Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 61 of 147)

You are the Person of the Year

And so am I. Time chooses YOU, meaning all of us participating in media and information construction and sharing on the Internet, as their Man (now Person) of the Year.

Time begins: “Person of the Year: You — Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”

As long as we have Net Neutrality that will be true.

And JJB points us to a Chrysler advert which gets it right by getting it wrong.

Dan Gillmor points out that the correct pronoun would be US not YOU.

NOTE to pathetic PR employees working for the anti-Net Neutrality duopoly: I won’t allow your obvious spammish links and misleading comments on this blog. In fact I’m more likely to do even more pro-Net Neutrality articles in response to your postings.

CEO of Reuter’s on Citizen Journalism

Tom Glocer is CEO of Reuters and he is also a blogger. Where better for him to publish an article called “Trust in the Age of Citizen Journalism” than on his blog?

The article is the text of a speech Glocer gave at “Globes Media Conference in Tel Aviv on Monday 11 December 2006.” About the talk he says: “It’s about trust in media today, taking into account the growing
popularity of blogging and all other types of citizen journalism.”

Reminds me that when I met Lobsang Wangyal, the Reuters reporter amongst exiled Tibetans, he was most interesting in talking about his newly formed Association of Tibetan Journalists. The Association’s biggest task, he told me, is preparing citizens to be journalists by educating them about strong and respected news practices — values, ethics and skills.

Glocer’s talk via Dan Gillmor and the Center for Citizen Media. Dan has his reservations about parts of the talk.

Birdsong silenced in Raleigh

Gary Birdsong - Nov 2005
“And no birds sang” as Keats ended his poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” But in this case, the silence befell our favorite pitpreacher, Gary Birdsong as he tried to take his redemption show on the road to the general public.

Gary has been preaching hell fire and damnation at UNC and other campuses or well over a decade that I can recall. But once he started up on Raleigh’s Fayetteville Street in front of the Wake County Courthouse, he upset the gentile dinners at Yancey’s Juke Joint who called the police.

Ryan Teague Beckwith has the story on his News and Observer blog.


The people at UNC-Asheville aren’t nice to Gary either.[YouTube]

We ibiblians have some nice pictures of a slightly younger and less hairy Gary in classic poses.

new ibiblio record over 24 million files in one day

Munch - Ashes
Thanks to Google’s Edvard Munch celebration yesterday and to the historic WebMuseum hosted on ibiblio, we handled over 24 million requests yesterday — about 10 million of those for images of Munch’s paintings.

Our Cogent link to Atlanta managed the extra requests easily without going over our limit (in the 500 mbs range). And thanks to Squid caching, our servers easily handled the load.

Overall, a great test of our new datacenter and networking arrangement with NCREN and a big success there for all of us.

Thanks to Nicholas Pioch of Netscape-AOL France for maintaining the Web Museum for almost 15 years and to Mark Harden for his contributions to the Munch area.

Song of Joy (coming soon)

I’ll be off the net all day today (Wednesday), but I do have unrelated news. I have a poem upcoming in the News and Observer’s Sunday Journal. Not sure which Sunday as I write this. I can’t put the poem here since it needs to appear in the Sunday Journal first, but I can give you the 99 words of the introduction to the poem:

I heard a voice in the night saying “Joy is here” then after a pause “It might be insincere.” I noticed that the lines created a perfect triplet of three lines of three syllables with rhyme. Of course they should occur three times in a poem. But the poem’s length? The most magical number would be ninety nine; the sum of the sums of divisors of the first eleven integers. Incidental to this mathematical epiphany, I suddenly recalled William Wordsworth‘s wonderful poem “The Tables Turned.” The birds sang as the sun rose. I wrote this poem. Hope you enjoy.

60s Student Protests in Chapel Hill

ae alerts us to an exhibit and a series of events called “I Raised my Hand to Volunteer: Students Protest in 1960s Chapel Hill” beginning on January 23 with all but the ultimate event in Wilson Library — that last event will be at the Sonja Hayes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, Seminar Room.

Scheduled events include:

  • Jan. 23, 2007– Prof. Peter Filene, Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor in the History Department at UNC-Chapel Hill, will give a talk entitled “Personally Authentic: Carolina Student Protestors in the Sixties.” Filene, who began teaching at UNC in 1967 and has won six teaching awards in his career, will draw on his own experiences, as well as his research and teaching about the political movements of the era and student activism in general. Wilson Library, reception and exhibit viewing at 5:15 p.m., program at 6 p.m.
  • Jan. 30, 2007 – “Pressing the Hold-outs: The Desegregation Sit-ins of 1963-1964,” moderated by Sally Greene, Chapel Hill Town Councilwoman and adjunct professor of law at UNC. Wilson Library, 5:30 – 7 p.m.
  • Feb. 6, 2007 – “Speaking Out-of-Bounds: Communism, Race, Intellectual Freedom, and the Speaker Ban Controversy of the Mid-Sixties,” moderated by Ferrel Guillory, Director, Program on Public Life. The panel will include William Friday, who was president of the UNC system at the time of the controversy, and Lewis Lipsitz, an outspoken opponent of the ban. Wilson Library, 5:30 – 7 p.m.
  • Feb. 13, 2007 – “Stomping Down: The Foodworkers Strike of 1969 and the Black Student Movement,” moderated by Dr. Archie Ervin, Associate Provost for Diversity and Multicultural Affairs at UNC. Sonja Hayes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, Seminar Room, 5:30 – 7 p.m.

Ideas of Karsarda and Galinsky (and others)

A is for Aerotropolis — or at least that newish word is the first entry in this year’s Ideas edition of the New York Times Magazine. UNC’s John Karsarda big idea (as well described here in a recent Fast Company article) that airports are the future of cities. Desirable and economic engines of the future that should be the center of our development; not noisy dangerous annoyances best placed on the distance edges and treated like a warehouse district.

As described here earlier, Adam Galinsky gets well deserved credit for discovering a secret of auction success – starting low price leads to selling at a high price in the same issue of the Magazine under the title (the titles are in alphabetical order) “Low Starting Prices Lead to High Auction Sales”.

Overall a great collection of ideas and a good read.

Jaron Lanier crabs about mobocracy in wikipedia calling it an example of Digital Maoism and warning about collectivism in the market place of ideas — no Hayakian, he.

Monkeysphere surpassable?

Monkeysphere
Robin Dunbar proposed and some say proved that there is a physical limit to the number of individuals with whom any single person can have a stable relationship.

That number is 150 (actually 147.8). But wait there’s more.

Looking at behavior of chimps, Dumbar noticed that the “chimps belong to social groups comprising about 50 individuals, but they have only two or three grooming partners.”

Then using the same neocortex measurements and ratios on humans, Dunbar calculated the magic numbers for humans.

“The results were… ~150 for social group size, and ~12 for the more intimate clique size” [or grooming size].

So much for Top 8.

Can online social networks extend the monkeysphere in the same way writing as expanded memory?

That is, do online networks allow an individual to manage and groom relationships of a greater order?

How is this accomplished?

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