Accept no substitutes

Month: February 2007 (Page 4 of 4)

Democratizing Music?

Yesterday in class, we discussed chapters in Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation.

Holly asked: Using an example relevant to the present day music industry status, do you think that Apple Inc. would benefit more from the iTunes/iPod industry financially by making it free or open source software instead of the highly restricted software that it currently employs?

Steve Jobs was releasing his answer to this question during our class! Here it is from the Apple site.

Briefly. Apple does DRM on iTunes because the music companies demand it. People who buy the music hate the restrictions. People who buy iPods hate the restrictions. Steve says the restrictions don’t work anyway. Maybe things will get fixed in Europe.

FakeSteveJobs
has the window into RealSteveJobs mind on this in his essay on the essay “Thoughts on ‘Thoughts on Music'”— and he is a much funnier writer.

About that Blogger Ascertainment

NBC-17 Triangle Blogger Community Ascertainment (Invite here at eVite)

Host: Jason Clough
Location: WNCN-TV / NBC-17
1205 Front Street, Raleigh, NC View Map
When: Monday, February 19, 12:00pm
Phone: 919-835-6320

You are cordially invited to attend to the NBC 17 Triangle Blogger Community Ascertainment.

What: NBC 17 holds community ascertainments once a month in our viewing area. A community ascertainment is a casual meeting with representatives from the community and NBC 17. They are also referred to as Listening Tours.

We would like to invite you to our groundbreaking Blogger Ascertainment. We recognize the contributions bloggers are making to their readers and would like the opportunity to make a lasting connection with your important voice.

This meeting will be dedicated to finding out more about the important issues in your community, and suggestions on how we might be able to serve them better.

You talk…..we listen.

These meetings will not be taped. Notes will be taken by our staff. Tours of the station will be conducted.

If you are interested in attending please RSVP by February 16th

Jason writes below that all bloggers are welcome so here’s the invite. Enjoy.

Snark-Infested Waters with MSM

So I made a little joke without naming the victim recently when a local TV station sent ill-advised spammish invites to bloggers asking them to join in an “ascertainment.”

This somehow bruised the sensitive male feelings of David Kirk over at Tech-Recipes who has as near as I can tell no dog in this fight or more accurately no humor in his reading of my post.

I feel so bad that he calls me snarky; he does notice that I was having lighthearted fun.

I do feel bad that he picks on Bora and Brian who have worked as hard as anyone in this area to make blogging known and respected by local MSM.

Oh Lord, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (as Eric Burton sang in 1965).

Working group on Expertise, Science, and Democracy Spring Talks

One will be me. I’m not exactly repeating the talk I recently did at Duke; I’m asking folks who come to this upcoming talk to add, subtract, modify the wiki pages of that talk and/or to send me email (jonesATuncDOTedu) and/or post a comment on this blog entry as a way of participating in the talk before it even begins. So have at it! And do come to the talks. All three look good.

Thurs February 8, 3:30 pm @ Hanes Art 118:
“The Intellectual Commons”
Don Nonini, Professor of Anthropology, UNC-Chapel Hill

Thurs March 8, 3:30 pm @ Hanes Art 118
Paul Jones, founder of sunsite.unc.edu and director of ibiblio.org,
“Participatory Digital Libraries – Past and Futures; the ibiblio trends”

Fri March 30, 3:30 pm @ Saunders 220
Matthew Farish, Department of Geography and Program in Planning,
University of Toronto, “From Recognition to Regulation: Climate Laboratories and the Nature of War”*
*co-sponsored with UNC Geography

Robots and Radios

Just back from Legopalooza at the Morehead Science Center where Joe Meno of BrickJournal had a simple MindStorms robot running around a table. The robot has a sonar/ultrasound/bat-like radar sensor so that when it encountered an object it would reverse course and then turn in a random direction. The fun for kids of all ages was that we had to be the objects or the robot would run off the table. [It’s this one but without the camera part. So the NXT spy rover without the spying part.]
Yesterday Tucker helped build and put a second robot on the table. And today we returned with reinforcements, two other 13 year old boys, to create a third robot. One robot running around the table was amusing. Two on the table at once were hilarious. And three. That’s the right number for chaotic delight.

We left and then took the boys to WCOM where they began the Teen Spirit radio show with an in-studio interview with Django Haskins and Josh Starmer of the Old Ceremony. Django sang and played guitar while Josh played cello which led to some interesting sound engineering. The Old Ceremony is off for a couple of gigs opening for the Squirrel Nut Zippers and a trip to NYC.

Later in the show, the teens did a phone interview with electronic composer/musician Olspur who they discovered on LastFM.com.

Talk about different music and different interviews. Both went well and all seemed to have a great time. No known robots took part in the interviews.

Did you hear about the Gaelic-speaking Indian?

Actually I did. When I lived down between Laurinburg (formerly McLaurinburgh) and Aberdeen, NC, my neighbor (also a Newton. one married to a Munroe) told me that the Presbyterian church had had an endowment to bring a Gaelic speaking someone once a year up into the 1960s. They had some connection to a church on the Isle of Skye who would send a preacher to the little rural church.

Finally there was only one person in Scotland County that could understand the preacher from Skye. He was an elderly Lumbee Indian.

WHAT: “Did you hear about the Gaelic-speaking Indian?”: Geidhlig Folklore about Race in North America
WHO: Dr. Michael Newton
WHEN: Thursday, Feb 15th at 3:30
WHERE: Donovan Lounge in Greenlaw Hall at UNC-CH
ABSTRACT: In the mid-eighteenth century, Scottish Highlanders began to settle in North America and mingle with people distinctly different from themselves in appearance, especially people of Native American and African ancestry. Within a generation or two, due to social ties of several sorts, including slavery, many African Americans and Native Americans became fluent speakers of Scottish Gaelic. Folklore recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries relates to the shock of Highland emigrants, fresh from the boat, encountering these unfamiliar-looking Gaelic speakers. This talk will examine this folklore in its many variants, putting it in its wider context and exploring its meaning and purpose.

Let Us Ascertain You!

About 100 are bloggers (including me) were surprised by an eVite to a “Triangle Blogger Community Ascertainment” to be held at the incredibly inconvenient time of noon on a Monday. The host, a local TV station.

I’m sure you mean well, but geez TV guys — Geeks want drinks! And those start after 5. Doncha know, we bloggers are still in our PJs at noon? And the colors of the invite listing are white on light tan; we can’t read our buds’ names there. Yikes!

And we are assured that whilst we are being ascertained that “These meetings will not be taped. Notes will be taken by our staff. Tours of the station will be conducted.”

As of this writing, the eVite has 1 yes (from the organizer), 5 maybes (from folks complaining about the time), and 95 not yet replieds.

Greg Dekoenigsberg on One Laptop Per Child 2/8/07

WHO: Greg Dekoenigsberg (Community Development Manager for Red Hat)
WHAT: One Laptop Per Child
HOW: Live presentation at the TriLUG meeting
WHEN: Thursday, Feb 8, 2007 at 7pm.
WHERE: Red Hat HQ
ETC: This meeting (including the pizza) sponsored by InCentric Solutions. Open to the public.

At the February meeting of the Triangle Linux Users Group, Greg Dekoenigsberg, Red Hat’s Community Development Manager, will be giving a presentation on One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a project started at the MIT Media Lab that will develop and market a $100 laptop to developing countries for use by children in educational settings. These laptops incorporate various innovations both to reduce cost and to make them appropriate for children in remote environments, including dual-mode screens that are readable in bright daylight, power via a hand crank, and ad-hoc wireless mesh networking. The laptops will run a Linux-based Operating System developed by Red Hat.

(Thanks to Cristobal Palmer for the alert)

The Present of Human Computer Interfaces

Christian Carlberg at the 2.5-D Table

Not the Future, but Now. You’ve seen some of touch screens in the recent iPhone announcement.

Here’s Jeff Han of NYU at the TED Conference showing a big broad touch screen with gestures in action.

And the Northrop Grumman/Applied Minds TouchTable (several video demos here)

Xeni has a write up of a visit to Applied Minds in Wired that talks about the 2.5 D Terraintable here.

2005 Newsweek story on Danny Hillis and Applied Minds here (from whence the picture at left comes).

I saw a demo of the TerrainTable in 2005 and was very very impressed.

The Eternal Optimism of Peots

Just received in email:

Date: Thu,  1 Feb 2007 06:48:33 -0500 (EST)
From: gabriel
To: Paul_Jones@XXXXXX
Subject: peoms for sale

cGood day,,
i am mr gabriel ,i am a peom writer based in africa.I WRITE peoms
based on any topic.i have peoms for sell with various topics so i
decided to contact you.
The topics are listed below,

(1)MERCY———–$2500
(2)TRUST———–$4500
(3)KNOWLEDGE——-$6000
(4)BEYOND THE WAVES-$7200
(5)THE NATURAL FEELINGS OF LOVE——–$7500
(6)THE IRONY OF LIFE————-$6500
(7)THE IRONY OF LIFE————-$6500

This peoms are peoms written by me and which have not been
posted out to the public and are peoms that has impact in peoples
life and can change people for the best in life.
please if interested,you can send me your,
NAME:
ADDRESS:
CITY:
STATE:COUNTRY:
ZIPCODE:
I will recieve my payment through western union money transfer
i will be expecting to hear from you soonest and the peom will be
deleverd to you via DHL OR FEDEX.

yours sincerely,

GABRIEL…

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