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February 24, 2006
What am I Missing Here?
David Pogue's technology piece in the NYT today ("Wifi to Go") trumpets some new portable wifi routers, in the $600 range, that accept wireless access cards, putting the router on the Internet and broadcasting a wifi signal. Can't any old laptop with a card slot connected to a $30 wifi router do this same thing? I use Linux, with which it is easy as pie to make a laptop a gateway host, but couldn't a Windows laptop "share" its Internet connection with the router easily enough? I can see the advantage for a stand-alone cell-to-wifi router for a permanent situation, like at home, due to the fact the desktops don't typically have card slots and one may not want a large computer at home, but the marketing seems to focus on the portable aspect, which seems trivial to me.
Posted by johnn at 10:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 23, 2006
Olympic coverage not that jingoistic: The Olympics The Nation missed.
Maybe The Nation is becoming a better magazine, because I finally read something in it I vehemently disagreed with: Dave Zirin's "The Olympics We Missed." (Well, aside from Hitchens a lot and Cockburn occasionally.)
I've been blogging on the Games and the coverage on my personal blog almost every night. (I'm a Winter Olympics freak and watch everything I can.) I agree with some of his points, about stupid, made-up events that practically only Americans excel in and the advertising build-up of mediocre American stars, for example. (He could be better informed about his sport history, though: slalom skiing is not a made-up American event; it premiered in Switzerland in 1922.)
The predictable charge of hyper-nationalism and arrogance is rather off the mark, at least this year. For one thing, NBC has shown practically no medal ceremonies, one common source of jingoistic skew. Secondly, they make almost no mention of the "medals race," the stupid, country-by-country tally that I ignore in the paper ever morning. They do always mention the Americans athletes in any event no matter how far down in the pack, but they have given expansive coverage, both in the events themselves and the schmaltzy back stories, to foreign athletes. (And since so many promising Americans are tanking, they don't have much choice, I suppose.) They even covered events in which Americans rarely figure, cross country skiing, for example. The human interest coverage seems to focus on underdogs, and not too many of these are American! I know that many countries, Canada, for instance, have much more extensive coverage, but I really didn't think NBC was so bad this year.
As for his other main complaint, the tape delay, what the hell? I couldn't take off work to watch in the morning and midday, and a lot of other folks couldn't either. I just tune out results news during the day and enjoy the suspense and drama of the carefully non-spoiling evening coverage. Ok, so Koreans are getting up at 3 a.m. or whatever to watch their athletes live. Only super-rabid nationalism could make people do that.
Posted by johnn at 08:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 22, 2006
Hoping Dick Cheney never finds out about the Internet
Remember Internet hunting in Texas? It's not too different from the actual kind of hunting they were engaged in.
I couldn't confirm that this is true or find the source of this blog entry (it was emailed to me without context), although mainstream media ave reported on similar canned hunts Cheney has been on, such the Dallas Morning News.
I read that the quail on Ms. Armstrong's property were domesticated, fenced and grown for the specific purpose of providing canned sport shooting for guests. Prior to the hunt, the quail were taken from their cages to various locations on Armstrong's property and released for the shoot, confused and disoriented. One newspaper reports that the quail's wings were clipped and that Cheney's hunting party went out in vehicles (probably SUV's) until they spotted a group of the recently released and dazed quail. At that point, the intrepid "hunters" jumped out of their SUV's to "flush out" the disconcerted birds. The report stated that it would have been almost as easy simply to chase the clipped-wing quail, grab them by the feet, and shake them to death.
Today's Los Angeles Times has an op-ed piece by Jonathan Chait that tries to put the joyful glee over Cheney's accident in perspective, pointing out that the mainstream media are too cowed ever to go after real lies and corruption and scandal so they vent by building up fairly trivial little things like this.
Posted by johnn at 12:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Danish insensitivity
When hundreds of people around the world are yelling "Allahu Akbar" and blowing themselves up in strategic locations, it is hardly reasonable not to expect some nervous humor linking, well, Allah with terrorism. But in the free speech rights furor in defense of the Danish cartoons, I've heard little discussion of what seems to be growing racial intolerance in countries generally thought immune to it. I remembered this really racist little online computer game that a Danish family show me a couple of years ago. They thought it was great fun and said they saw the racist elements as satire. The "Mujaffa" game is hosted on the National Danish Radio and Televsion website, and can be found here.
Here's a description of it that appeared in the American Prospect in 2002:
The national radio station's Web site offers a video game featuring a dark-skinned immigrant named Mujaffa, who earns points by collecting gold chains and condoms on the street, yelling hello to all of his cousins and soliciting big-breasted, blond Danish women who pass him on the sidewalk. Mujaffa can spend these points on new speakers, stereo systems and hydraulics for his car. Though the Board for Ethnic Equality's executive director, Mandana Zarrehvarpar, complained that a state institution was perpetuating negative stereotypes, she and her colleagues were quickly dismissed as excessively politically correct and unable to "understand Danish humor." They succeeded only in having the game's name changed from one that included a derogatory term for Arabs (roughly equivalent to "nigger") to the more palatable "Mujaffa game." For the Danes who find Mujaffa harmless and hilarious, Muslim intolerance remains unacceptable, but their own is quite all right.
Posted by johnn at 09:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 21, 2006
Academic email and the too-casual style
Today's silly New York Times story about email from students to professors quotes complaints about being asked to send notes for missed classes, about receiving pleas for help with personal issues, about being asked about what kind of school supplies to buy.
Although I can relate to many of these experiences, and have now and then received an email from a student with a cheeky "hey teach" sort of flair that put me off, I think there's a strong reactionary streak running through a lot of the professors' moaning.
English Professor Meg Worley of Pomona College, was quoted as saying that
she told students that they must say thank you after receiving a professor's response to an e-mail message."One of the rules that I teach my students is, the less powerful person always has to write back," Professor Worley said.
She is saying that she was misquoted, here on Tim Burke's blog and in an email to Pomona faculty, and that she just makes suggestions about etiquette for email to profs and points out "conventions." The suggestions, although basic and reasonable things your mother or Emily Post might say, still reveal a little anxiety about authority such as often accompanies new forms of communication (I guess the New York Times thinks email in academia is new).
There has always been disrespectful (and, following the analysis in the article, perhaps increasingly consumerist) behavior between students and faculty: acting up in class, nasty things written on bathroom stalls, home phone calls at inappropriate hours, overly personal issues raised in office hours, an "exaggerated sense of entitlement" exhibited in comments about classwork or grades. The medium is not to blame when occasional behavior like this shows up in emails.
Personally, I like it that students can send me email at 2 a.m. when they're up studying or whatever. I can answer it right away if I'm up - embarrassingly often, actually - or wait to respond until it's convenient for me. I do let students know that although they may frequently get quick responses at odd hours from me, they can't always count on it. I get lots of breezy and sometimes mildly inappropriate emails, but I don't find that it undercuts my authority where it matters, and I think the informality in this medium is good, on balance. The empowerment given to students through email can be helpful to some, the shy ones, for example, something I also notice in my students' blogs in my "Life Online" course. I too communicate to students differently via email, more teasing, maybe, sometimes more terse, sometime more prolix than in "RL." Since there is less and less socializing between students and faculty (damn lawyers again?), email is a nice escape from more scripted forms of interaction. On the other hand, I also get some emails from students that are far more formal than what I assume they are exchanging with peers, sometimes comically so. As in all Internet interaction, the way users interpret and imbue meaning to particular sites, and communication media are unpredictably connected to cultural values from other arenas and other times.
As for the offensive email asking about what kind of binder to buy, jeez, I answer that question all the time in my classes. They usually want to know whether they are going to get a blizzard of handouts they will have keep organized (the answer is no, due to the miracle of course web sites, an even newer educational technology the New York Times might want to look into).
Letting students email assignments, another point of contention, does introduce a whole new genre of sometimes dubious excuses, but it's often a whole lot more convenient for me and them. It saves them money, and as long as the College is paying for my paper and toner....
Posted by johnn at 11:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 09, 2006
"Dead Hacker" is Public Figure say German Courts
A story in Speigel (English online edition, click here) reports that Wikipedia won the lawsuit filed by the parents of the famous (that's the point, I think) hacker Tron ("Boris F.", in the German media). The parents alleged breach of privacy, and Wikipedia argued that the volume of Google hits to Internet sources that reveal his full name make him a public figure. Seems right, except that the Internet affords instant public figure status to anyone who gets famous voluntarily or not. Just another area of life made interestingly blurry by the Net.
The Spiegel article says the German Wikipedia site was shut down by court order pending the outcome of the trial, but the English Wikipedia entry denies this, saying that only a German domain that pointed to the German Wikipedia was served with a notice.
Interesting that Boris Floricic, the late Tron's father, owns a trademark on his son's pseudonym. Also weird is that, according to a German dicussion forum, Dad argued to the court that his rights as now the only Floricic in Germany are violated by the Wikipedia mention of his son's surname. Huh?
Spiegel does an interesting thing, by the way: each story has a Technorati/"blogs discussing this story" link at the bottom.
Posted by johnn at 08:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 06, 2006
Rear Projection: Tales of the Brazilian Butt
A great quote from today's L.A. Times story in the health section about glute exercises:
But be warned: A toned gluteous medius, though it provides nice side shaping, doesn't provide the rear projection favored by fashion-conscious Brazilians and other posterior purists.Assessing the meaning of "Brazil" in contemporary American popular culture, I guess we have a distinctive distribution of wealth, a distinctive distribution of bikini fabric, a distinctive distribution of depilation wax, and a distinctive distribution of butt muscle.
Posted by johnn at 04:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 04, 2006
myspace.com
I caught the tail end of a CNN Headline News report late last night in which the anchor, in HN's new, Anderson Cooper-like breathless tones, expressed incredulity that minors using myspace.com were "only a few clicks away" from hard-core pornography. Um, is anyone ever more than a few clicks away from hard-core pornography on the Internet? Sometimes you don't even have to click; it comes to you! The amazing thing is that in 2006 some parents thought a site like myspace, with a lot of adolescent members, would somehow be "safe."
Ironically, when I searched for myspace on cnn.com, I forgot to check the "seach cnn" button, and the search brought me a whole series of ad links for myspace.com. Whoops!
Posted by johnn at 09:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 03, 2006
Bucolic life, too much so
What happens in America when your desire for country living brings you to, well, the country? Where I live in Southern California it seems to mean that sprawling suburbs that encroach on the few remaining farms in places like Chino and Ontario have no trouble shutting them down as nuisances: the dust, the smells, the noice, the horror!
Not all land use conflicts are clear-cut cases of big developers and rich landowners pitted against small family farms. In lots of cases, the "public nuisance" concept has been used to shut down highly polluting operations.
But some cases do point right at the hypocrisy at the core desires feeding sprawl.
Charles Wolff, a friend of mine in upstate New York, has been representing a guy who moved to Stuyvesant, NY, a couple years ago and started raising some sheep and chickens in small, neat, well-run farm. His chickens would occasionally get loose and enter the yards of adjacent multi-million-dollar homes in this rural Hudson River area north of Manhattan. He met the complaints with an attempt to erect a better fence, which was blocked some confused and illegal moves by town zoning officials, at which point he just let his chickens wander where they would. The bumbling town backed down under threat of lawsuit, and he built his fence. Apparently his chickens have not escaped since.
The town government, however, pushed by a handful of residents who want the bucolic without worry of sighting a chicken on their estates, has now enacted a Dracononian (Drake-onian? argh) ordinance with rapidly escalating fines: up to $500 and fifteen days in jail for wandering livestock. Other area farmers expressed alarm and were calmed with the publicly given assurance that the law would only be applied to this "one chicken farmer on Eichybush Rd." Charles calls this a bill of attainder and has threatened a federal suit. Meanwhile, the farmer's supporters, apparently a majority in the town according to an online poll, have banded together to ridicule the town board's actions.:
The local newspaper has covered the controversy, and apparently outfits like the New York Times and NPR may soon do stories, based on interviews Charles has given recently.
(I've met this chicken farmer, by the way, and he has the most beautiful chickens I've ever seen.)
(Also a propos of nearly nothing, but maybe something, Charles is a former anthropology colleague of mine and earned an M.A. from Cornell.)
Posted by johnn at 11:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Everything2: Wikipedia with attitudes
For those who like their encyclopedia entries with a bit of attitude and an unpredictable degree of bias, they might like Everything2. I do. Dating back to 1999, it's been around a lot longer than the Wikipedia (b. January 15, 2001). Each entry here has a single author who maintains his or her rights. Many are encyclopedic in genre, but the site also accepts essays, poetry, whatever. Many entries have a distinct point of view, as opposed to Wikipedia's number 1 rule: Neutral Point of View. It was started by the software developer who started Slashdot: "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." It includes a Slashdot-like system for ranking users and posts, but the site warns against taking it too seriously. (Introduction apge is here.)
Everything2 has the following self-definition, culled from various of its own pages:
The web is distributed hypertext covering infinite subjects.
everything2 is localized hypertext covering infinite subjects.
[...]
everything2 is the web's schizophrenic little brother.
[...]
E2 is really two things: the premiere instantiation of the Everything System, a nice database-driven postboard/weblog thingie which works like a Wiki only more so; and a pretty highly structured (in a low-key way) society of folks who like writing (actively and passively), pathos and (particularly) hypertext.
[...]
The Everything Web System is Another Dumb Perl-MySQL Web Content-Management System
One rises through the ranks from Initiate to Novice, etc. up to Pseudo-God and then - in a nice twist - Pedant, this highest authority on the site!
This adds up to a pleasant and amusingly self-deprecating self-representation typical of the tone throughout the site.
Compare, for example, entries from the two sites on a topic that caught my eye when randomly clicking out from some "write-up" on Everything2 I'd stumbled across via a Google search: Anne-Sophie Mütter.
The Wikipedia entry has been edited by apparently twenty separate individuals over the last eighteen months, with no apparent controversy (there is no discussion page at all), and the gradual accretion of images, facts, and a few corrections.
It runs as follows:
Anne-Sophie Mutter (born June 29, 1963) is a German violinist.Born in Rheinfelden in Baden, Germany, she started playing the piano at age five. Shortly thereafter, she began playing the violin, studying with Erna Honigberger and Aida Stucki.
After winning several prizes, she was exempted from school to dedicate herself to her art. When she was 13, conductor Herbert von Karajan invited her to play with the Berlin Philharmonic. In 1977, she made her debut at the Salzburg Festival and with the English Chamber Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim.
At 15, Mutter made her first recording of the Mozart Third and Fifth Violin Concertos with von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. The same year, she was named Artist of the Year.
In 1980, she made her American debut with the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta. In 1985, at the age of 22, she was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Music (London) and head of its faculty of international violin studies. In 1988, she made a grand tour of Canada and the United States, playing for the first time at Carnegie Hall. In 1998 she played and recorded for CD and DVD the complete set of Beethoven's Violin Sonatas, accompanied by Lambert Orkis; these were broadcast on television in many countries.
Though her repertoire includes many classical works, Mutter is particularly known for her performances of modern music. A number of pieces have been especially written for or dedicated to her, including Witold Lutoslawski's Partita, Krzysztof Penderecki's Second Violin Concerto and Wolfgang Rihm's Gesungene Zeit ("Time Chant"). She has received various prizes, including several Grammys. She also owns two Stradivarius violins (The Emiliani of 1703, and the Lord Dunn-Raven of 1710).
She is married to the pianist and conductor André Previn.
The Everything2 entry, written by Gritchka, is as follows:
A German violinist with a warm, passionate, but precise tone.Born on 29 June 1963 in Rheinfelden, she took up learning the violin at the age of five, and at the age of six won first prize in the Jugend Musiziert (Young Musician) competition, the youngest ever winner. She also won a prize as a pianist; then she won the same prizes in 1974, and was asked if she'd mind awfully not entering again. Her tutors included Henryk Szeryng.
She was taken up as a protégée (and of course prodigy) by Karajan in 1976. She made her Salzburg and London débuts the following year.
In new music, she is especially associated with the composer Witold Lutoslawski. Recently she has regularly paired with the pianist Lambert Orkis for many recitals and recordings of modern music, in a project called "Back to the Future".
She is quite a gift to a record producer, being stunningly beautiful, but unlike some whose name mae not be mentioned, she is one of the most solidly talented of all violinists around, and the business with the dark flowing dresses and bare arms is just a bonus for the viewers. From watching her perform, I would say she gets quite as excited by the music as we her audience do.
Mutter is reticent about her private life; I believe her husband Dr Detlef Wunderlich died in a car crash, leaving her with a young child. (News! On or about 1 August 2002 she married the ageing conductor André Previn in a secret ceremony in Germany; his fifth marriage, the lucky swine.) She is a guest teacher at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
"Ten years from now, thirty years from now, I want more or less to be doing the same thing. Just better."
Updated 18 August 2001 to the spiky strains of the Prokofiev sonata in D major
This entry has no references, other than internal links to term-related stories, although many pages do include them. It's hard to assess the factual value of the piece, a common complaint about the Wikipedia. Wikipedia entries can be judged by the amount of behind-the-scenes activity and the quality of the meta-debate on the discussion page. On Everything2, you take your chances. It's often amusing writing, at least.
Posted by johnn at 10:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Un «blog»? - sacre bleu!
The Internet seems finally to have worn down the official French insistence on inventing "French" words for new(ish) things named by pesky English words that infiltrate French culture, "le weekend," par example. I had not been to the Le Monde website before tonight, when I noticed that the menu headings included, among "actualités" et "perspectives", "blogs" and "chats," (which did not refer to felines), "newsletters," and - most strangely for me - "Le Desk," which seems to be a kind of web portal to extra online content. I didn't cough up the € to see. Since not too long ago one could be fined for writing "le parking," do these words in Le Monde mean the French grammarians have given up?
Posted by johnn at 12:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 01, 2006
Grand Theft Auto
Joel Stein, writes in his January 31column in the L.A. Times :
On Thursday, the city [Los Angeles] sued the firm that makes the video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" over a hidden sex scene that can be unlocked by hacking into the computer coding. The city believes that parents who simply wanted to buy their boys a wholesome cop-shooting, hooker-killing, car-stealing game were unfairly duped.
Posted by johnn at 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack