are reading the writing on the wall!"

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