meta-roj

the camera eye

i’m going to leave you with some homework… courtsey the people trying to make a difference at the united nations: ten stories the world should hear more about.

#1 – Uganda: Child soldiers at centre of mounting humanitarian crisis

#2 – Central African Republic: a silent crisis crying out for help

#3 – AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa: a looming threat to future generations

#4 – The peacekeeping paradox: as peace spreads, surge in demand strains UN resources

#5 – Tajikistan: rising from the ashes of civil war

#6 – Women as peacemakers: from victims to re-builders of society

#7 – Persons with disabilities: a treaty seeks to break new ground in ensuring equality

#8 – Bakassi Peninsula: Recourse to the law to prevent conflict

#9 – Overfishing: a threat to marine biodiversity

#10 – Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation

maybe there will be a quiz….

i never expected to drop a bash link here, but… this just fits.

just a quick pointer to a sort of follow-up on sony and drm….

last year, sony acknowledged that drm-wrapped cd’s were less valuable to consumers (if indirectly) by adding content to make up for the restrictions.

in what appears to be a reversal of policy, slashdot has the news that sony will abandon its drm wrapper for cds.

could be bad news for sunnncomm.

update: boingboing has it too.

how’s the economy doing? some pretty serious people wrote an opinion…

An Open Letter to the American Public, August 25, 2004 [pdf from the kerry campaign site]

The differences between President Bush and John Kerry with respect to leadership on the economy are wider than in any other Presidential election in our experience. President Bush believes that tax cuts benefiting the most-wealthy Americans are the answer to almost every economic problem. The Bush Administration’s tax cuts were poorly designed and therefore have given insufficient stimulus to job creation. The principal effect of the Bush administration’s fiscal policies has been to turn budget surpluses into enormous budget deficits. President Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility threatens the long-term economic security and prosperity of our nation. At a time when our nation should be saving for the future, to pay the Medicare and Social Security benefits for the baby boomers, our national debt is swelling; the social contract that binds one generation to another is being threatened with unraveling. Increased borrowing from abroad– now almost five percent of our GDP–leaves our country, our economy and global stability increasingly vulnerable to changes in sentiments of foreign, or even domestic, investors. At the same time, his policies have exacerbated income inequality, failed to address the real wage declines and rising health care costs beleaguering American families, and ignored the need for critical investments to spur long-term growth.

it sounds like political mumbo-jumbo inside-the-beltway elitist claptrap! signed by these people:

Paul A. Samuelson, Nobel Economics 1970 (for the scientific work through which he has developed static and dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level of analysis in economic science)
Kenneth J. Arrow, Nobel Economics 1972 (for pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory)
Lawrence R. Klein, Nobel Economics 1980 (for the creation of econometric models and the application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies)
Robert M. Solow, Nobel Economics 1987 (for contributions to the theory of economic growth)
William F. Sharpe, Nobel Economics 1990 (for pioneering work in the theory of financial economics)
Douglass C. North, Nobel Economics 1993 (for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change)
Daniel L. McFadden, Nobel Economics 2000 (for development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice)
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Economics 2001 (for analyses of markets with asymmetric information)
George A. Akerlof, Nobel Economics 2001 (for analyses of markets with asymmetric information)
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Economics 2002 (for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty)

so it’s 10 nobel economists… what do these people know about economies?

when rss meets the ipod… you get an i-jockey? adam curry gives himself a promotion from vj to ij with a little help from applescript, perl and python.

picking up a long-idle thread here on the value of musigeeks, we have a new approach to the filtering problem for the vast expanse of music that is now available in that little box plugged into your ears.

On-demand audio coming to iPod, extreme ipod, september 13, 2004

In what may prove to be the next big thing for the iPod, weblogger Adam Curry has released the source code to an application which allows users to automatically download MP3 audio files from weblogs and other web sites to their iPod.

it’s such a good idea, the ubergeeks at slashdot even picked up on it.

so this does solve the breadth problem – even clearchannel can’t shove an approved playlist down every rss feed – and it leaves open some level of personal discovery (you do get to find your personal list of i-jockeys). and, assuming you pick good ones, the filtering problem is solved. sorta.

much potential in this indeed.

just to take a moment to consider the kind(s) of test(s) that would be done with this data…

U.S. Wants Personal Data on Airline Passengers, reuters, september 21, 2004

The U.S. government wants airlines to turn over information on more than a million people who traveled in June to test a new system for identifying passengers who may pose a security risk, officials said on Tuesday.

what’s the methodology here? the feds know there were terrorists on airplanes in june, and knows who they are, so they want to check the known terrorists against what the passenger-screening system finds by going through all the june data? someone with more software-testing experience than i needs to help explain this to me… what testing methodology needs real data but works without prior knowledge of the targets?

ew jersey could learn a little from west virginia on this one…. we’ve been here before.

Laura Bush heckled during campaign speech cnn, september 17, 2004

The mother of a soldier killed in Iraq was arrested Thursday after interrupting a campaign speech by first lady Laura Bush.

of course, sue niederer was doing a lot more than just wearing a t-shirt…and she’s been heckling and protesting all over the country since her son’s death in iraq. “defiant tresspass” is the best we can come up with for her? i’m disappointed. at least put her on a no-fly list or something.

a little late with this, but it fits in the series….

among the ranks of people so dangerous that they cannot be allowed to board airplanes, yet so innocent they cannot be detained even with the sweeping provisions of the usa patriot act, we find one yusuf islam (cat stevens).

i guess this puts mr. islam on the same freedom train as senator edward kennedy (d-ma) and congressman john lewis (d-ga). troublemakers, every one of them.

confluence of sightings this evening… chipping kids and barflies.

from our good friends at the bbc, we find a story about a little bar in barcelona that has an rfid approach to running a tab…

and from our good friend joichi, we find a story about chipping schoolkids for safety.

so, there’s the state of the art rfid-for-humans as of today: it’s either the “ultimate in membership cards” or it’s the logical response to “rising concerns about student safety.” or both, probably.

sunncomm has been a recurring theme around here, but sometimes it takes a little more in the way of resources to dig into the story deep enough to find elvis.

for that, we can thank the register.

Is SunnComm a sham or the next, big DRM success?, the register, september 27, 2004

the firm’s experience revolves around a troubled oil and gas business, an Elvis and Madonna impersonator operation and even a Christmas tree farm.

and you thought the shift key hack was interesting….

After significant effort on our part, The Register eventually managed to secure Jacobs on the horn – about a week after the first call. The fact that he even took the call was impressive given our punishing treatment of the Shift key debacle.

“Everyone told me not to talk to you,” Jacobs began. “They’re afraid you’ll do a real hatchet job.”

This wasn’t the most pleasant way to begin a grueling, accusatory interview, but Jacobs’ unease made sense for the obvious reasons. He was well aware of the skewering SunnComm was taking on the investor message boards and beyond that knew that The Register tends to dismiss DRM technology as a type of pointless CD cancer that will stop people from enjoying the free exchange of culture they’ve come to expect.

after seeing this “in print,” my hat’s off to jacobs, even if i continue to trash drm periodically…