Accept no substitutes

Category: General (Page 8 of 135)

My news bits on iPad and Facebook Security

Double news day on Wednesday.

I did some bits for and article in the Durham Herald-Sun on the iPad and education — even before the product was unveiled. I think this last part isn’t great for journalism, so you can see that I hedged my bets on what the thing would do or had I seen it and the DRM implications I would have given different quotes. As it was, I got to close the article with a whimsical quote:

“One of my goals in life is to be rich enough so that I could have an account with Apple,” he [Paul Jones] said. “That way, whatever they develop they can just take money out of there and send me what[ever] it is.”

Then I did a little on camera for the UNC Carolina Week Program about Facebook, Privacy and the new settings and controls. That’s not out yet that I know of, but I did shoot the crew as they were setting up.

Secure Transactions for Electronic Medical Records

Just after hearing a great, if quick and concise, discussion “Toward Health Care Reform Through Electronic Medical Records” featuring Jonathan Oberlander, Tim Carey and Deniese Chaney at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health this evening. Louise Winstanly turned to me and said “Why not let banks to it?” This was not only a good insight but one in keeping with the class discussion that I had been planning for tomorrow in the School of Information and Library Science. Not about banks nor about health records, but about the sources of disruptive innovations as described by Clayton Christensen (for my class in this video from this past summer).

Banks, Louise had realized, have been experts at secure, reliable, authoritative transactions between institutions as well as delivering money and records to the correct individuals anywhere in the world. If an individual and the country of Qatar can trust the fiscal transactions handled by banking systems, then surely UNC Hospitals, Duke Medical, Medicare and you and me could trust them with health information.

In fact, if banks concentrated on what they did well — that is not the content so much as the secure transfer and reliable delivery — you could have access to your health records by just a card swipe from an ATM-like machine or on your phone or a computer display. Authorized entities could update the records much like direct deposit is done. They could download appropriate parts of the records much like drafting your checking account or receiving an electronic transfer.

Banks could err bank the records. The bank of your choice holding all or part of your records as you deemed appropriate.

The network and the controls and the security are already in place. The banks need not, let me say again, be concerned with the content, nor with the format of the records. Those are separate issues that could be decided by other entities be they medical groups, government, insurance or even individuals. Standard formats would make sense but banks need not even be aware of those standards to perform much of the work of interchange and transactions.

What does this have to do with disruptive innovation? Banks have a proven and transferable competency with technical infrastructure in support of secure transactions. Medical organizations do not. Yet we see medical organizations, governments and insurance attempting to create new networks right beside the world’s best networks for secure transactions. If banking networks were to conceive of themselves not as financial exchange networks bit instead as secure information exchange networks, then they would already be in the business and would by now own it. Less replication, less useless reinvention, less time to build trust (you may not trust banks as investors and makers of loans but you do trust the ATM), there is already a culture of cooperative exchange that is well understood. All of this is under very long term construction in the medical area and in fact may not be accomplished in my life time. Banks and banking networks would have to do more than turn the switch, but not much more.

Margaret “Peggy” Rabb (1953 – 2010)

This Friday, I was at the funeral, burial, and an informal gathering of friends for the poet and teacher Margaret Rabb who most of us knew as Peggy. Peggy had a rich life much of which was spent on making other peoples lives richer. I knew her as a poet, but also as someone who worked in international health issues, put together documentary film festivals, was a lawyer (not practicing but much informed by her legal education), a mother, and an all round creative person and teacher who brought out the creativity in others.

Her obituary tells a part of her story, but it doesn’t say how hard she worked to complete her dream as a poet and teacher culminating with her last job as the head of the Creative Writing Program at Wichita State University.

Here is Peggy reading two late poems that capture her love of words, word play and of precise observation:

Low Owl Illusion

Transvestites in Waukegan

If I am he, is he now me? Mixed up with @jaykaydee by Indy

Thanks to Google Alerts, I learned that I was cited in the Independent Weekly’s food section for my blog. Not this blog. In fact, not even a blog that I’ve ever posted too. Perhaps I should have posted to Jacob Kramer-Duffield aka JKD aka @jaykaydee’s Piedmont Review of Food a long time ago; it’s a great blog with good stuff to say about food.

Nonetheless I’m in the ink as the author of the Piedmont Review of Food as the writer for the Indy didn’t bother to try to contact me or JKD. If Claire Cusick had, then her article “Eat with your mouse instead of your mouth” would have been corrected like this:

Even Paul JonesEven a busy PhD candidate has a food blog. The local online pioneer and director of ibiblio.orgJacob Kramer-Duffield, an insightful researcher on metadata, also writes about food and drink at the academically named Piedmont Review of Food (piedmontreview.blogspot.com), subtitled “Food, beer, &c. from Carrboro, North Carolina.” He began in 2007 with these words: “This blog will be about food, which is to say it’ll be about a lot of things,” and he’s kept faithful to that vision, sharing recipes with annotations and verdicts, a review of a brown ale and a discussion of stevia that begins “What on earth is that stuff??!”

Overall with this fix a fine bit of a bigger article.

Still the article omitted the Best Food Blog of the Triangle! Grace Talks About Food. You must read and view Grace’s videos — especially on Hannah Montana Cereal

UPDATE: Just heard from Claire who is correcting now. And JKD has updated Piedmont Review of Food so it’s easier to see who writes it.

Those Who Dare Live Offline (well, 2 at least)

The Wall Street Journal just ran a bit called “Refusing the Internet” or “Daring to Live Your Life Offline” by Kevin Helliker, a great investigative reporter in a different role here, about his brother and my old I’ll-Never-Be-Online pal, Tom Wilkerson. Mostly the brother, Keith.

Through Barry Wellman, I hooked up Tom and Kevin knowing that Tom would have much more to say that Kevin could possibly use and that most all of it would be funny. Tom did end up with a nice full paragraph:

Many holdouts are resigned to the necessity of joining Online America. As a 59-year-old amateur sailor, Thomas Wilkinson III shakes his head recalling how at the end of a cruise his friends will leap onto the dock to run and check their email.

“I mean, we’ve only been out there for three or four hours,” he’ll tell them. But as a newly elected officer of his stagehands union local, the Charlotte, N.C., resident suspects he may need to break down and get an email address. And as a longtime collector of memorabilia, he is fascinated by the idea of buying and selling on eBay. “I have warehouses full of stuff, and that would be a great way of getting rid of it,” he says.

But with his wildest stories and funniest jokes cut out. Still he got more ink in WSJ than most CEOs could get in a lifetime.

Both Tom and Keith are classic laggards. I mean in the Everett Rogers sense from his DIffusion of Innovation theory. They could adopt new technologies, their families wish they would, but they resist even to the annoyance of their friends.

Interestingly enough, both Tom and Keith are very social creatures. Both are inconvenienced by canceled meetings in the article — Tom by his local stage hands union and Keith by Knights of Columbus. In this — their sociality not their not liking meetings canceled — they are atypical internet laggards. As Keith Hampton points out in a twitter reply to me, “the data show nonusers have less diverse networks, spend less time in public- not more. WSJ story has it backwards.” The data that Keith H is pointing to are the results of the Pew Internet study on social isolation and new technologies in which he did some very good and rigorous data collection and analysis (published this last November 2009).

What makes Kevin’s WSJ interesting is that his examples do go against type. That’s the difference between a pretty good story and very good research; generalizable stories are less interesting, but generalizable research is priceless. Just don’t get the two confused.

Thanksgiving menu – wherein Texas meets NC

Texans like to send us food. Then we think up ways to cook it up good. This year, Texans sent us grapefruit and smoked turkey and A&M sent us a fake basmati red and brown rice. So…

Cold grapefruit and fennel soup – a raw soup easily made. Just put one cup of fresh diced fennel bulb to one grapefruit in the blender and let her whirrr. Tastes great. Right outa France via UK http://www.sofeminine.co.uk/w/recipe/r1615/fennel-and-grapefruit-soup.html

Rice with collards – a great way to get your greens and use the potlicker to flavor the rice. First, I heated some olive oil and flavored it with garlic, bacon and chopped onion stirring until the onion was transparent, then added the collards and cooked them down for about 10 minutes. Next I added the rice mixing until it was glistening from the oil and well mixed with the collards. Lastly I added stock and simmered until the rice was just beyond al dente but still firm. Proportions: 3 cloves of garlic, 1 strip of bacon thinly chopped, 1 onion well chopped, 1/4 teaspoon of crushed red peppers, 1 bunch of collards well washed and chopped, 1 cup of rice (brown and red in this case), 2 cups of stock. Started from http://southernfood.about.com/od/collardgreens/r/bln138.htm

Sally’s Secret Dressing with chestnuts
– I can say no more except that she’s Texan.

Turkey – It came smoked and ready to slice and heat and eat from Texas

Chocolate Eggnog Walnut pie – First, a food ole Southern graham cracker crust but with last year’s Moravian black walnut cookies that we forgot about. Then fill with Chocolate Eggnog pie made with Walnuts instead of pecans using this recipe and following it closely http://southernfood.about.com/od/chocolatepies/r/bl50908f.htm. Whipped cream on top. Yumm.

Raymond Carver: Stephen King and I agree and we disagree

Stephen King reviews a biography and a new, yet another new, collected stories by Raymond Carver in last Sunday’s NYTimes Book Review.

As with all reviews of Carver, the twin stories are Carver’s mostly alcoholic life and his relationship with heavy-handed — or creatively instructive — editor Gordon Lish.

Everyone agrees. Carver’s alcoholism = bad. And mostly the psychology of the Lish relationship = bad.

But almost everyone’s reactions become more complex when asked which stories they prefer, the Lish versions, the manuscripts that Carver submitted to Lish, or — and this is less mentioned — the stories as recovered by Carver during his final days like those in Cathedral say.

King and I agree that the difference between “A Small, Good Thing” (a story that Carver recovered and re-extended and made deep) better than “The Bath” (the ruthlessly edited Lish version). The fact that we had access to both versions for a long time, that they illustrated the two public presentations of Carver’s work, and the quality of both stories were the reasons that I chose “A Small, Good Thing” for the Health Anthology. Great stories to talk about Carver, his public reception, the role of the editor, minimalist fiction and the changing relationship of the author to his own work.

King says:

The contrast between “The Bath” (Lish-edited) and “A Small, Good Thing” (Ray Carver unplugged) is even less palatable. On her son’s birthday, Scotty’s mother orders a birthday cake that will never be eaten. The boy is struck by a car on his way home from school and winds up in a coma. In both stories, the baker makes dunning calls to the mother and her husband while their son lies near death in the hospital. Lish’s baker is a sinister figure, symbolic of death’s inevitability. We last hear from him on the phone, still wanting to be paid. In Carver’s version, the couple — who are actually characters instead of shadows — go to see the baker, who apologizes for his unintended cruelty when he understands the situation. He gives the bereaved parents coffee and hot rolls. The three of them take this communion together and talk until morning. “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” the baker says. This version has a satisfying symmetry that the stripped-down Lish version lacks, but it has something more important: it has heart.

Where we, and many others, disagree is over Carver’s most famous story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” which Carver presented to Lish as “Beginners.” Lish’s editing was ruthless as a restoration of the manuscript published online by the New Yorker shows. King compares the two, citing the highly different prose styles. The work Carver presented “consists of dense blocks of narration broken up by bursts of dialogue.” While the version we saw as WWTAWWTAL as edited by Lish, “there is so much white space that some of the stories…look almost like chapters in a James Patterson novel.”

While King does, as seen in the quotes above, pass judgment on the Lish edited stories in WWTAWWTAL, King doesn’t exactly pass judgement on the title story itself. I personally still after many rereadings prefer the story as edited by Lish known as WWTAWWTAL to Beginners. That makes my own thoughts about the Carver/Lish relationship more complex. When the editors of the Health Anthology substituted WWTAWWTAL for “A Small, Good Thing,” I felt a little like Carver. What the hell were they thinking! But I agree WWTAWWTAL is a very good story, a better story, the story that we know Carver–the public Carver of a certain period–by. I am wondering now is WWTAWWTAL more instructive or less so than ASGT?

Some Triangle Futures — maybe — just if

After taking a vacation from blogging for the first time in over five years, I have more than enough to be writing about, but I thought I’d start out by posting a reply I just sent to Rick Smith of Metro Magazine who was asking about the future of the Triangle for communications, infotech and biotech and anything else than comes to mind.

My answers:

There is an old sufi saying that teaching can only happen when the time, the place and the people are all at the correct stage for learning to happen. In the case of technology leadership, you need to add resources to the list.

The Triangle got an early start betting on our universities to supply the people either directly by educating them or indirectly by providing a desirable intellectual and cultural environment to attract and keep the best.

We built the place based on the relationships among the universities and the cities of the Triangle, but we’ve yet to create an integrated transportation system to really foster the interactions that we need to lead.

Through MCNC and NCREN we have built the network infrastructure for research and teaching, but the commercial mobile networks are still spotty in their coverage compared to the areas with which we compete.

We’ve been slightly diverse by developing biotech and infotech but we need to broaden beyond those two core industries. I think there are opportunities in energy management for example that have not been developed by that will make a giant difference in the next ten years.

The time is changing and I think in our favor if the state acts bravely and invests wisely in education and lifestyle that will continue to attract the best in infotech and biotech but also in transportation, energy management solutions, and nanotech. There are significant interactions between these areas and we will see more as they develop.

We will need to continue to support schools, our universities, our parks and the arts if we wish to continue to grow and to innovate. We are competing with the Bay Area, Austin, Boston, Seattle/Portland and Boulder/Denver more than with Atlanta or Richmond or Charlotte (although Charlotte should it recover from betting far too heavily on finance would be a strong partner for the Triangle and for the State).

I could, as you know write for ages about social media, which is the open source culture pushed out into our daily lives. Ultimately that means businesses thinking about their relationships with their employees and their customers very differently — that’s where the impact is being felt and will continue to have influence. Every transaction is not turned into a payment; despite of how phone companies charge us for text messages. Some transactions and activities are about relationships as any small town business owner knows well. Expect the importance of relationships to cause some very large changes as customers continue to be able to raise their voices with strong effect — positive as well as negative.

Computer screens will continue to move to the edges of size — large as is being tested with home theatres and small as is being tested on phones and netbooks. Desktops will be pushed into special categories such as use by design groups say.

That means more mobile but also and the computing to drive moble will be over the net, over the air. The delivery of this computing, this access to usable data, will mean that we need more bandwidth. If we don’t lead the country there, we lose. But also we need innovative services to be delivered over the air to these theatre sized screens and this portable/mobile devices. These will be appropriate to the use — say audio and video for directions, say quick updates in text to voice or searchable audio and video, say location awareness integrated into many functions. That means flexible datacenters with high connectivity and efficient cheap power and cooling running effective database and visualization services.

Did I say visualization? Yes that cuts across all the categories and is an area that we need to develop along with analytics. Expect to see businesses looking for better ways to understand the data deluge that is now available to them, but also expect individuals to demand similar services which is something entirely new.

If we, as our government and industry, provide the infrastructure through proper taxation, then we will continue to have the place, will continue to produce and attract the people, will have our eyes on the time and will in the end reap the resources and rewards.

Three kinds of Beets + Pomegranate Salad

There must be some reason, some grand reason, why beets and pomegranates are in season at the same time. I took three bunches of beets — each a different variety; Golden, Red and Chiogga — from the Farmer’s Market , roasted them then cooked them up with onion, ginger, orange zest, wine vinegar and stock/water. After that cooked down good, I chilled them and added pomegranates and feta cheese. Tossed them on greens and served them up.

Here’s the recipes I started from: one from Simply Recipes featuring Golden Beets and this one which inspired the previous from Sunset Magazine via MyRecipes.

My contribution/changes were to: 1) add fresh ginger finely chopped to cook with the beets 2) make the recipe vegetarian by changing to vegetable stock or just water 3) took a pass on the liquer 4) used red wine vinegar for red beets, seasoned rice wine vinegar for the goldens and chioggas 5) served the beets isolated by type.

Three Beet (Chiogga, Red, Golden) + Pomegranate Salad with a ... on Twitpic

Yumm! Even if you never liked beets before, you will like them this way. BTW I only used fresh beets; I can’t imagine doing this with canned.

Concise-ness of Carver in Heath Anthology

We went to pick up our son for his extended weekend away for Science and Math yesterday. On his desk was the Concise Edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature! And yes it included Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” I wrote the Carver headnote for the Heath Editions — Concise and Less-than-Concise-but-multivolume-and-full-of-more-literature Editions — and so was delighted to see the story included.

I had rushed to meet a deadline for the new edition back in January when the Heath editors changed the Carver story from “A Small Good Thing” to WWTAWWTAL.

I also made changes to the Teachers Guide, but since that is online only now there was less of a rush.

What drove me was the importance of recognizing the publication of the original pre-Lish story, Beginners, from which WWTAWWTAL was formed (by Lish’s strong editorial hand).

I’m not sure if this penultimate paragraph made it as an addition to the headnote or not:

Yet there is new controversy about Carver’s rewriting and of his relationship to his editors, particularly Lish. The recent publication of “Beginners” in the New Yorker, the story that would become – after extensive editing by Lish – “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and the accompanying article and an online exclusive displaying Lish’s edits in detail show that Carver’s rewriting may have been as much an attempt to recover his stories as an enlargement of earlier minimalist works. Once some legal issues can be resolved, we will be able to have a much closer look at Carver’s process, intentions and art as well as an ability to evaluate the relationship between Carver and Lish.

I don’t see it on the website for the Anthology. Looks like I need to check in with the editors.

Cubed Roots?

Fall comes to the Carrboro Farmers Market and with the sudden cool wet weather comes a harvest of root vegetables. I’ve taken those roots and made salads using the greens and roots, made soups and gumbos, roasted and baked them, but I wanted to try something different — crunchy, but not raw; mixed but still with unique flavors, spiced some.

My solution was to dice several roots, stir fry them for differing amounts of time depending on how crunchy or squishy they should be, spice them some and eat ’em up.

My plan for this week is to use garlic then onion then ginger to flavor the oil then add small cubes of sweet potato, turnip, golden beet (red turn it all red and I want some color effect), carrots and stir fry to slow cook the root concoction and add some seasonal spice like basil, rosemary or marjoram.

Looking for other suggestions and experiences.

NC Literary Festival Panel of Twitter 9/12 at 10am

NC Literary Festival
Come see us @nc_litfest‘s Twitter & Literature Panel Tomorrow Sept 12 at 10 am @mightymur @waynesutton & @smalljones Moderator @hartzog / in Murphey Hall at UNC. Full Saturday schedule here.

I plan to talk about several poetic experiments: @haikuoftheday and @sonnets for two and ask for others. One fairly complex moderated Twitter Haiku collective from Phil Boiarski.

I’ll also contrast @PatrickHerron‘s use of Twitter based on this statement:

I often use twitter in series posts (1of2, 2of2, etc.) to go just a little bit further than aphorisms. Or to just sort of “toss up” fragments of text that are scheduled to land in pieces in my new project. Twitter then acts as a sort of ‘locus of detachment” where I can put things in public and be done with the personal dimension once and for all.

with Philip Boiarski’s much more personal statement:

Twitter has been a life saver for me as a poet. I have a real life gig to support my poetry habit. Now, in my : ( sixty fourth year under heaven, I am not, by nature, a man who takes lightly his obligations to spouse and family. How one dares to have a family, a life, more than a tent and a horse, the muse has yet to explain to me. My workday doesn’t make it easy to make notes, or jot down ideas for poems, lines that come to me, etc. The 140 characters in a tweet seem to me to be of a perfect length to hold in mind until a minute frees up to iPhone, keyboard, thwirl, them in. I now link them to my blog about writing and am running there a “Twitter Experiment” (It’s at Boiarski theblog if you want to see). I have thousand plus fans many of whom are poets, avid readers, amateurs, etc. and they react and clue me as to what hits a chord, what I might take time to write further into on the weekend or evenings. So for me, the tweet has taken the place of the little ring notebook I used to carry in my pocket. But now, I write it where a thousand folks can read and react. I have a friendly place to try out my words and objective input into what communicated to real folks and not to just my idea of an audience.

And these two notes from Robin Black:

1) Best 140-character story submitted to our booth at #BrooklynBookFestival or tweeted to @onestorymag wins subscription + dinner with OS staff

2) Georgia Review recently blogged about what Michael Martone is doing with Twitter. I don’t have that link, but his nom de Tweet is @4foraquarter. He’s writing a book about things that come in fours and has used Twitter to explore the idea.

Twitter = epigram, epigraph, epitaph, epithet, epilogue, episode, epiphany, epic, epicenter, epidemic? an epistle to an epicene epicure? the epidermis of an epistemological epitome’s epicyclical by an epiphenomenonal episcopal epigone?

I can also talk about small groups vs larger groups vs broadcast and “thick” vs “thin” tweets if you like.

Battle of the birds

A goldfinch, trying perhaps to convince me that he’s the prothonotary warbler (see below), was hanging on the nectar feeder that has been under the protection of a very aggressive hummingbird. The goldfinch was sipping a little water that was in the feeder to discourage ants from crawling into the nectar when the confrontation occurred. Here’s how it played out as captured by my iPhone.

Yellow Mystery Bird at the Hummingbird Feeder

Few the past few days this bird has been living at our hummingbird feeder, sipping nectar and enjoying him/herself. Note a slender light beak, grey wings with no bars or stripes, yellow to white underside, no easily noticed eye bar or ring.

Candidates: Blue-winged Warbler dark legs, wingbars, eye line (not matching our bird) Northern Oriole aka Baltimore (Female) no white underside as seen on our bird, Summer Tanager (female) too heavy beak and markings off, your guess ???

Presenting the Mushroom Book Project

Jeff Beam presents John Cage's Mushroom Book

Jeff Beam, Jeffrey Pomerantz and I are there in the picture showing one of the rare copies of John Cage’s Mushroom Book which will serve as a jumping off point for our presentation/project/happening/theatre piece at the CHAT or Collaboration: Humanities, Arts and Technology Festival early next year.

CHAT, which will take place on the UNC campus February 16-20, 2010, will showcase the possibilities for innovative, collaborative arts and humanities work enabled by technology by drawing together the region’s diverse digital resources in a series of performances, colloquies, demonstrations and training sessions.

We say:

John Cage’s Mushroom Book captures the experience of mushroom hunting through a collaboration between a noted mycologist (Alexander H. Smith), an extraordinary illustrator (Lois Long), and Renaissance man/visionary John Cage. Using scientific illustration and description, poetry, typography, and text the book is essentially an early multimedia event. We will re-capture the experience of their hunt and collaboration through a reinterpretation of the Mushroom Book: an interactive, three-dimensional, technologically-enabled multimedia experience.

This Happening will fulfill the as-yet unfulfilled promise to Dr. John Couch’s widow, by the UNC-CH John N. Couch Biology-Botany Library to make use of the Mushroom Book in the educational mission of the University. The volume was a gift from Mrs. Couch in memory of her husband’s and John Cage’s friendship. Dr. Couch was a world-renown mycologist for whom the Biology-Botany library at UNC was named. Couch, Cage, and others made a number of mushroom forays together. [revised/expanded JB 7/14/2009]

The book is discussed here in Cage’s biography, Roaring Silence (Amazon preview) page 235-236. also Cage on technology on page 237. (at UNC Music Library ML410.C24 R5 1992 ) In Conversations with Cage, John Cage says 10 lithographs were by Lois Long (the scientifically correct mushroom images) and 10 by Cage, himself ( “My texts … handwritten in five different litho crayon intensities (… superimpositions making much unreadable) … enabling the reader … to go hunting in my handwritten page.” (letter to Smith from Cage)

Read more and help us think about how to do all of this on this Google Doc at http://tinyURL.com/18Hn6Pz

Four tasty local tomato dishes

Watermelon Tomato Salad tastes great too! Thx Bill Smith on Twitpic

That’s dishes made with local tomatoes — not all of them contrived locally:

Chilled Yellow Tomato Soup (used local Yellows – Sungolds perhaps)

White Wine Gazpacho (used Cherokee Purples)

Watermelon and Tomato Salad (from Bill Smith) (used a variety for colors and textures) Subbed Thai Basil for regular and dropped the cayanne in favor of a dash Cackalacky Sauce.

Vegetarian Gumbo (used locally grown Romas) – you know this one Trinity (from Red Onion, Roasted Peppers, Celery) + Garlic + Okra + Maters in stock

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